The following book review was written for the Mark Twain Forum by Larry
Howe.

~~~~~

BOOK REVIEW

_Gender Play in Mark Twain: Cross-Dressing and Transgression_. By Linda
Morris. University of Missouri Press, 2008. Hardcover, Pp. 182 + xiv.
ISBN: 978-0-8262-1759-2. $34.95.

Many books reviewed on the Forum are available at discounted prices
from the TwainWeb Bookstore, and purchases from this site generate
commissions that benefit the Mark Twain Project. Please visit
<http://www.twainweb.net>.

Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by:
Larry Howe
Roosevelt University

Copyright (c) 2008 Mark Twain Forum. This review may not be published
or redistributed in any medium without permission.


The work of any literary figure whose legacy endures will attract a
variety of critical interpretations. The ability of that work to make
itself available to a range of perspectives is why the work maintains
its cultural prominence. Mark Twain's work continues to attract a wide
array of critical approaches, but it took some time before feminist
approaches gained any traction in Twain studies. Feminist criticism has
been extremely vital since the 1970s, but Twain seems to have lingered
longer in the masculine shadow. Carolyn Porter, Myra Jehlen, Judith
Fetterley, and Susan Harris were among the first to pry Twain loose
from the domain of critics who saw Twain as a male writer engaged with
male concerns. Subsequent book-length studies, such as Peter Stoneley's
_Mark Twain and the Feminine Aesthetic_ (1992) and Laura
Skandera-Trombley's _Mark Twain in the Company of Women_ (1994),  have
shown how Twain's life and the literary representations of women in his
work engage with feminist issues consistently and emphatically, though
perhaps often subtly.

As feminist criticism has given rise to gender studies, new critical
perspectives have emerged. Linda Morris's _Gender Play in Mark Twain_
demonstrates the merits of interpreting aspects of Twain's writing from
this latest vantage point. Morris's study is among the most recent of
the significant scholarship being published by the "Mark Twain and His
Circle" series from the University of Missouri Press. I've commented
previously on another book in this series, John Bird's _Mark Twain and
Metaphor_ and the difference between these two important books suggests
the diversity of scholarship being published in this enterprise, and
demonstrating how encompassing both Twain's work and the critical
vantages it supports are.

_Gender Play in Mark Twain_ consists of five very efficient chapters.
In the first, “Misplaced Sex,” Morris wastes no time in getting to her
thesis, arguing that Mark Twain's "approach to gender is much more
playful and experimental than most critics allow" and that he
"subverted Victorian notions of fixed gender roles and essentialist
constructions" (1). This introduction also effectively contextualizes
Morris’s study within a number of relevant cultural developments.
First, she considers theatrical traditions from Shakespeare to
minstrelsy, vaudeville, and late-nineteenth century farce, all of which
relied in some degree on playful cross-dressing and gender confusions.
Next, she traces the influence of "New Sexuality" in the late
nineteenth century, referenced in the public fascination with some high
profile cases that were sensationalized in the popular press, such as
the cases of Alice Mitchell and Oscar Wilde, as well as in the rise of
psychological theories by Havelock Ellis and Richard von Krafft-Ebbing.
These would continue to attract the interest of modernist writers in
the next century. Morris also looks at the intrusion of this "new
sexuality" within the sphere of Twain's own life. This occurred most
closely in the affectionate relationship that developed between his
daughter Susy and her college "smash" Louise Brownell, which Morris
places within the social history of women's affection of the period. In
the last section of this chapter, Morris deals with the theoretical
foundations of her approach to Twain's texts. She acknowledges an early
debt to Susan Gilman's _Dark Twins_ (1989), whose observations and
inferences about Twain's concern with clothing, specifically clothing
that did not comply with gender conventions, introduced the topic of
cross-dressing before much of the theory about gender performance had
been formulated. Morris's study also benefits significantly from
Marjorie Garber's _Vested Interests_ (1992) and Judith Butler's _Gender
Trouble_ (1999), both of which theorize the subtexts and implications
of cross-dressing and the function of performance in the social
construction of gender. Morris also draws from Mikhail Bakhtin's
theories of carnivalesque, which have proven very useful to quite a
number of Twain scholars in the last decade or so, as well as other
critical perspectives in subsequent chapters, but many of these derive
from similarly influenced ideas about gender and performance. After
staking out this ground, Morris devotes the subsequent four chapters to
address specific texts across the full spectrum of Twain's career.

The first sustained readings of Twain's work through this gendered lens
arrive in Chapter 2, "Sarah Mary Williams George Elexander Peters."
Beginning with "A Medieval Romance" and "The 1002 Arabian Night," both
of which register Twain's early interest in the theme of gender masking
and its consequences, Morris devotes the bulk of the chapter to showing
how cross-dressing functions throughout _Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn_. As the chapter title clearly implies, the most commonly cited
cross-dressing episode of the novel, when Huck disguises himself in
girl's clothing in his visit with Judith Loftus in Chapter 10, is
prominent. Morris notes how this masquerade introduces Huck to the
series of identity impostures that he will undertake throughout the
novel. More pointedly, she links cross-dressing and gender play with
the often observed undercurrent of death that moves through Huck's
consciousness and the narrative itself. Somewhat less persuasively,
Morris cites Marjorie Garber's thesis that cross-dressing invariably
signals a "category crisis," a type of cultural or social dissonance,
to claim that the "category crisis" in _Huckleberry Finn_ "is
unmistakably race" (28). Clearly race is a crucial issue in the novel,
but it strikes me as imprecise to call it a category crisis. Unlike the
example of _Pudd'nhead Wilson_, which Morris analyzes quite effectively
in the Chapter 3, there is little doubt that the races of characters in
_Huckleberry Finn_ are determined and immutable. Jim's status as slave
or free, on the other hand, or the presumed superior humanity of whites
over blacks, or Huck's crisis with the values of morality or
immorality, are very much in flux in the narrative and qualify as
category crises in this text. This mildly troubling point is, however,
a relatively minor glitch in an otherwise astute reading. Morris
effectively synthesizes the observations of critical forerunners and
offers new insights about gender, bawdy humor, and cultural slippage
which serve as an introduction to concepts that earn far more attention
in the later work that she goes on to examine.

In Chapters 3 and 4, Morris turns her attention to _Pudd'nhead Wilson_
and _Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc_, two narratives in which
gender confusion plays an increasingly central role. In the former,
Morris highlights the dynamics of race and gender in her careful
consideration of Roxana's function both within the plot and as an
unconventionally active figure in American literature, and in Tom's
multiple layers of disguise, masking his gender and more ambiguously
both masking and implicitly acknowledging his racial status. Morris
credits _Pudd'nhead Wilson_ with expressing more fully the racial and
gender crossings that were introduced in _Huckleberry Finn_ and with
"ultimately insist[ing] that race and gender are interconnected
performances that are multivocal and highly unstable" (87). Morris's
research also turns up a surprising connection between _Pudd'nhead
Wilson_ and _Joan of Arc_: on the reverse side of a manuscript page of
the latter, Twain first drafted the motivations for Roxana in
_Pudd'nhead Wilson. This suggests that Twain developed a concept
linking race and gender at the time he was writing _Joan of Arc_, a
story which lacks a racial component.

Joan of Arc's emphatic and defiant flouting of gender conventions
contributes directly to Morris's argument. Her analysis goes beyond
interpretation of Twain's sentimentalized narrative itself to consider
the iconography of illustrations in the text. Moreover, she discusses
how Twain's treatment of his heroine differs from other versions of the
story that circulated in the late nineteenth century, with particular
emphasis on the rigidity of patriarchal authorities who refuse to
countenance Joan's cross-dressing transgressions. Morris concludes by
noting how the story corresponds with Twain's own "patriarchal crisis"
(118) concerning the sexual maturity of his daughters Susy and Clara,
and especially with respect to Susy's relationship with Louise
Brownell.

Chapter 5 examines Mark Twain's later work, all unpublished and in some
cases even unfinished, that deal more directly with gender masquerades
or role reversals. Of the five texts considered here, the story
"Hellfire Hotchkiss" and the play _Is He Dead?_, which enjoyed a
successful run on Broadway earlier this year, receive most of Morris's
attention. These two texts aggressively flout convention and thus yield
a significant payoff to Morris's approach. "Hellfire Hotchkiss" is
singled out for its emphatic resistance to essentialist conformity that
many of the other texts had hinted at. And _Is He Dead?_ uses
theatrical farce to play comically with the idea of gender. As Morris
notes, the play "literally stages gender more completely than does any
other work by Twain. Even wrapped in farce, the male-to-female
transvestitism represents a public commitment on Twain's part to the
notion that gender is a performance--nothing more nothing less" (166).

All of the readings here support Morris's thesis, while leaving room
for further elaboration, as any successfully provocative study should.
However, Morris's book comes to a rather abrupt ending with its remarks
on _Is He Dead?_  Without an epilogue or afterword that ties the
various strands of gendered interpretation together, the book lacks
rhetorical closure. For me, this lack of a conclusion was a
disappointment, and I would have preferred that Morris provide a
resolution that more closely approximates the virtues of the analytical
enterprise. Granted, many scholarly books are not read as complete
wholes, but rather as sections that address particular texts in new and
insightful ways. And for the many readers who will come to her study
for its ability to illuminate the gender trouble in particular texts,
the lack of a conclusion will not be an issue. But for a study that
takes on a canonical writer in a fresh and theoretically challenging
way, a more rhetorically fulfilling ending would have rewarded those
who made the commitment to read the entire argument. Still, to avoid
ending my remarks on what Morris hasn't done, let me re-emphasize here
the clarity and the insight of what she has done. Her study is critical
scholarship marked by a fine analytical intelligence and written in a
lucid prose that reveals the ways in which theory can discover meaning
rather than obscure it. This latest contribution to Twain studies shows
the merits of its approach and demonstrates the ways in which Twain's
writing continues to be relevant to new critical paradigms.