| Homicidal Economics in Mark Twain: Legacies of American Theft , by Catherine Carlstroem, examines the roles and representations of money—economic valuations, definitions, and transactions—within the context of two critical economic events in nineteenth century America: the culmination and virtual completion of Native Americans' dispossession, and the existence and abolition of race-slavery. I focus on four of Mark Twain's major works: Roughing It, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. My thesis, greatly simplified, is that Twain's work is profoundly informed by particularly disturbing aspects of the national economy, the homicidal-economy . His vision of economics is fundamentally, irrevocably altered by the twin realities of American economics, particularly pointed for a Southerner from Missouri: stolen land and stolen labor. It thereby encompasses a range of interpenetrating issues: the Civil War, murder, violence, racial prejudice, theories of racial difference—the civilized and savage—supporting economic exploitation, the authority of law, property rights, theft, and the influence of economic valuation on humanistic values.; My study necessarily generalizes to adapt to these complexly related parts, using a broad definition of economic, including economic models of framing an issue—profit and loss, risk and investment—even with no strictly financial subject. Indeed, Twain employs this language regularly to describe interpersonal, political, and religious interactions. The word money serves as shorthand for several different but closely related and frequently conflated things: currency, the different species of money like gold and coins, which are symbols of exchange value; property and wealth, which currency represents; ownership as a concept, and its logical compliment—robbery.; The foundation of my method is close-textual analysis, with attention to the historical/cultural context of the works, and to a lesser extent, its biographical context. Since bonds between the larger U.S. homicidal economy and economics in Twain's texts are sometimes submerged or overlaid, visible only with dose inspection, I rely on the emergence and repetition of patterns, and the intersection of these within and among the texts to reinforce my argument, so that it has a cumulative power beyond the individual interpretations of specific sections and subjects. |
