“The Breath of Flowers That Perished”: Imperial Ecologies in Mark Twain’s Early Letters

Abstract:This article will trace Mark Twain’s early notes and letters to the Sacramento Union and Alta California during his four-month stay on the Hawaiian Island in 1866 and his subsequent trip down the Rio San Juan in Nicaragua later that year, considering his poetic meditations on a diversity of flora and fauna alongside his occasionally direct and sometimes elusive commentaries on territorial annexation, missionization, and settler occupation in the Pacific and beyond. Reading across a colonial archive of nineteenth-century environmental surveys of the Pacific atolls and the Central American isthmus, this article will highlight Twain’s alignment toward and departure from a tradition of writing about non-European ecologies as bound within the exotic picturesque. Twain’s ambivalent, non-Western ecologies mark a politics that extends well beyond his familiar satires and pointed expositions, offering pathways for reimagining the place of non-human environments throughout his subsequent literary canon.