★Part 6: Americannovel of realism 2课时
1. 教学内容：文学史导读，文学选读赏析，文学术语介绍，文学练习阐释，文学创作实践。
(1) Mark Twain: The Adventuresof Huckleberry Finn
（思政融入点：讨论资本主义社会的意识形态矛盾）
(2) Henry James: The Portrait of a Lady
2.基本要求：了解1865—1900年期间美国现实主义文学主要特征，以及美国内战、
战后重建、新兴的工业革命和北方的城市化进程对文学的广泛影响。
3.教学重点：通过文学阅读了解美国从分裂走向融合的历史进程，和现实主义文学中
所记录的人的生存状态和社会风貌。
4.教学难点：从文学作品的赏析中概括美国现实主义三位代表人物所关注的三个社会阶层，
和以Mark Twain为首的美国文学家逐步走向世界的趋势。
(1) Mark Twain: The Adventuresof Huckleberry Finn
（思政融入点：讨论资本主义社会的意识形态矛盾）
Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910), called this period “the Gilded Age.” “My books are simply autobiographies,” Twain insisted once. True of every American writer, perhaps, the remark seems especially true of him. He relied, frequently and frankly, on personal experience: in accounts of his travels, for instance, like The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), and A Tramp Abroad (1880). Even those books of his that were the results of strenuous imaginative effort can be read as attempts to resolve his inner divisions, and create some sense of continuity between his present and his past, his critical investment in common sense, pragmatism, and progress and his emotional involvement in his childhood and the childhood of his region and nation. The inner divisions and discontinuity were, in fact, inseparable. For all of Twain’s best fictional work has to do with what has been called “the matter of A Brief History of American Literature Richard Gray © 2011 Richard Gray. ISBN: 978-1-405-19231-6 Hannibal”: that is, his experiences as a child in the slaveholding state of Missouri and his years as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi. This was not simply a matter of nostalgia for the good old days before the Civil War, of the kind to be found in other, simpler writers born in the South like, say, Thomas Nelson Page or Richard Malcolm Johnston (1822–1898). Nor was it merely another example of the romantic idealization of youth. It was rather, and more simply, that Twain recognized intuitively that his years as a boy and youth, in the pre-Civil War South, had formed him for good and ill. So to explore those years was to explore the often equivocal nature of his own vision. It was also that Twain also sensed that the gap he felt between his self and his experiences before and after the war was typical, representative. So to understand that gap was to begin at least to understand his nation and its times. Twain first turned to the matter of Hannibal in a series of articles published in 1875 in The Atlantic Monthly entitled “Old Times on the Mississippi” – later revised and expanded to become Life on the Mississippi (1883) – and then one year later in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. It was his third excursion into his and the national past, however, that produced his greatest work, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, begun in 1876 and published in 1885. Twain began Huckleberry Finn simply as a sequel to Tom Sawyer, with several narrative threads carried over from the earlier work. Even as he began it, however, he must have realized that this was a very different, more authentic work. For the manuscript shows Twain trying to catch the trick, the exact lilt of Huck’s voice. “You will not know about me,” the first try at an opening, is scratched out. So is the second try, “You do not know about me.” Only at the third attempt does Twain come up with the right, idiomatic but poetic, start: “You don’t know about me.” Like a jazz musician, trying to hit the right beat before swinging into the full melody and the rhythm of the piece, Twain searches for just the right voice, the right pitch and momentum, before moving into the story of his greatest vernacular hero. The intimacy is vital too: in a way that was to become characteristic of American fiction, the protagonist addresses “you” the reader directly, in terms that appear spontaneous, sincere, unpremeditated. We are drawn into this web of words in a manner that convinces us that we are enjoying an unpremeditated, vital relationship with the hero. The spontaneity is also a function of the narrative structure. Twain once said that he relied on a book to “write itself,” and that is the impression, in the best sense, given by Huckleberry Finn. The story has a structure, of course, that of the picaresque narrative (Don Quixote was one of Twain’s favorite books): but that structure is as paradoxically structureless as the structure of, say, Moby-Dick or “Song of Myself.” The book flows like the Mississippi, at a constantly altering pace, in unanticipated directions; new characters, episodes, incidents pop up without warning, old characters like Jim or Tom Sawyer reappear just when we least expect them to. Like the great works of Melville and Whitman, too, Huckleberry Finn remains an open field, describing an open, unstructured and unreconstructed spirit. It does not conclude, in any conventional fashion. Famously, it ends as “Song of Myself ” does and many later American narratives were to do: looking to the open road, with the hero still breaking away – or, as Huck himself has it, ready to “light out for the Territory ahead of the rest.” Twain later described Huckleberry Finn as “a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers a defeat.” The central moral dilemma Huck has to face, in this deeply serious, even tragic comedy, is whether 116 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 or not he should betray his friend, the escaped slave Jim, by revealing Jim’s whereabouts to other whites, including Miss Watson, his owner. For much of the narrative, Huck is equivocal. Sometimes, he sees Jim as a slave, as property that should be returned; and sometimes he sees him as a human being and a friend, requiring his sympathy and help. And the vacillation stems from Huck’s uncertainty over what takes priority: the laws of society, his social upbringing which, however patchily, has shaped his conscience, or the promptings of his own heart, his instincts and feelings as an individual. The book is about the historical injustice of slavery, of course, and the social inequity of racism, the human use or denial of human beings. But it is also about the same fundamental conflict as the one that fires The Scarlet Letter and so many other American narratives into life. Huck must choose between the law and liberty, the sanctions of the community and the perceptions of the individual, civil and natural justice. He chooses the latter, the lessons learned from his own experience, the knowledge of his own rebellious heart. In doing so, Huck reflects his creator’s belief at the time in aboriginal innocence, the purity of the asocial – and asocial or presocial creatures like the child. And he also measures the extent of the creative triumph, since Twain manages here a miracle: that rare thing, Figure 3.1 Illustration from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain: Huck and Jim on the raft. Bettmann/Corbis. Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 117 a sympathetic and credibly virtuous character. The sympathy and credibility stem from the same source: Huck is a grotesque saint, a queer kind of savior because he does not know he is doing good. His notions of right and wrong, salvation and damnation, have been formed by society. So, when he is doing good he believes that he is doing evil, and vice versa. His belief system is at odds with his right instincts: hence, the terms in which he describes his final decision not to betray Jim. “All right, then,” Huck declares, “I’ll go to hell.” Twain’s strategies for shifting Huck’s conflict from the personal to the mythic are several. Easily the most important, though, is his own, almost certainly intuitive, variation on the contrast between the clearing and the wilderness: the riverbank and the river. The riverbank is the fixed element, the clearing, the community. On the riverbank, everyone plays a social role, observes a social function: either without knowing it, like the Grangerford family or the inhabitants of Bricksville, or knowing it and using it to exploit others, like the Duke and Dauphin. Everyone is obsessed with appearances and disguises, and uses language to conceal meaning and feeling from others and themselves. Everyone behaves like an actor, who has certain lines to say, clothes to wear, things to do, rather than as an independent individual. Everyone, in short, denies their essential humanity on the riverbank, and the humanity of others: here, Jim is not a human being, he is the lowest form of social function, a slave. What adds to the power of this portrait is that, as with the account of the Puritan settlement in The Scarlet Letter, it is simultaneously mythic and historical. This is society, the machinery of the social system seen from the standpoint of individualism. It is also a very specific society, that of the South before the Civil War. Drawing on the devices of the Southwestern humorists, but exponentially developing them, Twain offers a brilliantly detailed satirical picture of the Old South: poor whites like Pap Finn and the people of Bricksville, middle-class farmers like the Phelps family, wealthy planters like the Grangerfords – and, of course, the slaves. Huckleberry Finn is an unremitting comic assault on the human capacity to substitute “style” for substance, social illusion for experiential fact. But it is also a satire on one particular kind of social “style” that Twain knew only too well. It is a tragic account of what, generally, happens when people stop seeing and testing things for themselves, as individual human beings. But it is also a very American tragedy, about a moment in American history when a sense of humanity and individuality was lost, with terrible consequences for the nation. The river, the fluid element and the medium for escape for Huck and Jim, is, of course, Twain’s version of the mythic wilderness. It is a place where Huck can enjoy intimacy with Jim and an almost Edenic harmony with nature. Recasting Huck as an American Adam, Twain shows his hero attending to the moods of the river and its surroundings and, in turn, projecting his own moods in and through those natural surrounds. Huck appears to enjoy a separate peace here on the river, a world apart from rules, codes, and clock time, where “lazying” becomes a positive activity. Free from the postlapsarian compulsion to work, Huck can simply be and wonder: live, meditate, and marvel at the miracle of the particular, the minutiae of life. It is in these episodes on the river that the indelible connection between the voice of Huck and his values becomes clear. Huck scrupulously, instinctively tells it as it is. He sees things as they are, free of social pretence or disguise. So he can judge things as they are, not as the social system 118 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 would tell him to judge them. It is also in these episodes that Huck’s power as a syncretic figure becomes clear. Huck Finn brings together and synthesizes the warring opposites of Twain’s earlier work. Huck is a focus for all his creator’s nostalgia, all his yearnings for childhood, the lost days of his youth, the days before the Civil War and the Fall; and he is also, quite clearly, a projection of Twain’s more progressive feelings, the belief in human development and perfectibility – he suggests hope for the future as well as love of the past. Again, this is measured in the language of the book, in that it is precisely Huck’s “progressive” attention to the use and function of things that gives his observations such color and immediacy. The language Huck is given, in effect, is at once exact and evocative, pragmatic and poetic: it reveals things as they are, in all their miraculous particularity. And Huck himself, the speaker of that language, comes across as a profoundly realistic and romantic figure: a pragmatist and a dreamer, a simple figure and a noble man – a perfect gentle knight, who seems honorable, even chivalric, precisely because he sticks closely to the facts. The deepening pessimism of Twain, in his later years, is evident from the novels A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and The Tragedy of Puddn’head Wilson (1894), the story “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” (1900), and the longer narrative, The Mysterious Stranger, which was published posthumously after editorial work by other hands in 1916. “I believe I can make it tell what I think of Man,” he wrote of The Mysterious Stranger, “... and what a shabby poor ridiculous thing he is, and how mistaken he is in his estimate of ... his place among the animals.” On a personal level, Twain continued to enjoy what he termed the “grace, peace, and benediction” of his family and circle of friends until the end of his life. On the social, he remained an ardent reformer and a brilliantly witty, judiciously savage critic of authority and champion of the underdog: attacking European imperialism in Africa, for instance, and American imperialism in the Spanish-American War. But his sense, most powerfully expressed in Huckleberry Finn, that the real could be infused with romance, that it was possible to be true to the facts and to the ideal possibilities of things: that had gone. And his eventual view of life could perhaps be summed up by a remark culled from what Twain called Puddn’head Wilson’s Calendar: “We owe Adam a great debt. He first brought death into the world.” Regionalism in the West and Midwest Twain has been called a regionalist, because he was born and raised in the South, lived for a while in the West, and wrote of both. Among those other writers who have been associated with the regionalist impulse was one who worked as a journalist and editor with Mark Twain in the West, Francis Bret Harte (1836–1902). Harte became editor of The Californian and then, in 1868, of the Overland Monthly in which he published the poems and stories that made him famous. Many of the stories were collected in The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Stories (1870). The two most famous, the title story and “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” are typical, in that they illustrate Harte’s tendency to find innocence flowering in inhospitable frontier circumstances and miners, gamblers, and whores revealing they have hearts of gold. In the same year as his most famous collection of tales appeared, Harte also published his most famous poem, “Plain Language from Truthful James.” Set, like so much of his work, in a Western mining Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 119 camp, it tells the story of a wily “heathen Chinee,” who claims not to understand a card game then is revealed as an astute cheat. “Plain Language from Truthful James” is also a mix of the vernacular and the more formal and rhetorical. What the narrator calls his “plain” language is not always that; and it is, in any event, set, frozen almost in an elaborate stanzaic pattern, with regular rhymes and repetitive rhythms. In this, it was typical of poems of the time about the West. Bayard Taylor (1825–1878), for example, wrote poems like “The Bison Track” (1875) and “On Leaving California” (1875) that show a similar obedience to poetic traditions, and an equally close observation of rhetorical rules, while celebrating frontier freedom. And Taylor’s poems, in turn, are typical to the extent that they endorse the contemporary belief in manifest destiny – the mission of white Americans to settle and civilize the West. A similar triumphalism, couched in formal rhetoric and carefully molded verse, is to be found in the work of Joaquin Miller (1841?–1913), who became known during his lifetime as “the Byron of Oregon.” The movement west was, as they saw it, a natural consequence of human evolution and national history, underwritten by both the idea of the survival of the fittest and the example of earlier explorers and settlers. In the more settled farming regions of the Midwest, the writing tone, in both poetry and prose, tended to be quieter, the narrative vision more narrowly focused on the pieties of family and community. James Whitcomb Riley (1849–1916), for instance, achieved fame and wealth by writing a series of poems in the “Hoosier” dialect of Indiana. The poems are light and sentimental, concentrating on picturesque figures of pathos, like “Little Orphan Annie” (1883), or on the simple satisfactions of hearth and home, and the rituals of farming life, as in his most famous piece, “When the Frost is on the Punkin” (1883). Like Riley, Edward Eggleston (1837–1902) was born in Indiana and achieved fame by writing about the simplicity and community of Midwestern life and using the local dialect. He chose fiction as his way of recording and celebrating his small corner of America. But, as his most famous book, The Hoosier Schoolmaster (1871), shows he was similarly inclined to domesticate and sentimentalize; the tone of the narrative tends towards the pious much of the time, and both the hero and the woman he eventually marries are depicted as improbably ideal and impeccable.
Preview questions:
1. Explain the term of realism.
2. In the novel Huck and Jim wander along the Mississippi peacefully and freely. The river brings them fun and honor, beauty and color. Discuss the symbolic meaning of the river.
3. Mark Twain has, as his aim of writing, the soul, the life and the speech of the people in mind. He has the story narrated by Huck, a little uneducated white boy, in his own wonderful vernacular. Why does the author have the story told in this way?
4. Make a comment on Mark Twain's influenceand writing style.
