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MARK TWAIN’S AMBIVALENT UTOPIANISM Thomas Bulger Siena College Throughout his literary career, the idea of a utopian society fascinated and frustrated Mark Twain. Utopianism is an underlying theme in much of Twain’s fiction, including “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” and Huckleberry Finn. Even in his final diatribes against humanity, there are suggestions of utopian possibilities that mankind has tragically been unwilling to realize. Moreover, in several instances Twain overtly explores the complex ramifications of a utopian community, as in “The Curious Republic of Gondour,” Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven, and A Con­ necticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. These works reveal Twain’s life­ long ambivalence in his fictional renditions of utopianism. Published anonymously in the October, 1875, issue ofAtlantic, “The Curious Republic” has all the trappings of a straightforward utopian narra­ tive. In many essential respects, it seems like a nineteenth-century update of Plato’s imaginary commonwealth: as in The Republic, justice is Gondour’s cardinal virtue; women in theory have an equal right to govern (though also like Plato’s ideal state, women governors are the exception rather than the rule; Gondour has had the grand total of two female leaders in its history); virtue is rewarded and given a tangible social value; perhaps most importantly, education, also the foundation of Plato’s community, is the cornerstone on which Gondour’s civilization is built. Another similarity between the republics of Plato and Twain is that both reject democracy as the form of their utopian governments. Despite Twain’s many pronouncements on the virtues of democracy (he still speaks of democracy in 1886 as a “new dynasty”1 that will replace the repressive and archaic institution of monarchy), “The Curious Republic” is overtly anti-egalitarian in its advocation of an educated ruling elite. In Gondour, “universal suffrage pure and simple” is abolished because “it had seemed to deliver all power into the hands of the ignorant and non-tax-paying classes.”2 Instead, Gondour operates under a system any academician would subscribe to wholeheartedly: the more education one has, the greater the voting power. Every resident of Gondour has at least one vote, but someone with a university education could possess up to nine votes. Twain, like Plato, regards the establishment of a utopian community as depending on the elevation of the wise to positions of political authority: “Learning goes usually with uprightness, broad views, and humanity; so the learned voters, possessing the balance of power, became the vigilant and efficient protec­ tors of the great lower rank of society” (pp. 3-4). There is no doubt that Twain saw “The Curious Republic” as an off­ shoot ofthe mode ofconventional utopian literature. In one of his notebook entries, he refers to Edward Bellamy’s enormously popular and influential utopian novel Looking Backward as a “fascinating book” and equates “The Curious Republic” with Bellamy’s work.3 It should also be added that Twain by no means starts with the premise that utopianism is inherently absurd; even after he composed the dystopic Connecticut Yankee, he praised Bellamy as “the man who has made the accepted heaven paltry by invent­ ing a better one on earth.”4 Consequently, the satirical thrust in “The Curious Republic” is not directed at the institutions of Gondour but at the narrator who is unable to appreciate the superior values and virtues of Gondour society. Nevertheless, the utopian vision of “The Curious Republic” is sharply qualified. There is a disturbingly Hobbesian pragmatism about this putatively better society. Material possession as well as education is made a fundamental criterion for political power: “brains and property managed the state” (p. 9). This concession to the instinct of self-interest is alien to the communistic impulse of most utopian societies and indicates that Twain is already acknowledging a basic human tendency that he later rails against in What is Man? that the individual is primarily interested not in altruism but in “the content of his own spirit.”3 Twain’s seemingly harmonious republic has other dissonant notes. From its inception, the utopian tradition assumes that human beings could and would act reasonably if provided with the proper circumstances. For Renaissance authors such as More...

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