Carnival in Mark Twain's "Stirring Times in Austria" and "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg" - Articles

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1998 by Peter Messent

The theme of dislocation and alienation, too, is increasingly prominent in this period, and is often linked to that of self-division. (4) In "Is He Living or Is He Dead?," Twain narrates how a (fictional) Francois Millet fakes his own death, with the help of artist friends, and takes on a new identity; and how his works then rise phenomenally in price. This might be read biographically both in terms of some buried desire on the author's part to shuck off the burdens of his invented public persona, or as a fictional exploration at a time of some financial anxiety of the question of the "value" of that persona as measured both in personal and professional terms. The view given of Theophile Magnan (the renamed Millet), who now appears "alone in the world, ... always looks sad and dreamy, and doesn't talk with anybody" (182), and who, despite his financial rewards, goes (it seems) ungreeted even by his previously "doting" and "inseparable" friend (184), speaks of anxieties about identity and estrangement that are repeated, in different ways, over and over in Twain's late fiction.

I am arguing, then, that the writings put together in the Hadleyburg collection are not quite the rag-bag of disparate materials we might expect, especially given the speed with which Twain was churning out books at this time (15 between 1889 and 1900; 12 from 1902 to 1909 [Rubin-Dorsky 1, 2]). The correlative of this is to suggest that we might gain critically by looking more closely at Twain's short stories and essays in the full context of the book in which they first appeared. Rather than extending my analysis of the other stories and essays in Hadleyburg, however, I narrow focus to set the one short story "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg" against the political essay "Stirring Times in Austria" (on a series of dramatic events in the Austrian parliament in late 1897). In doing this, I extend Cynthia Ozick's initial exploration of the complementary nature of these texts, where she writes of the Austrian parliament, as Twain represents it, as "a non-homogeneous Hadleyburg corrupted well past greed into the contagion of chaos and contumely." The trace of the word "Hapsburg" in "Hadleyburg" helps to reinforce the analogy made here.

If the Hadleyburg townspeople, unlike the Hapsburg parliament with its 19 national groupings, are apparently from the same ethnic background, Ozick notes that "their interests [too] conflict as if they held nothing in common" (xxxix). (5) For her, the crux of both pieces lies in the issue of language. In "Stirring Times in Austria," Twain explains how ratification of the Ausgleich, the treaty that formally links the Austro-Hungarian Empire, has been jeopardized by the deal Count Bedani, leader of the government, has made with the Czechs, "making the Czech tongue the official language in Bohemia in place of the German." The German-speaking minority, "incensed" (292) by this move, obstructs government business--in particular that of the Ausgleich--until the status of their own language should once more be restored. Ozick compares the 19 states in the Austrian parliament to the 19 worthies in Hadleyburg, and sees the way both the parliamentarians and leading citizens "furiously compete" as analogous: "we can recognize in Hadleyburg the dissolving Austria-Hungary of the 1890's" (xl).