The Voice of Her Laughter: Mark Twain's Tragic Feminism
In an 1865 letter to his brother Orion, Mark Twain confesses to having a "call to literature of a low order -- i.e. humorous." He continues by admitting to his feckless brother that he was made, not to pursue any honest trade or profession, but to "excite the laughter of God's creatures." In this comic manifesto, Twain positions himself as a prophet of sorts, delivering his message to an audience whose conversion is signaled by laughter. For Mark Twain, as for every working comic, laughter is the only result that matters, the final moment in a moral and economic exchange where the audience pays for its pleasure by yielding to the will of the comic. In his autobiography, Twain recalls an early performance in San Francisco which illustrates this dynamic. Twain began his routine by telling and retelling -- with his signature deadpan affect -- "a silly and pointless and unkillable anecdote" five times, until finally the audience "recognized the sell and broke into a laugh." Twain glories not only in his victory over the common sense of the audience (he has, after all, convinced them to laugh at a joke that's not funny), but also in the sound of the laughter:
It spread back, and back, and back to the furthest verge of the place; then swept forward again, and then back again, and at the end of a minute the laughter was as universal and as thunderously noisy as a tempest. It was a heavenly sound to me.
After trying this experiment again in New York, Twain was asked by James Russell Lowell, "What do you expect to accomplish by it?" and Twain replied "Only a laugh. I want the audience to laugh." This laughter for Mark Twain is a visceral pleasure, one that mingles physical and spiritual ecstasy: it is [End Page 192] both a "heavenly sound" and a sensual satisfaction. Yet despite the innocent disclaimer, Twain wants more from his audience than "only a laugh"; he wants to overcome his audience and empower it simultaneously. Twain often spoke of laughter in military and violent terms, the most famous example being from "The Chronicle of Young Satan," where Satan informs his human pupils:
For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon -- laughter. Power, Money, Persuasion, Supplication, Persecution -- these can lift at a colossal humbug, -- push it a little -- crowd it a little -- weaken it a little, century by century: but only Laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of Laughter nothing can stand.
Within this collaborative and combative process of "exciting the laughter of God's creatures" women occupy a particularly fraught position. As bulwarks of religion, culture, and all the edifying forces of civilization, women are prime targets of Twain's satire; however, their laughter also signals a terrifying and exhilarating fissure in these defenses, as well as an unsettling reorganization of gender identity. Although Twain begins his career by engaging in comic battles with women, particularly regarding such issues as suffrage, over time he develops these battles into dialogues that eventually blur the lines between the male comic and the female subject. In the characters of Aunt Rachel, Roxy, and Eve, for example, we see Twain tempted by the promise of a feminine laugh, yet equally committed to its "fall" or erasure. To excite the laughter of women is, for Mark Twain, both a dangerous and seductive desire, one that moves him toward a series of cultural, political, and theological revolutions that might effect precisely the devastating consequences that Twain, as "Satan," longs for. What if, for example, Miss Watson exchanges her sentiment and her seriousness for humor? What if she laughs at the conventional promises of Christianity -- a heaven full of harps and wings -- rather than idealizing them? Mark Twain -- the icon of American masculinity -- imagines shattering patriarchal structures in a blast of feminine laughter. The evolution of Twain's feminism, as well as its final defeat, will be intimately associated with the sound of women laughing.
The next of Twain's comic "dark" ladies (women made suspect either by pigmentation or personality) is Roxana, a character who emerges from a clear historical context: the sexual exploitation and objectification of black women by white men. James M. Cox describes Roxy's power as emerging from the "submerged lust" of the master: "In rearing the white man's legitimate children and giving birth to his illegitimate ones, Roxana bears what their honor cannot bear -- the guilt of their repressed desires. Her humiliation (she has no guilt) takes the form of repressed vengeance." Twain exposes this submerged narrative in the untold story of Tom Driscoll's father and Roxy's paramour/assailant: "Then there was Colonel Cecil Burleigh Essex, another F.F.V. of formidable caliber -- however, with him we have no concern." Out of this repressed history emerges Roxy's potential to disrupt Dawson's Landing by switching her child for that of the master. Carolyn Porter associates Roxy's power in the tension between the "Mammy/Jezebel" opposition: "What comes into and out of focus in Twain's portrayal of Roxana is a region where mothers are sexual, slaves are powerful, and women are temporarily out of (and thus in) control." One measure of Twain's experiment with women's liberation, or at least this particular black woman's liberation, is the shifting status of Roxy's laughter within the narrative.
Before he introduces Roxy's feminist, outrageous laugh, Twain exposes the impotence of an exclusively masculine humor. In the opening chapters of Pudd'nhead Wilson, Twain opposes the blind literalism of Dawson's Landing to the irony of David Wilson. Wilson's joke challenges the perceptions of the townspeople: "'I wish I owned half that dog.' 'Why?' Somebody asked. 'Because I would kill my half'". The townspeople lack the ability to recognize irony; they ignore the tension between exterior appearances and deeper truths (the same structure, not incidentally, that Twain uses to describe Livy's personality), which causes them to miss more than Wilson's joke: "The group searched his face with curiosity, with anxiety even, but found no light there, no expression that they could read". The people of Dawson's Landing fail to recognize the explosive conditions that lie beneath the bucolic and pastoral surface that surrounds them: "Dawson's Landing was a slave-holding town with a rich slave-worked grain and pork country back of it. The town was sleepy, and comfortable, and contented". Roxy is the only character in the novel capable of appreciating Wilson's humor, just as she is the only one who knows that he's not a pudd'nhead: "Dey calls him a pudd'nhead, en says he's a fool. My lan', dat man ain't no more fool den I is! He's de smartes man in dis town". At the beginning of the novel, Twain describes both Roxy and Wilson as hiding something from our view. The covert twinkle in David [End Page 203] Wilson's eye and the black blood hidden beneath Roxy's white skin make them both an embodiment of irony.
Twain opens the novel with a male joker whose humor fails to connect with his all-male audience; he follows with a description of Roxy and her explosive laugh. In response to Jasper's promise to come courting, Roxy declares, "'You is, you black mud-cat! Yah-yah-yah! I got sump'n better to do den 'sociat'n wid niggers as black as you is. Is old Miss Cooper's Nancy done give you de mitten?' Roxy followed this sally with another discharge of care-free laughter". The latent violence of Roxy's "discharge" of laughter makes apparent what Dawson's Landing would prefer to remain invisible: the "fiction of law and custom" that creates the slave economy. Twain links David Wilson (a white man who jokes about invisible dogs) and Roxana (a black woman who laughs at mud cats) in an imaginative relationship that threatens to transform the racial landscape of the community. This pairing also reframes the combative dialogue between "Mr. and Mrs. Mark Twain" and instead suggests a collaboration in which men and women conspire to affect change through the "assault" of their laughter, possibly leaving Dawson's Landing "physically exhausted and spiritually reconciled." Puddn'head and Roxy begin the novel poised to share in a moment of humor that resembles the convulsions of laughter shared by Twain and Olivia. In the potential union of David Wilson and Roxana, Twain contemplates a powerful alignment of masculinity and femininity, black and white, which could wake the town of Dawson's Landing out of its slumbers.
What evolves between Twain and his female audiences is a kind of ritual of seduction and betrayal best exemplified in a scene described by Justin Kaplan. Twain intended to read "The Golden Arm" at Bryn Mawr where Susy was a first-year student. Susy found the story unsophisticated and inappropriate for the setting, and Kaplan also suggests that she was especially troubled by Twain's affection for a story in which a husband profits from the death of his wife. According to Kaplan, Susy begged her father:
"Promise me that you will not tell the ghost story," she said when she met him at the station. He laughed, patted her on the head, and promised, even though at no time had he considered leaving it out of the program.... When he started telling the story, she ran up the aisle and out of the room, weeping.
The explanation for Twain's oddly cruel behavior can be found in his essay "How to Tell a Story." Twain explains that when he performed "The Golden Arm," "if I got it [the pause] the right length precisely, I could spring the finishing ejaculation with effect enough to make some impressible girl deliver a startled little yelp and jump out of her seat -- and that was what I was after." Mark Twain, author of "Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism," surely is aware of the sexual overtones of his description, that with his "finishing ejaculation" he could make a young girl "deliver a startled little yelp." He longs for this seductive relationship with a female audience to excite women's laughter, to shock them into an almost orgasmic state of surprise, laughter, and relief. Yet the other side of this scenario is equally a part of Twain's relationship to women's laughter. Twain's laughing women all end their narratives in sorrow, punished or chastened by some patriarchal figure (David Wilson, God the father, Mark Twain). The girls laugh, while Susy runs from the auditorium weeping.
Twain's origins as a comic performer are bound up in this cycle of exciting [End Page 210] the laughter of women and then excluding them from fully appreciating the humor. As an adolescent in Hannibal, Twain pretended to be under the sway of a traveling hypnotist, an act which his mother believed entirely:
I was fourteen or fifteen years old, the age at which a boy is willing to endure all things, suffer all things short of death by fire, if thereby he may be conspicuous and show off before the public; and so when I saw the "subjects" perform their foolish antics on the platform and make the people laugh and shout and admire I had a burning desire to be a subject myself.
Years later, Twain attempted to confide in his mother the truth of his antics "but she refused to believe that I had invented my visions myself; she said it was folly: that I was only a child at the time and could not have done it.... And so the lie which I played upon her in my youth remained with her as an unchallengeable truth to the day of her death. Carlyle said, 'A lie cannot live.' It proves he did not know how to tell one". The language of this passage has less to do with telling the truth than with getting the joke. The young Sam plays this prank upon his mother while the older Mark Twain mourns the fact that she will never share the humor with him. Twain suggests in his portraits of Eve, Roxy, and Aunt Rachel that this alienation of the male joker from the laughter of women is the "fate" of gender.