HENRY JAMES AND MARK TWAIN: PUBLIC IMAGE VERSUS LITERARY REALITY

RICHARD MILTON MARSHALL, Purdue University

Abstract

This dissertation refutes the standard critical view that Mark Twain and Henry James represent opposite poles of American literature and thought. Both authors write about New-World figures confronting the Old World, applaud American freshness, the satirize American provinciality and bumptiousness. Chapter 1 describes how Life on the Mississippi and The American Scene apparently present the over-simplified but accepted view that James was the sophisticated expatriate whose artistic temperament withered in America's commercial soil, and Twain was the self-made man whose democratic spirit thrived in America's free-wheeling economy. The authors' fiction, however, attenuates, if not actually contradicts, this view. The Bostonians and The Gilded Age, Chapter 2's subject, direct humorous barbs at the opportunists who infested America in the 1870s and 1880s. Both novels consider the issues of women's emancipation, prying journalism, sectional conflict, and the greedy speculative fever which gripped the nation. Chapter 3 explores the stories of two self-made and energetic Americans, Hank Morgan and Christopher Newman. Living in old and aristocratic cultures, they both become active parts of the societies, and initially they prosper. In both works, though, the failure of the heroes suggests the limits of the practical but aggressive American mentality. Twain and James reverse this situation in Pudd'nhead Wilson and The Europeans. Chapter 4 examines the disruption of two small, provincial American towns when Europeans suddenly arrive on the scene. Both communities find it difficult to adjust to the new ideas which the strangers bring. Chapter 5 describes Huck Finn and Isabel Archer's conception of themselves as literary characters in romantic adventures. These two novels describe the heroes' progress out of this bookish conception of life into a more realistic one. With these comparisons in mind, a quick return to Life on the Mississippi and The American Scene, Chapter 6, reveals the common ground even in these two apparently dissimilar works. Both authors are intrigued by the tension between romance and realism, but, more importantly, they themselves argue eloquently for the benefits of comparative analysis.

Degree

Ph.D.

Subject Area

American literature|British and Irish literature

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