| Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) loved gadgets, wanted to earn money, and created great texts. This work explores those three factors in Twain's life and in three of his major texts, Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. These texts demonstrate the arc of development of a new technological man. This man leverages technology in order to extend his influence, especially in ways that will give him economic privilege. In doing so, the new technological man seeks to create a particularly masculine space.;As technology and masculinity get more complicated towards the end of the 1880s, leading to a "crisis" in each area, Twain's ability to maintain the new technological man as a viable construct collapses in a conceptual bankruptcy that parallels his financial bankruptcy. The study begins by examining Twain in comparison with Henry Adams and William Dean Howells. Adams, though from a different socioeconomic background, reacts to the cultural changes in America in ways surprisingly similar to Twain. Howells, with a background similar to Twain's, ends up with a much different outlook. By triangulating Twain through Howells and Adams, one gets a clearer sense of Twain. In the remaining chapters, the study examines each text closely, in light of the critical tradition in Twain studies, Twain's own life, his economic interests, and the construct of the new technological man. These shed light on the construction of masculinity in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as well as on the literary trend that came to be known as realism.;In Roughing It, Twain establishes an attraction to and revulsion of male characters who combine personal and economic power, defining masculinity around such traits. In Life on the Mississippi, he develops this further, and also includes mastery of technology as a prime trait of the masculine man. In Connecticut Yankee, Twain attempts to combine all positive masculine traits into one character, Hank Morgan, but the result, instead of being the perfect republican man, is a collapse, a bankruptcy. Never again in his writing would Twain attempt such an amalgamation. |
