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Philanthropic taste: race and character in Melville's The Confidence Man. (Abstracts).(Herman Melville)(Brief Article)

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From: Melville Society Extracts
Date: 20020201
Author:Salazar, James B.

Herman Melville's novel The Confidence-Man certainly reads like a warning, and the chilling story of the genocidal Indian-hater, Colonel John Moredock, certainly seems its most hyperbolic moment. But while the Indian-hater story, on its surface, warns of the exterminating danger of his genocidal rage, the story also suggests that the even greater danger of the Indian-hater "par excellence" is that he paradoxically ex-terminates the very traces of his ownformation. The danger, in other words, is that the racial fictions which form him "shall never become news." More ominous still ...

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