An Imperfect Novel Worth Reading

 

Thomas Nast

 

     What better time to have a look at The Gilded Age than when the American president seeks to gild everything about him while exhibiting unprecedented greed, fraud, and corruption?

 

     The collaborative authorship of The Gilded Age (1873), written by Mark Twain and his Hartford neighbor Charles Dudley Warner [1], is doubtless responsible for the narrative’s uneven plot line and style.  The shift between Twain’s colorful characters and vigorous dialect and Warner’s smooth and bland sentiments makes the reader feel the work is two different novels, braided together in a way that is never quite integrated. 

     The cast of characters is largely familiar from the melodramas of the day: a distressed woman, a cad, the virtuous and the avaricious.  Critics judge that the authors were satirizing popular plot-lines, but it seems more accurate to say that they were reproducing popular stories in part to ensure themselves a market while reserving the right to make a bit of fun now and then.  For the first two-thirds of the novel the emphasis is on comedy and a devastating attack on the government and the economic system with the love interests kept in the background, though romance does eventually emerge, a concession to the taste of the masses like Kitty Carlisle and Alan Jones in Night at the Opera.  Laura’s murder of Col. Selby (which to many readers comes as a surprise) alters the tone, adding notes of pathos and tragedy while the satiric onslaught continues unabated.

     Though he had published travel sketches and short stories, The Gilded Age is Twain’s first attempt at a full-length novel which may in part explain his willingness to work with a co-author.  The combination of his and Warner’s inexperience in the form (Warner was a distinguished editor but he had written only books on travel and gardening) makes it unsurprising that they produced a formally imperfect volume.  This factor and their shared authorship were not lost on the book’s earliest reviewers, one of whom wrote that “Neither of them has yet given evidence that he could command an interesting plot, the conduct of which would develop interesting characters.”  Another found the narration “jerky and jolty” exhibiting an “abruptness and unexpectedness” in the development as a result of the fact that “two hands did fashion the work,” while a third concluded more severely, “The Gilded Age is a failure.  It is rather a simply incoherent series of sketches.” [2]

     Further, though each wrote an initial section, they later came to do alternate chapters and to rewrite each other’s contributions.  Their wives, who had originally challenged them to attempt the work, may have offered opinions on its progress as well, and the result is inevitably uneven.

     Whatever its faults, The Gilded Age presents an uncompromising, even devastating critique of America.  The government is portrayed not as simply harboring corruption but as being altogether rotten.  When one senator exposes the bribe another has offered him, there are calls to investigate not the miscreant but the whistle-blower.  A politician who refuses to buy votes is considered the unethical one.  The public good cannot survive in an environment where everyone is looking out for the main chance.  And the legislators’ rapacity is only a special case of the general greed that reigns under capitalism.  While Philip’s Ilium coal mine does finally deliver on its early promise, virtually every other investment scheme mentioned is wholly fraudulent. 

     For a contemporary American reader, this picture of crooked profiteering in public life will seem only slightly exaggerated.  The current president is openly selling pardons and appointments, making subservience (and its material form of donations) far more important than expertise for influence in his administration.  And we have seen speculative bubbles in technology stocks as well as the birth of explicitly fraudulent investments like cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens, encouraged by politicians more interested in advancing their own wealth than the good of the country.  The present day has at least matched the single-minded pursuit of money in the nineteenth century, when American presidents would at least never have considered hawking trashy merchandise while in office. 

     Apart from this general critique of the political and economic system, The Gilded Age makes significant comment on the role of women.  Laura and Ruth are arguably the most important characters, as most of the others are either caricatures or very thinly portrayed.  Furthermore, the book is clear about the unfairness of the limited life choices available to women and goes so far as to suggest that women’s suffrage might bring reform to the legislative halls. 

     Yet a feminist today would surely complain that both of these women, who possess unusual ambition and initiative, not only fail, they fail because of the very female characteristics typically cited by male chauvinists.  Laura is clever and effective in her machinations, but comes to grief after being deceitfully betrayed by a lover.  She becomes very close at least to legally insane before killing Selby, highlighting the double sexual standard and women’s dependance on men, but also suggesting that she is overemotional, the victim, perhaps of hormones.  Though Twain referred to her as the “heroine” [3] of the book, she is as well a villain, a femme fatale, in her lobbying in which her trading on her good looks is yet another gender stereotype.  Ruth, while guilty only of the laudable desire to practiced medicine, proves not quite up the demands the profession placed on her, nearly dying from overwork, thus implying that those who wished to bar women from the professions for their own good did so for good reason. 

     The novel contains numerous loose ends.  The appended note with its ironic apology for raising curiosity about Laura’s father without satisfying it, is itself sufficient evidence that the story had not been thoroughly planned.  The epigraphs, selected not just from European languages, but also from Hawaiian, Quiché, Sanskrit, Yoruba, and the like, may be a good enough gag the first time, but rapidly becomes annoying before the reader simply ignores them.  The fact that the first edition left them untranslated proves that readers were not expected to understand them.

     Yet, for all its shortcomings, the book hits its mark squarely with its depiction of most politicians and businessmen as self-interested and capable of any deceit.  At the same time it shows the hopeful optimism of Americans in general, never sufficiently disillusioned to turn away the next sure thing when pitched by a glib salesman.  One finds in The Gilded Age only sparks of Mark Twain’s brilliance and a few sonorous if platitudinous lines of Charles Dudley Warner, but, considered as a whole, it is an important American political novel and a well-observed portrait of the United States revealing the national faults: an obsession with money-making, the dialectic of hucksterism and naivete, the oppression of women, but also allowing room for a saving remnant of ambitious individuals whose dreams, unavailable in some other nations, may in the United States, at least in part, come true.   

 

  

 

1.  Twain later said that both authors’ wives also contributed to the book.  It was not Twain’s only attempt at collaboration.  He wrote Ah Sin with Bret Harte, a play that ran for five weeks and the unperformed Colonel Sellers as a Scientist with William Dean Howells but withdrawn before its first performance.  He later contemplated two collaborations with the Austrian playwright Siegmund Schlesinger.

2. Quotations are, in order, from “American Satire,” New York Herald, Dec. 22, 1873; “The New Book by ‘Twain” and Warner,” Hartford Times, December 23, 1873; and “Literary Notes,” The New York Graphic, December 23, 1873.

3.  April 16, 1873 letter to Mary Fairbanks.