“Tell everything as it is – no better and no worse:” Images of the West in Washington Irving and Mark Twain

Abstract

In the United States of the nineteenth-century, the struggle to liberate American writing from European influences took many forms, but one prophecy was that a literature of the West would amount to an American coming of age. The prophecy remains unfulfilled and as one commentator has argued, all the fiction and non-fiction concerning the Frontier “can best be expressed in the image of a Western man straddling his vast empire in splendour, yet standing with his back to the West and looking eastward with awe and reverence” (Robert Lee, From West to East). To explore this proposition, I wish briefly to examine two texts, Washington Irving’s A Tour on the Prairies (1835) and Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872). In Irving’s Tour, for instance, we are given an account by a well-educated easterner, in which the actual details of Western life and idiom are censored into the picturesque, whilst Twain’s Roughing It is written from the position of a wide-eyed innocent. Both approaches tend to distort the truth. In the work of both authors, the romance of the West takes over from reality and it can be argued that in both cases the disorder of frontier life was kept outside texts, which were written for a predominantly eastern audience. The question posed, then, concerns the way the West was turned into a pastoral world by these authors.