Mark Twain and Female Power: Public and Private

51 MARK TWAIN AND FEMALE POWER: PUBLIC AND PRIVATE John Daniel Stahl* In the 1870s Mark Twain wrote several sketches that show him confronting female privilege, sexuality, and power. Significantly, the exploration of these themes derives from his attention to British royalty and class structure . As Twain turned from the travel narrative of The Innocents Abroad (1869) to fiction, he was simultaneously delving into the European and the American past, the period ofthe Renaissance in England, and the period of his childhood in the Mississippi Valley of the 1830s and 1840s. It is no accident that the shift in tone and substance was happening during the years after he was first married, which were also years of prosperity and the expansion of his reputation. The experience of living intimately with a woman in marriage almost certainly exerted a subtle pressure on his perspective, though he, perhaps to the detriment of his art, often tried to maintain the tone and persona he had established in his bachelor days.1 Nonetheless, marital and professional fulfillment seem to have temporarily muted Twain's tone and diminished the range of his poses. This is partially substantiated by his not having found sufficient material in England to satirize; he gave up the attempt to write another book like The Innocents Abroad exclusively about England. At the same time, he was gaining greater mastery in the use of limited perspective. The sketches he wrote in the attempt to repeat the approach of The Innocents Abroad form his unpublished English Notes. In the best of these sketches, "A Memorable Midnight Experience," and in a scatological, bawdy piece Clemens composed for his own amusement and that of a few male friends, 1601, there is an increasing tension between public and private utterance that became a key to Mark Twain's attitudes toward gender at this period. The relationship between the restrained sketch written for general publication and the bawdy, body-function-oriented one written for private entertainment is the same as that between a book such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the notes "Villagers of 1840-1843" that Twain never intended to publish, in which he recalled some of the physical and moral realities of life in Hannibal that he considered improper for publication. *John D. Stahl is an Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. His previous articles have appeared in American Literature, Dickens Studies Newsletter, and Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature. He is currently working on a book on "Mark Twain and the Other: Gender and Europe." 52John Daniel Stahl The fact that "A Memorable Midnight Experience" was written for publication and 1601 was not suggests a dichotomy in Twain's consciousness —as well as in the consciousness of his contemporaries—about what was considered appropriate for public acknowledgment and discussion and what was not. While Twain was indubitably keenly attuned to the limits and taboos concerning the border between public and private in the consensus of his time, his writing also reveals the fact that for him, the duality was fraught with paradoxes, that it did indeed present tensions and at times the temptation to overstep the bounds, playfully or seriously. In "A Memorable Midnight Experience," Twain visits a public monument in London at night, in the company only of a friend, a guide, and a cat. He protects the privacy of his friend, Charles Kingsley, by never naming him, and preserves his own through a certain self-effacement in tone and theme. Conversely, though the subject matter of 1601, flatulence and copulation, is private, the arena in which it is discussed, within the framework of the sketch, is at least semi-public: the "Social Fireside" of Queen Elizabeth, including in its circle some of the most prominent Tudors: Shakespeare, Sir Walter Ralegh, Ben Jonson, and Lord Bacon. Furthermore, these Tudors refer to continental figures such as Montaigne, Rabelais, Cervantes, Rubens, and Margaret of Navarre; as they "talk about ye manners and customs of many peoples" they are hence far less provincial, more cosmopolitan than the narrator, who seems still to cling to Lyly's false euphuism as emblematic of queenly "grace" and the true English style. This ironic...