The Self-Reliant Man and the Confidence Man
Karen Halttunen (59) described the confidence man in her book ‘Confidence Men and Painted Women’ about the middle class culture of the rapidly industrializing 19th century America. On the other hand, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s (73) ‘Self-Reliance’ glorifies the independence of choice and judgments of a person within the society in the 19th century to accommodate the rapidly evolving society. A relation of these two works by these authors reveals that the self-reliant man that Waldo describes is almost identical to the confidence man that Halttunen describes.
Halttunen describes three types of confidence men; the youth’s urban companion,
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