understanding mark twain: mark twain’s novels

Understanding Mark Twain: Understanding Mark Twain:

Mark Twain’s NovelsMark Twain’s Novels

At my blog, TwainProject.BlogSpot.com, I post Twain related articles and photos

that showcase his time in Redding, Connecticut.

One day, after a post about one of the Centennial Celebrations we were having

to commemorate his life in Redding, I received the following comment/rant…

“Mark Twain is the kind of boring writer that my teachers tried to push down my

throat in Middle School and High School. If there is any way to learn about the way people lived back then, reading Twain is

not it. If there’s a literary icon or role model for the 19th century, Mark Twain is

not the one.”

“His scatterbrained stories have no meaning or reason behind them. He

simply wrote for the sake of writing…”

The remarks echoed those made by Danbury CT’s High School English

Department Chairman last year in the Danbury News-Times:

“His [Twain’s] influence is waning. It’s a lot more difficult to get kids interested in his writings. Sometimes, it’s because it’s more satirical and less blunt humor than

they hear today.”

The issue here is real- teachers & students don’t get Twain because they don’t know Twain. After a great deal of

thought & discussion with others, I concluded that we

may be teaching Twain wrong.

What if kids got to know Twain first?Maybe if they better understood his life experiences, they’d understand why he

wrote what he wrote and want to read his works.

Here is a preview of my solution to this issue, and what I’d like to present to classrooms across

America.

Hello…my name isSamuel L. Clemens. A.K.A. Mark Twain!

“I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming

again next year (1910), and I expect to go out with it. It will

be the greatest disappointment of my life if I

don’t go out with Halley’s Comet.”

-Mark Twain, a Biography

In 1910, Halley’s Comet reached perihelion on April 20th and Mark Twain

died on the 21st.

Born:11/30/1835

Died:04/21/1910

Halley’s Comet

Florida, Missouri

Redding, Connecticut

Sure…You could call me “Rags to Riches”

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was born in this cabin in the small frontier settlement of

Florida, Missouri.

Interior of Florida, Missouri homeInterior of Florida, Missouri home

He was born two months premature, on November 30th 1835.

The sixth child of John and Jane Clemens.

Premature babies at that time period did not usually survive. The frontier was a

harsh environment and children routinely died from diseases such as measles, smallpox, scarlet fever and malaria.

“When I first saw him I could see no promise in him.”

Jane Clemens, his mother.

Sam survived, but would spent a good amount of his first four years of life in bed. There he would absorb and retain

many of the sounds and voices that surrounded him.

Hearing is believed to develop very quickly in premature babies and Sam

would exhibit an unusual ability to retain the sounds he heard around him in his

younger years, especially, the dialects of speech.

“He never stopped performing the earliest songs and spirituals he heard, and as a mature writer he could reproduce entire

blocks of spoken conversation.”

“His capacity to transform commonplace spoken language into literature, like any

artist’s gift, remains beyond understanding.”

-Ron Powers, Mark Twain, a Life

Other Talented Premature Babies:

Pablo PicassoIsaac NewtonAlbert EinsteinCharles Darwin

RenoirJohn Keats

Franklin RooseveltStevie Wonder

Many, if not all, of Mark Twain novels and stories were directly tied to his life

experiences.

His earliest life experiences, specifically his exposure to slaves and slavery, are

brought to life in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

In many ways Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is autobiographical.

Understanding Huckleberry Finn

Although the Missouri he grew up in never joined the Confederacy, it was a world in

which slavery was accepted and practiced by most white families… Sam's parents owned slaves, his Uncle John did too.

In fact, slavery was defended by all of Missouri’s public institutions, including the

churches.

Understanding Huckleberry Finn

In Twain’s Notebook #35 he writes:

“In those slave-holding days the whole community was agreed as to one thing-

the awful sacredness of slave property.”

“It shows that that strange thing, the conscience - the unerring monitor - can be trained to approve any wild thing you want

it to approve if you begin its education early & stick to it.”

Understanding Huckleberry Finn

Unlike many Missourians, Twain left Missouri in his teens and traveled to

several Northern States that frowned upon Slavery and the hatred that fueled it.

Sam’s teenage travels… 2,000+ miles

Understanding Huckleberry Finn

As he matured, he came to realize the wrongs that he had unknowingly been a

part of and through his writings he exposed the wrongs that he had seen committed.

Understanding Huckleberry Finn

In Following the Equator, he says:

“When I was ten years old I saw a man fling a lump of iron-ore at a slave-man in anger, for

merely doing something awkwardly- as if that were a crime. It bounded from the man’s skull,

and the man fell and never spoke again. He was dead in an hour… Nobody in the village approved of that murder, but of course no one said much

about it.” (Chapter 38)

Understanding Huckleberry Finn

His association with Slavery left him with a legacy of guilt, guilt that he tried to

lessen through acts of charity. He donated money and made special appearances at fundraising events for numerous African

American Churches, Institutes, and Associations. He also supported

individuals.

Understanding Huckleberry Finn

In 1885, the year Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was released, he

anonymously paid the tuition for Warner T. McGuinn, a struggling African American

law student at Yale Law School. In a letter to Yale’s Law School Dean, he

noted: “We have ground the manhood out of them, & the shame is ours, not theirs,

& we should pay for it.”

Understanding Huckleberry Finn

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is powerful because of it’s realism. The

situations, the topics, the conversations, and the dialects he uses in those

conversations all come from Twain’s unique life experiences.

Jim’s words and the way he speaks are all tied to Twain’s childhood…

Understanding Huckleberry Finn

Ron Powers, Mark Twain, a Life

“He heard his first slave voices before the age of four, and sought them out through

the rest of his childhood and beyond.”

“…no human voices, save his own mother’s, caught his imagination quite

like those of the Negro slaves…”

Understanding Huckleberry Finn

“Those voices spoke in a way different from the people in his family: quick,

delicious, throbbing with urgencies half-named, half-encoded. They conjured

mind-pictures: lightning bolts, apparitions from the spirit world, chariots swooping down from heaven… the slave voices

treated language as a cherished creature, to be passed around, partaken of…”

Understanding Huckleberry Finn

One of the slave voices that influenced Sam’s life was a middle aged slave known

to him as “Uncle Dan’l”

He’d later recall the “privileged nights” he, his cousins & the slave children clustered at Dan’l’s feet to hear him tell his thunderous

stories.

Understanding Huckleberry Finn

“He has served me well, these many, many years…spiritually I have had his welcome company… & have staged him in books as

his own name and as “Jim”…

It was on the farm that I got my strong liking for his race and my appreciation

of… its fine qualities.”

Understanding Huckleberry Finn

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn took Twain 8 years to write. Between

manuscript 1 and 2, he made more than 1,700 revisions. 88 percent of these

revisions being: word changes, spelling, punctuation and adding emphasis. He used the words he used for a reason.

The “N-Word” appears 219 times in the novel

and its usage is deliberate.

"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – it's the

difference between the lightning bug and the lightning."

-Mark Twain

Understanding Huckleberry Finn

The “N-Word” appears 219 times for two reasons.

1. Its usage is historically correct. That is how white people referred to African- Americans in that time period.

2. It shows/screams at us how wrong and hurtful that mindset was.

Understanding Huckleberry Finn

As the novel progresses, Huck matures and realizes the wrongs of the slavery

society he’s grown up in; much like Twain himself did.

Huck’s decision to reject that society’s values and “go to Hell,” rather than

betray his friend Jim is one of the novel’s most powerful moments.

Understanding Huckleberry Finn

Huck discovers "you can't pray a lie" and that helping Jim is the right thing to do -- even if society's most pious and learned insist that aiding a runaway is perverted

and wicked.

Understanding Huckleberry Finn

Twain once described the novel as: "a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers a defeat." He also

once said: “My books are simply autobiographies”

and in many ways Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is just that…

In summary…I am not a

Racist.

Now… back to my life story.

Many of Twain’s characters, including Huckleberry Finn,

were a product of his childhood experiences in Hannibal.

Sam’s family moved to nearby Hannibal, Missouri in 1839, where he’d enjoy his boyhood in the presence

of the broad Mississippi River.

Location, Location, Location

Hannibal was the center of America at a time when America was making the

transition from East to West. Sam had a very unique, front row seat to

civilization… Immigrants, Merchants, Speculators, Gamblers, Thieves,

Politicians, Preachers, Runaways & Indians… he saw it all on the river front

and he soaked it all in.

United States in 1835

The Great FrontierThe West is largely unsettled byAmericans.

Location, Location, Location

Because of Hannibal’s River-side location and America’s Westward expansion, Sam would experience a very diverse group of

individuals or as Ron Powers’ notes in Mark Twain, a Life:

“…a continuing vaudeville of floating humanity.”

“When I find a well-drawn character in fiction or biography I generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the

reason that I have known him before--met him on the river.”

- Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

Location, Location, Location

The education that Sam would receive in Hannibal from the age of four to the age of seventeen would come through loud

and clear in his novels:

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

From here I would go on to describe his childhood, education, teenage travels,

etc…

Feedback is welcomed, please e-mail me at:

bcolley@colleyweb.com