Roughing It Under the Shadow of the Corporation

Abstract

Introduction Mark Twain's Roughing It (1872) is, by most accounts, a sprawling, patched- together, decentered thing. But many commentators have unified the book by suggesting that it coheres around the difference between U. S. East and West—and therefore between genteel values and their attendant social limitations and demands, and the comparative openness and possibility of the frontier. The most influential reading of the text in this regard is Henry Nash Smith's (1957), which argues that the book is framed by the double- consciousness of the character "Mark Twain"—both a western "tenderfoot" and "old-timer." The latter, according to Smith, is a representative of "ver- nacular values" and the conditions of the wild West, including picturesque "color," "brotherhood," and "freedom." This figure exhibits traits of "laziness, irresponsibility, irreverence," and Smith concludes that the "western" Twain rejects such values by the end of the book, and substitutes American values of self-making which are inherently "urban," "industrial," and "capitalist" (226, 218, 225).1