A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court 1091and logical. For example, when he rallies after an ini-
tial bout of despair, he exclaims, “my mercury went
up to the top of the tube.” He adopts a derisive atti-
tude toward Alisande (Sandy), based largely on her
long-windedness. He is frustrated by her inability
to speak efficiently and get to the point, lamenting,
“I don’t believe you could have sluiced it out with a
hydraulic; nor got it with the earlier forms of blast-
ing, even.” Yet he cannot help but admire her verbal
productivity and stamina. Comparing her capacity
for speech to a mill and to a locomotive, he says “she
could grind, and pump, and churn and buzz by the
week, and never stop to oil up or blow out.”
As he gradually makes progress in his efforts
to modernize the country to 19th-century stan-
dards, Hank proudly professes, “I was turning on
my light one candle-power at a time.” Later, at the
royal banquet, he compares the sound of eating
to “the muffled burr of subterranean machinery.”
When preparing to defeat an opponent in a verbal
debate, he “rigged up [his] pile driver,” and when he
hears the king’s voice echoing down the corridor,
he “caught the boom of the king’s batteries.” The
employment of these technological metaphors dem-
onstrates how completely his notion of progress and
reverence for technology permeate his worldview.
After Hank escapes death for the first time and
begins to explore his new surroundings, he is struck
by the utter lack of the conveniences he had previ-
ously taken for granted. He notices that “there was
no soap, no matches, no looking glass. . . . There
wasn’t even a bell or a speaking-tube in the castle
. . . no gas, there were no candles . . . no books,
pens, paper, or ink, and no glass.” The absence of
these conveniences is so shocking to Hank that
he contrives to “modernize” medieval Britain and
introduce them to the marvels of the 19th cen-
tury. He becomes utterly preoccupied with modern
technology, relating what he encounters in the sixth
century to rough analogues in the 19th century. For
instance, he describes the seat of his suit of armor
as “an inverted coal scuttle,” the arms as “stove-pipe
joints,” and the helmet as an “iron rat-trap.”
Hank’s culture shock is so complete that he
almost immediately decides on the superiority of
the 19th century and creates a dichotomy in which
the “civilized” is equated with the technologically
advanced and the “barbaric” with the underdevel-
oped. He considers the great inventors of his time,
such as Alexander Graham Bell and Samuel Morse,
equivalent to the nobility of the past and himself
their ambassador to the sixth century. Among
the technological innovations he brings to King
Arthur’s England are public schools, mines, fac-
tories, and workshops for the production of useful
citizens, steamboats, warships, a commercial marine,
a railway, soap, toothbrushes, newspapers, sew-
ing machines, barbed wire, electricity, and Gatling
guns. Although he succeeds in revolutionizing the
economy and industries of the sixth century, he
upsets the social order and attempts to reorganize it
by using advanced technology to stage a coup. Ironi-
cally, it is the “civilization” of the Britons that leads
to the destruction of the golden age of Camelot as
Hank’s technology is responsible for the massive
destruction of the knighthood in a most barbaric
and grotesque manner.
Kristine WilsonvIoLence in A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur’s Court
Hank Morgan, the primary narrator and protagonist
in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, is a
craftsman whose trade in the Colt arms factory ties
him to violence from the outset of his story. After
receiving a blow to the head during an altercation
with a brutish coworker, Hank is transported back
in time to sixth-century England and finds himself
amid the knight-errantry of King Arthur’s court.
The violence engaged in by the knights serves as
a counterpoint to the violence inflicted upon them
by Hank Morgan (“The Boss”), the self-proclaimed
“civilized” man from the 19th century. In both cases,
the relatively short-term outbreaks of violence in
sport, showmanship, and battle serve to underscore
the more long-term, widespread, and devastating
forms of violence inflicted on the poor and disem-
powered people in each society.
Hank detests the savagery of the nobility because
it lacks the thing he values—reason. Although many
of their quests are inspired by petitioners in need,
the Boss finds little reason in the battles the knights
engage in while wandering the countryside; they
seem to wreak violence on one another simply for