Herman Melville and the Metafictions of Indian Hating

Abstract In Chapter 6, the shift to intertextuality and metacommentary culminates in Melville’s exploration of the “metaphysics of Indian Hating” in The Confidence Man (1857). This source has long dominated the study of Indian Hating. In a sequence of chapters, Melville openly misreads Hall’s essay “Indian Hating” (1833) to attack the textualization of Indian Hating more generally. However, he overlooks Hall’s ambivalence and groups it in with sensational authors such as Bird. Using a dense intertextuality, Melville misreads Hall to identify and condemn the entire body of materials as typifying how a corrupt print culture drained language of meaning. In turn, this epitomizes the amoral foundation of a hypocritical and genocidal national culture based in the pretentious and anti-democratic assumptions of settler colonialism. Save for a brief condemnation of Tom Quick by Stephen Crane in 1891, Melville’s was the final critical version of the story. After the Civil War, the tradition was wholly absorbed into the rhetoric of imperial nationalism.