The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 32 (2021)
Copyright © 2021 Takayuki Tatsumi. All rights reserved. This work may be used, with thisnotice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be distributed,
electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.

The Laws of Literary Life Cycle: Reading MarkTwain’s Is He Dead? as a Transnational Play

Takayuki TATSUMI*INTRODUCTION: MARK TWAIN’S IS HE DEAD?
I have long meditated on the laws of literary life cycle, chiefly inspired by
the literary giant of Meiji Japan, Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), who was soeager to clarify the psychological origins and social factors of literature as tocome up with the science of literature while studying in London between
1900 and 1901. He published a highly speculative book on the subject,
Bungakuron (Theory of Literature) in 1907.1 Coinciding with the rise ofmodernism around the turn of the century, this book is considered tobe comparable with French structuralism and Russian formalism in thesame period. A twenty-first century perspective will, however, allow us
to reinterpret Sōseki’s Theory of Literature as a post-Spencerian social
evolutionist hypothesis about the laws of literary life cycle, in which certainsocial factors bring literature into this world and cause it to flourish andwither, and in which a writer will succeed or fail in acquiring fame for theirmajor work, either applauded or criticized during his or her lifetime or
posthumously.2 Without his solitary transnational situation in London at theturn of the century, Sōseki could not have deeply meditated on the fate ofwriters in general.
In Book 5 of his Theory of Literature Sōseki wrote about the distinguished
British novelist Jane Austen (1775–1817). He noted that she faced hardships*Professor emeritus, Keio University

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TAKAYUKI TATSUMI

in getting published, and that even after she became a professional writer
she was not paid much. Thus, he concluded: “It is often the case, I regret tosay, that genius is usually given an unfair reception.”3 Finding thisobservation applicable to French artist Jean-François Millet (1814–75),
Sōseki added that, although he had been in an obscure position during his
lifetime, Millet’s death brought him worldwide fame overnight, with hismasterpiece The Angelus selling for 553,000 francs. Sōseki concluded that
there are more geniuses than the ones recorded in history, and geniuses often
have to be content with the fate of the unsung hero during their lifetimes.4
Sōseki’s insightful observation reminds us of a black comedy, Is He
Dead?, written by Mark Twain (1835–1910) in Vienna in 1898, with theartist Millet serving as the protagonist.5 Twain shared with Sōseki an interest
in what could well be designated as the laws of literary life cycle, and hewent further to propose an idea for getting out of the artistic predicament oflack of fame during one’s lifetime.
Of course, today Millet is widely acclaimed as one of the major Frenchartists, who learned a lot from sixteenth-century Flemish painters of peasantlife such as Pieter Bruegel, and who had a tremendous impact on fin desiècle impressionists such as Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Paul
Cézanne.
Nevertheless, it is also known that Millet struggled with poverty all of hislife. Five years before his play Is He Dead? Twain published a short story
titled “Is He Living or Is He Dead?”(1893), featuring Millet who disguises
himself as another in order to deceive a debt collector.6 We should note herethat “Is He Living or Is He Dead?” is the first story of Twain’s translated
into Japanese, by Isoo Yamagata and included as “Seishi Ikan” in theNovember 1893 issue of Shonen Bunko (Literature for Boys), immediately
after Twain published the original story. It was later adapted by
distinguished novelist Takeo Arishima as Domomata no Shi (The death ofDomomata) in 1922. Arishima’s novel was made into a film of the same
name in 2007 by director Shutaro Oku.7
Despite the fascinating concept, Twain’s short story lacked an engaging
plot. Later, Twain beautifully transformed the story into an exciting dramatic
black comedy. Twain himself suffered from huge debts in the 1890s, somuch so that he left North America in 1897 for Vienna. It was there that hefamiliarized himself with the local theater and completed writing a playbased on the short story on February 5, 1898.8
The plot is simple. A vicious usurer, Bastien André, has been tormenting
the young genius Millet so ferociously that Agamemnon Buckner

THE LAWS OF LITERARY LIFE CYCLE

53(nicknamed “Chicago”), who was the latter’s good friend at Yale University,
joins forces with other friends to stage Millet’s funeral, disguising Millet as
his own younger sister. Since they know it is the death of a genius thatdrives up the market value of an artist’s works, Millet and his friends plan tomake a large profit out of his “death.”
Literary history convinces us that while some writers such as antebellum
bestseller novelist George Lippard achieved fame during their lifetime,others like all-time canonical author Herman Melville were re-appraised
posthumously. Although poststructuralist critics such as Roland Barthes andMichel Foucault did not believe in the concept of the author as an entity,9 westill consider the actual death of an author as a trigger for an alternative
narrative that could not have been composed during his or her lifetime. For
example, Edgar Allan Poe’s death in 1849 led his chosen literary executor,
Rufus Wilmot Griswold—who had long felt jealous of Poe’s genius—to
start a negative campaign against his supposed friend’s reputation. In thearticle “Memoir of the Author” written as a preface to his compilation The
Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe, Griswold invented the creepy image of
Poe as a madman in the attic who not only drinks but also takes a shot ofopium, morphine, laudanum, hashish, and who-knows-what.10 The samething is true of the reputation of Paul de Man, the boa-deconstructor of the
Yale school, who revolutionized the scholarship of literary studies withpoststructuralist strategies from the 1970s through the mid-1980s. Gilbert
Adair’s novel The Death of the Author (1992) spelled out that it was thedeath of this distinguished scholar-critic in 1983 that induced Ortwin deGraef, a Belgian graduate student at the University of Leuven, to research
the wartime journalism and reveal the hidden history of de Man as a young
man when he wrote for collaborationist journals in Belgium during WorldWar II.11 Because it was a close reading a la mode which long neglected thehistoricity of the authors and their times, deconstructionism was thus
required to be contextualized, in the post-Foucauldian New Historicist
milieu.
As Mark Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin has pointed out, already in
The Innocents Abroad (1869) Twain had said “Is he dead?” in response to
the guide in Genoa, Italy, who boasted of “Christopher Columbo” as thediscoverer of America, of whom Twain and other Americans had “heard
nothing.” 12 Twain was clearly commenting on the Europeans’
overestimation of the work of dead celebrities vis-à-vis Americans’preference for living artists.13 In his observation of how Europeans value
dead geniuses in this episode lies the transnational origin of the short story

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TAKAYUKI TATSUMI“Is He Living or Is He Dead?” and the black comedy Is He Dead? Whether
the author is dead or alive gives us a chance to re-evaluate his or her works
in a way that otherwise would not have been acceptable and to reexamine
the transnational laws of literary life cycle.
What is literary life? To put it simply, what is the life span of a work of art
which is swayed by or which survives the fluctuations in reputation of artists
and/or authors? How is this life span intertwined with the capitalist market?
And how does a dead author get forgotten, overcome being neglected, andacquire his or her second life? With Twain’s black comedy as an example, inthis article I investigate the post-Spencerian universal laws of literary
evolutionism which govern transnational literary history.
THE TRANSATLANTIC SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ANGELUS
Let me start by outlining the career of the French artist Jean-François
Millet, who was sixteen years older than Twain. This painter of peasants wasborn on October 4, 1814, in the village of Gruchy, commune of Greville,canton of Baumont (Manche). He was the second child and the eldest son ofJean-Louis-Nicholas Millet, a farmer, and his wife, Aimee-HenrietteAdelaide Henry. Jean-François demonstrated an unexpected artistic talent asa child, and at twenty-three moved to Paris where he got the opportunity to
study with Paul Delaroche, a distinguished painter whom “every one
pointed to as the greatest talent of that time.”14 In 1840, Millet made his
professional debut at the Salon of the Louvre with a portrait of his closefriend Louis Marolle’s father, M. L. F. In 1841, Millet married a niceCherbourg girl, Pauline-Virginie Ono, in his hometown. She was delicate inhealth and died of tuberculosis in Paris in 1844. In 1845 Millet remarried,
this time to a young girl, Catherine Lemaire, who gave birth to many
children and remained a devoted companion throughout Millet’s life.15
Millet started over in Paris in December 1845 with his new wife. In Rue
Rochechouart they found three mansard rooms where he arranged a very
informal studio, whose furniture consisted of three chairs and an easel.16
Millet made money chiefly by painting naked women and portraits. His art
became so popular that in April 1848 Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin,
minister of the interior in the provisional government of the Second
Republic, came to see Millet and gave him a commission of eighteen
hundred francs for an original painting. What is more, Ledru-Rollin, who
was a champion of the working class, bought one of Millet’s masterpieces,
The Winnower, for five hundred francs.17 The political downfall of Ledru-

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55

Rollin in June 1849, however, radically changed Millet’s life. Ledru-Rollin
had attacked the new president Louis-Napoleon, who in 1849 attempted todestroy the republican government in Rome and helped the Pope reconquer
Rome. Ledru-Rollin, in vain, called for a mass demonstration in Paris.
Furthermore, in 1849 there was an outbreak of cholera.18 With eighteen
hundred francs, Millet moved with his family to Barbizon near the forest of
Fontainebleau in north-central France, where he decided to focus on
painting peasant life, not the nudes he had been notorious for.
The only tavern in Barbizon, Guanne’s, attracted not only Millet but also
many other talented artists who had escaped from Paris, to avoid thepolitical upheaval. The Barbizon school was identified with those who
frequented this tavern. Millet himself stayed in Barbizon from 1849 through1875, the year of his death, completing many masterpieces such as The
Sower (1850), The Gleaners (1855), The Angelus (1857–59), The Shepherd
Taking Back a Flock of Sheep at Dusk (1857–60), Shepherdess with Her
Flock (1864), and The Goose Girl (1867).19 He undoubtedly entered his
major phase during the Barbizon years, particularly in the 1850s and the1860s. Sōseki, who pointed out the posthumous value of The Angelus in his
aforementioned Theory of Literature, became so fascinated with The GooseGirl that he imitated it in 1903 in his own painting, which is now onpermanent exhibit at Yamanashi Prefectural Museum of Literature in Japan.
Shepherdess with Her Flock in particular brought Millet tremendous fame
when it was shown at the Salon of 1864 along with Peasants Bringing Homea Calf Born in the Fields, and the director of the Beaux Arts offered Millet
fifteen hundred francs for it. Millet, however, had already sold the painting
to someone else for two thousand francs so that he only received a medal at
the Salon.20 Since by 1863 Millet had become a patriarch responsible for ahuge family consisting of his wife, their nine children, and a couple ofyounger brothers, he had to make intense effort to support them financially.
Therefore, he not only signed a long contract with several Belgian art
dealers but also sold, after 1867, fifty-six paintings to John Quincy Shaw,
one of the wealthiest Boston Brahmins, who was to become the greatest
collector of Millet after his death in 1875.
The Angelus, painted in the late 1850s, is doubtless a masterpiece from
Millet’s major phase. At this point, we should not overlook the Americanbackground of the work. Millet made the painting between 1857 and 1859,
commissioned by an American writer and a patron of the fine arts, Thomas
Gold Appleton of Boston, brother-in-law of distinguished poet Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow and an acquaintance of Twain’s friend William Dean

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Howells. Strangely, Appleton did not take possession of The Angelus when it
was completed. Fishkin has determined that this painting, which Millet hadoriginally sold to Appleton for 1,800 francs, changed hands a number oftimes, ending up with Antonin Proust in the 1889 bidding war between the
Louvre Museum and the American Art Association offering his winning bidof 553,000 francs ($111,000), “an astronomical price for a painting.”21
Proust was representing the French government that wanted to keep themasterpiece in France. The French government, however, hesitated toauthorize the expenditure and this masterpiece came to be owned by theAmericans. Thus, James Sutton, representing the American Art Association,
exhibited it on tour in the United States. In this way the Americans became
fascinated with Millet’s work.
THE AMERICAN FACE OF JEAN-FRANÇOIS MILLET
The brief biography of Millet outlined above will very naturally lead toproblematization of the general image of Millet as a typical artist of honest
poverty. It is true that when he was born on October 4, 1814 in the village ofGruchy, Jean-François Millet was named after Saint Francis of Assisi who
embodied holy poverty.22 And yet, with a huge family to support, Millet
made much money by managing his own market. Moreover, given that hemarried Catherine in 1845, only a year after the death of his wife Pauline, it
is difficult to consider him a kind of saint. It is highly plausible that Twain
composed Is He Dead? because he felt so uncomfortable with the general
idealized image that he wanted to deface, disfigure, and demythologize thegenius. To accentuate this purpose, Twain decided to characterize Millet as ayoung man in his play.
Before discussing Twain’s ambitious play, let us first pay attention to theway Millet himself regarded the genre of drama and actors.
The Luxembourg first gave me a strong dislike to the theatre; and,
although I was not insensible to the famous dramas which were to be
seen in Paris, I must say that I have always retained an invincible
feeling of repulsion for the exaggerations, falseness and grimaces ofactors and actresses. Since those days, I have seen something of peopleof this sort in private life, and I am convinced that by constantly trying
to put themselves into the place of others they lose the sense of theirown personality, and can only speak in the character of the parts theyplay. So in the end they become deprived of truth and common sense,

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57

and lose the simple sentiment of plastic art. It seems to me, that if yourart is to be true and natural, you must avoid the theatre.23
It is undeniable that Millet abhorred the falsity of theatrical performance.
Nevertheless, here Twain takes the liberty of developing the general imageof Millet as a man of honest poverty who wants to survive economic distressby refashioning himself as an heiress of himself. With this concept in mind,
Twain started by radically revising Millet’s biography. His headnote reads,“Note. The time is really before 1848, and Louis Philippe is still king. Millet
was born before 1820 (I’ve forgotten the date, but it is not important.) In thispiece he is about 25.”24
As a reminder, Millet’s major phase was between the 1850s and the1860s, and The Angelus was created from 1857 through 1859 in Barbizon.
Its price soared after his death in 1875, especially between 1881 and 1889.
In Twain’s art of creative anachronism he casts Millet as twenty-five andvery active in the painters’ village of Barbizon in 1839, already well-known
for his masterpiece The Angelus. In fact, Millet left Paris for Barbizon in1849 after the downfall of Ledru-Rollin and the spread of the cholera. Why
did Twain radically modify these facts, providing us with an alternate
history?
In my opinion, there are three reasons. First, insofar as Is He Dead?,
despite being black comedy, centers around the romantic love between
Millet and his sweetheart Marie, Twain had to start the narrative before
Millet’s marriage with his first wife Pauline in 1841. Second, since in 1840
Millet made his professional debut with a portrait exhibited at the Salon of
the Louvre in the 1830s, he had to be leading a life of failure and disgrace;
he could not get along with his mentor Delaroche and was deprived of achance to get a scholarship to study in Rome. Third, the portrait of Millet as
a young, poor, and unsuccessful artist beautifully mirrors the playwrightTwain himself in the 1890s, as he had just faced personal tragedies:bankruptcy in 1894, following the loss of his investment in the Paige
Compositor, and the death of his twenty-four-year-old daughter Olivia Susan“Suzy” Clemens from spinal meningitis in 1896. By 1898, however, Twain
was able to resolve his financial problems and move to Vienna.25 He settledwith his creditors by collecting the royalties from his books and launching a
year-long lecture circuit. In Is He Dead? Millet and Marie’s family resolve
their financial problems when they defend themselves against André’s crafty
exaction.
At this point, we should point out that distinguished art historian Alfred

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Sensier’s 1881 biography, Jean-François Millet, Peasant and Painter, had
an overwhelming impact on the American reception of the French artist. His
portrait of Millet as an artist of honest poverty and noble simplicity, who had
long been shamefully neglected in his own country, appealed to a wide
audience in postbellum America.26
One of Millet’s closest friends and devoted supporters, Sensier was bornin Paris in 1815 and died there in 1877. On the day of Sensier’s funeral, it
was decided among his family and close friends that his Millet biography,
still in manuscript, if arranged and completed carefully, should be
published.27 Thus, the manuscript was given to art critic Paul Mantz tocomplete. Finding that Sensier only related Millet’s life up to 1864, Mantz
very tactfully mixed the already prepared biography with the author’s notes
and correspondences documenting the last decade of Millet’s life. An
abridged version of the biography was serialized in Scribner’s Monthly
Magazine in 1880 with Helena de Kay as translator, and the full edited
biography was published in book form in 1881 by James R. Osgood andCompany in Boston.28 Herein lies the origin of the Millet myth that captured
the American imagination.
Of course, it is important that the Millet myth had been prepared byMillet’s American disciples. William Perkins Babcock, who studied art in
Barbizon in 1848, introduced Millet’s works of art to his friends in Boston.
William Hunt Morris went to Barbizon in 1851 and informed Millet of
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s transcendentalist essays, especially “The American
Scholar” (1837), whose basic concept harmonized with Millet’s vision: “I
ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy or
Arabia; what is Greek art, or Provencal minstrelsy; I embrace the common, I
explore and sit at the feet of the familiar and the low.”29 Edward
Wheelwright as the art editor of the Atlantic Monthly wrote a long 1876
essay on Millet which became influential in shaping the general image ofMillet in the United States.30
Millet’s major phase (1850s–1860s) coincides with what F. O.
Matthiessen in 1941 termed the “American Renaissance,” the peak ofAmerican Romanticism. In this period the expansionist slogan “Manifest
Destiny,” first proposed by John O’Sullivan in 1845, implied the virtues ofhonest Puritan poverty and republican pragmatism. This resulted in
antebellum Americans pushing back the wilderness and expanding
agriculture until the eventual closing of the frontier in 1890.31 It is safe toassume that Emerson’s transcendentalist aesthetics regarding nature invited
Millet to notice a coincidence between the American and French pastoral

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59

style. The Barbizon school in France coincided with the heyday of the
Hudson River school of art founded by Thomas Cole and influenced
American Renaissance writers such as Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville.
Millet, from the beginning, was situated to become popular in the UnitedStates. Millet’s boom peaked when Sensier’s 1881 biography intrigued theAmerican audience by presenting Millet as an artist of honest poverty andnoble simplicity. Therefore, it is highly plausible that after reading Sensier’s
biography of Millet and analyzing why it appealed to Americans, bothTwain and Sōseki became keenly aware of the creation of the Millet myth.
Thus, Twain’s work Is He Dead? is important because it demythologizes
Millet. As noted, Millet’s marriages and skillful marketing of his paintings
convince today’s audience that he is in fact neither a holy man of poverty
nor a saint. Although he appealed to the American audience with his
paintings of peasants, he himself rarely communicated with villagers, only
welcoming his fellow artists and critics, as Wheelright pointed out.32 The
Millet myth was no more than a product of sales promotion by his heirs andSensier’s heirs.
POE, TWAIN, HWANG: TRANSPACIFIC ADVENTURES
Twain’s headnote to Is He Dead? specifies the setting as “really before
1848.” In fin de siècle Vienna, when Twain started writing the play, theMillet myth had already been established. Therefore, demythologizing
Millet as an ambitious and defiant young man induces us to assume that inthis black comedy Twain not only mocks Millet and French art criticism but
also weaves out his own theory about literary life cycle, the first law ofwhich is embedded in his 1893 short story “Is He Living or Is He Dead?”:“The merit of every great unknown and neglected artist must and will berecognized, and his pictures climb to high prices after his death.”33
Expanding the idea, Twain succeeds in formulating what I would like to callthe first law of literary life cycle in Is He Dead?:
CHICAGO. Dutchy said, “When there’s a great Master, the people don’tknow it—and they let him starve, and when he is dead and it is too late,
his name fills the whole world, and the riches come.”(pause)One of us must seem to die—must change his name and disappear—
we’ll make his name sound throughout the world, and the riches will
come.

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TAKAYUKI TATSUMI(Raising his glass in left hand)
François Millet must die! . . .
(With genuine feeling and solemnity)
Friends, you will drink, in silence and standing. . . .
To the sacred memory of him who was always our stay, our comfort,
and our refuge in time of distress—the best friend that ever man had in
this world—the late Jean François Millet, who sleeps in peace, God rest
his soul!
(Toast drunk in silence)34
This very black comedy, even after the author’s death in 1910, had neverbeen discovered let alone performed until the early twenty-first century, after
Fishkin, while conducting research in the UC Bancroft Library, noticed
Twain’s unpublished play.35 The literary life cycle of not only the author but
also the text itself needs to be considered.
It is well-known that Twain’s own major phase, from the 1870s throughthe 1880s, resulted in popular masterpieces such as The Adventures of Tom
Sawyer (1876), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), and A Connecticut
Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). Is He Dead?, written in 1898,
undoubtedly is part of Twain’s late style, which is known for its satiricaltone. Therefore, Twain himself was deeply aware that works like “The WarPrayer” (1905), a scathing satire on the Spanish-American War (1898) and
the Philippine-American War (1899–1902), could not be published during
his lifetime.36 Nonetheless, Is He Dead? is another story—the author
ardently hoped to publish the play and see it performed on the stage in vain,
as Fishkin noted.37 Is He Dead? was supposed to be performed at London’s
Lyceum Theatre, managed by Twain’s British agent Bram Stoker, who had
become famous for the novel Dracula (1897). But the theater burned down.
In consequence, Is He Dead? remained unnoticed for more than a century.
This radical belatedness has made the farsighted play ahead of its time. If
it had been staged around the turn of the twentieth century, Is He Dead?
might have caused a serious controversy. The rise of imperialist America
from the 1890s through the 1900s was made possible through Caucasianheterosexual masculinity embodied by the twenty-fifth president William
McKinley and the twenty-sixth president Theodore Roosevelt, as discussed
by E. Anthony Rotundo and Kathleen Dalton.38 Indeed, the United States
started with the vision of modern democracy. And yet, hemispheric history
links the New World revolutionary experience of postcolonial nationalismwith the ongoing process of Euro-American imperialism.39 Post-

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61

Revolutionary America paradoxically came to champion the cause of
postcolonialism not as future democracy but as a discourse of
cryptoimperialism. Thus, embodying American imperialist masculinity,
Theodore Roosevelt declared in 1904 the right of the United States tointervene in South and Central America in order to maintain economic
stability and democracy.40 Roosevelt made explicit the responsibility of theUnited States to not only protect the Western Hemisphere but also police it.41
Featuring Millet’s transvestism in fin de siècle America would likely havechallenged American masculinity. Considering discourses of heterosexuality
and masculinity pervading fin de siècle imperialist America, it is not difficult
to assume that if actually performed on stage, Twain’s late style experimentin gender bending would have sounded very radical, profoundly disturbing
the sensible audience.
More than a century after Twain’s original writing of the play, thetheatergoer is armed with postcolonialist theory as developed by Edward
Said and Gayatri Spivak as well as being familiar with queer theory as
proposed by Michael Warner and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Educated readers
and theatergoers are now able to appreciate the literary and culturalexperiments of Is He Dead?
The turning point in enjoying transvestite theater is the transvestite
tragicomedy M. Butterfly written in 1988 by distinguished Chinese American
playwright David Henry Hwang and premiered in Washington, D.C.,
synchronous with the dawn of postcolonialism and gender politics.42 Just as
Is He Dead? shows the way the transvestite artist Millet outwits the vicious
usurer, M. Butterfly narrates the way a Chinese male spy disguised as abeautiful actress outwits a French diplomat who believes in his own
Orientalist fantasy. While Twain, at sixty-three, criticized American
masculine imperialism as represented by the Spanish American War (1898),
the Chinese American playwright, who came of age after the end of theVietnam War, mocked Caucasian masculine Orientalism in the queer theater
when he was thirty-one. From this vantage point, we can describe Is He
Dead? as a black comedy written in the author’s late style, which presaged
the advent of postmodern drama. Hence the second law of literary life cycle
based on Edward Said’s theory outlined in his monograph On Late Style(2006): “But what of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution but
as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction? . . . Latenesstherefore is a kind of self-imposed exile from what is generally acceptable,
coming after it, and surviving beyond it.”43
This second law convinces us of the writer’s later years as detachment

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from, overcoming and revolutionizing of, what he or she has patiently
achieved in the whole career. With this law in mind, I would like to consider
the enormous impact of Twain’s radical representation of Millet as atransvestite to be far ahead of its time. Keenly aware of the usurer Bastien
André’s male gaze, Twain’s Millet, disguised as wealthy widow Daisy
Tillou, exhibits how his/her female body is skillfully constructed ofprostheses. Since André has long proposed to the widow, Millet/Daisy plans
to deeply insult and disgrace his/her suitor by uncovering his/hermonstrosity. This weird masquerade reaches a climax when Millet/Daisy
asks her servant, a chimney sweep, for an artificial eye, perfectly aware that
André is peeping at her from behind the door:
WIDOW. Bring me a fresh glass eye—clean one. . . .
Sho! I’ve turned it with the gilded side to the front.
(Hand-glass.)
Why, it looks like a torch.
(Works at it.)
There—now it’s right.44
The “widow”’s masquerade disillusions André dramatically andmiserably.
ANDRÉ. Talk about the ruins of ancient Rome!—I wish—I wish—I
suppose there is no way to get out of here without her seeing
me. . . . Think of it—she would do that every night before she went tobed. A body couldn’t stand it. It would give him night-mare. . . . Isn’t
any part of her genuine? . . . Nothing solid about her. . . . I wouldn’t
marry that debris if she was worth a billion. I’m going to get out or
die.45Note that Millet/Daisy refers to “the gilded side” of the “fresh glass eye,”whereas André discovers “nothing solid about her.” This brings to mind The
Gilded Age: A Tale of Today cowritten by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley
Warner in 1873, which satirized the high economic growth in postbellum
America which masked social problems with a thin gold gilding.
It is also apparent that, in creating the fake identity of the widow, Twain
was inspired by a short story, “The Man That Was Used Up,” written in1839 by Edgar Allan Poe. The narrator of the tale attempts to investigate theidentity of Brevet Brigadier General John A. B. C. Smith, a “truly fine-THE LAWS OF LITERARY LIFE CYCLE

63

looking fellow,” who turns out to be a kind of cyborg whose body,thoroughly mutilated during a battle with Indians, consists of prostheses.
This fictional general is modelled after Vice President Richard Mentor
Johnson, who was severely wounded in the Battle of the Thames in Upper
Canada in 1813, where he killed the Shawnee chief Tecumseh. According to
Stuart and Susan Levine, whoever read the tale in antebellum America“would have recognized Poe’s target.”46 Now let us compare Twain’s
representation of Millet/Daisy with Poe’s description of Brevet Brigadier
General John A. B. C. Smith, who asks his slave for an artificial eyeball: “O
yes, by-the-by, my eye—here, Pompey, you scamp, screw it in! Those
Kickapoos are not so very slow at a gouge; but he’s a belied man, that Dr.
Williams after all; you can’t imagine how well I see with the eyes of his
make.”47
A comparative glance at “The Man That Was Used Up” and Is He Dead?
will clarify that here Twain paid homage to, or even stole Poe’s constructionof cyborgian identity. The most remarkable authority of Brevet Brigadier
General John A. B. C. Smith was intricately and prosthetically reconstructed. Likewise the noble dignity of Millet/Daisy was technicallyinvented. Inheriting this literary tradition, David Henry Hwang wrote M.
Butterfly as a satirical allegory about the Orientalist construction of identity
as analyzed above. In the denouement of M. Butterfly Song Liling, who had
long disguised himself as a beautiful opera singer, reveals to a French
diplomat, Rene Gallimard, his identity as a male spy. Rather than getting
disillusioned with his Orientalist romance, Rene starts looking for the true
Madama Butterfly. Thus, he calls down curses on Song: “You? You are as
real as hamburger. Now get out! I have a date with my Butterfly and I don’t
want your body polluting the room.”48
Here we witness the way the literary history of transvestism has beenradically revised through not only transatlantic negotiations but alsotranspacific interactions.
CONCLUSION: FROM ORIGINALITY TO SELF-PLAGIARISM
Let me conclude the essay with the third and last law of literary life cycleby quoting from the last scene of Is He Dead? After an elaborate funeral for
himself, Millet disguised as Widow Daisy Tillou a.k.a. Millet’s sister starts
his second life as a new artist whose name “Placide Duval” was invented byhis fellow artists Charles Everest and others deeply involved with thisconspiracy from the beginning. Sandy Ferguson and Chicago support the

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idea: “You’re a rich amateur. . . . Marvelously successful imitator of the latelamented.”49
Although David Ives’s 2008 adaptation of Is He Dead? for Broadway
resurrects Jean-François Millet himself in the final sequence, I find Twain’s
original ending more profound. In Ives’s version, Millet supposedly hides in
the Barbary Coast of North Africa, whereas Widow Daisy is revealed to be
an imaginary figure:
INSPECTOR MONNET. Where is the Barbary Coast?
MILLET. Just off the coast of Barbary. Wracked by debt and deep indespair I decided to disappear for a while—only to return and find myfuneral in progress.
INSPECTOR MONNET. Well, it’s no surprise. You have been dead fora week, according to your so-called sister.
MILLET. Sister? What sister?
INSPECTOR MONNET. The Widow Tillou.
MILLET. I have no sister and I’ve never heard of any Widow Tillou.
INSPECTOR MONNET. Ah-ha! So she was not only an imposter—she
didn’t even exist!
MILLET. It looks like somebody’s been having a joke at my expense.
At my great expense.50
Compared with this happy ending, Twain’s original ending sounds
pessimistic. The idea of living his next life as a new artist called “Placide
Duval,” though carefully conceived by his good friends, could not but
disappoint Millet deeply:
WIDOW. (Sorrowfully) Ah boys, I never thought of this. You’ve killed
me for good. Ah. To live maybe fifty years, and suffer the daily tortureof that bastard fame—successful imitator of my own works!51
To live as Placide Duval means imitating Millet’s own masterpieces forever.
Although Millet’s transvestite masquerade in this play resolves his financial
problems, it deprives him of future possibilities: he is forced to be content
with past achievements, a “successful imitator” of his own works. Of
course, we may also assume that as Placide Duval, Millet is expected tocreate more. However, this is another story. As far as Twain’s ironic ending
is concerned, the playwright seems to superbly allegorize the third law ofliterary life cycle: self-plagiarism. Thus, Millet/Daisy accepts this fate andTHE LAWS OF LITERARY LIFE CYCLE

65

waves good-bye to the friends:
WIDOW. You will let me say good-bye, and God bless you all—weshall meet no more. I go back to my country home and my desolate life.
To-morrow a rich stranger will occupy this grand house—with his
young wife—a good man and kind, but a recluse—a man with a secretsorrow gnawing at his heart—he thought he was born to fame, but
knows he must die unknown. You will know him. Be good to him. He
goes disguised—pretend not to notice it.
(Marie looks up wistfully.)
He bears a fictitious name—Placide Duval—(Marie rises, gazing)—Keep his secret. And so, good-bye dear friends. . . .52
Herman Melville’s major works were published from 1846 through 1857.
Henry James reached his literary peak from 1887 through 1904. And
Natsume Sōseki published masterpieces from 1905 through 1916. A writerwanting to last beyond the major phase will be required to rearrange andreproduce his or her past narrative patterns. Twain himself found it
necessary to continue writing Tom and Huck stories in his later years, works
that included Tom Sawyer, Detective (1906) and The Mysterious Stranger(1916), creating a star system of famous characters from his own literature.
It is also true that as they are winning transnational fame in the later years it
gradually becomes indispensable for experienced writers to determine
whether they should repeat, reenact, or self-plagiarize their work for a
growing international audience. Of course, self-plagiarism as a late stylemight sound a hopeless choice. However, a writer’s self-reflexive
mannerism can also be recognized as a truly original style, which may be
imitated by other latecomer writers. In this way the seemingly weird endingof Is He Dead? initiates us not only into the truth of art and literature but
also the laws of literary life cycle: first, posthumous fame; second, a latetransgressive style; third, self-plagiarism. At this point, let us recall how
Sandy Ferguson and Chicago comforted Millet disguised as Widow Daisy
Tillou: “You’re a rich amateur. . . . Marvelously successful imitator of thelate lamented” (emphasis mine). Taking full advantage of his own financial,ontological, and transnational predicaments, in his later years Mark Twainskillfully recreated the painter Millet in his own image and brilliantly
formulated a universal paradox—that it is imperative for a professional
writer to recover the spirit of amateurism full of his or her original intentions

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if he/she wishes to survive as a writer after his/her major phase has peaked.
NOTES
This article was first delivered in Japanese at the panel “Twain and theDramatic Imagination” at the annual conference of the Japan Mark Twain
Society, held on November 2, 2019, at Keio University, Mita. The
illuminating comments of fellow panelists Rie Egashira (University ofTeacher Education Fukuoka), Yoshiko Uzawa (Keio University), andHideyuki Yamamoto (Kobe University), allowed me to complete the written
text. For the Japanese version, see Journal of Mark Twain Studies, 19(2020): 12–20.
Natsume Sōseki, Bungakuron, 2 vols. (1907; repr., Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2007). In
Meiji Japan, Soseki is an all-Japanese writer very well-known for digesting the essence ofmodern English literature and establishing modern Japanese literature.
2
For a rereading of Bungakuron in the context of structuralism and Russian formalism, seechapter 1 of Karatani Kōjin’s Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (1980; tr. Brett de Bary,
repr., Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 11– 44. Nonetheless, we should also notethat in the late Victorian era Herbert Spencer’s social evolutionism gave impacts on a major
literary historian Thomas Sergeant Perry’s English Literature in the Eighteenth Century (NewYork: Harper & Brothers, 1883).
1

My aim, however, has been rather to supplement the histories by pointing out, so far as I
could, the more evident laws that govern literature. I have accordingly tried to show the
principles that went to the formation of the literature of the last century, and also thecauses of its overthrow. Many will doubtless be unwilling to subscribe to the belief that
letters are controlled by laws. Mrs. Oliphant, a writer who deserves and receives therespect of all her many readers, affirms, in her admirable “Literary History of England in
the End of the Eighteenth and the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century” (i. 7 and 8), that“every singer is a new miracle—created if nothing else is created—no growth developedout of precedent poets, but something sprung from an impulse which is not reducible tolaw.” If this statement is correct, literature forms a singular exception to what has
seemed a universal rule. When we consider Mrs. Oliphant’s delightful novels we findthem occupying a normal position in the development of fiction, with their exact
drawing of life and avoidance of direct moral teaching. (vi–vii, emphasis mine)
In this book, Professor Perry clearly attacked the belief that genius was outside the “laws thatgovern literature.”3
Sōseki, Bungakuron, vol. 2, 333. All the quotations from the text are by the author.
4
Ibid., vol. 2, 341.
5Although Is He Dead? was written in 1898, the author could not publish it at the time forvarious reasons. Thus, the play remained unknown for more than a century. In 2002 Shelley
Fisher Fishkin came across the manuscript in the Mark Twain Papers at the University ofCalifornia, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. Fishkin decided to rescue from obscurity thisdelightfully ebullient play—from the period when Twain was known for much darker work.
She published it in 2003 with a lengthy afterword detailing background information useful toTHE LAWS OF LITERARY LIFE CYCLE

67

anyone performing the play today. The result is the following definitive text: Mark Twain, Is
He Dead? A Comedy in Three Acts, ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 2003). See also Fishkin, “Foreword: Bringing Mark Twain’s Is He Dead? toLife” in David Ives, Is He Dead? A New Comedy by Mark Twain (New York: Playscripts,
2008), 7.
6Mark Twain, “Is He Living or Is He Dead?,” in The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg andOther Stories and Essays, ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin (New York: Oxford University Press,2009), 181–96.
7
It is notable that this short story was translated into Japanese much earlier than The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which were published intranslation in 1919 and 1921, respectively. See Tsuyoshi Ishihara, Mark Twain in Japan: The
Cultural Reception of an American Icon (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005).
8
Although Twain had been tantalized and frustrated by the world of the theater all his life,
his stay in Vienna in 1897–98 radically transformed his image of it. According to Fishkin,“Surrounded by a broad range of superb productions in spectacular state-of-the-art theatresand courted as a collaborator by one of Austria’s leading playwrights, Twain couldn’t resist
the siren call of the stage. He jumped into a frenzy of projects—translating plays that were
hits on the Viennese stage for production in the United States, collaborating with Viennese
playwright Siegmund Schleginger on a series of plays about contemporary social issues, andwriting a new comedy of his own.” The collaboration turned out to be a failure. It issignificant, however, that at the same time that Twain was writing Is He Dead?, a play thatfeatures an extraordinary “heroine,” he and Schlesinger were working on a play tentatively
titled “Der Gegenkandidat, oder die Frauen Politiker” (The opposing candidate, or womenpoliticians) featuring female characters in an unprecedented way. Fishkin, afterword to Is He
Dead?, 151–54.
9
See Roland Barthes’s essay “The Death of the Author” (1967) and Michel Foucault’s“What Is an Author?” (1969). Rpt. in Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer, eds.,
Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies (New York: Longman,1998), 280–83, 364–76.
10
Stuart Levine, “Introduction: The New Image of Poe,” in The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan
Poe, ed. Stuart and Susan Levine (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1976), xv–xxx. For
Rufus Wilmot Griswold’s debasement of Poe, see his “Memoir of the Author” included in hisedited The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe: With a Memoir (New York: Redfield, 1857),
xxi–lv.
11
See Gilbert Adair, The Death of the Author (1992; repr., New York: Melville House,2008); and Evelyn Barish, The Double Life of Paul de Man (New York: Norton, 2014).
12
Fishkin, afterword to Is He Dead?, 182.
13
Ibid.
14
Alfred Sensier, Jean-François Millet, Peasant and Painter, ed. Paul Mantz, trans. Helenade Kay (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1881), 53.
15
Ibid., 66.
16
Ibid., 67.
17
Ibid., 74.
18
Julia Cartwright, Jean François Millet; His Life and Letters (1896; repr., London: Swan
Sonnenschein, 1902), 100.
19
Ibid., 105–360.
20
Sensier, Jean-François Millet, 172.
21
Fishkin, afterword to Is He Dead?, 170.
22
Sensier, Jean-François Millet, 22.
23
Cartwright, Jean François Millet, 60.

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Twain, Is He Dead? A Comedy in Three Acts (hereafter abbreviated as IHD), xv.
Fishkin states that Mark Twain wrote Is He Dead? in 1898 as he emerged from one of thedarkest period of his life. “A cripping bankruptcy had forced Twain to give up his home in the
U.S. and embark on a world-wide lecture tour to pay back his creditors, and while he wasabroad, in 1896, his youngest daughter had died suddenly. It would not be surprising if Twain
had wondered whether he’d ever manage to laugh again. But by 1898, Twain had come out of
the gloom that had enveloped him and found himself ready to transform death and debt into
the raw material for a hilarious, over-the-top comedy.” Fishkin, foreword to Ives, Is He
Dead?: A New Comedy by Mark Twain, 7.
26
Regarding the enormous impact of the Millet myth on the American audience, Fishkinobserves: “Although twentieth-century critics, most notably Robert Herbert, have endeavored
to revise and rectify Sensier’s exaggerations and misstatements, it was the myth promoted by
Sensier and others that fascinated Americans—and that clearly intrigued Mark Twain.”Fishkin, afterword to Is He Dead?, 168. Also see Robert L. Herbert, Peasants andPrimitivism: French Prints from Millet to Gauguin (Seattle: University of Washington Press,
1997); and Yoichiro Ide, Nomingaka Millet no Shinjitsu [The truth of Millet the painter ofpeasants] (Tokyo: NHK Books, 2014).
27
Paul Mantz, “Alfred Sensier,” Sensier, Jean-François Millet, viii.
28
Note that James R. Osgood, the publisher of the first English translation of Sensier’s
biography of Millet in the United States, was also Twain’s publisher and also published The
Prince and the Pauper in 1881.
29
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in The Norton Anthology of American
Literature Shorter Ninth Edition: Beginnings to 1865, ed. Robert S. Levine et al. (New York:
Norton, 2017), 593–94.
30
Edward Wheelright, “Personal Recollections of Jean-Francois Millet.” Atlantic Monthly,
September 1876. Wheelright was one of Millet’s American disciples. For more details about
Millet’s American disciples, see Fishkin, afterword to Is He Dead?, 162–63.
31
For the interactions between American Romanticism and expansionism, see F. O.
Matthiessen’s American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and
Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941); and Edward L. Widmer, Young
America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1999).
32
Wheelright, “Personal Recollections of Jean-Francois Millet,” 257–76.
33
Twain, “Is He Living or Is He Dead?,” 188.
34
Twain, IHD, act 1, 46–47, emphasis mine.
35
See note 5.
36
Recently I discovered that the eighth and ninth editions of The Norton Anthology ofAmerican Literature I have been using as a wonderful textbook for my class on American
literary history lacks any reference to the Philippine-American War (1899–1902). Although
the Spanish-American War (1898–99) is clearly inscribed in the chronology, it is brief andsimply followed by the entry at the year 1900: “U.S. population exceeds seventy-fivemillion.” Obscured by this chronology is the fact that the Spanish-American War did not soclearly end but rather continued in the Philippine-American War, which itself did not end in1902 so clearly either but expanded to include the slaughter of the natives and the battle
between one thousand Moros and many US soldiers in 1906. This war is such aninconvenient fact that official history of the United States tends to erase it. As was clarified in
the second volume of the Japanese journal Mark Twain Studies (2006), with Fishkin as guest
editor, Mark Twain was so deeply aware not only of the Spanish-American War but also of
the Philippine-American War that he wrote “The War-Prayer” (1905), a black humorous
critique of Christianity, nationalism, and imperialism.
24
25

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Fishkin, afterword to Is He Dead?, 196–197.
E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the
Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Perseus, 1993); Kathleen Dalton, Theodore
Roosevelt: a Strenuous Life (New York: Vintage, 2002).
39
Gretchen Murphy, Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S.
Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 2.
40
Ibid., 6.
41
Ibid., vii. For Theodore Roosevelt’s imperialistic masculinity, see Rotundo, who focuseson Roosevelt’s famous “Strenuous Life” speech of 1899, in which “Roosevelt treated themartial ideals for the individual man and for the nation as barely distinguishable from one
another,” American Manhood, 235. For the antagonism between Theodore Roosevelt andMark Twain, see Dalton, Theodore Roosevelt, 322–23.
42
David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly (New York: Dramatist Play Service, 1988).
43
Edward Said, On Late Style (New York: Pantheon, 2006), 7, 16.
44
IHD, act 3, 136–37, emphasis mine.
45
Ibid., 135–39, emphasis mine.
46
Stuart and Susan Levine, Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, 438.
47
“The Man That Was Used Up,” in Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, 448.
48
Hwang, M. Butterfly, 67.
49
IHD, act 3, 128.
50
Ives, Is He Dead? A New Comedy by Mark Twain, 97.
51
IHD, act 3, 129.
52
Ibid., 142–43.
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