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Mark Twain's sexual politics -- Mark Twain, Culture and Gender: Envisioning America Through Europe by J. D. Stahl
Papers on Language and Literature, Winter 1995 by Trites, Roberta Seelinger
J.D, Stahl. Mark Twain, Culture and Gender: Envisioning America Through Europe. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1994. 231 pp. cloth $35.00.
J. D. Stahl's Mark Twain, Culture and Gender: Envisioning America Through Europe is an important study of Clemens's well-known ambivalence towards femininity. But rather than rehashing the already established facts about how shallow Clemens's female characterizations are, Stahl links Clemens's anxiety about gender to the tensions in his writing between the old and the new worlds. Stahl states his premise in his Introduction: What I set out to show in the following pages is how the relativity of European values, customs, and beliefs in comparison with Samuel Clemens's own American ideas, attitudes, and practices informed and permeated his envisioning of gender and vice versa.... Clemens expressed some of his deepest and most enduring concerns with gender and sexuality through European metaphors. (1)
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Stahl is more convincing and consistent as he delineates Clemens's anxiety about sexuality than he is about Clemens's conflicted opinions of Europe. In that regard, the book will probably have more impact on feminist studies of Twain than on American Studies and Clemens's attitudes towards Europe (a subject which has been studied more thoroughly anyway).
Stahl investigates five of Clemens's longer and two of his shorter works, all of which have in common a European setting: The Innocents Abroad, The Prince and the pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, the various versions of The Mysterious Stranger, "A Memorable Midnight Experience," and "1601: Conversation As It was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors." Stahl argues that the European settings of these texts provide Clemens with an opportunity to appropriate European images in order to explore the nuances of gender. Moreover, Stahl shows how Clemens's contradictory depictions of gender and of Europe develop during the course of the writer's career so that by the time of his writing The Mysterious Stranger, his characters are able to move in the direction of an androgyny that would have been impossible in earlier works.
Stahl perceives The Innocents Abroad as the earliest arena in which Clemens uses European metaphors to explore American cultural issues surrounding sexuality. Stahl notes the instances where the Twain persona who narrates The Innocents Abroad--because of his "merging of sexual anxiety and cultural anxiety" (46)--represents Europe as "seductive temptress," "witch," or "symbolic mother" in order to set himself up as the archetypal innocent American (6). Thus, Stahl makes much of the female shopkeeper who convinces Twain to buy a pair of gloves that doesn't fit, of the waitress in France who spoils his romanticism by speaking English, of the ugly grisettes, of the beggar-woman in Portugal, of Twain's bowdlerization of the Heloise and Abelard legend, and of Twain's excision of the female passengers aboard the Quaker City from the text of The Innocents Abroad.
All of this is very convincing, but it would have been more convincing if Stahl had not limited his examples almost exclusively to those from the first half of the text, for in the second half of the text, as Twain moves farther east into cultures even more foreign to him than those of western Europe, he confronts a variety of masculine characters who, as personifications of the Old World, deserve the same type of analysis as the women of Twain's early travels. Stahl includes almost nothing from the final third of the book when Twain and company travel in the Holy Land, and Stahl fails to analyze the implications of Twain's adoration of the Czar of Russia, whose coat Twain wishes to steal. Posing as an innocent American and equating unexplored masculinity with this innocence, Twain, in his desire to wear the cloak of the clearly masculine Czar, adds another interesting twist to Stahl's argument. Europe is not entirely feminine for Twain, but it is clearly sexual.
The most completely realized chapter in Mark Twain, Culture and Gender is the fourth chapter, "Sexual Politics in A Connecticut Yankee. "Stahl ties Morgan le Fay's predatory sexuality to Hank Morgan's predatory nature. As Stahl points out, they share both a name and a desire to control everything around them (102-3). The Church serves as another predatory female figure in the text, which serves nicely to illustrate Stahl's observation of the frequency with which femininity is polarized into the predatory, sexual woman and the martyred, nonsexual mother-figure in Clemens's texts. Stahl demonstrates Clarence's and King Arthur's androgyny as foils to Hank's need to cultivate his own androgyny; Stahl also successfully establishes Hank as another failed father-figure in a long line of such figures in the Twain canon. Of Connecticut Yankee, Stahl concludes:
Twain dramatically, if not consciously, acknowledges the inadequacy of Hank's masculine values by showing him, finally, not merely longing to be reunited with his anima, Sandy, and with his child whose name echoes the technological alienation of a distant future, but assuming a role poignantly uncharacteristic of him: that of the martyred mother losing her child. Hank's political failure is rooted in a psychological failure. (119)
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