Karen Halttunen. Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870.
Introduction | Overview | Social Conditions | Reactions | Outcomes | Commentary
Overview
A brief overview of the structure of the meta-narrative in Halttunen's discussion will help orient us as we move through Confidence Men and Painted Women. Two strands feed into sentimental culture's preoccupation with hypocrisy. One strand derives from a national identity crisis generated by the rise of large urban centers, in which people could no longer know others in the community as well as people in small towns could know the members of their community. There was a need for a “code” to distinguish who these strangers were. The other strand has its origins in the eighteenth century republican ideology, which considered virtue as a necessary requisite for the preservation of the American republican experiment. The confidence man embodied the hypocrisy and corrupting influences that might lead young Americans away from the virtues necessary for the success of the American nation.
The preoccupation with hypocrisy lead to the formation of social forms and rituals intended to allow members of the middle-class to distinguish who in their community was sincere. The social forms and rituals were then followed as custom rather than an expression of sincerity, which heightened the preoccupation with hypocrisy, and lead to development of new social forms and rituals. Eventually this cycle broke when the preoccupation with sincerity faded away and only the empty social forms and rituals remained.
