CHAPTER 9 Local Colorism Mark Twain.doc

CHAPTER 9 Local Colorism Mark Twain      Local Colorism     The vogue of local color fiction was, as Claude M. Simpson puts it, the logical culmination of a long, progressive development. It was the outgrowth of historical and aesthetic forces that had been gathering energy since early nineteenth century.     In his Crumbling Idols Hamlin Garland defined local colorism as having "such quality of texture and background that it could not have been written in any other place or by anyone else than a native." Garland's "texture" refers to the elements which characterize a local culture, elements such as speech, customs, and mores peculiar to one particular place. And his "background" covers physical, setting and those distinctive qualities of landscape which condition human thought and behavior. The ultimate aim of the local colorists is, as Garland indicates, to create the illusion of an indigenous little world with qualities that tell it apart from the world outside.     The social and intellectual climate of the country provided a stimulating milieu for the growth of local color fiction. The United States, still expanding westward, had not had time to solidify itself into a cohesive cultural whole. Marked differences existed between different parts of the country, with the East assuming the superior "aristocratic" posture. The rest of the country keenly felt the psychological need to assert their cultural identity, seeking understanding and recognition by showing their local character. Intellectually, the frontier humorists, who had flourished several decades before the Civil War, had prepared the literary ground for local colorism. In the humorous "tall tales" of these writers, there was an obvious emphasis on local peculiarities of speech, dress and habits of thought and the presentation of native character types, which continued, to some extent, into local color fiction. The earlier humorists influenced local color writers so much that one of the latter group, Bret Harte, even declared that local color derived directly from them. After the Civil War a good number of periodicals appeared unusually willing to accept and pay well for local color short stories: Harper's Monthly, Harper's Weekly, The Galaxy, and Scribner's Magazine ?to name just a few. all were ready to spread local color.     Local colorism as a trend first made its presence felt in the late 1860s and early seventies. The appearance of Bret Harte's "The Luck of Roaring Camp" in 1868 marked a significant development in the brief history of local color fiction. Bret Harte's stories managed to draw the attention of the nation to the new genre of writing and make editors and readers more responsive to the speedy growths of similar, regional literature in different sections of the country. The voice of Bret Harte was echoed and made more resonant by those of such local colorists as Harriet Beecher Stowe with her Oldtown Folks and Edward Eggleston with his The Hoosier Schoolmaster. By the early seventies William Dean Howells noticed that the whole varied field of American life was coming into view in American fiction. Magazines were filled with local sketches and stories. The next decade saw a spectacular growth of regional literature when the literary geniuses of different localities rose to join the race to paint their own section of the country in the best colors available. The movement was so widespread that it became as contagious as whooping-cough. Not until the turn of the 20th century did local colorism cease to be a dominant fashion.     Local colorists concerned themselves with presenting and interpreting the local character of their regions. They tended to idealize and glorify, but they never forgot to keep an eye on the truthful color of local life. Bret Harte's The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Stories contains, in his own words, "bits of local color that are truthful" and characters that had "a real human being as a suggesting and starting point." Mrs. Stowe's object was "to interpret to the world the New England life and character in that particular time of its history which may be called the seminal period," and her studies for this object "have been taken from real characters, real scenes, and real incidents." And Hamlin Garland, in writing about the region which he knew best, and dealing explicitly with the local environment, coined the word "veritism" for his particular brand of realism. His Main-Traveled Roads, a truthful record of the commonplace farm life of the West, Howells saw as a creation out of the burning dust of the truth about human experience on the American soil.     The list of names of the local colorists is a long one. In addition to those mentioned above, there are, among others, Constance Fenimore Woolson's Castle Nowhere: Lake-Country Sketches, Sarah Orne Jewett's Deephaven, a collection about coastal Maine, Kate Chopin writing of Louisiana Cajun-life in her Bayou Folk, A Night in Acadie and The Awakening (1899), Gertrude Atherion of Spanish California, Owen Wister of Wyoming cowboy life, and C. B. Fernald of San Francisco's Chinatown. There were also Mary H. Catherwood, in the middle West, Mary Hallock Foote in the far West, and Mary N. Murfree, G. W. Cable, J. Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page in the South. For over three decades, there raged such a sweeping vogue of local color that virtually no corner of the country was left untouched. The local colorists formed an important part of the realistic movement. Their truthful depiction of the common people in their commonplace lives added strength to the fight for realism which Howells championed with James and Mark Twain. There was, in addition, the tall-tale kind of humor built into the very texture of most of local color literature. In a sense local color literature stemmed directly from the frontier tall-tale tradition. Although it lost its momentum toward the end of the nineteenth century, the local spirit continued to inspire and fertilize the imagination of authors such as Willa Cather, John Steinbeck and William Faulkner, who ultimately managed, by rooting their work in their place, to reach the plane of universal meaning.     Mark Twain (1835-1910)     Mark Twain, pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was brought up in the small town of Hannibal, Missouri, on the Mississippi River. He was twelve when his father died and he had to leave school. He was successively a printer's apprentice, a tramp printer, a silver miner, a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi, and a frontier journalist in Nevada and California. This knocking about gave him a wide knowledge of humanity. With the publication of his frontier tale, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," Twain became nationally famous. In 1866 he went east, where he met Howells and married Olivia Langdon of Elmira, New York, both symbols of gentility who combined to tame this "wild humorist of the Pacific Slope." His first novel, The Gilded Age (1873), written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner, was an artistic failure, but it gave its name to the America of the post-bellum period which it attempts to satirize. His boyhood experience, so happily remembered later in his Autobiography, furnished him with ample material for "fiction." The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) was an immediate success as "a boy's book" its sequel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) which Mark Twain wrote some years later, became his masterwork, the one book from which, as Ernest Hemingway noted, "all modern American literature comes." Mark Twain's three years' life on the Mississippi left such a fond memory with him that he returned to the theme more than once in his writing career. Life on the Mississippi (1883), another masterpiece of his, relates it in a vivid, moving way. Mark Twain was essentially an affirmative writer. But toward the latter part of his life, he became increasingly violent in his censure of man and his society. In his later works the change from an optimist and humorist to an almost despairing determinist is unmistakable. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900), The Mysterious Stranger (1916), and his Autobiography (1924) all contain bitter attacks on the human race. Some critics link this change with the tragic events of his later life, the failure of his investments, his fatiguing travels and lectures in order to pay off his debts, and added to this, the death of his wife and two daughters which left him absolutely inconsolable. There is certainly a good deal of truth in this, though the basic reason is to be sought in the darkening social life, as in the case of William Dean Howells.     Although Howells, James, and Twain all worked for realism, there were obvious differences between them. In thematic terms, for instance, James wrote mostly of the upper reaches of American society, and Howells concerned himself chiefly with middle class life, whereas Mark Twain dealt largely with the lower strata of society. "I have never tried in even one single little instance," he wrote in one of his letters, "to help cultivate the cultivated classes. I was not equipped for it, either by native gifts or training, and I never had any ambition in that direction, but always hunted for bigger game ?the masses." He proposed to entertain them with his prodigious humor. Technically, Howells wrote in the vein of genteel realism, James pursued an "imaginative" treatment of reality or psychological realism, but Mark Twain's contribution to the development of realism and to American literature as a whole was partly through his theories of localism in American fiction, and partly through his colloquial style which we shall discuss in detail in connection with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.     Mark Twain preferred to represent social life through portraits of local places which he knew best. Indeed, he started off as a teller of tall tales and local colorist. He felt that a novelist must not try to generalize about a nation. "No," he says, "The novelist lays before you the ways and speech and life of a few people grouped in a certain place ?his own place ?and that is one book. In time, he and his brethren will report to you the life and the people of the whole nation." He goes on to state that "When a thousand able novels have been written, there you have the soul of the people, the life of the people, the speech of the people, and not anywhere else can these be had." Here he clearly defined the place and function of local colorism, and foresaw the coming in sections of the "great American novel" to which he did his best to contribute his share.     Mark Twain drew heavily from his own rich fund of knowledge of people and places. He confined himself to the life with which he was familiar, convinced, as he states in a letter of 1890, that "the most valuable capital, or culture or education usable in the building of novels is personal experience." 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." In a way Mark Twain was his own biographer, and the central drama of his mature literary life was his discovery of his "usable past" which took him the rest of his life to transform imaginatively into literature. His usable past was mostly related to the Mississippi and the West which incidentally became his major theme. Life on the Mississippi was such a truthful description that Howells felt that he could taste "the mud" in it; Tom Sawyer walked out of Twain's pages directly from his fresh memory of his boyhood in the West. By quoting from his own experience. Mark Twain managed to transform into art the freedom and humor, in short, the finest elements of western culture.     The best work that Mark Twain ever produced is, as we noted earlier on, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The writing of the book was evidently not easy for him, for he wrote some of it, then put it away and worked on other things, then later wrote some more of it ?he kept this up for a number of years. Commenting on the writing of the book, Sherwood Anderson observes that here for once, the real Mark Twain became again "the half savage, tender, god-worshipping, believing boy" that he had once been. "I believe he wrote that book in a little hut on a hill on his farm," Anderson said, imaginatively. "It poured out of him. I fancy that at night he came down from his hill stepping like a king ?a splendid playboy, playing with rivers and men, ending on the Mississippi, on the broad river that is the great artery flowing out of the heart of the land." The book was a success from its first publication in 1884 and has always been regarded as one of the great books of Western literature and Western civilization.     The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn tells a story about the United States before the Civil War, around 1850, when the great Mississippi Valley was still being settled. Here lies an America, with its great national faults, full of violence and even cruelty, yet still retaining the virtues of "some simplicity, some innocence, some peace." Here is a "hymn" to that ante bellum America, the moral values of which vanished with the war. The machine and the worship of money were on their way in, but the river-god, with its "sunlight, space, uncrowded time, stillness, and danger," had not been forgotten.     The story takes place along the Mississippi River, on both sides of which there was unpopulated wilderness and a dense forest. Along this river floats a small raft, with two people on it: One is an ignorant, uneducated Black slave named Jim and the other is a little uneducated outcast white boy of about the age of thirteen, called Huckleberry Finn, or Huck Finn. The book relates the story of the escape of Jim from slavery and, more important, how Huck Finn, floating along with him and helping him as best he could, changes his mind, his prejudice about Black people, and comes to accept Jim as a man and as a close friend as well. Now Huck Finn comes from the very lowest level of society. His father is the poor town drunkard who would willingly commit any crime just for the pure pleasure of it. Huck Finn is an outcast, with no mother, no home, sleeping in barrels, eating scraps and leavings, and dressed in rags. All of his virtues come from his good heart and his sense of humanity, for most of the things he was taught turned out to be wrong; for example, he was taught that slavery was good and right, and that runaway slaves should be reported, so what Huck has got to do is to cut through social prejudices and social discriminations to find truth for himself. Huck starts by believing that Blacks are by nature lower than whites ?inferior animals of sorts in fact. A good illustration is the conversation between him and Aunt Sally afte