Hogs, Not Maidens: The Ambivalent Imperialism of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Despite the increased critical attention mark Twain's 1889 novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court has received in recent years, little progress has been made in resolving what I see as the central problem of the novel: what do we do about the fact that Hank Morgan, an ultimately vile character responsible for the murder of thousands, nonetheless acts in the service and promotion of genuinely laudable ideals, such as democracy, equality, the prohibition of slavery, and so on? Hank is a murderer and a tyrant, but he murders and tyrannizes in the name of these undeniably good things. Most recent analyses of the novel tend to throw this proverbial baby out with the bath water, and see Hank as the personification of Twain's growing disgust with the moral implications of American capitalism, industrialism, and militarism. However, by reading the novel only as a satire on the despotism of wealth and technology in the nineteenth century, current critics mirror the reception of the novel by Twain's contemporaries, who saw it by and large as a light-hearted mockery of archaic medieval values still present in European culture.¹

There is perhaps a temptation to split the difference between these two strains of criticism, and to see Twain's novel as mocking certain elements from the sixth century and certain elements from the nineteenth, without committing to a complete condemnation of one or a complete celebration of the other: religious superstition is bad, this reading might go, but so is technological utopianism; total authority invested in a king is bad, but in precisely the same way that total authority invested in a boss is bad. Read this way, the novel's moral seems to have been telegraphed by Twain three years prior to its publication, when, in his essay "The New Dynasty," Twain argued for the inevitable, timeless danger of concentrated power: "Power," writes Twain, "when lodged in the hands of man, means oppression—insures oppression: it means oppression always: not always consciously, deliberately, purposely; not always severely or heavily, or cruelly, or sweepingly; but oppression, anyways, and always, in one shape or another. . . . Power cannot be so righteously placed that it will neglect to exercise its great specialty, Oppression" (383). Connecticut Yankee is thus understood not to be merely a satire on this or that particular mode of government or social organization, but instead a satire on—and a warning against—oppressive power in any and all forms. This understanding of the novel is indeed further underlined by several of Dan Beard's original illustrations; one, for instance, shows three iterations of a superior refusing to admit fraternity with a lesser—a king refusing the brotherhood of a peasant, a slave-owner that of a slave, and, lastly, a businessman that of a worker, with the different forms the oppressors take being insignificant in comparison to the similarity of the content of their oppression (Fig 1). The novel, on this reading, compares the two centuries and two cultures to the point of distilling these persistent similarities despite other more obvious and superficial differences.

Fig. 1.

Dan Beard. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, 1889. Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University.

This similarity is indeed a focus of the novel, but I want to argue that such a reading reduces Twain's more complex meditation on the nature of worthy values—on how they are discovered, how they are applied across cultures, how they are to be imposed by authority. Despite the novel's ultimate pessimism about Hank's project to force his good nineteenth-century values onto sixth-century culture, Twain does not dismiss all values as the playthings of cynical forces or surrender their worth to a cultural relativism that permits some values to apply only to the sixth century and others only to the nineteenth. Clearly Twain does not promote the idea that slavery, though wrong in the nineteenth century, might have been right for the sixth, nor does he...