（英语语言文学专业论文）马克·吐温：其作品以及其人.pdf

ii 摘 要 马克吐温是美国十九世纪著名的幽默现实主义文学家本文试图从其作品 及思想对其作一全面的研究 理想主义与悲观主义是马克吐温作品中的两个重要因素这两个因素在马 克吐温的作品中呈现出一个成反比的变化的趋势即理想主义的成分越来越少 而悲观主义的成分越来越多 最终理想主义的成分消失殆尽而悲观主义的成分占 据了马克吐温晚年作品的全部自由平等自力更生一直是美国人民的也是 马克 吐温对社会的理想 而公正和友爱一直是全人类的也是马克 吐温的目标 马克吐温的悲观主义表现在他作品对社会的批判之中其悲观主义起源于他对 美国堕落的文化的失望从十九世纪六十年代晚期起宗教成为马克吐温的社 会批判的主要对象 马克吐温的内心中有两个中心一个是自然神论的哲学中心一个是要作 道德宣教家的心理中心 这两个中心的共同作用促使他与他文化中的神性作坚决 的斗争但是在他文学生涯的最后二十年中他的哲学中心发生碎裂这相应地也 降低了他作一名道德家的作用马克吐温的复杂性在于他对种种反差的强烈意 识而他的不连贯性在于他一生与宗教作斗争却不能摆脱宗教的影响 但是马克吐温今天仍然被人们所喜爱这显然是与他的道德勇气以及对 同胞的深深认同有关 i abstract this thesis is an attempt to study mark twain and his works as a whole. two factors idealism and pessimism are involved in mark twains works. these two factors evolve in mark twains works in an inversely proportional way, that is, with the passage of time idealism goes on a decreasing scale while pessimism goes on an increasing scale and at last idealism dies away and pessimism dominates in his works. mark twains idealism is rooted in the american soil. freedom, equality, self-reliance had been mark twains ideal, which are also american peoples ideal for society. and brotherhood and justice had been mark twains goal, which are also the human races goal for society. mark twains pessimism is expressed in his social criticism and it originated from his disillusionment with the decadent culture. from the late 1860s on, religion became the main target of mark twins social criticism. there are two centers deism as a philosophical one and desire to be a moralist as a psychological one in mark twain. and between these two centers is his lifelong engagement with the religious ethos of his culture, his personal struggle with religion. but the philosophical center broke into fragments in the 1890s and 1900s and consequently undermined his role as a moralist. mark twains complexity lies in his radical sense of contradictions and his inconsistency lies in the fact that he struggled with religion but never freed himself from its influence. mark twain is still loved by the american people. the reason obviously lies in his moral bravery and his total identification with his fellow man. 1 introduction mark twain, the great comic realist, has become a legendary figure in the american literary history and has been loved so much by the american people, although he never ceased to ridicule the human foolishness and especially in his old age he exposed the mortal weak points of humanity ruthlessly even without the defense of humor. a lot of research has been done on his works and his thought. but much of the research done is focused on one of his books or one of his attitudes towards some problems and consequently lacks systematicness and the views are sometimes contradictory to each other. there have been actually attempts to study him and his works as a whole, but many have been frustrated by his complexity and inconsistency and have ended hastily by concluding that he was erratic and capricious and so on. my thesis is another attempt to study him, based on what others have done before, trying to find some consistency among the inconsistencies accredited to mark twain. mark twains complexity or inconsistency is obvious, but in my view, the consistency among his inconsistencies is his lifelong engagement with the religious ethos of his culture, or puritanism, as is popularly called, and his personal struggle with theology and with the way theological concepts and beliefs shaped a humanity ultimately damned. his complexity lies in his radical sense of contradictions and his inconsistency lies in the fact that he struggled with the traditional culture all his life but never escaped its influence. in mark twain, the thing unchanged is his sense of responsibility to tell the truth and to teach people goodness; what changed is his philosophy from a presbyterian to a deist and at last to a determinist and also his social criticism, which becomes more and more violent, and his idealism, which finally dies away altogether. maybe the best way to study mark twain is to read his books first and try to find something common in them and then to understand his inner part. and i would adopt historical approach to do both of these. my selecting of the three books the adventures of tom sawyer (1876), the adventures of huckleberry finn (1885) and the mysterious stranger (1916)is not only because they are, especially the first two, the most important works in mark twains different periods of writing career, but also because they reflect twains experience of different periods of life respectively the childhood, the youth and the old age and record the change of his attitude toward the traditional culturefrom illusion to disillusion to hatred. 2 there are two factors idealism and pessimism interacting in mark twains works. by idealism, i mean the author has an optimistic view of society and creates a perfect world that embodies his ideals in his works. and by pessimism, i mean the opposite tendency, i.e. the author bases his works on reality but has a melancholy or despairing view of society. mark twains idealism is a continuation of the american literary tradition, and freedom, equality, brotherhood and justice have been the american peoples and also had been mark twains ideal for society. mark twains pessimism is expressed in his social criticism and it originated in his sober recognition of and disillusionment with the decadent traditional culture. what is great of mark twain is when he found that reality contradicted his ideals and religion began to lose its effectiveness, he consciously took up the responsibility of reforming society and used his humor to expose and criticize the sham, the irrational and the evil. and what we regret is when the social situation continued to deteriorate in his old age, he lost confidence in the reforming function of his humor and lost hope of the ideals that he cherished so much and finally fell into deep despair. although he placed his hope on such a superman as satan to uphold justice and to subvert god and tried to create a dreamy world for human beings to live in, the despairing determinism prevented him from giving an optimistic future for human beings. my thesis includes three chapters. the first chapter gives a brief account of twains life story. its aim is to help understand twains works well, for as a realist, twain was involved in the large and small details of american life. he drew heavily from his own rich fund of knowledge of people and places. he confined himself to the life with which he was familiar and convinced and certainly he was at his best when, in the words of everett carter, transmuting the ore of his personal experience into “the gold of reminiscence, autobiography and autobiographical fiction.”1 so in a way mark twain was his own biographer and his personal experience also played a part in the forming of his pessimistic philosophy in his old age. the second chapter is an analysis of the three selected works of mark twain the adventures of tom sawyer, the adventures of huckleberry finn and the mysterious stranger. for the adventures of tom sawyer, the analysis focuses on the idealism in the novel. although almost every character and every event can be found to be a real person or a real happening in twains childhood, the novel only provides a small 3 world of reality and the author idealizes the state of his child world. freedom is the primary problem the book is concerned with. the adventures of huckleberry finn is mark twains masterpiece, the book from which, as hemingway said, all modern american literature began. the emphasis is on the authors social criticism of or his pessimism about the decadent traditional culture. the work is the peak of mark twains literary career both for its literary art and for its ideological content. besides freedom, equality and fraternal love become the authors great concern. the mysterious stranger is mark twains last important fiction. the book is the summary of mark twains despair in his old age. it is a philosophy of determinism and a terror world. at the end of the chapter is an analysis of the change of twains view of the world and attitude toward the main characters of the three books. two factors idealism and pessimism go through his books in an inversely proportional way. accompanying the change of the authors thinking is the change of his attitude toward the main characters in the three books. in the third chapter, based on the study of his books and his experience, i try to explore twains philosophy and psychology historically and by doing so to find the reason for the change of styles of his books and to know the most important part of mark twain a staunch anti-theologian writer who never escaped the influence of the traditional culture and an authentic moralist who could not find an optimistic future for the human race and could not get consolation for himself. this chapter includes three parts. the first part is about the influence of mark twains early beliefs calvinism and sentimentalism. mark twains idealism originated from these two early beliefs. the second part is about mark twains two centers a deistic philosophical center and a psychological center, his desire to preach and to be a moralist, and his exposing of the false religious consciousness. the third part is his subversion of biblical god and the creation of his own theology. 4 chapter 1 the life story of mark twain section one the boyhood of mark twain mark twain, pseudonym of samuel langhorne clemens, was born on november 30, 1835. his father was john marshall clemens of virginia and mother jane lampton of kentucky. after marriage, they removed to the remote village of jamestown, in the east tennessee. his fathers fortunes in jamestown were wrecked in the great financial crash of 1834. he gathered together his household and traveled a long way and settled down temporarily in the small village of florida, where samuel was born. one among thousands of americans who in the early decades of the nineteenth century moved westward to seek opportunities in the newly opened lands, john clemens did not prosper in florida either, so when samuel was four years old, the family moved to hannibal, a larger town on the banks of the mississippi river. there, beside this river, samuel clemens was fascinated by the splendid mississippi country life and grew through boyhood happily much as tom sawyer does. obviously, hannibal in the 1840s was a wonderful place for a boy. looking back on the childhood years he had spent there, mark twain recalled endless scenes of delight: picnic on the wooded holliday hill that overlooked the town; adventures in the limestone caves in which the area abounded and he once lost himself, along with a lady; going to minstrel shows with a couple of young friends, or to the circus that came through hannibal from time to time. the village was “a heaven place for a boy,” he said,1 providing immunities and graces which he never forgot: hunting and fishing, a swimming hole, an inevitable graveyard, truant days at glasscocks island, and yearnings toward the better freedom of tom blankenship, the town drunkards son, to whom truancy brought no penalties of conscience or recrimination. and then, of course, there was the river. at hannibal, you were always conscious of the river, the muddy, majestic, mile-wide mississippi, rolling southward toward the imperial city of st. louis and beyond toward new orleans. the river was wonderful for swimming and fishing. it was also interesting just to watch, for the river bore a heavy freight in those days. hundreds of rafts, made either of logs or of lumber, floated downstream during the month of june alone, when the river was in full flood. and among them, there were the monstrous, gallant river steamboats, which stirred up childrens imagination. to be a steamboat pilot was the ambition of the boys in town and eventually a few 5 of the hannibal boys did become steamboat pilots, including an ambitious youth named sam clemens. the experience was most thrilling of his life, and the most deeply satisfying which explains why clemens, when he finally left the river and took up writing as a career, borrowed a piloting term mark twain as his literary name. it was a way of summoning up a heroic past. and there were the peaceful, beautiful, idyllic sceneries, which inhabited mark twains memory forever. but let mark twain himself tell what they were like in the village of mississippi: i can see the woods in their autumn dress, the oaks purple, the hickories washed with gold, the maples and the sumachs luminous with crimson fires, and i can hear the rustle made by the fallen leaves as we plowed through them . i know how the wild blackberries looked, and how they tasted, and the same with paw-paw, the hazelnuts, and the persimmons; and i can feel the thumping rain, upon my head, of hickory nuts and walnuts when we were out in the frosty dawn to scramble for them with the pigs, and the gusts of wind loosed them and sent them down. 2 one of the most important factors in the happiness of mark twains boyhood was the personality of his mother, jane clemens. beneath a superficial sternness, she was warm-hearted, humorous and high-spirited. she loved all her children, and they loved her. her temperament was mark twains temperament, and her influence upon him can be seen at every turn. she was a presbyterian, but she was not fanatic, and her religion was never a burden to her. she was unconventional. in her youth, she was a kentucky belle devoted to dancing. she loved the theater and hated housekeeping. at one period she smoked a pipe. and she was capable of great indignation and of dauntless courage. from her mark twain inherited many specific tastes and tendencies his love of red, his tenderness toward animals, especially the cat, his quick, impulsive emotion, his lifelong habit of protecting the outcast and unfortunate. mark twains father, however, was a different order of being. he was a proud, silent, austere man. the emotional atmosphere in the clemens household was rather chilly. at night, the family shook hands before going to bed. indeed, mark twain recollected in later life only one occasion when he had seen members of his family kiss one another. actually, it was when his dying father put his arms around his sisters neck and kissed her, saying “let me die”3 and then he died. little sympathy existed between 6 young clemens and his father. the boys volatile temperament apparently lay beyond the range of the fathers understanding. twain summed up his own relationship with his father as one of “armed neutrality.” thus, hannibal was not all happiness. in hannibal, a boy could suffer from loneliness there, too. furthermore, he had to live with the ugly possibility that violence might explode in his face at any moment. although hannibal in the 1840s was no longer a frontier town, the frontier spirit still hung in the air. the raftsmen and the riverfront toughs knew only one way to settle their disputes: with knives and fists. and besides, the western, southern movement was still continuing in the other territories and through hannibal did pass the picturesque, sometimes mendacious or menacing pilgrims of restless expanding america, up or down the river or across it toward the western plains. young samuel must have watched this, as any boy might, admiringly, but fearfully also. and there was the slavery system. the clemens, though not wealthy, hired a little negro named sandy who is little jim in tom sawyer. about negroes, mark twain wrote in his autobiography: “all the negroes were friends of ours, and with those of our age were in effect comrades.” and in my schoolboy days i had no aversion to slavery. i was not aware that there was anything wrong about it. no one arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that god approved it, that it was a holy thing and that the doubter need only look in the bible if he wished to settle his mind and then the texts were read aloud to us to make the matter sure; if the slaves themselves had an aversion to slavery they were wise and, said nothing. in hannibal we seldom saw a slave misused; on the farm never. 4 despite this, however, mark twain vividly remembered seeing a dozen black men and women chained to one another on the pavement, awaiting shipment to the southern slave market. another time, he saw everybody seemed indifferent about it when a white man killed a negro man for a trifling little offence. so terror in hannibal was not just a deliciously romantic matter of mysterious caves and scary stories; it was a matter of fact. mark twain had nightmares and walked in his sleep, and always remembered these things, the rude ways and tremendous talk, and the terror. anyway, the happy days were soon over, for when samuel was twelve years old, 7 his father died. about his father, mark twain, when he was an old man himself after a bankruptcy and failure in investment, seemed to have a better understanding. in his autobiography, mark twain stated that his father left a large estate of about 100,000 acres behind him in the region roundabout jamestown. he did believe the land would bring great fortune to his children though his vision never came true, or even become a burden to the family. and in hannibal he rose to the dignity of justice of the peace and had been elected to the clerkship of the court. “he had been doing tolerably well during the first years of his residence in hannibal.”5 but ill fortune tripped him once more, and he was made use of by