FOUR WAYS TO INSCRIBE A MACKEREL: MARK TWAIN AND LAURA HAWKINS

Abstract

In The Gilded Age, Twain's female protagonist, Laura Hawkins, is in? scribed in four different and at times antithetical ways: as a figure of fallen innocence, as a victim of male power fantasies, as an American culture hero, and as a Mark Twain alter-ego. An examination of those inscriptions demonstrates the options for depicting women Twain apparently perceived as available to him in the 1870s. However the new attention paid to non-canonical literature of the period has shown that other options were also available; in the light of this material Twain's choice of which strain to pursue tells us much about the constitutive conventions this particular author brought to gender inscription.2 In addition, a study of the choices Twain made as he constructed Laura Hawkins also helps us understand our own constitutive conventions. Twentieth century critics of The Gilded Age have long assumed that the portrait of Laura Hawkins is intended parodically; that Twain, using the conventions of senti? mental and/or sensational dime novels, was burlesquing the immensely popular novels produced by women writers. Proponents of this view may have had little or no first-hand acquaintance with the books to which they refer however; closer acquaintance with the women's texts indicates that the critics were making value judgments in Twain's favor that a closer look at the literary context does not support. Rather than creating a character intended to undermine stock portraits? as parodies generally are intended to do?Twain may well have been affirming the values those sentimental heroines were intended to convey. Moreover a serious examination of what contemporary women's novels were trying to