Violence in Twain's Connecticut Yankee

'Ungentle Laws and Customs'

The Role of Violence in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)

By Lucy Coleman

The consensus reached by critics that the role of Mark Twain’s 1889 time travel novel is to ‘bring together two otherwise disparate historic periods in order to measure them against one another’ is most absolutely true in its relationship to violence.[1] The story hinges on brutality, with the central theme of physical violence established in the first few pages, when Hank Morgan is ‘laid out’ with a crowbar in an arms factory, only to wake up in an anachronistic 6^th Century.[2] By charting the rise of a despot as he ‘plays the game,’ Twain places the loud and visceral violence of Arthurian works such as Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur beside the silent, mechanical weaponry of the 19^th Century, ultimately proving one form of combat to have a superior moral character to the other.

            Twain first conceived the idea for A Connecticut Yankee in 1884, after being recommended a copy of Le Morte D’Arthur by fellow novelist G. W. Cable.[3] The novel’s connection to Malory’s work is unmistakable, qualifying it more as caricature of the Morte than of wider Arthuriana. It contains six excerpts from the Malory in full, with the initial narrator depicted like Twain as having ‘fed at its rich feast of prodigies and adventurers’ until he is inspired to ‘dream again’ (p.12). Twain’s inclusion of viscerally violent scenes marks the combat of the 6^th Century as brutal and bloody: ‘Sir Launcelot put his shield afore him […] and with his sword he clave his head asunder.’[4] The clamorous soundscapes of these passages are especially notable when compared to the mechanical silence of modern technology in the novel: the line ‘within six strokes Sir Launcelot had stricken them to the earth. And then they all three cried,’[5] presents a markedly louder scene of battle than Twain’s ‘Battle of the Sandbelt’, where, in a particularly horrifying tactic, Hank’s ‘tremendous’ electric fences ‘[kill] before the victim could cry out,’ leaving a ‘stillness [that] was deathlike’ (pp.312-5). As such, though Malory’s work does contain violence much more viscerally disturbing than Twain’s (I take, for example, the death of Sir Lucan who when lifted ‘fell in a swoon, that part of his guts fell out of his body [and] he lay foaming at the mouth’[6]), the comparative silence of Hank’s modern weaponry renders the violence of Twain’s time much more unnatural and psychologically distressing. As John Carlos Rowe writes, in ‘electrocuting, drowning and machine-gunning ‘twenty-five thousand men,’ the Boss enacts in the sixth century the special horrors of modern, mechanized warfare’ leaving the reader with a ‘prophetic warning from the mouth of the cave.’[7] Connecticut Yankee therefore contrasts a vision of Archaic violence which is bloody and loud with the overpowered silence of modernity, making Twain’s choice of inciting incident more significant; in a space dominated by modern violence (the ‘great arms factory’), Hank is dealt a portion of visceral, archaic violence (‘[he] made everything crack, and seemed to spring every joint in my skull’) and as such is sent to a reality in which this brutality dominates (pp.14-5).

            Twain’s moral view of each age’s violence in the novel is not immediately apparent. He reportedly ‘mined’ many of Connecticut Yankee’s scenes from William Lecky’s History of European Morals (1869), which he took to be ‘conclusive proof of Europe’s depravity throughout much, if not all, of its history.’[8] Hank can be seen to pass similar moral judgements on the 6^th Century Europeans of King Arthur’s court, at one point calling the nobility ‘tyrannical, murderous, rapacious and morally rotten’ (p.104). This condemnation would support Frank Baldanza’s opinion that ‘there lurks beneath the surface […] the assumption that late-nineteenth century American democracy […] is the ideal norm against which to measure the failure of other civilizations.’[9] Twain’s depiction of a morally bankrupt court goes against conventional scholarship on Arthurian violence, where many take the view that whilst excessively bloody, the brutality of Arthur’s knights often serves to bolster moral character. As Kenneth Tiller states, ‘even Arthur's opponents are described as 'good men' [in the Morte] because of their courage and skill in battle.’[10] Twain’s description of the round table knights as immoral because of their archaic violence is therefore surprising, however I would not wage, as Baldanza does, that this is a symptom of Twain’s belief in the superiority of American democracy. It serves, rather, to establish Hank’s hypocrisy as a leader, as it is he and not the ‘morally rotten’ nobility who is proven truly immoral in the ‘Battle of the Sandbelt’. As Rowe writes, Hank is a character of repeated ‘contradictory impulses,’[11] making it less likely to be Twain’s opinion that Arthur’s court is morally bankrupt, and more an illustration of American hypocrisy. In his wider writings, Twain makes the present a far greater target of moral condemnation than the past, with the American government a particular focus. One fragment of a lost manuscript named ‘Glances at History (Suppressed)’, written in response to American intervention in the Philippines, depicts what he called ‘an unjust and trivial war’ from a dystopic future vantage point, cynically describing a government whose ‘prerogative cannot be to determine what is right and what is wrong,’ and a public who convince themselves that ‘even if the war be wrong we are in it and must fight it out: we cannot retire from it without dishonor.’[12] This fragment presents a twisted version of the morally constructive violence of Arthurian literature: here honour is not found in fighting, but in being blind to morality when fighting. The morally indifferent politics of this future is Twain’s true ‘warning from the mouth of the cave.’

            Sam Halliday is right to remind us, however, that in regularly applying transhistorical interpretations to Connecticut Yankee, the field of criticism ‘systematically undervalues Twain’s interest in the past in its own right.’[13] Twain was greatly interested in English history,[14] and though he stressed that he had not intended to write a satire of Arthuriana,[15] we cannot ignore ‘the fact that it may also function as, quite simply, a representation of Arthurian England.’ Certain characteristics of violence can clearly be found in both Twain’s novel and its inspiration, Le Morte D’Arthur, suggesting Twain may have only intended to exaggerate the violence of Malory’s work in his own. This is most clear in the scale of bloodshed in both texts; in the Morte’s final battle, Malory describes heaps of corpses similar to those in Twain’s ‘Battle of the Sandbelt’: ‘Sir Mordred lean[t] upon his sword among a great heap of dead men,’[16] just as ‘[Hank’s] camp was enclosed with a solid wall of the dead […] a breastwork of corpses you might say’ (p.315). That this battle is an exaggerated reincarnation of Malory’s climax is all but confirmed by Twain’s repetition of the 15^th Century writer’s statement when recording the number of casualties: Malory writes ‘a hundred thousand men laid dead’ just as Twain writes ‘twenty-five thousand men lay dead’ (p.315). As such, Twain shows the horror that can be derived from even a quarter of Malory’s battle. The unbelievable ratios of Arthurian battles are a point of humour for Twain in several sections of the novel: the initial passage he took from the Morte accounts ‘how Launcelot slew two giants,’ and then freed ‘three score ladies and damsels,’[17] however when this tale reaches Hank in King Arthur’s court a few chapters later, the numbers have been exaggerated as ‘[Lancelot] killed seven giants at one sweep of his sword, and set a hundred and forty-two captive maidens free’ (p.28). This speaks to a common urge in Arthurian writers to embellish their heroes’ glory through unbelievable odds in battle, for example in William of Malmesbury’s Chronicle of the Kings of England, where King Arthur is said to have defeated an army of nine-hundred Saxon invaders single-handedly.[18] The inherent humour of these claims is darkened in the novel’s final massacre, when Twain attempts to realise a battle with similarly unbelievable odds: fifty-two young boys against twenty-five thousand knights. As Twain reflected while writing, ‘the fun, which was abounding in the Yankee at Arthur’s Court up to three days ago, has slumped into funereal seriousness.’[19] By bringing the comedic scale of death in Arthurian literature into a fully realised first-person narrative, Twain illuminates the horror of battle in full colour, within a genre of otherwise detached narration.

            When reading Twain’s wider works, however, it is difficult to read lines like ‘we fifty-four were masters of England! Twenty-five thousand men lay dead around us’ (p.315) and accept that they are purely an expression of interest in Arthurian violence, when read against Twain’s writings on the early 20^th Century, such as his 1906 essay ‘Comments on the killing of 600 Moros.’ Here, Twain begins with the same celebratory language as he gave Hank towards a ‘battle’ with unbelievable odds, the Bud Dajo massacre of 1906: ‘with six-hundred engaged on each side, we lost fifteen men outright […] this is incomparably the greatest victory that was ever achieved by the Christian soldiers of the United States.’[20] Twain then questions in mock-confusion why the newspapers were ‘editorially silent’ on the matter, before clarifying that it was an unspoken fact that ‘to pen six-hundred helpless and weaponless savages in a hole like rats in a trap and massacre them […] from a safe position on the heights above […] had not ‘upheld the honour of the American flag’,’ as had been President Roosevelt’s comment, even if they had ‘shot them down with bibles and the golden rule.’[21] Twain’s issue here is again not only the scale of the violence, but the conscious effort of the American government to ignore the question of morality. Like Hank’s electric fences, the violence, and the discourse around it, is deadly silent. Twain’s ‘Battle of the Sandbelt’ is just one of several allusions to colonial brutality; As Rowe writes, Hank’s earlier ‘bluff’ when ‘facing down five hundred knights with two Colt revolvers holding twelve cartridges is the sort of scene repeated countless times […] in the ‘heroic’ exploits of British and European adventures in exotic colonial states.’[22] The unmistakable critiques of modern violence in A Connecticut Yankee have therefore led many critics to hesitate in labelling it a historical satire, with Henry Nash Smith writing that of all Twain’s novels, this is ‘the most urgently focussed on the state of the nation and of the world at the moment of writing.’[23] Twain embeds contemporary violence into his anachronistic 6^th Century, so that ‘though Connecticut Yankee starts as an attempt to juxtapose the past and the present, it ends up struggling to tell them apart.’[24] One such modern issue explored in the novel, relevant to Twain, was the late 19^th Century rise in lynchings. At the turn of the Century America saw roughly a hundred lynchings every year, with one in particular in Twain’s home state of Missouri prompting him to write ‘The United States of Lyncherdom’ in 1901, where he describes how these violent tragedies grow from silence: ‘the average child would know better,’ but ‘each man is afraid of his neighbor’s disapproval.’[25] Twain transplants this cognitive dissonance into his 6^th Century world when Hank and Arthur come upon ‘a man who was hanging from the limb of a tree,’ and the King is hasty to say that ‘if others hanged him, belike they had the right – let him hang,’ restating 19^th century arguments in defense of lynchings (pp.212-3). Twain then reveals that eighteen people have been hanged because of suspicion around a fire, and ‘without [the people of the manor] ever stopping to inquire about the rights or wrongs of the matter’ (p.216). The novel consistently embeds the violence of the modern world in the 6^th Century, and intentionally steeps any discourse around it in silence.

Ultimately, the most significant facet of violence which Mark Twain explores in A Connecticut Yankee is scale. The novel, intended as ‘a contrast between two radically different ages,’[26] finds a field of literature in which unbelievable mortality rates are exaggerated to reflect military and moral prowess, and invades it with a world in which impossible ratios of victor to casualty really do exist, in the morally silent ‘battles’ of the modern age. Essential to this exploration is the degree to which violence is hidden from the reader; jousting tournaments and battles drive the narratives of Arthurian works, with visual descriptions that make violence unavoidable, but morally necessary. In contrast to this, the violence Twain saw in the modern day resides in ‘editorial silence,’ relying on the conscious ignorance of the nation and showing, in Rowe’s words, ‘how despotism secures its power by controlling people’s attitudes and values.’[27] Twain’s Connecticut Yankee condemns the brutality of both ages, but fundamentally leaves its readers with a clear warning to listen out for the hidden violence of the present.

References

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[1] Sam Halliday, ‘History, ‘Civilisation,’ and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court’, in A Companion to Mark Twain, ed. Peter Messent and Louis J. Budd (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp.416-430 (p.416).

[2] Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (New York: The New American Library, 1963), p.15. All further references are to this edition.

[3] Frank Baldanza, Mark Twain: An Introduction and Interpretation (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961), p.69.

[4] Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte D’Arthur (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), Book 6, Chapter 11, p.109.

[5] Ibid

[6] Le Morte D’Arthur, Book 21, Chapter 5, p.514.

[7] John Carlos Rowe, ‘How the boss played the game: Twain’s critique of imperialism in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court’ in The Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain, ed. Forrest G. Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp.175-192 (p.189).

[8] Halliday, p.422.

[9] Baldanza, p.70.

[10] Kenneth Tiller, ‘En-graving Chivalry: Tombs, Burial, and the Ideology of Knighthood in Malory's Tale of King Arthur’, Arthuriana, 14.2 (2004), 37-53 (p.40).

[11] Rowe, p.181.

[12] Mark Twain, ‘Glances at History (suppressed)’, in A Pen Warmed up in Hell: Mark Twain in Protest, ed. Frederick Anderson (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), pp.48-51.

[13] Halliday, p.416.

[14] Baldanza, pp.68-9.

[15] James M. Cox, ‘A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court: The Machinery of Self-Preservation’, in Mark Twain: A collection of Critical Essays, ed. Henry Nash Smith (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1963), pp.117-129 (p.120).

[16] Le Morte D’Arthur, Book 21, Chapter 4, p.512.

[17] Le Morte D’Arthur, Book 6, Chapter 11, p.109.  

[18] William of Malmesbury, Chronicle of the kings of England: from the earliest period to the reign of King Stephen (London: George Bell and Sons, 1904), p.11.

[19] Dennis Welland, Mark Twain in England (London: Chatto & Windus, 1978), p.132.

[20] Mark Twain, ‘Comments on the killing of 600 Moros’, in Mark Twain: on the Damned Human Race, ed. Janet Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1962), pp.110-120 (p.114).

[21] Ibid, p.115.

[22] Rowe, p.180.

[23] Henry Nash Smith, Mark Twain’s Fable of Progress: Political and Economic Ideas in A Connecticut Yankee (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1964), p.7.

[24] Halliday, p.425.

[25] Mark Twain, ‘The United States of Lyncherdom’, in Mark Twain: on the Damned Human Race, ed. Janet Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1962), pp.96-104 (p.99-101). 

[26] Cox, p.120.

[27] Rowe, p.179.