The Disillusioned
Dreams of Mark Twain
Abstract:[WT]The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,which renders Mark Twain a worldwide fame,presents a sample of his disillusioned dreams as well as that of the small-town world of the early 19ｔｈ century's America.
Key words:〖WT〗Mark Twain Huck Finn disillusion dream
An adventurous cruise on a raft during a journey on the Mississippi
undertaken by two fugitives,Huck and Jim,loads Mark Twain' long-lasting
desiresfor freedom and nature where he was able to find ultimate expression of
escape from the space he lived by and often deplored;from life's regularities
and energy-sapping clamor for success.On the raft,through the eyes of the
outcast Huck Fim,Twain's imagination flew back where lay his nostalgic ideals.Unortunately,there
was no vacuum for freedom and nature since the raft overshot after all,“skillfully”,the
free city of
1.Huck's Breaking Away From Tom
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn [WT]marks the climax of Twain's literar
y creativity as well as his presentation of ego orientation.Huck,implying Twain himself,was a bitter and starry-eyed cynic though he often offered to help other human beings and kept good company with a runaway nigger Jim. Compared with Tom,who depended on and in the event was assimilated into the sciety where he tried to find his place even when he was rebelling against it,Huck was an uncivilized boy with simple“noble savage” character and attempted to reject the world where he lived.In this way,Huck ceased to be an accomplice to Tom Sawyer,instead,he put away Tom's fantasy ideas as lies:
I reckoned (Tom)believed in the A-rabs and elephants,but as for me,I think different,it had all the marks of Sunday school[WTHX](The Adventures o Huckleberry Finn,[WT]chapter 5)
Tom could enjoy to a certain extent the Sunday school's ideas while Huck detested it completely.Just on this point,Huck broke away from Tom and the former acts as the stereotype of Twain who himself was also at odds with that educated life.
As recorded in his Boy's Manuscript,[WT]he protested:
I wonder what I had done that I had done that God should pick me out mo
re than any other boy and give me a father able to send me to school〖WTHX〗(Boy's Manuscript chapter９).
This self-recrimination suggested how deeply Twain was imbued with despair.In his cynical eyes,there was no longer romantic and adventurous Tom Sawyer,who was already a disillusioned dream in his mind whreras in Tom's place rose a ridiculous and more mature Huck Finn,who was his satirical spokesman.Huck,however,was not fortune enough to have a father able to send him to school so he had to plot a "murder" for his escape from his father's cruelty.As a pariah,son of the town drunkard,he was self-restrained and even self-humble compared with Tom's romantic character.His class consciousness was a tool for him to impose psychic distance between himself and others.While he used literacy to indicate his superiority to Pap and Jim,he also used literacy and his own unworthiness to indicate his inferiority to others including his close friend Tom.Even he himself was shrewd enough to maintain his idyllic cruise with Jim on a raft down the tricky and lengthy Mississippi,he thought Tom was the real hero:
He(Tom) never paid attention to me,went right on;it was his way when he'd got his plans set (The adventures of Huckleberry Finn, chapter 36).
2.Hock's Tragedy
Huck's Tragedy was actually blamed on his personality.Even when he was approached by a person sincerely willing to grant him membership in society,he created on purpose barriers by insisting he was underdeserving and trying to convince himself to be a fool.This outrageous inferiority underlies his isolation from St Petersberg and the civilization of the Mississipp Valley.Consequently,he contrived his own apparent "murder" to escape from his father and the society.From then on,Huck was "dead" to the sophisticated society and led a symbolic existence with no identity.He and Jim were both outside society with one "dead",the other fugitive.Then a raft appeared to be a bridge since the previous bridge between Nature and Society had been burned because of the modern civilization.Such a journey served a perfect purpose for Huck (or Twain himself) to escape into the lonesomeness of Nature and consolation of friendship.The raft threw up in his mind an abundance of poetic forms and feelings;the river itself was a symbol of Nature full of romantic.But,unfortunately,there was no sheer escape,no romantic retreat for Huck into a benevolent Nature:the river was tricky,full of hidden dangers,“unavoidably",the steamboats were wrecked,frame house brought down,and the raft rundown;along the river,the sensational violence of the Shepherdson-Grangerford feud,the outraeous murder of Boggs and the shameless frauds of the duke and the kin
g all destroyed the picturesque
3. Twain's Disillusioned Dreams
Twain's own nostalgic imagination never failed to flow back to his
own boy life out of the
like some vanished Adam,revisiting his half-forgotten paradise and wondering how the arid world could ever have seemed green and fair to him"[WTHX](Enjoyment of Mark Twain's Works,[WT]chapter 5).He wrote the following to his close friend Bowen:
Your letter has stirred me to the bottom.The fountains of my great deep are broken up and I have rained reminiscence…the old life has swept before me the old faces have looked out of the mists of the past and the songs I loved ages and ages have come wailing down the centuries.(Letter to Will Bowen)
He would rather be left to dreams than live in real life.He imagined that the years had not slipped away;that there had been no war,no mining days and noliterary adventures;that he was still a pilot crying “twain" on a steamboat,happy and unfettered as he had ever been.He evoked not only the the river itself,bu
t also his most intimate ties to the life on its surface and shores.Thus he returned imaginatively to the Hannibal of his youth.However his dreams were battered into every piece,inevitably.The dark,polluted and deceitful modern civilization (in his eveys) rudely invaded his domain that was bright,pure and sincere.It was not surprising that he began to perceive that nostalgia was simply mental or moral consolation.Consequently,Twain's mind had gone through a drastic transition from the romantic ideas based on the character Tom to the realistic doctrines based on the character Huck.Sure enough,such transition preceded a series of misfortunes happening to Twain's family that staggered him.His son and two daughters died in heartbreaking circumstances;the publishing house in which he was a parther collapsed;he had invested his money and it turned to be disastrous.Meanwhile,the rapid development of the modern industry relentlessly devastated the ideal Utopia where he had entrusted his dreams.For whatever the reason,the high spirits of optimism in his works started to coexist with a caustic and increasingly bleak view of human nature.This transition can even be traced long before in his social satire,[WTHX]The Gilded Age[WT](1873),came out.Written in collaboration wiht Charles Duddy Warner,the novel explored the scrupulous individualism in a world of fantastic speculation and unstable values,and gave its name to the get-rich-quick years of the post-Civil War era.Twain's dark view of the society became even more self-evident in the works published later in his life.In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889),a parable of colonization,Twain follows the journey of a representative of modern technology and ideas into a historically backward,feudal society.Offering to develop the Arthurian world and rid it of superstition,Hank Morgan destroys it,instead of modernizing it.A similar mood of despair permeates The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson(1894),which shows the disastrous effects of slavery on the victimizer and the victim alike and reveals to us a Mark Twain whose conscience as a white Southerner was tormented by fear and remorse.By the turn of the last century,with the publication of The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg(1900) and The Mysterious Stranger(1916),the change in Mark Twain from an optimist to an almost despairing pessimist could be felt and his cynicism and disillusionment with what Twain referred to regularly as the "dammed race" became apparent.It is no wonder that in his cynical eyes,the romantic image of Tom vanished and the more realistic Huck had gone nowhere,instead,only the relics of the raft could be found floating far away,away,away…
References:
Zhang Boxiang,English and American
literatures(
ess,1998).
Robert booly,Enjoyment of Mark Twain's Works(Boston,Appleton Crofts Press,1986)
责任编辑：姚先林
（刊在南充职业技术学院学报2005-3）