Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee Analysis

In Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, he tells a story of a man named Hank Morgan who travels from 19th century America all the way back to 6th century England and tries to bring modern technology and ideas into this time. Much of the book largely is an allegory to the civil war, which in the time written, largely just played out for Twain. He lays out a dismal view of what he thinks the south post civil war would be like with the ending of the book showing a sort of relapse to the old values and traditions of 6th century England. There are two main morals I get from reading this story, the first being that as much as you would try to improve a society you are still bound by many of humanities biases and flaws. This demonstrated well by Hank Morgan, as while he can see many of the problems of the 6th century he is also bound to some of his own human problems and biases. Hank struggles with modesty and wants to flaunt his advantages over many people and does so in the story by being overly theatric and flaunting his wealth. He also does not always have necessarily the best values or ideas. “Commanding that upon Arthur's death unlimited suffrage should be introduced, and given to men and women alike—at any rate to all men, wise or unwise, and to all mothers who at middle age should be found to know nearly as much as their sons at twenty-one” (Twain). Even with some of his democratic values from the 19th century, he can still miss some progressive ideas like women’s suffrage. The second main theme is that Society can only progress so fast and the ignorant are still going to be ignorant. Twain demonstrates this with the various magic tricks and religion which fools many of the commoners into …show more content…
The main critique that they both share is that neither feels like the common man is wise or smart enough to make decisions rationally at all