Mark Twain's Satire on Republicanism

Abstract

CLEMENS' great achievement, his humor, can best be understood as burlesque of the genteel tradition. This is a burlesque generated by the collision of two characters, high and low, Easterner and Westerner, Elect and Depraved. In the ensuing fracas the genteel Eastern character claims that the Westerner eats too much and too fast, engages in bestial fights in which he gouges out the eyeballs and wrenches off the ears of his opponents, is an ignoramus, a reprobate, and a boor. To put the issues of this conflict in the historical-philosophical terms still current in the nineteenth century, the Westerner conforms to the philosophe Condorcet's picture of the stages of social history by beating an evolutionary retreat to the level appropriate to the frontier, barbarism. Clemens, following the tradition of American humor, pictures his vernacular-speaking character in the act of flouting the genteel charge of loutish stupidity by deliberately carrying it to an extreme. This strategy is the key to Clemens' political satire, and it unlocks issues of surprising weight. In politics, the Western community is lectured by the genteel for its failure to live up to the latter's ideal of Citizenship. Clemens' answer not only carries this charge to absurd limits, but also ridicules the political orthodoxy on which this ideal is based-eighteenth century republicanism. He burlesques the genteel effort to measure the Westerner against the abstract and dogmatic stereotype of the Citizen, and impeaches such characteristic features of republicanism as individualism, Freedom, and Progress. The force of his criticism may be measured by his penetration and rejection of basic genteel concepts; his satire is concerned, not with particular policies or parties, but with fundamental political principles.