A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court Essay

Mark Twain, in his seminal novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, employs a layered and multifaceted critique of the reconstruction era in the American South and industrialized New England. Along the way, he also advances a stern rebuke of Catholicism and organized religion. It will be the contention of this essay that Twain’s satire of the church was an effort at proving the hypothesis that the church and its agents dehumanizes society rather than advancing it.
When Hank, Twain’s protagonist and symbolic technocrat, ascends to the role of “Boss” early in the novel, the author announces his intentions in relation to religion: “Yes, in power, I was equal to the King. At the same time, there was a power that was a trifle stronger than both of us put together. That was the church. I do not wish to disguise that

fact. I couldn’t, if I wanted to” (53). With this statement, Twain is foreshadowing, a future conflict of the novel. The church will play a central and despotic role in Arthurian England.
Twain further advances this theme through Hank by expanding on the concept of tradition or ‘inherited ideas. He states, “Inherited ideas are a curious thing, and interesting to observe and examine. I had mine, and the king and his people had theirs. In both cases, they flowed in ruts worn deep by time and habit, and the man who should have proposed to divert them by reason and argument would have had a long contract on his hand” (55-56). This notion that societal convention as a detriment is a large part of Twain’s satire and story within a story. In both Arthurian Camelot and the American South of the author’s era, a reliance on custom and lack of access to knowledge were used to foster a culture of servitude and slavery.
Twain’s illustrator, Dan Beard, represents the author’s vision by depicting the king as Bacchanalian Figure (55). ‘Curious” acts as an evocative choice of words as the reader contemplates image of the king gorging on grapes while resting on a bed of flowers and riding on the backs of his subjects. By employing elements of the grotesque in the depiction of the servants and common man, both author and artist are lampooning the mediaeval revival in the 1880”s
Twain further satirizes the concept of a “Divine Right of Kings” where organized religions acts in conjunction with the political monarchy in establishing the legitimacy of their dominion over the populace. Hank, through his knowledge of historical fact, correctly predicts a solar eclipse while playing on the fears and conventions of the time. He states, “Then I lifted up my hands-stood just so a moment-then I said, with the most awful solemnity: Let the enchantment dissolve and pass harmless away” (44). As a practical and matter of fact man, Twain is effectively mocking the lens of romanticism present in both Mallory’s Camelot and the mediaeval rival.
Beard’s image on page 57 further exemplifies this point. The subjects are on their knees paralyzed with fear, while knowledge, depicted as the eclipse, blocks out the divine right of kings, represented by the sun. This caricature represents one of the central allegories of the novel. When knowledge is an abstraction, advancement on the personal, social, and political levels becomes next to impossible.
While Hank begins to mold society into his futuristic vision, a not so subtle strain of anti-Catholicism begins to sneak out. He has begun organizing and teaching Arthur’s subjects as a means of advancing his agenda. He goes so far as to require permits for entry to his nurseries or teaching academy’s due to fear of the Catholic Church. As an act of subterfuge, he introduces Protestantism to Camelot: “Everybody could be any kind of Christian he wanted to; there was perfect freedom in that matter” (68). In one of his few acts of reverence to tradition, Hank understood the folly of a full attack on the Church:
I could have given my own sect the preference and made everybody a Presbyterian
Without any trouble but that would have been to affront a law of human nature…
I was afraid of a united Church; it makes a mighty power, the mightiest conceivable,
and then when it by and by gets into selfish hands, as it is always bond to do, it means
death to human liberty, and paralysis to human thought (69).

Twain also uses the concept of knight errantry as a vehicle to ridicule the mediaeval tradition. While on his journey with Sandy, Hank runs into one of his knights affixed with a sandwich board as a coat of arms. It reads, “Persimmons’s – All the Prime Donne Use It” (108). With this almost burlesque representation, the author chastises both errantry and the act of religious missions by sending a purveyor of modern goods into the countryside. The subtle implication is that one could themselves out of the dark ages.
Dan Beard’s excellent caricature of this scene perfectly exemplifies the fear that comes with upsetting the proverbial apple cart (109). Beard indicates the delicate balance between church and monarchy could be disrupted by the introduction of soap or modernity into society. The knight, or soap salesmen, is depicted as an agent which will upend the royal thrown with the soap acting as fulcrum. The cartoon is not subtly titled: “This would undermine the Church” (108).
In the subsequent episode of Hank’s errantry, we are introduced to King Arthur’s half-sister, Morgan le Fay. She is described as a “great sorceress” whose “ways were wicked” and “all her instincts devilish”. She foolishly allows Hank to view her torture room after the Royal Banquet. Upon seeing a man on a rack, a torture device synonymous with the Spanish Inquisition, for the crime the crime of killing a stag on the Queen’s land, Hank recoils in horror. The prisoner refuses to confess to his crime as it would allow the Church and State the right to seize both his and his family’s wealth and property: “The biter law takes the convicted man’s estate and beggars his widow and his orphans. They could torture you to death but without conviction or confession they could not rob your wife and baby” (122).
Impressed with the man’s loyalty to family and conviction, Hank orders the husband spared and offer sanctuary and employment in Camelot.

Morgan La Fay was duly angered but powerless to stop the Boss, “The Queen was a good deal outraged, next morning, when she found out she was going to have neither Hugo’s life nor his property. But I told her she must bear this cross…and so in Arthur the king’s name, I had pardoned him” (126). This reflects the author’s contempt for the piety of church and nobility who can imprison, impoverish and murder with impunity.
Twain follows this by proceeding on a diatribe against organized religion in feudal times. While it is Hank offering judgement, the author’s voice rings clear rather than speaking in allegory and symbolism:
But I did not like it. For it was just the sort of thing to people reconciled to an Established Church. We must have religion-it goes without saying- but my idea is, to have it cup up into forty free sects as had been the case in the United States of my time. Concentration of power in political machine is bad and an Established Church is only a political machine; it was invented for that…

(125).

The author is clearly drawing a parallel between injustices inherent in feudal society and those inherent in the American South. As a son of Missouri, Twain was well acquainted with the brutality of life for sharecroppers and ex-slaves.
Dan Beard also reinforces Twain’s disdain for the corrupt comingling of religion and politics with his illustration at the start of the Dungeon chapter (124). Titled, they have a right to their view, I only stand to this, beard depicts a Pope and King standing on the back of a peasant while a drunken member of the nobility hang on for life. View is clearly meant as a double-entendre reflecting both the epistemology of the church and lofty position of the individual monarchies in feudal society. The serf on whose backs they stand symbolically represents the lack of social mobility both in mediaeval times and in Twain’s era.
Throughout A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Mark Twain advances the theme of the Church and Monarchy acting in concert for political purposes. Ultimately, this has the effect of dehumanizing the lower classes of the population. Through the use of superstition mysticism, and hereditary nobility, Twain intimates that the common man is bound in servitude to authority and tradition. Also, the author is leveling harsh rebuke of the gravest social ill, slavery, of his time. The author states, “It being my conviction that any Establish Church is an established crime, an established slave pen. I had no scruples, but was willing to assail it in anyway or with any weapon that promised to hurt it” (109).