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Overview
The writer’s fascination with America’s spiritual and religious evolution in the 19th century.
Mark Twain is often pictured as a severe critic of religious piety, shaking his fist at God and mocking the devout. Such a view, however, is only partly correct. It ignores the social realities of Twain’s major period as a writer and his own spiritual interests: his participation in church activities, his socially progressive agenda, his reliance on religious themes in his major works, and his friendships with clergymen, especially his pastor and best friend, Joe Twichell. It also betrays a conception of religion that is more contemporary than that of the period in which he lived.
Harold K. Bush Jr. highlights Twain’s attractions to and engagements with the wide variety of religious phenomena of America in his lifetime, and how these matters affected his writings. Though Twain lived in an era of tremendous religious vigor, it was also a time of spiritual upheaval and crisis. The rise of biological and psychological sciences, the criticism of biblical texts as literary documents, the influx of world religions and immigrant communities, and the trauma of the Civil War all had dramatic effects on America’s religious life. At the same time mass urban revivalism, the ecumenical movement, Social Christianity, and occultic phenomena, like spiritualism and mind sciences, all rushed in to fill the voids. The rapid growth of agnosticism in the 1870s and 1880s is also clearly reflected in Twain’s life and writings. Thus Twain’s career reflects in an unusually resonant way the vast changes in American belief during his lifetime.
Bush’s study offers both a new and more complicated understanding of Twain and his literary output and serves as the cultural biography of an era.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817381295 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 02/15/2008 |
| Series: | Studies in American Literary Realism and Naturalism |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Mark Twain and the Spiritual Crisis of His Age
By Harold K. Bush Jr.
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2007 The University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-5548-7
CHAPTER 1
Mark Twain's Roots
Hannibal, the River, and the West
The Declaration of Independence of 1776 makes its primary appeal to "the laws of nature and nature's God" — a phrase that highlights a harmony between the spheres of science and theology, physics and meta-physics. The recognition of this harmony was a staple of the early republic's Enlightenment-style deism, shared by Jefferson and his cohort of founders. However, by the time of the Declaration's one-hundred-year celebration in 1876, a moment that coincided with Mark Twain reaching his peak powers as a writer, the laws of nature and the laws of God seemed to be not at all harmonized, but greatly at odds with each other. Scientists were making grand proclamations that called into question the so-called laws of religion, while theologians were rethinking traditional ideas in light of science's rapid changes. As Twain came to maturity as an author, "two apprehensions, of 'revealed' religion and of reason and science, were becoming aligned against each other. ... Two ways of knowing, two avenues to Truth, were in conflict."
If we recognize the pervasive manner in which this opposition typified nineteenth-century America, we will not be surprised to see how it typified the life and times of Mark Twain. To begin with, it provides a shorthand for understanding the religious influence passed on to him from those two most formative teachers, his parents. According to this gendered model, Sam's mother, Jane Lampton Clemens, would be most closely associated with the "feminized" revealed religion of an older order, while his father, John Marshal Clemens, would be associated with the emerging "masculine" sensibilities of science, reason, and ultimately business and industry. The influence of his parents came in the form of a tension between these two competing ways of knowing — one that was similar to the growing antagonisms within the general culture.
Young Sam's emerging faith in God is seen most prominently in his desire to manifest and to foster sympathy for others, and his primary model for this guiding moral sense was by his own admission his mother, Jane. Once he noted "it is at our mother's knee that we acquire our highest and noblest and purest ideals but there is seldom any money in them." This humorous quote is itself gendered, setting the maternal instinct of religion against the masculine concerns of breadwinning. In a memoir Twain wrote on the occasion of his mother's death in 1890, her "large nature and liberal sympathies" are the dominant themes (figure 1):
The greatest difference which I find between her and the rest of the people whom I have known, is this, and it is a remarkable one: those others felt a strong interest in a few things, whereas to the very day of her death she felt a strong interest in the whole world and everything and everybody in it. In all her life she never knew such a thing as a half-hearted interest in affairs and people, or an interest which drew a line and left out certain affairs and was indifferent to certain people. The invalid who takes a strenuous and indestructible interest in everything and everybody but himself, and to whom a dull moment is an unknown thing and an impossibility, is a formidable adversary for disease and a hard invalid to vanquish. I am certain it was this feature of my mother's makeup that carried her so far toward ninety.
Twain recalled that "[s]he had a slender small body, but a large heart; a heart so large that everybody's griefs and everybody's joys found welcome in it and hospitable accommodation." This implicit biblical allusion refers to a Christian's ability to sympathize with whatever emotion another person is experiencing, as in Romans 12:15: "Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep." Strikingly, the first mental "photograph" of Jane that Twain gives in the essay is of a grief-stricken mother moaning intensely over the dead body of his older brother Benjamin in May 1842. Twain recalled how she had asked him and the other children to place their hands, one by one, on Benjamin's still cheek. He never forgot her anguish and immediately recalled it at the outset of his moving sketch in tribute to her.
Much of Twain's description of his mother avoids strictly religious vocabulary in describing what is essentially a religious or moral characterization. However, by invoking her "liberal sympathies," claiming that she had a large heart that exercised grief and joy with any person, and in particular by depicting her as a figure of bereavement over lost children, Twain is calling upon major features of the religious sensibilities and moral ethos of his time. In nineteenth-century America, the rise of sympathy as a moral category is most often associated with the Scottish "Common Sense" philosophers, whose leading thinkers included the Earl of Shaftesbury, Adam Smith, Francis Hutcheson, Thomas Reid, and Hugh Blair. Hutcheson, for example, drew upon Shaftesbury's supposed discovery of a "moral sense" and then described additional "finer powers of perception." The outworking of these moral sensibilities required, according to Hutcheson, the exercise of the "benevolent affections," meaning charitable acts done solely for the good of other human beings, and "sympathy," which was "an ability to feel along with others both in 'compassion' for their troubles and in 'congratulation' for their happiness." According to Gregg Camfield, Hutcheson's theory of the moral sensibility became a central precept for the Common Sense school: "the sympathetic social impulse was the fundamental precondition of society and in turn of moral behavior." Without the moral sense, society could not possibly cohere, nor could it ever progress.
This understanding of sympathy became important in sentimentalism. We can characterize sentimental ideology as "the cultural expression of the desire for union. Sentimentalism is a manifestation of the belief in or yearning for consonance — or even unity — of principal and purpose. Sympathy complements the work of sentiment: each can be defined as a set of registered impulses psychologically connecting an individual to things and people outside of him or her." This desired psychological connection originates in the sentimentalist's assumption that a code of Christian morality and theology is shared by the sentimental writer herself (or himself), the individuals whom she or he addresses, and the object or objective of "the work of sentiment." The term sentimental applies to literature that "paradoxically both assumes and seeks to bring about an emotional and moral alliance between reader and text (an alliance at once so mystical and material that critics generally read it as excessive), an intimacy that is rooted in common cultural assumptions about virtue and piety."
In Hartford, Mark Twain became next-door neighbors with Harriet Beecher Stowe, one of the movement's most exemplary figures. Her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin exemplifies the cultural work of popular, pietistic sentimentalism: "to assure us that we can and do feel culturally sanctioned and even socially prescribed emotions strongly." The emphasis on feeling correctly is commonly seen as the major motivational focus of Uncle Tom's Cabin, as in the well-known passage in the "Concluding Remarks":
There is one thing that every individual can do, — they can see to it they feel right. An atmosphere of sympathetic influence encircles every human being; and the man or woman who feels strongly, healthily, and justly, on the great interests of humanity, is the constant benefactor to the human race. See, then, to your sympathies in this matter! Are they in harmony with the sympathies of Christ? Or are they swayed and perverted by the sophistries of worldly policy?
One can only be sympathetic insofar as one is in touch with the transcendent — as manifested through the "atmosphere of sympathetic influence" that surrounds each of us.
Typically sentiment was gendered as a feminine trait in Mark Twain's world. It is certainly true that much of Twain's early work emphasized his masculinity and to some extent his disdain for the sentimental. However, much of his greatest achievement derives from his dependence on the human desire to form union and solidarity with others — and as such, is sentimental in temperament. Twain's essay on his mother was an exemplary moment in his career as a sentimentalist, and it shows that despite his frequent satires of emotional excess, sometimes sentiment was not only appropriate but even necessary. It also reveals a man who believed that his own moral attributes originated at his mother's knee. One of his most important fictional depictions of his mother is the character of Mrs. Carpenter, the mother in the "Hellfire Hotchkiss" stories (1897). Written several years after the death of his mother, these stories involve the gendered expectations for a lively young lady but also narrate the parental wisdom being dispensed to a young man, Oscar Carpenter, who sets out to make good in the world. Carpenter's mother serves him well in providing encouragement and strength, and the character can be regarded as a loving tribute to Twain's own mother, Jane:
I know now that she was the most eloquent person whom I have met in all my days, but I did not know it then, and I suppose that no one in all the village suspected that she was a marvel, or indeed that she was in any degree above the common. I had been abroad in the world for twenty years and known and listened to many of its best talkers before it at last dawned on me that in the matter of moving and pathetic eloquence none of them was the equal of that untrained and artless talker out there in the western village, that obscure little woman with the beautiful spirit and the great heart and the enchanted tongue.
The keywords "spirit" and "heart" resonate with important aspects of the romantic and sentimental Christianity that peaked in nineteenth-century America.
Despite his powerfully masculine persona, Mark Twain (and young Sammy) yearned strongly for the guidance and love of the feminine others in his life. One critic recently put it this way: "In both the personal and literary realms, he was a man voluntarily controlled and influenced by women. Women shaped his life, edited his books, provided models for his fictional characters, and, through their correspondence, heavily influenced his fiction and literary works." In general, these women tended to be women of faith; always, they were women of "liberal sympathies," and a chief model would always be his mother. Indeed if a woman did not meet such specifications, such as the wicked queen Morgan La Fey of Connecticut Yankee, she was hardly a woman at all.
Due to his mother's influence, young Sam became very familiar with the Sunday schools and church life of the antebellum frontier. He first went to Sunday school for about a year in a tiny brick Methodist church on the public square of Hannibal called the "Old Ship of Zion." On February 18, 1841, Sam's mother became a member of Hannibal's First Presbyterian Church, in whose basement young Sam attended the Sunday school that would stay with him throughout his life. It was there that young Clemens was trained, as William Dean Howells once put it, "to fear God and dread the Sunday School." The church Sam attended with his family (minus his father) based its doctrine on the Bible, with an emphasis on Old Testament texts about God's power, majesty, and wrath. Young Sammy was required to know the Bible: like others of his age, he had to memorize many passages and by his own admission had "read the Bible through" before he was fifteen. As Sherwood Cummings puts it, "The Bible's imprint on his mind remained indelible under the palimpsest of later scientific knowledge."
The positive imprint of the Bible and frontier religion, as rendered in sentimentalized and often humorous anecdotes about churchgoing, do appear in some of Twain's work. In a series of newspaper pieces published in 1866 while living in San Francisco, he remembers with some nostalgia his early church years. Some of the memories are not so flattering, to be sure. Twain took up the subject of the new "wild-cat" religions then appearing in California. By "wildcat" he was lumping together a variety of spiritualist and other newly formed sects that preached either communion with the dead or, more generally, emotional and charismatic expressions of religious ecstasy. The articles make it clear that Clemens then found these kinds of behavior aberrant. But these were wildcat religions — offshoots, out of the mainstream. As such, this material makes Mark Twain appear conventional and conservative in his religious temperament, favoring the tried and true over the new and unconventional. In this context he still described himself as a Presbyterian, with a mildly satirical tone, yet in general he praised the regular activities of the First Presbyterian Church of Hannibal:
We get up of a Sunday morning and put on the best harness we have got and trip cheerfully down town; we subside into solemnity and enter the church; we stand up and duck our heads and bear down on a hymn book propped on the pew in front when the minister prays; we stand up again while our hired choir are singing, and look in the hymn book and check off the verses to see that they don't shirk any of the stanzas; we sit silent and grave while the minister is preaching, and count the waterfalls and bonnets furtively, and catch flies; we grab our hats and bonnets when the benediction is begun; when it is finished, we shove, so to speak. No frenzy — no fanaticism — no skirmishing; everything perfectly serene.
Throughout the rest of his career, he regularly self-identified as a Presbyterian. The sections of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer covering church life, despite a clearly satirical tone, contain as well sentimental details, such as the moment when the sermon reaches its climax: "[Tom] was really interested for a little while. The minister made a grand and moving picture of the assembling together of the world's hosts at the millennium when the lion and the lamb should lie down together and a little child should lead them." While it is true that Twain does immediately deflate this transcendent vision by explaining Tom's inability to grasp it, the sheer wonder represented is a telling detail.
On the other hand, he certainly did recognize the negative legacy of his religious upbringing. Still some critics have been far too negative in their portrayals of Hannibal's harmful effects upon young Sam. The chief example of this is the very early depiction by Van Wyck Brooks, who perpetrated numerous distortions regarding Hannibal and his mother's religious influence: the town was a "desert of human sand! — the barrenest spot in all Christendom, surely, for the seed of genius to fall in. ... [frontier Missouri] was not happy: it was a dark jumble of decayed faiths, of unconfessed class distinctions, of inarticulate misery. ... It was a horde-life, a herd-life, an epoch without sun or stars, the twilight of a human spirit." As Ron Powers has remarked, "Seldom has a recognized scholar been more drastically self-deluded, and with more destructive consequences, about the crucial resonance between an artist and the artist's formative habitat."
Still we must concede that in Twain's mind, there were negative aspects to small-town life in Hannibal. Twain's Sunday school or church passages in Tom Sawyer, The Gilded Age, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and elsewhere are notable for their oppressive and enervating tone. certainly Twain often poked fun at the silliness of the churches of his youth. In Tom Sawyer the key features of church life appear to be "showing off" and brainless conformity, such as in the story of the boy who "once recited three thousand verses [of Scripture] without stopping; but the strain upon his mental faculties was too great, and he was little better than an idiot from that day forth." This comic episode suggests (and criticizes) the way religious language is consumed by the general populace: memorization without meaning or reflection that precludes any in-depth examination of the religious texts themselves. In many ways, the idiot child of Twain's anecdote is representative of all the evolving (or devolving) generations who consume the language without reflection and are won over by the art and in turn have forsaken the underlying reality (attitudes memorably captured in the posthumously published essay "Corn-Pone Opinions"). Later Tom is able to trade a variety of materials for the colored tokens in order to be presented with the prize Bible before the learned and honored guests by Judge Temple, who takes the opportunity to wax eloquent about this fine young Christian boy: "it's all owing to right bringing up." Similarly, in The Gilded Age, the corrupt Senator Dilsworthy addresses a Sunday school with reverence and pious charm, ending by claiming that "All that he is, he owes to Sunday-school." The irony of the speech consists of the allusion to the Sunday school as source of "all that he is" — meaning, hypocrisy, hidden corruption, and the ability to manipulate institutional religion to foster docility and conformity.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Mark Twain and the Spiritual Crisis of His Age by Harold K. Bush Jr.. Copyright © 2007 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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