Marietta Holley and Mark Twain: Cultural-Gender Politics and

Marietta Holley and Mark Twain:

Cultural-Gender Politics and

Literary Reputation

Charlotte Templin

Marietta Holley (1836-1926) andMark Twain (1835-1910)

were

contempo-

raries with remarkable similarities. They were not only highly popular writers of

comedy in the tradition of the crackerbarrel philosopher, but they also had the

same publisher, the same illustrator, and were marketed in the same way—by

subscription—to the same public in upstate New York and elsewhere. So

comparable were their reputations in their own lifetimes that Twain was report-

edly jealous of Holley (Winter 135). Roughly three quarters of a century after

their

deaths,

their posthumous reputations could hardly be more dissimilar. Mark

Twain's name and even his image may be known to more Americans than that of

any other writer except William Shakespeare while Holley's name was lost to

public memory until recently.

Holley, the author of twenty-one best-selling novels (plus many short

stories) from 1873 to 1914, was unknown for decades until her work was

rediscovered by feminists in the 1980s. Yet in the late nineteenth century she had

been a writer of comparable standing to Twain. The following statement, written

about Holley during her lifetime, could, with a change of

names,

describe Twain's

reputation today:

'Josiah Allen's Wife,' as Miss Holley is widely known, has

written some of

the

most mirth-provoking books that have ever

been given to the public, and her books have found a warm

welcome with all classes and are read in nearly every civilized

country of the globe, having been translated into a number of

0026-3079/98/3901-075$2.00/0 American Studies, 39:1 (Spring 1998): 75-91

76 Charlotte Templin

languages. From Africa and Japan have come messages of

warm appreciation, and the foreign press has been quite as

appreciative as the American (National Cyclopedia of Ameri-

can Biography 278).

Ellis Parker Butler thought Holley's appeal was even broader than Twain's:

Literally hundreds of thousands enjoyed her writings who

could see nothing funny in Bill

Nye,

or any of the professional

humorists, not even Mark Twain (13).

But ten years after Holley's death, B. M. Fullerton's evaluation in the

Selective Bibliography of American Literature reveals how completely Holley's

work was dismissed in some quarters:

Miss Holley, a native of Jefferson County, Mo., [sic, she was

born in New York] and a resident of upper New York State,

began her literary labors as a contributor to the Christian

Union, and found a productive vein in a crude and blundering

type of humor. Her work was extremely popular, but quite

without distinction (142).

The contrasting histories of the reputations of Holley and Twain make

possible interesting case studies because of their remarkable similarities and their

insuperable differences—the latter related preeminently to gender. Holley and

Twain were known first as humorists. They were also known as critics of their

culture, but Twain also came to be a figure through whom Americans were able

to represent their culture to themselves and in that way to embody certain values

that it

was

impossible for a woman

embody in a patriarchal

culture.

Twain came

to represent American individualism, an ideology Holley was disqualified from

representing because of her gender. In fact, the central impulse of her work was

to extend the ideology of individualism to women, to claim for women political

rights and personal autonomy that men took for granted. Women writers of humor

in the late nineteenth century repudiated the contemporary stereotype of women

as dependent, emotional, and weaker than men in mind and body. But Holley's

eligibility for the role of bearer of universal themes was mediated by nineteenth-

and twentieth-century institutions, and we will see how her gender put her at a

disadvantage while Twain's gender ensured

his

suitability for such a

role.

Indeed,

as I will suggest, Holley's identification with female autonomy may well have

exacerbated her marginalization as the white males who controlled academic

institutions, feeling threatened by the burgeoning of literary productions by

women and minority writers, excluded these writers from the canon.

While discrete evaluations are matters of individual choice and taste (how-

ever dependent on the individual reader's social and cultural identity), literary

Marietta Holley and Mark Twain 77

reputation involves individuals operating in conjunction with institutions and

with shifting aesthetic criteria and responsiveness to social change. Literary

reputation is indeed a political matter since it is inseparable from ideological

beliefs and issues of power within society and

its

institutions.

Literary reputations

are made, but they can also be unmade, or completely transformed, as aesthetic

and ideological values and literary fashions change and as individuals with

cultural authority work through institutions to effect such change.

Northrup Frye dismisses discussion of reputation as "leisure class gossip,"

believing that it can contribute nothing to the building up of a "systematic

structure of

knowledge"

(18) of

literature.

But for those whose concern is with

the writers who have been relegated to the margins, a study of literary reputation

that is attentive to particular cultural, historical and institutional contexts is far

more meaningful than the type of codification that Frye engaged in or than the

explication of the monuments of an inherited canon. For students of literary

reputation the interesting question is why some literature survives its own day

while some is forgotten. Why did Holley's reputation fall (and why has it risen

again in recent years)?

answer this question it is crucial that

understand that

"literary reputations are made, not born" (xii), as John Rodden suggests in The

Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of "St. George"

Orwell. "Reputations," wrote Rodden, "are invariably 'political,' enmeshed in

ideological beliefs and emergent from within concrete forms of social and

institutional life" (xii).

Holley's humor emerged during a time of agitation for women's rights.

Pointing out that the humorist as truth-teller occupies

position of authority and

that few women have claimed such a position for themselves, Nancy Walker

suggests that the support of a national movement probably accounts for Holley's

straightforward feminist stance (A

Very

Serious Thing 121). Among the reasons

that Holley's work disappeared from the literary scene was very likely the belief

that women's rights issues were outmoded after women obtained the vote. We

may note that

the

vote for women was secured at roughly the same time

the end

of Holley's career. Feminists who have been instrumental in recuperating

Holley's reputation have focused almost exclusively on Holley's concern for

equal rights and have emphasized her mockery of patriarchal authority and her

satirical dismissal of the doctrine of separate spheres and the cult of true

womanhood. To fully understand the contexts of Holley's reputation in her own

time,

however, we must locate her at the center of a number of social reform

movements, preeminently temperance, but also enlarging women's role in

church government, ameliorating the plight of freed slaves and mediating

between capital and

labor.

Holley '

home in upper New York

state was

in the area

referred to as the "burnt over district" because it

was

so often touched

the fires

of reform.

understand Holley ' s reputation

her own

day,

we must understand

how that reputation was encouraged and supported by a social context that made

possible Holley's literary prominence. To understand the decline of her reputa-

78 Charlotte Templin

tion at the close of Holley's life, we must pay attention to the role played by

institutions in carrying a writer's reputation beyond his or her lifetime or in

exerting influences that precipitate a decline in reputation or even a fall into

oblivion.

All of the Holley novels feature a persona named Samantha Allen, a simple

country woman who speaks in the comic dialect of the Phunny Phellows, as the

personae of dialect humor

were

called,

and mixes comedy meant solely

amuse

with other material that contains a satirical edge. Holley carried on the tradition

of the other crackerbarrel philosophers, but she adds a new element to the mix:

she is a feminist, whose conviction that women need greater political power stems

directly from her common sense.

Holley joined other women humorists of the nineteenth century in repudiat-

ing the sentimentality that was the hallmark of women's literature and of the

image of literary women at the time. In her character Betsey Bobbet, Holley

satirizes the woman who prides herself on her emotionalism, her frailty, her

penchant for writing sentimental poetry, and her insistence that women need to

cling to a strong male. Such characteristics were consistent with the genteel

values of the nineteenth century, but Holley and her character Samantha despised

such

notion of gentility

foolish, as well

destructive of female authority and

autonomy. In "Wit, Sentimentality, and the Image of Women in the Nineteenth

Century," Nancy Walker points out that Holley and other women used humor and

wit

bespeak female strength and

expose

the

insulting nature of the stereotype

of the woman as clinging vine.

Samantha refutes the notion of female weakness by consistently displaying

a stronger head than Josiah as well as by accomplishing heroic tasks as a farm

wife.

Samantha is fully aware of

the

hypocrisy of men who demand great efforts

of their women in private but deny the legitimacy of any public role for women

on the grounds of their "delicacy." At one point an exasperated Samantha

remarks:

You can go into any neighborhood you please, and if there is

a family in it, where the wife has to set up leeches, make soap,

cut her own kindlin' wood, build fires in winter, set up stove

pipes,

dround

kittens,

hang out clothes lines, cord beds, cut up

pork, skin

calves,

and hatchel flax with a baby lashed

her side

—I haint afraid to bet you a ten cent bill, that that woman's

husband thinks that wimmin are too feeble and delicate to go

to the pole (Opinions 93).

Exposure of the self-serving nature of male support of

the

cult of

the

lady is one

of the main purposes of Holley '

work.

If women are kept out of the public sphere,

men can have all of its rewards (tangible and intangible) for themselves.

Samantha's views were attractive to the feminists of her

day,

and sound very

contemporary. These views include (along with commitment

the franchise for

Marietta Holley and Mark Twain 79

women) support of equal pay for equal work, disavowal of marriage as the only

role for women, rejection of any form of double standard, criticism of a church

controlled by and for men, and repudiation of sexist language.

Samantha's

staunch support of the family may well be attractive to much current feminism,

which faults

the

past generation of feminists, intent

securing

the

right

to follow

careers, with paying inadequate attention

women's needs for social and family

support in child rearing.

No essentialist, Samantha believes that women are intrinsically no better or

worse than men and does not overlook the faults of her own gender. Samantha

has little patience with feminism that features man-hating as its first principle.

She is highly critical of women's rights lecturers who begin every sentence with

the phrase "Tyrant man" (Opinions 343), explaining that the problems women

face have to do with the system: "One class was never at the mercy of another, in

any respect, without that power bein' abused in some instances" (Opinions 344).

An astute analyst of power relations, Samantha connects women's issues

larger

issues of power. She sees that both men and women may be victimized by the

abuse of power. As the common woman who speaks a vernacular dialect,

Samantha also embodies a rebuke to the women's rights lecturers, who, of a

higher class than she, are blind to their complicity in class oppression, and in a

novel about the sufferings of the freed slaves (Samantha on the Race Problem),

she reveals that she has an awareness of the imbrications of not only class and

gender, but also race.

As we examine the social dynamics that placed Holley in a prominent

position in her day, we may note the importance of Holley's role in advocating

social reform. The causes of temperance and women's rights were especially dear

to her heart, but she also wrote about American imperialism, the relations of

capital and labor, racial conflict, and white slave traffic. The violence and

political corruption that were the aftermath of the civil war shocked and horrified

the common man and woman, many of whom shared Holley '

religious and moral

values. Kate Winter's biography of Holley makes clear how closely Holley was

associated with important social movements of her day. That she had a vast

audience in social movement communities is seen in the series of invitations

extended to her (which she refused because of shyness) to speak at women's

rights congresses and Women's Christian Temperance Union meetings. Holley,

who became a friend of Clara Barton, was also popular with the feminist leaders

of her time, including Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton from

Holley's own upper New York state. A number of women urged Holley to take

a public role in the women's movement, and Anthony tried to get her to write for

suffragist publications, urging her

send "any of the things too good, that

is,

too

decidedly woman suffrage for the popular press" (Winter 66). Anthony also

frequently sent her clippings, saying about one such offering, "Samantha may

have a comment to make on it" (Blyley 18). Men involved in reform movements

also solicited Holley's help. Winter tells of Holley's decision to write Samantha

80 Charlotte Templin

the

Race Problem after she was approached separately by several clergymen

requesting that she address

the

problem of black suffrage (113). That Holley was

approached by many prominent people soliciting support for progressive causes

is further evidence of how wide was her readership.

Special attention should be paid to Holley's connection with the cause of

temperance. While the temperance theme appears intermittently throughout her

work, some novels, such as Sweet Cecily, are constructed around a temperance

theme and thus participate in the genre of the temperance

novel.

Holley's serious

convictions did not prevent her from dealing with the theme in a comic way, as

we see in an episode from Sweet Cecily, in which Samantha inquires about an

acquaintance, Susan Clapsaddle, and is told she is in the poorhouse. Samantha,

who knows the woman was well off when she married, is duly shocked and

inquires where all the property has gone. She receives this reply:

I can tell you where all the property has

gone.

It has gone down

Philemon Clapsaddle's throat. Look down that man's throat

and you will see 150 acres of land, a good house and

barns,

sheep and 40 head of cattle You will see four mules, and

a span of horses, two buggies, a double sleigh, and three

buffalo-robes. He has drinked 'em all up—and 2 horse rakes,

a cultivator and

thrashin' machine (Curry, Samantha Rastles

146-47).

The quotation illustrates the WCTU theme of powerless and abused womanhood,

with the drunken husband, a symbol of

callous patriarchy. The abuse of alcohol

was a serious problem in the nineteenth century, and the fate of Susan Clapsaddle

was not an exaggeration. Holley, a Baptist, had deep religious convictions and

was thoroughly in tune with the WCTU, which came out of nineteenth-century

evangelism. She corresponded with WCTU president Frances Willard.

In Woman's

World,

Woman's Empire: The Women's Christian Temperance

Union in International Perspective 1880-1930, Ian Tyrrell has shown that the

work of the WCTU went far beyond temperance. The first women's mass

movement, it became an important force in the drive for suffrage when Frances

Willard took the organization with her in support of enfranchisement, arguing

that a "home protection ballot" was needed to empower

women.

The WCTU was

active in many reform causes, and, interestingly, Samatha takes up these same

causes. It seems reasonable to assume that Holley was a reader of the WCTU

publication, The

Union

Signal,

since

many of her causes were espoused by that

publication, including criticism of American imperialism, support for workers

(especially women), equal pay for equal work, rejection of a sexual double

standard, reform of prostitution, and rejection of sexist language. In fact, it

appears that all the aspects of reform that Holley supported were also WCTU

causes.

In the example of Holley and her

readers,

we have

particularly striking

Marietta Holley and Mark Twain 81

case of readers and writers creating each other. Among the many women who

made pilgrimages to Holley's home during her lifetime were very likely many

who shared her temperance and reform convictions. The support of the WCTU,

which exists in public memory today only in caricature, was unlikely to aid

Holley's ultimate literary reputation.

Holley's popularity, however, went beyond reform-minded readers. In

Notable American

Women,

Margaret Wyman Langworthy attributes much of the

popularity of Holley's books to "their comic treatment of domestic incident and

masculine presumptions in a way that endeared Samantha

many a wifely heart"

(203).

Holley continued to write after the other major crackerbarrel philosophers

died or ceased writing and thus was probably welcomed by a number of

old-fashioned readers who were not attracted to the urban and ethnic humor that

was replacing Yankee dialect humor. Her books became best sellers partly

through the support of a male audience, many of whom must have enjoyed her

simply in her manifestation as literary comedian. "If it was not the argument that

won her readers," Winter suggests, "it may have been the good-humored vision

of rural life with its quirky customs and manners" (61). There was a persistent

rumor that the writer of the Samantha novels was a

man.

Winter tells the story of

one male reader

who

said of

Holley work that "he had a high opinion of the man

who wrote that book," and upon being told that the author was a woman insisted

again "that book

was

written by

man"

(79).

The political satire that was a staple

of the crackerbarrel philosopher was also an important element in Holley's

popularity. Sometimes Holley wrote something closer to comedy of manners, as

in the best-selling Samantha at Saratoga, subtitled "Racin' after Fashion."

Holley's work offered a wealth of pleasures, and her readers could pick and

choose among them. Likewise, Holley's modern readers have foregrounded

certain parts of her

works.

Most certainly, they have backgrounded some parts—

the occasional Victorian indulgence in sentiment (which Twain has also been

accused

of),

the persistent temperance message and some of the dated humor, e.g.,

the sketches that cast Samantha as the rube on visits to the city.

This study of Holley's reputation illustrates how a work of literature is

variably constituted by various readers in different historical periods (or indeed

by different readers in the same historical moment). Individual readers value

literature that suits their own needs and interests, works that appeal to them for

reasons of ideology or that they can relate to experientially. The constituting of

Holley's texts in particular ways today is surely

function of the

needs,

interests,

and beliefs of her current readers and may differ from the ways the text was

constituted by her past

readers.

work of literature may be

"remade"

many times

as it is passed on from one generation to another, but the important thing is that

it has the institutional support that is a prerequisite for its being passed on.

Elisha

Bliss

published Holley '

first novel, My Opinions and Betsey Bobbet 's

(1873),

at his own risk, as he had Twain's Innocents

Abroad.

Opinions was an

immediate success and made Holley a popular author; Innocents Abroad played

82 Charlotte Templin

a similar role for Twain. Bliss had his finger on the pulse of the popular book

market and used to his advantage the system of selling novels by subscription,

sending his canvassers to rural areas where Holley's appeal was great. Holley's

first novel went through five editions in its first year, and her 1887 novel,

Samantha at Saratoga, was among the best sellers for the decade 1880-1889.

Indeed, Holley appears to have had as many readers as Twain (Winter 6).

Why did Holley's great fame evaporate? One significant factor was that

Holley did not attract the interest and support of the literary establishment. No

matter how much the general public or individual admirers backed Holley,

without institutional support her humor could not survive to the next generation.

Holley's work

largely unknown today because she failed to attract the support

of the (male) literary establishment both in her lifetime and after her death. The

self-effacing Holley did little to help her cause with posterity. Mark Twain, on

the other hand, with his zeal for self-promotion on the lecture circuit, was able to

ally himself with institutions that would keep his name alive. (This point is

discussed more fully below.)

Contemporary reviews of Holley '

work suggest a fair amount of condescen-

sion from the literary elite. The Independent for January 26, 1905, refers to

Samantha's "weakly witty garrulity (212); the Critic for September, 1906, finds

"genuine humor" in Samantha

vs.

Josiah but recommends small doses: "To one

who picks it up from time to time, it should make a genuine appeal" (286); the

Critic for February 20, 1886, finds "good and genuinely humorous points" in

Sweet Cecily but hastens to add that the kind of humor found in Holley's work is

"not destined

be immortal"

(93).

TheLiterary World for March 20,1886, finds

the novel Sweet Cecily "wearisome" and "at least a hundred

pages"

too

long.

The

reviewer is not interested in Samantha's feminist arguments ("she raves about

women's rights"), but does agree with what he calls Samantha's views on "public

affairs," e.g., her comments on the copyright law (102). In a favorable review of

Samantha at

the

St.

Louis Exposition,

the

reviewer

calls

Holley '

humor "homely

but nonetheless attractive to thousands of readers" and states that Holley "has

entertained as large an audience, I should say, as has been entertained by the

humor of Mark

Twain"

(6).

The most positive review I found of any Holley work

appeared, not in a literary magazine, but in a newspaper, the New Orleans Daily

Picayune (December 13,1885), which refers

the "infinite variety of her wit and

genius" (8).

Most telling is the review of Samantha Among the Brethren in the Critic for

January 17, 1891. This novel, about the role of women in the church, the only

Holley work currently in print (included in a series of reprints of works in the

tradition of women in American Protestantism), is praised by Holley's recent

admirers and is the work from which a selection was made for the Heath

anthology. The contemporary reviewer quotes Samantha's statement in her

preface that she is working in the "Cause of Eternal Justice," and comments:

Marietta Holley and Mark Twain 83

No doubt the Cause of Eternal Justice

gets

very much the worst

of it as does the cause of orthography. The two have always

seemed

us to suffer together at the hands of humorists of the

Marietta Holley sort. It is

be hoped that

the

humorists will be

worsted in their turn and disappear ... to the Limbo of vain

things (28).

Humor has always had to fight for respect, and Holley's humor was doubly

vulnerable as it fell victim to a turn-of-the-century move toward gentility. Blair

and Hill suggest that humor based on fracturing the English sentence and

wrecking havoc with English spelling arose as a reaction to the cultural emphasis

on proper spelling in the nineteenth century (276). As the more elite literary

magazines spread the gospel of gentility at the turn of

the

century, the humor of

the literary comedians fell victim. The comments of W. D. Nesbit in the

Independent (May 29, 1902) represent the turn-of-the-century disdain for

old-fashioned dialect humor. In an article entitled "The Humor of Today," Nesbit

refers to "the host of misguided writers who seem

think that poor spelling

the

hall mark of real humor" (1300).

Given

the values

of the literary

elite,

was

unlikely that Holley '

work would

be passed on as part of the American literature canon. Canons reflect the values

of those

who

create

them,

and

America the literary canon reflects

the

masculine

values of the men who created it. It is not surprising that male values should

dominate in any literary canon, since men have long had a disproportionate share

of cultural authority, but in America those influential in establishing the Ameri-

can literature canon felt a particular imperative

enshrine masculine values. Paul

Lauter describes the process, beginning in the 1920s, that led to the elimination

of women as well as black and working-class writers from the literary canon as

American academics, a white, male, and socially elite group, undertook the

project of making American literature a respectable field of study in the univer-

sity. To those involved in this project,

the

banishment of women writers appeared

to be a necessity.

The

university came to be the primary mediator of literary value,

replacing a more diverse literary establishment consisting of literary clubs (where

women had some influence) and magazines. Thus the professionalization of the

study of American literature worked to exclude women. Besides, it was felt that

feminization had been a problem with American literature for some time.

Elizabeth Ammons makes an analysis similar to Lauter's in "Men of Color,

Women, and Uppity Art at the Turn of the Century."

She

argues that

the

low status

of the turn of the century as a literary period can be connected with the abundance

of women and minority writers flourishing at that time and their repudiation by

academic

canonizers.

Ammons refers to "an incredible twentieth-century project

in repression" (21) caused

fear of female self-determination and minority

self-

assertion:

84 Charlotte Templin

permit people other than straight white men

tell their own

stories and tell them on their own terms constitutes a serious

threat to fundamental, hegemonous, white male construction

of and rules about

sex,

race,

gender,

culture,

order and disorder,

and subservience and dominance in the United States (22).

Holley was out of the canon on many grounds: as a woman, a feminist, a

humorist, and a writer of what came to be seen as a crude and old-fashioned form

of comedy. Like other women and minority writers at the turn of the century, she

was a special target of hostility by the male academic canonizers. As late as 1978,

after her work had begun

attract

the

attention of some feminist

scholars,

she was

dismissed

in two

sentences

Walter Blair and Hamlin

Hill

in America's

Humor:

From Poor Richard to Doonesbury:

Ms.

Holley, a feminist, satirized religious hypocrisy, political

skulduggery, and male chauvinism. But

she was

an unschooled

rustic with sound mare's sense, a Christian, a loving-wife and

a model housekeeper, and therefore could never have become

as popular today as she did during her lifetime (496).

This question-begging account, which confuses the unmarried Holley with

her artistic creation, is indicative of the gender biases, past and present, that

pervade the thinking of the cultural authorities who create canons.

It is only in recent times that many scholars are able to consider a writer like

Holley as having literary merit. Ideological shifts, realignment of cultural power,

and changing literary tastes have given Holley a visibility and a position of

prominence for a certain group of

readers.

In our day, Holley's humor is funny

again, an illustration of the truth that the only universal of literary value is its

mutability.

Without the increasing institutional influence of feminists within academia,

Holley's reputation would not be where it is today. Beginning in the 1970s,

articles about Holley began

appear

feminist journals. Holley's work

has

also

been included in recent histories and anthologies of women's

humor.

Since,

know, anthologies tend to establish boundaries and fix canons, a significant

milestone was achieved when a selection of one of Holley's novels was included

in the Heath Anthology of American Literature. In 1996 Holley became the

subject of a volume in the Twayne series, authored by Jane Curry. Up until her

recent partial rehabilitation by feminists, Holley was regularly omitted from

books about humor and anthologies of humor.

Mark Twain's rise to prominence is instructive in explaining the role of

gender as a contextual factor in the creation of the American literature canon.

Twain's critical reception was mixed during his lifetime. He had, however, one

consistent advantage over Holley. While the diffident and reclusive Holley

refused all invitations to appear on a public platform, Twain was an avid

self-

Marietta Holley and Mark Twain 85

promoter with a knack—perhaps acquired through his education

a journalist—

for marketing

himself.

Inventing "Mark Twain" as a public personality, he called

attention to himself through his lectures, by cultivating journalists, and by using

a host of props and public relations devices, of which the best known is the white

suit (Budd, "Talent"

90-93).

The hard work of self-promotion paid off, and, even

during his lifetime, the man was better known than his work, as Louis J. Budd

suggests.

Of special importance is his friendship with the influential literary

promoter, William Dean Howells.

Twain's reputation was also threatened by the decline of dialect humor as

well as by the low opinion of the humorist generally. Those who wanted to

facilitate Twain's assimilation

to the

category "Man of Letters" had to bring about

a kind of metamorphosis. This feat was accomplished by redescribing him as a

moralist and philosopher, a keen observer of the world and

man with insight into

human character. Henry Nash Smith sees this move taking place in the speeches

given at the dinner to honor Twain on his seventieth birthday. Those with the

authority to reconstruct Twain as a moralist and philosopher were, of course,

professors and other members of the literary elite, e.g., Professor Brander

Matthews of Columbia and Joel Chandler Harris.

Twain's immediate posthumous reputation was influenced by Harper's

pushing the Author's National Edition after his death.

Nevertheless, Twain's

reputation was at a low point after he died (always the dangerous moment for a

reputation), as indicated by his omission from Norman Foerster's The Chief

American Prose Writers in 1916 (Hubbell 113-14). During these years, some

reservations were expressed about the quality of Twain's work. A comment by

Fred Louis Pattee in 1928 is a case in point:

Mark Twain must be rated

thwarted creator

Melville,

one

hamstrung

by his

times and

his

temperament.

must

down

in posterity

a collection of glorious fragments, as an enrich-

ment to anthologies rather than as

maker of rounded master-

pieces (82).

Twain's name was kept alive, however, by a series of debates over the merit of

his work,

and by the end of the 1930s his reputation was established, and it

continued to grow firmer thereafter (Hubbell 133-44, 169-87, 235-67). Twain

was eventually elevated to the rank of literary genius, author of masterpieces.

Critics found interpretive strategies that allowed them to view him as a great

writer. Stanley Brodwin argues, for example, that Twain could be seen as great

when read in the shadow of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard.

We should consider, however, an underlying reason that may account for

Twain's "greatness." Twain filled

the

need for

truly American author, someone

who could represent our national character and our history. Alan Gribben

comments:

86 Charlotte Templin

If the historical figure of Mark Twain had never been born in

Missouri, had never achieved his international fame, and had

never left behind his legend as a cultural symbol, would it not

have been necessary for the United States to discover a com-

parable author? More to the point, are we not continually

reinventing and refining his image to meet our contemporary

needs and anxieties about our national character and the history

of our literature ("Autobiography," 42)?

Twain, who was identified with the South, the West, the Midwest, and the East,

was ideal for the purpose of representing America

itself (Krauth). Twain could

be seen as embodying much of

the

American myth—the settlement of

the

West,

Mississippi River piloting, and mining in Nevada and California. In the mid-

twentieth century, under the influence of nostalgia for a vanished past, Twain's

stature increased at a monumental rate. Twain is also important to a notion of

American identity. Richard Schickel says that Hal Holbrook's Mark Twain

"reminds us of what our national character is ideally supposed to be and rarely

is—independent, skeptical, rational, humorous, plagued by demons but coping"

(159).

The master needed a masterpiece, and Huck Finn, which was labelled a

children's book when it first appeared (Hill 297), was found to fit the

bill.

Huck

Finn was seen to embody the major American themes and, when the need arose,

to contain the dark vision preferred in the latter twentieth century. The character

Huck became a mirror into which the interpreter gazed. Eric Soloman describes

him as the quintessential American: "alone even among others, a first-person

narrator who is at home in nature and, like Cooper's Natty Bumppo, at a loss in

towns, yet as able to cope with the venality and evil of knaves as any Dashiell

Hammett or Raymond Chandler version of the Scout"

(248).

was,

one time,

the symbol for the democratic spirit, and later, an alienated character living in a

nightmare world (Hill 298). Huck became the basis for much American litera-

ture—Hemingway could say that modern American literature began with Huck

Finn.

The novel began to perform the function of creating culture described by

Herrnstein Smith in Contingencies of

Value:

The canonical work begins increasingly not merely to survive

within but to shape and create the culture in which its value is

produced and transmitted and, for that very reason, to perpetu-

ate the conditions of its own flourishing. Nothing endures like

endurance (50).

After World War II, Twain was increasingly assigned in schools as a result of

federal budget support for the study of American literature (Budd, Our Mark

Twain

236).

His

prominence in the secondary school curriculum indicates that he

Marietta Holley and Mark Twain 87

has become a cultural monument and helps to insure that he will continue to be.

As these examples illustrate, maintaining a work or author in a position of

prominence necessitates the expenditure of enormous cultural

energy,

not only

the academic community but

also

the

culture

a whole. Scholars and teachers

have had powerful allies among those who have kept Twain's popular reputation

alive, among them Hal Holbrook, whose performances impersonating Mark

Twain, continuing over thirty years, have been noted as a significant factor in

keeping Twain before the public eye.

Jane Curry has performed for years in a one-woman show in which she

impersonates the Samantha character. While her performances before university

and community groups have been well-received, Curry is not in a position to do

what Hollywood's Hal Holbrook could

for Twain. (See Curry's description of

her performances in Marietta Holley, 84-85.)

Given the mechanisms by which canons are established, it seems impossible

that Holley could have become a canonical author of the status that Twain

enjoyed. I am suggesting however, that what placed Twain—and, in like manner,

others—on the list of great American writers is not the inevitability that genius

will carry all before it or

the

objective wisdom of a "test of

time."

Similarly, what

caused Holley

become victim of a politics of neglect

has

little

do with ability

or inability

write works of "good" or "great" literature—since good or great are

terms which have meaning only in relation to particular audiences. Holley and

Twain were both judged to be gifted writers by their contemporaries, or certain

constituencies among their contemporaries, because they had value for those

readers based on their

needs,

beliefs and

interests,

including their preferences for

certain literary styles. But because of her gender Holley could not meet certain

cultural needs or fill certain cultural roles that Twain, as a

male,

was eligible and

qualified to fill. Even though Holley '

Samantha

was

a strong character with firm

personal convictions, how could she, a woman, represent individualism to a

culture in which women were only marginally individuals? How could a charac-

ter who espoused a feminist ideology so critical of patriarchal structures and

viewpoints have found broad acceptance in a patriarchal culture? How could

Holley be made a representative of

the

comic spirit of a nation that shared

the

view

of Charles Godfrey Leland, who asserted in 1904 that "Though more given to

merriment and fun than man, there has never yet appeared in literature a single,

original female Humorist" (11)? In the view of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, the

canon has "equated the progress of elite white men with the rise and triumph of

civilization and sanctified their position as its elect representatives and interpret-

ers"

(172). Though in her own day Holley claimed individualism for women and

as a female individualist was able to provide a cultural critique that spoke to the

most profound responses the reform-minded had

their

society,

the

male literary

elite of a later generation—those who had the authority to create, perpetuate, or

reproduce reputation—could not see in Holley a writer able to represent America

itself.

Charlotte

Templin

NOTES

See Templin, Feminism and the Politics of Literary Reputation: The Example of Erica Jong.

Holley participated in a tradition that lasted from 1855 to 1895 and included scores of

writers, including Charles Farrar Browne (Artemus Ward), Henry Wheeler Shaw (Josh Billings),

David Ross Locke (Petroleum Nasby), and Charles Henry Smith (Bill Arp). The crackerbarrel

philosopher, who presented his material (often time-worn observations about human nature but also

frequently political satire) decked out in homely metaphors and bad spelling, captured a huge

audience. Blair and Hill list forty names and indicate there are dozens more

(289).

Holley was unique

for her feminist stance. Most frequently these humorists satirized suffragists.

See, for

example,

the heated discussion by Samantha and her husband in Samantha Among

the Brethren about whether the Methodist meeting house should be called "he" or "she," and, in the

same novel, Samantha's exposure of the pseudo-generic nature of the word "layman."

See Ian Tyrrell's Woman's

World,

Woman's Empire: The Women's Christian Temperance

Union

in International Perspective

1880

-1930 for general study of WCTU

causes.

Winter mentions

the WCTU only briefly and does not comment on the minute parallelism of Holley's causes and

WCTU causes.

I am indebted to Barbara Herrnstein Smith's Contingencies of

Value:

Alternative Perspec-

tives for Critical Theory for my understanding of the ideas expressed in this paragraph.

6. The concern about the feminization of American literature is discussed in Lauter's article,

447-49.

Articles appearing in the 1970s and 1980s include those by Graulich and Armitage. In the

Heath anthology, Holley is included in a section called "Issues and Visions in Post-Civil War

America," along with Charlotte Perkins Gilman,

W.E.B.

Bois,

Henry

Adams,

and others.

other

nineteenth-century humorist except Twain is included in the anthology. Holley is also included in

Walker and Dresner's Redressing the Balance: American Women's Literary Humor from Colonial

Times to the 1980's. Jane Curry's anthology of selections from Holley's work is entitled Samantha

Rastles the Woman Question. Among the works on American humor that Holley is left out of are

Constance Rourke's American Humor: A Study of

the

National Character (1931), Enid Veron's

Humor

America (1976), and Stephen Leacock's The Greatest Pages of American Humor (1936).

The three latter books include others from the tradition of the crackerbarrel philosopher, e.g.,

Petroleum Nasby, Josh Billings, Artemus Ward.

8. In "A Talent for Posturing,'" Budd says that Twain's "fame ran wider and deeper than

literature, that it rode on adulation among millions who had not read through one of his books" (88).

9. Henry Nash Smith describes the speeches, which had a distinct note of condescension to

Twain, the humorist, and could only praise him by describing him as something more than a mere

humorist. See especially pp. 61-64.

10.

As an

indication of where Twain's reputation stood at the turn of the century, see

Ford' s

article in Munsey

1901.

Ford praises Twain but grants higher laurels to Oliver Wendell Holmes,

who is

called "perhaps the greatest humorist

this

country has produced"

(486).