Contesting Masculinities and Performance

A concern about the ways in which "masculinity" and "performance" define each other—in larger cultural terms and in instances of Mark Twain's writing—may seem an obvious enough choice, since in our cultural lexicon masculinity still evokes notions of performance. In the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the performative masculinity that came to fascinate Mark Twain—the performance of pugnacious self-display and boasting, or the successful performance of a trick or joke—had an uneasy place in a middle-class culture that had seemed much more ready to sanction quieter and soberer masculine virtues of self-control and self-improvement, diligence, thrift, and sincerity, and that seemed to find its securest identity in the supposed source of these virtues, the domestic interiors it walled off from the streets.^[2] The values important for consolidating the self-awareness of the mid-nineteenth-century middle class, that is, may have prized masculine performance in the senses of providing and accumulating, but official ideas of self and respectability stressed control, integrity, containment, and privacy, recoiling from the theatricality of male braggadocio. Yet Mark Twain took masculinities associated with territories outside the middle-class ideological enclosure—the cultures of working-class urban youths, river-boatmen, and miners—and reenacted them as a route to success, notoriety, and fame.

The question, then, partly concerns the attraction and cultural meaning of this other masculinity, one of public display and swagger. And for one explanation, we must look to the historical generalization that masculinity was in "crisis" in the later nineteenth century. Middle-class manhood suffered during this period, according to a number of historians, because a bureaucratized workplace pre-

cluded classic individualism and heroic effort; patriarchal authority at home diminished, usurped by motherly power, critiqued by domestic ideology, and ignored by mobile children; and women's influence in public increased, with female workers and reformers raising male worries about a "feminization" of culture. In this context, a "new virility" looked attractive.^[3] Add to this another familiar explanation, that the allure of new masculinities arose for middle-class males in accord with an emerging culture of consumption and imperialism, a culture that no longer meshed with the conservative and producerly "character" of older Victorian manliness.^[4] Helpful as these generalizations are, when lifted out of the particulars of the historical studies that generate them they threaten to discount, for example, the investment bourgeois males had in the domestic, or their recoil from pugnacious manliness. Elaine Showalter's attunement, in Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle , to the forces of both disorder and reordering that circulated around this general "crisis in gender" is instructive.^[5] Beginning to grasp Mark Twain's performances will require heightened sensitivity to middle-class ambivalences about home and market, the genteel and the vulgar, production and consumption, masculinities and femininities.

Understanding Twain's performances will require, too, sensitivity to the flexible meanings these ordering oppositions made, for they refused to hold still, changing a contest into an alignment, and then changing it back again—with the effect of making Mark Twain's poses into complicated dances within Victorian ideology of challenge and affirmation. Twain's ostentatiously lowbrow performances could seemingly affront bourgeois notions of proper character, for example, at the same time that they helpfully expanded them. His embracing of music-hall burlesque could attack the subjectivity associated with middle-class femininity seemingly from a working-class perspective, but it could also serve to celebrate traditional, middle-class male prerogatives. Brandishing a local culture of down-and-outers in the face of an emerging mass culture could show an affinity with a male bohemian elitism devoted to resecuring belles lettres for itself—and to repudiating a "feminized" literary culture. And racial and ethnic caricatures could serve to exclude social subordinates and affirm dominant stereotypes, but they also could be the vehicles for attacks on Twain's parent culture. Ambivalent stances toward a changing dominant culture, toward a changing

femininity, and toward racial and social subordinates all combined and recombined in disorderly ways.

To grasp the ambivalences and contradictions that surface in Mark Twain's written acts—and in his writing about performances and theater—it will help to outline the culture of male performance, the theatrical subculture, and the relatively new social conditions the eighteen-year-old Samuel Clemens encountered when he first left home in 1853. His move from rural Hannibal to the cities—St. Louis, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.—followed a typical pattern; like so many others, Clemens left home after apprenticeship in a trade and got work in the city as a "jour printer," a semiskilled journeyman. As historians note, however, the position of journeyman in the cities was becoming one of a wage laborer, an employee of an entrepreneur, with little hope of rising within the craft system. Shop masters tended no longer to take on the role of caretaker or mentor, and apprentices and journeymen no longer lived and dined with the master. Clemens worked with as many as two hundred other employees in a single shop, made enough money only to scrape by, lived in boardinghouses and hotels, and spent time with peers rather than family.^[6] He was part of a new, marginal population, quite transient: dupring 1853 and 1854 Clemens spent no more than a few months in any one place. He joined the ranks of a mass of youths just liberated from the moral supervision traditionally exercised over their conduct in the home, family, and village. As a group, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg argues, they came to symbolize widespread worries over urbanization and the decaying village order and craft system.^[7]

Members of a bachelor subculture, Clemens and his friends replaced the controlling hands of parents, guardians, and masters with peer relationships. Outside the workplace, they attended the taverns, theaters, music halls, gambling saloons, and billiard parlors of the city. Although Clemens dutifully sent word home that he spent evenings reading in mechanics' libraries and had not touched a drop of liquor (he had pledged his mother that he would not drink or gamble, and may have kept the promise), we know that he also pursued less respectable amusements far from the quietness and privacy of a reading nook. In New York, for example, he apparently went to a "model artist" show, in which women in flesh-colored tights and draped with transparent gauze posed in attitudes of Greek sculpture.^[8] He wrote from Philadelphia that he took part in "what is called

a free-and-easy at the saloons on Saturday nights," at which "a chairman is appointed, who calls any of the assembled company for a song or recitation, and as there are plenty of singers and spouters, one may laugh himself to fits at very small expense."^[9] The contrast between quiet reading, the activity most fully invested with bourgeois values of privacy and self-improvement, and raucous "spouting" in a tavern, which negated such sanctified privacy and interiority, crystallizes in its most simple terms the specter posed by Clemens and his peers.

Both the model artist show and free-and-easies were relatively new entertainments, initiated for this emerging audience of single men—and for husbands fleeing family morality. Attended in groups, both existed as public rites of masculinity.^[10] The free-and-easy, which had begun to appear in Philadelphia only in the late 1840s, especially exemplifies the performative masculinity of the bachelor subculture.^[11] It took place in a tavern, established by mid-century as the social center for workers and the single men of boardinghouses,^[12] and as individuals performed—getting cheers or hoots for their skill—the entertainment enacted the camaraderie that built group identity while working also as an occasion for competition, self-display, and the rituals of affirmation and humiliation that determined status. The dynamics of such self-consciously public performances, enacted for and within groups of men, powerfully shaped the performative dimension of Clemens's earlier writings.

These performances, then, had somewhat different emphases at different cultural levels, locally embodying a dynamic of male ritual, of group and status, but in the more general territory of dominant cultural meanings serving to symbolize an emergent threat. For much of the northern, urban middle class around mid-century, these young men and their entertainments became an obsession, representing a variety of fears and fantasies of unleashed masculinity. The situation of Clemens and his companions was grasped by the prevailing culture, and usually disparaged, in terms of the pervasive, ordering oppositions between public and private, street and home, theater and hearth. Henry Ward Beecher, in his Lectures to Young Men (1844), asserted a guardianship in the home and shop over "our sons, our brothers, our wards, clerks, or apprentices" that was endangered by a "whole race of men whose camp is the theater, the circus, the turf, or the gaming-table."^[13] William K. Northall, writing in 1851

about the theaters of New York, observed that "our boarding-house system of living" underwrites the health of New York playhouses; because there is "no domestic purpose" and "very little to make the fireside attractive," "the boarders are entirely thrown upon their own resources for amusement." Instead of "fireside enjoyments," "public places of entertainment offer the readiest means to these poor undomesticated animals."^[14] In this specific mid-nineteenth-century version of anti-theatricality, theater itself came to epitomize a changing public world of working-class male anarchy whose excitements, one writer feared, would create a distaste for "the quiet and pure enjoyments of the home."^[15] Both alarmist and reformist, this arrangement of the cultural topography so starkly contrasts the order, comfort, and sense of classless togetherness promised by the hearth to the image of unsupervised bachelor life outside the parlor doors, that the emotionally barren boardinghouses, the streets, and the theaters become places fearfully alien to the idealized interior.

Young men at leisure surely provoked more worries than did young wage-earners in manufactories and shops. And in the years following the 1849 Astor Place riot, in which the working-class, nationalist supporters of the actor Edwin Forrest mobbed the performance of the Englishman Charles Macready at the highbrow Astor Place Opera House, this entertainment subculture of bachelors especially evoked fear in the middle classes.^[16] Significantly, Clemens in 1853 (and for a couple of decades thereafter) was an intense admirer of Edwin Forrest; after seeing the actor play the title role in The Gladiator in October in New York, he (perhaps not coincidentally) traveled to Philadelphia, where Forrest was performing, and then to Washington, D.C., where he saw Forrest in Othello .^[17] Like the other "boys in the pit," the artisans and laborers who occupied the cheap seats and set the tone for Forrest's appearances at the Bowery Theater, Clemens reveled in Forrest's unleashing of violent, "manly" emotions; he commented on the actor's seemingly uncontrolled absorption in "the fierce pleasure of gratified revenge." Since one middleclass strategy of distinguishing itself from social and economic inferiors was to stress decorum, self-control, propriety, hearthbound pastimes, and privatized leisure, it is telling that Clemens chose to idolize Forrest, whose romantic style and most famous roles—Spartacus battling his Roman oppressors, or Metamora defying the English conquerors—symbolized uncontrolled rage and worked to

crystallize working-class resentment and male hooliganism. Clemens indeed seems to have felt an affiliation with the "Bowery boy" subculture of apprentices and journeymen. A youth culture of styles and tastes—a preference for Forrest, outfits of red flannel shirts, stovepipe hats, and high boots, a leisure milieu of theaters and taverns and fire companies, and an identification with the stage characters of Sikesey and Mose—its "rowdies" positioned themselves against bourgeois propriety.^[18]

In Victorian symbolic topography, Forrest's manly bellowing on stage existed on the same continuum with the Bowery boys' hooting in the pit or rioting in the streets, in somewhat the same way that audience shouting and performers' spouting at free-and-easies had a kinship. They existed in relationship all the more strongly because of their contrast to the image of proper middle-class pastimes: particularly the quiet pursuit of reading at home, but more generally a passivity and receptiveness in consuming entertainment that stressed privacy, the spectacle of feeling, the transport of the imagination. As the middle class began to sanction the theater after mid-century and transported its model of consumption—darkening the theaters, demanding audience silence and decorum, turning the collective ritual into a private experience—the conflict between styles of being entertained became sharp.

Samuel Clemens's 1856 sketch about Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass's trip to the theater embodies the tension. Usually dismissed as a simple and derivative story of a rube who cannot meet the imaginative demands of the theater (like, say, Jonathan in Royall Tyler's The Contrast ), the piece actually resonates with the specific mid-century frame that contrasted the more passive spectatorship of the middle classes to the competitiveness and aggression of certain strains of working-class masculine performance. Failing to grasp Julius Caesar and Don Cesar de Bazan as fictions or representations, Snodgrass sees them as present-time events and through the similes of his male subculture. The murder of Caesar looks to him like an actual streetfight. And in a telling moment, Snodgrass tries to compete with the orchestra by rendering "Auld Lang Syne" on his comb in an effort to "bring the house down, too."^[19] For him, spectatorship is not divided from performance, and consumption is not divided from production, because the space of illusion is not divided from the present, and he does not have a privatized, passive subjectivity marked off from the publicly recognized self. His displacing the appropriate and private

sensitivity to pathos with his ritual of competitive "showing off" corresponds, as we shall see, to the typical tactics of burlesque, which make consumption as aggressive an activity as performance. In this, the Snodgrass sketch reverberates not only with the tensions between low entertainments and the psychological spectacle of bourgeois theater, but also more generally with conflicting notions of the self that symbolized a social division—the raucous public self of male camaraderie, and the private, quiescent self of the genteel.

If the territory of public entertainment became a location for both symbolic and literal conflicts, these contests nonetheless cannot generally be grasped simply as reflections of class tensions, and such a simplification of course fails to account for Mark Twain's specific enactments of them. Although in middle-class paranoia ruffian masculinity was largely a signifier of class, there were of course among workingmen cultures of temperance and industry as strong as the "traditionalist" subculture that embraced drinking, gambling, brawling, and whoring. And if the latter, extroverted masculinity did indeed have an actual tradition, mainly a preindustrial, rural one to which punctuality and niceties were alien, it rapidly became mythicized for bourgeois delectation.^[20] The Davy Crockett almanacs of the 1830s to 1850s, as Smith-Rosenberg has shown, made this tradition into an urban, bourgeois fantasy about a wild and violent backwoodsman who symbolized everything reform-minded people feared (and were fascinated by): ungoverned adolescence, uncontrolled sexuality, dirt, disorder, intemperance, illiteracy, poverty, insubordination, drunkenness, profanity, and so on.^[21] Images of urban workingmen and frontier louts had a kinship based on the middle class's widely disseminated projections of otherness—projections of the preindustrial and the lower class, of vulgar and ungoverned masculinity.

To some extent Mark Twain certainly exploited both the experience and the romanticization of this masculinity, sending a reporter's dispatches from worrisome cultural territory and playing to that worry, a divided stance that his social position would seem to require. Although he joined the wage-earning subculture when he left home and seemed to revel in working-class entertainments, his sturdily middle-class background and the status he was able to hold onto, despite his downward mobility, as an artisan rather than a laborer undoubtedly imbued his perspective on the lower reaches of culture with profound ambivalences. And when he moved to the decidedly male riverboat world, then to the mining communities of

Nevada and California, his immersion in the rough masculinity of these subcultures was tinctured nonetheless with bourgeois values; the dramatized tensions between the "innocence" of the tenderfoot in Roughing It or the cub in Life on the Mississippi and the "experience" of the groups they are initiated into engage conflicts between these marginal male cultures and the dominant middle-class culture. Mark Twain's popularity lay partly in his ability to poise his writing in the divide between the middle class and its others.

His roughneck persona and self-conscious bohemianism in Nevada and California during the 1860s—poses so sharply fraught with contradictions—self-consciously engaged the tensions between accepted middle-class values and the lure of male and workingclass subcultures and entertainments. Whether or not we agree that nineteenth-century bohemias functioned mainly to serve their middleclass parent cultures by exploring specifically bourgeois contradictions and dilemmas, as Jerrold Seigel has argued, Mark Twain, as a public poser, dandy, and ne'er-do-well, pursued the netherworlds of male leisure with a combination of pleasure and recoil which, even if both were poses, spoke to a dualistic response of bourgeois fascination and revulsion.^[22] His writings of the 1860s are riddled with multiple and jostling voices accented by contentions between classes, masculinities, and genders.

For example, his report in 1863, for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise , of a visit to San Francisco's Bella Union Melodeon—the best-known music hall for disreputable variety shows and minstrelsy—presents his persona of Mark Twain as ingenuously interested only in going to "a chaste and high-toned establishment." His companion, the Unreliable (modeled on Clement T. Rice, of the Virginia City Union ), assures him that the show is properly "moral," but the spectacle of "half a dozen lovely and blooming damsels, with the largest ankles you ever saw"—with dresses, indeed, that "looked like so many parasols"—lashes quickly with the guarantee.^[23] Mark Twain's additional remark, that forty-two single men and twenty-six married ones were in town from Nevada, and that all were at the music hall except two ("both unmarried"—a homoerotic/homophobic joke?), spells out the nature of the audience (men out on the town) and the appeal of the show (the spectacle of women's bodies). The performance in print mimics the male ritual of collective watching, and the collective rites of male readers and spectators together overshadow the actual sight of the performing female body. From the

point of view of this subcultural male rite, the propriety of Twain's persona might signify an excluded bourgeois respectability, except that the persona is not sufficiently denied to preclude strains of identiffcation with its sense of scandal.

The account, more elaborate but similarly structured, of his visit in 1867 to Harry Hill's saloon in New York—again, a notorious institution—also combines a foray into the demimonde of illegitimate male pleasure with a caricature of proper decorum. This time the "innocent" Mark Twain follows his companions into "a little sawdusted den of a tenth-rate rum hole" under the assumption that it is a men's club for "savants " and philosophers, a "retired spot" suitable for a "reflective mood." From the assorted toughs he picks out men who "must be" Louis Agassiz, John Ericsson, and Samuel F. B. Morse, and he expresses some surprise when these men "take each a lady" and variously dance with them, kiss them, seat them on their laps, or buy them drinks. He is further surprised by a floor show of music, minstrelsy, mimics, and a male dancer in a kilt whose highland flings serve to expose himself to the house, especially to a row of "young ladies" gathered by the footlights. After Mark Twain buys drinks for a friendly woman, then righteously refuses her request to see her home, he leaves, declaring to his friends his amazement about this philosophers' club; whereupon they inform him that the place is one of "the worst dens in all New York," and "the young girls were streetwalkers, and the most abandoned in the city." His response to this news condenses the contradictory attitudes that shape the episode; Twain declares that "my indignation knew no bounds, and I said we would go and hunt up another one."^[24] This eager pursuit of wild, illegitimate leisure and pleasure is bound to a caricature of middleclass quietness, reflective contemplation, and decorum that, despite the caricature, outlines Twain's point of view and invokes a guilty sense of transgression. And the commitment of this experience of consumption and spectatorship to print, especially because it emphasizes these contradictory attitudes as poses, outlines the cruising at Harry Hill's and the reportage in his newspaper (the Alta California ) as performances themselves in male ritual.

Such pieces plainly resonated at different pitches in different configurations of reception. Within a broad middle-class ideological dynamic, Twain's forays into cheap dives and music halls in pursuit of marginalized cultures and masculine styles held allure, plausibly enough, for a culture beginning to place consumerist hedonism over

frugality and searching for a vitality and virility seemingly lost to breadwinners stuck as clerks and oppressed by wage-earning, rationalized labor. The echo of Twain's contrast between sissies and roughnecks in the desires and anxieties of the larger middle-class culture, however, would have had an emphasis different from that in the mainly male societies of urban leisure, the river, and the mining town, where they served more explicitly as acts in a homosocial dynamic, as exchanges between men—located on a continuum with the types of public performance that Twain sometimes wrote about: parades, fire company displays, political meetings and orations, sporting contests, informal street theater, impromptu acts and storytelling in taverns, and music-hall and minstrel performances.^[25]

At this local level, the varieties of male public performance were interwoven. As John Dizikes has observed in Sportsmen and Gamesmen , by the 1860s there was a well-established "sporting theatrical world" in America that brought together performers and fans of the turf, the prizefight ring, and the stage.^[26] Twain's newspaperman's culture was inextricable from this context. Virginia City, Nevada, had four theaters (along with at least six music halls or taverns that provided entertainment); it also became a center for pugilism and other sports.^[27] Twain and his cohort from the Virginia City Enterprise had free passes to the theaters, went to the music halls to hear monologuists and minstrels, attended the prizefights, and wrote about these performances;^[28] thanks to the sexual diary of his friend Alf Doten of the Virginia City Union , we can guess that Twain may have accompanied his companions also to dance halls, brothels, and prostitutes' balls.^[29] Mark Twain also belonged to a drinking club that entertained visiting actors, and at which both writers and actors engaged in informal performances of poetry, tales, and jokes.^[30] The circumstances of male performance and the rites of masculinity, in other words, shaped the conditions of entertainment. While there were moments when writing or onstage performance were separated from and mimed acts in the social dynamic, there also were moments when representations and social acts collapsed into a continuum. Mark Twain's writings were entertainments themselves, often about entertainments, but also themselves among the symbolic acts that reproduced and defined their culture.

As prizefighters in this culture used newspapers to convey "cards"—challenges and boasts—to each other, Twain and other

newspapermen used newspapers to feud, often teetering on the line between kidding or mimicry of a fight and serious fighting. (One of these feuds prompted his flight from Virginia City to San Francisco.)^[31] As monologuists and minstrels pattered and joked on stage, so Clemens did in print, following quite closely the conventions of popular performance. This writing was explicitly, and often selfconsciously, preoccupied with public self-display, competition, braggadocio, and status—features of a masculinity that respectable society had chosen to suppress or ignore, and performances that helped constitute the milieux they arose from.

Acts in the definition of a male group, performances in this subculture tended to oppose themselves not only to the propriety of the dominant bourgeois manhood, but also to femininity and sentimentality, to the middle-class subjectivity associated with the feminine, and to a developing mass culture—also associated with the feminine. This pattern of symbolic exclusion is telling, partly because of the affinities it sets up. The writings by Mark Twain that emerge from this context are attuned to the connection between conceptions of middle-class masculine "character" and, to use Mary Ryan's characterization, the "cradle" of domestic femininity that nurtured them.^[32] Twain and his comrades, ostensibly at least, pitted themselves against a perceived alliance in Victorian individualism between industrious masculinity and domestically based identity. Twain's burlesques of sentimentality look more complicated than the dismissive characterizations of his "antiromanticism" suggest when we grasp them as attacks on a particular subjectivity associated with both femininity and the northern middle class. If, as several historians—particularly Nancy Armstrong—have argued, consolidation of middleclass dominance involved the construction and exaltation of a domestic femininity of psychological depth, emotional resonance, and moral value that struggled to replace or suppress status and class as measures of personal worth, then in midcentury America there emerged counterstrains.^[33] What appears to occur in many of Mark Twain's early writings is a clash between masculine systems of status and the sincerity and emotional expression of supposedly classless bourgeois domesticity. Invoking a working-class masculinity of aggression, mockery, posing, and braggadocio, Twain assaults affiliations among self-improvement, equilibrium and strength of character, tenderness, emotional expressiveness, and sincerity.

Opera's emotional spectacle served most especially as a signifier of the psychological interior and of the transparency of expression (though not of the equilibrium of character), and Twain's 1866 burlesque of Il Trovatore , therefore, exemplifies the contrast between a subjectivity of depth and the dynamics of masculine status competition. Written as a kind of summary of the opera, and characterized throughout by a profound misreading through uncultivated and masculinist eyes, the piece simply obliterates the existence of the emotional interior and its expression. When Count di Luna first appeared on stage, Twain reports, he began "to yell," until Manrico, offstage ("in the kitchen"), "crowded him down." In the passionate and well-known trio during the first act, sung by the count, Manrico, and Leonora, the two lovers finally "beat" the count "at his own tune"; in an equally well-known scene, when Azucena sings of her mother's death and her gypsy chorus departs, their voices dying prettily away in the distance, Twain again characterizes the singing as a contest, with gypsies who "blasted away and tried to beat her" but "made a fizzle of it and knew enough to curl their tails and leave." Misreading the signs of emotional expression as competitive performance, Mark Twain's persona violates the vulnerability of love and grief and erases the subjective interior. In so doing, the regime of masculine status displaces that of feminine feeling.^[34]

Opera, for Mark Twain, epitomized not only a territory of emotional expression but also the power of publicity over what he considered a middle-class mass mind; to him it was ludicrous for Americans to sit in awe before a spectacle in an incomprehensible language, and this was possible only through a weak-minded surrender. Likewise, his sense of an emerging mass culture—the best term, given his frequent condescension toward sentimentalism, sensationalism, and melodrama—was interwoven with notions of femininity, emotional surrender, and "inauthenticity." On the one hand, in his reviews of popular theater Twain consistently attacks such plays as East Lynne , the "sickest of all sentimental dramas"; he scorns those San Franciscans who watch it and "whine and snuffle and slobber all over themselves."^[35] He mocks Tom Taylor's temperance drama, The Bottle; or, The Drunkard's Doom , as "rather overwrought in the misery line" and in general rejects what he called "sensational, snuffling dramatic bosh, and tragedy bosh,"^[36] Consistently paired, then denounced, is behavior associated with the domestic interior

(the expression and transparency of a limited range of emotions—the tender, quiet emotions appropriate to the home) and a submissive passivity. Ann Douglas, in The Feminization of American Culture , rightly identifies (though, as some critics have insisted, she may too readily accept and adopt) this nineteenth-century equation of the sentimentalism of the private sphere with a new, emotionally manipulating mass culture. Mark Twain surely perceives this alignment—to the detriment of both femininity and mass culture. And the concomitant contest Douglas sees between mass cultural sentimentalism and an "authentic" and tough-minded masculine opposition also clearly surfaces in Twain's writings.^[37]

For example, what Twain contrasted to "sentimental bosh," with its connotations of inauthenticity and femininely passive consumption, was the banjo music of the minstrels Tommy Bree and Charley Rhoades and the black (not just blackfaced) minstrel Sam Pride, which he called "genuine music —music that will come right home to you like a bad quarter, suffuse your system like strychnine whisky, go right through you like Brandreth's Pills, ramify your whole constitution like measles, and break out on your hide like the pinfeathered pimples on a picked goose."^[38] To be sure, there is passivity and victimization here as well, really an impregnation that echoes the contiguity of the homosocial and homosexual, and that more specifically invokes the white desire in minstrelsy to turn the threateningly wild black body into pleasure; but it is combined with a sense of overt and "manly" assault that is to be distinguished from emotional seduction and surrender and that may partly vitiate its eroticism. The similes here, of swindling, whisky, and disease, are violent rather than languid, bodily rather than emotional, and come pointedly from the low-masculine territories of the marketplace, the tavern, and the grotesque material body—far from an etherealized feminine sphere. The man-to-man assault, as Twain describes it, has a "genuineness" that the emotionally manipulative lacks. The direct physical effect escapes the dynamic of depth on which an uncovering of the emotional interior relied. The embrace of "black music," played in a music hall for a predominantly male audience, further separates Twain's tastes from the genteel and effeminate. (I will turn to the meanings of race and performance in relation to these distinctions of gender in a moment.)

Mark Twain upholds—against the ostensibly mass cultural and feminizing features of midcentury national culture—the qualities of

the local and the masculine, the aggressive and performative ethos of the mining camp. This is perhaps best exemplified in his most famous pieces from this period, the two hoaxes entitled "Petrified Man" and "A Bloody Massacre near Carson."^[39] Twain claimed that each of these was a burlesque—the first, of news articles in the popular press about supposed cases of petrifaction, which Twain called a "wonder-business," the second, of sensation items in general, murder stories in particular. In other words, they were mockeries, as he saw them, of mass-media-induced readerly wonder and gullibility. The description of the petrified man—the details of which, when carefully read, revealed the subject frozen in the act of thumbing his nose—and certain details of the massacre piece supposedly disclosed them as derision and sport. But each of them, the "Massacre" in particular, relied on local reference to mark them as burlesques. They were jokes for insiders, and means for victimizing outsiders, vehicles for contrasting serious truth and jokes and for making the ethos of male joshing prevail over news. The pieces set up an opposition (a mocking one) between the male subcultures and the mass press, between the knowledgeable locals and the gullible masses, and between manly raillery and passive consumption. Twain later criticized the "hurried" and "heedless" readers who mistook the pieces for the truth because, he said, they went for the "marvellously exciting" and "blood-curdling particulars," ignoring the elements of burlesque, travesty, and satire.^[40] The scorn for this imagined audience of witless readers relies on a conception of mass culture as eliciting wonder and horror from the pliant and careless; it relies on a conception of a feminized and victimized mass audience.

The "Bloody Massacre near Carson," moreover, seems figuratively to match what Twain thought the burlesque-hoax did to the unguarded portion of its audience. Pete Hopkins, whom local readers would know as a saloon keeper and a bachelor, kills and scalps his wife and then his children. The echo of the masculinely aggressive bachelor and saloon culture scalping masses conceived as sentimentalized and feminized—and who, from the point of view of this culture, might indeed deserve such scalping because of their passivity, gullibility, and vulnerability—is quite strong. The characters in the story and the projected audiences are divided into masculine and feminine, active and passive; it is the bachelors and saloon goers of Virginia City who would be best able to spot the hoax as a fiction, avoid getting figuratively scalped themselves, and take some plea-

sure in ridiculing the credulity of the distant and victimized masses. The locals would also take "Massacre" as a mockery of Hopkins himself, and "Petrified Man" as an insult to G. T. Sewall, the local judge who, the piece reports, gravely conducts an inquest into the petrifaction. Each piece, in other words, works as mockery and insult in the guise of seriousness and truth, and enacts a ritual that excludes the gullible and feminine and resecures the bond of laughing males. In addition to this subcultural enactment, each tale projects two different audiences, a vulnerable and victimized one and a wary and scoffing one, in a way that activates the distinctions between the feminine and the masculine, the serious and the rollicking, the atomized mass and the reveling locals.

As a final example of the attack on the conjoined values of femininity, tender feeling, and the serious representation or expression of emotion, consider Twain's 1863 burlesque of Ingomar the Barbarian , a play that directly embodied the middle-class myth of feminine "influence" and the power of the domestic over unbridled masculinity. In contrast to Edwin Forrest's unreconstructed barbarians, the hero of Friedrich Halm's play—the wild, warriorly, and sexually aggressive Ingomar—is transformed by his tender love for the Greek maiden Parthenia, which leads finally to their marriage and establishment as rulers in a new Greek city. It is a story of the taming of uncivilized masculinity and desire, the awakening of the tender emotions of middle-class subjectivity, and the repudiation of roving male bands for the closure of marital domesticity. Mark Twain takes these matters explicitly as the targets of his burlesque. In his version of the play, Ingomar's "rebellious spirit rises" at the requirement that he must "dress like a Christian; he must shave; he must work; he must give up his sword!" But Parthenia "tames it with the mightier spirit of love. Ingomar weakens—he lets down—he is utterly demoralized." The love of "Two Hearts that Beat as One" is mocked, as is grief (Parthenia's father, kidnapped from home, "weeps—he sighs—he slobbers. Grief lays her heavy hand upon him"). At the same time that Twain's piece discounts historical representation in typical burlesque fashion—by turning Greece into Nevada, Ingomar into a Comanche, and so on—it attacks marriage, love, family, and emotion in a generalized assault on the image of the feminine.^[41]

The environment of theatrical burlesque out of which so much of Twain's writing emerged supports the contention that male "homo-sociality," including both friendship and rivalry, cements its bonds

by taking "woman" as object of exchange, control, exclusion, and scorn.^[42] Romantic narrative, sentimentalism, sobs, embraces, tears, "soul butter," and "flapdoodle" are the markers of femininity and mass culture that function as items of abjection whose mockery consolidates the opposed system of the masculine and the local. In addition to this masculine dimension, because the burlesque tradition that Mark Twain and his peers looked to was primarily a working-class, male entertainment—associated by the 1850s and 1860s with burlesque houses and minstrel shows that travestied the legitimate theater and played predominantly to audiences of mechanics, miners, and urban bachelors—burlesquing was accented by the insubordination of male groups who stood outside both the prosperity and the domesticity of the American middle classes.^[43]

The terms conventionally (and ingenuously) used in formalist criticism to describe burlesque tactics—"puncturing" illusion or "deflating" pretension—encode penetration and aggression that not only connote a general gendering of artistic practices, but also resonate specifically with the sense of nineteenth-century burlesque as an attack on a subjectivity conceived as enclosed, feminine, and bourgeois. The enclosure of the space of illusion is violated, as is the private communion of the spectator/reader with the spectacle in this enclosure. Much like his friend Charles Henry Webb (whose Arrahno-Poke , a burlesque of Dion Boucicault's Arrah-na-Pogue , began with the "grand effect of changing the flats"),^[44] Twain travestied performances by foregrounding the background, focusing on real-time behavior rather than imaginative representation, or stressing "discrepancies" or errant details that ruined the "unity of effect"—all tactics of willful misreading that resisted enthrallment, emotional contagion, effects of feeling, the losing of the self through union/identification with the spectatorial space carved out by the representation. In his burlesque review of Daniel François Auber's The Crown Diamonds , for example, Twain directs all his attention and praise to a "furniture-scout and sofa-shifter," who "performed his part" of moving the stage properties in such a "sublime" way that "there was not a dry eye in the house." Partly an attack on drama reviewers, the piece nonetheless follows the burlesque practices of resisting the instructions for response in the play, refusing the emphases offered, and parodying the intended effect designed by the dramatic structure of pathos and sublimity.^[45] Travesties of the popular theater—

that was finally, in the 1860s, becoming legitimate for the middle class and respectable women—enact tactics of symbolic violation, predation, and seizure that underscore their masculine gendering at the same time that they follow the practices of perverse readings that enabled men in working-class subcultures to evade bourgeois propriety and domesticity.