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Chapter 2 Features of Mark Twain‘s work
2.1 Background and themes of short stories
Mark Twain‘s greatest gift to American literature is his ability to write honestly and simply about all types of ordinary people. He created wonderful characters and used them to portray every aspect of human nature with amazing insight and sympathy. His extraordinary range of characters show great courage, generosity and honor as well as cruelty, weakness, stupidity and selfishness.
Mark Twain believed passionately in the right to freedom for all men. This was issue of much debate in the United States when he was writing. The American Civil War (1861-1865) was fought between the north (which opposed slavery) and the south (which fought to defend its way of life, including keeping slaves). In The
Other Side of War Twain shows us that people‘s motives were less clear-cut than history teaches. In A True Story he uses the life story of Aunt Rachel to demonstrate the terrible cruelty of slavery.
Trust is another important theme of Mark Twain‘s work. Often the characters who trust others are cheated and suffer dreadfully (e.g. Aileen in A Dog‘s Tale).
This might be seen as more cynical side of Twain‘s writing, but in other stories we see how trust and optimism can be rewarded in the right company (e.g. Ed Jackson‘s trusting Cornelius Vanderbilt).
Humor is an important element of many of Twain‘s stories, and of his writings in general. In A Passport to Russia Twain creates an unusual and funny character – Professor Jackson – who cheerfully pulls his new friend, Alfred Parrish, into stranger and stranger situations. Only when Parrish is faced with ten years in prison does the dangerous side of the story‘s humor become apparent. Similarly Murder in Connecticut begins humorously, with a funny-looking little monster floating around the writer‘s office, but ultimately the story tells a very serious tale about the ease which many people can commit horrific acts of cruelty.
Twain‘s first well noted work was, ―The Celebrated Jumping Frog of
Calaveras County.‖ It appeared under several different names in different newspapers such as the New York Saturday Press. The story, told by Jim Smiley is set during the gold rush era and tells how Jim competes with others to see whose frog can jump farther. This story helped to first establish twain as a humorist. He used both humor and exaggeration to satirize storytelling and the cultural differences between east and the new west.
Twain wrote ―The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg‖ in 1899 in response to his misfortunes, including the death of his wife and daughter as well as his financial loss. The story explores the disillusionment of human nature and includes themes such as hypocrisy, morality, ethics, the distinctiveness of human sinfulness, and individual versus society.
Twain‘s ―The Invalid‘s Story‖ tells of two men sitting in a railcar who mistake a gunbox and rotting cheese for a corpse in a casket. This short story
displays Twain‘s frontier style humor as it comments on both morality and behavior towards the dead.
Part of the humor of Twain‘s text is in the narrator‘s use of dialect, with words spelled out to imitate his characters‘ pronunciation: ―Dan‘l‖ for ―Daniel,‖
―p‘nts‖ for ―points.‖ Today, this is viewed as a dangerous technique as it can misfire and seem to condescend to characters or make them regional stereotypes. Twain gets away with it, in part because we sense that the sound of his speech is key to the character of Wheeler the raconteur and Smiley, the archetypal betmaker. Much of the story‘s charm relies on its folksy, I‘m-gonna-tell-you-a-tale oral tradition.
Twain‘s stories deliberately court the feel of an old man in a rocking chair, telling you a story on a cricket-infused summer night, with iced tea in beaded glasses and mosquitoes round your ears. Twain made a great deal of money by performing his stories, essentially story-telling on stage, and key to his success was his genius at approximating the mannerisms of speech, the way that phrasing and word choice create character. But along with reproducing the homey way that unschooled people speak, Twain captures the way that anecdotal story-tellers can spin yarns apropos of little and keep it up indefinitely.
The narrator‘s tale allows him to play straightman to a lonely old man who is pleased to find an interlocutor, even an unwilling one. Wheeler ―backed me into a corner and blockaded me there with his chair.‖ Smiley is a pure caricature, relentless, none-too-clever, and all-too-eager to display his failings, not only with
the dog, Andrew Jackson, but with his celebrated frog, Dan‘l Webster. A gambling addict, Smiley has the time and wherewithal to dedicate three months to frogtraining, only to be bamboozled by a cleverer stranger. If we enjoy Wheeler‘s company, then we should be curious to know what Smiley got up to with his oneeyed cow.
Twain himself rewrote ―The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras
Country‖ several times, giving it different titles, and it was widely translated. He wrote an essay about the writing of ―The Jumping Frog Story,‖ and he even demonstrated his anti-Gallic sentiment by retranslating into English the French translation of the story, retaining the French grammatical structure to humorous
effect, in his ―The Jumping Frog Story: in English, then in French, and then Clawed Back into a Civilized Language Once More by Patient, Unremunerated
Toil.‖ Twain was a master at making one effort earn multiple times, as evidenced by at least three versions of this story published in books and magazines, his onstage performances of it, and his addition material in the form of an origin essay and his re-translation from French.
In his 1903 essay, ―Private History of the Jumping Frog Story,‖ Twain tells how pleased he was to learn that a similar story about a frog had appeared as an ancient Greek fable, along the lines of Aesop. Of this he wrote, ―I think it must be a case of history actually repeating itself, and not the case of a good story floating down the ages and surviving because too good to be allowed to perish.‖ He would later learn that this rumor was mistaken—there was no ancient Greek fable about a jumping frog, but his own story had been adapted by a Professor Sidgwick in his book on grammar, Greek Prose Composition. The idea that the story has ancient origins suggests that Twain‘s version might be either an allegorical or a moral tale with a didactic purpose, as with Aesop‘s fables.
And yet Twain‘s apparent confusion about an ancient antecedent sounds a bit like a shaggy-dog—or buckshot-filled frog—story itself. Is the uncertainty surrounding the origins of folk tales the point, or is Twain simply ribbing us with the possibly of allegory—in which animals take on the names of important American personages? Andrew Jackson and Daniel Webster, while certainly historically significant individuals, are also figures of folk lore and tall tales. Is there an allegory behind Twain‘s story, or merely fun with the very notion of moralizing fiction? There may be less to it than meets the eye, but the ―Jumping Frog‖ story is undoubtedly charming, funny, was hugely popular a good fifty years after its first publication, and has been duly ―celebrated‖ ever since