Mark Twain and the Feminine Aesthetic by Peter Stoneley

Abstract

Reviews 375 that encourages notions of excess for the sake of the effect—is the cement that binds the Phelps farm section to the rest of the text. Doyno’s argument for the inherent connections within the novel is fascinating and convincing. It is also extremely disturbing because it demonstrates how easily our culture has ig­ nored its own violent and abusive history. We have become too sanguine about Clemens’s indictments of the “damned human race.” Times have dulled our appreciation of the outrage that lurks within Huck’syarn. Doyno has managed to resurrect the times and the disgust and the pain inherent in the struggle to tell a terrible and sad story. MICHAELJ. KISKIS SUNY-EmpireState College Mark Twain and theFeminineAesthetic. By Peter Stoneley. (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. 205 pages, $44.95.) Mark Twain and theFeminine Aesthetic examines Twain’s literary and nonliterary writings for his responses to the ideology of gender. Envisioning “the feminine aesthetic” as “an ideological process that involved men and women, both in its creation and its effects,”Stoneley traces the bifurcation between the adventurous, picaresque, or “male” world of Roughing It, Adventures ofHuckle­ berryFinn, and HuckFinn and TomSawyeramongtheIndiansversusworks corrobo­ rating “feminine”values. Readers interested in Twain’swestern experience will enjoy Chapter One’streatment ofthe Nevada-California literary apprenticeship and two early gender parodies: “Lucretia Smith’s Soldiers” (1864) and “Aurelia’s Unfortunate Young Man” (1864). Chapter Two examines Twain’s evolving masculine aesthetic in Life on the Mississippi and Huck Finn, while Chapter Three contends The Prince and the Pauper and Personal Recollections of Joan ofArcwere “written to conform to the taste and strictures of the feminine aesthetic.” To borrow Stoneley’sbinary paradigm, this readable studysucceeds when it springboards from the definitive feminist scholarship of Ann Douglas, Jane Tompkins, Nina Baym, and Cathy Davidson, when it exposes gender equivoca­ tion in Twain’s lesser-known A Dog’s Tale (1904), Eve’s Diary (1906), and A Horse’sTale(1907), and when it treats the unpublished “To the Unborn Reader” (written-1909), a saga of Twain’s squabble with secretary-companion Isabel Lyon. Moreover, the laudable footnotes offer both resource and colloquy. Conversely, the book abstains from contemporary literary theory and all but ignores Twain’s female literary contemporaries (except for the ubiquitous Stowe, Susan Warner, and the “Sweet Singers”). Chapter Five’s chronicle of Twain and Mary Baker Eddy adds little to the book’s argument, and even Stoneley’sphrase “the feminine aesthetic”might be more fittingly deemed the 376 Western American Literature “schoolgirl”aesthetic, Twain’s own term for the female Angelfish who formed his early 1900s “Aquarium” (see John Cooley’s 1991 book, Mark Twain’s Aquarium: TheSamuel ClemensAngelfish Correspondence, 1905-1910). Despite repeated disclaimers about the dilemma of prioritizing a male writer’s “feminine aesthetic,” Stoneley’s commentary sometimes strays into sexist territory. He proposes, for example, that Mary Baker Eddy’s “recurrent illnesses had as much to do with ‘hysteria’aswith organic dysfunction”and that her opposition to mesmerism implied “a strong, sublimated sexual element to her paranoia.” He also slights race and class in defining a feminine aesthetic. Stoneley’s thesis—“that Mark Twain often privileged a masculine aesthetic over a feminine one”—may not be new, but his book offers engrossing evidence nonetheless. HEATHER KIRKTHOMAS Loyola CollegeofMaryland Land Circle: Writings Collected From The Land. By Linda Hasselstrom. (Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Publishing, 1991. 349 pages, $19.95.) MyAunt Viola was a cattle rancher. She spoke, as my father used to say, a language “with the bark on it.”Linda Hasselstrom speaks to us in thatsame tone of quiet, well-earned authority. Hers is one of those voices folks who grew up in the outback country of the American Westwere likely to hear every so often—a decent, experienced woman announcing her thoughts in a direct, passionate way, speaking straight from the trials of her life. Hasselstrom iswilling to saywhat she wants to saywithout much time spent worrying about the effect it might have on some potential reader. Hers is a world where you can take it or leave it, but you can always believe she means what she says. She accepts and loves the...