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.

Misogyny in Heywood’s The Four PP

 

Numbers in parentheses refer to lines of the text.

 

     Though it is never produced (apart from a few times in academic settings), Thomas Heywood’s comic interlude The Four PP (ca. 1530) retains some comic appeal yet today.  Its lively tetrameter couplets move briskly along and a bit of earthy humor revives the reader (or viewer) whose interest might be flagging.  In spite of this apparent popular appeal, Heywood was a courtier and the piece was most likely performed for Henry VIII.  All of its characters, the four Ps of the title (normally pronounced "four pees"– a palmer, a pardoner, a peddler, and a “pothecary” (medical practitioner) – are satirized as professionals who all excel in lying.

     Each of these groups has, of course, long been subject to suspicion and wit.   Heywood’s reservations about the physicians of his day recalls Montaigne’s remark that “I see no kinde of men so soone sicke, nor so late cured, as those who are under the jurisdiction of Physicke” (Bk. II, 37, “Of the resemblance betweene children and fathers”).   This attitude is surely understandable given the state of science during the Renaissance and indeed persists in many  people’s distrust of conventional medical treatments even today.  Before the development of experimental science and the professionalization of the practice of medicine, a great many medical practitioners were out-and-out charlatans, and, for good reason, even the university men enjoyed little confidence from their patients.

     Doubting the spiritual benefits of pardons, relics, and pilgrimages, all practices sanctioned and encouraged by the church, might seem to make Heywood seem a partisan of the Reformation, did we not know that he clung to the Roman church when it became disadvantageous, even dangerous, to do so.  His interlude was written very close to the times that religious controversies led to the Schism of 1531 and Henry VIII’s foundation of the Church of England a few years later, so the issues were certainly part of public discourse, but his criticism of Catholic practices surely follows in the tradition of fundamentally orthodox reformers such as Chaucer, Dante, and Rabelais rather than of schismatics. 

     The peddler, asked to judge among the other three, notes that he himself is a skilled liar (one might think of the popular image of a used car salesman) and thereby something of an expert on deceit, so he asks the others to compete to see who might be judged the greatest liar.  Contemporaries accustomed to today’s onslaught of advertising claims will need no convincing that those in the retail trade are often accomplished at misrepresentation. 

      Yet another unrelated theme runs alongside the ridicule of religion and science.  The palmer, the pardoner, the peddler, and the apothecary are all mendacious, but they are also all  misogynists.  This commonality is unsurprising as denigrating women and limiting their power is surely the most widespread and enduring form of prejudice.  Since the Bronze Age, at any rate, women have been subordinated socially and, like other targets of discrimination, assigned characteristics that justify their oppression.  From Semonides in archaic Greece through Tertullian to Jean de Meun to Donne’s inability to imagine a woman both “true, and fair” and consistently in the centuries since, women have been subject to sexist slanders. 

     The first sustained reference to women in The Four PP occurs in the peddler’s introduction of himself as he lists his wares just as he would have done when approaching prospective customers.  His inventory is heavily slanted toward “women’ triflings” (219) such as “gloves, pins,combs . . . “

 

Pomanders, hooks, and laces knotted,

Brooches, rings, and all manner beads,

Lace, round and flat, for women’s heads,

Needles, thread, thimbles, shears, and all such knacks

                                                          (236-239)

 

The pardoner then refers to another female trait that remains today the theme of jocular criticism, the time spent in toilette and dressing.  This leads the apothecary to dilate on women’s “trimming and pinning up their gear” (266).  He notes that they have particular difficulty “fiddling with the tail-pin” (267), an anticipation of the apothecary’s ribald story, soon to come.  The peddler, anxious to make his pitch, says, “let women’s matters pass” (279), but the theme soon returns. 

     As the men set to arguing about who should have mastery, the peddler suggests that since “all three can lie as well/ As can the falsest devil in hell” (442-443), their leader should be the one who can tell the single biggest lie.  The peddler is competent to judge such a competition as he boasts “some skill” (446) in fraud.

     Each contestant then offers a sample of his self-praise, including a certain amount of scatological humor, first about the musty relics; one is a “buttock-bone of Pentecost” (521) while another “relic hath beshitten the roast” (523).  This vein intensifies and focuses on the female body in the apothecary’s tall tale about inserting an anal plug which the female patient expels with such force that it razes a castle ten miles away (710-767). 

     Not to be outdone, the pardoner responds with a story of his fetching a woman out of hell (776-976) to the great relief of the devils to whom she had been a constant trial.  They ask the pardoner to divert other such impossible creatures from their realm and “roar” with joy at her departure (964).  Women are such monsters, it seems, that even devils cannot bear their company. 

     After these flights of fancy, the palmer delivers the interlude’s punch line.  In the vast number of women whom he has encountered he has never, he maintains, met a single one “out of patience” (1004).  The four instantly agree that this is surely the greatest lie possible.  All find then that they are in complete agreement, and the losers are released from “their bond” (1134) in an act of masculine solidarity.

     Having reinforced received opinion in this way, the play turns to a pious conclusion (not sufficiently pious, however, to prevent some play with the word “virtue” [1182-1190]), ending in their embrace of “the Church Universal.” (1236)  Male chauvinism seems the vehicle for their unanimity even more than Jesus Christ.  Like locker-room vulgarity, attacks on women provide reassurance of male power as well as timeless humor, enjoyed by Henry VIII as well as by commoners.  The “war of the sexes” is in some ways perennial, but, because of the male domination of education and literature, only one side of the propaganda is preserved.   

 

 

Notes on Olauda Equiano’s Interesting Narrative

 

 

     The Interesting Narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself (1789) is well-written, though of less value as literature than as history.  Equiano himself declares that he has “no wish to adorn the plainness of truth” in his account (Ch. XII).  The historical information transmitted by slave autobiographies such as Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1853), Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), and Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery (1901) cannot be disputed.  Equiano was early in the tradition, but he was not the first to compose such a memoir: A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince had appeared in 1772 and the Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho in 1782.  Equiano's story work remains a critical resource in understanding racial attitudes during his era and even today.  When Equiano wrote, slavery, though central to the American economy, was already controversial.  Debated in the Continental Congresses, the issue was put off in the interest of unity; banned in four states when the Interesting Narrative was published, it continued unrestricted in others for another three-quarters of a century.  As a victim and a contemporary analyst, Equiano’s insights throw dramatic light on several aspects of the barbaric practice. 

 

1

     Equiano places the origins of racism squarely on economic motives, saying that he does not suppose that those who mistreat Africans “are born worse than other men, they are “debauched” and “harden” themselves through “avarice” which “corrupts the milk of human kindness, and turns it into gall” (Ch. V).  Indeed, before the establishment of the slave trade and the immense profits it brought both shippers and plantation owners, Europeans typically regarded Africans as inhabitants of distant kingdoms rather like their own.  Shakespeare’s Othello is clearly noble and Iago’s racist jibes are untrue, symptoms of envy and malice.   Ne Vunda, ambassador of the Kingdom of Kongo to the Vatican during the sixteenth century, was honored with burial in Santa Maria Maggiore.  During the same period, Juan Latino, born a slave of Ethiopian origin, became professor of Latin at the university in Granada and the mixed-race Alessandro de' Medici, Duke of Florence, called “il Moro,” became the first Duke of Florence.  The greed that magnified racism in the interest of economic interest is evident in the multiple times whites swindle Equiano even after he has attained free status.

 

2

     Race is further demonstrated to be incidental rather than essential to the practice of slavery by the fact that Equiano’s own Ibo father kept slaves and that he was owned by a series of Africans before being sold to whites.  Debit could bring any individual into slavery in  ancient Babylon and, though foreigners and war captives were enslaved in ancient Greece and Rome, criminals were as well, without regard for ethnic origins.  At a time when Britain represented the very margin of the known world, Bede relates an anecdote about Pope Gregory I (540-604 C. E.) commenting that the English youths offered for sale looked more to him like angels than Angles.  The word “slave” itself is derived from Slav because of the early medieval practice of capturing slaves in Eastern Europe.  Finally, even during the times of New World chattel slavery, the many native American and Black slaveholders proved that racial identity was not in fact essential in distinguishing slave from free status.  Rather than the source of white supremacist ideology, the myth of African inferiority is a rationalization to justify a patently immoral yet profitable system.

 

3

     Equiano specifically focuses on the injustices he suffers because of his African origins, scanting most other topics apart (from his religious enthusiasm), so the reader may well be surprised when, in the last chapter, in the second clause of a sentence, after noting his attendance in the House of Commons for its debate on ending the slave trade, he suddenly inserts, as though incidentally, “and was married on the 7^th of April to Miss Cullen, daughter of James and Ann Cullen, late of Ely.”  This is the sole mention of his wife. 

     The marriage was announced in a variety of publications, including the General Evening Post, the Gentleman’s Magazine and the Literary and Biographical Magazine, and British Review.  Several of these accounts note the groom’s prominence, the lavish table, and the large company of guests, while none records anyone’s objection to the match.  There had, in fact, never been laws against interracial marriages in the U. K. or in Europe.  This unanimity only became international in the twentieth century with the United Nations' inclusion of the right to marry "without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion" in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 

     Americans who are surprised at the eighteenth-century acceptance of Equiano’s marriage are influenced by the United States status as an outlier, accompanied only by the likes of Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa in prohibiting what in America came to be called miscegenation, a word designed to sound like an abnormality.  (The term was invented by pro-proslavery advocate David G, Croly in an 1863 pamphlet and has been little used in other countries.)  Because of the unique place of slavery in the American economy, such unions were long banned by law, beginning with a statute passed by the Maryland General Assembly in 1691.  Even at that time a certain Zephaniah Kingsley published an essay praising intermarriage, as a cause of healthier and more beautiful children, and better citizens.  Not until 1967 did the Supreme Court strike down such laws. 

     The peculiar American horror at sexual contact between Africans and Europeans, though belied by the commonplace rape of slaves and later by Black prostitution, is evident in the history of lynching.  The most common excuse for mob violence was disrespect for a white woman and the victims often suffered sexual mutilation.  Equiano was being prudent when he chose to live in the United Kingdom.

 

3

     Once Equiiano was converted to Christianity, he regarded himself as an adherent of the Church of England.  Yet he continued to be tormented by doubts, not about theology but about his own chances for salvation until he experienced a renewed commitment to the faith under the guidance of a Dissenter, very likely a Methodist, who guided him to a rebirth, relieving his fears.  While the efforts of the Society of Friends for social justice are well-known, in eighteenth-century Britain Methodists were also prominent in the struggle.  Wesley himself was deeply involved, corresponding with Wilberforce and writing in his Thoughts upon Slavery (1774) that slavery was an “execrable villainy.”  In the United States, though, the issue caused the defection of supporters of slavery who, more than a generation after Equiano’s death, formed the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.  More generally, the evangelical movement, including low church Anglicans, was likely to insist on the equality of all souls in God’s eyes, and, more broadly yet, religious groups as a whole have formed a significant element in many progressive coalitions, including nineteenth-century American abolitionism and the twentieth century civil rights movement.

 

4

     Although, as noted, Equiano claimed no literary value for his book, his articulate mastery of proper English doubtless served as strong prima facie evidence for his equality with Europeans.  Just as Frederick Douglass’ rhetorical powers impressed his audiences, apart from what he had to say, any reader of the Interesting Narrative must respect its author’s intelligence simply because of his skill at using language.  Although he certainly had to educate himself first in the English language and then in the conventions of European rhetoric, oratorical skills were highly regarded in oral African societies.  Readers of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart which depicts pre-colonial Ibo society (as well as The Arrow of God, a novel set in more contemporary times) will be familiar with the high prestige attached to verbal ability among the people of Equiano’s tribe.  I personally recall that, when I taught in what us now Delta State, Nigeria, that teachers’ meetings could occupy an entire day (to the detriment of instruction) as speakers rose to make elaborate, polite, and flowery statements as though they were in the Oxford Union or the House of Commons even on issues over which they had no control, seemingly for the pleasure of the rich language and the admiration of their colleagues.  When I complained about the protracted orations to the headmaster, he (a Yoruba man educated at the University of Kent) commented, “I think you Europeans have a different sense of time.  Why be always in a hurry?”