¹ Woods, Daniel B., Sixteen Months at the Gold Diggings (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1851), 47Google Scholar.

² That the gold rush might have represented a wished-for escape from normality as much as a chance to get rich, is similarly suggested by Fender, Stephen in Plotting the Golden West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)Google Scholar. He observes that “men broke away from their wives and small children; adolescents freed themselves from a dominating father; and (in a few cases) social deviants escaped an accusing community” (61).

³ De Quille, Dan, The Big Bonanza ([1876] London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1969), 247–8Google Scholar. The exposure commented on is not limited to the “professional” nakedness of men at work. Robert Allsop, among others, noted such things as a miner performing jury service “without other dress than his trousers and shoes.” See Allsop, , California and its Gold Miners (London: Groombridge and Sons, 1853), 124Google Scholar.

⁴ This seeking to relocate newness is similarly evident in Shinn, Charles Howard's Mining Camps ([1885] New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948)Google Scholar, in which he is reminded of when “men of our race” “bound their rune-cut, bleeding arms together, swearing eternal Freundschaft over their naked war-weapons” (23).

⁵ See Wilde, Oscar, The Importance of Being Earnest, ed. Bristow, Joseph ([1895] London: Routledge, 1992), 79Google Scholar.

⁶ Borthwick, J. D., Three Years in California (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1857), 27Google Scholar; McClellan, Rolander Guy, The Golden State (Philadelphia: W. Flint, 1872), 419Google Scholar; MrsClappe, Louise Amelia Knapp Smith, The Shirley Letters ([1851–2] San Francisco: Thomas C. Russell, 1922), 169Google Scholar; Borthwick, 357.

⁷ I have taken my lead here from Butler, Judith, in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990)Google Scholar and Garber, Marjorie, in Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992)Google Scholar, who both make the same observation. Writing within the terms of a later era, Butler argues: “The repetition of heterosexual constructs in non-heterosexual frames brings into relief the utterly constructed status of the so-called heterosexual original. Thus gay is to straight not as copy is to original, but, rather, as copy is to copy. The parodic repetition of ‘the original’ …reveals the original to be nothing other than a parody of the idea of the natural and original” (31).

⁸ De Quille, Dan, “No Head Nor Tail,” San FranciscoGolden Era (6 12, 1863)Google Scholar; Gold Hill News (18 April, 1964). I am very grateful to Andy Hoffman for bringing both of these items to my attention, although I do not read them as evidence of actual homosexual liaisons, as Hoffman does. See Hoffman, Andrew Jay, “Mark Twain and Homosexuality,” American Literature 67.1 (03 1995), 23–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ I have taken my terms here from Alan Sinfield. See Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992)Google Scholar, and also The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment (London: Cassell, 1994): “The stories that address the unresolved issues, the ones where the conditions of plausibility are in dispute, require the most assiduous and continuous reworking; I call them faultline stories” (4–5)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Mark Twain to Orion Clemens, 13 March, 1871; quoted by Steinbrink, Jeffrey in Getting to be Mark Twain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 163Google Scholar.

¹¹ There is no entirely satisfactory edition of the Autobiography in terms of order and inclusiveness; indeed, given its genesis, such a thing is surely impossible. Twain began writing autobiographical fragments as early as 1870, and was still dictating his life in the year of his death. The parts to which I refer most frequently were composed in the period 1906–7, during which time he was almost exclusively committed to this work. Page numbers refer to the Neider edition ([1957] New York: Harper and Row, 1975). Kiskis, Michael, in Mark Twain's Own Autobiography: The Chapters from the North American Review (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990)Google Scholar gives an extremely useful chronology of Twain's experiments in autobiography, and a comparison of the compositions of the various available editions (253–57).

¹² This Freudian reading of tradition and revision is indebted to Bloom, Harold's The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973)Google Scholar. Other, more recent work that has been particularly helpful includes Warner, Michael's “Homo-Narcissism; or, Heterosexuality,” in Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism, eds. Boone, Joseph A. and Cadden, Michael (New York: Routledge, 1990), 190–306Google Scholar, the reworking of René Girard's ideas of mimetic desire to Sedgwick, Eve's Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986)Google Scholar, and Moon, Michael's “A Small Boy and Others: Sexual Disorientation in Henry James, Kenneth Anger, and David Lynch,” in Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text, ed. Spillers, Hortense (New York: Routledge, 1991), 141–156Google Scholar.

¹³ For a full-length study of Twain's interest in doubling and imposture, see especially Gillman, Susan's Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain's America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Mark Twain's Letters, ed. Paine, Albert Bigelow (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1917), vol. 2, 731Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Quoted by Blair, Walter in Mark Twain and Huck Finn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 60Google Scholar.

¹⁶ It is the use to which Twain puts his representation of Harte that interests me; I do not mean to suggest that Twain “made it all up.” Indeed, various people offered a similar commentary on Harte's appearance and manner: Anton Roman described Harte as “a dandy; a dainty man, too much of a woman to rough it in the mines,” and Gertrude Atherton portrayed him as a “dapper dandified little man, who walked with short mincing steps, as if his patent leather shoes were too small for him.” See Scharnhorst, Gary, Bret Harte (New York: Twayne, 1992), 37, 106–107Google Scholar.

¹⁷ This type of argument was suggested to me by the work of Garber and Butler; but more particularly here, my logic follows Barbara Johnson's use of deconstructive theory in relation to African Americanisms. See especially Johnson, Barbara, A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987), 178Google Scholar; and see also Lee Edelman's adaptation of Johnson in relation to Baldwin, James, in Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994)Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Sedgwick in particular demonstrates with great sophistication the potential complexity of male-male relationship. Her most important discriminations center upon the difference between homosexual and homosocial desire and the proscription enabled by the ambiguities of male bonding: “For a man to be a man's man is separated only by an invisible, carefully blurred, always-already-crossed line from being interested in men” (89).

¹⁹ Hatte, Bret, The Writings of Bret Harte (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896–1903), vol. 2, xxivGoogle Scholar.

²⁰ Harte, Bret, The Complete Works of Bret Harte (London: Chatto and Windus, 1903), vol. 2, 25Google Scholar.

²¹ Twain, Mark, Roughing It ([1872] Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1981), 191Google Scholar.

²² Twain, Mark, “Answers to Correspondents,” in Mark Twain's Early Tales and Sketches, eds. Branch, Edgar M. and Hirst, Robert M. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), vol. 2, 189–96Google Scholar.

²³ We might, for instance, contrast Simon Wheeler with another odd poet, to be found in Harte's “The Poet of Sierra Flat.” This story tells of a western poet who is always a figure of ridicule to others because he fails to live up to the norms of western manliness. In the dénouement, the poet disappears, but not without our learning that “he” was a woman cross-dressed as a man. Harte himself was famous as a western poet, and he was also famous for abandoning the West, and his manly responsibilities as husband and father. He seems in his own work, then, to confirm Twain's insinuations, but not necessarily within the sentimental register to which Twain seeks to confine him. Equally, “He Done His Level Best” was primarily intended as a satire on a collection of California poetry produced to rival Harte's own: it seems probable that the item was produced in a spirit of complicity with Harte. For a history of the rival collections and their bearing on “He Done His Level Best,” see Mark Twain's Letters, vol. 2, (1867–8), eds, Bucci, Richard and Smith, Harriet Elinor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 29–32Google Scholar.

²⁴ Although Jim and Huck's relationship is usually seen as the most important, their de facto inequality is never less obvious than the difference between black and white. And this imbalance (which denies the possibility of partnership) is also translated into mimicry of masculine/feminine roles: Jim often occupies a feminine role in relation to Huck. It is Jim whose emotional or terrified outbursts are reported, and it is Jim who waits on the “home” of the raft while Huck actively tries to determine their fate. Huck's relationship with Tom Sawyer is unbalanced in another direction: Tom is superior by virtue of his education and of the moral authority of his family background. He is out of Huck's class and he won't let Huck forget it.

²⁵ Interestingly, Scharnhorst reads “The Illiad of Sandy Bar” as Harte's projection of his estrangement “from his sometime friend and rival Mark Twain” (34).

²⁶ See Halperin, David M., One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (New York: Routledge, 1990), 79Google Scholar.

²⁷ Tompkins, Jane, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) 56, 60Google Scholar. Antony Easthope pursues a similar argument in What a Man's Gotta Do: The Masculine Myth in Popular Culture (London: Paladin-Grafton, 1986), 52Google Scholar. We need not think of silence as a sign of power or lack of power; nor indeed as constructed around a simple binary. See, for instance, Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Hurley, Robert (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1987), 27Google Scholar. Also, Paz, in The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico, trans. Kemp, Lysander (London: Penguin, 1967)Google Scholar affirms a connection between the formulaic and, not an absence of feeling, but a regulation of it: “This predominance of the closed over the open manifests itself not only as impassivity and distrust, irony and suspicion, but also as love for Form. Form surrounds and sets bounds to our privacy, limiting its excesses, curbing its explosions, isolating and preserving it” (24).

²⁸ See Fiedler, Leslie, Love and Death in the American Novel ([1960] Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1984), 26Google Scholar.

²⁹ Martin, Robert K., “Knights-Errant and Gothic Seducers: The Representation of Male Friendship in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America,” in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, eds. Duberman, Martin Bauml, Vicinus, Martha and Chauncey, George Jr (New York: New American Library, 1989), 169–182Google Scholar. The Cleveland Street scandal involved a police raid of an upper-class homosexual brothel at 19, Cleveland Street; it became known that the Earl of Euston had visited the place, and rumours abounded that one of the Prince of Wales's sons, Arthur, Duke of Clarence, was also implicated. For Twain's disgusted awareness of it, see Mark Twain's Notebooks and Journals, eds. Anderson, Frederick et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975–1979), vol. 3, 540Google Scholar.

³⁰ See, among many possible references, Halperin's One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, Sedgwick, 's Between Men and Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990)Google Scholar, Sinfield's The Wilde Century, and Weeks, Jeffrey, Sex, Politics and Society (London: Longman, 1989)Google Scholar.

³¹ See Cohen, Ed, Talk on the Wilde Side: Toward a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1993), 5–6Google Scholar.