Okay, okay—we don't want to lean too hard into the fact that "man" is in the title, but it is. Plus, nearly every one of the very many characters in this text are cast is a dude. The Confidence-Man is kind of like a "Small World"-type survey of the different types of men in the world.
You get glimpses of this in the way women are mentioned: they are wives, widows, and daughters of men, mostly appearing in the text to demonstrate character development for the guys. Published in 1857—a time when sometimes writing about "people" meant writing about "dudes" by default—it actually offers more than one opinion about what it means to be "a man."
Questions About Men and Masculinity
- What's the difference between being a man and being masculine for Melville?
- What are three ways Melville defines masculinity?
- Which characters struggle with these definitions of masculinity?
- How does the text's treatment of intelligence relate to its treatment of masculinity?
Chew on This
Melville thinks masculinity is a joke and uses the text to undermine accepted notions of what it means to be a man.
Masculinity for Melville is complicated; there's no one-size-fits-all definition for him.