Mighty Liars in the Utopia: Science, Violence, and Belief in Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee

Abstract: I argue that Mark Twain’s novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) reveals the similarly deceptive qualities of magic and science that facilitate interpersonal fraud and largescale violence. First, I close read the novel with special attention to the dynamic between science and what it rejects, especially to the extent that Twain disassociates science from its attachment to concepts like democracy and progress. To further understand Twain’s project in Connecticut Yankee , I then compare the novel to several other politically minded time travel narratives: Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward , William Dean Howells’s The Traveler from Altruria (and sequels), William Morris’s News from Nowhere , and H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine . Not only does Connecticut Yankee foreshadow Twain’s increasing turn toward a grumpy, critical radicalism, the novel’s description of liars and bloodshed stands as relatively exceptional among contemporary late-nineteenth-century utopian novels.