Anti-Imperialism in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee
This paper examines Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court as a sustained critique of imperialism rather than mere comic entertainment. Drawing on the novel's plot, characters, and key passages, the paper argues that Twain's anti-imperialist message is embedded in the very concept of the book — a time-traveling Yankee who imposes modern values on a medieval society with catastrophic results. The analysis considers how Twain's literary executor Albert Bigelow Paine suppressed the political dimensions of his writing, how the novel engages with Manifest Destiny and colonial arrogance, and why Hank Morgan's unshakeable belief in his own superiority serves as an indictment of all imperialist enterprise.
- Introduction: Twain Beyond the Humorist: Twain as social critic, not just humorist
- Anti-Imperialist in Concept: Novel's core concept embeds anti-imperialist critique
- From Humorist to Political Commentator: Twain's political shift and Paine's censorship
- All Imperialists Believe That They Are Right: Hank Morgan as symbol of imperialist arrogance
- Conclusion: Laughing and Thinking: Twain's dual demand: laughter and moral reckoning
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What makes this paper effective
- Grounds its argument in close reading of specific chapters, using extended quotations from the novel to anchor analytical claims rather than relying solely on secondary sources.
- Contextualizes Twain's political writing within the historical suppression of his radical voice by his literary executor, adding a layer of bibliographic and cultural nuance.
- Moves fluidly between broad thematic argument and character-level analysis, using Hank Morgan as both a literary figure and a representative type of the imperialist mindset.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates effective use of textual evidence alongside secondary criticism. Rather than simply summarizing scholars such as Smith, Foner, and Zwick, the writer integrates their arguments to support an independently developed thesis about the novel's anti-imperialist design. This synthesis of primary and secondary sources is a core undergraduate literary analysis skill.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a broad introduction to Twain's dual identity as humorist and social critic, then narrows to Connecticut Yankee as an anti-imperialist text. A middle section explains how Paine's editorial censorship obscured Twain's political voice, followed by analysis of how the novel's core concept embodies the critique. The paper closes by focusing on Hank Morgan's unexamined sense of superiority as the defining trait of all imperialists, ending with an appeal to take Twain seriously as a moral writer.
Introduction: Twain Beyond the Humorist
To most readers of his works in the 21st century, Mark Twain is probably best known as a humorist — someone who, by deft use of language, entertainingly offbeat characters, and the more-than-occasional plot twist, can keep us reading and laughing to the end. But he was in fact far more than simply a humorist. His work — from short stories like "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" to novels like Huckleberry Finn and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court — was as much social commentary and an attempt to right the wrongs of the world he saw around him as it was any attempt to make people laugh. This paper examines the ways in which Twain used wit, repartee, and an engaging cast of characters in Connecticut Yankee to make a strong statement against imperialism.
While some of Twain's work is still recognized as containing an element of social commentary — such as the clearly anti-slavery tone of Huckleberry Finn or the anti-imperialist tenor of Connecticut Yankee — much of it is not. There are at least two reasons for this. The first is that history has to some extent made Twain's protests seem less like protests and more like simple truth.
When we read in "As Regards Patriotism" his warnings against the ways in which calls to protect "homeland security" can take one very far from democracy, or when we read in Huckleberry Finn the plea Twain made not simply against slavery (which had, after all, ended twenty years before that book was published) but more importantly for the treatment of Black Americans as just as important as anyone else, we accept such statements as being what any ordinarily decent person should believe rather than as any sort of radicalism.
The social causes that Twain championed in his writings — which all came down one way or another to a universal respect for people's individual and civil rights — are now the causes of much of the civilized world. As a result, we fail to give him enough credit for speaking out at a time when far fewer people would have agreed with him. A Connecticut Yankee no longer surprises us with its message that colonization (in the novel, of the past by the future; in the real world, of the Philippines by Spain and the United States) can have unintended and terrible consequences.
Twain's novel suggests that when different peoples come together, the one with the simpler weapons will always lose: it takes only a handful of imperialists — and indeed in the novel it takes only one — to lay waste to the structure of an entire culture. The message of the novel is that meddling is bound to lead to terrible consequences, though a secondary reading might well suggest that such imperialist meddling is also inevitable.
The novel, published in 1889, tells the story of a superintendent of a Hartford arms factory who receives a blow on the head that transports him back in time to King Arthur's Court. He uses his modern know-how and Yankee ingenuity to thwart the superstitious inhabitants of the medieval world — and especially the practice of chivalry and the institution of the Church. He is eventually returned to the present by another blow to the head, but the world he leaves behind is already irrevocably changed.
Works Cited
Anderson, Kenneth. "The Ending of Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court." Mark Twain Journal 14 (Summer 1969): 21.
Anderson, Kenneth. "Mark Twain, W.D. Howells, and Henry James: Three Agnostics in Search of Salvation." Mark Twain Journal 15 (Winter 1970): 13–16.
Carter, Everett. "The Meaning of 'A Connecticut Yankee.'" In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. New York: Norton.
Foner, Philip S. Mark Twain: Social Critic. New York: International Publishers, 1958.
Geismar, Maxwell. Mark Twain: An American Prophet. New York: McGraw, 1973.
Hoffman, Daniel G. Form and Fable in American Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961.
Holmes, Charles S. "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court: Mark Twain's Fable of Uncertainty." South Atlantic Quarterly 61:4 (Autumn 1962), 462–72.
Oliver, Nancy S. "New Manifest Destiny in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court." Mark Twain Journal 21:4 (Fall 1983), 28–31.
Sewall, David R. "Hank Morgan and the Colonization of Utopia." In Mark Twain: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Eric J. Sundquist. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1994.
Smith, Janet, ed. Mark Twain on the Damned Human Race. San Francisco: Noonday, 1962.
Twain, Mark. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Twain, Mark. Mark Twain on the Damned Human Race. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1994.
Zwick, J. Mark Twain's Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1992.
Zurlo, John A. "Hank's Egomania." Mark Twain Journal 21.3 (Spring 1983): 60.
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