Mark Twain
Subject: Mark Twain and the local color , Gilded age.
Objectives:
1. The background of the realistic period
2.Mark Twain’s works and his style and characteristics.
3. local colour of Mark Twain’s
FOCUS:
1. Under what circumstances does local colorism emerge?
2. What do local colorists mainly concern?
3. What is Mark Twain’s contribution to American literature?
4. What are the major features in American realism?
5. What are the major features in American local color fiction?
6. What are the major features in American naturalism?
The difficult points:
Local Colourism local color Writers American naturalism
Time arrangement: 4 small classes
the concrete arrangement:
1. the realistic period:
the period ranging from 1865 to 1914 has been referred to as the Age of realism in the literary
history of the USA, which is actually a movement or tendency that dominated the spirit of
American literature, especially American fiction, from the 1850s onwards. Realism was a
reaction against romanticism or a move away from the bias towards romance and self-creating
fictions, and paved the way to Modernism.
The American society after the Civil War provided rich soil for the rise and development of
realism. The fifty years between the end of the Civil War to the outbreak of the First World
War is one of the periods in the American history characterized with changes, in relation to
every aspect of American life, politically, economically, culturally, and religiously. The scale
of the change was so vast that it indicated a fundamental redirection in the nature and
ideology of the American society. First of all, the civil war affected both the social and the
value of the country. America had transformed itself from a Jeffersonian agrarian community
to an industrialized and commercialized society. Wilderness gave way to civilization. The war
also brought some noticeable changes to the American economy. It had stimulated the
technological development, and new methods of organization and management were tested to
adapt to industrial modernization on a large scale. The first transcontinental railway was
completed in 1869; electricity is introduced on a large scale; new means of communication
such as the telephone revolutionized many aspects of daily life; various kinds of mineral
wealth were discovered and extracted to help improve the national economy. As a result,
capital invested in manufacturing industries more than quadrupled; factory employment
nearly doubled; industrial output grew at a geometric rate; and agricultural productivity
increased dramatically. The burgeoning economy and industry stepped up urbanization.
American cities grew fast, with one half of the American population concentrated in a dozen
or so cities by the end of the First World War. However, the changes were not all for the better.
The industrialization and the urbanization were accompanied by the incalculable suffering of
the laboring people. In the countryside, increasing numbers of farmers were squeezed off the
land to become city jobseekers, causing an oversupply of labor, which kept wages down and
allowed the industrialists to maintain working conditions of notorious danger and discomfort
for men, women and children. Therefore, polarization of the well-being started to show up,
with the poor poorer and the rich richer. The concentration of power and wealth gave birth to
buccaneers, tycoons and slums, and ghettos as well. As far as the ideology was concerned,
people were on a shaking ground. They became dubious about the human nature and the
benevolence of God, which the Transcendentalism cared most. Gone was the frontier and the
spirit of the frontiersman, which is the spirit of freedom and human connection, and gone was
a place to escape for the American Dream. In place of all this is what Mark Twain referred to
as “the Gilded age”.
The literary scene after the Civil War proved to be quite different a picture. The harsh realities
of life as well as the disillusion of heroism resulting from the dark memories of the Civil War
had set the nation against the romance. The Americans began to be tired of the sentimental
feelings of Romanticism. A new generation of writers , dissatisfied with the Romantic ideas in
the older generation, came up with a new inspiration. This new attitude was characterized by a
great interest in the realities of life. It aimed at the interpretation of the actualities of any
aspect of life, free from subjective prejudice, idealism, or romantic color. Instead of thinking
about the mysteries of life and death and heroic individualism, people’s attention was now
directed to the interesting features of everyday existence, to what was brutal or sordid, and to
the open portrayal of class struggle. So writers who could describe the integrity of human
character reacting under various circumstances and authors who could picture the pioneers of
the Far West, the new immigrants and the struggles of the working classes began to gain the
favor of the reading public. This literary interest in the so-called “reality” of life started a new
period in the American literary writings known as the Age of Realism. The three dominant
figures of the period are William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James.
Together they brought to fulfillment native trends in the realistic portrayal of the landscape
and social surfaces, brought to perfection the vernacular style, and explored and exploited the
literary possibilities of the interior life. They recorded and made permanent the essential life
of the eastern third of the continent as it was lived in the last half of the nineteenth century on
the vanishing frontier, in the village, the small town, or the turbulent metropolis. They
established the literary identify of distinctively American protagonists, specifically the
vernacular hero and the “American Girl”, the baffled and strained middle-class family, the
businessman, the psychologically complicated citizens of a new international culture.
Together, in short, they set the example and charted the future course fro the subjects, themes,
techniques and styles of fiction we still call modern. Mark Twain is not the only one whose
works are characterized with local colors. The other local colorists might includes Sarah Orne
Jewett, Joseph Kirkland and Hamlin Garland. Generally, their writings are concerned with the
life of a small well-defined region or province. The characteristic setting is the isolated small
town. Local colorists were consciously nostalgic historians of a vanishing way of life,
recorders of a present that faded before their eyes. Yet for all their sentimentality, they
dedicated themselves to minutely accurate descriptions of the life of their regions. They
worked from personal experience; they recorded the facts of a unique environment and
suggested that the native life was shaped by the curious conditions of the locale. Their
materials were necessarily limited and topics disparate, yet they had certain common artistic
concerns.
Realism is the theory of writing in which familiar aspects of contemporary life and everyday
scenes are represented in a straightforward or matter-of-fact manner. This is the theory
that authors try to use and guide them in their writing; in realist fiction characters from
all social levels are examined in depth. Before this time characters served some sort of
allegorical or symbolic purpose. The realist writers hold on to characters and keep
examining how these people relate to each other; open ending is also a good example of
the truthful treatment of material. It is something that might be puzzling to the reader,
but it has a theoretical purpose. It tells the reader that life is complex and cannot be fully
understood; realism focuses on commonness of the lives of the common people who are
customarily ignored by the arts. Realists are interested in the commonplace, the
everyday, the average, the trival, and the representative; realism emphasizes objectivity
and offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human
experience; realism presents moral visions. The author does have a purpose for
presenting an objective account of real life. The moral sense is something that resides in
the author’s purpose.
The impact of Darwin’s evolutionary theory on the American thought and the influence of the
19th century French literature on the American naturalism. Darwin, in his The Origin of
Species and Descent of Man, hypothesized that over the millennia man had evolved from
lower forms of life. Humans were special, not because God had created them in his image, but
because they had successfully adapted to changing environmental conditions and had passed
on their survival making characteristics genetically. The American naturalists accepted the
more negative implications of this theory and used it to account fro the behavior of those
characters in literary works who were conceived as more or less complex combinations of
inherited attributes, their habits conditioned by social and economic forces. And consciously
or unconsciously the American naturalists followed the French novelist and theorist Emile
Zola’s call that the literary artist “must operate with characters, passions, human and social
data as the chemist and the physicist work on inert bodies, as the physiologist works on living
bodies.” They chose their subjects from the lower ranks of society, and portrayed misery and
poverty of the “underdogs” who were demonstrably victims of society and nature. And one of
the most familiar themes in American naturalism is the theme of human “bestiality” especially
as an explanation of sexual desire.
2. Mark Twain
He (1835-1910) is a great literary giant of America, whom H. L. Mencken considered “the
true father of our national literature”. With works like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and
life on the Mississipi Twain shaped the world’s view of America and made a more extensive
combination of America folk humor and serious literature than previous writers had ever done.
One of Mark Twain’s significant contribution to American literature lies in the fact that
he made colloquial speech an accepted, respectable literary medium in the literary history of
the country. The style has swept American literature and made books before Huck Finn
and after it quite different . its influence is clearly visible in twentieth –century American
literature. It is continued in both prose and poetry. Sherwood Anderson took his cue from
Mark Twain and became, as Richard Bridgman puts it, about the first writer after Twain to
take the vernacular as a serious way of presenting reality. Anderson was for a while
Hemingway’s mentor in the colloquial style. Ernest Hemingway was the direct descendant of
Mark Twain. His masculine prose with its infinite power of suggestion and connotation, is the
continuation of and improvement upon Twain’s style. Among the number of American authors
who acknowledged their indebtness to Mark Twain are T. S. Eliot who noted that Twain
established a new way of writing valid not only for himself but for others as well, and William
Faulkner when he declared, “in my opinion, Mark Twain was the first truly American writer,
and all of us since are his heirs, who descended from his.” And if we survey the contemporary
literary scene we will easily find authors like J. D. Salinger obviously following Mark Twain’s
tradition. In modern and recent poetry there is a conversational element clearly observable as
is revealed in the works of E. A. Robinson, Robert Forst, CARL sandburg, William Carlos
Williams, E. E. Cummings, and even T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. The importance of the style
in American literature cannot be overrated.
Local color fiction presents a locale which is distinguished from the outside world. Local
colorists concern themselves with portraying and interpreting the local character of their
particular region; local color fiction describes the exotic and the picturesque. It describes
things that are not common in other regions. It is marked by an attempt at accurate dialect
reporting, a tendency toward the use of eccentrics as characters, and the use of
sentimentalized pathos or whimsical humor in plotting; local color fiction glorifies the past.
The writers are nostalgic about the past as they are really trying to describe things that would
be lost; local color fiction also attempts to show things as they are. There is a great
contradiction in local color fictionists. They want to tell the reader how things are right now,
but they also want to recall the past and tell the reader how great the past had been; local color
fiction stresses the influence of setting on character. The local color writers set out with a
thesis that in each region of the country, the setting is different, and therefore the people
behave differently. Although much of the 19th century local color fiction was not of high
literary quality. It did convince people that the common life of the common people in the
backwards and on the frontiers of American society was worthy of serious literary treatment.
Naturalism applies the principles of scientific determinism to fiction. It views human beings
as animals in the natural world responding to environmental forces and internal stresses and
drives, over none of which they have control and none of which they fully understand. Here
are three major concepts of literary naturalism in the broad abstract way. 1. humans are
controlled by laws of heredity and environment. And since they are controlled, they lack
freedom of their own will. 2.the universe is cold, godless, indifferent and hostile to human
desires, life becomes a struggle for survival. This makes for really great fiction, the kind that
wipes out all hope for any great accomplishments in the human sphere. 3.the literary
naturalists have a major difference from the realists, the naturalists also describes real life, the
way things really are. They don not escape into a world of imagination. But they dismiss the
realists as far too ‘genteel’ , the naturalists look at a different spot to find real life.
3.Mark Twain’s works introduction (Ommision)
7. Local Colourism local colorism or regionalism as a trend first made its presence felt in the
late 1860s and early seventies in America. The movement once was so much widespread that
it became as contagious as whooping cough. The social and intellectual climate of the country
provided a stimulating milieu fro the growth of local color fiction in America. Local colorists
concerned themselves with presenting and interpreting the local character fo their regions.
They tended to idealize and glorify, but they never forgot to keep an eye on the truthful color
of local life. They formed an important part of the realistic movement.
local color Writers
the name given to authors who realistically and sympathetically treat the rural life of a
particular geographical region and, not infrequently, employ regional dialects, settings, and
folk materials in their work. American naturalism a post –Darwinian movement of the late
19th century that tried to apply the “:laws” of scientific determinism to fiction. The naturalist
went beyond the realist’s insistence on the objective presentation of the details of everyday
life to insist that the materials of literature should be arranged to reflect a deterministic
universe in which a person is a biological creature controlled by environment and heredity.
Major writers include Crane, Dreiser, Norris, and O’neill in America, Zola in France, and
Hardy and Gissing in England. The American naturalists accepted the more negative
implications fo this theory and used it to account fro the behavior of those characters in
literary works who were conceived as more or less complex combinations of inherited
attributes, their habits conditioned by social and economic forces.