Mark Twain

The Main Features of Mark Twain's Writing Style

Ⅰ.Introduction

Mark Twain (pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910), was one of the best known American writers, journalist and humorist, who won a worldwide audience for his stories of the youthful adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in the 19th century.

Mark Twain was born on November 30, 1835 in Florida, Missouri in the middle part of the United States. He was brought up in Hannibal, Missouri. His father, a poor lawyer, died when he was only twelve years old. So he had to leave school and make his own living. He was apprenticed to a printer and wrote for his brother's newspaper. He later worked as a licensed Mississippi river-boat pilot. In 1861, Mark Twain became a miner in Nevada. During this period, he started to write short articles. It was as this time that he adopted the pen name \"Mark Twain\". He took it from the shout of the sailors measuring the depth of the water when the water was two marks deep on the lead. The Civil War put an end to the steamboat traffic and Clemens moved to Virginia City, where he edited the Territorial Enterprise. On February 3, 1863, 'Mark Twain' was born when Clemens signed a humorous travel account with that pseudonym

In 1864 Twain left for California, and worked in San Francisco as a reporter. He visited Hawaii as a correspondent for The Sacramento Union, publishing letters on his trip and giving lectures. He set out on a world tour, traveling in France and Italy. His experiences were recorded in 1869 in The Innocents Abroad, which gained him wide popularity, and poked fun at both American and European prejudices and manners. The success as a writer gave Twain enough financial security to marry Olivia Langdon in 1870. They moved next year to Hartford. Twain continued to lecture in the United States and England. Between 1876 and 1884 he published several masterpieces, Tom Sawyer (1881) and The Prince and the Pauper (1881). Life On The Mississippi appeared in 1883 and Huckleberry Finn in 1884.

In the 1890s Twain lost most of his earnings in financial speculations and in the failure of his own publishing firm. To recover from the bankruptcy, he started a world lecture tour, during which one of his daughters died. Twain toured New Zealand, Australia, India, and South Africa. He wrote such books as The Tragedy Of Pudd'head

1

Wilson (1884), Personal Recollections Of Joan Of Arc (1885), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) and the travel book Following The Equator (1897). During his long writing career, Twain also produced a considerable number of essays. The death of his wife and his second daughter darkened the author's later years, which is seen in his posthumously published autobiography (1924). Twain died on April 21, 1910.

At the heart of Mark Twain's achievement is his creation of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, who embody the mythic America, midway between the wilderness and the model state. Some of his writings have been translated into many languages. He and his works are deeply loved by readers throughout the world. Mark Twain once said, “To believe yourself to be brave is to be brave; it is the only essential thing. ”（Autobiography of Mark Twain）

Ⅱ. The Features of Mark Twain's Writing Style

Twain’s works, containing some practical jokes, comic details, witty remarks,

etc., and some of them are actually tall tales. At the same time, his writing style contain many features. The details are as follows:

A. The important founder of realistic American literature

The period ranging from 1865 to 1914 has been referred to as the Age of Realism in the literary history. It can be described as by a works of Mark Twain ‘The Golden Age’. The harsh realities of life as well as the disillusion of heroism resulting form the dark memories of the Civil War have set the nation against the romance. 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. The content of this age is actualities and the form is truthful treatment of life.

Mark Twain is a great literary giant of America, whom H.L.Mencken considered “the true father of our national literature.” With works like Adventure of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and Life on the Mississippi (1883), Twain shaped the world’s view of America and made a more extensive combination of American folk humor and serious literature than previous writers had ever done.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and, especially, its sequence Adventures of

Huckleberry Finn proved themselves to be the mile stone in American literature..The

2

childhood of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn in the Mississippi is a record of a vanished way of life in the pre-Civil War Mississippi valley and it has moved millions of people of different ages and conditions all over the world; and the books are noted for their unpretentious, colloquial yet poetic style, their wide-ranging humor, and their universally shared dream of perfect innocence and freedom.

His novel Adventure of Huckleberry Finn is a vindication of what Mark Twain called “the damned human race.” That is the theme of man’s inhumanity to man---of human cruelty, hypocrisies, dishonesties, and moral corruptions.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is best known for Mark Twain’s wonderful characterization of “Huck,” a typical American boy whom its creator described as a boy with “a sound heart and a deformed conscience,” and remarkable for the raft’s journey down the Mississippi river, which Twain used both realistically and symbolically to shape his book into an organic whole.

Through the eyes of Huck, the innocent and reluctant rebel, we see the pre-Civil War American society fully exposed and at the same time we are deeply impressed by Mark Twain’s thematic contrasts between innocence and experience, nature and culture, wilderness and civilization.

His The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was a story about a popular theme in American literature. The two young heroes, Tom and Huck Finn, are \"bad\" only because they fight against the stupidity of the adult world. In the end they win. Twain creates a highly realistic background for the story. We get to know the village very well with its many colorful characters, its graveyards and the house in which a ghost is supposed to exist. Although there are many similarities between Tom and Huck, there are also important differences. Twain studies the psychology of his characters carefully. Tom is very romantic. His view of life comes from books about knights in the Middle Ages. A whistle from Huck outside Tom's window calls him out for a night of adventures. Afterwards, Tom can always return to his Aunt Polly's house. Huck has no real home. By the end of the novel, we can see Tom growing up. Soon, he will also be a part of the adult world. Huck, however, is a real outsider.

B. Local color

Mark Twain uses the Mississippi valley as his fictional kingdom, writing about the landscape and people, the customs and the dialects of one particular region, and therefore known as a local colorist.

Twain is known as a local colorist, who preferred to present social life through portraits of the local characters of his regions, including people living in that area, the landscape, and other peculiarities like the customs, dialects, costumes and so on. Consequently, the rich material of his boyhood experience on the Mississippi became

3

the endless resources for his fiction, and the Mississippi valley and the West became his major theme.Mark Twain wrote about the lower-class people, because they were the people he knew so well and their 1ife was the one he himself had lived. Moreover he successfully used local color and historical settings to i1lustrate and she delight on the contemporary society.

Twain depicted social life through descriptions of local places and people he knew best and believed that \"the most valuable capital, or culture, or education usable in the building of novels is personal experience.\" （Autobiography of Mark Twain）

Local color in American literature refers to a unique variation of American literary realism, such as the particular concern about the local character of a region. Mark Twain and some other American realistic writers’ works are characterized with local colors. Generally, the works by local colorists are concerned with the life of a small, well--defined region or province. This kind of fiction depicts the characters from a specific setting or of an era, which are marked by its customs, dialects, costumes, landscape, or other peculiarities that have escaped standardizing cultural influence. These writers were nostalgic and sentimental, but they dedicated themselves to 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 loca1e.Their materials were necessarily limited and topics disparate, yet they had certain common artistic concerns.

C. Satire

As a satirist, he employed his common, lowly characters as vernacular spokesmen to deflate the values of the official culture of his day and what he saw as the rattle-brained folly of American politics of imperialism. His social satire is The Gilded Age. The novel explored the scrupulous individualism in a world of fantastic speculation and unstable values, and gave its name to the get-rich-quick years of the post-Civil War era. Twain’s dark view of the society became more self-evident in the works published later in his life. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), a parable of colonialization. A similar mood of despair permeates The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), which shows the disastrous effects of slavery on the victimizer and the victim alike and reveals to us a Mark Twain whose conscience as a white Southerner was tormented by fear and remorse. By the turn of the century, with the publication of The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg (l900) and The Mysterious Stranger (1916), the change in Mark Twain from an optimist to an almost despairing pessimist could be felt and his cynicism and disillusionment with what Twain referred to regularly as the “damned human race” became obvious.

4

Mark Twain's humor is remarkable. It is fun to read Twain to begin with, for most of his works tend to be funny, containing some practical jokes, comic details, witty remarks, etc., and some of them are actually tall tales. By considering his experience as a newspaperman, Mark Twain shared the popular image of the American funny man whose punning, facetious, irreverent articles filled the newspapers, and a great deal of his humor is characterized by puns, straight-faced exaggeration, repetition, and anti-climax, let alone tricks of travesty and invective. However, his humor is not only of witty remarks mocking at small things or of farcical elements making people laugh, but a kind of artistic style used to criticize the social injustice and satirize the decayed romanticism.

Sometimes Twain wrote a sentimental story, not because he was sentimental, but because he wanted to show the reader how stupid such a story really was. So the reader has to be very careful when he or she reads Mark Twain. Twain often played trick on the reader. He often said things when he meant just the opposite. This is the irony that he got from the humor of the Far West. He would often do things that he did just to make fun of, but the reader might think that he really meant it. Then the reader was the tender-foot who got taken in.

Huckleberry Finn, by general agreement, is Twain's finest book and an outstanding American novel. Its narrator is Huck, a youngster whose carelessly recorded vernacular speech is admirably adapted to detailed and poetic description of scenes, vivid representations of characters, and narrative renditions that are both broadly comic and subtly ironic.

\"There it is: it doesn't make any difference who we are or what we are, there's always somebody to look down on! Somebody to hold in light esteem, somebody to be indifferent about.\" Mark Twain (1835–1910), U.S. author. \"Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes,\" ch. 15 (written 1905; published in Which Was the Dream? ed. by John S. Tuckey, 1967). This quote says that people will always feel superior to some one different. The reason for this is that it makes people feel important and better about themselves. Slavery derived from this belief in superiority. Mark Twain, author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn uses satire as a literary technique to present his ideals on slavery within his period of time. Satire is a method of taking a serious issue and representing it in a humorous way. The Author uses Huck's relationship with Jim, society’s attitude towards Jim during their travel up the Mississippi River, and the use of racist terminology throughout the novel. Mark Twain's use of satire in the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn enables the reader to better understand his message of slavery. The harsh realities of life as well as the disillusion of heroism resulting form the dark memories of the Civil War have set the nation against the romance. 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. The content of this age is actualities and the form is truthful treatment of life.

5

D. Use of Dialect

The fact that made Mark Twain unique is his magic power with language, his use of vernacular. His words are col1oquial, concrete and direct in effect, and his sentence structures are simp1e, even ungrammatical, which is typical of the spoken language. And Twain skillfully used the colloquialism to cast his protagonists in their everyday life. What's more, his characters, confined to a particular region and to a particular historical moment, speak with a strong accent, which is true of his local color. Besides, different characters from different literary or cultural backgrounds talk differently, as is the case with Huck, Tom, and Jim. Indeed, with his great mastery and effective use of vernacular, Twain has made colloquial speech an accepted, respectable literary medium in the literary history of the country.

Mark Twain wrote in his unpretentious, colloquial, and poetic style. He used vernacular language, dialect with spelling representing pronunciation. Part of this comes from his interest in humor. The directness of the language is a very influential. Ernest Hemingway in the 20th century said that he had learnt his craft from Mark Twain because of the direct speech and the direct narration that Twain was able to achieve. The hoax and tall tale are also part of Twain's style. Hoax is writing something fantastic and pretending that it were true, much like the tall tale. It is told as if it were true, and so the reader would laugh that anybody could believe such preposterous thing, the burlesque making fun of established ways of writing.

Mark Twain said, “I amend dialect stuff by talking and talking and talking it till it sounds right.”（Autobiography of Mark Twain）He wanted his writing to have the sound of easy-going speech. In Huckleberry Finn, the fountainhead of the American colloquial prose, he wrote seven different dialects and each can be distinguished. If the reader is a linguist, he can examine the different pronunciations that Twain has shown. He was extremely interested in showing how the person from this part of the states slope, how the person from that side of the river spoke, how the black people spoke, and he was able to write it precisely. In his own time, dialect writing was considered humorous. People got a big laugh out of reading these misspelt words.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is written in a language that is simple, direct and lucid (easy to understand) and faithful to the colloquial speech. This unpretentious style of colloquialism is best described as “vernacular”. Speaking in vernacular, a wild and uneducated Huck, running away from civilization for his freedom, is vividly brought to life. Huckleberry Finn marks the climax of Twain's literary creativity. It is what Hemingway once described as the one book from which “all modern American literature comes”.

6

Mark Twain is one of the most popular names in American literature, even as the name was a product of his imagination. With \"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,\" Twain created one of the most controversial works in literary history, which is spiced with humor and resonating with tragedy.

E. “The Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope”

Being a humorist, Mark Twain’s works are full of special humor and intelligent language .His western-based humor and slangy words had broken the limitation of the traditional literature and dug a bright new road of American literature.Mark Twain considered “Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritations and resentments slip away and a sunny spirit takes their place.” （Mark Twain's What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us）The style of Mark Twain’ humor might be called humor of gravity.

Mark Twain, “the Lincoln of American literature”, is a well-known American humorist, satirist, and novelist. A great deal of the humor of Mark Twain differs from that of most Western humorist not only in being funnier but in his gravity. Aristotle said, “Humor is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor… And a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit.”（Autobiography of Mark Twain）Mark Twain’s humor is remarkable.

Now discusses how Twain's use of humor engages his readers.

Mark Twain was the funniest man of his time. His writing inspired comedy as readers know it today. With The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Mark Twain's Short Stories, he had every reader smiling and laughing aloud.

He made readers laugh at innocence, at his plot and characters, and sometimes he turned it around so that readers laughed at themselves.

Readers were compelled to laugh at Twain's characters' naiveté. For example, Jim from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn asked, \"Why, Huck, doan' de French people talk de same way we does\". A reader had to laugh at the frivolous question. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer when Tom asked, \"Say, Becky, was you ever engaged\one had to grin at his innocence.

All in all, his humors contain following features:

Firstly, on the base of western traditional humor, Mark Twain used many hyperbole and extremely exaggerative imagination to make the stories more humorous and more ironic.

Secondarily, Mark Twain’s humor was not just for amusement, but was a sharp weapon to criticize the evilness of society. He satirized the Sunday-school book, the unfair world in “The Story of the Bad Little Boy” and “The Story of the Good Little

7

Boy”.It is so ironic that these two different characteristic boys get these different ending: bad boy does bad things but lives a charmed life, the good boy always has bad luck when he does good things. The world is unfair, the people in the world is also unfair. Though the content of the Sunday-school book is good ——good people get reward and the bad people get punish, but the world isn’t. These two stories make readers think deeply while enjoying the humorous and ironic stories.

In a word, Mark Twain’s humors contained sorrow and satire. He exposed the crime of the exploiting class, of imperialists and of the whole society, showing deep sympathy for the toiled and persecuted.His humor is a kind of artistic style used to criticize the social injustice and satirize the decayed romanticism.

Ⅲ. A Great Literary Artist and A Great Social Critic

“Criticism is a queer thing. If I print 'She was stark naked' - & then proceeded to describe her person in detail, what critic would not howl? - Who would venture to leave the book on a parlor table, - but the artist does this & all ages gather around & look & talk & point. I can't say, 'They cut his head off, or stabbed him, ' & describe the blood & the agony in his face.”（Mark Twain 's Notebook #18, Feb. - Sept. 1879）

One of the great writers of American literature, Twain is admired for capturing typical American experiences in a language which is realistic and charming. Howells was one of Twain's early admirers, and he wrote the following on Twain's style: “So far as I know, Mr. Clemens is the first writer to use in extended writing the fashion we all use in thinking, and to set down the thing that comes into his mind without fear or favor of the thing that went before or the thing that may be about to follow.” Most of the critical attention has been given to Huck Finn, Clemens' greatest achievement. This book concerns itself with a number of themes, among them the quest for freedom, the transition from adolescence into adulthood, alienation and initiation, criticism of pre-Civil War southern life. A remarkable achievement of the book is Clemens' use of American humor, folklore, slang, and dialects. There is critical debate, however,

concerning the ending of the book - some call it weak and ineffective, and others feel it is appropriate and effective.

8

Ⅳ.Conclusion

Mark Twain is one of the best known American writers in the 19th century. As one of America’s first and foremost realists, humorists, Mark Twain usually wrote about his own personal experiences and things he knew about from firsthand experience. At the same time, Twain is admired for capturing typical American experiences in a language which is realistic and charming .Mark Twain is considered as “the true father of our national literature”, and Twain is known as a local colorist, a satirist, a humorist.

Mark Twain is regarded as” the Lincoln of American literature”. The features of his writing style contain local color, using of dialect, humor, satire. His works are written in a language that is simple direct, and lucid （easy to understand）and faithful to the colloquial speech. This made Mark Twain unique.

Mark Twain, a mastermind of humor and realism, is seen as a giant in world

literature. His humor had great impact on the following men of letters; critics also

attached significant importance to it and put forward various interpretations. His style of language was later taken up by his descendants, Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway, and influenced generations of letters.

In a word, Mark Twain presented the 19th century American in his own unique way.

9

References

Bmurray. （1985）. The Autobiography of Mark Twain. Washington : Engish language programs division.

Chang Yiaoxin. （2003）. A Survey of American Literature(the 2nd Edition) .天津：

南开大学出版社.

Deng Xuxin.（2002）. An Introduction to Literature of English. 武汉： 武汉大学出版社.

Wu Weiren. （1990）. History and Anthology of American Literature(Volume 2). 北京： 北京外语教学研究出版社.

Zhang Hanxi.（1995）. Advenced English. 北京：北京外语教学研究出版社. 广惟.（1994）.《中外文学名著精品赏析——外国文学卷》.(下) . 北京：首都师范大学出版社 .

李公昭.（2000）.《二十世纪美国文学导论》. 西安：西安交通大学出版社. 马克·吐温 著；唐荫荪 译.（2001）.《世界文学经典名著：马克·吐温短篇小说

选》. 湖南：湖南文艺出版社 .

沈晓莉、郭玲.（1997）.《汤姆·索亚历险记》导读.四川：四川教育出版社. . 王恩铭.（1997）.《当代美国文化与社会》. 上海：上海外语教育出版社.

10