I am posting this book review on behalf of Janice McIntire-Strasburg who
wrote it.

Barbara Schmidt

~~~~~

Cooley, John, ed. _How Nancy Jackson Married Kate Wilson and Other Tales of
Rebellious Girls and Daring Young Women_. Lincoln and London: University of
Nebraska Press, 2001. pp. xvi +255, Paper, Dimensions (in inches): 0.55 x
8.98 x 5.03   ISBN 0803294425.

Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by:

Janice McIntire-Strasburg
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St. Louis University

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Copyright (c) 2001 Mark Twain Forum. This review may not be published or
redistributed in any medium without permission.

John Cooley has collected and placed together in one slim volume Mark
Twain's short pieces about young women and girls who break the mold of
Victorian female gender roles. Many of these tales have been published
elsewhere: "Little Bessie" and "Saint Joan of Arc" have appeared in Louis
Budd's _Sketches and Tales_ (1991); "A Medieval Romance" has been reprinted
in McCullough and McIntire-Strasburg's _Mark Twain at the Buffalo Express_
(1999) and "Eve's Diary" has been collected in _The Bible According to Mark
Twain_ by Baetzhold and McCullough (1995). However, the value of this
present collection does not rely upon publishing previously unavailable
works. It lies in the ability to read several of Twain's short pieces
dealing with young female protagonists, often written years apart, as a
cohesive whole.

The text contains a Preface and a short Introduction in which Cooley
briefly places Twain in the Victorian tradition, discusses his conflicting
emotions toward women's suffrage/independence, and posits the stories about
young women (teenaged or younger) as a space for Twain's examination of
these conflicts. The Afterward contains a short analysis of each of the
tales, relating them to biographical details about Clara and Suzy and
Twain's "Aquarium," the young girls (Angelfish) that he kept in contact
with in his last years. The selected bibliography and suggestions for
further reading point readers toward the major scholarly work written about
Twain and women, including works by Susan Harris, Shelley Fisher-Fishkin,
Susan Gillman, and Laura Skandera-Trombley.

One of the collection's strengths is its extensive and carefully written
head notes. The tales it contains span Twain's writing career, some written
as early as the 1860s and the majority between 1895 and 1908. In them,
Cooley gives a quick synopsis of the story line, places the individual
story within Twain's biography and body of work, and attempts to draw from
these sources Twain's conception of women. Several of the tales employ the
devices of cross-dressing, transvestitism, or gender role switching,
devices that Cooley discusses in both introduction and afterward as
demonstrating Twain's equivocal stance on gender roles and the New Woman.

In his introduction, Cooley points out that "[u]ntil very recently, Mark
Twain's portraits of female characters have been dismissed as
stereotypical" and that this collection of stories, in which the (young)
female protagonists are not "waiting at home, polishing their domestic arts
and hoping for a marriage proposal" will cause scholars to "revise previous
assessments that Twain was ineffective in representing women and
unreceptive to women's rights." While the collection offers scholars a good
cross-section of stories in which Twain uses female characters, in the end
it probably will not change how they view Twain's treatment of women in his
work. Wapping Alice, the protagonist in the story of the same name, is a
man dressed as a woman, and thus doesn't qualify as a female character at
all. Nancy Jackson's cross-dressing and masquerade as a man is a result of
the revenge plot of a male character, and the duke's daughter in "A
Medieval Romance" has dressed as a boy her entire life because of her
father's desire to usurp the throne from his brother. Less problematic are
the portrayals of Joan of Arc, Hellfire Hotchkiss, and Cathy of "A Horse's
Tale," all three of which illustrate strong, intelligent young women who
take on roles generally reserved to men and perform them as well or better
than their male counterparts.  Unfortunately two of these young girls die,
and the third (Hellfire Hotchkiss) must conceal her "male" tendencies as
she approaches adulthood in order to survive in a small-town male dominated
world.

Rather than choose one sustained conceptual framework for the collection,
Cooley has chosen to present several.  On the one hand, he suggests that
the stories about young girls Twain has written, particularly the ones
written late in his life, are reflections of his nostalgia--his fond
recollections of his daughters. He also suggests that they represent
Twain's bifurcated thought concerning women's rights--his attempt to
wrestle with Victorian traditions and his own inherent respect for the
intelligence and strength of the women in his life.  In addition, he
attempts to tie the tales together with Twain's fascination with the
Angelfish--the new generation of young women growing up in the shadow of
the suffragette movement. While this approach does an excellent job of
illustrating lines of inquiry for future scholarship on Twain and women, it
tends to detract from the unity and rationale for the collection as a
whole.

As a collected representation of female subjects, one obvious omission is
"A True Story." Outside of the characterizations of Roxy (_Pudd'nhead
Wilson_) and Joan of Arc, she is the strongest of Twain's women, and should
be represented here. Also missing is "The Death Disk," another tale in
which a young girl plays a major role. The stories that are present are an
enjoyable read, and an analysis of them in conjunction with other, more
fully developed characters in more sustained works should generate research
in this sometimes neglected area of Twain scholarship.