Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad and American Attitudes Abroad
This essay examines Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad as a commentary on American attitudes toward foreign peoples and places. Drawing on Twain's 1867 journey through Europe and the Middle East aboard the Quaker City, the paper analyzes how Twain simultaneously criticizes his fellow travelers for their arrogance and ignorance while himself perpetuating many of the same ethnocentric prejudices. Through close reading of key passages and engagement with secondary scholarship by Bennett Kravitz and Mordecai Richler, the essay explores themes of American cultural superiority, national innocence, and the tension between European tradition and American identity that runs throughout the book.
- Overview of Innocents Abroad: Book's origins, purpose, and central themes
- Travel, Discomfort, and Being 'Foreignized': Twain's humorous account of travel hardships
- American Ignorance and Arrogance Abroad: Fellow travelers' ignorance and boastful behavior
- Twain's Own Prejudices and Ethnocentrism: Twain's unexamined stereotypes about foreign peoples
- American Cultural Superiority and the European Tradition: American identity measured against European culture
- Conclusion: Shaping American Attitudes: Travel writing as mirror of American worldview
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What makes this paper effective
- It balances close textual analysis with secondary scholarship, weaving direct quotations from Twain alongside critical commentary from Kravitz and Richler to support its argument.
- The paper maintains a consistent central tension — Twain critiques his fellow travelers' ethnocentrism while unknowingly exhibiting the same attitudes — and returns to this irony throughout.
- Specific, well-chosen passages from the primary text illustrate each analytical point, keeping the argument grounded in evidence rather than generalization.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates effective use of the narrator-as-unreliable-observer framework. By positioning Twain simultaneously as critic and subject of critique, the writer uses secondary sources (particularly Kravitz) to expose the gap between what Twain claims to observe about others and what his own text reveals about himself. This layered reading — using the author's blind spots as evidence — is a sophisticated interpretive move in literary analysis.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens with an overview of the book's context and purpose, then moves through specific episodes illustrating Twain's travel observations. It builds from external criticism of fellow travelers toward internalized American ethnocentrism, culminating in Kravitz's argument that Twain cannot recognize his own cultural innocence. The conclusion ties the textual analysis back to the broader theme of how American attitudes toward the foreign world are formed and expressed.
Overview of Innocents Abroad
Mark Twain wrote about a trip to Europe and the Middle East in his book Innocents Abroad, and in the course of the book he also reveals much that he observes about American foreign policy in the broadest sense. This means not so much about foreign policy as it is typically understood — the policies of the American government — but more about the source of such policy: the attitudes of the American people toward foreign places. On the one hand, Twain criticizes certain behavior on the part of his fellow travelers, which shows them to be arrogant toward, as well as somewhat ignorant about, many of the regions through which they travel. On the other hand, Twain himself exhibits many of these same traits, assuming the superiority of anything American over anything foreign.
The Innocents Abroad is a book that began as a series of letters written by Mark Twain for a San Francisco newspaper concerning his 1867 trip on the Quaker City. The travelers on this ship were for the most part motivated by a desire to see the Holy Land. Twain's major purpose in making the trip was to see a part of the world he had not yet seen, and his purpose in writing the book was to reveal to others what he had witnessed firsthand — the reality of the world, separated from the interference of pretense and convention. He wanted the account to be both informative and entertaining. The book that resulted is a mixture of irreverence and the promotion of America as an ideal. One of the central themes is the degree to which reality differs from the narrator's expectations. The narrator visits not only the Holy Land but most of Europe, and he reacts to such institutions as Paris, the Old Masters in Italy, and Roman Catholicism. Twain also pokes fun at the hypocrisies of the religious pilgrims traveling with him and at such elements common to travelers as guidebooks and hotel rooms.
Works Cited
Kravitz, Bennett. "There's No Place Like Home: 'Geographies of the [American] Mind' in The Innocents Abroad." American Studies International 35(2) (June 1997), 52–76.
Richler, Mordecai. "'The Innocents Abroad' or the New Pilgrim's Progress." New Criterion 14(9) (May 1996), 10–18.
Twain, Mark. Innocents Abroad. New York: Greystone, 1922.
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