Mark Twain's American Adam: Humor as Hope and Apocalypse

Abstract

In fall of 1879, Mark Twain enlisted many of most prominent members of Elmira society into his rather preposterous scheme to erect a memorial to as the Father of Human Race. committee, called Monument Association of was appointed to select a sculptor. This association, which included local minister Thomas K. Beecher as president, went so far as to have letterhead produced. In their zeal they proclaimed, The monument will rise. It only awaits approval of model (qtd. in Jerome and Wisbey 83). In his essay titled A Monument to Adam that he published many years afterward, Twain recalled some of reasons for his idea: Darwin's Descent of Man had been in print five or six years, and storm of indignation raised by it was still raging in pulpits and periodicals. In tracing genesis of human race back to its sources, Mr. Darwin had left out altogether [...]. Jesting with Mr. Beecher and other friends of Elmira, I said there seemed to be a likelihood that world would discard and accept monkey, and that in course of time Adam's very name would be forgotten in earth; therefore this calamity ought to he averted; a monument would accomplish this [...]. People would come from every corner of globe and stop off to look at it[;] no tour of world would be complete that left out Adam's monument. Elmira would be a Mecca; there would be pilgrim ships at pilgrim rates, pilgrim specials on continent's railways; libraries would be written about monument[;] every tourist would kodak it. (qtd. in Jerome and Wisbey 84-85) Why this puzzling and rather irreverent focus on Adam? We should begin to unpack Twain's selective use of by situating it within rich religious climate of Gilded Age in America. As Twain was writing these comments, a sustained attack against all religious claims was mounting, so much so that it can be said to be one of most obvious features of that era. As Gilded Age got fully under way after Civil War, fervid evangelical Christianity of antebellum period began to take new directions. It had to evolve, given emergence of scientific and intellectual movements that scrutinized Christian notions of humankind as made in image of God and of Bible as holy, infallible, and authentic Word of God. Simultaneously, educated Americans were being told that there was nothing particularly sacred or supernatural about either their Bible or their own species. These rapid changes resulted in what historian Paul Carter has called the spiritual crisis of Gilded Age. Interestingly, as various critics have argued, Twain's movement from a rather primitivistic form of Protestant Christianity, through deism, and later into more scientific and psychological forms of belief roughly squares with general movement of culture at large. Moreover, given affinity of Christianity with nurturing of a peculiarly ideology, simultaneous attacks of Darwinism and of German Higher Criticism of Bible implicitly advanced criticisms against America's religion. In essay focused on realm of religious, we must continually recall close intertwining throughout social and cultural history of with political and other forms of thought. Indeed, close connection of these two realms provides term civil religion itself, pointing as it does simultaneously to kingdoms of this world and to Kingdom of God, as defined by Robert Bellah. Twain's ideological versions of regnant myth, many of which invoked Adamic qualities of America's pioneering and highly individualistic spirit, are myriad in his fiction and essays. Key aspects of this ideology were famously captured by R. W. B. Lewis, who described American Adam as an individual emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefiled by usual inheritances of family and race; individual standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with aid of his own unique and inherent resources. …