Word: twains
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...attacks were and are silly--and miss the point. The novel is profoundly antislavery. Jim's search through the slave states for the family from whom he has been forcibly parted is heroic. As the Twain scholar Jocelyn Chadwick has pointed out, the character of Jim was a first in American fiction--a recognition that the slave had two personalities, "the voice of survival within a white slave culture and the voice of the individual: Jim, the father...
There is much more. Twain's mystery novel Pudd'nhead Wilson--aside from being one of the earliest stories to hinge on the evidence of fingerprints--stood as a challenge to the racial convictions of even many of the liberals of his day. Written at a time when the accepted wisdom held Negroes to be inferior to whites, especially in intellect, Twain's tale revolved in part around two babies switched at birth. A slave gave birth to her master's baby and, concerned lest the child be sold South, switched him in the crib for the master's baby...
...thrust was difficult to miss: nurture, not nature, was the key to social status. The features of the black man that provided the stuff of prejudice--manner of speech, for example--were, to Twain, indicative of nothing other than the conditioning that slavery imposed on its victims. At the same time, he was well aware of the possibility that the oppressed might eke out moments of joy amid their sorrows. This was the subject matter of a sprightly little tale titled A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It, published in the 1870s. The narrator asks...
...slavery was wrong, was it worth fighting a war to destroy it? Twain seems to have thought so. Indeed, his underappreciated short story A Trial may be viewed as a justification for the Civil War. A Trial tells of a ship's captain who dotes on his first mate, a black man. The ship docks at an island, where Bill Noakes, the self-proclaimed toughest man on the island, charges on board and demands to fight the captain, who promptly dumps him into the water. The next night, the same thing occurs. A week later, evidently enraged by his humiliation...
...Twain himself, of course, joined up on the Southern side. In his justifiably famous 1885 essay The Private History of a Campaign That Failed, he describes how he knocked about from one position on the war to another, evidently following in the footsteps of his buddies. One striking aspect of his tale is the groping inability of any of the several members of his ragtag militia to assign a reason for their struggle. The essay is in that sense better understood as a part of Twain's significant antiwar oeuvre, a category in which, for example, his essay...