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/37Q/c /vo. THE CAPTAIN STORMFIELD CHARACTER IN THE PUBLISHED AND UNPUBLISHED WORKS OF MARK TWAIN DISSERTATION Presented to the Graduate Council of the North Texas State University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY By Helen Hanicak, B. A., M. A. Denton, Texas May, 1976 Hanicak, Helen A., The Captain Stormfield Character in the Published and Unpublished Works of Mark Twain. Doctor of Philosophy (English) December, 1975, 148 pp., bibliography, 77 titles. Captain Stormf ield, the main character in Mark Twain's last book, Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven (1909), and in Dixon Wecter's restored posthumous edition of this work, entitled "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" (1952), appears numerous times--under either the Stormfield name or some other--in Twain's published and unpublished works. His presence throughout the Twain canon--from soon after 1868 when Twain sailed from San Francisco to Panama with Stormfield's original, Captain Edgar (Ned) Wakeman, until 1909, the publication date of Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven--demon- strates Twain's preoccupation with this important character. Works, listed by real or approximate date of composition, as diverse as Roughing It (1872), the "Simon Wheeler Sequence" (c. 1870), Simon Wheeler: Amateur Detective (1878-c. 1898), "Some Random Notes on an Idle Excursion" (1877), "The Great Dark" (1897), and another posthumous work, "Refuge of the Derelicts" (1905-1906), all have 2 Stormfieldian characters, and they all reflect the complex personality of Mark Twain. Most important, Stormfield and represents Twain's ambivalence toward theological philosophical questions of existence. The blending of Mark Twain's disposition with that of an intrepid sea captain who dares the gates of heaven results in a mild satire of fundamentalist Christian beliefs, a satire handled with verve and humor in "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven." Yet the Captain also appears in "The Great Dark," an unfinished story among Twain's most pessimistic. When the Captain is present in a story, tale, or play, so are human aspirations; when the Captain is absent--for example in "Letters from the Earth"--Twain's satire degenerates into invective, and human hope turns into despair. The sources of the Stormfield character were many. Twain explained the origin of Stormfield and his dream adventure as having come from an encounter with Captain Wakeman and from Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Gates Ajar (1868). Other sources, however, were Twain's Calvinistic heritage, his interest in astronomy, his experiences with tyrannical pilots on the Mississippi River. Subject matter 3 nightmare and attitudes in "Letters from the Earth" and the arrangement of "The Great Dark" suggest that Captain Stormfield's dream should be grouped with the pessimistic writings of Twain's later years. Angels in "Captain in Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" resemble Milton's angels Paradise Lost (1667), but Twain's heaven is reordered from the versions of the Bible and Milton's art to be more nearly consonant with human nature. DeVoto suggested parallels for Captain Stormfield in the humorous literature of Mark Twain's day; Wecter cited George Woodward's The Cities of the Sun (1901) as a possible source. Twain's mature attitudes toward blacks, Jews, extraterrestrial beings, and humanity as a whole found their way into "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven." The final source is the most nebulous but the most significant of all: a combi- nation of Mark Twain's deep-seated fear of death and dissolution and Mark Twain's strain of indomitable optimism. Scholars since Twain's death have given only passing or may slight notice to the Stormfield character, who indeed seem insignificant if only his prototypal story, "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," is examined. His 4 numerous appearances, however, his pivotal function among several unfinished works, and his essential optimism must lead to an awareness of his significant role in Twain's fiction. Above all, this character throws new light on the ambivalent nature of Mark Twain the artist. PREFACE The primary vehicle for the Stormfield character in Mark Twain's literary productions, "Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," had a peculiar history in its composition. Receiving its impetus from a dream Mark Twain heard a garrulous sea captain tell in 1868, the long pigeonholed story finally appeared among Twain' s last 2 published pieces in 1907. In the intervening years evidence from letters and notebooks shows Twain's pre- occupation with the story. In addition, the Stormfield character type appears in several of Twain's other pub- lished works. After the editorship of the Mark Twain Papers had passed from Twain's official biographer, A. B. Paine, to Bernard DeVoto, it came to Dixon Wecter who collected two more chapters of the "Visit," added them to the two published chapters, appended an introduction, and published "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" in 1952. The Stormfield of "Extract from Captain Stormfield' s Visit to Heaven" may be termed the prototype Stormfield because of his early appearance among all the Stormfield i creations. The Stormfield of the first two chapters of the 1952 "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" may have existed as long as the Stormfield of Chapters III and IV, but the former does not carry with him the force of Mark Twain's intent to publish. Yet considered together, these revisions of the Stormfield prototype suggest two key elements in my study and raise by implication a third. The possibility that Twain wrote himself into the Stormfield character is the first of three key elements. All of the Stormfield characters contain two major personal characteristics, both of which may be considered a reflection of Mark Twain's own temperament. First, there is the attractive and humorous side of the captain's char- acter. Second, there is the angry, wrong-headed aspect, present to a marked degree in every Stormfield character except the prototype, where the old fellow has a quality of deference rather than divisiveness. The second key element of the three is found in the prototype Stormfield's native milieu, heaven. The setting for the captain's adventures in "Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" suggests kinship with that of a certain amount of Mark Twain's work which treats the ends and expectations of human existence. The third and final element is the ii implication that Mark Twain's impulse to satirize fundamentalist Christianity through the captain's story may have arisen from a deep-seated discomfort with the tenets of a belief he could neither accept nor ignore. If all the examples of the Captain Stormfield character in their delineations, settings, and adventures can be shown to be representative of the divided personality of Mark Twain, then the Stormfield character becomes a vehicle for Mark Twain, the artist, in a new fashion. In the pro- totype story, Stormfield demonstrates his common humanity in a setting of finality. He is a believing, orthodox Christian who discovers the Supreme Power did not mean the messages of the Bible as tradition has interpreted them; rather the Supreme Power is all-understanding of human differences of race, creed, and places of origin. Even aliens are welcomed in Stormfield's heaven. Stormfield's God accepts individuality, humor, human failings, and even impatience, the latter illustrated by Adam's lack of interest in being wept upon by heavenly newcomers. Although Stormfield is illustrative of the optimistic Twain, he is a character met in the most pessimistic of Twain's works. Stormfield's experience in heaven is not duplicated by iii Twainian characters on earth, a point which suggests utopia cannot exist here. In brief, the Stormfield character, because of its pervasiveness, its significance to Mark Twain, and its contradictory nature, may be seen as one that is far weightier than Twain scholars have admitted and as one that provides access to some of Mark Twain's artistic, religious, and philosophical thinking. The length of time alone spent on the composition of "Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" would justify a study of the artist at work. No other book was begun so early in Twain's writing career, worked on inter- mittently over so many decades, and published so close to the end of his life. For forty years before publication,3 Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven existed in manuscript form in a variety of drafts; the story of the reworking is the subject of a study in itself. My interest here, however, lies in the portrait of the blustery old sea captain, Eli Stormfield, also called Ben Stormfield in his primary work,4 and does not lie presently in the history of the composition of the novella. Captain Stormfield's character, though infrequently his name, appears elsewhere in the body of Mark Twain's work. The approach of this study, consequently, is first to examine the sources of iv to the Stormfield story. A second province of interest is describe all appearances of the Stormfield character in the published and unpublished works of Mark Twain. Having shown the character's occurrences and types, I then draw conclusions which differ largely from conventional criticism on the unfinished short story. I close with a consideration of the meaning of the Stormfield character, of Stormfield's heaven, and of Mark Twain's ambivalence toward final things. The two extant, and differing, published revisions of "Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" first alerted me to the need for closer study of Captain Stormfield. Discovery of the composition history and recog- nition of a certain hostility--a certain unwillingness to allow the old fellow any merit--among certain scholars gave added impetus to the continuation of my project.