Mark Twain's Fascination with Bad Boys and the Impact of This Fascination on Modern Society - Essay Example

"Mark Twain's fascination with "bad" boys and the impact of this fascination on modern society" 0. Introduction Bad boy or Wild boy 2. Wild boy or Trickster 3. Huck Finn as a "natural" a. Victorian American Construction of childhood b. Construction of American masculine identity c. Religion of solitude or buddy film 5. Sympathy for the Devil a. Mark Twain vs. the Moral Sense b. Pangs of Conscience 6. Influence on contemporary American letters 7. Influence on contemporary American life a. Life imitating art b. Art imitating life Few figures in the brief history of American literary life loom as large as Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain. Born in Florida, Missouri in 1835 and growing up in nearby Hannibal, Twain lived out a somewhat restless and rambunctious boyhood, and received only a few sporadic years of formal education, culminating when he was 11 or 12 years old. From there he apprenticed in a printing shop, and later, worked on a riverboat, gaining some of the experiences that would fuel Life on the Mississippi and much of his earlier literary work, as well. Many of the prototypical encounters, moral and philosophical dilemmas and significant characterizations in Twain's writing are prefigured in the reality of his childhood. Mark Twain was not a "bad boy" at heart, but a wild boy, essentially untamable. As Coleman Parsons points out in The Devil and Samuel Clemens, "In her old age, Jane Lampton Clemens told her son, 'You gave me more uneasiness than any child I had'"(Leary 184). Sam was the rebellious and impulsive child, in contrast to his more obedient brother Henry. Their relationship may serve as the model of contrast we see in such characters as Tom and Sid Sawyer, for example. But a boy does not remain a boy for long; unless of course that boy is Peter Pan or Huck Finn, both embodiments of the eternal child. For boys who do grow up, like Sam Clemens, growing up does not necessarily mean settling into conventional modes of living or cultural norms with grace and ease. For as much as he is lauded as the quintessentially American writer, Twain was far too conscious of the inconsistencies of the American character to stand as a model or emblem for our self-congratulations. He is more than humorist, more than even satirist, but also Trickster, in the old mythological sense, his humor knows no end, it cannot be contained between the bookends of moral purpose. Twain is larger than that. Seeing the imprint of Twain's personality upon the protagonist of his best-loved novel, Harold Bloom put it this way, "I suspect that ultimately Huck stands for what is least sociable in Mark Twain, whose discomfort with American culture was profound" (Bloom 5). This diagnosis seems born out in Twain's many satiric early writings, that appeared in western newspapers, and also in his mature and darker works, that remain largely unknown to the broader American reading public to this very day. For example, in The Mysterious Stranger, Twain takes on the conventional and Christian notions of God with a vengeful fury. As Coleman Parsons recounts in his masterful essay The Devil and Samuel Clemens, Twain settles into a sort of solipsism, a "dream philosphy" that denies untenable and superstitious notions of God, along with any ultimate reference point beyond oneself. Parsons cites the following passage from this little known and controversial work: Life itself is only a vision, a dream . . . Strange indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction ! Strange because they are so frankly and hysterically insane-like all dreams : a God . . . who created man without invitation, then tries to snuffle responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself ; and finally, with altogether divine obstuseness, invites this poor abused slave to worship him ! There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. . . .Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought-a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities ! (Leary 203) As the above passage makes clear, Twain's discomfort with tradional notions and norms at times took on cosmic proportions. Take the relentless, questioning mind of this American philosopher and man of letters, combine it with turns of cynicism, pessimism and savage humor, and stir in his social unease and deliberate use of the "wild boy" or "natural" (especially as embodied in Huckleberry Finn) and it's easy to see the outline of the "Trickster" archetype at work in the psychic life of an author who could be both humorous and gravely serious by turns and sometimes almost simultaneously. Perhaps it is this trickster quality that makes The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as much a novel of escape or evasion as a commentary on American social realities, as Susan K. Harris and others have noted (Mark Twain's Escape from Time). Huck is never more comfortable or at home than on the raft, drifting free of societal responsibilities, or perhaps sheltering on Jackson Island with Jim. In chapter 9 of Huckleberry Finn, Huck gives voice to the beauty of a storm: Directly it begun to rain, and it rained like all fury, too, and I never see the wind blow so. It was one of these regular summer storms. It would get so dark that it looked all blue-black outside, and lovely; and the rain would thrash along by so thick that the trees off a little ways looked dim and spider-webby; and here would come a blast of wind that would bend the trees down and turn up the pale underside of the leaves; and then a perfect ripper of a gust would follow along and set the branches to tossing their arms as if they was just wild; and next, when it was just about the bluest and blackest--fst! it was as bright as glory and you'd have a little glimpse of tree-tops a-plunging about, away off yonder in the storm, hundreds of yards further than you could see before; dark as a sin again in a second, and how you'd hear the thunder let go with an awful crash and then rumbling, grumbling, tumbling down the sky towards the under side of the world, like rolling barrels down stairs, where it's long stairs, and they bounce a good deal, you know. "Jim, this is nice," I says. "I wouldn't want to be nowhere else but here" (Twain 55-56)." It's clear from this passage that Huck isn't just prone to misbehavior for no good reason, as when the widow Watson fits him with Sunday school clothes and insists on proper manners, but his underlying motivations are to live free, as a force of nature. This is what is natural and right for him. Sometimes the only way to achieve that freedom is through lies and misdirection; this is where the essential Trickster quality comes through. For example, in order for Huck escape from Pap Finn after the kidnapping, he devises an ingenious plan that involves sawing a hole in the cabin wall when Pap is sleeping drunk or gone hunting, then covering it over before he returns, finally escaping through that hole and to the waiting canoe that he has quarried and hidden away, but not before smearing the cabin floor with pig's blood and bits of his own hair, leaving a bloody axe, and dragging a heavy sack to the river to effectively fake his own murder. Huck is capable of wiles that are worthy of any Trickster figure in all of folklore and mythology. This is his survival. He is amoral and unbounded by society, but purposeful when he needs to be and never cruel. In these regards, Huck is the Wild Boy and not the Bad Boy. Twain had the model that Aldrich created, for a "bad boy" in his autobiographical The Story of a Bad Boy; however, Twain's collected letters make it clear that he found the Aldrich rendition a bit tepid. A cursory survey of Aldrich's prose reveals a boy who is not bad, but only slightly more adventuresome and less restricted than his playmates. Twain carries this trope much further and develops far more memorable characters. One might argue that Twain perfected the form, by arriving at a fuller-bodied "wild boy" story, and also achieving a quintessentially American form of literature. Twain is indebted, of course, to Jean Jacques Rousseau, the French philosopher who believed in original grace and the "noble savage" and to all of France from where so many things quintessentially American are derived. For Twain, as for Rousseau, society is a corrupting influence. This struggle, between society and the individual who wants to live life on his own terms, seems at the heart of the American experience and a fulcrum for much of our best fiction. All the heavyweights of American literature have paid homage to Huckleberry Finn. As Harold Bloom points out, "Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner all exalted Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, seeing in it their American starting point. Their tributes were rather fierce: Fitzgerald said that Huck's 'eyes were the first eyes that ever looked at us objectively that were not eyes from overseas,' while Hemingway placed the book first among all our books, and Faulkner's final novel, The Rievers, explicitly presents itself as a revision of Twain's masterpiece." Huck himself is perhaps best understood as not only a sport of nature, a "natural" in every sense of the word, but also we may perceive his emergence against the backdrop of American culture in Victorian times, immediately following the Civil War. This time in American life saw the construction of modern childhood as well as the construction of modern industry. According to Gail S. Murray, "By mid-century, both British and American culture came to assign to childhood a more idealized and sanctified position. Life itself might be sordid, unpredictable, dangerous. But the child had yet to be corrupted by the real world; she came directly from the hand of God (or Nature)" (Murray 52). Murray also points out that, "After 1850 two complementary, full-fledged literary genres provided extraordinary numbers of texts for family and child audiences. One strain was the family or domestic novel, written principally by women and focused on character development and moral suasion. The other strain was adventure literature, penned mostly by male authors and concentrating more on plot and setting than on character transformation. While the two seemed to dichotomize characters in children's fiction into 'good girls' and 'bad boys,' the genres share a tradition of didactic instruction inherited from the eighteenth century, made more entertaining by credible characters and interesting plots. Both strains drew heavily on characteristics increasingly identified with the emerging middle class: an internalized moral code, ingenuity, persistence, practicality, and independence" (Murray 52). Twain's protagonist in Huckleberry Finn certainly embodies such characteristics as ingenuity, persistence, practicality, and independence. The one quality listed that might be in question is the "internalized moral code." Huck's conscience has been warped by a society that embraces slavery. While his heart compels him to assist Jim, the runaway slave, his conscience tells him that putting himself amongst the ranks of the 'lowdown abolitionist' is about as low as he can sink. The implication is devastating; despite a good heart and a generous nature and despite incredible resilience against the pull of society, Huck is still a victim of his culture. Of course, Huck is a victim in terms of his inner life, and for the lack of adequate reflective powers to liberate himself completely from the moral depravities of his society which remain to him as invisible as water to a fish. Where Huck is victorious is in the freedom of the outer life, full of pluck and adventure, as thought proper to boys. The triumph of his inner life is the courage to "choose to go to hell" and give up on much telling of truth, if lies and evasion will save his best friend from the punishment of the dominant culture. These characteristics mark an important difference between Huck and Tom Sawyer. Tom Sawyer expresses an inner, imaginative inner life that Huck seems to lack, but in outer behavior and relation to acceptable society, Tom is much more of a conformist, especially in the latter part of his narrative. Like Alrich's "bad boy" Tom and Huck are more mischievous than bad, but Tom's mischief is minor and socially circumscribed, while Huck embodies the free-roving vagabond type, something truly wild, and an important figure in the literature for and about boys in nineteenth century America. Additonally, as the passage from Murray brings up, an important difference must be noted in the literature for boys of the time and the literature for girls. In Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, and other titles for girls, moral instruction still takes the form of teaching an obedient and demure nature, rather than the will to test and challenge the prevailing culture. As for the boys' literature, many authors worked with the theme of adventure, mild rebellion against established authority, and also persistence and industry, but very few took up issues of conscience and none as masterfully as Twain. What was it in Mark Twain's own conscience that compelled him to adopt, as one of his central themes, the problem of a socially informed conscience in a corrupt and utterly imperfect society One factor for sure must have been the untimely death of his brother Henry, a death that Twain regretted as a matter of his own fault. As Coleman O. Parsons attests: After getting Henry the unpaid post of "mud" clerk on the river boat, Pennsylvania, Sam Clemens had a circumstantial dream of his brother's corpse in a metallic coffin. When the boilers burst at Ship Island, below Memphis, Henry inhaled live steam. Sam arrived later to watch by his mattress bed and to insist that a medical student should "judge" the eighth grain of morphine prescribed for the patient, if disturbed. Whether Henry died of the clumsily measured overdose of another cause, Sam found his dream sadly matched by reality. His guild was threefold, for he got Henry the job in the first place, he gave him fatal advice about being brave during an accident, and he prompted the apprentice physician. He had failed as his brother's keeper. (Leary 186) Parsons goes on to express the conviction "that Samuel Clemens' guilt complex was rooted in his relations with Mother Jane and Brother Henry. His nostalgic yearning for the age of innocence and his belief in the sinlessness of animals are evidences of his lifelong compulsion to shake off the cruel burden" (Leary 186). This guilt likely never worked its way out, but it did work its way into Twain's writing, both in fiction and non-fiction form. Henry was only twenty years old at the time of the accident, and Twain had many years left to reflect upon it. As Parsons goes on to recount, "Clemens' humanitarian protest was launched against all forms of violence-coercion of opinion, lynchings, wars; his sense of guilt fixated on death. In Hannibal, when a drunken tramp was locked up in the calcboose, Sam impulsively invested in a box of lucifers to give the poor retch materials for entertainment. The tramp clumsily burned down the jail and himself in it. For weeks, in waking or sleeping consciousness, Sam, the unintentional murderer, was clawed by remorse" (Leary 187-88). This incident occurred eleven years after Henry's death. Likewise, as Parsons goes on to recount, Sam carried the guilt burden of enticing his friend Tom Nash to a night of ice skating on the Mississippi without permission. "When the river began to break up about midnight," Parsons tells us, "the boys took an hour to make their fearful way back to shore over floating fields of ice. All perspiring, Tom fell short in his last leap, struggled to shore in a bitter bath, took to bed, and had 'a procession of diseases' culminating in scarlet fever. His doom was to go through life stone deaf and ludicrously impaired in speech. Sam Clemens never recovered from this confutation of ideal justice, this horribly disproportionate punishment of a small sin. Indeed, he himself might have been the victim of cosmic cruelty. The incident turned over and over in his mind until it emerged in three different forms in his Notebook (May 27, 1898) and Autobiography and in The Mysterious Stranger" (Leary 189). The emotional strain and deep questioning engendered by such traumatic and unfair events show themselves in Sam's more somber and serious writing. Nonetheless, we are forever stamped with the image of our Mark Twain as the master of caricature and exaggeration, as a speech-making, socially mobile gadfly and humorist, a world traveler and entertainer. That these two sides existed simultaneously in one and the same man leads us to a reconsideration of Twain's depth and complexity, both as embodied in the man and in his writing. In his more sober and somber moods, Twain returns to the dreary Calvinism and Presbyterianism of his youth, except molding the doctrine of predestination into an absolute materialist determinism; albeit buttressed with a deist notion of a distant and impartial Creator who set the whole process into motion and then vanished. He can brook no worship of a jealous and particular tribal deity who metes out justice with a seemingly uneven hand, and allows, as they say in our age, for "bad things to happen to good people." Twain wrestles with all of these notions relentlessly, making him, as Parsons goes on to point out, temperamentally quite similar to Nietzsche. An image starts to emerge of a Stoic American humorist whose wit sometimes escapes the bounds of descent humor, or indeed, of anything light-hearted at all. He has not mastered gravity, as Nietzsche's transcendent ubermench might; he has instead embraced it and achieved a sort of humor, sometimes raw, that could be the only transcendence that human experience can sometimes afford. Some critics, such as Theodore Dreiser, have wondered with some incredulity that Twain did not take up the pressing issues of his day-crushing poverty, slavery, and the disparate wealth of the robber barons, for instance-more directly. Why not give them all a good whipping It is well-known that Twain's editorial board (which informally included his wife Livy) did take issue with some of his more pointed social criticisms, did temper and tailor the edges of his writing to support the likeable jester image the public had come to love (yes, a smart jester, with a conscience, but we mustn't push the King too far!) What we may never know is the extent to which Twain accepted this leash with good grace, and to what extent it may have chaffed him. By either account we find a great American mind at work in Mark Twain, a writer who for his lack of formal education, in some ways rivals such luminaries (and contemporaries) as Chekhov. While Hemingway consciously modeled the literary prowess of the later, he credited the former as the foundational American author. When asked once about the prospects for writing--and the capacity needed to write--the great American novel, Hemingway replied, "Don't worry about it, it's already been done. It's called Huckleberry Finn." To this day, Huck functions as the archetype of American youth in the struggle toward adult prowess, shaping both the world of letters and the world of men. Huck is each American male, at large in a world not made to fit him, and in need of trustworthy companions. He is Fitzgerald's Gatsby, too large for the world of his contemporaries. He is Kerouac "On the Road." And he is Chuck Palahniuk's Tyler Durden, somewhat more skilled at primal chaos than the world of civilized men. He is each of us who, in our secret heart or hearts, is alone in the world and sometimes trapped by this loneliness, other times, radically free. Works Cited Bloom, Harold. Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. [Bloom's Notes] Broomall, PA Chelsea House Publishers, 1996. Harris, Susan K. Mark Twain's Escape from Time. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982. Leary, Lewis. A Casebook on Mark Twain's Wound. Columbia University, New York, 1962. Michelson, Bruce. Mark Twain on the Loose: A Comic Writer and the American Self. University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1995. Murray, Gail S. American Children's Literature and the Construction of Childhood. Twayne Publishers, An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, New York, 1998. Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Reissued by Signet Classics, an Imprint of Penguin Press, New York, 1959. Read More