I came across a curious passage in Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court a couple days ago, while on the road. The book itself is interesting set of contradictions, between its embrace of the terror of the French Revolution, and a blind acceptance of evolutionary progress. I suspect that this rich set of symptoms have been written about quite extensively, but, to be honest, it's not really in my field of study. However, I thought I would present one of the more interesting passages within the text, although without much commentary. Historically, the notion of 'whiteness' or white privilege has its origins in the work of W.E.B. DuBois, however we can find a fairly crude version of the hypothesis in Twain's 1889 work, or perhaps more specifically, it poses the problem that DuBois offers a solution to, why did 'poor whites' support the 'slave-lords', rather than those in a similar, although worse condition? Twain captures the structures of privilege and rank within the feudal society of the 7th century, arguing that these hierarchical structures hold the entire structure in place, but the analogy is never made explicit in the text, left to the reader to make the connection. As a matter of fact, in the passage below, Twain implies that the structure had been abolished with the Civil War, something Twain should have known better about given the results of the compromise of 1877, which ended the Reconstruction, and the terror that came afterwards. Nonetheless, the passage is certainly evocative, and gestures towards the fact that DuBois' insight was in response to a long history of inquiry, which has its origins, in a certain sense, to the work of Montaigne and others.
" I was just expecting he would come out with that. For a moment
the man and his wife showed an eager interest in this news and an
impatience to go out and spread it; then a sudden something else
betrayed itself in their faces, and they began to ask questions. I
answered the questions myself, and narrowly watched the effects
produced. I was soon satisfied that the knowledge of who these three
prisoners were had somehow changed the atmosphere; that our hosts'
continued eagerness to go and spread the news was now only pretended
and not real. The king did not notice the change, and I was glad of
that. I worked the conversation around toward other details of the
night's proceedings, and noted that these people were relieved to
have it take that direction.
The painful thing observable
about all this business was the alacrity with which this oppressed
community had turned their cruel hands against their own class in
the interest of the common oppressor. This man and woman seemed to
feel that in a quarrel between a person of their own class and his
lord, it was the natural and proper and rightful thing for that poor
devil's whole caste to side with the master and fight his battle for
him, without ever stopping to inquire into the rights or wrongs of the
matter. This man had been out helping to hang his neighbors, and had
done his work with zeal, and yet was aware that there was nothing
against them but a mere suspicion, with nothing back of it describable
as evidence, still neither he nor his wife seemed to see anything horrible about it
This
was depressing -- to a man with the dream of a republic in
his head. It reminded me of a time thirteen centuries away, when the
"poor whites" of our South who were always despised and frequently
insulted by the slave-lords around them, and who owed their base
condition simply to the presence of slavery in their midst, were yet
pusillanimously ready to side with the slave-lords in all political
moves for the upholding and perpetuating of slavery, and did also
finally shoulder their muskets and pour out their lives in an effort
to prevent the destruction of that very institution which degraded
them. And there was only one redeeming feature connected with that
pitiful piece of history; and that was, that secretly the "poor white"
did detest the slave-lord, and did feel his own shame. That
feeling was not brought to the surface, but the fact that it was there
and could have been brought out, under favoring circumstances, was
something -- in fact, it was enough; for it showed that a man
is at bottom a man, after all, even if it doesn't show on the outside."
--Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
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