The Oppressed, The Oppressors, and Everyone In Between
Oppression is a powerful weapon that is often manipulated to strip man of any and all rights he once possessed. Nowhere is the tool better employed than in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, where the nobility tyrannize society and decimate human morale. Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court depicts a peasant class suppressed by aristocrats and clergy in a corrupt and arbitrarily stratified society.
King Arthur is an unable ruler whose narrow mindset validates the illogicality of his place in society. When he notices several escaped slaves, he instructs Hank, “We are bound in duty to lay hands upon them and deliver them again to their lord” (Twain 205). To King …show more content…
When Hank encounters a peasant in the forest, “[he] tells Morgan that the only reason he helped lynch his neighbors was fear of retaliation if he failed to show zeal in the master’s cause” (Morris 7). The subjection is so severe that peasants are willing to perform any task asked of them— even murder. This exchange embodies the callousness of the nobility, intimating that they can viciously abuse people without feeling remorse. However, Twain, who is known for his sharp satirical tongue, is strictly descriptive and respectful in characterizing peasants. In Morgan Le Fay’s prison, Hank spots a man in a corner and says, “He was thirty-four years old, and looked sixty” (Twain 111). There is nothing remotely caustic about his description as he is solely explicit. When he describes the nobility, however, he lacks all remorse and compassion. In illustrating the battle between Hank and a group of knights, his only mention of the knights’ deaths is “Bang! One saddle empty. Bang! Another one. Bang-bang!” (Twain 276). Hank’s unusual lack of compassion exposes his disdain for the nobles; he does not concern himself to even acknowledge who died. Robert Penn Warren justifies Hank’s inhumanity by amalgamating the nobility, knight-errantry, and the South into one common enemy when he writes, “Hank is arrayed not only against Sir Sagramor le Desirous and their ilk, but also against the spectral …show more content…
In Morgan Le Fay’s castle, Hank works diligently to free her prisoners, who are imprisoned for either crimes they did not commit or crimes long forgotten. When Hank asks Le Fay to consider the possibility that the prisoner might not have anything to confess, she responds, “An I rack him to death and he confess not, it will peradventure show that he had indeed naught to confess” (Twain 102). Her rationale mirrors the Spanish Inquisition where the accused were deemed guilty until proven innocent and were “racked” by clerics until they became guilty. In both instances, the clergy ruled with an iron fist and oppressed the populace. Warren refers to the society in the sixth century as “a land where mania and brutality are masked by pretensions of chivalry and Christianity” (482). In his definitive statement, Warren not only argues that the clerics are the root of the subjugation but also insists that they are surreptitious about their abuse, making the institution even more unscrupulous. The clergy is behind the despotism and the unreasonable social order that places them at the top and withholds education to ensure the system remains this way. Jeffrey Miller comments on the greatest restriction to the lower classes by stating, “Without his education, the laborer had continued what he was, a slave, with it, he is what he is, a sovereign” (Miller 5). The clergy prevents people