Criticism

David Kelly

Kelly is an instructor of literature and creative writing at two schools in Illinois. In this essay, Kelly examines how the character of Hank Morgan makes Twain's story difficult for modern readers.

Reading and becoming informed about the past is part of a well-rounded education. Still, it is not always easy. An especially difficult task for modern readers is to determine the proper approach to a work that was not only written decades prior, but whose setting is centuries in the past. Published in the late 1880s, the book is about history; at the same time, for the contemporary reader, it is history. Twain wrote about the Middle Ages, setting his novel in the year 587. His central idea concerns explaining the changes that had come over the world over the course of thirteen centuries. There is nothing in the novel to explain the changes of the past hundred and fifteen years.

Contemporary readers are presented with the world Twain was writing about and also the world that he assumed his readers would know. That is a lot of information to synthesize. To make matters worse, a good case can be made that in the twentieth century the rate of social change accelerated at a pace quicker than it did in many of the pretechnological centuries that separated Twain from his subject. The book focuses on the developments that occurred between King Arthur's time and Twain's, such as the locomotive, the telephone, the newspaper, and the gun; these are all significant advances, but they do not really hold up in magnitude to the automobile, airplane, television, laser, DNA mapping, and thousands of other achievements that have occurred. The time that has passed since Twain lived might easily be characterized as the age of the nuclear bomb and the computer. Both destruction and knowledge have become global, not provincial, realities.

It is common to blame contemporary American students for their lack of historical perspective; studies regularly quote students saying that they do not see how incidents in the distant past matter to their lives, and tests show that they cannot identify the dates for milestones in world history like the French Revolution, the Renaissance, or even the First World War. In the case of a novel like A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, it would be easy to sympathize with their sense of alienation. Readers of this book are not only required to look backward through history, but also have to line up two separate historical points and determine their relationship to each other. Students might approach the book armed with a dictionary, but an astrolabe might be more appropriate.

Students will commonly express their frustration with fiction that was written long ago or about ancient times and their inability to relate to the strange settings and surroundings depicted in both. The standard response is that good readers will look beyond the cultural differences and concentrate on the work's characters. Literature is about the human condition. Regardless of where a story takes place or what happens in it, the characters should still, at heart, be human. No one says that a reader has to be a student of the sixth century or of the nineteenth century in order to appreciate A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. The behavior of Hank Morgan, the Yankee of the title, is all that one really has to relate to. In some regards, Twain makes it easy for readers of any generation to join Hank in his adventure, but in other regards, Twain complicates things by making Hank more complex than people expect to find in an adventure yarn or satire.

This type of story should be familiar to anyone who has ever read a book, seen a movie, or watched TV. It is a standard stranger-in-a-strange-land myth, a variation on the old fish-out-of-water formula, which throws its protagonist into an unfamiliar environment and studies how he reacts to what he finds there and how the people there react to him.

In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Twain continually refines this formula. When Hank becomes a familiar figure around Camelot, he leaves it to travel across the country on several extended journeys. While Hank is out on his travels, a war breaks out in King Arthur's realm. Hank returns to find a devastated landscape where almost all of the people he has come to know over the years are dead and the social order he personally constructed no longer exists. Rather than seeing him act throughout the downfall of Arthur's court, readers see him plunged into another unfamiliar situation, learning about what kind of man Hank Morgan is by watching how he reacts.

It would be easier for readers to float through this book, experiencing new worlds with Hank Morgan, if Hank were the ordinary man that he is often assumed to be. Twain does not give much background about his life before being transported back in time. Readers are told only that he was a foreman in the Colt firearms factory; that his father was a blacksmith and his uncle a horse doctor, and he has practiced both trades; that he had a girl in his time that he was "practically engaged to," although she seldom passes through his thoughts; and that he considers himself "a practical Connecticut man." From these details, one can assume a penchant for problem-solving and a high degree of impatience with sentimentality and romance. What one does not assume is the fact that Hank Morgan is not a very nice man.

Hank tells the story and, therefore, readers tend to identify with him. When he looks at the barbaric practices of Camelot, from the inequity of ownership to the government-supported cruelty of nobles to the people's ignorance of the physical world, his directness is admirable. When Hank sees problems, he sets about fixing them, which is a huge improvement over the people who are accustomed to accepting their troubles because of tradition or fear. And, in fact, one sees a few benefits when Arthurian society begins to run the Hank Morgan way. Slavery is abolished, prisoners are freed, and despots learn that they are accountable for the suffering of their subjects.

What is not as openly pronounced in the novel is the weakness of Hank's reforms. Readers hear about railroads, gold currency, a stock market, newspapers, etc., but, really, what effect do these have? The ones that are shown to have any value have value to Morgan, for securing his claims of being a great sorcerer, like his fixing of the pump at the Holy Fountain or his synthesis of gunpowder specifically to destroy Merlin's castle. Some reforms, like his miller-gun for dispensing currency, seem to have been forced on the Middle Age peasants because Hank, a gunsmith, thought to invent them. Hank does not comprehend that his reforms might never be appropriate for these particular people. His faith is in technology and machines, not in the democratic spirit that he so often evokes.

The idea of understanding a strange social setting by relating to the protagonist of the book is much more difficult in this book than it is in other novels because the protagonist has been written to be ignorant of his own flaws. Hank is aware of the shortcomings of Camelot and, like any good mechanic, he can suggest means to fix particular problems, but he cannot see beyond the repairs he suggests. He does not think about the problems that he might create when his programs fall into place. Hank is not a social planner. Twain himself was unimpressed with Hank. Edmund Reiss (in his afterward to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court) quotes Twain as having said "this Yankee of mine has neither the refinement nor weakness of a college education; he is a perfect ignoramus; he is boss of a machine shop; he can build a locomotive or a Colt's revolver, he can put up and run a telegraph line, but he's an ignoramus, nevertheless." Readers who find it difficult to understand King Arthur's society and who are unfamiliar with the way people thought in the eighteen hundreds will find Hank Morgan himself no less perplexing. He thinks that he knows more than he does so readers who take him at his word are bound to misinterpret the book's overall significance.

In Twain's time, it would be easy to judge Morgan as a meddler who has gone and interfered in another culture, finding them to be too lacking in modern conveniences, forcing his own social standards on them. Modern readers, though, see two historic cultures at work, each one with its positives and negatives, but neither one our own. Contemporary readers therefore tend to miss out on the story's careful moral balance.

The story of the stranger finding himself suddenly catapulted into an unfamiliar culture has been told time and time again. Usually, writers focus their attention on the clash of the cultures, and so they make their protagonist either benign, so as to not draw too much attention away from the cultural issues, or wise, so that the author can use the story to show how the world ought to work. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Twain takes the more difficult path by having two cultures converge in the life of one complex character. This gives modern readers a lot to analyze, and they understandably might fail to notice just how much Twain expects of them.

Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, in Novels for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

What Do I Read Next?

• At about the same time that Twain was writing his version of the Arthurian legend in America, Great Britain's poet laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, was working on his masterful poem about the same subject, Idylls of the King (begun in 1859, completed in 1885). Tennyson's version of the story is beautifully lush, dreamy, and considerably more reverent than Twain's version.
• The version of the story of Camelot that Twain used as a basis for his novel was Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur (1485). In 2003, Cassel published a complete version of Malory's work called Le Morte D'Arthur: Complete, Unabridged, Illustrated Edition, which is edited by John Matthews and lushly illustrated by Anna Marie Ferguson.
• Journalist T. H. White retold the story of King Arthur in his book The Once and Future King (1958), which made the tales accessible for modern readers. White's version became a bestseller and is considered by many critics to be a masterpiece of fantasy literature.
• Twain's own masterpiece is considered to be The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Similar in episodic plot and political indignation to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, this work is considered by many to be the elusive "great American novel."
• Twain was a well-known personality of his day and has become almost as recognizable to readers of American literature as any of the characters he created. The Autobiography of Mark Twain (1959), edited by Charles Neider, gives Twain's story directly. This book was assembled from various autobiographical writings and is available in paperback from Harper Perennial.
• Of the many biographies of Twain that are available, one of the most user-friendly is Mark Twain (2001), by Geoffrey C. Ward and Dayton Duncan. This book was produced to be the companion piece to Ken Burns's documentary miniseries about Twain and reflects the most current (at the time) research on his life.