Mark Twain's sexual politics -- Mark Twain, Culture and Gender: Envisioning America Through Europe by J. D. Stahl

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)

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)

Hank's failure to convert the Old World to New World innovations and mores ultimately affirms the power of European institutions. All of the other chapters have their strengths, but none seems to me as complete as this fourth chapter.

Stahl does give convincing readings of two often-neglected Clemens's texts: The Prince and the Pauper and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. Peter Stoneley reductively views these novels as vehicles with which to examine the tension between Mark Twain's masculine persona and Samuel Clemens's feminized domestic life (Mark Twain and the Feminine Aesthetic, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992). Stahl problematizes the novels with far greater sophistication. He notes how Clemens transforms Europe from "seductive but dangerous Motherland" to "Europe as American Fatherland" in The Prince and the pauper (70) as he investigates the nature of paternity. Stahl connects the novel to Joan of Arc by asserting that "if in The Prince and the pauper Clemens imaginatively spun out varieties of paternity, in Joan of Arc he spins out varieties of masculinity" (128). Stahl delineates how the narrator, de Conte, "is both a narrative device and a character whose predicaments and evolutions discover Clemens's projections of a problematic masculinity that corresponds to the warrior saint's emblematic femininity" (122). Stahl criticizes Clemens for marginalizing Joan's sexuality in that this repression denies the humanity of both the protagonist and the narrator, for the desexualized Joan ensures that de Conte can never have any "tragic depth and complexity" (149). Stahl recognizes that the sexual politics embedded in these novels reflect far more than the biographical situation of Clemens's life.

I do, however, have some minor criticisms of the text as a whole. In the Introduction, Stahl says he will follow the tradition Justin Kaplan set in separating Clemens the historical figure from his created public and fictional persona, Mark Twain (xi). Stahl acknowledges that the boundaries between the two are often ambiguous, but unfortunately he does not consistently make this distinction in places where he could, so his meaning sometimes is not as clear as it might be. For example, in the following passage, the lines between the historical person and the fictional persona seem unnecessarily obscured: "By looking at the images of masculine identity in Twain's narrative in relation to the kind of ideal of femininity--and of humanity--represented by Joan, we can see Twain's representations of gender and sexuality in a clearer light" (121). Is it Twain's or Clemens's representations of gender that we are experiencing as we read the text?

And a minor complaint: I wish Stahl had explained the significance of the photographs included in the book. Although the reason for some of the choices is obvious, for others, it is not--but the possibilities seem intriguing. What are we supposed to make of the images of Clemens surrounded by women aboard the S. S. Northland and the U. S. S. Mohican? Why are there so many pictures of Clemens and his daughter Clara? Are we to read meaning into Clemens's posture or his demeanor or the company he keeps in these pictures?

Another and more important point that I would like to raise is the significance of this study for children's literature. Stahl's writing is clearly shaped by his work in children's literature, and he has a keen contextual awareness of the children's texts contemporary to Clemens. But Stahl does not explore the implications of such incredible sexual tension informing texts that have been so completely appropriated by children: The Prince and the Pauper, Connecticut Yankee, and Joan of Arc. What does it mean for children that these books written for them (and for their parents) are saturated with sexual tensions

My final criticism of Mark Twain, Culture and Gender is that at times Stahl seems to be more accepting of Clemens's (and Twain's) inherent sexism than I am. Perhaps Stahl's calm acceptance of the textual misogyny is what allows him to go beyond mere Twain-bashing so that he can rationally explore the implications of Clemens's gender biases. But at times, Stahl's acceptance could be read as a tacit approval, as if such sexism does not matter if through it we can come to understand more about Twain. And, perhaps in fact, it does not. I will say this: Stahl's book has allowed me for the first time in my scholarly career to think about the stereotypes surrounding- Clemens's use of gender in ways that have led me to an increased understanding of his ambiguity about sex.

This book is by no means the culmination of the study of Twain and gender, nor does it pretend to be. But it is an important work that asks the right questions and helps the reader to gain a new understanding of a problematic issue. For that, J. D. Stahl's Mark Twain, Culture and Gender should become a standard in the canon of Twain studies.

Copyright Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville Winter 1995
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