Exploring Laura Skandera-Trombley’s Article: Mark Twain’s Cross-Dressing Oeuvre

1. Exploring Laura Skandera-Trombley’s Article: Mark Twain’s Cross-Dressing Oeuvre Presented by: Pam Eyster, Amanda Paulsen, and Alissa Dvorak

2. Overview of the Article • “Laura Skandera-Trombley discusses Mark Twain’s use of cross-dressing in some of his works and explore society being reflected by Twain’s writings, such as “Medieval Romance” and “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.””

3. The Thesis of Skandera-Trombley’s Article • “In his transvestites tales Twain was identifying and challenging social constructions of gender, distribution of power within a patriarchal society, and socially determined racial categories.”

4. The ways the article supports the thesis: • Many examples found within his literary works. • Examples that reflect Twain’s personal life, and the ways they end up in his literary works.

5. Examples from Twain’s Literary Works: Medieval Romance” • In this story the characters sex necessitates cross dressing in order for inheritance and dynastic structures to remain in tact.

6. In Medieval Romance the main character is a female who has been raised as a male by her father. She is portrayed as the first gender-trickster transvestite character, even though she is unaware she is. Her father informs her when she is 28 years old, the deception of her identity, in order to win the monarchy. Twain’s Medieval Romance: identifying and challenging social constructions of gender

7. Transvestitism Depicted in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn • All of the main characters wear female clothing during different parts of the book.

8. An interesting scene of specific interest that occurs: ●Tom Sawyer reflects on a body found in the river, and the victim’s apparel: “But wasn’t comfortable long, because I happen to think of something. I knowned mighty well that a drowned man don’t float on his back, but on his face. So I knowed then, that this wasn’t pap, but a woman dressed up in a man’s clothes” (15). ● Easily overlooked, the reader might look at this as the possibility of a female cross dresser who may have met foul play. ● Two questions that Skandera-Trombley asks: -”Is the drowned woman simply a southern transvestite, or could Twain be testing the reader’s knowledge of African-American antebellum history?” ●This makes the reader question if this was a slave fleeing from enslavement, who could have been killed or accidently drowned. ● With this said, Twain started to connect gender to race.

9. Another Gender Trickster: Huckleberry Finn • Wanting to know what is going on and if anyone is looking for him, Huck desguises himself as a girl, and tries to get information from Mrs. Judith Loftus. • Mrs. Loftus suspecting that Huck is not a girl, gives Huck a series of gendertype tests, such as threading a needle. • Huck’s feminine disguise may have been Twain’s way of giving Huck insight into Jim’s predicament. To understand Jim’s problem, Huck needs to know how it feels to be powerless, therefore Twain makes him a girl. • When Huck is dresses as a female, through Mrs. Loftus he learns, “that being female means, among other things, restricted movement and a required lack of intellectual and physical prowess.” • Loftus continues by giving Huck a lesson on gender roles and expectations.

10. Huck learns the powerlessness associated with the female gender. This part of the novel, makes Huck and the reader realize that, “racial hatred is, like gender, a socio-cultural construct, not a biological certitude.” The use of Twain’s cross-dressing connects the types of restraints the female gender have and connects them to the same restraints African-Americans have that are constructed by society. Huckleberry, the Gender Trickster cont.

11. Twain’s personal experience with transvestism Did Twain’s interest in writing about cross-dressing extend into his personal life? How did this affect his writing? Why did he cross-dress at times?

12. Twain’s personal experience with transvestism cont. Twain was very interested in both gender and racial differences (90). He wrote about transvestism before he wrote about race issues. It appears that Twain “transgressed into cross-dressing” himself (93). Twain dressed in whatever attire was required in family productions and charades (93). Twain had a picture taken of himself in a woman’s dress with his daughter, circa 1890 Skandera-Trombley feels that Twain’s dressing as a woman might have been a way for him to escape the confines of masculinity (93). Twain knew of Harriet Jacobs, a slave who wrote an autobiography with cross-dressing involved

13. Shedding New Light • Laura Skandera-Trombley says: “While I am not the first to discuss Twain’s use of cross-dressing…what has not been previously explored is the society being reflected in Twain’s writings whose culture and history is being portrayed”(83).

14. Insights

15. The author-Skandera-Trombley, seems to assume that Twain plays out his obsession with cross-dressing, race, and gender in his novels. • It is depicted in his novels; Medieval Romance, “1,002d Arabian Night (1883), Huck Finn (1885), Personal Recollection of Joan of Arc (1896), Wapping Alice (1898,1907), How Nancy Jackson married Kate Wilson (c.1902) and A Horse’s Tale (1907). (82)

16. If we pursue the possibility that the drowned woman might have been African-American, this would signal the beginning of Twain’s conflating gender identification with racial categories. Twain seems to be developing a paradigm where gender and race meet.” (84) • There is a close connection between Huck’s willingness to cross gender lines and his later act of questioning and rejecting racial categories. (87)

17. The intersections of gender and race manifested in cross-dressing introduced in Adventures in Huckleberry Finn have their fullest rendering nine years later in Pudd’nhead Wilson, where various uses of cross-dressing traceable in Twain’s earlier works merge in and become inextricable from the narrative. (88) • Twain seems to be slipping and pushing one extreme over the borderline to the next, “the slippage from one borderline to another, in this case race to gender, or gender to race, marked by the appearance of the transvestite.” (90)

18. After all this exchanging of clothing, it seems fair to ask if Twain himself ever transgressed into cross-dressing. (93) • Twain had evolving views on race and gender. (93) • Twain proved to be willing to explore what other authors feared. (93) • Twain’s personal involvement in cross-dressing quite possibly reflects his willingness to engage the issue fictionally. (93) • Twain, trickster himself, never stopped dancing between the accepted and the taboo. (94)