Mark Twain at Home: How Family Shaped Twain's Fiction and Mark Twain and Youth: Studies in His Life and Writings
2018; Penn State University Press; Volume: 4; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/studamerhumor.4.1.0101
ISSN2333-9934
Autores ResumoIn his 1901 memoir recounting their friendship, William Dean Howells writes of Mark Twain, “He was a youth to the end of his days, the heart of a boy with the head of a sage” (quoted in Mark Twain and Youth, xix). Certainly Howells is not alone in associating Mark Twain with youth. As Kevin Mac Donnell and R. Kent Rasmussen assert in their introduction to Mark Twain and Youth: A Study of His Life and Writings, “Among major writers of the nineteenth century, no name is more closely associated with the concepts of youth” (xix). Both Mac Donnell and Rasmussen's text and Michael J. Kiskis's recently published Mark Twain at Home: How Family Shaped Twain's Fiction focus on questions of youth, family, and domesticity in the author's work, laying out important biographical and historical information, opening up new and provocative avenues of inquiry and interpretation. The two books are thus valuable additions not only to Mark Twain studies but also to larger discussions of childhood and home in nineteenth-century American literature. Moreover, both books remind scholars of American literature that humor can and often does intersect with the sentimental and domestic.Mark Twain and Youth is the more wide reaching of the two books in terms of scope. Part 1, “Overviews,” works to position Mark Twain among the literature of the time and trace out Sam Clemens's lifelong attitudes toward youth and aging. Here Lawrence Berkove's essay on Mark Twain's “fundamentally tragic” view of human life and “heretical version of Calvinism” stands out, as he argues that for Mark Twain, “the human race was damned, and … youth was included in the bleakness of his vision” (12). Part 2, “The Clemens Family,” as the title suggests, turns to the familial. A highlight is “Sam and Livy as Parents,” in which John Bird describes Clemens and his wife “as parents who were devoted to their children, with family life at the center of their marriage, and with an approach to parenting that shares more with the latter part of the twentieth century than the latter part of the nineteenth century” (63). Part 3, “Sam Clemens's Life Experiences,” treats topics as diverse as the writer's boyhood friends and, as detailed in Barbara Schmidt's essay, his late-in-life “collecting of surrogate granddaughters” in a group he called his “angelfish” (137). Part 4, “Mark Twain's Writings,” moves dutifully through the writer's canon, with compelling readings of the major novels. Also of note is Linda Morris's “Gender Bending as Child's Play,” a nuanced reading of “An Awful—Terrible Medieval Romance” and “How Nancy Jackson Married Kate Wilson.” Morris argues that these pieces illustrate that “even as he challenged and played with the notions of gender norms, his work also tended to reinforce conventional gender roles” (203). The final section, “Modern Perspectives,” includes perhaps the most surprising essay, Shelley Fisher Fishkin's reading of Clemens's life alongside that of Henry Dant, born a slave in Sam Clemens's hometown of Hannibal, in 1835, the same year as Sam. Fishkin writes of the Dant family's role in the 2013 opening of “Jim's Journey: The Huck Finn Freedom Center,” a museum dedicated to the black experience in Hannibal. In the aftermath of unrest in Ferguson, only one hundred miles or so from Hannibal, Fishkin's reminder that the “intersecting, interlocking stories of [Clemens's and Dant's] legacies and their lives” will “shape how black and white youth … in the twenty-first century understand their community's past, and how they choose to craft its future” (237) applies not just to tiny Hannibal, but to the country as a whole.Kiskis's Mark Twain at Home, especially when read after Mac Donnell and Rasmussen's collection, likewise invites readers to think about Mark Twain, childhood, and domesticity in new ways. Kiskis argues that attention to such issues and particularly the emotion Sam Clemens attaches to them is long overdue, noting “we must recognize that a study of deep feeling has been long missing in scholarship on Samuel Clemens” (7). In fact, he works to correct what he sees as a pattern of misreading of themes of home and family among Mark Twain critics, claiming that this “aspect of Clemens' adult life has been too long dismissed or, worse, misinterpreted by critics who see his growing reliance on home and family as a mark of his weakness as an artist.” He adds, “For this batch of critics … Clemens's homelife strangled his burgeoning talent and constricted his iconoclastic voice and creativity. Domesticity became the antithesis of ‘Mark Twain,’ perhaps even his demon, his opposition, and his villain” (8). With refreshing bluntness, Kiskis states, “This is simply wrong,” arguing instead that “his literary work was the strongest when it dealt with the demands of home and family” (9). Moreover, he claims, Clemens's family life invigorated and improved his writing, particularly in his agitation for social change: “He looks outward and is energized toward social criticism because he wants his daughters to be safe and their world more stable because it is more compassionate” (9).Key to Kiskis's methodology is his study of nineteenth-century women writers and the domestic/sentimental tradition. He notes that while Mark Twain's books are “untidy and offer a less conventional Christianity” than those of Susan Warner and Harriet Beecher Stowe, nevertheless, his “mid-career novels make it clear that he was deeply integrated into the Christian moral tradition” (4). Seeing Mark Twain this way—as connected to writers like Warner and Stowe rather than simply opposed to them—opens up fascinating considerations for readers. For instance, Clemens writes in an 1887 notebook entry that Stowe (his neighbor in Hartford) tells him she is reading The Prince and the Pauper for the fourth time, explaining “I know it is the best book for young folks ever written” (54). Stowe's positive view of the book—which Clemens felt was important enough to write down—reminds us that these writers perhaps saw eye to eye more often than we have acknowledged in the past. After all, Clemens adds that the “strong fervency” of Stowe's endorsement “surprised the moisture into my eyes,” employing the language of sentimentalism as he reflects on the compliment. Simply put, Mark Twain and nineteenth-century American women writers, so often seen as standing for diametrically opposed values, held worldviews that overlapped in compelling ways, and those similarities have been ignored for too long.Considering Mac Donnell and Rasmussen's collection alongside Kiskis's book reveals moments of surprising synergy, beginning with each text's treatment of Tom Sawyer, specifically how events in Twain's life affected the novel. Joseph Csicsila, in an essay on Langdon Clemens that appears in the collection, argues persuasively that the infant's death in 1872 was a formative event for both Clemens and his book. Csicsila shows that Clemens began composing Tom Sawyer within weeks of the child's death and reasons that “coincidence simply cannot adequately account for Twain suddenly reflecting on his boyhood within a few short weeks of his eighteen-month-old son's passing” (71). From here, he traces out his argument that “Tom Sawyer emerges not from a place of nostalgia but instead from Twain's grief and is fundamentally about him processing the loss of his son” (72). Kiskis likewise explores the significance of Langdon's death, noting that in the early/mid 1870s the loss “was still a fresh wound, and if we consider its importance by how often Clemens does not mention it (similar to Huck Finn's silence about the death of Buck Grangerford), we begin to see how Clemens's stories pivot on the unmentionable wound” (19). If we consider that Clemens turns to the domestic to process his grief, we can also see him focusing on what remains: his three daughters. In this light, rather than a novel about how a child rebels against home and family, Kiskis reads Tom Sawyer as embracing such values, writing that the book “presents the story of a precocious child who remains true to the basic community values and who, in the end, embraces and enforces domesticity” (25). Though later novels would explore children apart from society, in Tom Sawyer Clemens is at the “beginning of his own exploration of the relationship of the child to the adult world of social custom and legal precedent and has not yet come to the point where his children find themselves in full exile” (21). Together, then, Csicsila and Kiskis make readers rethink Tom Sawyer and its place in Mark Twain's canon and American literature.So, too, do both books invite readers to think about Huckleberry Finn in new ways that focus on concerns of home, childhood, and family. Kiskis specifically takes on Leo Marx's influential 1956 essay “Mr. Eliot, Mr. Trilling, and Huckleberry Finn,” which sees the raft as a “utopian, egalitarian, icon … [and a] floating refuge and model of brotherhood,” in stark contrast to the shore (44). Kiskis, though, shows that Huck Finn is not an idyllic work of nostalgia, but rather “a book about the failure of a father to properly nurture his son and about the failure of a community to understand the depths of that father's and that son's ruin. If Clemens thought that Tom Sawyer was a hymn, he offers Huckleberry Finn as a dirge, a lament for the socially and spiritually dead” (40). For Kiskis, Huck is not an “innocent or benign presence,” but rather “a genuine and disturbing threat to the society Clemens's readers inhabit” and a reminder “of their complicity in a society that disposes of people—of children especially—in service to financial stability, material comfort, and spiritual laziness” (47, 48). Similarly, Andrew Levy's essay in the Mac Donnell and Rasmussen collection insists on a reading that foregrounds domestic concerns. He notes that “when Huck says he will ‘light out for the Territory’ rather than be ‘sivilized,’ he means many things: But he means, first and foremost, that an older generation cannot teach him anything…. It is a line written by a parent to parents, and it is meant to sting” (183). For Levy, “the achievement of Huckleberry Finn is that it offers us the opportunity to see where our childrearing practices interact with our national politics—a conversation we rarely have, and one we defy having by maintaining that Huckleberry Finn was a light-hearted book about children and a deep one elsewhere” (183). Thus both writers push readers to think critically about how Mark Twain's most famous novel intersects with national conversations about family and home. Mark Twain does not argue for a retreat from such institutions, but rather, through scathing critique, advocates for a moral reckoning and more honest, authentic reinvestment in them.Finally, the texts offer compelling new readings of Mark Twain's later novels, most notably Pudd'nhead Wilson and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. Debra Ann MacComb's essay in the Mac Donnnell and Rasmussen collection connects events in Pudd'nhead to Clemens's boyhood experiences with slavery, arguing that “slaves and children have their tremendous vulnerability in common: Both are helpless in the face of adult and institutional power that is remote, frequently frightening, self-serving, and absolute” (187). Similarly, Kiskis traces the journey from boyhood to manhood in the book, focusing not on Tom or Chambers but rather Wilson himself. For Kiskis, “David Wilson is the end point of Tom Sawyer's adult future” (72). Wilson, after all, is the “avenging angel who puts things right,” reifying the “town's order and deliver[ing] retribution for [Roxy's] attack on slavery” (73). Kiskis's reading, especially when it is connected with MacComb's insights, further illuminates what so many readers find troubling about the novel's resolution. On the subject of Joan, though, the books take decidedly different positions. For Kiskis, De Conte, the narrator, looks back and “sees a child's death. And he sees his own role in that death, and he is unable to reconcile the loss when so little was gained. His loss is personal. Not national. Not religious. He sees a childhood friend he loved engulfed—one way or the other—in the flames of political and religious zealotry. And he is tired. And he wants to die” (86). In his essay in the Mac Donnell and Rasmussen collection, though, Ronald Jenn reminds us that Sam Clemens intended the book for young readers, especially girls, and gave it to young women more than any of his other works (198). Jenn surveys the last twenty years of scholarship on the novel, most of it focused on gender, and posits that the work “has not yet revealed all of its transnational and translational potential” (202).In their introduction, Mac Donnell and Rasmussen quote from Clara Clemens's memoir, My Father, Mark Twain: “He was fundamentally young to the day of his death and would in no way have been marked by the increase of years had not sorrow clutched at the vitals of his heart” (xix). Clara's words lay out a tension that not only marked Sam Clemens's later life but also fueled his entire career as Mark Twain. As these two books reveal, his fascination with youth and home is infused with a sense of sadness and despair over their continued vulnerability and corruption. For those who study American humor, these books offer new perspectives on how Mark Twain used humor to approach both aspects of this worldview. Kiskis's book and Mac Donnell and Rasmussen's collection provide readers with ample material for future discussion of and debate over domesticity and youth in the Mark Twain canon.
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