“… and then the great gates were flung open, the drawbridge was lowered, and the head of the cavalcade swept forward under the frowning arches; and we, following, soon found ourselves in a great paved court, with towers and turrets stretching up into the blue air on all the four sides…” (Twain).
Today we are going to summarize and analyze Chapter 1 of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain. In this chapter, our protagonist, Hank Morgan, is taken to the fabled city of Camelot and takes note of the grim lives of the townsfolk versus the resplendence of the knights and castle.
Tale of the Lost Land: Chapter 1. Camelot
The chapter opens with our main character remarking that the name “Camelot”–as the knight uttered–was unfamiliar and was perhaps the name of an asylum. Of course, this is not true. As the knight and Hank continue toward the castle, they come across an ten-year-old girl who is dressed in “as sweet an outfit” as Hank had ever seen. Hank thinks it strange that the girl does not look in surprise at the knight (after all, Hank believes the knight to be crazy or perhaps some kind of circus performer), and he finds it equally strange when she is more surprised by Hank’s appearance.
As he states: “Up went her hands, and she was turned to stone; her mouth dropped open, her eyes stared wide and timorously, she was the picture of astonished curiosity touched with fear. And there she stood gazing, in a sort of stupefied fascination, till we turned a corner of the wood and were lost to her view.”
Her surprise unsettles Hank, and he begins to think that he is not in Kansas, er…Connecticut, anymore. “That she should be startled at me instead of at the other man, was too many for me…” he states. “And that she should seem to consider me a spectacle, and totally overlook her own merits in that respect, was another puzzling thing, and a display of magnanimity, too, that was surprising in one so young.”
Afterward, they begin to see the signs of the outer-kingdom, which featured a “wretched cabin, with a thatched roof” and people that were “brawny men, with long, coarse, uncombed hair that hung down over their faces and made them look like animals.” In so many words, the people looked to be our modern understanding of serfs; in this way, we can see the mud-rutted roads and hoary houses juxtaposed with the castle keep in the distance. Likewise, as they approached the town that stood before the castle, Hank saw much of the same: uncomely roads and dirty people. Hank, at this point, is confused, as he has not put two and two together; his musings have not placed him in the fantasy that he now lives.
Hank and the knight find a “noble cavalcade” before them heading toward the castle and they follow. As they came to the castle, the “great gates were flung open, the drawbridge was lowered,” and they entered into the courtyard of the castle. As such, the knights greeted each other kindly and Hank, all the while, watches the odd reunion of knights in his new reality.
Analysis
The first official chapter of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court serves as a set up between the fantastical nature of the narrative and Hank Morgan’s own perceptions and literal reality as he is brought to the fantastical city of Camelot.
However, we do have a couple of moments worth pointing out that seem to address Mark Twain’s view of feudal society and its disparities.
For one, the young girl that Hank meets on the road is quite striking as she has “a cataract of golden hair streaming down over her shoulders,” and, for me, this is a contrast between the society itself and what we can say of its people. For instance, Twain describes everything as dirty and unkempt; meanwhile, the presence of youth and innocence is described with beauty. The description between the two is contrast. In my eyes, the young girl represents the youth of ideas before they are plagued by age, wisdom, and the environment in which she lives.
Camelot, as most people know, is a tragic tale, as Arthur attempted to build a new society that could live without the dirt from the past, and yet the youthful visage of the city came into conflict with the realities of the world. We will find this to be a recurring issue in this novel, from Hank’s own ideas to the ideas presented to him in Camelot. Utopia’s, in Twain’s best estimation, are doomed to fail due to humanity’s own stupidity and ignorance.
Leave a Reply