Hermeneutic Delusion in Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner's The Gilded Age

Abstract The notorious difficulty of assigning authorship to specific parts of Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner's The Gilded Age (1873) is a formal correlative of its allegory: all characters are deluded whenever they make the ordinary reading assumption that language must have natural origins and referents. “Gilded” names a condition of illusory authenticity. The danger of arbitrary signs is demonstrated diegetically when characters pursue mirages induced by writing and cultural artifacts; these end in madness or new illusions. The theme is reinforced by paratextual elements—title, preface, epigraphs, parabases, and the expensive, tipped-in diagram of Sellers's speculative dream. Twain had earlier evoked such a labile world, foreshadowing the Derridean “postal,” in travel writings and tall tales narrating the delusions of author- and reader-surrogates. Twain's later writings will describe the “gilded” world as one without any viable alternative to Tom Sawyer or as wholly unreal, as in The Mysterious Stranger.