Twain's Work Research Articles

Mark Twain, culture and gender: envisioning America through Europe

Often regarded as the quintessential American author, in fact mined his knowledge and experience of Europe as assiduously as he did his adventures on the Mississippi and in the American West. In this challenging study, J.D. Stahl looks closely at various works with European settings and traces the manner in which the writer redefined European notions of class into American concepts of gender, identity, and society. Stahl not only examines such writings as Innocents Abroad, Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut in King Arthur's Court, and the Mysterious Stranger manuscripts but also treats a number of neglected works, including 1601, A Memorable Midnight Experience, and Personal Recollection of Joan of Arc. In these writings, Stahl suggests, utilised the terms and symbols of European society and history to express his deepest concerns involving father-son relationships, the legitimation of parentage, female political and sexual power, the victimisation of good women, and, ultimately, the desire to bridge or even destroy the barriers between the sexes. The exoticism of foreign culture - with its kings and queens, priests, and aristocrats - furnished with some especially potent images of power, authority, and tradition. These images, Stahl argues, were plastic material in Twain's hands, enabling the writer to explore the uncertainties and ambiguities of gender in America: what it meant to be a man in Victorian America; what thought it meant to be a woman; how men and women did, could, and should relate to each other. Stahl's approach offers insights into Twain's work. In discussing Innocents Abroad, for example, he analyses the emergence of the Mark Twain persona as part of a quest for cultural authority that often took the form of sexual role-playing. He also demonstrates that Prince and the Pauper, even more strikingly than Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, embodies the writier's central myth of orphaned sons searching for surrogate fathers. His reading of A Connecticut Yankee uncovers the psychological contradictions in Twain's political aspirations towards democratic equality. Stahl's book offers a contribution to literary scholarship, informed by psychology, gender study, cultural theory, and traditional criticism. It confirms Twain's debt to European culture even as it illuminates his re-envisioning of that culture in his own uniquely American way.

Sentimental Liberalism and the Problem of Race in Huckleberry Finn

ARK Twain is one of those rare writers loved by both academics and the larger public, though it should surprise no one that the academy and the public seem fond of him for different reasons. One can get some idea of the popular response to Twain by looking at how he has been marketed since his death. His tremendous popularity led Hollywood quickly to turn his works to account; studios produced film versions of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as early as 1920.1 The best known of these, the 1939 MGM version starring Mickey Rooney as Huck, purifies the tale by eliminating all of Tom Sawyer's appearances, by having Huck convert so completely to abolitionism that he convinces the Widow Douglas (not Miss Watson) to set Jim free at the end of the tale, and by having Jim sail off on a steamboat to the free states to join his already free wife and child. While the movie does not whitewash the political problem of slavery, the ironic ambiguities are stripped away in favor of a conventional happy ending, complete with heartwarming violin music to mark Huck's conversion and Jim's freedom. At least this film treatment has the integrity to maintain much of the political content; other film adaptations of Twain's works partake of the same sentimental spirit while ignoring or

The Further Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Greg Matthews

Reviews 233 feature that can be faulted is the form of documentation; Benson never pro­ vides a bibliography of primary and secondary sources but lists sources sep­ arately for each chapter, making the reader hunt and seek among them. The only other fault is the price;at $35.00 the book istoo expensive for the average reader, who will have to check it out of the library or wait for the paperback edition. But Benson has given us the definitive biography of an American writer whose major status has never been in doubt with readers, while Edmund Wilson’s embarrassingly bad novels have long been forgotten. ROBERT E. MORSBERGER California State Polytechnic University, Pomona The Further Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. By Greg Matthews. (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1983. 500 pages, $15.95.) Greg Matthews has guts. How else can a first-novel author who dares to write a sequel to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Adventures, here­ after) be described? He dares, and, what’smore, he does it well. The Further Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Further) is a tour-de-force of 36 chapters, with the bulk of them covering the trek westward. Four chapters tie into Adventures and set the stage for leaving Missouri; 22 cover the desert travel to California; three have Huck and Jim digging successfully for gold almost immediately upon arrival in California; and the last seven move to San Francisco, where the American questers experience the inevitable boredom in a settled society and the desire to move on. As Huck’s statement at the end of Tom Sawyer supplied a kernel for Adventures, so that same statement is at least one kernel for Further. When Huck questioned whether or not it would be wise to bury his treasure, he said, “Pap would come back to this yer town some day and get his claws on it if I didn’t hurry up, and I tell you he’d clear it out pretty quick.” A prophetic statement, this is just what Pap, still alive in Further, does. Pap and Morg, a lowest-dregs-of-society companion, burn the widow Douglas’ house, killing her and Jim’s family, reunited with him at the beginning of Further, and murder Judge Thatcher. Huck is blamed for the murders; Jim helps him escape from jail; and they are off to “howling adventures” in the West, where they are known as Desperado Finn and his Nigger Accomplice. The fugitives assume aliases throughout their picaresque adventures, and each new alias marks a new adventure. Rather than leaving the river for the land, Huck and Jim meet people and adventure at outposts of civilization in the emptiness of the Old West. Echoes of Adventures, such as “You ain’t playin’no joke on ol’Jim is you, Huck?” and Jim’s father-sermonizing to the boy, permeate the story. Also, allusions to other Twain works, especially Roughing It, a sub-title in Chapter 31, crop up frequently. Huck is called a “puddin-head,” a town isnamed Hedleyville, signs and hexes, the “It don’pay 234 Western American Literature to mess wid kings” philosophy, several references to Tom Sawyer’senvy at the friends’adventures, and more, are present. Differences appear in Further, too. Perhaps because mores are different in 1984, the humor in Matthews’ novel is sometimes more risque, but humor it is and just as basic as Twain’s. Although Twain might have thought of depicting the practical method of checking the virginity of a mail order bride, Matthews wrote it. Prejudice also appears in Further but rather than applying only to “niggers” it embraces “Greasers” and “Chinky Chinky Chinee” as well, depicting clearly the ugliness and brutality of prejudice anywhere. And Jim comes into his own when he says, “I ain’t steppin’down no mo’.” Matthews seems comfortable when writing about women. As Twain did in Roughing It, he shows how men outnumbered women in the Old West. He, too, depicts the usual low-class whores who followed the gold strikes and the just-as-usual higher-class whores who plied their trade in the burgeoning cities on the Coast. Mrs. McSween, the ex-whore who forces her five daugh...

Mark Twain and the Art of Memory

ANY have commented on the importance of in the LYJL materials, themes, and composition of Mark Twain's works.' And not only as a fiction writer but also as a riverboat pilot and as a lecturer, Mark Twain's livelihood, and at times even his life, depended on his ability to remember bends and obstacles in the river or words and ideas to be delivered from the lecture platform. Much of Old Times on the Mississippi supports the thesis, there is one faculty which a pilot must incessantly cultivate until he has brought it to absolute perfection. Nothing short of perfection will do. That faculty is memory. I think a pilot's is about the most wonderful thing in the world.2 And yet throughout his life Clemens had a notoriously poor memory. Even as a cub pilot he continually worried how with his dull memory he would be able to retain the shape of the river; nor was this merely a fictional pose, for Clemens' absent-mindedness was a family joke. At age fourteen Susy introduces her father into her biography of him as . the loveliest man I ever saw, and ever so absentminded,3 and Paine notes that even as a young man he could

Mark Twain's Response to the Native American

ARK TWAIN HAS BEEN called the champion of the oppressed,' IVJL but when he wrote of the Native American he was unfailingly hostile. Some Twain scholars, reluctant to accept Maxwell Geismar's conclusion that Twain's writings reflected hatred of the Indian,2 have cited instances of Twain's sympathetic response to Indians and concluded that although during his Western years he seemed prejudiced against Indians his attitude eventually changed.3 To be sure, Lewis Leary raised a valid consideration when he expressed concern that sustained focus on Twain's social reform efforts would diminish his image and detract attention from his literary artistry.' However, if Twain's work is worthy of analysis, both as a complex individual's artistic expression and as literature reflecting nineteenth-century American culture and literary taste-for Twain was a popular writer-then his response to the Indian, usually treated as a taboo subject or ignored, demands investigation. To oversimplify Twain's response to the Native American tribes and their struggle to survive as a free people may be to ignore the relationship between Twain's literary insistence on the inferiority of the Indian and the nation's need to mythologize extermination of the natives and seizure of their homelands as an admirable part of the pioneer struggle. Although the Native American was a frequent subject of Twain's writing, analysis of Twain's portrayal of him is usually limited to Injun Joe's mythic role or Cooper's influence on Twain's portrayal of the Indian.5 Long before Twain, the Indian had been stereotyped

Mark Twain's Masks of Satan: The Final Phase

PERHAPS THERE IS NO MORE intriguing-or perplexing-phase in Mark Twain's life and art than the final one, the I890's and early I900's. During these years, according to Bernard DeVoto, Twain threshed out his symbols of despair from a wide variety of material much of which was left incomplete, though virtually all of it saturated with a bitter or black satiric mood.' And DeVoto's hypothesis that Twain sought to free himself from an intolerable burden of guilt through the dream-philosophy of Philip Traum, the mysterious stranger, remains one that still must be considered fruitful, though it has set off some impressive countertheories.2 Yet there is no easily perceived, clearly defined artistic direction in this phase of Mark Twain's work as a whole. What we do see is that Twain's mind and art were coiled around a number of stakes driven into the heart of a dominant symbolic and thematic complex: fallen man with all his attendant personal, social and political evils; an absurd universe grotesquely deterministic and dream-like at the same time; the problem of personal (psychic) identity; and a Satan-figure, who, ironically, very likely developed out of a persistent Mark Twain character-type, the sometimes innocent, sometimes devious stranger striving either to con or to reform the people and society around him. The Satan-figure has received serious critical attention, since it is he who is at the center of the Mysterious Stranger manuscripts-the uncompleted last testament of Mark Twain.3 But there were several Satans for

HUCKLEBERRY FİNN VE AMERİKAN GERÇEKÇİLİGİ

This article discuss the importance of Mark Twain's work Huckleberry Finn into realistic literature from American regional folk literature.