Beneath Mark Twain: Judgments of Justice and Gender in Twain's Early Western Writing, 1861-1873
By the time Samuel Clemens began writing journalism and crafting what he called the “sensation hoax” for Virginia City’s Territorial Enterprise in 1862, Americans had been devouring sensational novels and journalism by such American writers as George Lippard, George Thompson, Ned Buntline, Emerson Bennett, and John Rollin Ridge for two decades. These writers, though only a few among many linked to the nineteenth-century Transatlantic genre of sensational fiction, were concerned with social reform in antebellum America, but they gained readership by writing tales about murderers and rapists. These male characters usurp the rights and freedoms of just but powerless men and symbolize the larger cultural anxieties of antebellum Americans living in growing cities. Lippard and Thompson wrote about such crime associated with disparate wealth distribution in the Metropolis, whereas Ridge and Bennett, for example, exposed racial and cultural violence in the American West. Indeed, Clemens, often writing as Mark Twain, combined all of these concerns in his early journalism and sensation hoaxes during the 1860s – state and personal justice, gender, class, race – while exploiting sensational literary depictions of violence that entertained readers but also encouraged readers to critique politics and the ethics of individual actions in the West. The purpose of this dissertation is not to write a history of the American West, nor to write a biography of Mark Twain. Rather, its primary aim is to describe Mark Twain’s sensational journalism and fiction, and his letters to friends and family, that responded to cultural anxieties about crime, punishment, and gender. My goals: to show Twain’s response to violence as a “philosophic observation,” rather than a standard news reporting. Though journalism imparted facts, Twain’s journalism also offered his personal philosophies, his observations, about morality, gender, and justice. With such observations, he became what we might call the “voice of the people.” This study also complicates Twain’s anti-gallows sentiment, for he distrusted capital punishment and yet supported frontier justice. Additionally, Twain developed judgments of subversive women in the West that culminated with a literary verdict in his legal novel The Gilded Age (1873). Before he left the West, however, much of Twain’s discourse about California and Nevada Territory and their spaces – cities and countryside – actually reflected his anxieties about westward expansion and the promise of a utopian West. To borrow Glenn Hendler’s terms, Twain expressed such worries in both his “personal” and “public” sentiments. Finally, this study problemitizes how Twain used his journalism to expose male criminals and to punish them with literary mockery, and yet he also distrusted the female victims who seemed to place themselves in harm’s way and challenged Twain’s assumptions about gender and chastity.
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