“Man Factories” and the “White Indians” of Camelot: Re-reading the Native Subtext of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Writing the Imperial Question at Home: Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians Revisited

“…While I’m not convinced that this issue necessarily caused Twain to discard the story (surely a storyteller like Twain could find the way to tell the story he wanted to tell), it does pose plotting challenges, some of which will not be resolved in these chapters, though they could be addressed in future writing. As for why Twain set the story aside, a more likely possibility comes from Kerry Driscoll, who argues that Twain would have struggled with “deep ambivalence … about Indians, but apparently could not openly express [this] within his community.” Many in Twain's Nook Farm neighborhood, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, supported the Connecticut Indian Association, a charitable organization created “to discuss ‘the importance of work for and among the Indians of the United States.” There is some evidence that the Clemens’ experienced social pressure to participate (both in person and financially) during the time he worked on Among the Indians (15–19). It is possible Twain stopped work on Among the Indians because of how it would impact him socially.…”

The International Twain and American Nationalist Humor:Vernacular Humor as a Post-Colonial Rhetoric

“…In these Twain was directly complicit. After all, he had gone west in 1861 to serve Manifest Destiny in the government of the Nevada Territory, and he expressed his investment in American expansion not only in the Sandwich Island letters but also through the life‐long antagonism to Native Americans that Kerry Driscoll and others have been tracing in recent years (Driscoll; Pugh; Coulombe). 9 Details include not only the unremittingly racist 1870 attack on romantic literary portraits and “humanitarian sympathy” in “The Noble Red Man” (“NRM” 446) and the grotesquely named and portrayed Goshoot Indians in Roughing It , but also his cynical humor, masquerading as dry wit, in claiming descent in his “Burlesque Autobiography” (1874) from “the first white person who ever interested himself in the work of elevating and civilizing our Indians”: “He built a commodious jail and put up a gallows, and to his dying day he claimed with satisfaction that he had had a more restraining and edifying influence on the Indians than any other reformer” (“BA” 201).…”

“…9 Details include not only the unremittingly racist 1870 attack on romantic literary portraits and “humanitarian sympathy” in “The Noble Red Man” (“NRM” 446) and the grotesquely named and portrayed Goshoot Indians in Roughing It , but also his cynical humor, masquerading as dry wit, in claiming descent in his “Burlesque Autobiography” (1874) from “the first white person who ever interested himself in the work of elevating and civilizing our Indians”: “He built a commodious jail and put up a gallows, and to his dying day he claimed with satisfaction that he had had a more restraining and edifying influence on the Indians than any other reformer” (“BA” 201). In addition, as Driscoll has also pointed out, in Connecticut Yankee , Hank characterizes the most downtrodden subjects of Arthur's Britain as “white Indians” and adopts plans for civilizing England in ways that imitate Americanization policies imposed on indigenous tribes (8‐9). But focus on Twain's lifelong antipathy to Indians overlooks how the comic premise of the novel's structure, the reverse colonization of England by America, undermines the post‐colonial evasions of the British‐American comic contrast in Connecticut Yankee .…”