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 places two women in a related lineage, translated into a female and 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. This essay does not identify earlier readings of these figures alongside the Melville-Lewis tradition, but both can be read through its central ambiguity: each appears fraudulent while also providing information the fiction does not simply dismiss.

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

Yet one piece of information Lady Jane provides within this discredited performance has consequences beyond the scene. 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 — may find the prophecy difficult to dismiss. Rather than explain Lady Jane’s apparent accuracy, the story leaves the relationship between fraud and perception unsettled.

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.

Myra also appears to read something accurately 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 retrospective analysis of the encounter poses the essay’s central question: “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 The passage suggests that con artistry and perceptiveness need not be opposed skills. Myra’s eventual theft of Molly’s credit card, charged toward “a television and some pornographic DVDs,” establishes her dishonesty without fully settling the question of her perceptiveness.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.

Mulhern’s use of the confidence-woman type differs in one respect from the Melville and Lewis works discussed here: the stories do not move directly toward unmasking. The Confidence-Man and Elmer Gantry can be read as allowing readers to see behind the performance, even if their fictional communities do not. In Mulhern’s stories, Lady Jane is fled from rather than exposed, and Myra Bocca is implicated in theft without an arrest scene. Both women leave their stories still performing, with fraud and apparent accuracy unresolved. The twenty-first-century charlatan, in this reading, need not be caught to be believed and need not be believed to be, on occasion, right.

— Silver Current Press

Notes

Works Quoted

All Essays The Comic-Grotesque Tradition → The Confessor Archetype