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.Walter Blair (Boston: Riverside Editions, 1961), p.206.Henceforth citedparenthetically in the text as PH.13.Mark Twain Speaking, ed.Paul Fatout (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1976),p.106.Henceforth cited parenthetically in the text as MTS. 199Mark Twain s Civil War: Humor s Reconstructive Writing14.Justin Kaplan, Mr.Clemens and Mark Twain (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966),p.274.15.Richard E.Peck, The Campaign That.Succeeded, American Literary Realism,1870 1910 21.3 (Spring 1989): 10.See also Thomas Quirk, Life Imitating Art:Huckleberry Finn and Twain s Autobiographical Writings, in One Hundred Years ofHuckleberry Finn: The Boy, His Book, and American Culture, ed.Robert Sattelmeyer and J.Donald Crowley (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985).16.Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (New York: Hill & Wang, 1968), p.243.Henceforth cited parenthetically in the text as LM.17.Mark Twain, A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It, in SelectedShorter Writings, ed.Blair; p.59.Henceforth cited parenthetically in the text as TS.18.Grady, The New South, p.14619.Ibid., pp.148-9.20.Forrest G.Robinson, In Bad Faith: The Dynamics of Deception in Mark Twain sAmerica (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp.240, 139.21.James M.Cox, Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor (Princeton, N.J.: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1966), p.197. J OHN CARLOS ROWEHow the Boss Played the Game:Twain s Critique of Imperialism inA Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur s CourtShall we bang right ahead in our old-time, loud, pious way, and committhe new century to the game; or shall we sober up and sit down and thinkit over first? Would it not be prudent to get our Civilization-toolstogether, and see how much stock is left on hand in the way of GlassBeads and Theology, and Maxim Guns and Hymn Books, and Trade Ginand Torches of Progress and Enlightenment (patent adjustable ones,good to fire villages with, upon occasion), and balance the books, andarrive at the profit and loss, so that we may intelligently decide whetherto continue the business or sell out the property and start a newCivilization Scheme on the proceeds?Mark Twain, To the Person Sitting in Darkness, North American Review, February 1901Twain is famous for his jeremiads against European imperialism and thefledgling efforts of the United States at colonial expansion in the Philippines.As scholars have pointed out, most of Twain s anticolonial zeal dates from thelate 1890s and early 1900s, provoked by such international crises as theSpanish-American War (1898), the Boxer Rebellion in China (1900), and theBoer War in South Africa (1899 1902).Twain s rage over U.S.annexation ofthe Philippines in To the Person Sitting in Darkness (1901) and ADefense of General Funston (1902), the cruel despotism of Belgium sFrom The Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain, Forrest G.Robinson, ed.© 1995 CambridgeUniversity Press.201 202John Carlos RoweLeopold II in the Congo Free State in King Leopold s Soliloquy (1905),and Czar Nicholas II s exploitation of Russians, Poles, and Finns in TheCzar s Soliloquy (1905) belongs to the historical period in which imperialism had entered the popular vocabulary as a term of opprobrium.1Powerful as Twain s anticolonial writings from this period are, theyseem to be different from the more ambivalent sentiments regarding the usesand abuses of civilization Twain had articulated as late as 1897 in Followingthe Equator.Despite frequently expressed sympathies with native peoplesthroughout his global lecturing tour, Twain also appears to acknowledge theinevitability of Euroamerican hegemony over the modern world.RichardBridgman concludes in Traveling in Mark Twain that such a destiny did notin 1897 disappoint Twain: For all the abuses of conquest that Twain haddocumented and lamented, his conclusive feeling was that all the savagelands in the world are going to be brought under the subjection of theChristian governments of Europe.I am not sorry, but glad. He was notbeing ironic.He believed, he wrote, that India demonstrated that after muchbloodshed the result would be peace and order and the reign of law. 2To be sure, Twain was powerfully impressed by historical events, fromthe Spanish-American War to the Russo-Japanese War, that underscored thebrutality of Euroamerican colonialism and foreshadowed the violence of theFirst World War.Yet these historical events alone were not the primaryreasons for the changes in Twain s views on colonialism from Following theEquator to the anti-imperialist tracts he wrote between 1898 and 1905.WhatBridgman confidently decides to be Twain s preference for imperial order,British India over the misrule of the Thugs, for example, by no meansapplies generally to Twain s often contradictory attitudes in this travel bookregarding the uses and abuses of Western civilization both at home andabroad.The strict periodization of the anti-imperialist Mark Twain of thefin de siècle as distinct from the apparently patriotic and nationalist Twain ofthe 1870s and 1880s, has prevented us from recognizing how anticolonialand anti-imperialist attitudes inflect virtually all of Twain s writings.3One of Twain s most obvious literary treatments of imperialism, indeedone of the most obvious in nineteenth-century literature in general, is AConnecticut Yankee in King Arthur s Court, but it is not customarily approachedin terms of its serious reflections on imperialism.One reason for this neglectis that Connecticut Yankee, published in 1889, belongs to the decade precedingTwain s overt change of mind about the dangers of colonialism andimperialism.Another reason, of course, is the formal distraction of thehistorical romance.Arthurian England invaded by a nineteenth-centuryYankee does not seem to be a fictive donnée likely to encourage discussion of 203Twain s Critique of Imperialismthe dangers of Euroamerican colonialism in the modern period.Yet morefamiliar literary indictments of Western imperialism, such as Conrad s Heartof Darkness (1899), often recall the colonial origins of the Europeancolonizers, as Marlow does at the beginning of his tale: Imagine thefeelings of a commander of a fine what d ye call em trireme in theMediterranean, ordered suddenly to the north.Imagine him here thevery end of the world, a sea the colour of lead, a sky the colour of smoke.Sandbanks, marshes, forests, savages precious little to eat fit for a civilisedman, nothing but Thames water.No Falernian wine here, no goingashore. 4 At times, such invocations of Roman conquerors work torationalize European or American ventures abroad, either by connecting themodern nations with a great tradition or by encouraging resignation to the inevitability of men s will to conquest and expansion.5 In other cases,previous colonial projects are recalled to remind us that history repeats itselfprimarily when we refuse to acknowledge the fundamental theft involved incolonization.Melville s Typee (1846) makes frequent reference to Romangenerals and legions in Europe, and Benito Cereno (1856) revives theimperium of the Holy Roman emperor both in Europe and in the NewWorld to warn us that the nominally democratic United States is followingthe lead of the European imperium against which it claimed to haverebelled.6The most convincing argument for excluding Connecticut Yankee from aconsideration of Twain s anti-imperialism is the relative novelty of the terms imperialism and anti-imperialism in the United States at the end of the1890s, primarily as a result of the public debates over the Spanish-Americanand Philippine-American Wars [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]
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.Walter Blair (Boston: Riverside Editions, 1961), p.206.Henceforth citedparenthetically in the text as PH.13.Mark Twain Speaking, ed.Paul Fatout (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1976),p.106.Henceforth cited parenthetically in the text as MTS. 199Mark Twain s Civil War: Humor s Reconstructive Writing14.Justin Kaplan, Mr.Clemens and Mark Twain (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966),p.274.15.Richard E.Peck, The Campaign That.Succeeded, American Literary Realism,1870 1910 21.3 (Spring 1989): 10.See also Thomas Quirk, Life Imitating Art:Huckleberry Finn and Twain s Autobiographical Writings, in One Hundred Years ofHuckleberry Finn: The Boy, His Book, and American Culture, ed.Robert Sattelmeyer and J.Donald Crowley (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985).16.Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (New York: Hill & Wang, 1968), p.243.Henceforth cited parenthetically in the text as LM.17.Mark Twain, A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It, in SelectedShorter Writings, ed.Blair; p.59.Henceforth cited parenthetically in the text as TS.18.Grady, The New South, p.14619.Ibid., pp.148-9.20.Forrest G.Robinson, In Bad Faith: The Dynamics of Deception in Mark Twain sAmerica (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp.240, 139.21.James M.Cox, Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor (Princeton, N.J.: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1966), p.197. J OHN CARLOS ROWEHow the Boss Played the Game:Twain s Critique of Imperialism inA Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur s CourtShall we bang right ahead in our old-time, loud, pious way, and committhe new century to the game; or shall we sober up and sit down and thinkit over first? Would it not be prudent to get our Civilization-toolstogether, and see how much stock is left on hand in the way of GlassBeads and Theology, and Maxim Guns and Hymn Books, and Trade Ginand Torches of Progress and Enlightenment (patent adjustable ones,good to fire villages with, upon occasion), and balance the books, andarrive at the profit and loss, so that we may intelligently decide whetherto continue the business or sell out the property and start a newCivilization Scheme on the proceeds?Mark Twain, To the Person Sitting in Darkness, North American Review, February 1901Twain is famous for his jeremiads against European imperialism and thefledgling efforts of the United States at colonial expansion in the Philippines.As scholars have pointed out, most of Twain s anticolonial zeal dates from thelate 1890s and early 1900s, provoked by such international crises as theSpanish-American War (1898), the Boxer Rebellion in China (1900), and theBoer War in South Africa (1899 1902).Twain s rage over U.S.annexation ofthe Philippines in To the Person Sitting in Darkness (1901) and ADefense of General Funston (1902), the cruel despotism of Belgium sFrom The Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain, Forrest G.Robinson, ed.© 1995 CambridgeUniversity Press.201 202John Carlos RoweLeopold II in the Congo Free State in King Leopold s Soliloquy (1905),and Czar Nicholas II s exploitation of Russians, Poles, and Finns in TheCzar s Soliloquy (1905) belongs to the historical period in which imperialism had entered the popular vocabulary as a term of opprobrium.1Powerful as Twain s anticolonial writings from this period are, theyseem to be different from the more ambivalent sentiments regarding the usesand abuses of civilization Twain had articulated as late as 1897 in Followingthe Equator.Despite frequently expressed sympathies with native peoplesthroughout his global lecturing tour, Twain also appears to acknowledge theinevitability of Euroamerican hegemony over the modern world.RichardBridgman concludes in Traveling in Mark Twain that such a destiny did notin 1897 disappoint Twain: For all the abuses of conquest that Twain haddocumented and lamented, his conclusive feeling was that all the savagelands in the world are going to be brought under the subjection of theChristian governments of Europe.I am not sorry, but glad. He was notbeing ironic.He believed, he wrote, that India demonstrated that after muchbloodshed the result would be peace and order and the reign of law. 2To be sure, Twain was powerfully impressed by historical events, fromthe Spanish-American War to the Russo-Japanese War, that underscored thebrutality of Euroamerican colonialism and foreshadowed the violence of theFirst World War.Yet these historical events alone were not the primaryreasons for the changes in Twain s views on colonialism from Following theEquator to the anti-imperialist tracts he wrote between 1898 and 1905.WhatBridgman confidently decides to be Twain s preference for imperial order,British India over the misrule of the Thugs, for example, by no meansapplies generally to Twain s often contradictory attitudes in this travel bookregarding the uses and abuses of Western civilization both at home andabroad.The strict periodization of the anti-imperialist Mark Twain of thefin de siècle as distinct from the apparently patriotic and nationalist Twain ofthe 1870s and 1880s, has prevented us from recognizing how anticolonialand anti-imperialist attitudes inflect virtually all of Twain s writings.3One of Twain s most obvious literary treatments of imperialism, indeedone of the most obvious in nineteenth-century literature in general, is AConnecticut Yankee in King Arthur s Court, but it is not customarily approachedin terms of its serious reflections on imperialism.One reason for this neglectis that Connecticut Yankee, published in 1889, belongs to the decade precedingTwain s overt change of mind about the dangers of colonialism andimperialism.Another reason, of course, is the formal distraction of thehistorical romance.Arthurian England invaded by a nineteenth-centuryYankee does not seem to be a fictive donnée likely to encourage discussion of 203Twain s Critique of Imperialismthe dangers of Euroamerican colonialism in the modern period.Yet morefamiliar literary indictments of Western imperialism, such as Conrad s Heartof Darkness (1899), often recall the colonial origins of the Europeancolonizers, as Marlow does at the beginning of his tale: Imagine thefeelings of a commander of a fine what d ye call em trireme in theMediterranean, ordered suddenly to the north.Imagine him here thevery end of the world, a sea the colour of lead, a sky the colour of smoke.Sandbanks, marshes, forests, savages precious little to eat fit for a civilisedman, nothing but Thames water.No Falernian wine here, no goingashore. 4 At times, such invocations of Roman conquerors work torationalize European or American ventures abroad, either by connecting themodern nations with a great tradition or by encouraging resignation to the inevitability of men s will to conquest and expansion.5 In other cases,previous colonial projects are recalled to remind us that history repeats itselfprimarily when we refuse to acknowledge the fundamental theft involved incolonization.Melville s Typee (1846) makes frequent reference to Romangenerals and legions in Europe, and Benito Cereno (1856) revives theimperium of the Holy Roman emperor both in Europe and in the NewWorld to warn us that the nominally democratic United States is followingthe lead of the European imperium against which it claimed to haverebelled.6The most convincing argument for excluding Connecticut Yankee from aconsideration of Twain s anti-imperialism is the relative novelty of the terms imperialism and anti-imperialism in the United States at the end of the1890s, primarily as a result of the public debates over the Spanish-Americanand Philippine-American Wars [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]