SOURCE: Folks, Jeffrey J. “Twain and the Garden of the World: Cultural Consolidation on the American Frontier.” Southern Quarterly 39, no. 3 (spring 2001): 82-95.

[In the following essay, Folks outlines Twain's use of certain cultural mythologies in Huckleberry Finn and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, concluding that Twain both accepts and resists the ideas of cultural unity and assimilation.]

In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Mark Twain positions culturally dominant values of commercialism, educational training, and other forms of cultural discipline in opposition to the frontier or to the distant past of Arthurian England (identified in many respects with the recent past of the western and somewhat earlier southern frontier, but also, quite explicitly, drawn from Twain's reading of Charles Ball's history of southern slavery and his family knowledge of the South as frontier). In both texts, the attendant cultural mythologies of American freedom and opportunity enfold and coopt oppositional myths, including the frontier ethos of radical freedom in nature and the southern ethos of plantation aristocracy and genteel agrarianism, both of which are viewed as oppositional to nineteenth-century individualism and laissez-faire economics. Without minimizing the symbolic oppositions inscribed within the characters of Huck and Jim in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and the several medieval institutions and mythologies represented in Connecticut Yankee, one can trace Twain's sense of the artistic demands of cultural unity and assimilation, as well as his strategies of resistance to these demands.

In The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America, Sacvan Bercovitch advances the thesis that major American literary works, from puritan histories and sermons to the nineteenth-century fiction of Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain, function as “rituals” by means of which cultural continuity is promoted and by which a consensus mythology is continually reaffirmed by way of cooptation or rejection of oppositional forms of belief.¹ For Bercovitch, of course, “the rhetoric of consensus, which helped sustain and mold the social order, originated in large measure in colonial New England” (41). Bercovitch's analysis of cultural consensus traces the development of a puritan communal myth, evolving through Revolutionary national legend and nineteenth-century transformations. The citizens of a republic, Bercovitch writes, “require some means of consecrating their way of life—a set of metaphysically (as well as naturally) self-evident truths; a moral framework within which a certain complex of attitudes, assumptions, and beliefs can be taken for granted as being not only proper by right; a super empirical authority to sustain the norms of personal and social selfhood” (41). The particular cultural myth which came to be agreed upon in the New Republic, closely tied to the symbology and metaphysics of puritan New England, was adaptable to the changing requirements of a developing democracy, apparently transformed from its Whiggish origins in the Jacksonian Revolution and in the expansionist and radically democratic tendencies of late nineteenth-century American imperial culture. In Bercovitch's reading, however, the frontier movement is subsumed within the original communal myth: thus, through the ritual of re-statement, the frontier experience, apparently so dissimilar to that of established New England culture, was consolidated within the earlier and unchanging myth of “America.”

This model of American culture is, of course, open to question in several respects. Bercovitch's narrow focus on New England culture undervalues other contributions to the formation of American society: those of immigrants from Hispanic, African, Asian, and other non-northern European origin, as well as the contributions of other geographical regions. Secondly, the very assumption of “consensus” may be overstated: Bercovitch's reading of the two great crises (only two?) of American democracy—the Revolution and the Civil War—would appear to smooth over what was in fact a more tortuous history, if not in terms of cataclysmic historical events, then in the perpetual crisis of economic and cultural existence. Focusing narrowly on the puritan thesis, Bercovitch dismisses certain “oppositional mythologies” which are made to appear to have had little role in the cultural construction of “America.” The regional bias in Bercovitch's language is so obvious as to require only citation: “Southern leaders had learned that ‘America’ could not be manipulated to mean the ideals of feudal hierarchy, because it already represented something else” (19) or, speaking of the New England settlement of the American Northwest, “the fact is that other immigrant groups responded in entirely different ways. I think here not only of the Spanish, who had the entire run of the West from the Mississippi Valley to California, but primarily of the Anglo-Canadians, who had the same cultural heritage as the Americans. They also defined themselves in relation to the Western frontier, yet their definition issued in a decidedly un-American outlook” (51-52). Bercovitch's historical project relies on a circular argument: from within the cultural consensus, its origins are self-apparent and its path of consolidation inevitable, while competing mythologies of “America” are subsumed or rejected depending upon their assumed suitability within the New England symbology.

Mark Twain's writing from the 1880s, centered on an imaginative return to the Mississippi Valley of the period a generation after the frontier—and, at that point in time, neither purely “frontier” nor yet “consolidated” into the national mythology—, provides evidence of both the power of the cultural consensus which Bercovitch details and of the oppositional mythologies, and indeed of an oppositional component, central to American communal myth, which rebels against any discourse of consolidation. Moving beyond the oppositional mythologies which Bercovitch sees as inevitably consolidated within the stable national ideal, Twain's oppositional mode of writing questions the nature of consolidation itself and undermines the possibility of a single cultural consensus, however broadly defined. It resists not merely elements of the New England ethos but the formation of consensus itself—and in this respect perhaps reflects the historical environment in which Twain wrote, a period in which a third great national crisis was embodied in the centripetal forces of foreign immigration, alienation of labor from capital centralized in “captains of industry” and “great corporations,” the failure of reconstruction in the South, and imperialist expansion of America overseas. Bercovitch might well argue that following this third crisis, which Twain's work addresses as does Whitman's the Civil War or Bancroft's both the Civil War and the Revolution, the cultural consensus reasserted its control. The problem with this analysis is that, if with ever-increasing frequency between the Revolution and the present, crises and oppositional mythologies appear to rival the one dominant myth, can we really describe the puritan mythos as the cultural consensus? Despite its resilience and longevity, it has at all times been challenged by oppositional mythologies, some of which, such as the oppositional myth of revolt that Twain draws upon, appear to be equally crucial in the construction of American ideology.

Significantly, it is not the pioneer experience, with its own legendry and myth, but the historical gap between the frontier and settlement (with its attendant symbolism of establishment and consensus) that Twain repeatedly evokes. Twain's “indecisiveness” in regard to the consensus mythology of liberal democratic culture is embodied in his presentation of Huck Finn as a possible examplar of frontier democracy, whose portrait as drawn by Ray Billington distinguishes the westerner in several ways. Less integrated into society, yet taking more communal responsibility for neighbors, the westerner was “relatively more self-sufficient” (173). “Faith in the equality of men was the great common creed on the West” (173). This egalitarianism meant that “on the newer frontiers rich and poor lived, dressed, and acted much more alike than in the East” (176). Instinctively resentful of display of wealth or social pretension, the westerner judged others on their merit and contributions to the community. The figure of Huck Finn cites frontier democracy in obvious ways: independent, solitary to the point of “lonesomeness,” judging others by their actions, skeptical of social pretension, Huck is even more a radical democrat than “Pap” (who, an egalitarianist in a sense, is also at heart, as Huck is not, a pretender to “rank” based on race and citizenship), yet the figure of Huck is other things as well. Twain's affinity with frontier democracy is in tension with the ritual of cultural consolidation simultaneously but indecisively enacted in Twain's novels, and even more so in tension with his skepticism toward all discourse of consensus.²

Bercovitch's term “Christianography,” defining the relationship of history and the printed word in the Puritan tradition, encompasses developments including the revivalist transformation of Puritanism, the development of civic humanism, and a libertarian ideology supporting entrepreneurialism and social freedom for the individual. The identification of nationalism and eschatology—national mission as sacred errand—is admittedly conveyed in Twain's occasional boosterism and his tirades against competing national purposes (whether southern, agrarian, feminist, socialist, or environmental), as well as in the disciplining of private life (Huck's “sivilizing”), with Huck and Jim's drifting, for example, figured as “leisure,” the “free time” of society's servant rather than actual freedom from society. (As an escape from a murderous parent, Huck's journey originates of course under another sort of duress, and one that equally betrays his bond to society.)

The work of cultural consolidation is also promoted in a treatment of gender issues in Huckleberry Finn and Connecticut Yankee that involves a refashioning of primitive frontier roles to a genteel norm in line with a more modern (i.e., Victorian) ascent to respectability. Only among the most degraded population of medieval England does the feminine equivalent of Pap appear, suitably distanced from Victorian America so as not to raise invidious comparisons with one's frontier ancestors. However isolated they may be on the new frontier, figures such as Judith Loftus, Aunt Sally Phelps, and the Wilks sisters exemplify progressive culture, as of course do the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson. The role of women in the consensus mythology was tied to a maternal role (whether literal or symbolic motherhood) and the responsibility for molding the future through nurture and education.³ In Huckleberry Finn, Huck encounters progressive domesticity wherever he meets adult women: Mrs. Judith Loftus, who instructs Huck in how to pass as a girl but also feeds him and promises “to get him out of trouble” if necessary; Rachel Grangerford, who orders food and dry clothes for the “boy” on her doorstep; and Sophia Grangerford—“gentle and sweet, like a dove” and secretly engaged to Harney Shepherdson (729). Though there are few actual mothers in the novel, there are many maternal women, a fact that discloses the cultural imperative toward motherhood at the center of the woman's role. Despite these instances of consolidation and Twain's temperamental prudery, however, his narrative also inscribes resistance to the consolidation of woman's role within the responsibilities of national mission: for example, when Tom Sawyer, still disguised as a visiting “stranger,” plays his joke of kissing Aunt Sally and asking her and her husband if she “liked” it, a momentary break with decorum that humorously mitigates her sober commitment to the domestic role. In protesting too much, Aunt Sally signals her knowledge, if not her approval, of the alternative mythology, in which woman's role is more independent and physically emancipated.

The figuration of western nature from primitive wilderness to controlled resource implies a similar process of consolidation. As the western extension of a contiguous American civilization and for the expansion of puritan ideals of free enterprise and representative individualism, the Mississippi Valley had much to recommend it. Its lush, fertile shores, serviced by an enormous network of navigable waterways, was portrayed in contemporary paintings as Edenic because of its suitability for human industry; its apparently unlimited natural resources and fertility, revitalized by the river's flow, seemed providentially to invite exploitation. The imagery of the assimilatable garden is suggested by the wondrous power of a summer thunderstorm and in the idyllic nights Huck and Jim spend drifting, merging so completely with the indolence of the summer season. Not surprisingly, nature in Huckleberry Finn is prettified from the sweltering, infested, malarial, violently stormy summers of the actual Mississippi Valley. The natural setting of the novel is made to stand for American nature in general, censoring the local extremes and disparities of a national landscape that the consensus mythology wished to figure as continental, optimistic, provident, and, to a degree, homogeneous. Figured as such, the great plenitude and vitality of American nature would excuse a great deal of environmental misconduct and carelessness: Jim and Huck are no better stewards of the earth than they are raftsmen, but the force of American nature, figured in Edenic terms, is not really to encourage difference but to assimilate it. The point is that given the safety-net of “boundless” resources, even such truants as Huck, Jim, and Tom can be enfolded into the continental mission.

Twain's frontier garden, by virtue of its value as a locus on natural wealth, has been inextricably drawn within history. As an avenue of transport between the West and the slave states, the Mississippi River, in fact, played a crucial role in antebellum political alliances, until railroad links between the Northeast and Northwest vitiated the river's importance. Within such historical contexts, Huck and Jim's flight to Jackson's Island and their night-drifting is hardly an escape from society. Throughout the novel, Twain located the river within historical contingencies, of which the longing of Jim and Huck for freedom is its own yardstick, and, with the force of history in the narrative, Huck is haled into the role of civic participation: he sympathizes with Jim, sets to work on the behalf of the Wilks sisters, and agonizes over victims such as Buck, Boggs, or the “humiliated” drunk and the “fooled” ringmaster at the circus. As Myra Jehlen rightly notes, the character of Huckleberry Finn includes “[a] conventionalism as instinctive as his rebellion” (99). His sentimental participation in the national culture is hinted at both by his impulse for “fair play” and by his embarrassed superiority at the ignorance and laziness of his own kind, and the suggestion of reform that enters the novel with the initial chapter's description of Huck's resistance to Miss Watson's “sivilizing” is never really dismissed: Huck's errant but essential goodness advertises his candidacy for reform, and he elicits the efforts of a succession of cultural consolidators.⁴

Against such reform, Twain's stubborn refusal to embrace the dynamic, culturally omnivorous America of New England mythology resulted in his humorous celebration of all sorts of resistance and inertia connected with the frontier and with the unrulier aspects of the garden mythology, instanced in Tom Sawyer's reappearance in the final third of the novel as the same childlike gang leader, as much the truant and misfit as Huck Finn; in Jim's decision to play along rather than grasp immediately his dream of personal ascent; and in Huck's mounting insight into the imperfections of pluralist democracy. The very mechanicalness of Tom's “games,” insisting that Jim be freed according to the “rules,” resists social responsibility by breaking intelligent reform upon the wheel of an almost surreal conduct of fantasy. Even the legalistic process by which Jim's “ownership” is noted, asserted by both his hunters and his defenders, lost track of during his flight and disguise as a “sick A-rab,” and re-established with his simultaneous manumission suggests some erratic mechanism beyond the control of the consensus mythology. If the American ideal seduces each of the three characters, the legal, economic, and social realities impose humorous correctives.

To understand the role of the frontier in Twain's resistance to reform, it is useful to revisit Henry Nash Smith's account of the garden of the world mythology, centered as it was in the Mississippi Valley of the mid-nineteenth century:

The image of this vast and constantly growing agricultural society in the interior of the continent became one of the dominant symbols of the nineteenth-century American society—a collective representation, a poetic idea (as Toqueville noted in the early 1830's) that defined the promise of American life. The master symbol of the garden embraced a cluster of metaphors expressing fecundity, growth, increase, and blissful labor in the earth, all centering about the heroic figure of the idealized farmer armed with that supreme agrarian weapon, the sacred plow.

(Virgin Land 124)

The fictional time period of Twain's Mississippi River writing is within the period of the “garden's” greatest vogue, but the agrarian myth in and of itself is not the central subject of the fiction: it is not farming that interests Twain, but the garden mythology's continuing rhetorical power to counter an even more aggressive mythology. Accordingly, even amid the rich natural productiveness of the Mississippi Valley, Twain's focus shifts from the garden's promise to the human betrayal of the American Dream. Huck's silence about the murder of his new friend Buck (“I don't want to talk much about the next day” [735]) is typical. Frontier justice is comically dismissed, as in the Duke's joke about escaping the mob of Wilks's supporters (“we'd a slept in our cravats to-night—cravats warranted to wear too—longer than we'd need 'em” [827]). Accidental death was even more common, as the frequent mention of drowning, steamboat explosions, and fire implies. In Huck's flight from the corruption and frailty of human society, Twain is transposing his sense of fin de siècle entropy from the 1880s back onto an earlier era, so that in conflating the fictional and compositional time periods in works such as Huckleberry Finn, Connecticut Yankee, and Pudd'nhead Wilson, the myth of the garden is retained in a negative way only: once glamorous images of agricultural opportunity—free land and the sacred plow—have been superseded, although the garden myth is simultaneously retained as a vehicle to interrogate more modern dreams of technological progress and new forms of social organization. The closest we get to a decent, independent small farmer in Huckleberry Finn is the Phelps plantation, and, as we know, the novel subjects the Phelpses to biting satire.⁵

If Twain dismisses the agricultural dream of the garden, centered in the vast developing basin of the Mississippi River, he explores an updated American Dream for the nation as a whole. Focused neither on agriculture nor on the frontier, the Gilded Age version of the dream features its own sacred icons: the captain of industry, the great corporation, the rise of great cities, the development of transportation networks and of national and international trade, and the new reality of national power. Unlike the myth of the agricultural garden, where the individual might with luck assume a reward commensurate with his or her own efforts, the industrial order delivered wealth for a few, power for the nation, but less opportunity and freedom for the ordinary citizen. Living through the fulfilled dreams of others (or of “others” figured as collective national greatness), mediated by journalistic fantasies of mass popular literature, newspapers, magazines, and later film and television, the mediated discourses of national power substituted for the earlier promise of the agrarian dream. The increasing separation of the individual from the possibility of actual independence was offset, so to speak, by increasingly vivid fantasies of technological progress, collective power, and the ascent of representative popular heroes.

The new nation which emerged after 1890 was dramatically more urban, industrial, and corporate; less rural, agrarian, and individualistic. In his fiction, Twain has, to many readers, appeared to reflect a national ambivalence toward the receding frontier; his fiction from the 1880s has been termed nostalgic, elegiac, and pastoral, but also technocratic, futuristic, and modern. It appears in this respect to mirror the national experience: technological possibilities were both alluring and abhorrent; the expansion of the middle class raised educational standards and refined daily life but also fostered a bland and conformist society; “great corporations,” as they were admiringly termed, broadened markets for industrial goods while suppressing local and small-scale industries. In terms that for moderns would become unrecognizable Twain interrogated the “moral virtue” of modernization itself, employing an outdated morality of individualism more suitable to the frontier mythology of the past than to amoral structures of capital and production. The humanist ideal of enlightened rational decision, comically mirrored in Huck and Jim's discussion of “what seems right” in the case of “Solermum” or moralistically enshrined in Jim's allegorical sermon on “trash,” seems unsuited to the corporate and imperial future.

Such a reading of Twain's enlightened reaction to an increasingly corporate amorality seems plausible, and appears to mirror national experience, if only because of the powerful influence on historiography of Frederick Jackson Turner, whose frontier thesis of 1893, refined and extended over the next forty years, offered a similar emplotment of frontier virtue sustained by centuries of “movement” beyond settled society until finally overturned by modernization. Turner's thesis that American character had been shaped by the effect of the continual frontier settlement, that “American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier” (4), suggested the virtuous result of fostering an open-minded, pragmatic, innovative, “strong” population. Further, the history of American settlement, in this interpretation, depicts in microcosm the social evolution of the human race: from Indian and hunter, to trader, rancher, farmer, and manufacturer. The effect of the frontier's disappearance will be to recast American character along the lines of Europe, that settled and less virtuous society which has finally “corrupted” America.

For generations of critics, Turner's model, despite attacks upon it beginning in the 1930s, helped to explain Huck's “uncomfortableness” and his fear of Miss Watson's brush and Bible. Yet it is apparent that Huck himself is imaged as out of place on both the frontier and in urban America, and surely this is the point of his continual discomfort: he has been born too late for frontier America. His command of frontier lore and skills is no less amateurish than Tom Sawyer's (indeed, Tom, whose class definition removes him further from the frontier, has mastered frontier skills—as hobby—more perfectly than Huck). Huck is a picaro-figure that exists in its dissenting voice and outsider perspective; its relation to the frontier lies not in those economic opportunities and disappointments that must have shaped the experience of so many actual settlers, but in the frontier's usefulness for social satire. Like Hank Morgan in Connecticut Yankee, the Huck-figure displays a near universal skepticism, directed at both establishment society and the absurdities of the recent frontier, but the skepticism is not entirely universal since Huck as a figure of resistance defends a set of particular virtues intrinsic to a model of unconsolidated America.

In this respect, Twain's employment of the frontier myth was considerably less nostalgic than that of his younger contemporary, Frederick Jackson Turner. In terms of the traits of national character that Turner identified with frontier experience—radical individualism, antipathy to control, and primitive social organization based on the family—Twain's figuration is distinctly unlike Turner's: Huck is hardly “anti-social,” he submits to or at least avoids challenging the control of others, and his social organization is hardly based on the family (although a cohesive “family” may well be what Huck is seeking throughout the novel). “The expansive character of American life” which Turner traced to the frontier experience—its movement and energy, its innovativeness, its pragmatism and materialism—are, of course, embodied in Hank Morgan, but in casting the “frontier” virtues in the Yankee figure, particularly one in the employ of one of those “great American corporations,” Twain has gone out of his way to distance these elements of the national myth from the western frontier.

Twain does register at least one specific criticism of eastern hegemony that Turner later articulated: the quite conscious efforts of New England educational and religious “reformers” to regulate and redirect the energies of the Western culture. The changes which Turner observed ten years after his famous 1893 address also parallel Twain's critical response to imperial expansion overseas and to a growing “complexity” of American society. Frontier nostalgia does nothing to critique the rise of oligarchic power, of course. Indeed, it appeals to none so well as to members of the controlling oligarchy itself. Thus, the patrician critic, Robert Herrick—recalling a brief encounter with the aging Twain on the family's New England summer retreat—includes himself, though never a westerner and certainly never a pioneer, among those “born into an earlier time and different place” who imbided values of “free, individual, independent human beings” (109). Although pure fantasy, Herrick succeeds in this “tribute” to the departed Mark Twain, in positioning the oligarchy itself, alongside Twain, as the last pioneers. A hint of Herrick's looping strategy is visible in his suggestion that the prominence of Europe in Twain's writing implies a “new frontier,” that of “culture” and refinement rather than mass movement westward.

Despite revisionists such as Herrick, Huck's plan to “light out for the Territories” implies much more than “fantasy” or nostalgia; it suggests Twain's resistance to cultural consolidation, not least in terms of sectional hegemony. After the popularization of Stephen H. Long's 1819-20 map of the West, the Great Plains was conceptualized as the “Great American Desert,” thus mythologizing a fertile region that included the Indian Territory to which Huck intends to light out, into a fruitless desert (Boorstin 229). The Great American Desert was, in other words, the only remaining proximal region which appeared in Huck's day to be “wasteland” and thus unassimilatable, indeed uninhabitable except by scattered ranchers and trappers. Huck's “lighting out” is not merely an escapist remark but an allusion to a uniquely desert section of America, one in which free individualism could presumably survive the advance of cultural progress. In this sense, it was the myth of the Garden itself that Huck was fleeing, the notion of a “New World garden long kept virgin to redress the overcultivation of the Old” (Boorstin 231). Yet, if Indian Territory (in the boy's book idiom of Huck's imagination) might be figured as attractive wasteland, in Twain's contemporary culture Oklahoma as one of the last undeveloped economic and cultural regions on the American continent would become another magnet for progressive consolidation. Twain's irony embraces both the former misconception of the Great Plains as unrecoverable desert and his own period's conception of Indian Territory, amid the land runs of the 1880s, as assimilatable resource.

Twain's recording of cultural resistance implies that the consolidation detailed in Bercovitch's model—the orderly procession westward of New England ideals, seriously troubled only twice by the crises of the Revolution and the Civil War—was far more troubled and proceeded at greater and more constant human cost that the model admits. Twain's problem was how to represent those who remain “unconsolidated,” those southerners, for example, for whom the deadend plantation mythology continued for generations after the Civil War a cogent, if sterile, explanation of the past. Or those westerners, like Cooper's Natty Bumppo, relocating from one frontier to the next, made as uncomfortable as Huck by society's consensus. The trope that Twain's narrative connects with such cultural deadends is, reasonably enough, death itself. As a travesty of the frontiersman, doubly outdated by his defense of slavery, Pap's mythologies get what they seem to deserve, a gruesome and disgusting end. The particular vice of dueling, another cultural dinosaur presumably abandoned after the Age of Jackson, condemns the Grangerfords and Shepherdsons (practitioners of other culturally oppositional activities, such as crayon painting and sentimental verse) to mutual extinction. The mob behavior of the Arkansas River towns implies death not for the victims of mobs so much as for the mob itself: for his part, Colonel Sherburn is vital enough, a complex figure of aristocratic disdain susceptible of refiguration into New South initiative.

The various strategies of resistance in Twain's writing, in a broader sense, may be interpreted as recognition of the transition of America, once understood in specifically human and personal terms, as a Republic of free individuals, toward a troubled and enslaving modernity. More effectively than any other critic of American literature, Lewis P. Simpson has analyzed the effects on literary consciousness of this cultural transition. In Simpson's conception of modern culture, human consciousness, formerly governed by mythic forms of belief, is now seen as imprisoned within a narrowly historical self-consciousness. Applying Simpson's insights, we might say that Twain's problem with modernity was complicated by his own complicity in Progress—his having been an agent, so to speak, of the very cultural consolidation which his narratives indecisively endorse and resist. Twain experienced much the same divided consciousness as William Faulkner, who, in Simpson's language, experienced the radically disturbing effects of “the almost complete displacement of a society of myth and tradition by a novel society of history and science” (96). In this sense Faulkner's, and perhaps Twain's, true subject is the artist's own experience, the unsettling and abrupt encounter with the modern world that leaves the writer attempting “to render the story of the self as literary artist attempting to confront and to order a desacralized world, in which all … has become historical” (Simpson 102). The artist's grappling with the shock of historical consciousness may be involved in the slippage in Twain's repetition of the word “freedom” and “free,” its many connotations alluding to contemporary discourse ranging from abolitionist rhetoric to laissez-faire economics. Embedded in Twain's references to “freedom” are contemporary discourses concerning agrarian homesteading, a particularly acute issue in the 1880s, the “freedom” associated with an idealized yeoman farmer from the time of Thomas Jefferson to Horace Greeley; of abolitionist-secessionist debates, with both sides manipulating the discourse of rights and liberty to suit their purposes; of the scientific and technological discourse connected with a mythology of “labor-saving” machines, consumer goods, and new “freedom” for both the laborer and consumer; and finally of a moral and social freedom from traditional authority associated with church and static community.

In an intriguing study of Twain's resistance to concensus ideologies, Walter Benn Michaels argues that “the defense of individuality against the ‘group’ took the form of imagining persons as machines, independent because essentially inflexible—mechanical as opposed to social” (73). Citing examples from Connecticut Yankee, Michaels suggests that Twain's resistance was particularly acute to programs of progressive education and cultural control, including proposals for educational and moral reform. Michaels notes that, in both the depiction of nineteenth-century American individualism and in that of Arthur's stubbornly unreformable knights, “it is with the power to resist training that Connecticut Yankee is most concerned” (74). The knights themselves, those who “can be killed, but … cannot be conquered” are, in Michaels's terms, “monuments to an individuality defined by nothing but the powers of resistance” (74). The massacred knights are metaphorically identified with the Native American, who epitomized the individualism which later, transformed into the “captain of industry,” produced machine culture. The very conception of “training” in Connecticut Yankee insists on a rejection of reform and education as social control: “schooling is re-described by Twain as manufacture, training as production—it takes place in the man ‘Factory’ [159] or in the ‘civilization-factories’ [396]” (Michaels 77). The same “essential likeness of persons to machines” can be seen in the “commitment embodied also in Twain's own identification with the Paige [typesetting machine] and in his vision of himself as a kind of writing machine” and reaches its narrative high point as the mechanical bowing of St. Stylite is utilized to run a sewing machine (Michaels 79).

Despite Twain's later avowal of his intention in Connecticut Yankee to contrast medieval English life with that of “modern civilization—to the advantage of the later, of course” (qtd. in Franklin 158)—Twain's narrative itself, in the form of its subsequently more extreme critique, suggests that “despite spectacular technological progress,” to paraphrase H. Bruce Franklin, early twentieth-century America “apparently has gone ‘backward’” from the earlier America (162-63). The representation of cultural consolidation in Huckleberry Finn also suggests that progress has “gone backward,” and Huck's response is to flee in futility without any definite purpose. As Franklin notes, in Connecticut Yankee, Hank and Clarence's discussions of “technical improvements in their electric fence … become vehicles for Twain's savage satire on the crass materialism and pragmatism of modern industrialized war” (169). Perhaps in reference to America as the overly exploited “garden of the world,” the forty-foot belt of dynamite torpedoes—a product of Hank's American technological prowess—is termed “the prettiest garden that was ever planted” (Connecticut Yankee, qtd. in Franklin 169).

Jonathan Arac's conclusions in “Nationalism, Hypercanonization, and Huckleberry Finn” raise further questions for my argument concerning Twain's resistance to national consensus. Contrasting Huckleberry Finn with James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers, a narrative that Arac terms “national narrative” for its explicit addressing of central political issues—narrative that “held a positive understanding of the course of American history and … believed it was a responsibility of culturally ambitious and important narrative not only to show but also to make explicit this understanding”—Twain's merely “literary narrative denied any such responsibility, challenged any such understanding, and developed techniques to supersede such explicitness” (29). According to Arac, allegorical readings which attempt to politicize Twain's writing, including Philip Fisher's “Mark Twain” in The Columbia Literary History of the United States, seriously mistake the cultural purposes of Twain's narrative. Through the point of view of Huck Finn, “Twain isolates the historical setting of the book”: Huck has “almost no historical perspective on the land he lives in, either in its local or national dimensions, and there is no narrative presence beyond Huck to open up a deeper past or to link his time and concerns to those of the time when Twain was writing” (Arac 30). Only in the “isolated grotesques” of Pap's and Colonel Sherburn's tirades does Arac find social and political issues significantly addressed. In so far as Huck considers moral issues, according to Arac, “the form and fable of Huckleberry Finn reject the very possibility of public debate” (33): the quasi-religious mode of Huck's ethical reflection seals off social discussion as the necessary secrecy and isolation of his moral crises force acceptance of his moral vision without debate.

Arac's reading recognizes the resistance to national consensus in Twain's narrative, but it also views this resistance as a retreat from public issues. As Arac writes: “Huck Finn lives so as to feel right with no sanction beyond his own psyche, the imaginative construction of an autonomous self that is the cultural work of literary narrative” (33). As I read Arac, however, I find his own urgency to reposition Huck Finn within what is termed “national narrative” another manifestation of the ambitious cultural consolidation outlined by Bercovitch. It is not that Twain fails in the figure of Huck Finn to debate public issues—certainly Huck's justifiably famous reflections on the equal worth of all human beings and the evil of racial bias were public issues in the 1880s and remain so today. Rather, it would seem that Twain's position in the debate, one that forecloses a “positive understanding” of American history, since it images and then resists the formation of cultural concensus, disqualifies his work as “national” narrative. Significantly, each of Arac's prominent examples of national narrative (George Bancroft's History of the United States, James Fenimore Cooper's novels, and Harriet Beecher Stowe's fiction) are located within the New England cultural establishment, while Arac's list of less consequential “local” and “personal” narratives is overweighted with western, southern, and culturally diverse authors: among the “local” narratives, Irving, Hawthorne in his shorter works, and “the so-called southwestern humorists”; among the personal narratives, Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, Francis Parkman's Oregon Trail, Frederick Douglass's Narrative, and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

In any case, Twain's writing, which in the 1880s is hardly without socio-political content and which becomes sharply more political in the following decades, implies resistance primarily toward the reduction of discourse to the socio-political mode which Arac equates with “national narrative.” If some readers find the socio-political ideals of Jacksonian democracy—individualism, democracy, and equality—inscribed in Huckleberry Finn and Connecticut Yankee, or identify the free man in these novels with industrial workers of Gilded-Age America, there is more than enough incongruity built into Twain's narrative to frustrate its reduction to political allegory.⁶ The satiric focus in Connecticut Yankee, for example, changes continually from its allusions to southern slavery to an indictment of all monarchist and oligarchist forms of oppression to an examination of democratic rhetoric turned violent. In the insistence on creative “vividness” and force (related to the primacy of “entertainment” for which Judith Fetterly finds evidence: polishing his lecture performance more carefully than his published texts, dramatically rendering fictionalized scenes of entertainment, or scenes where thematic meaning devolves into entertainment), Twain privileges the theater of unconsolidated social voices over the debate, necessarily restricted by the terms in which it is framed, concerning national concensus.

Ultimately, the “indecisiveness” that Bercovitch finds in Twain's writing evidences a resistance to reducing his creative intelligence, and by implication the creativity of a nation of readers only just removed from the frontier, to the New England model of American cultural development. In the discourse itself of consolidation and resistance, often registered as no more than “talk,” the novels suggest the value of burlesque and parody which recognizes nothing so simple as “the national character” or “the frontier experience.” Even the suggestion that mockery itself may be valorized—that Twain created the “modern ironic mode of personality” (Brown 174)—might seem to assimilate Twain's complexity to a manageable principle. Twain's artistic practice is not so much “indecisive,” as Bercovitch and others have viewed it, as stubbornly resistant to programmatic and redemptive discourses. In this respect perhaps, Twain's art retraces the topography of his life, neither western in embracing a frontier ethos nor eastern in conforming to the “national” mythology, nor again southern in figuring resistance as sectional politics. Like the figure of Huck Finn, Mark Twain as artist is liminal and indecisive by intention. Despite the force of national consensus, Twain's mythology embodies an alternative of resistance.

Notes

1. The title of this article self-consciously echoes and contrasts the terms in which Henry Nash Smith and Sacvan Bercovitch have written about nineteenth-century American culture. My argument interprets Twain's resistance to cultural consolidation differently from the views of recent commentators such as Bruce Michelson, Myra Jehlen, and Eric Carton. I share Michelson's emphasis on the ways in which Twain's literary identity “defines itself by how it refuses and evades, rather than by how and what it affirms” (2), yet I view Twain's evasions as purposeful acts of resistance to particular cultural forces rather than, as Michelson states, a “war against convention widened to the absolute” (4). Even as I find evidence of that war against convention, I do not read Twain's resistance within the “American hunger for the unnamable” (Michelson 267) but as a struggle against anti-democratic and anti-populist cultural forces. Nor would I go so far as Myra Jehlen, who argues that “dissonance is the message of Huckleberry Finn” and that the novel is “radically contradictory—so dissonant, indeed, that it finally fails to represent the contradictions it means to address” (96). While the novel is enormously complex and subtle in its responses to consolidation, it does not “collapse” in its “contradictions” (Jehlen 96). Eric Carton's intriguing analysis of “the politics of literary performance” raises profound questions concerning the relationship of Twain's writing to the profit motive and social exploitation, but his view that “[f]or Twain, all acts of communication, even invitations to democratic communion, simultaneously enact the will to mastery and domination” (161) seems overly fatalistic for an author who did, after all, engage in nearly a lifetime of moral satire, often with clearly identifiable purposes.

2. In a discussion of Life on the Mississippi, Maurice Brown finds that “revolt” is the central feature of this work. Brown traces the growth of Twain's “social concern” and states that Twain's ironic vision “mediates a major conflict in American values” (167). This conflict or identity crisis involves a dilemma between romantic, premodern culture and modern technological culture. Brown's reading challenges the familiar emphasis on the oppositional southern mythology as the dominant conflict of Twain's writing from the 1880s. Both northern towns, such as Quincy, Illinois, or Keokuk, Iowa, and southern metropolises such as Memphis and New Orleans, were equally ridiculed as targets of the “westward course of culture and opera houses” (Brown 171) and as aspirants to technology (“the practical application of science to the making of oleo” [Brown 171]). Brown's reading, however, which interprets technology as a generalized evil, dehumanizing in and of itself, does not explain Twain's obvious fascination for technology or, in his writing, the cultural value of technology, as both the means of enlightened progress wrought by “captains of industry” and also the means of repression and imperial control.

3. As Bercovitch points out, even militant feminism echoed the terms of the national mission, as, for example, the 1848 Seneca Falls Manifesto repeats the “rights” language from the Declaration of Independence.

4. Myra Jehlen's reading of Huck's role as a figure of resistance focuses on Huck's relationship to Jim, and especially on that fact that his innate goodness is motivated by “his own desire for absolute freedom, not out of any antislavery conviction” (102). In this reading Huck's moral action is “indecisive” because it lacks of consciousness of the need for “social action.” As Jehlen writes: “Huck has no ambition to change the world; he just can't live in it” (102). Jehlen's argument, echoing Bercovitch's view of Twain's “indecisiveness,” is convincing in so far as it accounts for Huck's relationship with Jim, although it would seem to demand a great deal of improbable development from Huck's consciousness. It also goes well beyond Huck's consciousness to interrogate some of the contradictions of national identity, especially issues of race and class in relation to the national ideology of free individualism. In its focus on his relationship to Jim, however, Jehlen devotes less attention to the significance of Huck's more decisive resistance to cultural consolidation in other respects.

5. Twain's opposition to the oligarchical power of the cultural establishment is evidenced in his admiration for Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward and his association with Sylvester Baxter, editor of the Boston Herald. As Horst Kruse documents, Baxter was involved in the organization of the Nationalist movement in Boston, along the lines of the utopian democratic principles set forth in Looking Backward. In attempting to persuade Twain to address the group's first anniversary meeting, Baxter wrote to the sympathetic Twain on 22 November 1889 that the Nationalist Clubs were “getting ready to give the Plutocracy a shaking up before many years” (qtd. in Kruse 482). The process by which Twain came to associate actual slavery with economic enslavement is explored in Sherwood Cummings's chapter on Connecticut Yankee in Mark Twain and Science. Finding that the “germ” of Connecticut Yankee lay in Twain's “return trip” to the South in writing Life on the Mississippi, Cummings believes that the contrasts between the tradition-bound, backward-looking South and the “go-ahead atmosphere” of the northern river towns formed the basis for Twain's broader analysis of privilege in contemporary Gilded-Age America. No longer focusing on southern slavery, Twain's allegorical purpose in Connecticut Yankee targeted America's entrenched oligarchy of wealth and cultural elitism: “a privileged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name” (136), as “the Boss” assesses Arthur and his Court. Cummings observes a “vacillating motion” in the structure of Connecticut Yankee. “Basically, the conflict is between an idealistic, sentimental view of man and a clinically behavioristic view” (166-67). Both modes of response to medieval oppression—sentimental idealism and reductive behaviorism—are distinctly American, and indeed “frontier,” modes of expression. Whether sentimental or cynical. Twain's tone is a response to the same outrage at the injustice of hereditary privilege, whether among European nobility or American oligarchy.

6. In a detailed contextual reading of the publication and publicity campaign surrounding Connecticut Yankee, Horst Kruse argues convincingly for “the author's attempt to direct the response to his novel in the light of current political and social events and developments” (465). Kruse shows that “just as topical matters had affected the novel's course of composition throughout, current events and political developments also determined the final preparations for presenting it to the public” (470). Kruse cites five contemporary news stories which were seized upon by Twain to prove the topicality of his novel: Czarist atrocities in Russia, recent weddings between American heiresses and European nobility, the impact of Edward Bellamy's recent Looking Backward, scandalous crimes involving the English nobility, and the proclamation of the Republic of Brazil (471). Kruse's review of Twain's specific socio-political intentions, and of the extraordinarily energetic manner in which he advanced his novel's political purposes with reviewers and through advertising, serves as a useful corrective to generalizations concerning Twain's political or apolitical allegorizing, but Kruse's findings also highlight the broader difficulty with socio-political readings that evaluate narrative art against topical issues (whether the reading that Twain pressed upon his readers and reviewers, Arac's denial of that political debate, or Kruse's reassertion of it). Presumably, if we accept Kruse's case, the ideological purpose—succinctly stated in Twain's “Preface” (updated just before publication 12 December 1889): “The character of the book is an arraignment of all shades and kinds of monarchy and aristocracy as shams and swindles, ridiculous and played-out anachronisms, silly and criminal survivals of ancient savagery” (qtd. in Kruse 476-77)—would qualify Connecticut Yankee as “national narrative” in a class with Bancroft, Cooper, and Stowe, for Twain's “Preface” clearly addresses broad national ideals of a maturing Republic. Yet, in this case Twain's outburst seems embarrassing in its mangling of what remains a suggestive and complex novel.

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