Twain, Mark

1835–1910

American Novelist, Journalist, and Humorist

Commonly viewed as the quintessential American writer, Mark Twain defined a brand of rugged masculinity through works such as Roughing It (1872) and Life on the Mississippi (1883) while his best-known works, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), drew affectionate portraits of nineteenth-century American boyhood. Twain's use of humor and colloquial language and his valorization of a new type of frontier male hero, which was a renunciation of the feminizing influences associated with the urban, industrial East, helped to shape the genre of Western American literature.

Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Twain grew up in the frontier town of Hannibal, Missouri. His youthful adventures as a riverboat pilot and prospector supplied material for his autobiographical works and comic stories, which frequently involve a rough, overtly masculine frontiersman triumphing over a more dignified and feminized easterner. Seen in such stories as “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865), this approach champions a new kind of male hero: uneducated but clever, uncouth but charming, and socially unconnected but physically powerful. Roughing It tells of Twain's own transformation from greenhorn to savvy western man during his time in Nevada and California in the early 1860s. These early writings glorified the still evolving West as a primitive, dusty, masculine place refreshingly free of the emasculating influences that middle-class Victorians associated with nineteenth-century civilization and industrialization in the eastern United States.

Twain's later work, however, paints a more ambiguous picture of the conflict between roughness and civilization, a shift occasioned perhaps by Twain's marriage into a prominent eastern family. The mischievous hero of the often comic Adventures of Tom Sawyer seeks to escape the feminine, domestic world of his Aunt Polly and the town of St. Petersburg, Missouri, and to discover a masculine world of adventure—a world repeatedly associated with nature. But Tom comes to recognize the dangers of an unbridled, untamed, “natural” masculinity through his contact with the murderous Injun Joe, a social and racial outsider. While Joe is punished with death at the end of the novel, the rebellious Tom achieves manhood by becoming tamed and reintegrated into the community.

Twain's masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, offers a still more biting commentary on the challenges of American manhood amid the nineteenth-century tensions of social class, slavery, and greed. Huck and the slave Jim are outcasts from Tom's world of white, middle-class masculinity— Huck by virtue of his poverty and Jim because of his race. Their adventures as runaways teach them the value of male friendship as they encounter a variety of crooks and confidence men who seek to cheat them and women who aim to control them. Huck and Jim are eventually redeemed and masculinized—Jim gains his freedom and Huck learns that his good-for-nothing father has died and has left him a small fortune. The novel closes more equivocally than its predecessor, however, for Huck ends where he began, preparing to run away, forever resistant to the rules of feminine domestic life.

[Page 466]Twain's combination of humor, colorful description, colloquial language, and social insights have made him one of the most beloved American writers. His heroes, whether boys or men, have intertwined concepts of masculinity with images of physicality, bravado, freedom, and nature in the American consciousness.

...