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Skandera-Trombley L. Mark Twain's cross-dressing oeuvre. College Literature [serial online]. June 1997;24(2):82. Available from: Academic Search Premier, Ipswich, MA. Accessed September 21, 2011.
MARK TWAIN'S CROSS-DRESSING OEUVRE
Mark Twain apparently enjoyed nothing better than writing a rollicking transvestite tale. Beginning with his uncompleted short story "A Medieval Romance" (begun in 1868) and continuing in his 1894 novel Pudd'nhead Wilson, Twain was irresistibly drawn to loving descriptions and painstaking explorations of the contexts and implications of cross-dressing. He left a myriad of texts that testify to his fascination with transvestism; in addition to the short story and novel mentioned above, cross-dressing can be found in such various works as "1,002d Arabian Night" (1883), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), Following the Equator (Vol. 2 1897), "Wapping Alice" (1898,1907), "How Nancy Jackson Married Kate Wilson" (c. 1902) [also known as "Feud Story and the Girl who was Ostensibly a Man"], and "A Horse's Tale" (1907).
In his transvestite tales Twain was identifying and challenging social constructions of gender, distribution of power within a patriarchal society, and socially determined racial categories. An evolution of what Marjorie Garber terms "transvestite effects" can be traced in Twain's transvestite tales from his first genderswitch short story where stereotypical gender roles are presented then problematized, to introducing a female "gender-trickster" figure in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn who identities and controls these constructions; to ultimately creating intersections where gender, race, and class identities meet in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Pudd'nhead Wilson.[1]
While I am not the first to discuss Twain's use of cross-dressing (both Susan Gillman and Garber include substantive explorations), what has not been previously explored is the society being reflected in Twain's writings whose culture and history is being portrayed. Indeed, in utilizing the element of cross-dressing in short stories and novels (such as "A Medieval Romance" and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc), where gender themes are foremost, Twain may well have been paying tribute to upper-class, EuropeanAmerican female reformers and suffragettes.[2] In addition, in novels where racial themes are paramount, such as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Pudd'nhead Wilson, he was openly recognizing oral and written contributions made by African-American women in the form of slave narratives.
In his first transvestite text, "Medieval Romance," Twain introduced a theme that would resurface in a more developed form in "1,002d Arabian Night." In both stories, the sex of the heroine necessitates cross-dressing in order for inheritance and dynastic structures to remain intact. Yet, in inventing the transvestite heroine, Twain was consciously subverting these systems. While the patriarchal order superficially remains intact at the end of these stories, a sexual revolution has been effected by transvestites who transform the monarchy and sultanate into matriarchies. What takes place here is that the figure of the transvestite restructures the existing society.
In "Medieval Romance," the main character Conrad has been raised as a male by her father, who is determined that the throne will belong to his side of the family, not his brother Ulrich's. When Conrad is twenty-eight years old, her father relates the story of her birth and the reasons for her male gender. Appalled, Conrad remonstrates, "Oh, my father! Is it for this my life hath been a lie? Was it that I might cheat my unoffending cousin of her rights? Spare me, father, spare your child!" (The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain 56).
With Conrad, Twain introduced his first gender-trickster transvestite character, although Conrad does not realize she is tricking anyone until her father informs her that her identity has been a deception in order to win the monarchy. However, despite her father's attempts to fool his brother, by the end of the tale Conrad and her father are out-tricked by Ulrich's daughter Constance. Constance has been seduced by one of her Uncle's henchmen, and she has given birth out of wedlock. It is decided that she must stand trial. Conrad, speaking from the throne, informs Constance that she must name the father of her child. Constance, enraged because Conrad has earlier rejected her advances, names Conrad. Conrad and her father, overcome by the accusation, both swoon. Apparently this plot twist complicated the story to such an extent that after this revelation Twain broke off the narrative and printed a disclaimer in the Buffalo Express explaining, "I have got my hero (or heroine) into such a particularly close place that I do not see how I am ever going to get him (or her) out of it again, and therefore I will wash my hands of the whole business" (The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain 56). Twain's language, "hero (or heroine)" and "him (or her)," is a good example of what Garber means by the transvestite's causing a "failure of definitional distinction."
Twain's next depiction of transvestism would come eight years after "A Medieval Romance," in the 1876 portion of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a novel where all of the main characters (Huckleberry, Jim, and Tom) don female dress at different junctures. The two scenes of cross-dressing contained in the first section of the manuscript (chapters 1-18) are of particular interest here. Early in the novel, there occurs an odd incident which Huckleberry Finn matter of factly recounts: a body had been found in the river. This in itself is not particularly unusual; what is noteworthy about this drowning is the victim's apparel:
Well, about this time [Pap] was found in the fiver drowned, about twelve mile above town, so people said. ... They judged it was him, anyway. ... They said he was floating on his back in the water. They took him and buried him on the bank. But I warn't comfortable long, because I happen to think of something. I knowed mighty well that a drownded man don't float on his back, but on his face. So I knowed then, that this warn't pap, but a woman dressed up in a man's clothes. (15)[3]
If Huck is correct (and he is regarding Pap), then the reader must contend with the possibility of a female cross-dresser who may have met with foul play. Without any other immediate reference, the aside is easily overlooked when Huck continues his story. Yet this mention, while brief, is crucial and contains two questions begging to be asked: is the drowned woman simply a southern transvestite, or could Twain have been testing his reader's knowledge of African-American antebellum history? There does exist an historical explanation for the identity of the drowning victim: she may have been an AfricanAmerican woman fleeing North to escape enslavement who in her flight had either accidently drowned or been murdered.
If we pursue the possibility that the drowned woman might have been African-American, this incident would signal the beginning of Twain's conflating gender identification with racial categories.[4] Indeed in this quick aside, Twain seems to be developing a paradigm where gender and race meet. Garber explains that,
the apparently spontaneous or unexpected or supplementary presence of a transvestite figure in a text ... that does not seem, thematically, to be primarily concerned with gender difference or blurred gender indicates a category crisis elsewhere, an irresolvable conflict or epistemological crux that destabilizes comfortable binarity, and displaces the resulting discomfort onto a figure that already inhabits, indeed incarnates, the margin. (17)
Huck's inability to determine the sex of the dead person, and the historical possibilities for explaining his/her presence, certainly indicate a "category crisis elsewhere"--indeed, the "irresolvable conflict" within Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is that of slavery.
A connection can be made between this episode and African-American women's slave narratives where cross-dressing was a familiar component. Tales of escape from the South were well known, and hundreds of formerly enslaved African-Americans told their stories on the anti-slavery lecture circuit in the Northeast. According to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "over one hundred [African-Americans] wrote book-length 'slave narratives,' before the end of the Civil War" (ix). Between the years of 1703 and 1944, these accounts were so numerous it has been estimated that "six thousand and six ex-slaves had narrated the stories of their captivity, through interviews, essays, and books" (The Classic Slave Narratives ix).
Among the published narratives were two that received a great deal of attention. William and Ellen Craft's Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, published in London in 1860, is by any measure a remarkable story. Ellen Craft, who was fair-skinned, disguised herself as a European-American southern planter, and her husband assumed the role of her/his slave. Travelling together, they managed to escape to the North and later fled to England. By the time William Still's The Underground Rail Road was published in 1883, the Crafts were so renowned that in addition to telling the story of their escape, Still included an account of their post-slavery life (Freedman xv).
Another slave narrative featuring a cross-dressed woman was published in 1861 by Harriet Jacobs under the pseudonym Linda Brent. Gates calls Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl "the major black woman's autobiography of the mid-nineteenth century" (The Classic Slave Narratives xvi). Could Twain have known of Harriet Jacobs? It seems almost impossible that he would not. Contained within his personal library were histories of slavery by Charles Ball and Still as well as Lydia Maria Child's Anti-Slavery Catechism (Gribben 43, 141,666).[5] In addition, after making her escape from the South in 1849, Jacobs moved to Rochester where she joined abolitionists and began working in an anti-slavery reading room and office located above Frederick Douglass's newspaper, The North Star (Yellin xvi). The Langdons were well acquainted with Douglass; Jervis Langdon served as a conductor on the Underground Railroad and had aided Douglass during his escape from slavery (Mark Twain's Letters. 1867-68 2: 244). In subsequent years, Douglass was often a guest in the Langdon home. Twain met and spoke with Douglass in December 1869 and later wrote a letter to President Garfield endorsing Douglass for a federal job (Mark Twain's Letters. 1869 3: 428). It seems logical that considering the Langdons's times to the Underground Railroad and abolitionist societies and both the Langdons and Twain's personal relationships with Douglass, that they knew of Jacobs's Incidents.
This initial transvestite allusion in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, read in isolation from other scenes of transvestism, quickly becomes buried as Huck races along in his narrative. Buried, that is, until the next incident of cross-dressing. Huck, attempting to "find out what was going on," clumsily disguises himself as a girl and inquires at the dwelling of Mrs. Judith Loftus to see if she has any news about the scarer for him and Jim (47). Loftus informs Huck that she thinks Jim is still in the area--over on Jackson Island. She then proceeds to tell Huck, in precise terms, her husband's plan for the evening. A frightened Huckleberry takes up needle and thread and, after watching him fumble, Mrs. Loftus asks him to throw and catch. Sharp-eyed Mrs. Loftus soon suspects that Huck is not a girl, and after she observes him awkwardly trying to thread a needle, she cleverly devises a series of tests to prove her suspicions: she has Huck throw a lump of lead at a rat and then drops a piece of lead in his skirted lap to see how he catches it--Huck gives scripted "masculine" responses to each of the tests, meaning that his throw is accurate and he clamps his legs together instead of widening them.
After the threading, throwing, and catching is completed, Mrs. Loftus's suspicions have been proven correct: Huck is indeed a boy. Loftus then asks Huckleberry to tell her the real reason he is there: "You just tell me your secret, and trust me. I'll keep it; and what's more, I'll help you. So'll my old man, if you want him to" (52). Mrs. Loftus asks Huck another series of questions to determine if he is from the country or the city and concludes that at least he has not lied to her about his country origin. After his perceptive hostess completes her questions, she then allows Huck to choose his new fake name, George Peters, and cautions him to remember it: "Don't forget and tell me it's Elexander before you go, and then get out by saying it's George-Elexander when I catch you" (53). Before she allows Huck to take his leave, Loftus says "Now trot along to your uncle, Sarah Mary Williams George Elexander Peters [here Loftus verbally acknowledges that Huck's gender identity is still a fabrication], and if you get into trouble you send word to Mrs. Judith Loftus, which is me, and I'll do what I can to get you out of it" (53).
Myra Jehlen poses two important questions in her discussion of the Loftus episode in her essay "Gender": "What is the role in all this of the feminine disguise"; and "Why and to what effect does Huck pass through the crisis of rejecting his born identity dressed as a girl?" (267) What Twain may have been doing in having Huck don female garb is to assist him in gaining insight into Jim's dilemma. Before Huck can understand Jim's plight, he must experience what it means to be powerless. Twain cannot make Huck African-American, but he can make him a girl (granted Huck isn't exactly a privileged member of the Southern elite, although compared to enslaved African-Americans and women he certainly enjoys more personal freedoms).
Dressed as a girl, Huck, under the guidance of Loftus, learns that being female means, among other things, restricted movement and a required lack of intellectual and physical prowess. What is particularly fascinating about Loftus is that, unlike Twain's preceding and subsequent gender-trickster characters, she reveals her methodology for tricking (thus giving her secrets to and, in conjunction, sharing her power with Huck). In other words, working within Gates's definition of the trickster and signifying language, Loftus, a straightdressed gender-trickster, is explaining the art of signifying to the transvestite Huck (Figures in Black 236-41). The gender-tricksters who appear in Twain's other works act out their roles, either male or female--cross-dressed or not-but never openly discuss and deconstruct the act as Loftus does.
When Loftus tells Huck that missing rats is what girls do, she is giving him a lesson on gender roles and expectations. Loftus is teaching Huck how the game is played, and once the rules are understood by Huck, the implication is not only that he can play but that he can win. Who was once powerless is now empowered. As Mrs. Loftus informs him, "You do a girl tolerable poor, but you might fool men, maybe" (53).
If there are any fools here, Twain seems to be saying, they are those who do not realize that such women as Mrs. Loftus are gender-tricksters who can manipulate and thus subvert socially prescribed gender roles. Huck learns from Loftus the powerlessness associated with female gender; Jim will instruct him about the powerlessness inherent in slavery. Huck, and by implication the reader, will eventually realize that racial hatred is, like gender, a sociocultural construct, not a biological certitude.
There is a close connection between Huck's willingness to cross gender lines and his later act of questioning and rejecting racial categories. These two discourses, race and gender, contain overlapping margins whose intersections surface in the figure of the transvestite. Throughout the novel, Huckleberry (as does Jim) adopts and abandons different male and female disguises as well as rejecting activities considered purely male or female. At the end of the novel, Twain has Jim and Tom share Huck's experience of cross-dressing when the two don Aunt Sally's clothes and flee. With such constancy of crossdressing it may be possible to reinterpret Huck's flight as a response to the death of the father leading to a quest for contact with the feminine.
During the summer of 1883 when Twain was completing work on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he was also writing "1,002d Arabian Night" (Mark Twain's Satires and Burlesques 88). While it is true, as Gillman recognizes, that Twain creates "a hero-heroine pair whose behavior reverses stereotypical masculine and feminine characteristics--but always the sexes are distinguished in terms of traditional traits," unlike "A Medieval Romance," Twain completes the narrative and introduces as the narrator of the tale a third female gender-trickster protagonist (108).
Scherezade, attempting to delay her execution by King Shahriyar, tells him tale "Number One Thousand and Two." Her story concerns two babies whose genders are switched at birth. She chronicles the infants' lives and how they eventually marry and have twins. When the cross-dressed pair show their son and daughter to their celebrating subjects, the people wonderingly comment: "To think that the father, and not the mother, should be the mother of the babes! Now of a truth are all things possible with God ..." (Mark Twain's Satires and Burlesques 91; 132). The pair's unconsciousness of possessing each others' supposed "correct" gender is similar to Conrad's apparent unawareness of being raised male in "Medieval Romance."