The Eloquent Silence in “Hellfire Hotchkiss”

Abstract

Among the Hotchkiss many stories stands Twain out left as enigmatic unfinished, yet especially remarkably toward satisfying. the end Begun of his in August career, Hotchkiss stands out as enigmatic yet remarkably satisfying. Begun in August of 1 897, one year after the death of his daughter Susy and one year after the publication of Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, Hotchkiss features another Vesuvius seen through the butt-end of the telescope.1 Rachel (Hellfire), with her mercurial temper, is an incurable tomboy (Twain's term) who plays only with the boys in the town. In Hellfire, Mark Twain imagines through fiction what we now might understand to be a character. He imagines Hellfire as queer not in terms of a sexual practice, indeed not even in relation to another young woman, but in terms of one who defies to the core of her being the conventional gender role assigned her as a girl. Remarkably, Twain depicts the genderdefiant Hellfire as a fully sympathetic character, and a heroine in her home town. Assuredly, the term lesbian is never mentioned in the text; indeed the term was not yet in common use in 1897 in the ways we understand it today. There was as yet no clear notion in the 1890s of a fixed gender determined by the object of one's desire. A young woman could enter into a Boston marriage; schoolgirls and college girls could develop smashes on one another and have intimate romantic relationships without such choices or activities constituting an identity as we have come to know it in the 2 1st century. Nonetheless, it was in the final decades of the 1 9th century that homosexuality began to have an emerging public face. Mark Twain, always an avid reader of daily newspapers and alert to the cultural debates taking place around him, would have been fully familiar with the 1 895 Oscar Wilde trials and all the publicity they generated; in all likelihood he would have known of the writing of the sexologists Havelock Ellis and Kraft-Ebbing, and the controversies surrounding their publications; and he surely would have followed the sensational reports about the murder of Freda Ward, in Tennessee, by her lover, Alice Mitchell.2 In Twain's story Hotchkiss, Rachel/Hellfire is not involved in any relationship; indeed, the only character Hellfire is paired with is an effeminate male