Ambivalent Citizenship in Winnemucca and Twain: Exclusion after the Fourteenth Amendment

Abstract: This essay investigates literary interrogations of the term "citizen" in the postbellum United States by looking at Sarah Winnemucca's Life Among the Piutes and Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi . The books, both 1883 memoirs of the West, present different cultural skepticisms towards American claims of citizenship, constitutionally formalized in the Fourteenth Amendment. Winnemucca displays ambivalence towards citizenship because of its unstable inclusion of her Indigenous brethren, concurrently displaying a Native martial disposition (while always mentioning the failures of white citizens) to suggest that Native people might be more fit for citizenship than the Anglo settlers. Twain presents a similar ambivalence towards the category, satirically painting American citizens as unsophisticated exemplars of the Gilded Age. The essay shows how two authors publishing nearly simultaneously articulated their critiques of the nation around the same politically charged category, whose ambiguity and importance to determining belonging made it ripe for literary treatments.