Emotional Insanity, Cynical Reason, and The Gilded Age

Abstract

In the 1881 trial of the presidential assassin Charles Guiteau, one witness invoked the character of Colonel Sellers from Mark Twain’s The Gilded Age (1873) as a means of refuting Guiteau’s plea of insanity--a moment when reading Twain took on national significance. I argue that the pairing of Sellers and Guiteau (reasserted in Twain’s later novel The American Claimant [1892[) reveals a crucial tension in Twain’s political imagination, in which insanity first grounds a cynical critique of legal and political corruption, then provides an optimistic yet ultimately insufficient antidote to the paralysis of that cynicism.