The Columbia History of the American Novel

Belt.

It seems altogether inevitable, this rush to technological armageddon. In a few strokes, Mark Twain has demolished the Yankee's England and, as if by predetermination, moved him into the rationalized madness and obsession with mechanized warfare and megadeaths. The passages of text that move us from Hank's departure from wife and baby into war plans with Gatling guns and mass electrocution seem, in fact, so seamless and inevitable, so much predestined (especially as readers begin to graph Hank's hankerings for -472- power and his violent impulses), so much a given in the story that one scarcely thinks to ask, Why not go back to France? Why not return, that is, to Sandy and the baby? — and therefore, on Twain's part, reclaim and reaffirm the most deeply felt and recurrently reinscribed values in the novel. For scenes of separated lovers and sundered families recur throughout A Connecticut Yankee and form its emotional center. The injustice of Arthurian England is personalized as injustice to human beings in their bonds of kinship and domesticity. The. model of and the ideal for human relationships in the novel are family bonds of love and enduring devotion, emphatically affirmed whenever threatened by mortal illness and the vagaries of politics and economics.

This ideal of familial love, moreover, has come to Hank Morgan in his marriage and fatherhood, as he tells us in recounting the very sequence of events that separates him from his wife and baby. Sandy is 'a flawless wife and mother….a prize.' Hank says, 'I became her worshipper; and ours was the dearest and perfectest comradeship that ever was. People talk about beautiful friendships between two persons of the same sex. What is the best of that sort, as compared with the friendship of man and wife, where the best impulses and highest ideals of both are the same?'

Why not, then, return to France, seeing the shambles in England? (For Hank has realized that the 'church was going to keep the upper hand and snuff out all my beautiful civilization…my dream of a republic to be a dream, and so remain.') Yet for him, as we have learned, another dream, that of familial bliss, has become a reality. And so — why not return?

Implicitly, of course, Twain has attempted to foreclose that possibility. The doctors who prescribed the journey for the baby's health, we learn — the very captain and crew in whose care the Morgans sailed — were agents of the church in service to the scheme for interdiction. Hereafter no site in Christendom is safe for the Yankee.

Yet what is significant here is the absence of the posed alternative, the posed consideration of domesticity affirmed in a return to Sandy and the baby. From his command post inside the magician's, Merlin's, cave, Hank tells us he could sit by the hour evoking a surrogate family scenario by writing the unmailable letters that enable him to -473- pretend to be in the midst of his loved ones. 'It was almost like having us all together again….it was almost like talking; it was almost as if I was saying, ' Sandy, if you and Hello-Central were here in the cave, instead of your photographs.'' The husband-father summons them in self-referential narratives and in photographic signs but does not once consider slipping away (with or without Clarence and the fifty-two boys) to rejoin them. The Yankee does not pose the possibility of this alternative. Much less reject it, he does not bring it to conscious consideration.

In fact, Mark Twain's omission of this alternative — even of consideration of it — is deeply rooted in the technological eschatological tradition extending from Colonial texts through Emerson. For Mark Twain's decision in this novel to enter into the world of contemporary technology virtually precluded the domestic-familial alternative that, by the late nineteenth century, was identified with the women's sphere. In trying to claim both technological and domestic American culture within one realm, Twain inevitably discovered that he could not have both but must choose between them. The ostensible choice, however, had really been made for him, predetermined as a millennial-technological legacy extending from Puritan colonialism through Emerson. For Mark Twain's Yankee was Emerson's young American, a white man in and of the New World, in full possession of it. And that world is constituted on masculine terms of precise calibration in the survey, and of engineering, of construction, of design. When Twain's predetermined adherence to the masculine technological world leads him to take leave of domesticity, Hank Morgan becomes himself the incarnation of positivist, rationalist technological values gone mad. He becomes a deformed figure, monomaniacal and monstrous. Readers are caught in the Emersonian realm inverted into madness by this agent of holocaust. The national technological narrative thus takes dystopian form.

Contrarily, however, American utopian technological novels also have abounded, undergirded by belief in inevitable progress. Their advocates have believed in societal perfection attainable by changes in material conditions and focused on the heightening of the general welfare, which is to say that they rely on the expertise increasingly attributed to the engineer. These novels include King Camp Gillette's The Human Drift (1894), Henry Olerich's A Cityless and Countryless-474- World: An Outline of Practical Co-operative Individualism (1893), Herman Brinsmade's Utopia Achieved: A Novel of the Future (1912).

Though the gendering of technology as a mainly male sphere has militated against its exploitation by women in the American novel, one prominent women's technological utopia is feminist reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915), which presents a women's civilization in a mountainous, remote region so difficult to reach that it has evaded discovery even in the great Victorian era of exploration. Herland, begun two thousand years ago with a slave revolt, is a civilization of 'clean, well-built roads, attractive architecture, ordered beauty' hidden beyond 'a desperate tangle of wood and water' over craggy mountains. Sustained by single-sex reproduction, Herland locates its ideological basis in maternal love ('Maternal Pantheism') and sisterhood extended for 'Beauty, Health, Strength, Intellect, Goodness.' Knowledge and expertise are shared and disseminated. Gilman's narrators, a group of male explorers, come technologically equipped with machinery from a 'big steam yacht' to an airplane, to discover a world solely inhabited by women: 'old women and young women and a great majority who seemed neither young nor old, but just women.' Herland becomes Gilman's vehicle for criticism of contemporary industrial America, its barbaric exploitation of women workers, cruelty to animals, economic inequities, military aggression, separation of home from work. Herland's industrial attainments (including eugenics) are presupposed, though its readers encounter a discourse that is mainly pastoral, for example, of the babies growing 'just as young fawns might grow up in dewy forest glades and brook- fed meadows.' Herland propounds the values of a rationalized, egalitarian society asserted to be technologically advanced but pastoral in practice. Its geographic remoteness suggests Gilman's anxiety about masculine appropriation of women's sphere.

Sharing Gilman's outrage at the human misery concomitant with capitalist economics, Edward Bellamy wrote the best known of all American technological utopian novels, Looking Backward, 20001887. Bellamy, a newspaper journalist, determined to combine popular romance with a vision of the engineered, utopian American future. His protagonist, a Bostonian named Julian West, falls into a trance-sleep and awakens in the year 2000 to find that his late -475- nineteenth-century Boston, a synecdoche for the United States, no longer suffers from the socioeconomic instability that precipitates human tragedy — orphanage, destitution, crime, insanity, suicide. These he terms 'prodigious wastes' that are susceptible to correction in the rationalized system of human planning and design. In short, Bellamy's protagonist awakes to learn that social amelioration has been accomplished by the engineering of society and its means of production. Certain inventions, such as radio, pneumatic transfer, central heat and ventilation, and electric lighting, increase human comfort and health and remind one that technology is a part of the discourse of this novel. But the ethos of the engineer is uppermost, with the valuation of efficiency and the means for its achievement. Looking Backward is a celebration of efficient America and of the engineers entrusted to plan and sustain it. It is a reprise of the millennialist technological visions extending back to the seventeenth century.

The reliance upon engineering enters into Ezra Pound's identification of the novel as an engine with precisely positioned wheels. His definition of the novel as machine shifts emphasis from story to functional design, from narration to construction. The values of modernism, as he and others knew, claimed kinship with those of engineering — functionalism, efficiency, stability, utilitarianism, design, and construction.

Nor was the linkage to engineering a recondite or high-culture relation, for early twentieth-century America saw the engineer become a popular culture hero for the industrial age, just as the cowboy had symbolized the era of westward expansion. Engineers, as one writer said, were now 'true poets, makers whose creations touch the imagination and move the world.' One manifestation of this socially broad-based engagement in engineering was the so-called efficiency movement of the 1910s, when one engineer, Frederick Winslow Taylor, disgusted by the wasteful inefficiency of industrial work practices rife with superfluous movements, analyzed workers' motions down