1. See Bernard DeVoto's remarks on Twain's burlesque, extravaganza, improvisation, and manipulation in Mark Twain's America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1932), 312. Edgar Branch judges Twain's early writings to be "theatrical rather than dramatic" throughout The Literary Apprenticeship of Mark Twain (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950), but see especially 21, 94-110. Henry Nash Smith traces moments when Twain frees himself from his "preoccupation with eloquence" and rhetorical effect, and renders experience "directly'' by becoming absorbed in a scene or memory, but these are only moments of self-forgetting ( Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer [Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1962], 84-87). John C. Gerber, though he treats Twain's personae seriously, finally characterizes them as only "cleverly staged comic acts" ("Mark Twain's Use of the Comic Pose," PMLA 77 [1962]: 304). Warner Berthoff directs perhaps the most sustained criticism against Twain's "art of the performer," its "machinery" of manipulation and staging generally overpowering instances of "the free flow of perception" and "visionary truth and beauty"; see Berthoff's The Ferment of Realism: American Literature 1884-1919 (New York: Free Press, 1965), 61-64. Dwight Macdonald, in "Mark Twain: An Unsentimental Journey," The New Yorker 36 (9 April 1960), writes that Twain's "actor's sensibility" produced a "coarse" writing attuned to idiom and delivery rather than "literary technique" (165, 177). And Guy Cardwell discounts Twain's burlesquing, caricaturing, striving for effects, mimicry, and "theatricalities" ( The Man Who Was Mark Twain: Images and Ideologies [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991], 45).

2. James M. Cox, Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966). Constance Rourke, in American Humor: A Study of the National Character (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931), situates Twain among the entertainment figures of the backwoodsman, the Yankee, and the black-faced minstrel, and in an American tradition of comic display and masking that repudiates emotional expression.

3. Mark Twain-Howells Letters: The Correspondence of Samuel L. Clemens and William Dean Howells, 1872-1910 , ed. Henry Nash Smith and William M. Gibson, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960), II, 780.

4. This is the argument made by Michael Davitt Bell, as part of his generally persuasive challenge to the coherence or distinctiveness of any general definition of American realism, in The Problem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History of a Literary Idea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). See the chapter on Mark Twain for the specific argument that Twain is not a realist because he shows little concern for the social and moral responsibility that Howells thought defined a realist novelist (39-69).

5. Forrest G. Robinson, In Bad Faith: The Dynamics of Deception in Mark Twain's America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), and Susan Gillman, Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain's America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

6. Franklin Rogers, Mark Twain's Burlesque Patterns as Seen in the Novels and Narratives, 1855-1885 (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1960).

7. Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). Levine does the most thorough job of recounting this history, but on the establishment of divisions between "high" and "low" theaters and repertoires, and between disciplined, bourgeois audiences and raucous music-hall ones, also see Garff B. Wilson, A History of American Acting (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), 107, 173; Claudia D. Johnson, "That Guilty Third Tier: Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Theaters," American Quarterly 27 (December 1975): 575-84; and Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin' Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 14-23.

8. See Mark Twain, The Adventures of Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass , ed. Charles Honce (Chicago: Pascal Covici, 1928), 4-12, and idem, Mark Twain's Travels with Mr. Brown , ed. Franklin Walker and Ezra Dane (New York: Knopf, 1940), 223. On the stratification within nineteenth-century theaters, see David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled: American Theatre and Culture, 1800-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 53-55; Francis Hodge, Yankee Theatre: The Image of America on the Stage, 1825-1850 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), 21-23; and Robert C. Toll, On With the Show (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 6.

9. The expansion of the number of theaters during this period was phenomenal. Between 1864 and 1870, for example, there was a 67 percent increase in the number of theaters in the country, and an 85 percent increase nationally in gross ticket receipts—all accelerated by population growth and the westward expansion enabled by railroads (see Eugene K. Bristow and William R. Reardon, "Box Office, U.S.A., 1864-1870: Regional Profiles," Theatre Survey 8 [1967]: 124).

10. Mark Twain, Mark Twain in Eruption: Hitherto Unpublished Pages about Men and Events , ed. Bernard DeVoto (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1940), 255. See, for an elaboration of this point of view, Rodman Gilder, "Mark Twain Detested the Theatre," Theatre Arts 28 (1944): 109-16.

11. Alan Gribben, Mark Twain's Library: A Reconstruction , 2 vols. (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980).

12. Mark Twain, Mark Twain Speaking , ed. Paul Fatout (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1976), 338-39.

13. For the history of Twain's playwriting, see Thomas Schirer, Mark Twain and the Theatre (Nuremberg: Hans Carl, 1984). Schirer notes eleven plays that Twain attempted by himself, involvement in ten collaborations on plays, and translations of three plays from German into English (105).

14. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic lmagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976); Nina Auerbach, Private Theatricals: The Lives of the Victorians (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), and "Secret Performances: George Eliot and the Art of Acting," in Romantic Imprisonment: Women and Other Glorified Outcasts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 253-67; Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). On Dickens, Twain's theatrical British counterpart, see Robert Garis, The Dickens Theatre: A Reassessment of the Novels (London: Oxford University Press, 1965); William Axton, Circle of Fire: Dickens' Vision and Style and the Popular Victorian Theater (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1966); and Edwin M. Eigner, The Dickens Pantomime (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989). Also pertinent to the relation between novels and theater are Gillian Beer, "'Coming Wonders': Uses of Theatre in the Victorian Novel," in English Drama: Forms and Development , ed. Marie Axton and Raymond Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 164-85, and Brenda Murphy, American Realism and American Drama, 1880-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), which argues for the influence of theories of literary realism on American drama.

15. John C. Gerber, Introduction, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; Tom Sawyer Abroad; Tom Sawyer, Detective (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 9, 15; Lin Salamo, Introduction, The Prince and the Pauper (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), 3-4.

16. The phrase is from Twain's denunciation of Rev. William A. Sabine for refusing to conduct the comedian George Holland's funeral service because Holland was an actor. The piece is devoted to the argument that theater teaches morals as effectively, even more effectively, than do ministers such as Sabine. See "The Indignity Put upon the Remains of George Holland by the Rev. Mr. Sabine," in What Is Man? and Other Philosophical Writings , ed. Paul Baender (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), 52.

17. Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography , 3 vols. (New York: Chelsea House, 1980), II, 571.

18. William Dean Howells, "My Mark Twain," in Literary Friends and Acquaintance , ed. David F. Hiatt and Edwin H. Cady (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 288.

19. William Dean Howells, "The Man of Letters as a Man of Business," Scribner's (October 1893): 444, and Mark Twain's Letters , arranged with comment by Albert Bigelow Paine, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1917), II, 528.

20. Early Tales and Sketches, Volume 1: 1851-1864 , ed. Edgar Marquess Branch and Robert H. Hirst (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), 78-82.

21. For a concise and lucid statement of the difficulties in scholarship when we believe both that culture is socially constructed and that society is culturally constructed, see Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., "A New Context for a New American Studies?" American Quarterly 41 (1989): 588-613. Berkhofer's (rightly) hesitant sense that scholars must contextualize reflexively, that they "must all textualize as they contextualize, poeticize as they politicize," is persuasive. Also helpful is Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), in whose first part historians grapple with the problems of conducting historical investigations of, and within, "discursive formations."

22. See Minnie M. Brashear, Mark Twain: Son of Missouri (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1934), 134, 141.

23. See Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973).

24. See John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990), especially chap. 7, "The Disciplining of Spectatorship." Also see Bruce A. McConachie, "Pacifying American Theatrical Audiences, 1820-1900," in For Fun and Profit: The Transformation of Leisure into Consumption , ed. Richard Butsch (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 47-70.

25. According to Minnie M. Brashear, in 1847 the population of Hannibal was 3,500 ( Mark Twain: Son of Missouri , 77). Elbert R. Bowen writes that, according to the Seventh Census, the population in 1850 was 2,020, excluding slaves ( Theatrical Entertainment in Rural Missouri before the Civil War [Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1959], 52).

26. Mark Twain's Autobiography , ed. Albert Bigelow Paine, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1929), I, 120.

27. See Bowen, Theatrical Entertainment , 2-4, and Dixon Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952), 111.

28. Bowen, Theatrical Entertainment , 123. Also see ibid., 71-82, and Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal , 186.

29. Mark Twain in Eruption , 110.

30. On the bad reputation among "upright citizens" that showboats had during the 1840s through the 1870s, see Philip Graham, Showboats: The History of an American Institution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1961), 7, 26-27, 35, 37, 52, 189.

31. Quoted in Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal , 187.

32. See ibid., 155.

31. Quoted in Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal , 187.

32. See ibid., 155.

33. At the beginning of "Old Times on the Mississippi," Mark Twain recalled that circus performances always left all the boys in the town "burning to become clowns," and "the first negro minstrel show that came to our section left us all suffering to try that kind of life." In notes he made much later, as he tried to gather memories about Hannibal that could serve as literary material, he mentioned a comic minstrel routine known as the ''Long Dog

Scratch" and singled out the circus and a "Nigger Show" ( Mark Twain's Hannibal, Huck and Tom , ed. Walter Blair [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969], 34, 37).

34. Ibid., 51-52.

33. At the beginning of "Old Times on the Mississippi," Mark Twain recalled that circus performances always left all the boys in the town "burning to become clowns," and "the first negro minstrel show that came to our section left us all suffering to try that kind of life." In notes he made much later, as he tried to gather memories about Hannibal that could serve as literary material, he mentioned a comic minstrel routine known as the ''Long Dog

Scratch" and singled out the circus and a "Nigger Show" ( Mark Twain's Hannibal, Huck and Tom , ed. Walter Blair [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969], 34, 37).

34. Ibid., 51-52.

35. On Dan Rice, see especially Graham, Showboats , 34-39. Also see Harold Edward Briggs and Ernestine Bennett Briggs, "The Early Theatre in the Upper Mississippi Valley," Mid-America 31 (1949): 140; Joseph S. Schick, "Early Showboat and Circus in the Upper Valley," Mid-America 32 (1950): 222; Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal , 192; Bowen, Theatrical Entertainment , 30.

36. Quoted in Bowen, Theatrical Entertainment , 29, and Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal , 192.

37. On respectable and rowdy styles of male public behavior, especially among working-class males, see Susan G. Davis, Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 20-23, 151-53.

38. Clifford Geertz, "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight," in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 412-53.

1. Berthoff, The Ferment of Realism , 62.

2. See Gillian Brown's argument in Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990) that the feminine interior in middle-class ideology—for men as well as for women—was the perceived guarantor of the integrity of the individual.

3. Peter N. Stearns, Be a Man! Males in Modern Society (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979), 96-112; Peter G. Filene, Him/Her/Self: Sex Roles in Modern America , 2d ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 69-93; Clyde Griffen, "Reconstructing Masculinity from the Evangelical Revival to the Waning of Progressivism: A Speculative Synthesis," in Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America , ed. Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 183-205. Also, John Higham's well-known account, "The Reorientation of American Culture in the 1890's," while preoccupied with "a farreaching reaction against the constrictions of a routinized society," reveals how profoundly concerned with masculinity were the late-nineteenth-century demands for a ''strenuous life" of "muscular spirit," prowess, "vital force," and virility that could replace not only the enervations supposedly caused by mechanization, but also those attributed to effeminacy, overcivilization, and parlor domesticity ( Writing American History: Essays on Modern Scholarship [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970], 73-102).

4. See, especially, Elliott J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), and Erenberg, Steppin' Out , for the argument that working-class styles became models of leisure and pleasure for the dominant culture.

5. Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Viking, 1990), especially 3-14.

6. John Lauber, The Making of Mark Twain: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985), 51.

7. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "Sex as Symbol in Victorian America," Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies 5 (1980): 55-59. On the changes in apprenticeship in the printing trade, see Ava Baron, "Acquiring Manly Competence: The Demise of Apprenticeship and the Remasculinization of Printers' Work," in Meanings for Manhood , ed. Carnes and Griffen, 152-63. On the general change for workingmen from the apprentice system to wage labor, see Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), especially 107-42.

8. Mark Twain's Travels with Mr. Brown , 84. George C. D. Odell in Annals of the New York Stage , 15 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927-49), VI, 258, 329, notes that in 1853 Mademoiselle Couret's model artists were performing at George Len's Franklin Museum; this may have been the show Clemens saw.

9. Mark Twain's Letters in the Muscatine Journal , ed. Edgar M. Branch (Chicago: The Mark Twain Association of America, 1942), 13.

10. For general accounts of gender-segregated leisure in the middle and later nineteenth century, see Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), especially 16-21, 56-57, and idem, "Commercial Leisure and the 'Woman Question,' "in For Fun and Profit , ed. Butsch, 106-9. Peiss helpfully stresses the ways in which commercial leisure—theaters, saloons, billiard halls, music halls, dance houses, arcades, etc.—expressed and shaped male culture and an ethos of rowdiness. Mary P. Ryan, too, discusses public domains as masculine (including parades, street festivals, cafés, restaurants, mechanics' institutes, etc.), with a new segregation of men and women occurring in the 1840s; see Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). Robert C. Allen, in Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 64-66, rightly observes that leisure spots reinforced solidarities of gender, class, and race.

11. See Arthur Herman Wilson, A History of the Philadelphia Theatre, 1853-1855 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1935), 37, 47-48.

12. Although Jon M. Kingsdale focuses on later, turn-of-the-century saloons, see his "The 'Poor Man's Club': Social Functions of the Urban Working-Class Saloon," American Quarterly 25 (1973): 472-89. Also pertinent is Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), on the "alternative culture" of saloons as a preserve of male sociability, an escape from middle-class culture and crowded tenements, and a place for singing, storytelling, prizefighting, and gambling (see especially 45-58).

13. Henry Ward Beecher, Lectures to Young Men on Various Important Subjects , new ed. (New York: J. B. Ford, 1873), 163, 185. This edition adds four newer lectures to the original seven lectures of the 1844 edition.

14. William Knight Northall, Before and Behind the Curtain; or Fifteen Years' Observation among the Theatres of New York (New York: W. F. Burgess, 1851), 7.

15. Quoted in Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled , 25.

16. Richard Moody, The Astor Place Riot (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958).

17. For Clemens's remarks on Forrest's New York performance, see Mark Twain's Letters, Volume 1: 1853-1866 , ed. Edgar Marquess Branch, Michael B. Frank, and Kenneth M. Sanderson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 16. In this letter Clemens also says he regrets having missed the actor in Damon and Pythias in New York, and he notes that Forrest will appear in Philadelphia "on Monday night." Forrest opened at the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia on Monday, October 10 (Wilson, A History of the Philadelphia Theatre , 689). The next existing letter from Clemens, dated October 26, came from Philadelphia, in which he told his family that his work schedule was flexible enough to allow him to stay at the theater until midnight ( Mark Twain's Letters, Volume 1 , 19). Sometime in January 1854, Clemens moved to Washington, and, in a letter to his brother Orion's newspaper, he wrote that he had seen Forrest play Othello at the National Theatre on February 17 (ibid., 42-43).

18. On the Bowery b'hoy subculture, see Wilentz, Chants Democratic , 257-71, and Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (New York: Knopf, 1986), 89-101. Also see John Dizikes, Sportsmen and Gamesmen (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), 193-225; Allen, Horrible Prettiness , 65-66; and Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 72-73, 81-84.

19. The Adventures of Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass , 3-15.

20. Herbert G. Gutman's influential overview of the persistence of preindustrial traditions among urban working people appears in Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working-Class and Social History (New York: Knopf, 1976), 3-78. Bruce Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia, 1800-1850 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), discusses the multiple cultures among the urban working class, and Wilentz, in Chants Democratic , properly notes the reductiveness of dividing people into exclusive categories, such as abstemious and respectable trade unionists and Bowery roisterers (270). Both tendencies could exist, of course, in a culture and in a person.

21. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "Davy Crockett as Trickster: Pornography, Liminality, and Symbolic Inversion in Victorian America," in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 90-108.

22. Jerrold Seigel, Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830-1930 (New York: Viking Penguin, 1986).

23. Early Tales and Sketches, Volume 1 , 251-52.

24. Mark Twain's Travels with Mr. Brown , 270-74.

25. Mark Twain's own list of the spectacles of Virginia City includes "theaters, 'hurdy-gurdy houses,' wide-open gambling places, political pow-wows, civic processions, street fights, murders, inquests, riots," and so on ( Roughing It [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972], 274).

26. Dizikes, Sportsmen and Gamesmen , 193.

27. On theaters and entertainment in Virginia City, see Margaret G. Watson, Silver Theatre, Amusements of the Mining Frontier in Early Nevada, 1850-1864 (Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark, 1964), 129-31, 159, and Paul Fatout, Mark Twain in Virginia City (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), 52, 57, 72-75. On Virginia City as a "mecca" for prizefighting, see Gorn, The Manly Art , 163-65.

28. See the Introduction to Mark Twain of the "Enterprise": Newspaper Articles and Other Documents 1862-1864 , ed. Henry Nash Smith and Frederick Anderson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957), 5. Also see Schirer, Mark Twain and the Theatre , 12-14.

29. On Clemens's friendship with Doten, see Paul Fatout, "Mark Twain's Nom de Plume," in Mark Twain: A Profile , ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), 162-65. On Alf Doten, his friendship with Twain's roommate Dan De Quille (William Wright), and their cruising, see Marion S. Goldman, Gold Diggers and Silver Miners: Prostitution and Social Life on the Comstock Lode (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981), 97, 111-12. Goldman also provides the best account of the vice districts in Virginia City.

30. Fatout, Mark Twain in Virginia City , 37.

31. Clemens carried on feuds with Clement T. Rice (whom he called the Unreliable) and Adair Wilson (whom he called the Unimportant) of the Virginia City Union ; Charlie Parker (the Obese) of the Virginia City Evening Bulletin ; William Wright (Dan De Quille), his companion on the Enterprise ; and Albert S. Evans (Fitz Smythe) of the Alta California . See, as a good example, the series of attacks on Fitz Smythe, in Early Tales and Sketches, Volume 2: 1864-1865 , ed. Edgar Marquess Branch and Robert H. Hirst (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), 329-58. Edgar Branch, in The Literary Apprenticeship of Mark Twain , provides a good account of this feuding.

32. Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

33. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

34. "Burlesque Il Trovatore ," in Mark Twain's Satires and Burlesques , ed. Franklin R. Rogers (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), 19-24.

35. Fatout, Mark Twain in Virginia City , 80.

36. Clemens of the "Call": Mark Twain in San Francisco , ed. Edgar M. Branch (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), 97, and Early Tales and Sketches, Volume 2 , 172.

37. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Avon, 1978); see especially 308-9 and the discussion of Melville in chap. 9. For critiques and historicizations of the association between mass culture and the feminine, see Andreas Huyssen, "Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other," in Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture , ed. Tania Modleski (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 188-207, and Tania Modleski, "Femininity as Mas[s]querade: A Feminist Approach to Mass Culture," in High Theory/Low Culture: Analysing Popular Television and Film , ed. Colin MacCabe (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), 37-52.

38. Early Tales and Sketches, Volume 2 , 235.

39. Early Tales and Sketches, Volume 1 , 155-59, 320-26.

40. See Contributions to "The Galaxy" 1868-1871 , ed. Bruce R. McElderry, Jr. (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1961), 47-50, for Mark Twain's comments, in retrospect, about these hoaxes.

41. The Washoe Giant in San Francisco , ed. Franklin Walker (San Francisco: George Fields, 1938), 58-60. Friedrich Halm was the pseudonym of Baron Eligius Franz Joseph von Münch-Bellinghausen. Originally Der Sohn der Wildniss, Ingomar was translated into English by William H. Charlton.

42. This is the argument made by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick throughout Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), but see, for example, 25-26.

43. See Claudia D. Johnson, "Burlesques of Shakespeare: The Democratic American's 'Light Artillery,'" Theatre Survey 21 (1980): 49-62. Ever since the Olympic and Chambers Street theaters in New York specialized in burlesques in the 1830s and 1840s and lowered their prices, burlesque was associated with audiences of Bowery b'hoys, mechanics, newsboys, and apprentices. See David Rinear, "Burlesque Comes to New York: William Mitchell's First Season at the Olympic," Nineteenth-Century Theatre Research 2 (1974): 23-34, and George Kummer, ''The Americanization of Burlesque, 1840-1860," in Popular Literature in America:A Symposium in Honor of Lyon N. Richardson , ed. James C. Austin and Donald A. Koch (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972), 146-54.

The literary critics who have attended most closely to Mark Twain's burlesques—such as Walter Blair, Franklin Rogers, and David E. E. Sloane—have insistently stressed their belletrism. Seemingly anxious to dissociate Clemens from low burlesque, and from its vulgar, roughneck culture, they connect his burlesquing to a tradition that devolves from the burlesques printed in Vanity Fair —the New York, bohemian, literary magazine—and that is connected to British and Irish literary burlesque, such as Dickens's Pickwick Papers and Thackeray's burlesque novels (Walter Blair, "Burlesques in Nineteenth-Century American Humor," American Literature 2 [1930]: 236-37, 246; Rogers, Mark Twain's Burlesque Patterns , 12-17; David E. E. Sloane, Mark Twain as a Literary Comedian [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979], 4-7, 58). It is true that Twain sought out the bohemian literati of Virginia City and San Francisco and wrote burlesque novels in the style of Bret Harte, Charles Webb, and Orpheus C. Kerr. But Constance Rourke, Bernard

DeVoto, and Edgar Branch were right to invoke a widespread "spirit" of burlesque in the theater, newspapers, and comic periodicals as the context for Twain's writing (Rourke, American Humor , 101-2, 169; DeVoto, Mark Twain's America , 165; Branch, The Literary Apprenticeship of Mark Twain , 83). Lawrence W. Levine's recent tracing in Highbrow/Lowbrow of the changing cultural place of nineteenth-century burlesque—its displacement from a more or less common, national culture that embraced both Shakespeare and Shakespeare travesty on the same bill, and its marginalization in working-class theaters and minstrel houses as the geography of entertainments came to match new hierarchies of taste—furnishes a most helpful account of the dynamic of cultural hierarchy and antagonism in which we should understand Mark Twain's burlesques.

If his burlesques had an ingredient of belletrism, it belonged to the bohemianism that also romanticized the burlesque shows of the rowdy b'hoys. And both literary elitism and working-class irreverence were opposed to the bourgeois Victorian home and its proprieties and amusements. The burlesque novels , I would suggest, had as much to do with an attack on the form that represented the privatized and emotional subjectivity of the middleclass hearth as they had to do with aspirations to literariness. And the burlesquers of novels were as much a part of the tradition of rowdy theatrical burlesques as they were of belles lettres. Twain's bohemian mentor, Charles Henry Webb, made his name—and a substantial income, according to Twain—with a burlesque of Dion Boucicault's Arrah-na-Pogue , not with his writing for the Californian . (On Webb's Arrah-no-Poke, or Arrah of the Gold Pomme de Terre , see Ettore Rella, A History of Burlesque , vol. 14 of The San Francisco Theatre Research Monographs: A Monograph History of the San Francisco Stage and Its People from 1849 to the Present Day , ed. Lawrence Estavan [San Francisco: Work Projects Administration, 1938-42], 65-68. Twain's notice of the burlesque appears in Early Tales and Sketches, Volume 2 , 380-84.) Twain's friend Artemus Ward (Charles Farrar Browne), a bohemian and dandy and former contributor to Vanity Fair , wrote burlesques of The Octoroon, Arrahna-Pogue, Othello , and other plays in the burlesque-hall spirit ( The Complete Works of Artemus Ward [1898; rpt. New York: Burt Franklin, 1970], 45-50, 417-21). When Artemus Ward put on his show in Virginia City in 1863, after having gotten drunk with Mark Twain and the Enterprise staff, he blackened his face and gave an unscheduled performance with a minstrel troupe at the Niagara Music Hall, delivering a nonsensical burlesque oration typical of minstrelsy (Watson, Silver Theatre , 231). Such a performance, more than literariness, set the conditions for Twain's burlesques.

44. See Rella, A History of Burlesque , 66.

45. Twain's burlesque review appears in Early Tales and Sketches, Volume 2 , 79-85.

46. Mark Twain in Eruption , 255.

47. On caricaturing monologuists, minstrels, and female performers in Virginia City during Mark Twain's stay there, see Watson, Silver Theatre . Often the same performers, and at least the same kinds of performers, were fea-

tured in the melodeons, minstrel halls, and taverns of San Francisco; see Edmond M. Gagey, The San Francisco Stage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950), and The San Francisco Theatre Research Monographs , ed. Estavan, especially vol. 1, Introduction to the Series ; vol. 13, Minstrelsy ; and vol. 14, A History of Burlesque . For information about the melodeons, saloons, and burlesque houses in Virginia City's bawdy district, see Goldman, Gold Diggers and Silver Miners .

48. Susan G. Davis gives an account of the circulation of "styles, dramatic techniques, devices and symbols" between street theater and the stage in her study Parades and Power , 15-16, 95-96, 102. David Roediger, too, in The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991), writes of blackface on both stage and street (104-5).

49. Early Tales and Sketches, Volume 2 , 449. An informative study of the African-American community in San Francisco during these years is Douglas Henry Daniels, Pioneer Urbanites: A Social and Cultural History of Black San Francisco (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980); for a discussion of dances and festivities, including the one Twain reported on, see 146-47. Also see Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993), 271-94, on the ways African-American cakewalks could combine minstrel conventions and their mockery, stereotypical buffoonery and parody of white manners.

50. My argument is at odds, obviously, with Guy Cardwell's assertion that, until about 1867, Twain was quite simply and crudely a white racist, invariably portraying blacks as ignorant, childlike, vulgar, inferior, etc.; see Cardwell, The Man Who Was Mark Twain , 109, 167-70, 180-200. I hope to complicate Twain's treatment of race in a way that will bypass the familiar argument over whether or not he was a minstrel-loving white supremacist, an argument whose tendency toward absolutism neglects the complexities in both minstrelsy and Twain's writing.

51. Homi Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse," October 28 (1984): 125-34, is useful on this issue, because the author argues that white racist caricatures and mimicry have "identityeffects" that "are always crucially split ." There exists a menacing excess in such mimicries, partly because they are designed not to get representation quite right, and thereby always leave a dimension of the mimicked unfixed, unknown, ungrasped.

52. Eric Lott, in Love and Theft , provides an especially cogent and helpful examination of the ambivalences white audiences invested in the minstrel image. But also see Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 244-301; Berndt Ostendorf, "Minstrelsy: Imitation, Parody and Travesty in Black-White Interaction Rituals 1830-1920," in Black Literature in White America (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1982), 65-94; Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness , especially 95-131; and Michael Rogin, "Blackface, White Noise: The Jewish Jazz Singer Finds His Voice," Critical Inquiry 18 (1992): 417-53.

53. Mark Twain in Eruption , 111. On minstrelsy in Hannibal, see Bowen, Theatrical Entertainment , 41, and Brashear, Mark Twain: Son of Missouri , 142.

54. Early Tales and Sketches, Volume 2 , 233.

55. See Twain's extended description and discussion of minstrelsy in Mark Twain in Eruption , 111-14.

56. Quoted in the entry for Adelaide Sartoris in Gribben, Mark Twain's Library , II, 604.

57. Relevant to my argument is Shelley Fisher Fishkin's Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), not only in the author's general point that Twain's imagination was pervasively shaped by a multiracial community, but also in the more particular point that he was familiar with and adopted "signifying" practices for social satire (see especially 53-76). Fishkin, however, is more concerned with characterizing Twain as an embodiment of "multiculturalism," with demonstrating the influences of particular African Americans on his creation of Huck, and with deciding the (impossible?) question of when he drew on African-American culture and when he drew on minstrelsy, than she is with my concerns—assessing the complex ends to which elements attributable to African-American culture are put, and how such cultural borrowings work within a field of cultural conflicts.

58. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of AfricanAmerican Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 46-53, 78, 85. But also see Houston A. Baker, Jr.'s, argument that, even if minstrel nonsense has ludic elements, it was nonetheless primarily a white creation of African Americans as brutish " mis-speakers ," a creation that African-American writers had to reinhabit, rework, re-sound, master—or deny, replacing it with "authentic" African-American sounds ( Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987], 17-24, 56).

59. These arguments are made persuasively by William J. Mahar, "Black English in Early Blackface Minstrelsy: A New Interpretation of the Sources of Minstrel Show Dialect," American Quarterly 37 (summer 1985): 260-85.

60. For Twain's remarks on Birch, see "The Lick House Ball," Early Tales and Sketches, Volume 1 , 316.

61. For considerations of such features in African-American language—talking without getting to the point, puns, boasting, put-ons, mimicries, etc.—see Geneva Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977), e.g., 79-83, 94-100, 142-63, and Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, "Signifying, Loud-Talking, and Marking," in Rappin' and Stylin' Out: Communication in Urban Black America , ed. Thomas Kochman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 315-35.

62. " Ah Sin," a Dramatic Work by Mark Twain and Bret Harte , ed. Frederick Anderson (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1961).

63. Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 169-70. On similar stage

representations of the Chinese in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, many of them patterned on Harte's "heathen Chinee," see Stuart W. Hyde, "The Chinese Stereotype in American Melodrama," California Historical Society Quarterly 34 (1955): 357-67, and William Purviance Fenn, Ah Sin and His Brethren in American Literature (Beijing: College of Chinese Studies, 1933), 75, 100-101.

64. There were of course general, though never consistent, tendencies among whites to conflate images of African Americans and Chinese into a vague Other; see Dan Cardwell, "The Negroization of the Chinese Stereotype in California," Southern California Quarterly 53 (1971): 123-32; Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 216-19; Stuart C. Miller, The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of the Chinese, 1785-1882 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), 7, 155; and Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), 260.

65. Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992) is indispensable for an understanding of this sort of displacement—for an understanding, that is, of the ways in which white authors have constructed race metaphorically and allegorically, using it as a vehicle for articulating other cultural and social problems—of class, gender, identity, etc. Also see the critique by bell hooks of blackness as a metaphor in the white imagination in "Eating the Other," in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 21-40.

66. See Dizikes, Sportsmen and Gamesmen , 227-32, for an account of Menken and the bohemian, sporting, theatrical subculture she knew.

67. For examples of the jokes, see Fatout, Mark Twain in Virginia City , 157, and Branch, The Literary Apprenticeship of Mark Twain , 288 n. 98. For Goodman's defense of Menken, see Fatout, Mark Twain in Virginia City , 163-64.

68. Menken was attacked especially by the Virginia City Union; see Watson, Silver Theatre , 259, and Fatout, Mark Twain in Virginia City , 157, 163.

69. Fatout, Mark Twain in Virginia City , 162-63.

70. "The Menken—Written Especially for Gentlemen," in Mark Twain of the "Enterprise," 78-79.

71. The San Francisco burlesques of Menken and Mazeppa are noted in Gagey, The San Francisco Stage , 91, and Rella, A History of Burlesque , 62-63, 213. For the Virginia City burlesques, see Watson, Silver Theatre , 251, 258-59, 311. Also see Twain's review of another Mazeppa , starring Emily Jordan, in Clemens of the "Call," 94-95. And see Early Tales and Sketches, Volume 2 , 521.

72. The Washoe Giant in San Francisco , 102-3.

73. Mary Russo, "Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory," in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies , ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 222.

74. Mark Twain's Travels with Mr. Brown , 84.

75. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 188, 200.

1. "A Notable Dinner," Hartford Courant , October 23, 1890, p. 2.

2. Paul Baender, "The Jumping Frog as a Comedian's First Virtue," Philological Quarterly 60 (1963): 194. Critics, of course, have written about the deadpan style, but usually as a kind of archetype in American literature of the "wise fool"—a figure given little historical specificity, usually treated in a broad sweep of American humor, and certainly never culturally situated in the way that I propose. See, for example, such surveys as Walter Blair's books: The Mirth of a Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), America's Humor: From Poor Richard to Doonesbury , written with Hamlin Hill (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), and Horse Sense in American Humor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942).

3. I am once again referring to the divisions created between "low" and "high" theater and culture, especially from midcentury on, including the emergence of "respectable" theaters, the expulsion from them of burlesque and variety, and the proliferation of minstrel halls and music halls; the disciplining in "legitimate'' theaters of boisterousness and its flourishing in "low" venues; and the consolidation of associated contrasts in taste and spectatorship. These are developments especially of the 1850s and 1860s, and therefore form a crucial background for Twain's and Jefferson's performances. See especially Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow , but also the other sources listed in my Introduction, notes 6 and 7. More than thirty years ago, Raymond Williams, writing about English entertainment, described the configuration of cultural developments I want to explore: the burgeoning of music halls in the 1840s, the related expansion of "serious" and "respectable" theater and audiences, especially between 1860 and 1900, and the consolidation of sentimental comedy, with its mixture of comedy and pathos, as the beloved form of the newer middle-class audiences. See Williams's essay, "The Social History of Dramatic Forms," in The Long Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 246-73.

4. My sense of the deadpan style as a popular form that is contradictory, open to multiple readings, resonant with both vernacular traditions and bourgeois values, and generally an acting-out of cultural tensions is influenced by work in "cultural studies"—for example, Stuart Hall's well-known essay, "Notes on Deconstructing the Popular," in People's History and Socialist Theory , ed. Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 227-41, which characterizes popular culture as always composed of "antagonistic and unstable elements," and as a "ground" for a "double movement" of popular resistance and the superimposition of dominant cultural forms to contain that resistance. Also see, for example, Tony Bennett's "The Politics of 'the Popular' and Popular Culture," in Popular Culture and Social Relations , ed. Tony Bennett, Colin Mercer, and Janet Woollacott (London: Open Uni-

versity Press, 1986), 6-21, which pertinently argues that "the very organisation of cultural forms" is shaped by the intermingling within them of antagonistic cultural values and ideologies. Helpful, too, is John Clarke's essay, "Pessimism Versus Populism: The Problematic Politics of Popular Culture," in For Fun and Profit , ed. Butsch, 28-44, because it underscores the instability and variability of meaning in any popular cultural text, but also insists on the ways in which culture limits the range of possible meanings, and on the ways in which bourgeois forms and meanings work to incorporate and dominate the pleasures and practices of subordinate groups. For a similar account of popular culture that focuses on nineteenth-century American theater—that stresses multiple audiences and various possible audience responses and identifications, but that also puts a somewhat greater stress than I do on the power of containment and hegemony—see Bruce A. McConachie, ''Using the Concept of Cultural Hegemony to Write Theatre History," in Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance , ed. Thomas Postlewait and Bruce A. McConachie (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989), 37-58.

5. Stuart Hall's "Notes on Deconstructing the Popular" is pertinent on this point as well; Hall stresses that languages, cultural practices, and cultural forms (and the deadpan style is a good example) never simply belong to a particular class, but are used variously by different class cultures (238).

6. Despite the unpredictability of individual response to popular forms, and despite the many variations in response shaped by people's differences in gender, race, class, ethnicity, nationality, age, sexual orientation, and so on, there do seem to be persistent configurations in popular culture and its reception that signal widespread preoccupations, anxieties, desires, conflicts. My aim here is to identify one such configuration, in which an extensive range of deadpan performances, and the existing responses to them, continually suggest and rehearse a prevalent concern over a separation between class cultures and gender ideals. These conflicts, I suggest, work to constitute a "horizon" of reading—or to set a group of canonical procedures for reading—that clearly shaped (even if it could never fully determine) what particular audiences saw in particular performances. Relevant to this conception is the work of Tony Bennett, who has argued that extratextual "codes," "discourses," "cultures," and protocols or conventions of interpretation can converge as "reading formations" that shape, organize, regulate, and activate readings and popular texts (or, I might add, viewings and performances); the effect is that readings are structured (though, often, very indirectly or unevenly) by larger social, cultural, and ideological relationships, and do not, therefore, dissolve into infinite idiosyncratic interpretations. See Bennett's essays, "Texts, Readers, Reading Formations," Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association 16, no. 1 (1983): 3-17; "Marxism and Popular Fiction," Literature and History 7 (1981): 138-65; and "Texts in History: The Determinations of Readings and Their Texts," in Post-structuralism and the Question of History , ed. Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington, and Robert Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1987), 63-81. Also see Michael Denning's Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (New York: Verso, 1987), 69-71, which argues against totalizing ideas of "the public" but nonetheless argues for discernible regularities and tendencies in readings, some of them tied to class cultures and their worries and interests.

7. On the practical anxiety among men, in the new urban situations of crowds of strangers, to avoid exposing themselves—partly by adopting an impassive visage—and the concomitant middle-class anxiety that the public world was filled with manipulating con men whose intentions could hardly be read from their faces, see Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), especially chaps. 1 and 2, "The Era of the Confidence Man" and "Hypocrisy and Sincerity in the World of Strangers." The deadpan style obviously crystallized anxiety about self-exposure and about not being able to detect the masking of another.

8. Mark Twain's comment on Fred Franks appears in Early Tales and Sketches, Volume 2 , 11; also see his remark on seeing Franks in San Francisco, in Clemens of the "Call," 40; and on Franks's performances in Virginia City in 1863, see Early Tales and Sketches, Volume 2 , 521-22, and Watson, Silver Theatre , 133, 186, 192. On Billy O'Neil's deadpan performance, see Mark Twain of the "Enterprise," 132; on O'Neil's performances in Virginia City, see Watson, Silver Theatre , 186, 240-41. Twain's notice of Stephen Massett's performance appears in Clemens of the "Call," 96; also see Watson, Silver Theatre , 317. For Twain's comment on Billy Birch, see Early Tales and Sketches, Volume 1, 316; for remarks on Birch's acting style, see Toll, Blacking Up , 250-51, and Minstrelsy , vol. 13 of The San Francisco Theatre Research Monographs , ed. Estavan, 64. Finally, for Twain on Setchell, see Early Tales and Sketches, Volume 2, 169-73. Setchell later starred in Artemus Ward, Showman —which further ties Twain, Ward, and Setchell together as kindred humorists and theatrical performers.

9. Richard Moody, America Takes the Stage: Romanticism in American Drama and Theatre, 1750-1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955), 110, and Rourke, American Humor , 87.

10. Early Tales and Sketches, Volume 2, 49-56.

11. Twain's comment on Billy O'Neil is in Mark Twain of the "Enterprise," 132.

12. On Toodles at Ben de Bar's Theatre in St. Louis, see Mark Twain's Notebook, #46, typescript p. 10, in the Mark Twain Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley (hereafter Mark Twain Papers).

13. William Evans Burton, The Toodles: A Domestic Drama in Two Acts (New York: Samuel French, [1853?]).

14. See Garff B. Wilson's report on the reception of Burton's Toodles in A History of American Acting , 158-60. To cite a possible influence on Twain, I also note that Burton and John Brougham played the Siamese twins, Chang as the drinker and Eng as helplessly and unintentionally drunk; see Laurence Hutton, Plays and Players (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1875), 243.

15. Burton and other deadpan performers, that is, represent a kind of continuous self that has moved somewhat beyond the sureties of "character" that such historians as Joseph Kett, Warren Susman, and Karen Halttunen have placed earlier in the century. Kett has observed that, between 1840 and 1880, "character" as "a configuration of moral qualities molded in each person" dominated American conceptions of the self ( Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America 1790 to the Present [New York: Basic Books, 1977], 105-8, 112-14). Halttunen has elaborated this conception of character as a matter of "fixed principles'' and "stable character"—something antebellum Americans opposed to indulgence and pleasure ( Confidence Men and Painted Women , especially chap. 2). Susman, compatibly, has argued that such a concept of character as a developing structure began to erode in mainstream thinking after 1880, culminating in twentieth-century versions of the self as shaped by ephemeral determinants (" 'Personality' and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture," in Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century [New York: Pantheon, 1984], 274, 280). The "unified" self: of the drunken or befuddled deadpan obviously is not that of character "structure," which was becoming obsolete and untenable, but it is that of interior integrity, of a unity and continuity of consciousness, of a psychologistic consciousness of ongoing free associations which could accommodate drunkenness and pleasure and yet keep a coherent, private identity intact. It is a reassurance of continuity and flow rather than of structural solidity.

16. "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog," Early Tales and Sketches, Volume 2 , 282-88.

17. On the Marsh troupe in Carson City, see Mark Twain of the "Enterprise," 129-31. Hutton is quoted in Rella, A History of Burlesque , 53. Also see Watson, Silver Theatre , 240.

18. For accounts of Burton's Captain Cuttle, see Donald Mullin, ed., Victorian Actors and Actresses in Review (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), 96-97, and William C. Young, Famous Actors and Actresses on the American Stage , 2 vols. (New York: Bowker, 1975), I, 139-42. Twain's fondness for Captain Cuttle was long-standing; from 1862 through 1903 he made a variety of references to Cuttle in his notebooks (to Cuttle's catch phrases, to his movements and mannerisms) and seems generally to have thought, as he wrote in 1885, that "Captain Cuttle is good anywhere," whether on the stage or in a novel (see the entry for Dombey and Son in Gribben, Mark Twain's Library , I, 189).

19. The praise for Setcheil appears in "A Voice for Setcheil," Early Tales and Sketches, Volume 2 , 169-73.

20. Edgar M. Branch, "'My Voice Is Still for Setchell': A Background Study of 'Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,'" PMLA 82 (1967): 598.

21. Cox, Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor , 28-30. For the opposing point of view, see, for example, Kenneth Lynn, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor (Boston: Little, Brown, 1959), 145-47, and Paul Schmidt, "The Deadpan on Simon Wheeler," Southwest Review 51 (1956): 270-77.

22. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980).

23. Quoted in the editors' note to the "Jumping Frog" story, Early Tales and Sketches, Volume 2 , 272.

24. Rourke, American Humor , 169.

25. On the history of lecturing in the United States, see Paul Fatout, Mark Twain on the Lecture Circuit (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960), 97-98; and Fatout's Introduction to Mark Twain Speaking , xv. On Twain's quickly growing popularity, see Fred W. Lorch, The Trouble Begins at Eight: Mark Twain's Lecture Tours (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1968), 224. Also see Donald M. Scott, "The Popular Lecture and the Creation of a Public in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America," Journal of American History 66 (March 1980): 791-809. On Redpath and lecturing see Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966), 84-86.

26. See, for example, Fatout, Lecture Circuit , 142.

27. On Holland, see ibid., but also Lorch, Trouble Begins , 232, and Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain , 146 and, for Twain's response, 147.

26. See, for example, Fatout, Lecture Circuit , 142.

27. On Holland, see ibid., but also Lorch, Trouble Begins , 232, and Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain , 146 and, for Twain's response, 147.

28. Lorch, Trouble Begins , 230, and Fatout, Lecture Circuit , 112. Both Lorch and Fatout refer to responses to a January 1869 lecture in Decatur, Illinois, reported in the Decatur Herald and Republican .

29. Fatout, Lecture Circuit , 136, 127, 73, 59.

30. Lorch, Trouble Begins , 44, 114, 128.

31. Cox, Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor , 59.

32. See Twain's remarks about pauses in Mark Twain in Eruption , 225-27, and in a letter to his wife, Livy, in The Love Letters of Mark Twain , ed. Dixon Wecter (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949), 162.

33. See Fatout's remarks in Mark Twain Speaking , xviii, and in Fatout, Lecture Circuit , 134-35.

34. Quoted in Lorch, Trouble Begins , 219.

35. For example, ibid., 71, 200, 227, and Fatout, Lecture Circuit , 42, 70, 75-76, 86, 107, 182.

34. Quoted in Lorch, Trouble Begins , 219.

35. For example, ibid., 71, 200, 227, and Fatout, Lecture Circuit , 42, 70, 75-76, 86, 107, 182.

36. See especially Fatout's quotation, from the January 28, 1896, Bombay Gazette , in Lecture Circuit , 260.

37. In a letter to Livy Clemens, from Bennington, Vermont, November 27, 1871, in Love Letters , 165.

38. Mark Twain Speaking , 247-49; also see 230, 450.

39. Hutton, Plays and Players , 46-47; Mark Twain's comment appears in Autobiographical Dictation, April 28, 1908, in the Mark Twain Papers. Quoted with permission. ^*

40. Mullin, Victorian Actors , 416-17, and Moses J. Montrose, Famous Actor-Families in America (1906; rpt. New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1968), 98.

41. Henry Austin Clapp, Reminiscences of a Dramatic Critic (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1902), 99-100.

42. Jefferson began playing the role of Rip Van Winkle in 1865 (for a run of 170 nights), and by 1881 he had performed the part 2,500 times. On Jeffer-

son's popularity, see Richard Moody, "American Actors and Acting before 1900: The Making of a Tradition," in American Theatre: A Sum of Its Parts , ed. Henry B. Williams (New York: Samuel French, 1971), 59.

43. L. Clarke Davis, "Among the Comedians," Atlantic Monthly 19 (June 1867): 751, and Joseph Jefferson, Rip Van Winkle , in Nineteenth-Century American Plays , ed. Myron Matlaw (New York: Applause, 1967), 166-67, 179, 183.

44. "Editor's Study," Harper's Monthly 82 (March 1891): 643.

45. Mullin, Victorian Actors , 273, and "Jefferson in 'Rip Van Winkle,'" The Nation 9 (23 September 1869): 248.

46. Mullin, Victorian Actors , 272-74.

47. Jefferson's remark is quoted in Young, Famous Actors , I, 585. Jefferson, Rip Van Winkle , 153, 155, 162, 175.

48. Mullin, Victorian Actors , 274.

49. Davis, "Among the Comedians," 752.

50. Young, Famous Actors , I, 586.

51. Mullin, Victorian Actors , 273, and Young, Famous Actors , I, 583.

52. Jerry Wayne Thomason has helpfully made the play available, and has fully recounted its history, in his dissertation, "Colonel Sellers: The Story of His Play" (Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri—Columbia, 1991). For more succinct and accessible accounts of the play, which Twain took originally from a copyright violator's dramatization of the novel, see Mark Twain-Howells Letters , II, 861-62; Phillip Walker, "Mark Twain, Playwright," Educational Theatre Journal 8 (1956): 185; Gilder, "Mark Twain Detested the Theatre," 111; and Schirer, Mark Twain and the Theatre , 42-48. Brenda Murphy discusses the trend of plays focused on one comic character in American Realism and American Drama, 1880-1940 , 4, 48.

53. September 20, 1874, Mark Twain-Howells Letters , I, 26; July 15 or 25, 1874, ibid., I, 20.

54. Twain's comment on Rip Van Winkle and Solon Shingle appears in his letter to Mr. Watt, January 26, 1875, quoted in Gribben, Mark Twain's Library , I, 359.

55. William Dean Howells, "Drama," Atlantic Monthly 35 (1875): 749-51.

56. Brander Matthews and Laurence Hutton, Actors and Actresses of Great Britain and the United States , 5 vols. (Boston: L. C. Page, 1900), V, 235, 231.

57. Brander Matthews, "The American on the Stage," Scribner's Monthly 18 (1879): 329.

58. New York Times , September 27, 1874, p. 6.

59. Ibid., August 17, 1875, p. 4, and September 17, 1874, p. 6.

58. New York Times , September 27, 1874, p. 6.

59. Ibid., August 17, 1875, p. 4, and September 17, 1874, p. 6.

60. See Matthews and Hutton, Actors and Actresses , V, 236, 240-41, and Mullin, Victorian Actors , 374.

61. Matthews and Hutton, Actors and Actresses , V, 234. "The Gilded Age," Rochester Evening Express , September 1, 1874, p. 2, col. 2, quoted in Thomason, "Colonel Sellers," 332. Thomason has brought together in his dissertation a host of otherwise difficult to acquire reviews of the play.

62. Mark Twain Speaking , 88.

63. The Autobiography of Mark Twain , ed. Charles Neider (New York: Harper and Row, 1959), 21.

64. Matthews, "The American on the Stage," 328.

1. Mark Twain in Eruption , 214-17.

2. Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography , II, 786.

3. Mark Twain's Letters, Volume 1 , 16.

4. See Twain's defenses of Forrest quoted in Pat M. Ryan, Jr., "Mark Twain: Frontier Theatre Critic," Arizona Quarterly 16 (1960): 201; also see Twain's piece praising Forrest in The Washoe Giant in San Francisco , 101-2. Twain revised his estimation of Forrest—linking his acting to an "adolescent taste" that America had outgrown—in one of the originally unpublished passages of Life on the Mississippi (1883). See Life on the Mississippi, Illustrated by Thomas Hart Benton, with an Introduction by Edward Wagenknecht and a Number of Previously Suppressed Passages, Now Printed for the First Time, and Edited with a Note by Willis Wager (New York: Heritage Press, 1944), 393.

5. As Jerry Wayne Thomason reports in his dissertation, "Colonel Sellers," there exist four versions of the play (none in Twain's hand): two in the Mark Twain Papers (one of which Thomason reproduces in his thesis); a copyrighted script in the Library of Congress; and a typescript in the Stanford University Theatre Collection.

6. On the playwriting, see Schirer, Mark Twain and the Theatre .

7. Mark Twain-Howells Letters , I, 81.

8. William Dean Howells, "Drama," Atlantic Monthly 35 (1875): 749-51. Howells's opinion was in accord with some other, early, reviewers of the play. The New York Times (September 17, 1874) said Raymond "assumed this role with an earnestness which insured his success" and an "absence of selfconsciousness" that made the "personation as artistic as it was striking." The Rochester, New York, Union and Advertiser (September 1, 1874) said Raymond ''appears to have caught the very inspiration of the author's meaning"; and the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle (September 1, 1874) said that Twain and Charles Dudley Warner "have found in Mr. Raymond the faithful interpreter of their conception" (quoted in Thomason, "Colonel Sellers," 333).

9. Mark Twain-Howells Letters , I, 82. It seems indeed to have become a commonplace in criticism of Colonel Sellers that the play was weak, but Raymond's fleshing out of Sellers was superb. George H. Jessop, for example, asserted that "the author had only created a shell into which Raymond infused his vigorous and glowing individuality, animating it into bustling, scheming life" (in Matthews and Hutton, Actors and Actresses , V, 234). And reviewer after reviewer wrote that the role of Sellers was "admirably adapted," "suited," or "fitted" to Raymond's "talent," "style," or "personality"—implying that the success of the play lay largely in the self that Raymond brought to his part. (See the reviews of the play quoted by Thomason, "Colonel Sellers," 26, 307, 309.)

10. Mark Twain-Howells Letters , I, 82-83. Also see the slightly tongue-in-cheek curtain speech Twain gave on opening night, in which he complains that Raymond transforms all the pathos and "tragedy" in Sellers into laughs ( Mark Twain Speaking , 88).

11. Mark Twain's Autobiography , ed. Paine, I, 89-90.

12. As a member of the Players Club, Twain attended dinners in the late 1880s with Boucicault, Coquelin, and Irving (see Mark Twain Speaking , 240-41, 338-39). Twain's connection with Irving deepened in the 1890s, when Twain not only dined with Irving but also enlisted the actor as a financial backer for the Paige typesetting machine (see Love Letters , 278, and Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain , 305).

13. Diderot's text, with Irving's introduction, is bound together with Archer's in The Paradox of Acting by Denis Diderot and Masks or Faces? by William Archer , intro. Lee Strasberg (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957). Coquelin's essay, with an 1887 review of it by Henry James, was reprinted as part of the series "Papers on Acting," published by the Dramatic Museum: Constant Coquelin, Art and the Actor , trans. Abby Langdon Alger (New York: Dramatic Museum of Columbia University, 1915). The series also includes Joseph Talma, Reflexions on the Actor's Art , intro. Sir Henry Irving (New York: Dramatic Museum of Columbia University, 1915), and The Art of Acting: A Discussion by Constant Coquelin, Henry Irving and Dion Boucicault (New York: Columbia University Press, 1926), which reprints the 1887 discussions. For a helpful account of the influence of Diderot and Coquelin in the late nineteenth century, with special reference to the writings of Henry James, see Steven H. Jobe, "Henry James and the Philosophic Actor," American Literature 62 (1990): 32-43; also see D. J. Gordon and John Stokes, "The Reference of The Tragic Muse ," in The Air of Reality: New Essays on Henry James , ed. John Goode (London: Methuen, 1972), 127-32, for an account (again with special reference to James) of the dispute in the journals, and the assertion that ''through the eighties no-one interested in acting or the theatre could forget the terms of reference of such discussions" (127). Finally, Benjamin McArthur, in Actors and American Culture, 1880-1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), writes of the resurgence in the 188os of "the debate over head versus heart," precipitated partly by Diderot and Archer and given a new dimension by late-nineteenth-century interest in automatism, suggestion, and hypnotism (180-86).

14. See Art of Acting , 47, and Irving's introduction to Diderot's Paradox , 7.

15. On the general tendency in the nineteenth century for the language of physiology and the body to surface in discussions of actors' emotional expression, and for a discussion of the influence of Darwin on theories of acting (including William Archer's), see Joseph R. Roach, "Darwin's Passion: The Language of Expression on Nature's Stage," Discourse 13 (fall-winter 1990-91): 40-57.

16. Adventures of Tom Sawyer , 71-73.

17. The Prince and the Pauper , 54.

18. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , ed. Walter Blair and Victor Fischer (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 254.

19. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court , ed. Bernard L. Stein (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), 320-25.

20. On both the longer history of "nature and art" in acting and Diderot's early versions of this opposition, see Joseph R. Roach, The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 23-29, 148-49.

21. Many of the actors Archer surveyed for Masks or Faces voiced this cliché or some version of it; see, for example, 129.

22. Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins , ed. Sidney E. Berger (New York: Norton, 1980).

23. See, for recent considerations of these matters, Susan Gillman and Forrest G. Robinson, eds., Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson: Race, Conflict, and Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990), especially the essays by Myra Jehlen, Michael Rogin, and Susan Gillman (Gillman's is a slightly different version of her chapter on Pudd'nhead Wilson in Dark Twins ). Also see Brook Thomas, "Tragedies of Race, Training, Birth, and Communities of Competent Pudd'nheads," American Literary History 1 (1989): 754-85, and Lee Clark Mitchell," 'De Nigger in You': Race or Training in Pudd'nhead Wilson ?" Nineteenth-Century Literature 42 (1987): 295-312.

24. The idea that an actor could generate an emotion by duplicating its physical expression has a longer history—Archer associates it especially with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (173). But late-nineteenth-century psychology put it on a different footing. William James, whose theory of the emotions made them epiphenomena of bodily responses, wrote similarly that "if our theory be true, a necessary corollary of it ought to be that any voluntary arousal of the so-called manifestations of a special emotion ought to give us the emotion itself" ( The Principles of Psychology , vol. 2 [1890; rpt. New York: Dover, 1950], 462).

25. For a discussion related to my point that, for Twain, generating emotion or identity through mechanical manipulation of the body threatened the integrity of the self, see Walter Benn Michaels, "An American Tragedy, or the Promise of American Life," Representations 25 (winter 1989): 71-98. Michaels argues, particularly in reference to the writings of S. Weir Mitchell, that the belief that mechanical imitation of facial emotional expression could generate actual emotion posed a severe threat to ideas of individuality and originality (85-86).

26. Mark Twain in Eruption , 243.

27. Ibid., 198.

26. Mark Twain in Eruption , 243.

27. Ibid., 198.

1. Quite relevant to my argument is Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989). Orvell argues that between 188o and 194o in

America a transformation took place from a "realist" culture that valued imitation and illusion to a "modernist" culture that valued ''authenticity," rejecting the "sham" of mimesis and attempting to create works of art that, instead of being replications, would be "real things" themselves. I am arguing, differently, that a version of this tension is present in Mark Twain's work from a very early date. I am inclined, in fact, to agree with Mark Seltzer's argument in Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992), that generally, in "the realist project," there existed a goal of "perfect referentiality: bodies and matter writing themselves " (108-9)—a kind of "real thing" tantamount to Orvell's modernist authenticity.

2. Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1955; rpt. New York: Greenwood, 1969), 364.

3. Howard Horwitz, in By the Law of Nature: Form and Value in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 99-100, 117, argues quite differently that the "semiotics of the river" in Life on the Mississippi "amount to a critique of empiricism" because the signs on the water's surface seem unreliable. But they are radically unreliable only to the uninitiated cub, not to Bixby, his tutor. When Bixby stresses the shape of the river "that's in your head , and never mind the one that's before your eyes," and asserts that this is learned through "instinct," he is not articulating an epistemology of "romance," as Horwitz argues, that somehow bypasses the visible. Instead, in a process I shall make clearer in my next chapter, the pilot's way of knowing the river "unconsciously," "naturally," and instinctually by amassing observations of it is akin in its automatism not only to the machinery of a tear, but also to the mechanical, automatic registration of a bluff reef on the water's surface.

4. Linda Williams, in Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible" (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), discusses the way in which late-nineteenth-century scientific discourse on the mechanisms of the human body treated the female body, as "science" joined the drive for visibility and knowledge to prurience, and joined fetishism and voyeurism to "the positivist quest for the truth of visible phenomena" (46). Williams notes the centrality (as in Jean-Martin Charcot's research) of watching unconscious movements, involuntary spasms, and hysterical convulsions for such male glimpses into "hidden" truths of female bodies; see, especially, chaps. 1 and 2. Also germane, of course, and important for Williams's discussion, is Michel Foucault's attention to confession, exposure, the pursuit of truth, and the penetration and control of bodies, in The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction , trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978).

5. Charles S. Peirce, "Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs," in Philosophical Writings of Peirce , ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955), 98-119.

6. Useful for my argument here was Rosalind Krauss's discussion of the pursuit in modernist art of indexical signs—traces, imprints, rubbings, "clues"—as "uncoded," more immediate, and therefore a security against

the loss of confidence in representation; see Krauss, "Notes on the Index: Part 1" and "Notes on the Index: Part 2," in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986), 196-219.

7. Clemens read George Sumner Weaver's Lectures on Mental Science According to the Philosophy of Phrenology . See Mark Twain's Notebooks and Journals , ed. Frederick Anderson, Michael B. Frank, and Kenneth M. Sanderson, 3 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), I, 11-16. The fullest account of Mark Twain's lifelong interest in (and doubts about) phrenology is Alan Gribben, "Mark Twain, Phrenology, and the 'Temperaments': A Study of Pseudoscientific Influence," American Quarterly 24 (1972): 45-68. For a powerfully persuasive discussion of the interweaving of phrenology, physiognomy, and photography into a cluster of indexical signs useful for "assessing the character of strangers in the dangerous and congested spaces of the nineteenth-century city," providing "intelligence" about them, and documenting them, see Allan Sekula, "The Body and the Archive," October 39 (1986): 3-64. Phrenology and physiognomy, and Twain's interest generally in the legibility of character, are obviously related to an anxiety about and a desire to control seemingly troublesome "others''—in other words, to formations of discipline and surveillance.

8. Mark Twain's Hannibal, Huck and Tom , 152-242.

9. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , 19.

10. Gillman, Dark Twins , 88-95; Michael Rogin, "Francis Galton and Mark Twain: The Natal Autograph in Pudd'nhead Wilson ," in Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson: Race, Conflict, and Culture , ed. Gillman and Robinson, 78-81; and David R. Sewell, Mark Twain's Languages: Discourse, Dialogue, and Linguistic Variety (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 124-25.

11. Francis Galton, Finger Prints (1892; rpt. New York: Da Capo Press, 1965), 16-18.

12. See Graeme Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel: Faces and Fortunes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), which argues that Lavater's theory "permeated nineteenth-century literature" (xvii) and had a particularly strong hold on European and American culture through the 1860s. Also see Patrizia Magli, "The Face and the Soul," in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part Two , ed. Michel Feher, with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 86-127. A broadranging history of physiognomy and of beliefs that the body registers the soul, Magli nonetheless helpfully provides a background for nineteenthcentury physiognomy, discusses such crucial figures as Lavater and Charles le Brun, and suggests the social anxieties—about charting, classifying, and controlling "the other"—that provided such a powerful impetus for this "science."

13. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; Tom Sawyer Abroad; Tom Sawyer, Detective , 412.

14. Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals , 50. Alan Gribben, in Mark Twain's Library , notes that Twain made "numerous pencil

marks" on the pages of Darwin's book that dealt with habit and reflex action (I, 175).

15. Twain articulates his interest in and concern over this confusion explicitly in What Is Man , where the Old Man defines instinct as "inherited habit" and concludes that the term "confuses us; for as a rule it applies to habits and impulses which had a far-off origin in thought, and now and then breaks the rule and applies itself to habits which can hardly claim a thought-origin" (190).

16. James, The Principles of Psychology . On Mark Twain and James, see Gribben, Mark Twain's Library , I, 351, and Gillman, Dark Twins , 154.

17. Cap'n Simon Wheeler, the Amateur Detective: A Light Tragedy , in Mark Twain's Satires and Burlesques , 216-311.

18. The argument about deaf-mute sign language as natural or conventional had long occupied theorists of gesture and language. See James R. Knowlson, "The Idea of Gesture as a Universal Language in the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries," Journal of the History of Ideas 26 (October-December 1965): 496-97. Also see Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 88-91.

19. Forrest G. Robinson's In Bad Faith , 31, 37-39, attends to the control of "face" in Tom Sawyer in connection with the "dynamics of deception" Robinson is tracing—a concern quite different from mine.

20. Mark Twain-Howells Letters , I, 245, and II, 633.

21. Twain refers to the composite photograph in an 1895 interview, quoted in Blair and Fischer, "Explanatory Notes," Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , 371. Galton's practice of and ideas about composite photographs receive a full discussion in Sekula, "The Body and the Archive"; also see Orvell, The Real Thing , 89-94.

22. Quoted in Orvell, The Real Thing , 124.

23. Twain to Howells, November 17, 1879, Mark Twain-Howells Letters , I, 279.

24. Quoted in Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain , 226.

25. Mark Twain's Letters , ed. Paine, I, 371, 373.

26. Mark Twain Speaking , 167-68.

27. Love Letters , 116.

28. Mark Twain-Howells Letters , I, 279.

29. Roland Barthes's ideas in his essay "The Grain of the Voice" may help focus these nineteenth-century antecedents ( Image, Music, Text , trans. Stephen Heath [New York: Hill and Wang, 1977]). Barthes writes: "The 'grain' is the body in the voice as it sings"—that is, the membranous fleshiness of the vocal cords, the throat, etc. The "grain" is also the body in "the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs" (188). Barthes echoes Twain not only in this connection between gesture and voice; he also similarly discovers a sexuality in the voice—derived from the body, and specifically from its metaphoric phalluses, ''the tongue, the glottis, the teeth, the mucous membranes, the nose" (183).

30. Elaine Scarry, Introduction, Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons , ed. Elaine Scarry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), xxi.

1. Mark Twain's Hannibal, Huck and Tom , 61-66.

2. Wecter reports on Hannibal mesmerists, spiritualists, and animal magnetists in Sam Clemens of Hannibal , 90, 196-97. See The Washoe Giant in San Francisco , 119-21, 125-36, for Twain's newspaper pieces on spiritualists. For a review of Twain's interest, see Howard Kerr, "'Sperits Couldn't a Done Better': Mark Twain and Spiritualism," in Mediums and Spirit Rappers and Roaring Radicals: Spiritualism in American Literature 1850-1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 155-89. Also Alan Gribben, "'When Other Amusements Fail': Mark Twain and the Occult," in The Haunted Dusk: American Supernatural Fiction, 1820-1920 , ed. Howard Kerr, John W. Crowley, and Charles L. Crow (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983), 171-89. Absolutely crucial for understanding Twain's attention to mediumship is Susan Gillman's Dark Twins , chap. 5, especially because it shows the connections in his thinking between science and the occult, psychic research and spiritualism.

3. On the use of conceptions of femininity and domesticity to counteract suspicions of fraud and imposture in mediumship, see, especially, Alex Owen, "The Other Voice: Women, Children, and Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism," in Language, Gender, and Childhood , ed. Carolyn Steedman, Cathy Urwin, and Valerie Walkerdine (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 34-73.

4. Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), provides a compelling account of mesmeric theorizing. On American versions of mesmerism see Robert C. Fuller, Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982). Mesmer drew on eighteenth-century theories of electricity in formulating his idea of animal magnetism; see Henri Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 186-87.

5. On the amazingly versatile explanatory power of electricity, see Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), especially chap. 3, "Locating the Body in Electrical Space and Time." And on the tendency to attribute clairvoyance and thought transference to the powers of electricity, see R. Lawrence Moore, "Spiritualism and Science: Reflections on the First Decade of the Spirit Rappings," American Quarterly 29 (1972): 491-92.

6. The secondary literature on nineteenth-century mental physiology is extensive. But see, for example, Kurt Danziger, "Mid-Nineteenth-Century

British Psycho-Physiology: A Neglected Chapter in the History of Psychology," in The Problematic Science: Psychology in Nineteenth-Century Thought , ed. William R. Woodward and Mitchell G. Ash (New York: Praeger, 1982), 119-44. Also Bruce Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), especially his chapter "Victorian Psychophysiology," and most especially 35-45. Helpful, too, is Elaine Showalter's The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980 (New York: Pantheon, 1985), particularly her discussion of the psychophysiologist Henry Maudsley and his insistence on the physical basis of mental phenomena, mental illness, and hysteria (106-38).

7. "Mental Telegraphy," in The American Claimant and Other Stories and Sketches by Mark Twain (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1897), 374-96.

8. The letters on this between Twain and De Quille, and De Quille's comment on the "force," appear in Lawrence I. Berkove, "'Nobody Writes to Anybody Except to Ask a Favor': New Correspondence between Mark Twain and Dan De Quille," Mark Twain Journal 26, no. 1 (spring 1988): 5, 7-8. For Twain's reference to odyle, see Notebooks , II, 172-75. For information about and a contemporary critique of odyle—a supposedly newly discovered natural force described by Karl, Baron von Reichenbach—see Thomas Laycock, "Odyle, Mesmerism, Electro-Biology, &c.,'' The British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review 8 (1851): 378-431.

9. See George M. Beard, The Study of Trance, Muscle-Reading and Allied Nervous Phenomena in Europe and America, with a Letter on the Moral Character of Trance Subjects and a Defence of Dr. Charcot (New York: privately printed, 1882), and Beard's "Physiology of Mind-Reading," Popular Science Monthly 10 (1877): 459-73. Beard is concerned to debunk the claim that Brown could communicate by a wire, and to assert that other instances of Brown's mindreading—done by placing his hands on a subject's head—were cases of "muscle-reading," accomplished by feeling involuntary and reflexive expressions of thought in the face. Also see Ricky Jay, "A Few Words about Death and Show Biz: Washington Irving Bishop, J. Randall Brown, and the Origins of Modern Mind Reading," in Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women (New York: Villard, 1986), 155-99; see 177 for an account of Brown's telegraphic demonstration.

10. In a letter to Howells, August 16, 1898 ( Mark Twain-Howells Letters , II, 674), Twain claimed that in an unpublished version of "Simon Wheeler" "written in 1876 or '75," an execution was prevented by testimony transmitted by mental telegraph—systematized in a phrenophonic way through a contraption "like the old mesmerizer-button" which automatically translated thoughts into words. And in "Three Thousand Years among the Microbes" (1905) Twain imagined a "Recorder" into which one dictated thoughts, not words, that were retained in a state so "clear and limpid and superbly radiant in expression that they make all articulated speech—even the most brilliant and the most perfect—seem dull and lifeless and confused by comparison" ( Which Was the Dream , 490).

11. See the collection of essays The Correlation and Conservation of Forces , ed. Edward Livingston Youmans (New York: D. Appleton, 1873), which includes essays by physicians, physicists, and physiologists, among them pieces by Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz and Michael Faraday, and William Carpenter's essay "On the Correlation of the Physical and Vital Forces." Yehuda Elkana, The Discovery of the Conservation of Energy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), provides the larger history of these scientific advances, as does Thomas S. Kuhn, "Energy Conservation as an Example of Simultaneous Discovery," in his collection of essays, The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 66-104.

12. William Carpenter, Principles of Mental Physiology, with Their Application to the Training and Discipline of the Mind and the Study of Its Morbid Conditions , 4th ed. (London: Henry S. King, 1876), 633. For examples of Carpenter's use of telegraphic metaphors to describe the nervous system, see 13, 35-38.

13. The Autobiography of Mark Twain , ed. Neider, 163-65.

14. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mechanism in Thought and Morals (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1871).

15. For a discussion of hysteria as a reflexive "physiological and pathological action of the ovaria," see Thomas Laycock, A Treatise on the Nervous Diseases of Women; Comprising an Inquiry into the Nature, Causes, and Treatment of Spinal and Hysterical Disorders (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1840). His investigations of hysteria led Laycock to extend the notion of reflex to other mental events; see "On the Reflex Functions of the Brain," British and Foreign Medical Review 19 (1845): 298-311.

16. Elin Diamond addresses this subject in "Realism and Hysteria: Toward a Feminist Mimesis," Discourse 13, no. 1 (fall-winter 1990-91): 59-91. However, inasmuch as Diamond broaches the issue of hysteria and mimetic immediacy, she characterizes hysteria as the figure of the breakdown of realism—the malady in which the symptoms seemingly have no referent. I am arguing, differently, that in the cases I cite, science thought it was able, after all, to root hysteria in the body—and hysteria therefore stood as the ideal model for realism, rather than the metaphor for its failure. Hysteria in these years raised the question of whether its symptoms were physiologically rooted; researchers had not come to the answer, yet, that they were not. Helpful on this point is Joan Copjec, "Flavit et Dissipati Sunt," October 18 (1981): 21-40, which discusses Jean-Martin Charcot's initial disposition to treat hysterical symptoms as indexical, physiological signs—as an instance of his more general "indexical neurology." See, too, Charcot's Lectures on the Diseases of the Nervous System, Delivered at la Salpêtrière (Philadelphia: Henry C. Lea, 1879), where, taking into account the criticisms made of the ''ovarists" (220) and their diagnosis of hysteria, and acknowledging that hysterics may be "guilty of trickery" in their symptoms (205), he nonetheless insists on ailments of the ovaries as causes (if not the cause) of hysterical symptoms, promotes "compression" of the ovaries for relief of symptoms (222-33), and pur-

sues other physiological causes of hysteria. On Charcot's stress on the brain and ovaries (rather than the uterus) in his etiology, on his attention to male hysteria, and on the linkage he made between hysteria and hypnosis, see Martha Noel Evans, Fits and Starts: A Genealogy of Hysteria in Modern France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 28-29, 42.

17. Quoted in Gillman, Dark Twins , 139.

18. As far back as 1869, for example, Twain claimed that when he wanted to write a newspaper article he would simply "sit down & let it write itself " (letter to Mrs. Jervis Langdon, February 13, 1869, in Love Letters , 67). He similarly claimed in his autobiography that he completed Tom Sawyer only because "the book went on and finished itself" ( Mark Twain in Eruption , 197). In 1893 he remarked to his wife that writing Tom Sawyer, Detective delighted him because "the story tells itself" (letter to Livy Clemens, November 10, 1893, Love Letters , 277). In his tale of how he wrote Pudd'nhead Wilson —in "Those Extraordinary Twins''—he explains that his writing "goes along telling itself" until "it spreads itself into a book" (119). Of Joan of Arc , he said, the novel seemed to write itself, "I merely have to hold the pen" (Twain to Rogers, September 2-3, 1894, in Mark Twain's Correspondence with Henry Huttleston Rogers 1893-1909 , ed. Lewis Leary [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969], 72-73); later, in the autobiography, he remembered that Joan knew what she had to say without intervention from "Mark Twain" and "said it, without doubt or hesitation" ( Mark Twain in Eruption , 199).

19. Letter to Emily G. Hutchings, November 14, 1902, in Mark Twain the Letter Writer , ed. Cyril Clemens (Boston: Meador, 1932), 25.

20. In relation to this, see Jan Goldstein, "The Uses of Male Hysteria: Medical and Literary Discourse in Nineteenth-Century France," Representations 34 (spring 1991): 134-65. Goldstein argues that nineteenth-century male writers, notably Flaubert, appropriated the concept of feminine hysteria, partly because the analogy between literary creation and biological procreation fostered a connection between hysteria and "the labors of male writing" (143). This resulted in a vacillation in such writers as Flaubert between embracing "feminine" passivity and giving rein to "the compensatory desire to exaggerate action beyond measure" (145). A similar vacillation and ambivalence, I argue, occurs in Mark Twain.

21. G.J. Barker-Benfield, "The Spermatic Economy: A Nineteenth-Century View of Sexuality," Feminist Studies 1 (1972): 46. Cynthia Eagle Russett and Charles E. Rosenberg also discuss conceptions of the body and psyche as a closed system of nervous energy or vital (or electrical) force depleted by discharge and strengthened by husbanding. See Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), especially chap. 4, "The Machinery of the Body." And Charles E. Rosenberg, No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 4-7, and idem, "Sexuality, Class, and Role," American Quarterly 25 (May 1973): 151. Also, John L. Greenway recounts common conceptions of human physiol-

ogy (men's especially) as an electrical battery storing nervous energy, in "'Nervous Disease' and Electric Medicine," in Pseudo-Science and Society in Nineteenth-Century America , ed. Arthur Wrobel (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987), 46-73.

22. Quite pertinent to Twain's self-sufficient electric system is the model of the bachelor machine that Michel Carrouges, in Les machines célibataires (Paris: Le Chêne, 1954), finds so common in the late nineteenth century—a solely masculine, often electric and masturbatory metaphor for the psychic economy and for artistic creation and mechanical reproduction. For further remarks on this "bachelor-machine logic" of male writers near the end of the nineteenth century, see Alice Jardine, "Of Bodies and Technologies," in Discussions in Contemporary Culture, Number One , ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987), 151-58.

23. Mark Twain and William Dean Howells, Colonel Sellers as a Scientist , in The Complete Plays of W. D. Howells , ed. Walter J. Meserve (New York: New York University Press, 1960), 209-41.

24. Howells, Literary Friends and Acquaintance , 270.

25. See, for example, Clyde L. Grimm, " The American Claimant: Reclamation of a Farce," American Quarterly 19 (1967): 86-103. Also Berthoff, The Ferment of Realism , 69, and DeVoto, Mark Twain's America , 288.

26. Nicholas Royle, Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading Mind (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 5; on Bell and Watson, see Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology—Schizophrenia—Electric Speech (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), especially 240-50.

27. Mark Seltzer, in Bodies and Machines , argues that late-nineteenth-century technologies of representation (typewriters, telephones, telegraphs, typesetting machines, etc.) derailed a preexisting model of continuity from the spiritual and invisible mind, through the writing hand, to visible and physical inscription on paper by interposing their material systems of registration (9-10). I argue, differently, that for Mark Twain this distinction between bodies and machines was not so clearly drawn: the body and its expression looked analogous to telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, and so on, when Twain reduced them to a physical and mechanical plane (a move not incompatible with Seltzer's broader argument about the turn-of-the-century oppositions and correlations of bodies and machines). This mechanical model, moreover, could promise for Twain a continuity in certain forms of expression precisely because of its materiality—though, as we now see, that materiality could then turn around into an impediment to representation.

28. Quite relevant to this idea of Huck as an impeding medium is the history of perception that Jonathan Crary outlines in Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992). Crary argues that conceptions of vision in the nineteenth century deposed the disembodied eye and its transparent seeing by locating vision "within the unstable physiology and temporality of the human body" (70). Discoveries of blind spots, afterimages, and less than instantaneous or reliable relays of impulses down nerve pathways showed the physiological

process of vision to be defective, prey to illusion, a basis for "subjective vision." Twain obviously was attuned to the same kind of science of perception, though he alternately took the corporeality of perception and expression as a promise of reliability and as an obstacle. Crary underplays the extent to which locating perception on the same material plane as the beheld object could be conceived as underwriting reliable perception and representation, and circumventing the distortions of interpretation and convention.

29. Ann D. Wood, "The 'Scribbling Women' and Fanny Fern: Why Women Wrote," American Quarterly 23 (1971): 7-9. Also see Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press), 1984, especially chap. 5, which reports on identity-denying tendencies of these women—publishing anonymously, adopting pseudonyms, and so on.

30. Judith R. Walkowitz, "Science and the Séance: Transgressions of Gender and Genre in Late Victorian London," Representations 22 (spring 1988): 8-9; R. Lawrence Moore, "The Spiritualist Medium: A Study of Female Professionalism in Victorian America," American Quarterly 27 (1975): 201-7; Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: Beacon, 1980), 82-83.

31. Alfred Habegger, Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 56. Jay Martin has also suggested that Twain and his male peers learned from women writers, including lessons about the representation and workings of the unconscious gained from women who wrote and acted as mediums; see Martin, "Ghostly Rentals, Ghostly Purchases: Haunted Imaginations in James, Twain, and Bellamy," in The Haunted Dusk , ed. Kerr et al., 124.

32. Mary Poovey argues, with reference to English writers, that "literary men" such as Dickens conceived of their work in terms of the dominant representations of the domestic sphere and domestic labor as a means of attaining an aura of moral authority and nonalienated production; see Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 125.

33. Mark Twain's Autobiography , ed. Paine, I, xv.

34. It appears, of course, that Twain, typically, was not consistently so sure of the "truth" of his autobiography; Howells observes that despite Twain's aim to tell only the truth, Twain announced one day that he had begun to lie, and "as to veracity [the autobiography] was a failure" ( Literary Friends and Acquaintance , 316). But his excitement about this "truest of all books" ( Mark Twain-Howells Letters , II, 782) and about the comparative truth of his autobiography was remarkably persistent (see the quotation in Gribben, Mark Twain's Library , II, 540, from "Mark Twain, the Greatest American Humorist, Returning Home, Talks at Length," New York World , October 14, 1900).

35. Ann Douglas notes that, because nineteenth-century Americans identified mourning as a private matter, opposed to the public world of mask, convention, and market, they saw it as one of their rare moments for sincere

and heartfelt emotion; see Douglas, "Heaven Our Home: Consolation Literature in the Northern United States, 1830-1880," American Quarterly 26 (1974): 496. Also see Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women , particularly chap. 5, "Mourning the Dead: A Study in Sentimental Ritual."

36. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). The authors discuss trance writing and its relation to male impersonation most fully in reference to Charlotte Brontë, whose career they take as a paradigm for many nineteenth-century women writers (see 311-17).

37. Terry Lovell, Consuming Fiction (London: Verso, 1987), 9, 74, 145; Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (New York: Methuen, 1985), 11; Showalter, Sexual Anarchy , particularly chap. 5, "King Romance"; and Michael Davitt Bell, "The Sin of Art: William Dean Howells," in The Problem of American Realism , 17-38.

38. Mark Seltzer, in Bodies and Machines , argues similarly that the American male naturalists based creation on a seminal, abstract "force," which women could convert, in accord with the model of thermodynamics, but which nonetheless cancelled the power of female reproduction and made possible "an autonomous (and male) technique of creation" (31-35).

39. Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography , I, 476.

40. Howells makes this remark about Ulysses S. Grant's Memoirs , in Criticism and Fiction and Other Essays (New York: New York University Press, 1959), 26.

41. Howells to Twain, February 14, 1904, Mark Twain-Howells Letters , II, 780.

42. Doesticks is quoted in Kerr, Mediums and Spirit Rappers , 35.

1. Philip Fisher, "Appearing and Disappearing in Public: Social Space in Late-Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture," in Reconstructing American Literary History , ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 155-88.

2. See Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment , trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 142-44.

3. "Queen Victoria's Jubilee," in Europe and Elsewhere , vol. 29 of The Writings of Mark Twain , Stormfield Edition (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1929), 193-94.

4. Michael Rogin," 'Make My Day!': Spectacle as Amnesia in Imperial Politics," Representations 29 (1990): 99-123.

5. Life on the Mississippi , chap. 46.

6. Mark Twain, "About Play-Acting," in The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Essays and Stories , vol. 23 of The Writings of Mark Twain , Stormfield Edition (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1929), 213-25.

7. Twain's remarks about the Children's Theatre are taken from speeches in Mark Twain Speaking , 546, 596, and 620, and from a typescript of

"The Great Alliance" (January 16, 1908), in the Mark Twain Papers. Quoted with permission. ^*

8. Mark Twain in Eruption , 110-15.

9. Macdonald, "Mark Twain: An Unsentimental Journey," 188. Howells's remark is in his letter to Twain, December 13, 1880, Mark TwainHowells Letters , I, 338.

10. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics , trans. and ed. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 124. On the crowning of fools, also see Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 79, 138, 217-19. These two books were initially helpful in framing the issues in Twain's fascination with spectacle and carnival. Ultimately, however, the Mark Twain of The Prince and the Pauper is more distressed than Bakhtin with the failures of official symbols, and less enamored of carnival licentiousness and "gay relativity."

11. Although Hank's discussion of "protection" and "free trade" certainly is related to the particular conflict in the 1880s between Republican party advocacy of tariffs and Democratic opposition to them, as Henry Nash Smith points out (in Mark Twain's Fable of Progress: Political and Economic Ideas in "A Connecticut Yankee" [New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1964], 57), focusing on this connection can obscure the larger tension raised here between fixed and circulating value.

12. Part of Mark Twain's grasp of Hank's performance business clearly draws on the tradition traced by Jean-Christophe Agnew in Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 , which argues that, in the years he studies, the abstractions of "the market," of money values, and of impersonal contracts raised fears of misrepresentation and ideas of temporary and artificial selves—matters reproduced and explored in the theater. The issues raised in Twain's clash between the sixth and the nineteenth centuries are much the same.

13. Twain here invokes a distinction akin to Roland Barthes's wellknown contrast "between feudal society and bourgeois society, index and sign," the indexical sign in feudal society always fixed to an origin, the sign in bourgeois society released into the "limitless process of equivalences, representations that nothing will ever stop, orient, fix, sanction" ( S/Z , trans. Richard Miller [New York: Hill and Wang, 1974], 39-40). Jean Baudrillard also writes of a pre-Renaissance security in signs and a post-Renaissance proliferation of signs (imitations, counterfeits, etc.) "emancipated" into a new culture of exchange that made their meanings quickly changeable ( Simulations , trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman [New York: Semiotext(e), 1983], 83-86). These are clearly among the contrasts Twain invokes between Arthur's England and Morgan's United States.

14. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics , trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 83. Robert Shulman suggests that Hank Morgan introduces "the reifying process" and "commodity value" into sixth-century England; see his Social Criticism and Nineteenth-Century Fictions (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987), 153.

15. The idea that capitalism annihilates not only referents but also signifieds is familiarly associated with Baudrillard, for example in Simulations , 43. A number of critics have situated a crisis in the sign, specifically the release of signifiers from signifieds, in the postmodern era, when, supposedly, capital finally fully penetrates the artistic sign and colonizes it with the forces of reification. See, for example, Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review , no. 146 (1984): 56, and Hal Foster, "Wild Signs: The Breakup of the Sign in Seventies' Art," in Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism , ed. Andrew Ross (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 253. Since it is obvious, however, that the nineteenth century is a heyday of capitalist commodification of cultural production, I am arguing that Twain turns his astute attention to anatomizing a full-blown (not simply emergent) phenomenon. If postmodern spectacles are different from late-nineteenth-century ones (and certainly they are), the colonization by capital of the aesthetic realm must not be the decisive difference.

16. Note how the supposed magnificence of each of Hank's theatrical effects surpasses all precedents: he makes his threat of the eclipse "in as sublime and noble a way as ever I did such a thing in my life" (87-88); the miracle of the fountain is "the very showiest bit of magic in history" (282), and his theatrical chanting there was "one of the best effects I ever invented" (267); on his display of conspicuous consumption before Marco and friends, he says, "I don't know that I ever put a situation together better, or got happier spectacular effects out of the materials available" (365); but he soon surpasses that by producing a "fine effect'' in arguing with them, "as fine as any I ever produced, with so little time to work it up in" (379); the rescue by the knights on bicycles was the "grandest sight that ever was seen" and "one of the gaudiest effects I ever instigated" (425-26). And so on.

17. James M. Cox, " A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court : The Machinery of Self-Preservation," in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court , ed. Allison R. Ensor (New York: Norton, 1982), 392, and Michaels, "An American Tragedy, or the Promise of American Life," 73-78.

18. Francis Hodge, in his Yankee Theatre: The Image of America on the Stage, 1825-1850 , gives the fullest account of the stage Yankees. Hank Morgan's predecessors, for example, appeared in David Humphrey's The Yankey in England (1815), Charles Mathews's Jonathan in England (1824), James Hackett's Jonathan Doubikins (1834), James Kirke Paulding's The Bucktails; or, Americans in England (1847), John Augustus Stone's The Knight of the Golden Fleece (1834) (which put Yankee Sy Saco in the world of Spanish medieval romance), Bayle Bernard's Speculations, or Major Wheeler in Europe (1838), and Charles Selby's A Day in France (1838).

19. Burlesque Hamlet, in Mark Twain's Satires and Burlesques , 49-87.

20. Bakhtin considers marketplace misrule and irreverence in Rabelais and His World ; see especially chap. 2, "The Language of the Marketplace in Rabelais."

21. Ann Douglas's argument that Hank is a nineteenth-century manipulator of crowd psychology, freeing Arthurians from "the conformist mob-

mentality of serfs" only to instill "the conformist mob-mentality of consumers" strikes me as more persuasive than Forrest G. Robinson's argument that the Arthurians were the best audience for Hank, because his showmanship flourished best in a culture of aristocrats and slaves. See Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture , 189-90, and Robinson, In Bad Faith , 160, 235. Hank reconceives Arthurians in terms of nineteenth-century conceptions of crowds and mobs. For pertinent background, see Patrick Brantlinger, Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), on the crowd psychologists of the turn of the century (e.g., Gustave Le Bon, Gabriel Tarde, William McDougall, William Trotter, Nietzsche, Freud) and the general, growing concern about "the masses"—their supposed barbarism, their irrationality, their surrender to animal instinct, etc. (19, 30-31, 109, 166-67). On late-nineteenth-century conceptions of crowds as primitive, irrational, instinctual, and credulous, also see Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 127, 131, and John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 97.

22. Forrest G. Robinson, in In Bad Faith , has relatedly traced depictions of "bad faith" in Twain's fiction—rationalizations, conscious dissimulations, self-deceptions, hypocrisies, distractions (sometimes in the form of amusements)—that serve to mask or deny racism, cruelty, and tragedy. Hank's spectacles suit this pattern, for they certainly divert his own attention from the ugliness of his acts at the same time that they invite his spectators and his readers to look at the astonishing rather than the repellent.

23. Mark Twain Speaking , 88.

1. Mark Twain's Correspondence with Henry Huttleston Rogers , 125.

2. Mark Twain-Howells Letters , II, 698-99.

3. David B. Richards, in "Mesmerism in Die Jungfrau von Orleans," PMLA 91 (1976): 856-70, argues that contemporaneous notions of mesmerism, hypnotism, clairvoyance, and somnambulism shaped Friedrich Schiller's story of Johanna. Twain, who appears to have read Die Jungfrau , probably was especially attentive to mesmeric overtones in nineteenth-century versions of Joan of Arc. (See Gribben, Mark Twain's Library , II, 606.)

4. Mark Twain, "Two Speeches," New York Times , July 7, 1900, p. 461.

5. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination . David Grimsted's analysis of "the melodramatic structure" in nineteenth-century American plays foregrounds the importance of feminine virtue, purity, and "perfect goodness" in a way that illustrates Brooks's characterization; see Grimsted, "The Melodramatic Structure," in Melodrama Unveiled , 172-83.

6. Christina Zwarg argues, valuably, that Joan of Arc is about the way masculine history and storytelling—including both the "authorities" that the "translator" supposedly draws on and the romanticizing narration of de Conte—obscure and imprison Joan, despite (or with the help of) their ap-

peals to privileged "proofs" and "personal recollections." But in "the few moments in which Joan is permitted to speak her own words" this male history is subverted, its grammar deconstructed, and a ''feminist" Joan shines through. See Zwarg, "Woman as Force in Twain's Joan of Arc: The Unwordable Fascination," Criticism 27 (1985): 57-72. Zwarg obviously is registering the melodramatic structure of obscuring and unveiling, although in her effort to make Joan a saboteur of phallocentric discourse, she discounts too surely the sentimental womanhood that links Joan of Arc to nineteenthcentury melodrama.

7. Mark Twain, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1896), vii-viii.

8. On the nineteenth-century popularity of Joan of Arc, see Marina Warner, Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (New York: Knopf, 1981), particularly chap. 12. Also see Ann Bleigh Powers, "The Joan of Arc Vogue in America, 1894-1929," American Society Legion of Honor Magazine 49 (1978): 177-92; Albert E. Stone, Jr., The Innocent Eye: Childhood in Mark Twain's Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 206; and Showalter, Sexual Anarchy , 29. Among the main stage versions of Joan's story was Schiller's Die Jungfrau von Orleans , first performed in Weimar in 1801, and performed in the United States throughout the century (see the listings for the play in Odell, Annals of the New York Stage ); John Brougham's The Lily of France (1840); George Henry Calvert's The Maid of Orleans (1873); and Jeanne D'Arc , by Jules Barbier, an English version of which—by William Young—was performed in New York in 1890 and 1891 (Odell, Annals of the New York Stage , XIV, 534, 575). Significantly, upon finishing Joan of Arc Twain turned quickly in 1896 to negotiations for its dramatization; though they were unsuccessful, a version of his Joan appeared on stage in 1926 to 1927, with his daughter Clara Clemens in the cast (see Mark Twain's Correspondence with Henry Huttleston Rogers , 221-22, 224, and Schirer, Mark Twain and the Theatre , 93). Pertinent for Twain's notions of femininity and performance, Adah Isaacs Menken played a version of Joan of Arc in New York, at least, in 1862—along with Mazeppa and The French Spy —just before taking her act out West, where Twain saw her and argued with his friends over her theatricality and expressiveness (Odell, Annals of the New York Stage , VII, 409).

9. Warner, Joan of Arc , 237, 260.

10. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981). Throughout this book Lears attends to the pursuit of "authentic experience" and a recoil from rationalized and commodified American culture, but see, especially, chap. 4, "The Morning of Belief: Medieval Mentalities in a Modern World."

11. This is the argument made throughout Marjorie Garber's Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992), but see, for example, 16.

12. Twain operates, in effect, with the version of the "public sphere" whose history Jürgen Habermas has traced—a conception of public interac-

tion grounded in privacy, private property, autonomy, and the intimate sphere of the nuclear family, with its ideals of equality, openness, mutual respect. See Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society , trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), especially 27-29, 43-56. By denying the competition and economic interest endemic to this public sphere, and paradoxically constituting itself by excluding women, the conception posed the contradictions that Twain's obsession with sincerity and performance tried to grapple with. The urgency of this grappling became greater as the late nineteenth century brought fissures and erosions in the homosocial male public terrain.

13. Linda Williams's remarks in the first two chapters of Hard Core about the late-nineteenth-century melding of the will to truth and the male drive to expose the secrets of the female body are, again, highly pertinent. The larger relation between melodramatic unveilings of feminine virtue and scopophilic sexuality deserves further investigation. Catherine Clément, too, has made a number of connections among male displays of women that are relevant to Twain's Joan of Arc—e.g., the similarities between theater and the exhibition of female hysterics in the 1890s, between the hypnotized woman in Jean-Martin Charcot's lecture theater and scenes of public punishment, between the exposure of entranced women patients and the display of the delirium and the public burning of witches. See Clément, The Weary Sons of Freud , trans. Nicole Ball (New York: Verso, 1987), 51-59. And see Martha Noel Evans, Fits and Starts: A Genealogy of Hysteria in Modern France , on Charcot's amphitheater and theatrical performances of hysteria (21) and on the interplay of visibility, knowledge, desire, and gender in conceptions of hysteria (5).

14. On this nineteenth-century argument, see Warner, Joan of Arc , 246.

15. See, for example, Cox, Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor , 272-75; Cox puts irony, satire, showmanship, amorality, and bad-boy mischievousness on the side of Satan / 44, and seriousness, morality, ideality, and piety with Joan. Also see Stone, The Innocent Eye ; Stone objects to Joan of Arc 's having "been dismissed as an aberration," but nonetheless contrasts it to "the hopeless pessimism" of The Mysterious Stranger (204).

16. The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts , ed. with intro, by William M. Gibson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), 386.

17. For an account of Satan / 44 as a showman, see Sargent Bush, Jr., "The Showman as Hero in Mark Twain's Fiction," in American Humor: Essays Presented to John C. Gerber , ed. O. M. Brack, Jr. (Scottsdale, Ariz.: Arete Publications, 1977), 79-98.

18. Sherwood Cummings, in Mark Twain and Science: Adventures of a Mind (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), sees a fundamental dichotomy in Twain's later writings between human organisms as machines and human beings as spirits. John S. Tuckey also discusses a similar split in "Mark Twain's Later Dialogue: The 'Me' and the Machine," American Literature 41 (1970): 532-42; the oppositions Tuckey identifies—between a psy-

chology of humans as mechanisms and a psychology of the unconscious and dreams, between automatism and spirituality (533)—put the matter in terms which, in light of my research and argument, show the connections of the pairs as much as their differences.

19. The connection William M. Gibson, in an undeveloped aside, sees between the materializations of Colonel Sellers as a scientist and the materializations of these duplicates is an important insight; see his Introduction to The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts , 10.

20. On the mesmerists' ideas that somnambulists had an enhanced "sixth sense," that the body could be touched in order to correct the flow of magnetic fluid, and that mesmerists, through touching or the projection of fluid, could throw patients into somnambulistic trances, see Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France , e.g., 3, 128, 153; also Maria Tatar, Spellbound: Studies on Mesmerism and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 13-15.

21. On the uncertainty in American phrenology between overt, atheistic materialism in explaining consciousness and religious attachment to ideas of spirit, see John D. Davies, Phrenology, Fad and Science: A Nineteenth-Century American Crusade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), 156-57. Similar, enduring confusion in homeopathy and mesmerism over whether the "vital principle" pervading and animating the body is material or immaterial, physiological or spiritual, is discussed in Joseph F. Kett, The Formation of the American Medical Profession: The Role of Institutions, 1780-1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 133-34, 141, 148.

22. R. Lawrence Moore recounts the tendency in spiritualism to speak of spirits, but to look to materialist science for conceptions of magnetic forces and imponderable fluids that could carry spirit communications; see Moore, "Spiritualism and Science," 474-500. Also see Owen, "The Other Voice: Women, Children, and Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism," 36.

23. Thomas Laycock, Mind and Brain (1860; rpt. New York: Arno Press, 1976), xv, 203, and Carpenter, Principles of Mental Physiology , xviii-xix, 2-3, 28, 691, 696-97, 701-2, 707-8. Also see L. S. Jacyna, "The Physiology of Mind, the Unity of Nature, and the Moral Order in Victorian Thought," British Journal for the History of Science 14 (1981): 109-32; Roger Smith, "The Human Significance of Biology: Carpenter, Darwin, and the vera causa ," in Nature and the Victorian Imagination , ed. U. C. Knoepflmacher and G. B. Tennyson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 218-23; and Danziger, "Mid-Nineteenth-Century British Psycho-Physiology," 127. Even Oliver Wendell Holmes, in Mechanism in Thought and Morals , while promoting conceptions of humans, and their brains, as automatic mechanisms, ultimately rejected reducing morality or moral choice to mechanism (82, 87) or "materializing'' human beings into "brute facts" (90).

24. Edmund Gurney, Frederic W. H. Myers, and Frank Podmore, Phantasms of the Living , 2 vols. (1886; rpt. Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1970). On Twain's reading of this volume, see Gribben, Mark Twain's Library , I, 282.

25. On Myers, Phantasms of the Living , and Twain's relations with the Society for Psychical Research, see Gillman's Dark Twins , 136-80.

26. See Mary Baker Eddy, "Christian Science Versus Spiritualism," "Animal Magnetism Unmasked," and "Physiology,'' in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (Norwood, Mass.: Plimpton Press, 1934). Eddy, despite these attacks, and in a kind of uncertainty characteristic of nineteenthcentury health "science," continued to believe in mesmeric and spiritualist phenomena. See Gail Parker's interesting discussion of Eddy in "Mary Baker Eddy and Sentimental Womanhood," New England Quarterly 43 (1970): 3-24, especially 13-14.

27. The relation between Quimby and Eddy is told in Stefan Zweig, Mental Healers: Franz Anton Mesmer, Mary Baker Eddy, Sigmund Freud , trans. Eden Paul and Cedar Paul (New York: Viking, 1932), 119-32, 154, 163, 190. Also see Frank Podmore, Mesmerism and Christian Science: A Short History of Mental Healing (London: Methuen, 1909), 251-67, 285.

28. Quoted in Gillman, Dark Twins , 139.

29. Ibid., 47.

28. Quoted in Gillman, Dark Twins , 139.

29. Ibid., 47.

30. On Twain and the ideas of Charcot and his followers, also see Gibson, Introduction, The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts , 27; Tuckey, "Mark Twain's Later Dialogue," 535; and John S. Tuckey, Mark Twain and Little Satan: The Writing of "The Mysterious Stranger" (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Studies, 1963), 26-28. All of these scholars focus on the pertinence of the French research into somnambulism for Twain's notion of the autonomous dream self. But the research of Charcot and Janet into hysteria is also instructive and important for understanding Twain's work because it moved from a decidedly physiological and neurological focus, in Charcot's investigations in the 1880s, to a declaration, in Janet's work of the 1890s, that hysteria (and manifestations of it such as mediumship, trance writing, hypnotic states, and somnambulism) was caused by the mind, as an automatic bodily response to unconscious "ideés fixes" and "suggestion." Janet argued that responses of patients to magnetism and electricity were the function of suggestion, not physics or physiology. He reviewed his research and general position in lectures given at Harvard University in 1906, published as The Major Symptoms of Hysteria (New York: Macmillan, 1920), xi-xxiii; see also, in these lectures, his history of the study of hysteria, with attention especially to the Salpêtrière and Nancy schools and the move from physiological to psychological explanations (1-21). This movement must provide the background for Twain's declaration, in reference to a cure for Susy, that hypnotism as practiced by "Charcot's pupils & disciples" is "the same thing" as "mind-cure" ( Mark Twain-Howells Letters , II, 659).