Herman Melville's short fiction : ideology and the American confidence game

Melville's short fiction of the 1850s constitutes a critique of a dominant American Ideology which was responsible for the demise of the American Dream. Melville registered his disappointment with and criticism of America's failed promise through subversive means: rather than attack outright, Melville put into practice within his texts as the form of his presentation that which he criticized, ideology. Through the ironic narrators of three tales, "The Two Temples," "The 'Gees," and "Benito Cereno," Melville reveals a confidence game of ideology. Each narrator embodies, in Marx's words, a "false consciousness," or in Althuserrian terms, a "lived relation to the real" which bolsters confidence in America's innocent self-image while it justifies and perpetuates an exploitative social order and one's place in it.

"The Two Temples," through the controlling metaphor of "acting," reveals how the narrator uses an ideologically-induced role of "democratic pilgrim" to delude himself to his elitist aspirations. As an actor within his own text, the narrator enacts the ideology of the dominant class and thus perpetuates the mindset which facilitates aristocratic pretension under the guise of democracy and Christian communion.

"The 'Gees" centers around an ironic motif of eyes and sight and accordingly reveals how ideology functions as a camera obscura to distort the "real" economic relations which undergird American society. Under the guise of an innocent sketch about a "peculiar people," the narrator reveals the ideological maneuvering which passes off economic exploitation as legitimate capitalism.

The more far-ranging "Benito Cereno," reveals through the eyes and thought of Delano, that ideology is a multi-layered confidence game which deceives on all levels of reality. In particular, Delano's ideology bolsters his confidence in his lived relation to both the historical and linguistic representation of the world. Because of this confidence he remains deceived to the fluidity of meanings--represented through images of fixity and flux--aboard the San Dominick. Delano is thus blind to the flux of reality which in the tale is historically represented by the subversive slave revolt and linguistically by what poststructuralists have shown to be the straying, indeterminacy of language.