Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court as a Dystopian Work Essay

Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court as a Dystopian Work For years, Mark Twains A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court has been primarily viewed as a work of simple satire. Twain, desiring to poke fun at a group of Americas ethnical critics, chief among them Matthew Arnold, who claimed that cultural life in the U.S. treaded on shallow soil, takes aim at the venerated institutions of Britain. The author attempts to show that his countrys lack of romanticized social structures, meaning an absence of royalty, the Catholic church, and long-dead knights and princesses, was far from a cultural weakness. Twain explodes the myth around idealized chivalric society and proves it to be no match for the Nineteenth Century man. The book follows Twains protagonist Hank Morgan, a pragmatist and the authors model of self-made, turn-of-the-century industrialist, through a time travel jump that lands him in Sixth Century England, specifically at the fabled Camelot. Here Hank, through readiness and entrepreneurial vigor, quickly ascends to the top of the socio-political structure of King Arthurs Court. Whats more, Twain takes great pains in ridiculing both the role of the church in England and the ignoble short letter and lack of intelligence of the ruling royalty. He also pokes fun at the romanticizing of English culture during this period by illustrating the prostrate and dependent nature of the British aristocratic system -- a system void of democratic mechanism. As a work of social satire, the beginning of the novel is fairly successful. At the source of the work, Twain accomplishes what must have been his original task. The opening chapters, the direct attack, the... ...mbolic of American innocence and the Morgan and his machines of destruction as symbols of capitalism and industrialization, the novel becomes not chaotic literary failure, but dystopian science fiction popularized in the Twentieth Century. Where Huxley and others predicted enslavement to technology, Twain asserts that innocence and naivet have no place in and will be wiped out by modern society. His final analysis is that they cannot coexist. Works Cited Bellamy, Gladys Carmen. Mark Twain as a Literary Artist. Norman University of Oklahoma Press, 1950. DeVoto, Benard. Mark Twains America. capital of Massachusetts Little, Brown, and Company, 1935. Twain, Mark. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court. New York P.F. Collier and Son Company, 1889. Wagenknecht, Edward. Mark Twain The Man and His Work. Norman University of Oklahoma Press, 1935.