Mark Twain's Last Cakewalk: Racialized Performance in No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger

Abstract

For good and obvious reasons, discussions of race in Mark Twain's writ ings tend to focus on what Henry Nash Smith famously called the Matter of Hannibal, the rich antebellum milieu that occupied such an important part of Twain's imagination. Indeed, the institution of racial slavery forms the social and political bedrock on which the fictional worlds of St. Pe tersburg and Dawson's Landing stand, and it is hard to imagine a serious account of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or Pudd'nhead Wilson that does not give sustained attention to its historical reality. Yet when Twain's focus shifts from the antebellum American scene to some distant past or imagined future, a Camelot or an Eseldorf, it be comes more difficult to pin down the significance of race as an element of characterization. Of course, ethnic imagery continues to abound, much of it demeaning, as when Hank Morgan asserts that the language spoken at King Arthur's court would have made a Comanche blush, but such a throw away line resonates far less clearly than Huck's comment that Jim is white inside, or his equally potent declaration, I'm a nigger.1 As Huck's acute race consciousness constantly suggests, identities in the world of Twain's Mississippi Valley are figured in black and white. Traces of this fictional antebellum world persist in all of Twain's novel istic settings, and yet black/white racial difference is understandably less insistent in his representation of Arthur's England, Joan of Arc's France, or contemporary Hadleyburg. Nevertheless, some of Twain's most provocative ethnic imagery occurs in fictional settings where racial identity is seemingly least at issue. One such setting is Eseldorf, the fifteenth-century Austrian vil lage that provides a background for No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger. Although