Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture

by Shelley Fisher Fishkin

Mark Twain has been called the American Cervantes, our Homer, our Tolstoy, our Shakespeare. Ernest Hemingway maintained that "all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn ." President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the phrase "New Deal" from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court . Twain's Gilded Age gave an entire era its name. Twain is everywhere--in ads for Bass Ale, in episodes of "Star Trek," as a greeter in Nevada's Silver Legacy casino. Clearly, the reports of his death have been greatly exaggerated. In Lighting Out for the Territory , Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin blends personal narrative with reflections on history, literature, and popular culture to provide a lively and provocative look at who Mark Twain really was, how he got to be that way, and what we do with his legacy today.
Fishkin illuminates the many ways that America has embraced Mark Twain--from the scenes and plots of his novels, to his famous quips, to his bushy-haired, white-suited persona. She reveals that we have constructed a Twain often far removed from the actual writer. For instance, we travel to Hannibal, Missouri, Mark Twain's home town, a locale that in his work is both the embodiment of the innocence of childhood and also an emblem of hypocrisy, barbarity, and moral rot. The author spotlights the fact that Hannibal today attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists and takes in millions yearly, by focusing on Tom Sawyer's boyhood exploits--marble-shoots and white-washed fences--and ignoring Twain's portraits of the darker side of the slave South. The narrative moves back and forth from modern Hannibal to antebellum Hannibal and to Mark Twain's childhood experiences with brutality and slavery. Her exploration of those subjects in his work shows that Tom Sawyer's fence isn't the only
thing being white-washed in Hannibal. Fishkin's research yields fresh insights into the remarkable story of how this child of slaveholders became the author of the most powerful anti-racist novel by an American.
Whether lending his name to a pizza parlor in Louisiana, a diner in Jackson Heights, New York, or an asteroid in outer space, whether making cameo appearances on "Cheers" and "Bonanza," or turning up in novels as a detective or a love interest, Mark Twain's presence in contemporary culture is pervasive and intriguing. Fishkin's wide-ranging examination of that presence demonstrates how Twain and his work echo, ripple, and reverberate throughout our society. We learn that Walt Disney was a great fan of Twain's fiction (in fact, "Tom Sawyer's Island" in Disneyland is the only part of the park that Disney himself designed) as is Chuck Jones, who credits the genesis of cartoon character Wile E. Coyote to the comic description of a coyote in Roughing It . We learn of Mark Twain impersonators (Hal Holbrook, for instance, has played Twain in some 1,500 performances) and recent movie versions of Twain books, such as A Million to Juan . And we discover how Twain's image can be seen in
claymation, in animatronics and robotics, in virtual reality, and on any number of home-pages on the Internet.
Lighting Out for the Territory offers an engrossing look at how Mark Twain's life and work have been cherished, memorialized, exploited, and misunderstood. It offers a wealth of insight into Twain, into his work, and into our nation, both past and present.

Genres: History, Literature, Nonfiction

276 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Shelley Fisher Fishkin is a Professor of English, Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities, and Director of American Studies at Stanford University. She is the author, editor or co-editor of over forty books and has published over eighty articles, essays and reviews. Issues of gender figure prominently in her most recent monograph, Feminist Engagements: Forays into American Literature and Culture (Palgrave/Macmillan 2009), which was selected as an "Outstanding Academic Title" by Choice; in Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism, which she co-edited in 1994 (Oxford UP); and People of the Book: Thirty Scholars Reflect on Their Jewish Identity, which she co-edited in 1996, (Wisconsin UP). Gender issues are also central to much of her work on Mark Twain including the Historical Guide to Mark Twain, which she edited in 2002 (Oxford UP) and to her edition of the previously unpublished gender-bending play, "Is He Dead?" A New Comedy by Mark Twain, which she published in 2003 (University of California Press) and helped produce on Broadway in 2007. She has published articles on women writers including Gloria Anzaldúa, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Erica Jong, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Tillie Olsen, and was a co-founder of Charlotte Perkins Gilman Society, which is still going strong after 20 years. She has served as President of the American Studies Association and is a Founding Editor of the Journal of Transnational American Studies. Current research interests include feminism and American literature; what we can learn from the first four decades of Ms. Magazine; the intersections between public history and literary history; and transnational perspectives on American literature.

(from http://gender.stanford.edu/people/she...)

Reviews

[John Kissell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well done and robust defense of Twain's place in American literature and the larger culture. I highly recommend " Lighting Out for the Territory" if you're looking for a companion to "Huck Finn" and a scholarly look at Twain.

[Trevor Seigler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mark Twain has held a central position in American literature and popular culture ever since he debuted the Celebrated Jumping Frog over 150 years ago. Wrestling with his legacy via his most well-known work ("The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"), Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin makes the argument that Twain's legacy (circa 1997, when this book was published) is in danger of being marginalized and whitewashed (in many cases, literally). Twain's hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, holds "Mark Twain Days" which acknowledge the hijinks of Tom Sawyer but do little if anything to mark the town's importance as an outpost in a slave state, where families like Twain's owned or sold slaves. She looks at the ways in which "Huck Finn" is removed from school reading lists (often for the use of the "n-word" throughout the book), and argues why this approach misses the point of Twain's discussion of racism and its entrenched status not just in Antebellum America (the setting of the novel) but in the time of the novel's composition in the 1870's and 1880's. Fishkin ends with a discussion of Twain's prominence in culture all over the world, where even if his works aren't read as much, he survives as the "prototypical American" in the eyes of many. This is a fun, important work of literary and cultural criticism, and I'm glad I finally got around to reading it (had it in my book collection for years).

[Tom]

Much the book is painful reading, as Ms. Fishkin takes us into the world of Hannibal, MO, Twain's world, and explores with the reader how a boy growing up in the midst of slavery could become such an advocate of Civil Rights. In some ways, then, Fishkin still asks that question of us: because racism persists, in spite of our sometimes feigned wide-eyed confusion at the very suggestion of it, and through Twain, helps us explore our own development and insight.

Fishkin doesn't let us off the hook, and in view of recent SCOTUS decisions and the simmering racism that pervades so much of our culture, her questions remain unanswered, even as Twain's famous book ends sadly - waiting for America to write a better ending.

Loaded with research on Twain and his times, and lots of conversation with Twain's critics, those favorable and those not. Fishkin clearly demonstrates that critics who accuse Twain of racism are way off the mark, failing to understand the character of irony and Twain's purpose - to show us how "good people" can be so wrong.

For anyone who wants to know more about Twain and his most famous work, "Huckleberry Finn," and who wants to think a bit about America's continuing struggle to define its national self, what with our highest pronouncements on equality and our lowest forms of behavior, then this book is for you.

Not always a quick read, but a necessary read to understand Twain and see a little more clearly the struggles that yet lie ahead for America.

[Frank · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book might usefully be thought of as a companion volume to Fishkin's groundbreaking study Was Huck Black?, which examined the influence of African American voices on Twain's fiction, and particularly on Huck's vernacular narration. In this latter book, Fishkin presents three long essays that consider the broader meanings of Twain's life and work in the context of American racism. In the first section, she travels to Hannibal, Mo., to investigate how the town memorializes black history and Twain's anti-racism. She finds that, for the most part, it ignores both. In the second section, she follows the events and people in Twain's life that helped him to transform from someone who accepted the racist attitudes that he'd grown up with to someone who wrote a novel that dramatized the horrifying ordinariness of racism, how "it was not the villains who made the system work but the ordinary folks who did nothing more than fail to question what was going on around them." In the third and weakest section, she catalogues how Twain's image and work have echoed and been perpetuated throughout American culture and throughout the world. Overall, I enjoyed this book quite a bit. Twenty years old, it feels a bit dated, but clearly Fishkin is an important and insightful Twain scholar whose work is foundational for later scholarly efforts like Andrew Levy's Huck Finn's America, which I read earlier this summer.

[Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

well-reasoned and interesting consideration of Mark Twain's works and his influence (as well as some examples of him appearing as character in other author's works). A few illustrations.