Mark Twain's dual vision of Hawaii :|sublime wilderness in nineteenth-century America

Abstract

When Mark Twain set sail for his journey to the Sandwich Islands in 1866, the frontiers in America had not been closed yet, and the concept of “wilderness” was undergoing a significant transformation toward becoming "a sacred American icon”. This thesis is inspired by William Cronon’s argument that the American wilderness is a cultural construct, and that two important cultural movements helped transform the “wilderness” into an icon: “the Romantic sublime” and “the national myth of the frontier”. The prevalent discourses of nature in nineteenth-century America brought about some cultural constraints, one of which was the view that certain landscapes were considered sublime. The question of to what extent and in what ways Twain subverts these conventions that provide the nineteenth-century paradigm for the representation of the landscape will guide the discussion. This thesis argues that Twain’s dual vision rejects participation in the construction of the popular discourses of wilderness in nineteenth century America through parodying and subverting the conventions of the “sublime” and the “frontier”. Within this framework, the focus will be on Letters from Hawaii, though Roughing It, Innocents Abroad, Life on Mississippi, Following the Equator, A Tramp Abroad, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and some of his letters will also be among the primary sources.