American literature Realism: Mark Twain

The Age of Realism: Social Background  The Civil War led many to question the assumptions shared by the Transcendentalists—natural goodness, the optimistic view of nature and man, benevolent God. It taught men that life was not so good, man was not and God was not. The war marked a change, a deterioration of American moral values.  In post-bellum America, commerce took the lead in the national economy. Increasing industrialization and mechanization of the country soon produced extremes of wealth and poverty.  The spirit of self-reliance that Emerson had preached became perverted into admiration for driving ambition, a lust for money and power.  In the meantime, life for the millions was fast becoming a veritable struggle for survival.  The worth of the American dream, the idealized, romantic view of man and his life in the New World, began to lose its hold on the imagination of the people. Disillusionment and frustration were widely felt. What had been expected to be a “Golden Age” turned out to be a “Gilded” one.

The Age of Realism  Time: By the 1870s, the age of Romanticism and Transcendentalism was by and large over.  Term: Realism 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.

Realism  Change of Cultural Center: Boston and New England ceased to be the cultural center of the country.  Representatives: William Dean Howells, Henry James, Mark Twain, and a good number of “local colorists”.  With Howells, James, and Mark Twain active on the scene, realism became a major trend in the seventies and eighties.

Local Colorism  Time: Local colorism as a trend first made its presence felt in the late 1860s and early seventies.  Definition: Hamlin Garland “such quality of texture and background that it could not have been written in any other place or by anyone else than a native.” (texture: refers to the elements which characterize a local culture, elements such as speech, customs and mores peculiar to one particular place.)

Local colorism  The appearance of Bret Harte’s “The Luck of Roaring Camp” in 1868 marked a significant development in the brief history of local color fiction. Not until the turn of the century did local colorism cease to be a dominant fashion.  Local colorists: Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Willa Cather, John Steinbeck and William Faulkner.  Although it lost its momentum toward the end of the nineteenth century, the local spirit continued to inspire and fertilize the imagination of authors such as Willa Cather, John Steinbeck and William Faulkner.

Mark Twain ( )  “the true father of our national literature” --H. L. Mencken  realist \ local colorist \ humorist  Works:  The celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County 1865  Life on the Mississippi 1883  The Adventures of Tom Sawyer 1876  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 1886  Innocents Abroad 1869  Roughing It 1872  The Gilded Age 1873  The Prince and the Pauper 1881  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court 1889  Pudd’nhead Wilson 1893  The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg 1990

Comparison of the main realists  Although Howells, James and Twain all worked for realism, there were obvious differences between them.  In thematic terms, James wrote mostly of the upper reaches of American society; Howells concerned himself chiefly with middle class life; Mark Twain dealt largely with the lower strata of society.  Technically, Howells wrote in the vein of genteel realism, James pursued an “imaginative” treatment of reality or psychological realism, but Mark Twain’s contribution to the development of realism and to American literature as a whole was partly through his theories of localism in American fiction, and partly through his colloquial style.

Mark Twain’s contributions  One of Mark Twain’s significant contributions to American literature lies in the fact that he made colloquial speech an accepted, respectable literary medium in the literary history of the country. Its influence is clearly visible in twentieth-century American literature.  Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, J. D. Salinger, E. A. Robinson, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings, and even T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were all influenced by him.