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UNIT 54

AMERICAN HUMOUR: MARK TWAIN HENRY JAMES AND COSMOPOLITANISM

1. INTRODUCTION The relevance of this unit is directly related with the curriculum. First of all because the curriculum promotes communicative competence and this unit is in direct connection to socio-cultural competence. But apart from that, the curriculum states that our students should be encouraged to read so we should motivate them to become highly involved in this activity.

2. THE WRITERS AND THEIR TIME In this unit, we are going to deal with two novelists who were writing at a time when America was beginning to emerge as a powerful economic force. Territorial expansion was complete and the Civil War that had threatened to divide the nation was over. Gold had been discovered in the West and rich coal and oil deposits in the Midwest were feeding new industries in the North East. Beef from Texas and cereals from the Great Plains were already being exported to Europe. America was quickly developing into a very prosperous nation and money and materialism were displacing old values. In these two novelists, we find a concern for the moral and artistic consequences of this new materialistic society that was developing. In the works of Mark Twain, we find a longing for the innocence of the old days of pre-Civil War America which later develops into a more brutal attack on the corruption and falseness of this new material world. In Henry James's works, the new ideals of the American dream are questioned through their juxtaposition with the values of the Old World. Material objects displace real characters in James's work as materialism displaces love and human feelings in this new society. Each novelist also had his own style. Twain drew on the American humorist style of the mid-1800s, whereas James developed his own style of fiction in the more experimental age towards the end of the 18th century. Twain's greatest works show local colour, whereas James's greatest work are cosmopolitan in theme and background.

3. MARK TWAIN (1835 - 1910) 1

3.1. LIFE Mark Twain is actually the pseudonym, not the real name, of SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS (1835 - 1910). "Twain" was actually a river man's term for water that was "two fathoms deep" and therefore only just safe for navigation. Clemens took this name, with which he would later win worldwide fame, from the Mississippi river, the river with which his life is so intimately associated. The Mississippi was where Twain spent his boyhood and where he later worked for four years as a steamboat pilot. The river brought him into contact with a whole host of interesting characters. Twain once commented that he had never met a man anywhere whose kind he had not first known on the river. Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, a village near the Mississippi river town of Hannibal, Missouri. He was the son of a local magistrate and merchant. When his father died, he left school at the age of 12 and he decided to start earning his own living. He worked as a journeyman printer and Mississippi riverboat pilot, before travelling westward into the gold settlements of Nevada. He became a travel writer and a journalist in California. He visited Europe, Africa, India and Australia in a period of booming economy when journeys had become quicker and cheaper. At the age of 35, he married the daughter of a rich New England coal merchant and he settled in Connecticut. He was eventually rewarded honorary degrees from Yale University, the University of Missouri and Oxford University. He made fortunes from his writing, but towards the end of his life, a number of disasters affected him both emotionally: and economically, so he had to resort to lecture tours to pay his debts. Twain's strong personality was observed in his works as well as in his life:  His image of faith in himself and his sense of self-efficiency was balanced by: periods of self-doubt and depression.  He supported the Puritan belief in the corruption and depravation of man, but he also had faith in the outcome of human achievement.  A pessimistic and cynical attitude combines with an abiding belief in the success of life.  Although he is considered as a humourist, many of his works stand for the value of death and negate the comic view of life. These personal conflicts are reflected in the bipolar structure of many of his works, for example Sid/Tom, Tom/Huck, Black people/American Indians, slavery/freedom, river/shore… 3.2. WORKS

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Twain's first attempts at writing date from his adolescence when his brother established the "Hannibal Journal" and employed the young Samuel as a compositor. Twain's early sketches drew largely on the humorist and local colourist schools that were popular in mid-19th century American fiction. However, this career was temporarily interrupted when Twain fulfilled his boyhood dream of becoming a pilot on a river steamship. Later, when he was in California, he met Bret Harte and Artemus Ward, who were both important members of the American humorist school. It was during this time that Twain wrote a work for which he gained enormous popularity and great critical acclaim. This was a short story called The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, which was written in the Southwestern humorist manner and published in a New York periodical, "The Saturday Press". It was based on a story Twain had heard in a California mining camp about an apparently innocent stranger who cheats a famous frog racer by filling the stomach of the other man's frog with tiny metal balls. This kind of "hoax" which was a major ingredient of similar humorist works of the day would later develop into one of Huck Finn's most endearing characteristics. His first book The Innocence Abroad was a double success, financial and literary. The humour and the undertone of the darker possibilities of life reveal the doubleness of his own nature and experience. The nature of the book was also double, a travel book and a burlesque of the travel book. Some of its humour has survived its time and social context. His second book, Roughing It was intended to be a companion to the previous one., since both deal with the two poles of the 19 th century American culture: the Europe from which the first colonists came and the present time. However, this book has a psychological and philosophical interest far more complex than that of the earlier book. The story is one of initiation: the simple self in contrast to the mature self. In The Gilded Age he collaborated with Charles Dudley Warner. This book holds Twain's feelings about the times. It presents the towns and villages of back-country America with a grim realism that is also a matrix for Twain's ideal vision of that world. He explores the world of luxury, self-deception', greed and hypocrisy Life on the Mississippi presents the world of Twain's hometown, Hannibal, and the river. Again, Twain deals with the theme of initiation. Tom Sawyer is one of the best-known books by Twain. It is a record of the author's boyhood, a document of American social history and a cult to childhood. Only after the civil war, the child was discovered as a literary subject associated with nostalgia for the loss of innocence.

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In spite of being a well known, Tom Sawyer is not his best work, HUCKLEBERRY FINN is the one considered the best of Twain’s works. It was published in 1885 but it was blacklisted and banned from public libraries for presenting a bad example to youth. NARRATOR: This book deals with the adventures of the same Huck who had appeared in The adventures of Tom Sawyer. However, in this new work Huck is now the narrator and so we see the events through a child's eyes. After writing The adventures of Tom Sawyer, Twain had apparently commented, "I perhaps made a mistake in not writing it in the first person". This change in the point of view is fundamental to the book's success, as the boy's world is now examined from the inside. Apart from that, Twain very cleverly reproduces a river child's speech so that the illusion that Huck is telling the story is complete. Huck’s language is nearly an invention of his author and it gave a new dimension to American literature VS TOM SAWYER: Huckleberry has often been compared to Tom Sawyer, at least in the fact that both are stories of growing up, but there is a great and important difference between both stories. Huck's growing up is by the process of a radical criticism of society while Tom's is by a process of achieving acceptance in society. Tom's career symbolizes the triumph of conventionality; he is accepted into the world of civilized and rational St. Petersburg, whereas Huckleberry Finn is the American unsuccess story, the drama of the innocent outside society. PLOT: Huckleberry Finn is the story of a frontier boy with little education Huck loves his freedom tries to escape from society ties. He represents the natural man who needs a free environment to live. Huckleberry Finn is the main character and the narrator. He becomes a popular hero after tracking down Joe. He is adopted by Widow Douglas and initiated in social rules. He goes to live with his father across the river. He meets the negro Jim and together, they float down the river on a raft in an attempt to get freedom. Most of the people they meet are murderers, liars, slave-hunters... the river leads them back to captivity. At the end, Jim is granted his freedom from slavery and Huck prefers to leave the village again. CIVILIZATION: In this work, Huck represents the world of childhood innocence against the world of adult corruption. Huck and the Negro slave, Jim, who accompanies him on his trip down the river, are running away from civilization and this corrupt world. The Mississippi is their accomplice in this escape. It is the symbol of the ideal world for Huck and Jim, whereas the shore represents civilization. The contrast between these two worlds gives the work its structural and thematic continuity.

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RACISM: Huck innocence is also brought out by his confrontation with this adult world. One of the problems he has to confront is what to do with Jim, the Negro slave. Huck is torn between what he knows society would want him to do, turn Kim over to his owner, and what he feels is the correct course of action, that is, what his heart tells him to do. In the course of the novel Huck overcomes his initial prejudices towards Jim and learns to love and respect him and he decides that he would rather go to hell than betray his friend. RIVER: The journey along the river is more than just a voyage. The river provides the story with structural and thematic unity. MORAL: The book implies a moral protest against society in general and the material values of industrial progress in particular. It is because of the spontaneous open morality shown in the novel, a morality free of the chains of social conventions, that this has been referred to as the "great novel of American democracy", where there is no place for social ideas that confront blacks and whites in a friendship relation. However, we must remember that this American freedom springs from the innocence of a child; it does not emanate from the civilized adult world. The adventures of Huckleberry Finn would also be the direct forerunner of J.D. SALINGER's famous work The catcher in the rye which also explores the falsehood of the adult social world through a child's eyes and a child's language. As Twain moved away from his child protagonist to deal with adult affairs, Twain's work became more and more pessimistic. He wrote The Prince and the Pauper a children's book laid in Tudor England. But his pessimism began to show itself in Twain’s next work, a historical novel called A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. And he continued to do so in succeeding works such as The man who Corrupted Hadleyburg, a book which deals with corruption. For many renowned authors, such as Hemingway, Eliot or Faulkner, mark twain became the father of American modern literature

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4. HENRY JAMES 4.1. COSMOPOLITANISM Turning now to Henry James, we find a man who had a very different upbringing from Mark Twain. However, it also served as the background for most of James's literary works. Henry James was one of the greatest representatives of Cosmopolitanism. This term refers to the American custom of going abroad to take European art, literature and fashion. This was reflected in the 19 th American literature. It was a time when international and cosmopolitan subjects and travel books became fashionable. Henry James was able to record in fiction the impact of Europe upon his fellows Americans. James’s idea of cosmopolitanism includes: that the globe was shrinking since the days of Dickens and Balzac; that the idea of expatriation, made the artist a citizen of the world; and detachment from any single measure of values. Some literary consequences of his cosmopolitanism are: Americans considered he had betrayed his true self by leaving his country and dealing mainly with Europe; He could examine American behaviour into perspective by placing American characters in European contexts; He could notice English usage, manners, modes of thought and action as an outside observer. And yet, Henry James is distinguished from other cosmopolitan writers by the quality of his writing and by his wit and discrete irony, which enabled him to avoid both the extremes of chauvinism and undiscriminating enthusiasm. After the civil war, the Old World was seen by many American writers as a place to visit. The bloom of economy led to expansion, leisure for travelling abroad. European art style was considered superior to that of America. Many American writers settled in Europe permanently. They were called the EXPATRIATES. In several aspects, they even showed reservations about America. Stay in Europe was associated to class distinction. Henry James's family atmosphere is an example: he had private tutors, he was educated in Europe; all of that contributed to his expatriation

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4.2. LIFE Henry James had an extremely cosmopolitan or international upbringing. He was born in New York, of Scottish and Irish ancestry. He was son of a prominent theologian and philosopher, was brought up in an atmosphere of liberalism and tolerance. His elder brother became also famous as a psychologist and a philosopher. He had private tutors and attended school in New York; and from the age of 12, in London, Paris and Geneva, entering the Law school at Harvard in 1862. He later abandoned it to start writing critical essays and fiction. He began to contribute to American journals with reviews and short stories. He began his long expatriation as he moved to Paris in 1875 and one year later, he settled in London, becoming an English citizen in 1915. 4.3. WORKS He wrote 22 novels, 120 short stories, collections of critical essays, plays, travel books, letters, autobiographies, art criticism and journal articles. In his literary production we can distinguish three periods: The first or EARLY PERIOD deals to a great extent with the international theme. The novels of this period deal with his thoughts and feelings as an American living in Europe. His main intention was to explore the moral qualities of men and women forced to deal with the dilemmas of cultural displacement. We can also observe that his fundamental theme was the innocence of the New World (America) compared to the corruption and wisdom of the Old World (Europe). This is seen is Roderick Hudson, which is the story of the disintegration of a young American sculptor in Italy. Also, in The American, which is a finer study of cultures confrontation, in it an American new rich is looking for a bride in Paris but he is rejected by her parents. Then it comes Daisy Miller, which was a great success. It is the story of a young, free-spirited but naive American girl caught up in and destroyed by the rigid, conventional and corrupt old culture of Europe. The same theme is developed more fully in James's memorable novel The portrait of a lady (1881). Here, we also find an American girl who is being "tested" by European society. Isabel Archer goes to Europe to "explore life" as the ward of a rich aunt. An English suitor proposes her but in spite of his name, appearance, kindness and properties; she refuses to marry him in the hope of finding a better match. She finally marries a cultivated man of American origin, who is a heartless snob to discover that

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he has married her for her money. She chooses the wrong man and suffers the bitter consequences of her choice. The situation is tragic, and Isabel's realization of her mistake is one of the most powerful passages in the novel. Here, we see the workings of Isabel's inner consciousness in a passage, which makes James a forerunner of the “stream of consciousness” technique In this novel, even when James tried to portrait cosmopolitanism, we do not meet any true Europeans face to face. We would have expected the innocent American heroine to find herself up against sophisticated and corrupt Europeans; instead, Isabel Archer is deceived by corrupt Americans who live in Italy. James seems to suggest that people like Osmond, the villain, and his accomplice, Madame Merle, are more at home than in the brave new world of America. So, these novels contain the following moral: genuine Americans are good people, but those who have been contaminated by Europe are not. James's MIDDLE PHASE was a transition phase in which he tried unsuccessfully to turn to drama. He was trying to gain public recognition and his desire to be popular led him to theatre. He wrote and put on stage a play Guy Donville but it was a failure. The works of this period also moved away from the "international situation" to study the introduction of children to the evil and immorality of the adult world. This is the theme of What Maisie knew and the famous ghost story The turn of the screw. In The turn of the screw, a governess who is hired to educate two children in an English mansion discovers to her horror that they are haunted by ghostly figures. However, the real terror in the tale lies in the suspicion that it is actually the governess, the narrator of the tale and a clearly unreliable one, who imagines the ghosts and perverts the innocent children with their presence. The children, Miles and Flora, are children in their early years of immaturity, which are the most vulnerable to exposure. The experiments of this middle phase finally found their full expression in the three great novels that constitute James's so-called MAJOR PHASE. In these works, James returned to his original "international" themes and went on to develop the stream of consciousness technique and symbolism. In the first of these, The Ambassadors we have a high comedy of American-European manners. It deals with the story of a middle-aged American called Strether who goes to Paris to "rescue" from the world of Paris vice a wealthy young American who has stayed abroad too long. But,

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Strether gradually realizes the many pleasures he has missed in life. So, by the end of the novel, the roles have been inverted. The second work, The wings of the dove tells the story of the wealthy American who is eager to enjoy life but has a mortal disease. The final novel, The golden bowl is considered by many critics to be James's great masterpiece. It is basically a story of adultery with four main characters. The first part of the story is seen through the eyes of the aristocratic husband and the second through the developing awareness of his wife. Dramatic action or "plot" is reduced to a minimum as James focuses on his characters inner perceptions and problems. Henry James reached a very limited public partly because of the great complexity of his work. His Native Americans rejected him for many years, as an expatriate who finally adopted the British nationality in 1915. That is why he was admired by critics but not by general public, with the exception of Daisy Miller. However, he exerted an enormous influence on early 20th century novelists such as JOSEPH CONRAD, VIRGINIA WOLFF, and JAMES JOYCE, and in the second half of the 20th century, literary critics unanimously recognized his great genius. James is considered one of the great realistic novelists, especially due to the psychological insight of his characters. And he is often thought as the father of the modem psychological novel. He was concerned with moral choice that will determine the destiny of the person who made it.

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5. CONCLUSION Therefore, we have seen two key figures of American Literature: Mark Twain and Henry James that have chosen so different directions as the humorous element and the cosmopolitan factor. The first one (Twain) is regarded as the first stylist who wrote in American Language, whereas James is said to be the most conscious American novelist who opened the door to the so-called Psychological novel. To sum up, literature portrays in many cases the problems and worries of an age. And although this is not part of the curriculum of English, our students may be highly motivated in case we propose them the reading of one of Twain’s graded stories or working in class with one of the films based on his novels. This would serve both to motivate them to read in English and to approach the world of English literature

6. BIBLIOGRAPHY Some of the books I have checked to elaborate this unit, all of them published in the 2nd half of the 20th century, are the following:   

FOSTER, R. 1968. Six American Novelists of the 19th century SCOTT, A.L. 1969. Mark Twain at large. SWAM, M. 1969. Henry James. The British Council, London,

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