“The Californian’s Tale”: Demythologizing the West Through Allegory Timothy Sexton College

Upon an initial reading, Mark Twain’s 1893 short story “The Californian’s Tale” seems to be nothing more ambitious than becoming another addition to what was at the time an ever-growing catalogue of characters collectively painting a portrait of the regional literature devoted to the opening of America’s western frontier. It may only be after the story of the tragic marriage of Henry and his charming young bride has had a chance to settle into the consciousness of a reader familiar with the conventions and tropes of the Western genre that true ambition of this story begins to seep in and take root.

Apparently, however, it is quite easy for some readers to be so easily sucked into the strange psychology of the story that this is the element on which they focus to the exclusion of the larger mythic status. To be sure, Henry’s bizarre mental disorder which creates an annual recurrence of symptoms involving a delusional belief that his wife is alive and preparing to return from the journey on which she embarked almost two decades earlier—never to return—is extreme enough to warrant such intense attention of analysis, but in the effort to explore the psychology, too much analysis has missed the grander historical meaning which...