Realism and Power in Mark Twain's

Abstract

To further our understanding of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) and its relationship to American culture, we need to be beyond the limiting questions of whether Twain was for or against technology and democracy, and to bridge the obstructive dichotomies assumed in our critical discourse between personal and political explanation, between the text and social history, and between the literary structure and the social content of the novel.The inconsistencies in the main character, for example, ought to be examined as more than either an artistic weakness or a psychological portrait. As an integral part of the novel, the characterization can be understood as an expression of the desires and fears of the author and readers, and as a product of the social context embedded in the novel. Furthermore, to heal the split between the novel and social history, we need to ask how the text works to structure experience and produce meanings within the social context of the late-nineteenth century. In particular, we must understand how the fantasy framework itself actively organizes social experience for the reader, rather than try to distill a static message from his process.In order to overcome some of these dichotomies, I propose to read A Connecticut Yankee as a fantasy about controlling social change. Instead of asking what Twain was trying to say about society, we can post the following question: How does Twain construct a fiction world that invokes, induces, and itself controls conflicting responses on the part of readers toward the social changes affecting their own lives? The narrative weaves a fantasy that is actively engaged in by the writer, the hero, and the readers. By writing about Hank Morgan's effort to orchestrate a transition from sixth-century feudalism to nineteen-century capitalism in England, Twain both gives meaning to and criticizes the social transformations underway in late-nineteenth-century America. Using fantastic means, Twain exiles Hank Morgan from his contemporary society and allows him to escape from its problem.From his newfound position of power, the Yankee attempts to reconstruct nineteenth-century American capitalism freed of the threatening conflicts he has left behind. By identifying with Hank, who comes across as a representative American folk hero, readers can remake contemporary society in the image of their own desires and can thereby share in his sense of control over social change. By imagining his own society starting practically from scratch in a controlled environment, Twain can confront and make sense of the social changes occurring during his lifetime.A close look at Connecticut Yankee shows that the use of technology and the idea of progress—issues most often discussed by critics—are actually subordinate to the process of social change and the struggle over social power.Despite his obvious devotion to modernizing feudal England, Hank Morgan shows at least as much concern with his own control of this transformation as with its concrete products. His determination to civilize King Arthur's backward nation only seems to follow upon his initial desire “to boss the country inside of three months.”1 He directs his most elaborate inventions to consolidating his power against the obstacles to “progress”—the Church, Merlin, and the Knight Errantry, obstacles that are pointedly shown to oppose his rule. Twain, likewise, allots little narrative space to the description of Hank's civilization.2 Instead, he focuses on the ongoing and violent struggle for control over the medieval people between the Yankee and feudal institutions.Thus Connecticut Yankee is by no means as idyllic as the word “fantasy” makes it sound. For a conflict evolves at its heart between the desire for control and the desire for change. The fantasy of controlling change works in tension with fears of powerlessness and fears about the potential destructiveness of the conflicts propelling social change. This fantasy continually borders on a nightmare, which, we shall see, finally erupts at the end of the novel. Connecticut Yankee, on the one hand, works out imaginary resolutions to the conflicts of nineteenth-century society. On the other hand, its process of resolving problems actually reproduces them in an intensified form. Thus Hank, in transforming medieval society, attempts to subdue the threats to his new civilization, yet this same act of denomination becomes a destructive threat to social order. If Connecticut Yankee does offer a trenchant critique of nineteenth-century American society, as critics have argued, it is by enacting this contradictory process, rather than by pronouncing a definitive political judgment.For Hank Morgan, the fantasy of waking up in King Arthur's court consists in part of reenacting the Robinson Crusoe story—the solitary man wrenched from society and forced to fend for himself in a foreign environment. Upon embarking on his project to modernize medieval England, Hank expresses both his sense of isolation and optimism in his creative powers by comparing himself to this fictional innovator of an earlier stage of capitalism: I saw that I was just another Robinson Crusoe castaway on an uninhabited island, with no society but some more or less tame animals, and if I wanted to make life bearable I must do as he did—invent, contrive, create, reorganize things; set brain and hand to work, and keep them busy. (47)Although Britain is by no means uninhabited, Hank's description reduces its people to “more or less tame animals” and renders its society as desolate and empty as Robinson Crusoe's island. He can thereby imagine himself as self-sufficient as Defoe's hero, and can present his activities as the creation of a new society ex nihilo, rather than as a struggle to dominate and destroy a prior culture. Employing the technical knowledge of the time, as does Robinson Crusoe, Hank Morgan views his own active intervention as the only source of meaning and productivity on the British Island. While to Hank, the inherent barrenness of medieval society appears to spawn the need for his inventiveness, the novel shows that his own desire for power forces him to treat medieval society as meaningless in itself, offering him at most only passive material to appropriate, dominate, and reform. The tension between Hank's treatment of King Arthur's England as an uninhabited island and his active confrontation with its inhabitants will be discussed later in this chapter.The comparison of Hank Morgan to Robinson Crusoe has wider implications for an understanding of Connecticut Yankee as a whole. Twain's novel can be read both as a recasting of Defoe's tale for late-nineteenth-century America and as an exploration of the current viability of this story. Both novels make sense of and criticize widespread social changes through parallel fictional structures. The hero of each text is removed from his contemporary society only to reinvent its essential features in a more primitive setting. Hank attempts to transform medieval England into a modern industrialized republic, just as Robinson Crusoe turns a deserted island into a piece of private property—his “estate”—and then a colony.Through the depiction of their heroes’ reconstruction of society, both Defoe and Twain present their readers with a myth of origins. That is, they tell a story of the inception of a particular form of society in order to examine its present development and anticipate its future course. Although the island imposes many hardships on the hero, for the author it serves as a hothouse in which he can imagine the growth of a social system under idealized conditions. By thus locating a mythical moment of the origin of contemporary society, the writer can impose order and meaning upon its trajectory of change, just as the hero comes to rule the island community he creates. In each text, the alternative vision of society implanted on the island both replicates and diverges from the one left behind by the hero. His reinvented world both glorifies and provides a critical vantage on the world which the readers still inhabit.While Connecticut Yankee resurrects the fantasy of the self-sufficient man on the island, it also implicitly parodies Defoe's story. We shall see that Twain reinvokes the Robinson Crusoe myth in order to push it to its explosive limits. Although Twain, on the one hand, does create another Robinson Crusoe, on the other he exposes the contradictions inherent in maintaining this eighteenth-century myth of origins as an explanation for his contemporary social system. Before discussing Twain's reworking of the Robinson Crusoe story to deal with the social changes of his period, let us take a brief look at Defoe's text and the social transformation that it confronts.Robinson Crusoe has long been pictured by both literary critics and economists the same way Hank sees him, as the archetypal rugged individualist—diligent, intelligent, and frugal—who masters nature through reason. This characterization evolves in Defoe's text through the amalgamation of old and new, often inconsistent popular images. On the one hand, Robinson Crusoe exemplifies the possessive individualism of early capitalism. His methodical pursuit of profit, his devaluation of traditional human bonds, his use of the contract form in his interaction with others, and his conversion to a secular brand of Protestantism, all contribute to his overall effect as “Economic Man.”3 On the other hand, Robinson Crusoe's life on the island harks back to an ideal of precapitalist self-sufficiency, to the artisan-farmer who owns his own land and tools and who produces everything he needs for himself. This image emerges through the painstaking descriptions of Robinson Crusoe's solitary manual labor on the island. Ian Watt explains that the diversity and thoroughness of the descriptions could offer readers the vicarious experience of rewarding work of which the growing division of labor was likely to have deprived them. In his words: It would be somewhat contrary to the facts of economic life under the division of labor to show the average individual's manual labor as interesting or inspiring. So Defoe sets back the economic clock, and take his hero to a primitive environment, where labor can be presented as varied and inspiring, and where it has the further significant difference from the pin-makers at home that there is an absolute equivalence between individual effort and individual reward.4Reading about Robinson Crusoe's isolated and primitive work on the island and his final success in the larger world may compensate for the reader's experience of narrow specialization, arbitrary competition, and ruthless exploitation, which accompanied the development of a capitalist mode of production during Defoe's lifetime. Defoe's nostalgia for the past thus allows him and his readers to glorify the modern possessive individualism while partially eliminating the structure of social interdependence which calls into being the figure of the solitary individual. The fantasy quality of Robinson Crusoe lies in this merging of the best of both worlds—the capitalist present and the artisan past. According to Watt: The shipwreck, far from being a tragic peripety is the deux ex machina which makes it possible for Defoe to present solitary labor not as an alternative to the death sentence, but as a solution to the perplexities of economic and social reality.5Watt does not note, however, that this “solution” is undermined in the text itself by the fact that Robinson Crusoe's labor is never entirely solitary; at the outset he salvages tools and weapons from the shipwreck without which he could never maintain his self-sufficiency nor establish his miniature empire.6His survival, which he attributes to his mastery of mechanical skills and to Providence, depend as much on the appropriation of the labor of countless other individuals whose work is embodied in those tools. Furthermore, Robinson Crusoe does more than merely survive; he eventually leaves the island—while keeping it as his property—and returns to civilization to join his new possession to his former wealth. If the tools provide Robinson Crusoe with the essential means to sustain himself on the island, it is only the appearance of another individual—Friday—which facilitates his moving beyond his self-sufficient, yet static existence. In particular, only by putting Friday to work and by fostering his “willing obedience” does Robinson Crusoe expand his production of goods, plan and execute his escape, gain control over the men of both the mutinied ship and the Spanish settlement, and actually establish a small colony which can later be incorporated into the larger colonial system.7Although his relationship to Friday is idealized as a harmonious partnership by Robinson Crusoe himself and by later readers, a closer look uncovers an unequal relationship founded on violence, cultural domination, and economic exploitation.Robinson Crusoe wins Friday's allegiance as much through his fear of the seemingly magic weapons as through his enduring gratitude. The names given each of them by Robinson—“Friday” and “Master”—reminds them constantly of Friday's subordinate position, as does the living space allocated to him outside Robinson's inner quarters (which are furnished with a burglar alarm). In asserting his control over Friday, Robinson Crusoe recreates the most basic form of the division of labor: the split between conceptual and manual labor. To reinforce his domination of Friday, Robinson teaches him necessary skills, yet withholds crucial knowledge—such as the fact that a gun requires ammunition—that would allow Friday to seize independence from his master. Once assured of Friday's obedience Robinson Crusoe directs him to perform the tasks he once did and stops working himself; under this arrangement Robinson Crusoe expands his production beyond immediate subsistence and has the time to engineer an escape.Thus Robinson Crusoe, on the one hand, celebrates the existence of the solitary individual through a fantasy of self-sufficiency that transcends the division of labor. On the other hand, it represents the solitary individual as the product of a complex and hierarchical social system founded upon violent coercion and the exploitation of the labor of others. A similar tension informs the text of Connecticut Yankee.By representing Hank Morgan as the new Robinson Crusoe, Twain upholds the ideal of the American self-reliant individual as the source of a new equitable society. This notion of self-reliance is not a mere justification for ruthless individualism, but includes, as it does for Emerson and Thoreau, a sense of moral responsibility to a society composed of other self-reliant individuals. This impulse, in part, leads Hank Morgan on his crusade to reform medieval England and to liberate the people from the traditional domination of the Church and the aristocracy. Yet, just as Robinson Crusoe's self-sufficiency paradoxically depends upon controlling the labor of other individuals, Hank Morgan's self-reliance depends upon his domination of the old order and upon his total control over the new community of “free” individuals as well.In casting his Yankee as another Robinson Crusoe, Twain expresses a nostalgic longing for simpler times, for the man alone on an island in command of his environment. But Twain also parodies the Robinson Crusoe myth and marks the limits of its fulfillment in the nineteenth century. Although Hank may seem himself on an “uninhabited island,” the novel pointedly shows that he is never alone. He constructs a society not simply from his ingenuity and technical skills but through a constant struggle for domination over the people of medieval Britain. Although Hank compares himself to Robinson Crusoe in order to stress his self-sufficiency, it is the violent side of Robinson Crusoe which the Yankee reenacts.The differences between Connecticut Yankee and Robinson Crusoe are as instructive as the similarities. Defoe's text discloses the origins of capitalist production in its fundamental division of labor—the creation of employer and employee—and in the appropriation of nature—the creation of private property. Written during a period in which capitalism was expanding beyond the realm of production to subsume more and more areas of life, Connecticut Yankee looks toward the organization of social life as a whole in a highly industrialized technological society. While Robinson Crusoe masters nature through work, Hank Morgan manages people; as we shall see, he concentrates on adapting his medieval subjects to his modern innovations through his creation of a mass culture. To understand Twain's reworking of the Robinson Crusoe myth, let us now look at the particular social transformations of the late-nineteenth century with which Twain was grappling.In the brief autobiography introducing his story, Hank Morgan alludes to the general social changes addressed by Connecticut Yankee: I am an American. I was born and reared in Hartford, in the state of Connecticut—anyway, just over the river, in the country. So I am a Yankee of Yankees—and practical; yes, and nearly barren of sentiment, I suppose—or poetry, in other words. My father was a blacksmith, my uncle was a horse-doctor, and I was both, along at first. Then I went over to the great arms factory and learned my real trade; learned all there was to it; learned to make everything: guns, revolvers, cannon, boilers, engines, all sorts of labor-saving machinery. Why I could make anything a body wanted—anything in the world, it didn't make any difference what; and if there wasn't any quick new-fangled way to make a thing, I could invent one—and do it as easy as rolling off a log. I became head superintendent; had a couple of thousand men under me. (14)The opening sentence informs us of more than its immediate referent; it also tells us how to read Hank Morgan's story and how to understand him as a character. We are to take him as a type, a representative man, a “Yankee of Yankees,” rather than as a unique psychological individual. Critics have noted his resemblance to such figures as the tall-tale hero and frontier explorer, all of which contribute to his image as a typical American—self-reliant, ingenious, and fearless.8 Hank Morgan, on the one hand, thus appeals to readers as a folk hero, representative of an idealized and enduring national identity. On the other hand, the Yankee's story speaks to the reader's experiences of dramatic social changes in the late-nineteenth century. Mark Twain shapes the character of Hank Morgan by interweaving the timeless figure of the folk hero with new types of Americans still very much in the making at the time.9I shall argue that the contradictions and inconsistencies so often pointed out in Hank Morgan's character are not a result of Twain's artistic weakness, as many critics have claimed. Rather, they arise from Twain's brilliant effort to embody the experiences of a complex historical transition within one character.Two conflicting pictures emerge of Hank Morgan's life in the nineteenth century: the opening self-portrait of an all-American folk hero—proud, self-reliant, and invulnerable; and fragmented glimpses of an insecure workingman, vulnerable to a variety of social transformations out of his control. Like many readers of Connecticut Yankee, he appears trapped in a double-edged historical process. On the one hand, American society was becoming more centralized and its different elements were growing more interdependent as a result of urbanization, the rise of corporations, and the expansion of communications and transportation systems. On the other hand, this process of integration was leading not to greater social harmony, but to the individual's isolation at home and fragmentation at work, and to intensified conflicts between social classes. These changes undercut the optimistic belief, which the Yankee constantly tries to reaffirm, in both the power of the individual to direct his own life and the correspondence between individual activity and general social advance. In this light, the Yankee's introductory bravado appears to compensate for the insecurities shared by many readers in the late-nineteenth century, who felt threatened by the extensive and seemingly paradoxical social changes affecting their lives.Hank's introduction suggests that urbanization plays a key role in this historical transformation. He informs us that he was born in the countryside to a family of independent artisans, and that he later moved to the city to work as a wage laborer in a large factory. Such a geographical and occupational shift truly was common for a great number of Americans during the latter half of the nineteenth century. And just as important as the statistics for an understanding of the impact of urbanization is the Populist myth that gained wide currency in the 1880s. It held that America was changing from a Jeffersonian democratic rural society of small landholders to an urban society dominated by the growing trusts and threatened by an impoverished and violent working class.10 The rapid growth of the cities at the time not only affected the lives of city-dwellers, but also altered the fabric of social life in the rest of the country; many Americans at this time perceived resentfully that “the city is stamping the country.”11 Just as the economic and political structures of small towns were becoming increasingly dependent on metropolitan financial centers, the popular images of rural America were being reinterpreted through the lenses of a new urban experience. Twain's Connecticut Yankee, and many of his other novels, participate in this process of remaking rural America in response to urbanization.Several critics have pointed out that Twain bases his representation of medieval England on his memories of the rural South.12 His descriptions of the narrowness, ugliness, and backwardness of the English countryside resemble those of the riverside communities in Huckleberry Finn and Dawson's Landing in Pudd'nhead Wilson. Even London appears in Connecticut Yankee as a “great big village” (260). Fewer critics, however, have noted that Hank Morgan, without actually building any cities, still establishes a markedly urban society, based on a centralized system of finance, transportation, and communication. His own sense of isolation in medieval England suggests the dislocation felt by newcomers to an alien city environment. His need to stand out in a crowd by staging outlandish spectacles typifies the peculiarly urban behavior described by sociologists.13 Hank Morgan believes that his urban civilization can free the English serfs from the bonds to their land, their masters, and their provincial customs. Yet this view contrasts with Hank's recurring nostalgia, expressed most strongly on his deathbed, for the pristine rural simplicity of medieval England, a longing reflected in the title of his manuscript—“The Long Land.” Critics have discussed these opposing attitudes in terms of the accuracy of Twain's depiction of the rural South and of his personal memories of childhood.14 The views of medieval England in Connecticut Yankee, however, say less about America's rural past and Twain's family history than about the present experiences of mobility and dislocation accompanying urbanization. The threat to social order perceived in the cities led many people to idealize the memory of a stable rural community, and it led reformers to attempt to regulate the social fragmentation and conflict through welfare programs and political organizations. By having the Yankee urbanize medieval England without constructing a metropolitan center, Twain captures this desire both to reap the benefits, yet to control the threats associated with nineteenth-century urbanization.The Yankee, in his introduction, boasts that his own move from the country to the city and into the factory provided him with the opportunity to expand his knowledge and his mastery of skills—“to learn his real trade”—and to ascend to a position of authority as head superintendent. Later on in the story, however, while congratulating himself on his new role as “the Boss” of King Arthur's England, he seems to contradict this previous opinion of his job at the Colt arms factory. Contrasting the open field of the sixth century with the intense competition of the twentieth, he asks himself: What would I amount to in the twentieth century? I should be a foreman of a factory, that is about all; and could drag a seine downstreet any day and catch a hundred better men than myself. (52)While these inconsistencies can be attributed to the Yankee optimism which allows Hank to make the most of whatever world he finds himself in, they also make sense in the context of the social changes occurring at the time. Although the move to the city did carry the promise of upward mobility and new opportunities, for many people it delivered just the opposite: dead end jobs and economic insecurity.15 Even for those who did reach the relatively stable position in the industry of the craftsman and foreman, as did Hank Morgan, the eighties introduced sweeping changes into the workplace which threatened that security.The rise of large corporations provoked a long range confrontation over the control of the work process between the newly emerging system of “scientific management” and industrial craftsmen, who were accustomed to regulating their own jobs.16 Among all the trades, the machinists (of whom Hank is a member) engaged most fiercely in this conflict; their sophisticated knowledge, their multi-faceted skills, and their strong organization gave them a high degree of autonomy in the factories. For several generations machinists had been determining their own output, setting their own hours, and disciplining their fellow workers. Like Hank Morgan, they “proudly envisaged themselves as masters of the world of lathes, milling machines, radial drill presses, blueprints, mathematical calculations, and precision work.”17 Nonetheless, aided by dramatic technological advances and the increased specialization and fragmentation of skills, management gradually succeeded in stripping away from machinists and other craftsmen both the knowledge of and control over the total work process. In addition, the foreman was losing his unique and indispensable status as master craftsman; no long requiring years of experience and training, he too was becoming an interchangeable part that could easily be replaced by someone else.18 Hank Morgan's second statement then aptly expresses the precarious situation of an industrial foreman at the time: his skills, his knowledge and control of the process at which he worked, and his authority over other men were being broken down and absorbed by management, itself growing into a highly specialized profession.19Thus Hank Morgan's two contradictory descriptions of his nineteenth-century job at the Colt arms factory are symptomatic of an important historical shift. The first, in which he brags of his ability “to make anything a body wanted,” idealizes the work of the industrial craftsman by stressing his continuity with an older artisan culture. It also points to the potential inherent in the development of modern industry, that of increasing the workers’ scientific knowledge and consequent direction of their own work. The fulfillment of this potential, however, was being denied at the turn of the century by the development of “scientific management,” which workers clearly saw as “a science of the management of other's work.”20 Referring significantly to his own future in the “twentieth century,” Hank Morgan's second deflated description anticipates the growing fragmentation and “degradation of work” at the hands of scientific management. The Yankee's retreat into the distant past can be seen as a way of confronting this transition from an unstable present to an increasingly rationalized and mechanized future. Like Robinson Crusoe, Hank Morgan on the British Isle temporarily transcends the contemporary divisions between conceptual and manual labor by acting as both a scientific manager, an “expert,” and a multi-skilled craftsman. Through Hank's success and failure in merging these social roles that have become antagonist in his own times, Connecticut Yankee addresses the insecurities experienced by both the middle classes and skilled workers who were losing control over their own work and lives to the domination of the growing corporate structure.21If Hank Morgan's position in society appears threatened by the competition around him and the corporate power above him, it seems equally threatened by the spectre of those beneath him on the social scale. Immediately after his brazen introduction, he informs us that he was knocked out by one of the workers he supervised “during a misunderstanding”—or a labor dispute. It is this blow which sends him on his journey to the sixth century. His fantasy of bossing King Arthur's England, therefore, can be seen as an immediate response to this threat from below. It would have been difficult in 1890 to read of a factory worker knocking out his foreman without thinking of the bitterly violent industrial conflicts that had been receiving so much public attention since the Great Railroad Strike of 1877.22 The nationwide hysteria later provoked by the Haymarket bombings of 1886 revealed a widespread fear that this violence would extend outside the workplace to the society as a whole.23 Social historians have suggested that the disproportionate reaction to this event and the dread of an impending social upheaval stemmed as much from the projects of middle-class insecurities as from an objective appraisal of the goals of the organized working class.24Henry Nash Smith, among others, has critic