Mark Twain and Whiteness

The many meanings of a color

Mark Twain seems to have been born in his white suit. He certainly made white clothes famous, though he was preceded in this bit of fashion by the American painter James McNeill Whistler who started doing so in Paris about a decade earlier. Decades later, the writer Tom Wolfe followed his example.

Twain made the white suit his trademark late in his life. Like television actors cast as grandees (think of Ricardo Montalban in “Fantasy Island”) or fossilized versions of Southern aristocrats (Col. Sanders, for examole), Twain adopted his signature style once he had become a white-haired author moving in a world of plutocrats, silver motorcars, and steam yachts; his best friend at the time was Henry Huttleston Rogers, the industrialist behind Standard Oil. You might call this the sartorial version of White Privilege.

About this same time — in his dotage and after the death of his beloved daughter Susie — Twain developed a special fondness for little girls. He sought them out wherever he was — in New York or the Connecticut countryside, or while vacationing in Bermuda. Then he would soon assemble a troop of “Angel Fish,” as he called them, to regale and take on pony rides. Whatever this might reveal about a heartbroken father, it seems to have had the approval of the girls’ parents and been entirely innocent…