Mark Twain between Saint and Satan, or the Impossible epos of androgynous reconciliations

Even before setting out on J. D. Stahl’s tantalizing odyssey for Mark Twain’s nineteenth-century Europe, the modern reader is caught by the enigmatic jacket photograph that stands as the allegory to the experience laid out in the book. For there unfolds the most surprising case of cultural twinship and reader’s involvement. The scene takes place in Vienna in 1897; one can see Mark Twain, with his bushy eyebrows, moustache, and crested mane, sitting in a dark suit as a model to the young artist Theresa Fedorowna Ries, who is giving the finishing strokes to his bust. The sculpture, with a somewhat subdued lift of the represented character’s crest and with its milder physiognomy, is seen against the background of another plaster piece showing the blurred shapes of a standing woman. The female Pygmalion facing her creation with a concentrated look is lit by a mellow light and the pair appear to confabulate in an unreal, but wonderfully serene atmosphere. The sculptress and the statue stand apart from the lonely and rather morose writer apparently unaware of the generous forms and grace of the other statue, the unexpected double, or female “guardian angel,” which looks like a projection of his effigy. Twain’s glory, it seems, can be ascribed to the active power of a real woman’s “construct,” as well as to the unsuspected care of the feminine unconscious forces active in the wings of the aesthetic scene.

One can now examine the set of interrogations that J. D. Stahl puts at the beginning of his preface when, dealing with the persona of one who, like the fantastic figure in the photograph, is “both a semifictional character in Samuel Clemens’s autobiographical writings and a narrative presence in the fiction by ‘Mark Twain,’” (xi) he writes:

How do Twain’s male characters think of themselves as male, and how do his female characters think of themselves as female or reveal themselves through their actions as culturally marked as female? How does Mark Twain envision his characters as masculine and feminine, and how do story-tellers within his stories conceive of gender, and why?

(xi)

Taking into account the risks of such speculations, insofar as literary texts are concerned, J. D. Stahl proclaims his intention to ground his interpretation of Twain’s fiction in the distinction established by E. D. Hirsch between “meaning” aimed at by the writer’s intention and “significance,” that is, the involuntary shades such meaning can take through the reader’s reception. This process of regarding Twain’s work as, “in Derrida’s terms, tattooed columns with multiple inscriptions” (180) may be very daring and Stahl owns that he sometimes has been “appropriating Clemens’s texts” and reading them in his “own fashion, in some cases against the grain of what appear to have been Clemens’s intentions” (180). Acknowledging the focus of his critical inquiry, Stahl, at the outset and significantly enough, stresses the importance of Twain’s “discovery of the physical reality of the body beneath the comfortable surface of quotidian life,” such a discovery giving the key to the democratic quality of all “the ancillary narratives that run throughout Mark Twain’s works” (xii). The aim of the critic’s task, one can assume, is to ascertain the “nature of the (writer’s) goals behind his efforts of imagination” (xi), or more definitely, to point to the discrepancies between Twain’s “quest for cultural and personal authority and attempts to imagine resolutions to some of the contradictions between ideology, desire and reality” (xi).

This is setting oneself a difficult task, for Stahl also notes that Mark Twain was quite “squeamish about including the physicality of sex in his published works” (xii), and used in his writings popular and stereotyped images of masculinity and femininity. As Alfred Habegger has shown (1982), these images, in the absence of a landed aristocracy or of a massive cultural inheritance, were ruled by strict criteria...