ABSTRACT
Herman Melville’s depiction of eighteenth-century London in Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile prefigures his representations of cities and geographies in The Confidence-Man; His Masquerade, which purports to explore the “all-fusing spirit” of the American West. Melville relies on the symbolic qualities of geographical figures to describe the “City of Dis” experiencing a kind of sooty apocalypse. Melville describes the Fidele as city-like to foreground ideas of competition and antagonism. Much as the Mississippi River unites “streams of the most distant and opposite zones”, The Confidence-Man conflates images of disparate places to highlight the artificial qualities of geography. The possibility that all forms of representation are counterfeits ultimately shapes Melville’s exploration of a fracturing nation. The violated contract between the barber and Cosmopolitan thus points beyond the novel’s apparent dismissal of its audience’s expectations about what a novel should do.
