Queer Ways of Knowing Islands: O.A. Bushnell. Molokai

Abstract

After his 1866 visit to Hawai'i, Mark Twain conceived an idea for a novel. According to literary critic Stephen Sumida, rather than a rollicking satire, it was to be a work of historical fiction contrasting an idyllic view of the islands with "the unvarnished truth" (Twain qtd. in Sumida, "Reevaluating" 589). The protagonist was to have been based on the biracial Hawaiian lawyer William Ragsdale, who had greatly impressed Twain in Honolulu. The fact that several years later, at the peak of his career, Ragsdale contracted leprosy and was exiled to a "leper colony" on the island of Molokai made him particularly interesting to Twain; the idea of a gifted man's "suffering and presumably death by a loathsome disease in a supposed paradise" had even greater literary potential Sumida, "Reevaluating" 596). Analyzing Twain's references to this novel made over the course of some twenty years, Sumida suggests several reasons why the project never materialized. The four months Twain spent in Hawai'i may have left him insecure about his ability to render the context without resorting to clichés. The prospect that readers would find the subject of leprosy repellent may have induced him to suppress it. Twain may also have felt daunted by Hawaiian racial politics which were quite distinct from those of the American South (597-599). Finally, work on the novel may have been impeded by Twain's ambivalent attitude towards both Hawaiian religious practices and the imposition of Christianity (601-602). Fred W. Lorch and others have suggested that the unwritten novel may have mutated into A Connecticut Yankee in KingArthur's Court, with Arthurian knights supplanting Hawaiian warriors. If so, then Ragsdale, leprosy, and race dropped out of the picture.