Quote 7
"At this coon. Can you, the fox, catch him?"
"If you mean," returned the other, not unselfpossessed, "whether I flatter myself that I can in any way dupe you, or impose upon you, or pass myself off upon you for what I am not, I, as an honest man, answer that I have neither the inclination nor the power to do aught of the kind."
"Honest man? Seems to me you talk more like a craven."
"You in vain seek to pick a quarrel with me, or put any affront upon me. The innocence in me heals me."
"A healing like your own nostrums. But you are a queer man—a very queer and dubious man; upon the whole, about the most so I ever met." (21, 75-79)
The herb-doctor is up against another version of the rough-and-tumble woodsman, but this time it's with a man who's a bit sprightlier. What do we make of their interaction? Well, for one thing, we get specific value judgments from Pitch about what type of a man the herb-doctor is, and they're all negative. Contrasting the herb-doctor's more mannered tone against Pitch's volatile jibes, we learn that part of the reason Pitch distrusts the dude (besides the obvious shady medicine thing) is because he talks a good game.
Wait a minute—the herb-doctor's being dissed for being good with words? Well, yeah—he's too good with them. Like, politician-level good—which, as we all know, means that nothing he says can be trusted. Overall, Melville presents a complicated system of manhood in which there is both value and danger in being seen as smart and eloquent. Depending on who you're chatting up, brains can be a boon or, as this coon-hat wearing rustic argues, a sign that you've got no brawn. Even trickier is the fact that Pitch aligns the herb-doctor's talents with the ability to deceive, while the herb-doctor claims innocence and hopes to demonstrate this by keeping his cool—another "manly" trait in this text, but who's keeping track?.
"Hands off!" cried the bachelor, involuntarily covering dejection with moroseness.
"Hands off? that sort of label won't do in our Fair. Whoever in our Fair has fine feelings loves to feel the nap of fine cloth, especially when a fine fellow wears it."
"And who of my fine-fellow species may you be? From the Brazils, ain't you? Toucan fowl. Fine feathers on foul meat." (24, 1-3)
We learn in kindergarten that it's best to keep our hands to ourselves. Pitch really doesn't like it when Frank gets grabby with him—the familiarity is too much, and the text asks us to look at Pitch's "manly" discomfort against Frank's sensual appreciation of Pitch's clothing and body. Pitch responds to Frank's appreciation with disdain: he's not into Frank's "fancy" outfit, which makes him look like a painted bird, and he insults him with a pun on "fowl" by calling Frank's clothes "fine feathers on foul meat." Why is Frank fowl (foul?) to Pitch? Is it because he doesn't ascribe to serious, plain, and rough stereotypes of masculinity?
Quote 9
"Ah, you are a talking man—what I call a wordy man. You talk, talk."
"And with submission, sir, what is the greatest judge, bishop or prophet, but a talking man? He talks, talks. It is the peculiar vocation of a teacher to talk. What's wisdom itself but table-talk? The best wisdom in this world, and the last spoken by its teacher, did it not literally and truly come in the form of table-talk?" (22, 89-90)
Pitch accuses the PIO man of being a talker. For Pitch, if you're talking up a storm, you're up to no good—but the PIO man turns things around on him…with talk…about talk. He's all, Remember oral tradition? Remember great philosophers? Remember basic education? Remember preachers? Heck, even the Bible is a record of what people said others said. Words have a lot of power, and the PIO man focuses on one of the biggies when he points to talking as teaching and learning.