Mark Twain

Mark Twain & Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Regionalism, Humor, and Identity in US Literary Imagination

Southern Literature

• Folklore
• Humor
• Local color / regionalism

"Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest."

"Always respect your superiors; if you have any."

"I was born modest, but it didn't last."

—Mark Twain

"All good things arrive unto them that wait and don’t die in the meantime."

"Travel is fatal to prejudice."

"Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to."

Samuel Langhorne Clemens & Mark Twain: from Hannibal, MO to Carson City, NV

Illustration by Joseph Ferdinand Keppler for the humor magazine Puck, Dec. 16, 1885.

Mark Twain-S. L. Clemens crossed signature

1. Shall I learn to be good? ....... I will sit here and think it over.
2. There do seem to be so many diffi .....
3. And yet I should really try ....
4. .... and just put my whole heart in it ....
5. .... But then I couldn't break the Sab ....
6. .... and there's so many other privileges that .... perhaps ....leadership now
7. Oh, never mind, I reckon I'm good enough just as I am.

style

genres

• Regional dialect (vernacular)
• Symbolism
• Irony (Southwestern humor)
• Characters taken from real life
• Combination of imagery and dialogue (word choice, dictions, descriptions, setting, child heroes, apparently "carefree" style, etc.)

• Tall Tale and short story

• Satire
• Travel writing
• Autobiography
• Novel
• Essay (social and political critique)
• Play
• Children literature
• Poetry

1872

1867

Roughing It

"The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County"

1880

1873

A Tramp Abroad

The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today

1876

1869

1881

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

The Innocents Abroad

The Prince and the Pauper

Old Times on the Mississippi

1889

1894

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson

1883

Life on the Mississippi

1884/1885

1896

1893–1905

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc

The Diaries of Adam and Eve

Born to Trouble: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

(PBS documentary, 2000)

Tom Sawyer, by True Williams (1876)

Huckleberry Finn, by E. W. Kemble (1884)

Widow Douglas

Miss Watson

Jim

Huckleberry Finn

• Racism and 19th-century US South:
• Jim: seen through Huck's eys (cf. Ralph Ellison: "one also has to look at the teller of the tale, and realize that you are getting a black man, an adult, seen through the condescending eyes—partially—of a young white boy" (Interview, 1991)
• Huck's biggest moral dilemma: "All right, then, I'll go to Hell"
• Jim might be the real hero of the book and may be using a "minstrel mask" strategically. > critics' failure

• Socratic/dramatic irony:
• Huck is too innocent and ignorant > he sincerily does not undestand wrong with his society and what is right about his own transgressive behavior.
• Twain's consciousness and awareness is larger than that of any of the characters in the novel, including Huck. One must be skeptical about most of what Huck says in order to hear what Twain is saying.

Huckleberry Finn

• Banned in 1885 for being sacrilegious, the book has been objected to for being “racist” since 1957.
• Twain developed a moral awareness of the injustic of slavery, despite being born in a world in which it was a perfectly legal institution, a change that is reflected in his masterpiece (cf. also "Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy", on the persecution of the Chinese in San Francisco; marriage into an abolitionist family; the 1869 anti-lynching editorial "Only a Nigger"; exposure to figures like Frederick Douglass and his father-in-law, Jervis Langdon).
• More than challenging the ideology of black inferiority that dominated his world > consciously inverting it (NB: Jim's character)