Mark Twain and France: The Making of a New American Identity by Paula Harrington and Ronald Jenn (review)

Mark Twain and France: The Making of a New American Identity is the twenty-second title in the "Mark Twain and His Circle Series" issued by the University of Missouri Press. As Harrington and Jenn readily admit, at first glance this topic is not promising, given how early and often Sam Clemens used his Mark Twain alter ego to express antipathy toward the French and their culture. The authors do not back away from that negative stance, but instead, they want to offer "a fuller interpretation of Twain's relationship with France and the French."

Their thesis: "the French serve as a kind of foil . . . to help build a modern American sense of cultural self" in the wake of the Civil War. The positioning of the French as a foil for an American cultural self makes sense, given that French culture had such a big presence in nineteenth-century America for art, manners, fashion, refinement, and elegance. Harrington and Jenn use that generality about French cultural influence in tandem with the foil metaphor as a touchstone for a tour of examples. They certainly did their homework insofar as they seem to have tracked down in the archive of Mark Twain writings any mention of France or the French, even speculating about the topic when there is no mention by Clemens, for example when he was in Nevada.

The chapters move from Sam Clemens' time growing up in Missouri, as pilot on the Mississippi River, out west in Nevada and California (including his excursion to the Hawaiian Islands), to the representation of France in The Innocents Abroad, and to the comic use of the Franco-Prussian War as a preliminary to the winter Clemens spent with his family in Paris, in 1879, as he struggled to write A Tramp Abroad. That sojourn served as backdrop for the most explicit and lengthy indictment of the French and as such the prime material for the promised fuller interpretation. Following that effort, Harrington and Jenn provide two more chapters. One shows how Clemens' attitude softened even as we are told his interest in France diminished, while the final chapter encompasses not only the longest stay in France of Clemens and his family, but also the longest literary work focused on France, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. Given that status for the book, Mark Twain and France surprisingly only devotes a few pages to the narrative, the authors content with saying it is "remarkable" that, given his lifelong antipathy to all things French, he should expend so much effort on "one of the greatest French figures of all time."

The best part of the book is chapter five, "Paris from the Inside," providing new information about the Clemenses' 1879 stay in Paris and a more detailed account of what they saw and did. When the authors stick to factual details, we are given a rich background account. In this chapter, the authors confront Clemens' strongest antipathy to the French, namely, on the topic of customs and mores about sexuality. They also discuss new material, a carte de visite album put together by Clemens, and two unpublished chapters from A Tramp Abroad concerned with France to accompany their discussion of the two published chapters about France.

The book is weakest when the authors are driven to speculation. The opening chapter discusses the fact that Missouri was French territory until the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, noting small towns like Hannibal would know something about that French past even as it was being replaced by American culture. The claim that Clemens' antipathy is rooted in his up-bringing and was not a "free-floating dislike" and that all the later instances of animus constitute a revival or re-emergence of an original dislike centers the book's argument. That Clemens imbibed cultural prejudices against the French existing in the cultural water...