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Mark Twain, Culture and Gender: Envisioning America Through Europe

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1995 by Heather Kirk Thomas

In The Innocents Abroad, Twain's traveler-persona simulates a "feminine" innocence when confronted with experienced and therefore eroticized European women. Polarizing foreign women as "angels" or "demons," the male "American Innocent" asserts a superior cultural authority. Both he and his gang of overgrown boys project a post-Civil War masculine cockiness: feigning disillusionment, they still retain their naivete. Curiously, Twain deletes the Quaker City's female passengers from the narrative - among them, "Mother" Mary Mason Fairbanks, his friend and literary adviser - thus claiming their "virginal innocence" and "genteel values" as his own.

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Stahl's principal concentration on Twain's short fiction contrasts two 1870s pieces featuring Queen Elizabeth. The travel sketch "A Memorable Midnight Experience" and the scatological and privately circulated "1601: Conversation As It Was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors" authenticate the tension between Twain's private and public utterance, a vital key to his attitudes about gender and class. In the first, Twain visits Westminster Abbey where the queen's granite monument conflates female power with willful cruelty, a persistent Twainian hobby horse. Conversely, the historic Abbey, feminized as a memorial "womb for the dead," serves positively to signify "home and refuge for the nation's best and bravest." Power is also the issue in "1601," comically and apprehensively symbolized by the queen's sexual appetites. The tale's "Chaucerian bawdiness" lampoons female dominance in an historically aristocratic setting but also targets nineteenth-century America's gender anxieties and sexual squeamishness.

The Prince and the Pauper obviously privileges masculine characterizations, but Stahl demonstrates that the novel's most admirable males combine the best qualities of both genders, whereas "saintly" mothers figure as powerless victims. Its central question concerns what "womanly" and what "manly" attributes fathers and surrogate fathers pass on to their sons. A Connecticut Yankee's "sexual politics" pairs con-man Hank Morgan opposite his Jungian "shadow," the beautiful but degenerate Morgan le Fay, as well as against his "good" wife, Sandy, and a corrupt, feminized Church. In this novel, women "provide the sentiment, while men exercise the power." Ultimately Twain's Arthurian chronicle, resoundingly ambiguous about human equality, "confirms rather than subverts the terms he attacks."

The idealized allegorical heroine in Joan of Arc embodies both Twain's male imagination and his "American faith in political and sexual innocence." Stahl's discussion of the novel's metafictional narrator, Sieur Louis de Conte (S.L.C.), makes fascinating reading, illuminating Twain's withdrawal into the psychological "interiority" of the "Mysterious Stranger" manuscripts, wherein he doubles characters in dream selves to confront, then to transcend, gender boundaries (see also Susan Gillman's Dark Twins). Although Twain invariably reviled ambitious, self-serving women and never presented any real egalitarian "partnerships" in his fiction, ironically, in his darker writings, virtuous mothers finally rise above victimization, and three courageously independent females (albeit all servants) represent humanity in general: Ursula in "The Chronicle of Young Satan"; Aunt Rachel in "Schoolhouse Hill"; and Katrina in "No 44, The Mysterious Stranger."

Mark Twain, Culture and Gender also contains a valuable bibliography, and its plentiful illustrations offer a visual treat, notwithstanding that they are never mentioned in the text. Perhaps unavoidably in studies of this nature, Twain's hilarious expressions furnish the bulk of the comic relief. Otherwise Stahl ponders Twain, culture, and gender very seriously indeed, maintaining, like Peter Wilks's undertaker, no more smile than a ham.

HEATHER KIRK THOMAS Loyola College in Maryland

Mark Twain, Culture and Gender: Envisioning America Through Europe

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1995 by Heather Kirk Thomas

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