Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee: The Original Mary Sue
Created | Updated Aug 13, 2017
Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee: The Original Mary Sue
Ed. Note: The late 19th Century was so full of itself, you wouldn't believe it. They thought that they knew everything. That's why Mark Twain, living at the dawn of the Telephone Age [landline only], wrote this ridiculous story. In it, a time-travelling flim-flam merchant from Connecticut convinces sixth-century Britain that he's a great magician. Oh, sure. (Turn on sarcasm meter to 10.)
You know what a 'Mary Sue' is, right? A character in a science fiction story who is a fairly transparent stand-in for the author. The Mary Sue knows everything. The Mary Sue has superpowers. The Mary Sue is automatically the coolest person in the room. I would argue that if Mark Twain didn't invent the Mary Sue here, he was an early practitioner of this form of humbuggery.
In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Twain's protagonist, merely by knowing when an eclipse would occur, makes himself the most important person in Arthur's kingdom. Yes, we know Twain was parodying the 19th Century's version of Game of Thrones. But that character is still a Mary Sue.
Get this:
I seemed to believe the boy, I didn't know why. Something in me seemed to believe him – my consciousness, as you may say; but my reason didn't. My reason straightway began to clamor; that was natural. I didn't know how to go about satisfying it, because I knew that the testimony of men wouldn't serve – my reason would say they were lunatics, and throw out their evidence. But all of a sudden I stumbled on the very thing, just by luck. I knew that the only total eclipse of the sun in the first half of the sixth century occurred on the 21st of June, A.D. 528, O.S., and began at 3 minutes after 12 noon. I also knew that no total eclipse of the sun was due in what to me was the present year – i.e., 1879. So, if I could keep my anxiety and curiosity from eating the heart out of me for forty-eight hours, I should then find out for certain whether this boy was telling me the truth or not.
. . . [This charlatan proceeds to pretend to 'blot out the sun', thus gaining an undeserved reputation as a magician from these 'superstitious' people.]. . .
One thing troubled me along at first – the immense interest which people took in me. Apparently the whole nation wanted a look at me. It soon transpired that the eclipse had scared the British world almost to death; that while it lasted the whole country, from one end to the other, was in a pitiable state of panic, and the churches, hermitages, and monkeries overflowed with praying and weeping poor creatures who thought the end of the world was come. Then had followed the news that the producer of this awful event was a stranger, a mighty magician at Arthur's court; that he could have blown out the sun like a candle, and was just going to do it when his mercy was purchased, and he then dissolved his enchantments, and was now recognized and honored as the man who had by his unaided might saved the globe from destruction and its peoples from extinction. Now if you consider that everybody believed that, and not only believed it, but never even dreamed of doubting it, you will easily understand that there was not a person in all Britain that would not have walked fifty miles to get a sight of me. Of course I was all the talk – all other subjects were dropped; even the king became suddenly a person of minor interest and notoriety. Within twenty-four hours the delegations began to arrive, and from that time onward for a fortnight they kept coming. The village was crowded, and all the countryside. I had to go out a dozen times a day and show myself to these reverent and awe-stricken multitudes.
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain.
Ed. Note: Ha! The fool! Twain thinks we won't look this up. In fact, he is a benighted ignoramus. If he only knew that we, the Connecticut Yankees and Mary Sues of the Future, would have at our disposals the means to out him as a poseur at the drop of a mouse click. Yes, I speak of the internet, and the fact that I don't even have to drive to Pittsburgh to check out this portion of the Akashic Record, or to look up Anglo-Saxon words in the Bosworth-Toller dictionary.
In point of fact, exactly how superstitious were sixth-century Britons about eclipses? And when did these eclipses occur in the 6th Century? We quote from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:
A.D. 538. This year the sun was eclipsed, fourteen days before the calends of March, from before morning until nine.
A.D. 540. This year the sun was eclipsed on the twelfth day before the calends of July; and the stars showed themselves full nigh half an hour over nine.
Translation courtesy of the Avalon Project of Yale University. (Yale University is located where? In Connecticut. O frabjous day.)
The Anglo-Saxon monks are quite blasé about such things as eclipses. Unlike Twain, they knew when they occurred. They also knew that the Earth was round. They were not stupid. One suspects they would probably have locked up the Connecticut Yankee merely as a fashion victim.
The moral? When time travelling, be less smug.
