Scuola Dottorale di Ateneo Graduate School Dottorato di ricerca in Lingue, Culture e Società Moderne Ciclo XXIX Anno di discussione 2017 A Connecticut Yankee in Utopia: Mark Twain Between Past, Present and Future SETTORE SCIENTIFICO DISCIPLINARE DI AFFERENZA: L-LIN/11 Tesi di Dottorato di Nicholas Stangherlin, matricola 819747 Coordinatore del Dottorato Tutore del Dottorando Prof. Enric Maqueda Bou Prof.ssa Pia Masiero Nicholas Stangherlin, Università Ca’ Foscari Table of Contents Introduction .......................................................................................................................................... p.5 Chapter 1. Twain’s Speculations on Civilization and Progress ..................................................... p.21 I. The Paige Typesetter-Conversion Narrative and Hank’s Idea of Progress ................. p.22 II. “Cannibalism in The Cars” and “The Great Revolution in Pitcairn:” Butterworth Stavely as a Prototype for Hank Morgan ..................................................................... p.27 III. Anti-Imperialism and The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts...................................... p.35 IV. Science, Capitalism and Slavery in “The Secret History of Eddypus” and “Sold To Satan.” ......................................................................................................... p.38 Chapter 2. Content and Tensions of Utopian Fiction ..................................................................... p.45 I. An Age of Fear and Invention...................................................................................... p.45 II. Pastoral vs. Utopia or Pastoral Utopia? ....................................................................... p.51 III. The Awkward Form of Late Nineteenth Century Utopias ........................................... p.56 IV. New Edens, New Arcadias, New Cities upon a Hill, New Frontiers and the Means to Obtain Them ................................................................................................. p.62 V. Dangerous Leisure, Eroticism, and the Medievalist Trend .......................................... p.72 1 Nicholas Stangherlin, Università Ca’ Foscari VI. Race and Religion in Imperial and Internal Utopias: to Conquer Abroad or to Fight the Alien at Home? ............................................................................................. p.77 VII. Isolationism vs. Expansionism in Populist Utopias ..................................................... p.89 VIII. Fear of the New “Great Unwashed” and of an Imperial Past ...................................... p.93 IX. Conclusion: A Connecticut Yankee As Utopian Fiction .............................................. p.99 Chapter 3. Experiments in Gender and Religion in Utopian Fiction .......................................... p.107 I. Gender, Sentimentalism and the Martian Sexual Revolution .................................... p.109 II. Feminist Utopias and Carnevalesques ....................................................................... p.119 III. Conservative and Patriarchal Utopias ........................................................................ p.124 IV. Sandy and “Hello-Girls” in A Connecticut Yankee................................................... p.131 V. New Religious Forms and Twain’s Telepathic-Dream Narratives ............................ p.137 Chapter 4. African-American Utopian Fiction and The South ................................................... p.145 I. The Mulatto Melodrama in Dystopian representations of the South ......................... p.148 II. Prophecies of Doom: White Violence and the Threat of a Black Revolution ........... p.154 III. Looking Within and Without: Internalized Anglo-Saxonsim and External Racism ........................................................................................................................ p.161 IV. Northern Complicity and African-American Views on Empire ................................ p.168 2 Nicholas Stangherlin, Università Ca’ Foscari V. Slavery and the “Negro Question” in A Connecticut Yankee and “Prophesy” .......... p.176 Chapter 5. The South: Utopian Fiction, Plantation Fiction and the Memory of the Civil War .................................................................................................................................................... p.185 I. Failed Reconstruction and Successful Reconciliation ............................................... p.187 II. Chavannes’ Liberal Utopianism, The New South and The South That Time Forgot ......................................................................................................................... p.194 III. The South as a New Frontier: Nostalgic Literature and Utopia ................................ .p.203 IV. Modifying the View of the South and the Memory of the Civil War ........................ p.211 V. The Civil War’s Marginal but Important Role in Utopian Fiction ............................ p.216 Chapter 6. “The Battle of the Sand-Belt:” Evoking the Images, Sounds and Smells of the Civil War .................................................................................................................................................... p.223 I. Photography, Battlefield Death and Literary Remembrance ..................................... p.227 II. Olfactory Data in Literature and In A Connecticut Yankee ....................................... p.236 III. Violence or “Effects?” Narrative Agency Before and During the “Battle of the Sand-Belt.” ......................................................................................... p.240 IV. Conclusion: The Final Results of Hank’s Experiment ............................................... p.245 3 Nicholas Stangherlin, Università Ca’ Foscari Chapter 7. The Hank Amalgam: Twain’s “Human” History of the Late Modern Era ........... p.249 I. A Human View of History ......................................................................................... p.250 II. Hank Morgan Beyond Good and Evil: Power Parables and Masks .......................... p.255 III. Hank as the Enlightened Dictator, Miles Gloriosus and Narrator ............................. p.262 IV. The John Meredith Paradox ....................................................................................... p.270 V. Historical Models for Hank: Hank as Grant?............................................................. p.274 VI. Hank Morgan’s Imperial Routes ................................................................................ p.278 VII. Conclusions ................................................................................................................ p.293 Conclusion......................................................................................................................................... p.295 Works Cited ...................................................................................................................................... p.301 4 Nicholas Stangherlin, Università Ca’ Foscari Introduction In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the speculative-utopian novel became one of the most popular forms of literature in the United States. From the beginning, the genre displayed peculiar combinations of the political treatise, decorative romantic plots and technical-scientific details. From the 1880s to the 1900s the genre evolved and borrowed from other popular genres; its political concerns changed but it maintained a clear didactic intent and rhetorical form. Consider four plots. Three are typical, one does not quite fit. 1) A nineteenth century middle-class everyman (and first person narrator) wakes up more than one hundred years in the future and into a perfect, utopian world. This modern Rip Van Winkle has this world explained to him by an authoritative figure who acts as his guide. Most of the novel consists of one-sided conversations between traveler and guide. Our protagonist falls in love with a descendant of the fiancée he had left behind in his own time. In the finale, the protagonist has a nightmare of his own century in which he cannot convince his contemporaries to change their ways and solve social injustice. He wakes up, relieved to find he is still in the future. 2) In the future a middle-class everyman/yeoman travels to the technologically advanced but corrupt big city. We are introduced to opposing social factions: on one side, plutocrats who tend to belong to a specific ethnicity; on the other, violent anarcho-socialist revolutionaries who also tend to belong to a specific ethnicity. An apocalyptic class war breaks out, but our protagonist 5 Nicholas Stangherlin, Università Ca’ Foscari escapes with a fair maiden he has saved from the unwanted attentions of representatives of both factions. They flee to the protagonist’s agrarian, colonial homeland and live happily ever after. 3) In the near future, an ingenious upper middle-class man of science creates a new weapon that allows his homeland, and consequently his “race,” to gain the upper hand in global and colonial warfare. His invention inaugurates a golden era of American world domination during which the Anglo-Saxon extends his civilizing influence to the corners of the Earth. He also falls in love with a fair maiden. 4) A lower middle-class nineteenth century everyman, and first person narrator, travels back in time to a primitive world. Having gained power due to his more advanced technical knowledge, he attempts to recreate nineteenth-century civilization with sweeping social