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26 2 DIALECTICAL HISTORY, WHITE INDIANS, AND QUEER ANXIETY IN MARK TWAIN’S A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR’S COURT M ark Twain derided the symptoms of “the Sir Walter disease” in southern culture as the mawkish and sentimental attachment to chivalric identities celebrated in Walter Scott’s novels. Hank Morgan, the protagonist of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), appears to display no such traces of this affliction in his flagrant Americanism characterized by gritty independence and technological know-how.1 Most important in this regard is Hank’s eponymous identification as a Yankee, an identity that ostensibly inoculates him from the nostalgia for chivalric social codes prevalent in the nineteenth-century U.S. South. Hank instead ridicules the Middle Ages for espousing and practicing chivalric values; his criticism of the past tautologically condemns the Middle Ages for its very medievalism. Despite this overarching color to his character, Hank has proved troublesome for scholars to construe as the representative of a specific ethos: he appears to represent nineteenthcentury American industrialism and progress in an anachronism-ridden vision of sixth-century medieval England, yet, by the novel’s end, he is seduced by the past and wishes nothing more than to remain in the history that he at first has despised. This conflict in Hank’s desire—to introduce innovation in a land and time he both scorns and adores—hampers a clear-cut interpretation of his motives and sensibilities. By creating these antitheses in Hank, Twain places contradiction at the heart of his protagonist ’s relationship to the past. As Richard Pressman argues, “The key tension [in A Connecticut Yankee] . . . is within Morgan’s own personality— a personality that reflects and renders not only Twain’s own conflicts but those of his social class.”2 Hank Morgan’s conflicted critique of the Middle Ages reflects Twain’s ambivalence about the period and its influence on the U.S. South. Cer-  27 Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court tainly, the author’s familiarity with medieval history and literature was extensive, and throughout his corpus he draws upon this body of knowledge to structure his narratives and to deepen their themes. To look at one example, The Innocents Abroad (1869) contains numerous (and humorous ) medieval moments: a tongue-in-cheek account of Abelard and Heloise’s love affair (141–47); a consideration of Petrarch’s beloved Laura, with a sympathetic nod toward “Mr. Laura” (“But who says a word in behalf of poor Mr. Laura?” [184]); his retelling of a “thrilling medieval romance ” (211–16); and a description of Dante’s tomb, as well as his somewhat ghoulish satisfaction that the body was not buried therein (245).3 Twain particularly extols Cervantes’ Don Quixote, which he refers to as the “beau ideal of fine writing”: “Don Quixote is one of the most exquisite books that was ever written, & to lose it from the world’s literature would be as the wresting of a constellation from the symmetry & perfection of the firmament.”4 Also, it is well documented from Twain’s notebooks and journals that he studied medieval history for his writings and that he relied heavily on W. E. H. Lecky’s History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (1869) while penning A Connecticut Yankee.5 Lecky’s historiographical influence, however, did not compensate for Twain’s lack of interest in the historical contours of the Middle Ages and preference for its fictional potential. Twain affirms his antihistoricism in the novel’s preface by excusing himself from the obligations of historical accuracy: “It is not pretended that these laws and customs existed in England in the sixth century; no, it is only pretended that inasmuch as they existed in the English and other civilizations of far later times, it is safe to consider that it is no libel upon the sixth century to suppose them to have been in practice in that day also” (xv). Twain’s fictions are inspired by the Middle Ages, yet not for the period’s history but for his own fantasies of how the past could be used to consider his present culture. These various examples of Twain’s medieval interests illuminate how he found much satiric potential in medieval literature, and his admiration for Cervantes aligns their authorial voices as jointly stimulating laughter by juxtaposing medieval narrative conventions with contemporary social concerns. In complementary contrast...

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