The thesis examines isolation and caritas, or charity, in The Confidence-Man as polar themes which express, respectively, withdrawal from and suspicion of the human community and integration within and appreciation for that community. Isolation is considered a negative theme; caritas, an affirmative theme.

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Herman Melville’s final novel The Confidence-Man destabilizes conventional Western models of ethical behavior, particularly Kantian notions of moral agency, by exposing and challenging their basis in rationality and a progressivist model of history. The Confidence-Man shows rationality to be nothing more than one way, among many other possible ways, that human beings attempt to fix the world in their understanding and justify their moral choices. I use these insights from The Confidence-Man to illuminate Melville’s opposition to the missionaries’ work of civilizing and Christianizing the South Seas islanders in his earlier travelogues. In Typee, his first novel, Melville demonstrates that layers of existence—in fact, real human lives—are denied when the story of human relations is framed as a narrative of progress. This thesis concludes by proposing that Melville reworks the idea of failure as a potential strategy against the totalizing narrative of advancing rationalism.

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The failure of identity in The Confidence-Man has confounded readers since its publication. To some critics, Melville's titular character has seemed to leave his readers in a hopelessness without access to confidence, identity, trust, ethical relationality, and, finally, without anything to say. I argue, however, that Melville's text does not leave us without hope. My argument, consequently, is inextricably bound to a reading of Melville's text as deeply engaged with the concepts it inherits from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, an inheritance woefully under-examined by those critics who would leave Melville's text in the mire of hopelessness. In examining how these two texts bind themselves together while simultaneously cutting against each other, my reading finds in The Confidence-Man an alternative way of responsibly living, one that eschews the fatal task of shoring up either our confidence or our embarrassment in favor of an inauthentic redeployment of identity that laughs at both the embarrassment in our confidence and the confidence in our embarrassment.

This thesis investigates the historical American medicine show of 1880-1900 through the lens of contemporaneous social and cultural debates, primarily regarding class and race relations. The medicine show pitchmen, the central figure of the medicine show, is the progeny of the confidence man of the mid to late-nineteenth century, best personified through the autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin and P.T. Barnum and novels of Herman Melville and Mark Twain. The confidence man utilized a performative identity directed towards the assumed needs and desires of his audience, which gave him a purely pragmatic orientation. As the confidence man filtered through emerging forms of popular entertainment, he found his place in the traveling medicine show in the figure of the medicine man. In many ways, the medicine show functioned as a cultural arena in which the concerns of rural audiences about the ongoing professionalization of the classes, specifically within the medical profession, were investigated and manipulated.

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This study examines how Herman Melville’s oeuvre interacts with Old Testament (OT) wisdom literature (the Books of Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes). Using recent historical findings on the rise of religious skepticism and the erosion of Biblical authority in both Europe and the United States, I read Melville as an author steeped in the theological controversies of the eighteenth-century. Specifically, I am interested in teasing out the surprising disavowals of overt religious skepticism in Melville’s writing. By tracing the so-called Solomonic wisdom tradition throughout Melville’s oeuvre, I argue that Melville had developed an epistemology of contemplation towards that body of Biblical texts. Scholarship has traditionally painted Melville as a subversive if not downright skeptical religious thinker. Most studies have produced authorial readings, using texts as forensic evidence to make assertions about the author’s psychology. Incidentally, such assessments have confirmed the narrative of Herman Melville as a grand failed author of the nineteenth century, while ignoring the ambivalent attitudes toward Biblical authority, textual history, and skepticism that emerge in Melville’s writing. The present study intervenes by re-addressing several procedural questions about Melville’s literary dealings with the Bible: How does Melville deal with the distinct topics of religion, theology, religious skepticism, and doubt? How does he think through the relationship between science and religion as well as that of personal religion and theology? I claim that Melville’s work can be read as a continuous contemplation of Biblical wisdom. His writing, I argue, deals productively rather than a destructive with the Bible, its textual history, and authority. Melville’s thinking on theological and religious subjects was not merely subversive but constructive. In mounting this argument, I contradict current scholarship that reads Melville as trying to invent a new American Bible. In contrast, I show how Melville’s philosophical forays, even when critical, are dependent on the ethics, language, and thinking of the OT.

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Tricksters are popular cultural and literary characters which appear across regions and genres in various forms. The characters Uncle Julius from The Conjure Woman collection of short stories by Charles W. Chesnutt, and the confidence man from Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade are both tricksters who are based on strong cultural backgrounds: the African(- American) religious trickster, and real life con artist William Thompson, respectively. This thesis sets out to compare the tricksters in thematic and structural elements. The origins of the literary characters help shape the readers' expectations and perception of the tricksters. Melville and Chesnutt encourage the stereotypical reading of the characters while also including an alternative one in the text. The conflict of perceptions serves to introduce a number of social topics regarding slavery in The Conjure Woman and self-reliance in The Confidence-Man, both of which ultimately point to the problematic distribution of freedom in American society. The tricksters appear both as literary characters and literary devices, corresponding with the ambiguous nature of the trickster archetype.