subject: How to Fix Mistakes [print this page] How to Fix Mistakes How to Fix Mistakes
Mark Twain once said "Man was made at the end of the week's work, when God was tired." This quote suggests that perhaps there were errors made in mankind after the expansive project of perfecting the planet and animals that were made before. Twain is no exception to this theory and uses his own faults and experiences as inspiration for his stories. His use of his own life as inspiration not only drew attention to his own flaws but also the faults of society.The endings of many of his works enhance the satire of social and personal issues that Twain explored in his humorous and thought provoking voice that changed American Literature and helped to change American's perceptions.
In the many accomplishments of Twain's vast career Alan Gribben states that "one of the grandest [is] his success in making literary humor seem like a respectable profession" ( 47). Twain's motivation for writing was to make a respectable amount of money to support his wife, Olivia, and their three daughters. Because he was a terrible business man, the means by which he achieved this was in writing fiction. He was very popular in his time, distributing his work by means of newspaper press. He dabbled in many forms of writing but it appears he held a special respect for humorous and stimulating short stories.
By his own admission in "How to Tell a Story," when Twain relayed a story, he was after the "startled little yelp" of an "impressionable girl" (794). Constance Rourke expands this idea in her essay "Facing West: The American Comic Legend," she explained that "one of [Twain's] favorite forms of comedy was to create the semblance of an emotional scene, beguiling the reader into the belief that it might be true, then puncturing it" (105). The ending of many of his stories creates not only sudden drop of humor or irony, but also the emphasis of the motivating theme explored in the writing. When looking at the stories, "A Medieval Romance", "A True Story", and "Extracts from Adam's Diary" coupled with "Eve's Diary", the ending remarks give satisfactory and often twisted or unexpected closing comments to each of their themes.
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The story "A Medieval Romance" tells of a princess that is forced by her father to pretend she is a prince in order to inherit the crown from her uncle. This plan is devised when no male heir is born to the royal family. She is raised as a boy and sent to her uncle's castle when his health is failing and his death is imminent. She is loved by all and is seen as the perfect successor to the crown and it seems that the scheme will go exactly as planned, until her problem is announced.
This story goes beyond the satire of fairy tales that, upon its surface, it seems to be. Twain used the entrapment of this princess as an approach to comment on the slavery of women in the male dominated society of his time, a time when women were trapped and had few options and little personal freedom. He also used the story to explore his own dual personality and the similar confinements he felt there. In his essay "The Average American", Ludwig Lewisohn, a highly acclaimed American critic, speaks of the battle happening within Twain. He states that we must remember that Twain is in essence a double personality. Samuel Clemens, the socially acceptable writer that followed the censorship of his wife and friends and Mark Twain, the pseudonym, which would rather "run away with the imagination" but was trapped in respectability (129). This struggle is similar to the struggle of the princess disguised as "Prince Conrad" especially when she realizes her female cousin is in love with her. She is bound by duty and the threat of a punishment of death if it is revealed that she, a female, has sat on the thrown before being crowned (68). She cannot reveal she is a woman and she also cannot marry another woman. She is stuck with no option out.
The reason for Conrad's unhappiness and the major problem of the story is Princess Constance's love for the pretending prince. A love "freighted with danger" that caused Conrad to be "appalled" (70-71). In the story the reason for this distaste is apparent. However, the passage directly after this admittance is what points to Twain's own feelings, masked by Prince Conrad's thoughts:
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He bitterly cursed himself for having yielded to the instinct that had made him seek the companionship of one of his own sex when he was new and a stranger in the palace when he sorrowful and yearned for a sympathy such as only women can give or feel (71).
There has been much debate about the reason that Twain allowed his wife to censor his voice and why he stayed in a situation that limited him creatively. This passage points to a need for the companionship that only a woman could provide. Twain loved and needed his wife so he conformed to her ideals. The danger Conrad felt from Constance's love represents the compulsion that Twain felt to please his wife before others, such as his critics of literature. Using the pronouns of "he" and "his" enforce that these feelings are closer to the male Twain than the female Princess Conrad. Even the names of these characters relay the hidden or masked imperfection of the author. According to the Behind the Names website, a site dedicated to the etymology and history of first names, Conrad means bold and brave counsel, while the name Constance denotes a loyal, steadfast, and constant nature (Campbell). Conrad is the bold humor and imagination that Twain wanted to set free, Constance is the constant social acceptance and income he received by sequestering his ideas.
This personal play of the characters is enforced by the humorous trickster ending of the story. In the end the author tells the reader that there is not, nor there will there ever be an ending to this story. The reasoning is explained and also enforces the presence of Twain's own predicament:
The truth is, I have gotten my hero (or heroine) into such a particularly close place that I do not see how I am ever going to get him (or her) out of it again, and therefore I will wash my hands of the whole business, and leave that person to get out the best way that offers - or else stay there (74).
This trick ending not only punctures the story by addressing the reader it also creates an unexpected element and humor. Twain as an author cannot see a way to resolve the character's issues. He leaves the character to get out of the predicament and also leaves himself a way to possibly also find a solution for himself. With the feminine signifier for the character being the parenthetical and the male signifier being the first and direct noun, a kind of dominance of male over female is presented. With the biological sex of the character being female and that fact being more of an afterthought in the structure of the ending paragraph points to the fact that in Twain's mind Conrad is a male. She is trapped and has no options and so is Twain. Conrad becomes a he because the character is more like Twain than the gender of her character birth.
The subtlety with which Twain creates a world where the exaggerated seems plausible is possible in part because of the fact that he never left his rural roots behind him. In his essay, Lewisohn also explains Twain's popularity with the common people, and why distributing his stories by newspaper worked so well. He states that Twain "has their morals and their manners, their spirit and their speech" (127). It is this rural speech that serves as a connection in his more serious stories that concentrate on commenting on social issues such as slavery and stereotypes caused by bigotry.
One of these stories, "A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It," tells the story of Aunt Rachel, an assumed pseudonym for Twain's own cook Mary Ann Cord, who targets her satire towards the trickster Twain, or Misto C as he calls himself in the story. Misto C asks Aunt Rachel why she is so happy and never had any trouble in her life. What is explained after this is a tale of a woman that has been physically assaulted, estranged from loved ones, and ridiculed for much of her life only because of her gender and race. As Aunt Rachel tells the story she gains power over Misto C. She relays the beginning of her tale and her mother's repeated phrase of "Look-heah!..I's one o' de ole Blue Hen's Chickens, I is" and the narrator, Misto C, explains how "she had gradually risen and now towered above us, black against the stars" (138). As the trickster of the story she has gained a position of power. Even if it is only a step above Misto C, she is now the dominate storyteller.
The name Misto C and Aunt Rachel's dialectic phrase are only a fraction of the wonderful vernacular of the story. The entire tale oozes authenticity and enhances the ending where the same phrase that has been passed down through the generations is the reason Aunt Rachel is able to finally reunite with one of her seven children (142). Carrying this dialectic phrase through the story ties the story together and an element of pathos to the character of Aunt Rachel. However, it is not the puncture that Twain so often uses.
The story ends with the painful statement that Aunt Rachel has had no trouble, and also no joy. Ann M. Ryan explains in her article, "The Voice of Her Laugher: Mark Twain's Tragic Feminism" why the ending of this piece is so important, not only for puncture that is so frequently used by Twain for either thought or humor, but also what it does for the black female in the story. "Twain allows a female character not only to have the last word, but to direct the satire at a host of masculine and white assumptions about her" (202). Her assumed joy is riddled with pain and loss. Her face and laughter are the masks she was forced to wear because of the perceptions of white Americans. This final statement is the puncture that is thought provoking.By having the final words hold such a powerful statement on issues of race and stereotypes Twain is able to share with his readers the experience of embarrassment and remorse for his own erroneous assumptions about his cook.
Ryan also speaks of Twain's addiction to the "sound of laugher." She relays the story of Twain being interviewed by James Russell Lowell on what Twain was trying to accomplish with his stories. Twain's answer being that he "only [wanted] a laugh" (192). Ryan argues that "despite the innocent disclaimer, Twain wants more from his audiencehe wants to overcome [them] and empower [them] simultaneously" (193). The genius of his work comes when he is able to create laughter and poignantly honest thought at the same time.
An excellent example of this comes from the stories held in both "Extracts from Adam's Diary" and "Eve's Diary." These companion stories tell the two opposite sides of what happened in the Garden of Eden and of the first battle of gender differences. Adam's version of the story has its female responsible for ruining the peacefulness of the garden. It has the breaking of a silence that reigned before "the new creature's" appearance (379). Eve's version has longing for the friendship of Adam and her loneliness at his refusal to oblige. It has an element of wonder and experimentation and her vanity in thinking she is the first subject of this experiment (390). These two stories counter each other and create an honest portrayal of these gender differences that makes each story as relevant and truthful today as it was when it was written. They both hold accounts of Eve's insistence on naming everything from the Niagara Falls to the Dodo bird and Adam's confusion to both the absence of practical reasons fornaming things and why she chose the particular names she did creates the same humor now as it did then (379-80). We find in Eve's account that she felt superior to Adam and thought her grasp on vocabulary to be far greater than his. She excuses her behavior of naming everything as a way to save him from embarrassment (394). This constant mirroring of conflicting viewpoints satires the relationship of gender differences, both in thought and action.
The differences are marked by completely different language and voice used in the two narratives. These differences are as distinct as the genders they represent. Adam's voice is a simpler diction that is filled with shorter sentences focused on the practicality of his day. For example, his Sunday entries are usually the short phrase, "Pulled through," because he does not have a lot of activity on the day of rest. Eve's is lyrical and poetic filled more with what she is thinking and feeling each day. Such as the day she talks about the moon disappearing. She relishes the beauty of the moon and wishes for more. She states the she "should ever get tired lying on the moss-bank and looking up at them" (391). Elements of Adam's diary are completely absent in Eve's and vice versa. Such as the fall from the garden, in Adam's version it is not Eve that caused the fall, but Adam in telling the first bad joke or "chestnut" (384). In Eve's version the fall is not detailed and barely mentioned as a title for her final entry. What is important to one is missing from the other and this shows how in battle of gender a lot of the issue is a matter of thought.
The ending of both diaries is where the power of provoked thought comes in. In the end Adam is grateful for the voice that he once would have wished to "fall silent." He blesses "the chestnut that brought [them] near together and taught [him] to know the goodness of her heart and the sweetness of her spirit" (389). This ending shows the reader that overtime he not only learned to compromise with Eve but that he also accepts and loves her. In Eve's ending we see that she has seen that her vanity in belief that she was better than Adam was not completely accurate. She has also grown to love him for the fact that he is hers and masculine. She pleads to that "if one of [them] must go first" that it is her. She does not think she can bear to lose him and knows that she needs him (405). Both stories end with Adam having the last word. At Eve's grave he writes "Wheresoever she was, there was Eden (405). At the surface these seem like simple romantic notions of love. However, there is a tremendous amount of persuasive pathos and meaning in them.
These endings explore the answers to the battle of gender roles that raged at the time of Twain. Women's Suffrage and the war for equal rights were both in full swing. These endings provide a middle ground for both genders, Adam representing men and Eve representing women. Both had and have opposing views much of the time. However, there is a compromise in finding that both need the other in some way. Adam in the end decides that Eden is a frame of mind present when he was with Eve. He also is the one to take the fall for the loss of the first Eden. He even blesses that fall that brought them closer together. Eve in the end realizes that perhaps, although faster at naming, she is not better than Adam. She has found out how much she needs his strength and love.
If there are mistakes in mankind or humanity it is the words of authors, such as Twain, that will help fix those issues. Using satire, humor, and a punctured ending, Twain has caused generations to ponder questions of gender equality, slavery, and inner struggle. He has indeed caused a yelp in the history of United States, especially in the evolution of American Literature. This yelp has changed both for the better and has helped to fix their issues along the way.
