Mark Twain and the “Slow, Poor, Shiftless, Sleepy, and Lazy” Azoreans in The Innocents Abroad

Abstract

Much has been written about Innocents Abroad (1869), Mark Twain's bestseller and literary success, but the two chapters he devotes to the Portuguese from the Azores Islands in this book have received little or no critical attention. For example, one would expect Hilton Obenzinger's recent study, American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania to make some reference to the Azoreans, but such is not the case. To my knowledge, Twain's impressions of the Portuguese he encountered on the island of Fayal (Faial) have never received any in-depth scholarly attention, not even in George Monteiro's article, 'The Poor, Shiftless, Lazy Azoreans': American Literary Attitudes Toward the Portuguese. And yet, a portion of Monteiro's title and the caption in his introduction have been extracted from this travel narrative. While I am particularly drawn to an ethnic group that, as far as I am aware, appears only once in Twain's canon and which has been repeatedly overlooked, my goal in this article is to assess Twain's treatment of the Azoreans in Innocents Abroad and analyze the ways in which this may shed additional light on the ongoing debate on and Otherness in Twain's fiction. As I have argued elsewhere, the Portuguese have been victims of prevailing theories of in America, and Twain's work of literature is a substantiation of this. As Eric J. Sundquist has shown in To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature, remains very much at the center of the American experience (17). While Innocents Abroad was being hailed as a literary success, the number of Azoreans flocking to New Bedford and Nantucket, Massachusetts to work on board American whalers was gradually increasing. Un- like other works of American fiction with Portuguese fictional characters, Twain's piece is unusual in the sense that he portrays them in their native land. Although Twain is writing about a foreign land, his glance and the manner in which he represents the Azoreans does not differ that much from later works like, say, Frank Norris's Octopus (1901), or even Jack London's Valley of the Moon (1913), where the Azoreans are seen working in the fields of California. same could be said for Melville's treatment of and his criticism of sea captains' racism in his short story The 'Gees' (1856), which focuses on the New England whaling industry. In this piece as in later ones, the Portuguese simply could not avoid being seen through the lens of racial theories, especially at the end of the nineteenth century, when social Darwinism was such a popular ideology. Twain's impressions of these faceless Azoreans anticipate similar feelings that turn-of-the-century writers such as the ones mentioned above had unleashed into their narratives. Toni Morrison, too, is of the opinion that Deep within the word 'American' is its association with race (47). As other scholars have argued, in matters of Twain is, indeed, slippery and elusive. I would add that his interest in tall tales makes this assessment even more difficult because of his humoristic treatment of Otherness in Innocents Abroad. After all, the effect of his story The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1867) was still very strong in his style of writing, and remained so throughout most of his career. voice we hear in Innocents Abroad is the one dating back to the period in Twain's life where he had been shaped by Western humor. It is the voice that delights in telling yarns to frontiersmen gathered around a campfire at night. humorous touch he has perfected here shows us a writer who is concerned with such matters as how he can refine his usage of such a rhetorical device into the crafting of bestsellers. It is no mere coincidence that Innocents Abroad was advertised and sold through subscription. In a way, that is why he couldn't care less if he denigrated or ridiculed the Azoreans. As long as he sold more and more copies to entertain nineteenth-century readers, that would be fine, considering his voracious appetite for making money. …