- Envisioning Mark Twain through J. D. Stahl
J. D. Stahl's intent in his recent study is, he declares, "to envision for myself what nineteenth-century American culture looked like in the writings of Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain. In particular, I have sought to understand how Twain envisioned gender: masculinity, femininity, and the social and emotional currents between men and women" (180). The fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and Charles Perrault possess a mythic quality that, for centuries, has helped shape the constructs of the European child (that is, his or her identity and expected social behavior). Similarly, Stahl argues, Mark Twain's writings, based upon the author's experiences and roots in Europe and now ingrained in American consciousness, have molded our perception of the nineteenth-century American child and our subsequent American identity. This, says Stahl, "is how the relativity of European values, customs, and beliefs in comparison with Samuel Clemens's own American ideas, attitudes, and practices informed and permeated his envisioning of gender and vice versa" (1).
Pursuing this aspect of criticism, Stahl addresses a number of Twain's works, analyzing how they serve the mythic purpose of explaining concepts of culture and gender. Stahl offers a study of the progressive evolution of Twain's ideas and then systematically examines his familiar and unfamiliar, youthful and adult, novels and shorter pieces. Stahl's initial purpose is the discovery of "the psychological inner workings of Mark Twain's characters, especially with regard to sexuality and gender"—even including Twain among these characters. The related second purpose—or "preoccupation," as Stahl labels it—is an investigation of "the archetypal son's search for a symbolic father, a theme that unites many of his American works with the works set in Europe" (xiii). The final aspect of Twain that Stahl examines, and "one of the most significant and, until recently, relatively unexplored dimensions of Twain's writing, is his use [End Page 213] of popular and stereotypical images of masculinity and femininity" (xiv). With these goals, Stahl embarks on what proves to be an enlightening and thought-provoking study.
Addressing the first of his stated purposes in "Privilege, Gender, and Self-definition: The Innocents Abroad," Stahl suggests that Twain offers a "new American voice" (31) to the world of literature that is "predominantly masculine" (31). Through the voice of his narrator, a male ingenue who is both confident and naive, Twain embarks on the definition of the gender roles representative of both the American travelers and the Europeans they encounter. Stahl claims that his "honest manliness is identified with the clarity of Victorian American gender roles and rituals, while sophistry, clerical hypocrisy, and sexual licentiousness are identified as European" (43).
Although Stahl points out that in The Innocents Abroad Twain begins to examine how his characters achieve these gender roles—particularly the masculine—in relation to culture, he continues the process of formalizing these roles in several of his shorter pieces. In "Mark Twain and Female Power: Public and Private," Stahl analyzes Twain's evolving ideas on gender in "A Memorable Midnight Experience" and "1601." In the former sketch, Twain "presents a dialectic between past and present; familiar and unfamiliar; living and dead; and, most subtly, between male and female modalities" (49). In the latter, he introduces the strong, sexual female, in the figure of royalty, who is able to overpower the male. Consequently, this juxtaposition of both gender and class displays Twain's "attempts to come to terms with the perceived cultural paradox of emblematic female power in European history" (65) and symbolizes the lifelong discourse that typifies Twain's writings.
In his third chapter, "Fathers and Sons in The Prince and the Pauper," Stahl discusses the manner in which this classic tale embodies American apprehensions regarding gender roles. He explains that Mark Twain's unfolding use and transposition of European history and culture depicts this anxiety through the expression of the class structure of Europe. Stahl effectively accounts for this theory as he expounds on Twain's treatment of the...