Pub Date : 2019-10-24DOI: 10.5325/marktwaij.17.1.0028
J. Baggett
Abstract:Mark Twain’s depiction of Lake Tahoe in Chapters 22 and 23 of Roughing It—“the fairest picture the whole earth affords”—has embedded him within Tahoe’s history and culture. His descriptions of pristine waters of the lake echo the Transcendental phrasings of Thoreau in “The Ponds” chapter of Walden and fit securely within the nineteenth-century Romantic tradition of wilderness writing. The lakes become important measures of the authors’ conceptualizations of the natural world—their “practice of the wild,” in the poet Gary Snyder’s terms. Using theoretical applications of wildness, including Thoreau’s essay “Walking,” this article argues that neither author’s literary imagination reconciles the presence of wildness, ultimately appropriating it as a setting where human activity takes place, and resisting the representation of nature as an organism in a state of constant change. Even Thoreau, after his disorienting climb to the summit of Mount Ktaadn, vows to settle for a more orthodox assimilation of wildness.
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Pub Date : 2019-10-24DOI: 10.5325/marktwaij.17.1.0159
Lisa Vandenbossche
Abstract:This article traces the evolution of Mark Twain’s early travel writing by comparing intersections between recorded travel and nature writing in Twain’s 1866 letters for the Sacramento Union and his 1872 full-length book about the America West, Roughing It. In his twenty-five published letters, Twain critiques past travel guides and histories that distract visitors—and by extension readers—from what is in front of them, forcing their attention away from the reality of the people and places they encounter. In Twain’s first full-length travel account, 1869’s The Innocents Abroad, this critique is more fully realized, as Twain articulates an even stronger lament against tour guides and books that script a travelers’ experiences with new spaces. When Twain returns to writing about the American frontier in Roughing It, he condenses the narration of his Pacific travel for his second full-length account, employing nature as a narrative structure that enables him to direct a reader’s attention to travel experiences as they unfold. Here nature serves as a witness that preserves stories and a phenomenon that punctuates Twain’s experiences uncovering these stories, thus working to frame human action in the text, drawing the attention of both travelers and readers to what is immediately in front of them. This article argues that, in employing this model, Roughing It insists on the importance of natural descriptions in travel writing, and that Twain’s work ultimately illustrates the essential role that nature plays in shaping the human experience of travel on the unscripted frontiers of the Pacific and American West, for travelers and readers alike.
{"title":"Nature as Travel Guide: Mark Twain and Hawaii in Writing the American Frontier","authors":"Lisa Vandenbossche","doi":"10.5325/marktwaij.17.1.0159","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/marktwaij.17.1.0159","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article traces the evolution of Mark Twain’s early travel writing by comparing intersections between recorded travel and nature writing in Twain’s 1866 letters for the Sacramento Union and his 1872 full-length book about the America West, Roughing It. In his twenty-five published letters, Twain critiques past travel guides and histories that distract visitors—and by extension readers—from what is in front of them, forcing their attention away from the reality of the people and places they encounter. In Twain’s first full-length travel account, 1869’s The Innocents Abroad, this critique is more fully realized, as Twain articulates an even stronger lament against tour guides and books that script a travelers’ experiences with new spaces. When Twain returns to writing about the American frontier in Roughing It, he condenses the narration of his Pacific travel for his second full-length account, employing nature as a narrative structure that enables him to direct a reader’s attention to travel experiences as they unfold. Here nature serves as a witness that preserves stories and a phenomenon that punctuates Twain’s experiences uncovering these stories, thus working to frame human action in the text, drawing the attention of both travelers and readers to what is immediately in front of them. This article argues that, in employing this model, Roughing It insists on the importance of natural descriptions in travel writing, and that Twain’s work ultimately illustrates the essential role that nature plays in shaping the human experience of travel on the unscripted frontiers of the Pacific and American West, for travelers and readers alike.","PeriodicalId":41060,"journal":{"name":"Mark Twain Annual","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2019-10-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43791830","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-10-24DOI: 10.5325/marktwaij.17.1.0140
Charles C. Bradshaw
Abstract:The animals in A Horse’s Tail populate a singular form of sentimental narrative that ties together animal welfare and the American frontier as a larger story of American national identity. Shelley Fisher Fishkin has called attention to Twain’s fascination with animal and human emotions and Twain’s associated reversal of human intelligence and animal ignorance in his writing. A Horse’s Tale follows this dynamic by offering its horse narrator as a pragmatic commentator on human foibles. But Twain also democratizes human compassion toward animals as a progressive outgrowth of a mythological American frontier, fashioning the horse and other western inhabitants as empathetic characters while casting Old World traditions as artificial and inhumane. Twain’s ultimate indictment of Spanish bullfighting at the novella’s end thus casts animal cruelty as a hierarchical ritual of social conformity while recasting the American frontier as a foundational myth in the animal welfare movement.
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Pub Date : 2019-10-24DOI: 10.5325/marktwaij.17.1.0011
Barbara Ladd
Abstract:Although Mark Twain was not himself an environmentalist, he was deeply sensitive to the interdependence of humankind and the natural world, to the conditions, often difficult, under which we inhabit the natural world, and to its ultimate indifference to our desires—issues that continue to preoccupy ecocritics, whether they are inclined toward philosophy or public policy. This article argues that the Mississippi River is touchstone for the natural world in Twain’s work and that Life on the Mississippi, a record of his return to the river in the aftermath of the great flood of 1882, demonstrates the power of a natural world both beautiful and indecipherable in Twain’s imagination.
{"title":"“Night after Night and Day after Day”: Mark Twain and the Natural World","authors":"Barbara Ladd","doi":"10.5325/marktwaij.17.1.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/marktwaij.17.1.0011","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Although Mark Twain was not himself an environmentalist, he was deeply sensitive to the interdependence of humankind and the natural world, to the conditions, often difficult, under which we inhabit the natural world, and to its ultimate indifference to our desires—issues that continue to preoccupy ecocritics, whether they are inclined toward philosophy or public policy. This article argues that the Mississippi River is touchstone for the natural world in Twain’s work and that Life on the Mississippi, a record of his return to the river in the aftermath of the great flood of 1882, demonstrates the power of a natural world both beautiful and indecipherable in Twain’s imagination.","PeriodicalId":41060,"journal":{"name":"Mark Twain Annual","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2019-10-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45961697","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-10-24DOI: 10.5325/marktwaij.17.1.0112
H. Bush
Abstract:After Susy’s untimely demise, Mark and Livy’s near obsession with Tennyson’s elegy “In Memoriam” was similar to that of many other bereaved parents of the era: it had become the preeminent “grieving book” of the nineteenth century. The poem powerfully captures the growing spiritual disillusionment and uncertainty of the century, and its depiction of the underlying violence of nature foreshadowed Darwin’s “war of nature” metaphor in his book On the Origin of Species. This article proceeds into three areas of related interest: first, a brief genealogy of the war of nature metaphor and its use prior to Twain; second, a look at how this concept is manifested in various written works of his; and third, a brief look forward at how the war of nature metaphor has continued to be deployed in literary works after Mark Twain—especially by Cormac McCarthy.
{"title":"“Nature Shrieking” and Parasitic Wasps: Mark Twain, Theodicy, and the War of Nature","authors":"H. Bush","doi":"10.5325/marktwaij.17.1.0112","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/marktwaij.17.1.0112","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:After Susy’s untimely demise, Mark and Livy’s near obsession with Tennyson’s elegy “In Memoriam” was similar to that of many other bereaved parents of the era: it had become the preeminent “grieving book” of the nineteenth century. The poem powerfully captures the growing spiritual disillusionment and uncertainty of the century, and its depiction of the underlying violence of nature foreshadowed Darwin’s “war of nature” metaphor in his book On the Origin of Species. This article proceeds into three areas of related interest: first, a brief genealogy of the war of nature metaphor and its use prior to Twain; second, a look at how this concept is manifested in various written works of his; and third, a brief look forward at how the war of nature metaphor has continued to be deployed in literary works after Mark Twain—especially by Cormac McCarthy.","PeriodicalId":41060,"journal":{"name":"Mark Twain Annual","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2019-10-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41564786","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-09-20DOI: 10.5325/MARKTWAIJ.16.1.0001
Joseph Csicsila
Abstract:Near the end of August 1872, Mark Twain traveled to England for the first time ostensibly to gather notes for a new literary project, which he would refer to over the next several months as the “English” book. Commentators from Albert Bigelow Paine to Howard Baetzhold have described the England trip of 1872 generally as a pleasurable experience for Twain. However, the fall of 1872 was an enormously turbulent time for Twain psychologically. He was in the throes of what he remembered years later as one of the darkest, most grief-filled periods of his entire life: a two-year stretch marked by an unrelenting succession of personal misfortune and tragedy. Considered from this perspective, the England trip of 1872 looks less like an enjoyable overseas excursion and more like a season in hell.
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Pub Date : 2018-09-20DOI: 10.5325/MARKTWAIJ.16.1.0047
Christine Dixon
Abstract:When P. T. Barnum needed to move dawdling spectators out of his museum, he posted signs over the exits that read, “This Way to the Egress.” Standing suddenly on the street, Barnum’s gullible patrons were left with two choices: pay for reentry or choose to see the world as the grand spectacle, the ultimate humbug. Barnum’s sly redirection of his audience is re-created in Mark Twain’s writing. Like Barnum, Twain challenges the boundaries of the joke, the fiction, the text. What begins as a romantic spectacle of fiction bleeds into the more inscrutable (and participatory) spectacle of its context: reality. This article examines this literary tactic in three texts: Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins, The Mysterious Stranger, and Mark Twain’s Autobiography. Here, the humbugs of society, self, and celebrity stand under close scrutiny. The exhibition of the Barnumesque real-or-manufactured marvels forces us to the exit without ever admitting that the show is over.
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