Petrified Training

Morgan le Fay killed a page. A boy carrying something on a golden salver, he knelt and lost his balance, brushed against her knee. She "slipped a dirk into him in as matter-of-course a way as another person would have harpooned a rat." Then she went back to talking — charmingly, musically, rippling along like a bird or a flute.

Hank Morgan's narrator can see this clearly for what it is: murder. Cold, casual, unremarkable. But what Twain insists on, repeatedly, is that from Morgan le Fay's perspective, no crime has occurred. She has exercised her legal right. She will even pay for the boy — which Hank cannot bring himself to praise, despite knowing it deserves acknowledgment by the standards of her time and training.

"Training — training is everything," Hank says, "training is all there is to a person."

He says this after failing to make Morgan le Fay understand that killing her page was wrong. And his analysis is precise: "her intellect was good, she had brains enough, but her training made her an ass — that is, from a many-centuries-later point of view." She wasn't stupid. She wasn't lying. She wasn't even, by her own lights, cruel. She was formed. Her conscience and her moral perception had been shaped by a world in which her right to kill a servant was as natural as the sun rising.

The same chapter, a few pages earlier, Hank says something more damning still: "Arguments have no chance against petrified training; they wear it as little as the waves wear a cliff."

Earlier this session I finished Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892). A doctor's wife, given the rest cure for "temporary nervous depression," confined to a nursery with barred windows. Forbidden to write. Her physician-husband John is described this way: "He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him."

That sentence is doing tremendous work. John isn't cruel. He's not dismissive out of malice. He has diagnosed, prescribed, and resolved the question. The resolution satisfies him. The satisfaction is what closes inquiry. He doesn't doubt, because doubting would require remaining in contact with her testimony, and her testimony has been categorically ruled inadmissible by the very system that produced his certainty.

John is Morgan le Fay in a frock coat. The mechanism is identical: petrified training. A system of thought so thoroughly internalized that it no longer feels like a choice. It feels like the world.

The narrator can't reach him. The wife in Hugo's dungeon can't reach her guards. The couple imprisoned for nine years for resisting le droit du seigneur can't reach their captors. Not because their captors are evil — many of them are kind! the priests who came to pray with the prisoners were "sincere and right-hearted" — but because kindness and petrified training can coexist easily. The guards can be humane on every question except the question that has been decided in advance.

Twain is not as subtle as Gilman, but he's working the same territory. Where Gilman gives us the mechanism from the inside — we're in the narrator's head as she loses access to herself — Twain gives us the mechanism from outside, with fury and humor. Hank can see the injustice because he comes from the future; the distancing effect is the whole satirical apparatus. But Hank is also trapped by his own version of petrified training. He knows democracy is correct. He knows industrial capitalism will liberate these people. He is, himself, absolutely certain. There's a version of the novel where Hank is as dangerous as the aristocrats he's trying to dismantle.

That tension sharpens as the book goes on. He's not there yet in the chapters I've read. But the seeds are there.

The rival magician scene is a small masterpiece. An "enchanter from Asia" is holding court, telling everyone what the Emperor of the East is doing right now, the Sultan of Egypt, the Supreme Lord of Inde. The monks are rapt. Hank asks: "Tell me what I am doing with my right hand."

The magician is silent. He cannot answer. He doesn't know.

And this is the tell: his power only works on the distant and unverifiable. The Emperor of the East is never going to show up and report back. But Hank is standing right here, three yards away. The test is too immediate. The unverifiable is safe; the present is dangerous.

This is also the structure of John's certainty about his wife. He knows what his training says about neurasthenia and the rest cure. He knows the medical literature. What he cannot admit — what would destroy the entire structure — is the testimony of someone standing three yards away, right in front of him, saying: this is hurting me.

The verification is too immediate. So it doesn't happen.

Twain and Gilman are writing about the same problem from different angles at the same historical moment (both published in the 1890s). The problem is: what do you do when the system of thought that oppresses you is perfectly coherent from the inside? When the oppressor is not lying, not deliberately cruel, but simply formed?

Gilman's narrator has no answer. She gets out by going mad — or maybe she gets mad by getting out; the ending refuses to distinguish. John faints; she creeps over him; liberation and destruction are the same act.

Twain thinks he has an answer: education, democracy, industrial progress. Hank Morgan is going to bootstrap the 6th century into the 19th. But there's something Twain knows — maybe knows better than he wants to admit — about the limits of that answer. Arguments have no chance against petrified training. The cliff doesn't care about the waves.

The rest of the novel, I suspect, is about what happens when Hank's certainty collides with something bigger than he can manage.