The Volcano Allegory

In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Mark Twain uses the allegory of a volcano to explore social, economic, political and technological change.  Hank, after establishing his utopia, declares that “unlimited power is the ideal thing when it is in safe hands”, the safe hand being his of course.  He considered himself to be a "despot” and the “perfectest individual of the human race” because he had managed to have the “civilization of the nineteenth century booming under its very nose.”  He compared this civilization to a volcano waiting to erupt:  “There it was, as sure a face, and as substantial a fact as any serene volcano, standing innocent with its smokeless summit in the blue sky and giving no sign of the rising hell in its bowels” (48).  His analogy proved to be more apt that he thought; by the end of the book thirteen gatlings (created by Hank and his factories) would “vomit death into the fated ten thousand” and “within ten short minutes after [they] had opened fire, armed resistance was totally annihilated” (264).  By the end of the battle “fifty-four were masters of England! Twenty-five thousand men lay dead” around them (264).  Hank’s reign as “the Boss” ended just as he predicted: a volcanic eruption that destroyed everything in its way. 

                Through this allegory Twain explores his conflicting ideals about capitalism.  Twain was a collector of new technologies.  He was the first to have a telephone in his home, he sank his money into various technologies including the Paige Compositor  (a printing press that used a mechanical arm to set type but that failed because it’s numerous errors),  and was supposedly the first person to write a book on a typewriter.  In Connecticut Yankee, Twain sets Hank, an ordinary man in the 19^th Century, in the 6^th Century where he can become extraordinary.  He soon sets himself above those around him and his lust for power drives him to create technologies that the 6^th Century morals are not yet able to handle.  Though Hank, Twain explores his own fears that technology will outstrip morals and that abused technology will provide the type of “ultimate power” that ends with the volcanic eruption that ends Hank’s stay in King Arthur’s court.