Women Who Perform Belief

I. The Confidence Woman as American Type

The confidence man is one of American literature’s oldest exports, and Herman Melville gave the type its founding text in 1857: The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, in which a shape-shifting swindler works a Mississippi riverboat, adopting whatever persona — philanthropist, herb doctor, cosmopolitan — will best extract money or trust from his marks, while the novel itself declines to ever confirm which, if any, of his identities is real.¹ Sinclair Lewis extended the type into organized religion with Elmer Gantry in 1927, whose title character rises through the American revivalist ministry on pure showmanship, his gift for simulated conviction indistinguishable, to his congregations, from the real thing.² Both books share a structural commitment: the confidence figure’s fraudulence is never fully separable from a kind of genuine gift, and the reader is left uncertain whether unmasking the con would actually explain away everything the con has produced.

James Mulhern populates two stories with women who belong unmistakably to this lineage, translated into a distinctly female and distinctly late-twentieth and twenty-first-century American register: Lady Jane, the Tremont Street faith healer of “Useless Things,” and Myra Bocca, the Wilton Manors New Age shop owner of the story bearing her name. Neither has, to this essay’s knowledge, been read against the Melville-Lewis tradition before, though both figures reproduce its central ambiguity with striking fidelity: each is transparently a fraud, and each nonetheless produces a piece of information that the fiction will not let the reader simply discard.

II. Lady Jane: The Twang That Slips

Lady Jane’s fraudulence is built into her introduction with unusual specificity: she speaks with “a fake British accent with a hint of Georgia twang,” a vocal costume that keeps slipping under pressure — by the story’s climax she is “speaking completely in her Georgia twang,” the performed Englishness abandoned entirely.³ Her healing technique is theater rather than method: “circular motions with her hands,” a “crisscross” gesture over the heart, an “ostensibly sacred language” that two skeptical listeners both hear degrading into the word “pussy.”³ Every visible signal the story provides argues for pure grift: the parlor beneath a printing company, the line of “desperadoes” extending around the corner, Lady Jane’s youth and showgirl costuming (“busty,” “white ballerina slippers with a flower pattern of red gemstones,” “untied” laces) so at odds with Mrs. Muldoon’s expectation of a wise elder that she immediately judges her “a tart that’s trying to make a few extra bucks before she goes to her other job in the Zone.”³

And yet the story’s single genuine narrative payload — the only piece of information Lady Jane produces that the reader is meant to carry forward — arrives inside this thoroughly discredited performance. Told to look at twelve-year-old Molly, Lady Jane says: “I see gruesome deaths in your future… You have the unlucky fortune of being someone who will either find dead people or be with them when they die, sometimes in violent situations. I guess you might say, ‘You’re an Angel of Death.’”³ A reader who has met Molly Bonamici elsewhere in the collected volume — where she narrates, in flat procedural prose, her own poisoning of a college roommate — already knows this prophecy is, at minimum, not wrong. Melville’s confidence-man never delivers a true prediction; Lewis’s Gantry never actually saves a soul. Mulhern’s innovation on the type is to let the fraud be accurate, without ever granting her narrative the authority to explain why.

III. Myra Bocca: Psychic Patter as Diagnostic Instrument

Myra Bocca performs the confidence type’s comic register more fully than Lady Jane, her shop “Sacred Ashes” stocked with “incense sticks… tarot cards, essential oils, prayer flags” and her patter built from stock New Age vocabulary — chakras, “universal force,” “awakened spirit” — that the story’s narrator, Molly, dismantles in real time: when Myra claims psychic insight into Gabe’s home state, he corrects her immediately, “It was the way that you pronounced ‘dear’ that clued me in. You dropped the ‘r.’”⁴ Every one of Myra’s claimed psychic perceptions has a mundane, deducible explanation available in the same paragraph, which is precisely how the confidence-woman genre is supposed to work: the mark, or in this case the skeptical narrator standing in for the reader, is always one step ahead of the performance’s mechanics.

But Myra, unlike a Melville confidence man whose fraud is total and self-contained, correctly reads something real about Molly on their first meeting — “Did someone die recently?” — a question Molly refuses to answer honestly (“Lots of people experience death. That’s not psychic”) even though her aunt has, in fact, just died.⁴ Molly’s own retrospective analysis of the encounter names the essay’s central critical question directly: “Maybe the black stones had nothing to do with grieving and she was making it all up, just a good reader of people, a con. In her business, you had to be.”⁴ This sentence is as close as the confidence-woman tradition comes to explaining its own mechanism: the con and the genuine perceptiveness are not opposed skills but the same skill, deployed for profit. Myra’s eventual theft of Molly’s credit card, charged toward “a television and some pornographic DVDs,” resolves the ambiguity about her honesty (she is, simply, a thief) without resolving the ambiguity about her perceptiveness (she was still right about the death).⁴

IV. Two Charlatans, One Family Resemblance

Placed side by side, Lady Jane and Myra Bocca share more than a profession. Both are physically described in terms that undercut their claimed spiritual authority — Lady Jane’s youth and showgirl costume, Myra’s “receding chin and… wrinkled prune face” that the narrator explicitly, if uncharitably, contrasts with her own grandmother’s beauty.⁴ Both are placed by the text in implicit comparison to the story’s actual matriarch: Molly notes that Myra’s eyes “reminded me a bit of my Nonna’s,” and Nonna herself is present as a skeptical chaperone throughout the Lady Jane scene, her running commentary (“Cut the crap!”) establishing her as the story’s implicit standard of authentic, unpaid, familial spiritual authority against which the professional healer is measured and found wanting.³ Both women, that is, are shadow versions of the grandmother figure examined elsewhere in Mulhern’s corpus: unlicensed authorities who claim access to hidden knowledge, except that where the grandmothers’ authority is familial, sacrificial, and free, Lady Jane and Myra Bocca’s is commercial, performative, and, in Myra’s case, outright criminal.

What ultimately distinguishes Mulhern’s use of the confidence-woman type from its Melville and Lewis antecedents is his refusal of the genre’s customary ending: unmasking. The Confidence-Man and Elmer Gantry both, eventually, let their readers see behind the performance, even if their fictional communities never do. Mulhern declines that resolution for both Lady Jane and Myra Bocca. Lady Jane is fled from, not exposed; Myra Bocca is arrested by implication, not by any scene the story bothers to stage. Both women exit their stories still performing, their fraud and their accuracy left standing side by side, unreconciled — which may be the most contemporary update Mulhern makes to a two-century-old American type: the twenty-first-century charlatan does not need to be caught to be believed, and does not need to be believed to be, on occasion, right.

— Silver Current Press

Notes

Works Quoted

All Essays The Comic-Grotesque Tradition → The Confessor Archetype