Date of Graduation

Spring 2026

Degree

Master of Arts in English

Department

English

Committee Chair

Matthew Calihman

Abstract

This thesis argues that Herman Melville fashioned his novel The Confidence-Man; His Masquerade (1857) after the moving panorama, a popular entertainment technology contemporary with the novel. More specifically, the thesis argues that the novel recalls Banvard’s Mississippi Panorama (1846). Using Jay Leyda’s The Melville Log and John Hanners’ record of Banvard’s performances, I establish beyond reasonable doubt the possibility that Melville saw this painting, or, at the very least, was aware of it, its content, and its social position. Tracing the novel’s engagement with this panorama reveals what seems at first to be its imperialist, Manifest Destinarian undertones. The novel’s presentation of these ideas is, however, carefully displaced onto a distinct and original narratorial voice: Melville’s Confidence Narrator. Although no scholar has found it necessary to argue this point, the novel does equate its Narrator with its protagonist through many oblique hints, including their shared propensity to con. The Narrator dupes the reader into thinking he presents an objective viewpoint on the events in the novel, but he undercuts his grift by insistently foregrounding his southern democratic subject position and by idealizing Manifest Destiny. Melville, the author, includes this narratorial misstep to introduce critical distance between the novel itself and the ideological vision of its Confidence Narrator. Comparing the Narrator’s ideology to that projected by the panorama reveals that Melville’s exact contention with this perception is its claim to supposedly Providential knowledge. The novel, I conclude, is Melville’s experimental indictment of the mid-nineteenth century U.S. imperialist impulse.

Keywords

Melville, The Confidence-Man, Banvard, Banvard’s Mississippi Panorama, nineteenth-century American literature, nineteenth-century novels, American novels, nineteenth-century visual media, moving panorama, moving panoramas of the Mississippi River

Subject Categories

American Art and Architecture | American Literature | American Material Culture | American Popular Culture | Visual Studies

Copyright

© Bradley J. Lee

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