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

Carnival depends on the upsetting of established hierarchies, and, at first view, this is exactly what happens in "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," with 18 of its 19 principle citizens exposed as "liars and thieves" (64) by a stranger who had once received "deep offence" (63) while passing through the town. The only name we have for this stranger is "Howard L. Stephenson," signed to a letter (supposedly from a quite other "stranger") written to put the plan of revenge in action. At the public meeting, as exposure occurs, these 18 "Symbols of Incorruptibility" (54) become the object of complete public ridicule, as the remainder of the community loose their voices in exuberant mockery of them. Thus, to quote Bakhtin, "the joyful relativity of all structure and order, of all authority and all (hierarchical) position" occurs as the "high" town authorities (the first three men exposed are the Deacon, Lawyer and Banker) are brought low, and "mass actions ... and ... the outspoken carnivalistic word" are given their day (Bakhtin, Problems 124, 123).

The social reversal that takes place here is compromised, however, by the position of the main protagonists in the narrative, Mary and Edward Richards. Edward is, we have to assume, one of the 19 principal citizens of Hadleyburg. He gets one of Stephenson's letters, and it is he who is left unexposed, his (nineteenth) letter claiming the gold unread by Burgess, due to an old debt he owes to Edwards. For the latter once warned Burgess, on the occasion of his unspecified disgrace, of the town's plans to "ride him on a rail" (11). The fact that the "town" as a whole is early identified with a violent act against an innocent man warns us not to take the opposition between "the authorities" and "the folk" too seriously here. And if the town is socially heterogeneous (the tanner, we are told, cannot get recognition as one of the 19), any clear gap between high and low is interrogated by the Richardses role.

For Edward Richards is the cashier at the bank. An old man who is neither rich nor successful, his working life consists of being "always at the grind, grind, grind, on a salary--another man's slave" (6). What he is doing here among the "aristocracy" (65) is never explained. The town meeting expresses its respect, honor, and love for Richards: ironically as he tries to interrupt it to confess his own greed and guilt. Jack Halliday validates that judgment, in a resonant metaphor, as the "hall-marked truth" (57). And if, to recall Michelson, power and identity come in the story to reside nowhere and everywhere as folk-life erupts at the meeting, then we might take the Richardses very name as signaling their membership of the general mass rather than the aristocracy. I am thinking here of his similarity of name to Henry Edwards in The Great Dark, and Michelson's description of the Edwardses as a couple who do "not exist, not as real folk nor even in some respect as characters, for they are ... presented as middle-class American everybodies and nobodies ... nonpeople" (Michelson 218). If this description itself calls the definition of "real folk" into question, that does not seem inappropriate once we return to "Hadleyburg." Here it might be argued that in the use of the Richardses, "the town's representative consciousness" (Briden 131), Twain deconstructs the opposition he appears to construct between classes, and between town authorities and folk-life, to suggest a lack of essential difference in kind between them. (16) In "Concerning the Jews," he famously wrote: "I think I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. All that I care to know is that a man is a human being--that is enough for me; he can't be any worse" (254). This statement might be applied, I would suggest, (with the possible exceptions of Sam Halliday and the dead Barclay Goodson) to the community of Hadleyburg. Class difference and social status matter very little if to be a man is to be a human being, and to be a human being is to be a self-interested hypocrite. Any positive conception of folk-life collapses with this equation.