Mark Twains Letters From Hawaii Download Pdf
Roseanne Gennett
The theme in the letters of leisure versus work shows most conspicuously when Mark Twain describes Hawaiian society and the role of American missionaries in creating the hybrid culture Clemens encountered. From the perspective of the American missionaries, the leisurely and apparently carefree way of life found in Hawaiʻi does not just demonstrate literal laziness but signifies moral sloth too. In order to attain salvation, Hawaiians clearly needed to be converted not just to a belief in Christ but also to a faith in the Protestant work ethic.
This attitude meshed with the Western expectation, derived from the myth of Polynesia as a paradise, that no work takes place in Hawaiʻi, even though plenty of hard work was obviously required to build the infrastructure for living in traditional Hawaiian society. In a subsistence economy such as existed in pre-contact Hawaiʻi, a strict rhythm of hard work and holiday would have been the norm for the commoner, and much of that work would be maintaining the basics: fishing, tending taro fields, repairing fishponds and houses, making clothes, cooking meals. Work in the modern Western sense, i.e. within a market economy to accumulate wealth, could appear to Americans to be virtually non-existent.
Sam Clemens speaking as Mark Twain understandably misreads important aspects of the Hawaiian society, for example, the cultural and political significance of hula. By the mid-1850s, well before Clemens arrived in the islands, society had radically changed, mostly because of the American whaling fleet. Significant traditional cultural practices nevertheless remained, giving Hawaiian society in 1866 a distinctively hybrid quality.
The misadventures of Mark Twain and Mr. Brown provided Clemens with opportunities to create broadly comic, even slapstick scenarios. His focus on the influence of American missionaries provided the opportunity to express in comic phrasing his deep ambivalence about that influence. Here is the key passage showing that Clemens understood the ambiguity of their work:
When the Union letters re-circulated back to the islands, the American community was less than pleased, even though Clemens in nearly every other instance supported their views and backed them in their ongoing struggle to maintain influence against the Church of England and its inroads into the royal family.
Clemens jokes about the United State annexing the islands because some folks in the American community in 1866 were agitating for that outcome in the midst of the uncertainty of securing a reciprocity treaty for sugar. Given a letter years later from the American minister Edward McCook to President Grant amid continuing speculation about the treaty, such uncertainty guaranteed that annexation had remained a topic for the United States government too.
We can make them ashamed of their simple and primitive justice . . . and let them have Judge Pratt to save imperiled Avery-assassins to society. . . . We can give them juries composed entirely of the most simple and charming leatherheads. We can give them railway corporations who will buy their Legislature like old clothes, and run over their best citizens and complain of the corpses for smearing their unpleasant juices on the track. . . . [W]e can furnish them some Jay Goulds who will do away with their old-time notion that stealing is not respectable. . . . We can give them lecturers! I will go myself.
The specific individuals Clemens includes here to accompany the sarcasms about general issues such as juries, railroads, and elected officials project a voice for Mark Twain found in The Gilded Age, also published in 1873.
The Hawaiian Islands showcased a unique society for Sam Clemens: a mlange mimicking the English monarchy and its Anglican church while countenancing the growing influence of American capitalism, yet maintaining significant aspects of its indigenous culture, especially hula and mele. He never forgot the experience, not only reprising it in his lecture on the island society, but also considering, early and late, writing a novel about it.
For me, its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of its surf is in my ear; I can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud-rack; I can feel the spirit of its woody solitudes, I hear the splashing of the brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.
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