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2. Character Is Capital
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63 2 Character Is Capital Manufacturing Habit in Mark Twain’s Character Factory Character is Habit Crystallized. —Frances Willard, What Frances E. Willard Said1 Under the guidance of the later biological and psychological science, human nature will have to be restated in terms of habit. —Thornstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class2 The prominence of the confidence man and his many avatars as an object of concern in the fiction, popular periodicals, and advice literature of the mid-nineteenth century was not simply a reaction to the threat he posed as a new social type but rather expressed the broader ambivalences many people had toward the performative dimensions and imperial implications of the iconic national character he announced and installed. Figures such as Benjamin Franklin, whose famous Autobiography was published in 1818, were increasingly canonized as “representative characters” not necessarily because of their introspective self-reliance, moral discipline , and self-transparency but rather because of their capacity for a kind of dramatic self-fashioning highly attuned to the subtleties and norms of social convention. For Franklin, such a capacity was best summarized in the Autobiography in his references to himself as a kind of textual or print character whose identity, like the “errata” printed to correct the errors in a publication, could also be “revised” and reissued in the political and social theaters of the public sphere. The “character” of Thomas Jefferson was similarly described, in works such as John Quincy and Charles Francis Adams’s Life of John Adams, in terms of the “duplicity” and “indirection” that hung 64 Character Is Capital around his public life like “a vapor.”3 Even George Washington, seemingly the most stalwart and steady of the founding fathers, was well known for dutifully recopying as a young man a book of manners and etiquette that, as historian Gordon Wood has pointed out, he followed with a “purposefulness ” that “awed his contemporaries . . . [and] that gave his behavior a copybook character. . . . Washington was obsessed with having things in fashion and was fastidious about his appearance to the world. . . . Indeed, he always thought of life as ‘the Stage’ on which one was a ‘Character’ making a mark.”4 In the years leading up to the publication of Melville’s The ConfidenceMan , such a national character was increasingly represented by the regional figure of the frontier merchant or “Yankee character,” a character who, like the American “Jonathan” in Lowell’s The Biglow Papers (1848), was defined as a kind of “angular hybrid with its hitherto unheard-of combinations of ‘mystic-practicalism,’ ‘calculating-fanaticism,’ and ‘sourfaced -humor.’”5 Such a hybrid figure merged not only the “self-reliance” of the frontiersman but also the worldly cunning of the “cosmopolite” into a composite figure that became, in the words of Sheila Post-Lauria, “the dominant symbol, not just of the American confidence man, but of American national character.”6 A complex historical amalgam that fused narratives of New England origins with the “manifest destiny” of frontier settlement, the Yankee character emerged in the post–Civil War period as a contested emblem of the expansionist aims and industrializing agenda of American entrepreneurialism. And of the many spectacles that emerged within the carnivalesque commodifications of the postbellum period, such an enterprising character has proven to be one of the most riveting and enduring fetishes of economic and political authority in American culture. With the publication in 1873 of The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, Mark Twain and his coauthor, Charles Dudley Warner, gave name to an era increasingly fascinated and repelled by the aura of false appearances and counterfeit value. But while Twain and Warner negatively defined this formative era in American culture by the excesses of capitalist speculation and endemic political corruption, it was not until A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court that Twain critically reflected on that most enduring and fascinating counterfeit of the Gilded Age marketplace, the counterfeit of the philanthropic character. Organized around the exemplary character of the man of pluck and enterprise, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court sends the charismatic jack-of-all-trades and master of invention, [18.217.118.213] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 18:55 GMT) Character Is Capital 65 Hank Morgan, back in time to “prove” sardonically the superiority of his “capablest” character not only over the hollow, “humbug,” authority of King Arthur’s court but also over the false valuations of Gilded Age authority such an aristocracy represents. Twain’s story thus takes us...