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Week 15 - The One Where I Get on my High Horse about Frankenstein

Aaaaaand now we’re on the final blog entry. What a wild ride it’s been! Taking a deep dive into Twain’s catalog like this has been a real academic treat, and I’m glad I got the opportunity to record my thoughts and develop them throughout the semester with this page. Without further ado, though, it’s time to dive into the last text of this humble little blog’s run with Little Bessie. (This will all be very much just “my first impressions” centered, as I’m writing this without any context of what the class discussed during our last reading session.)

There’s a lot I could comment on here, especially given how utterly raw and unfiltered this piece is with the Christianity critiques, but let’s just focus on this section from chapter 2, pages 326-327:

“Hollister. Bessie, suppose you should take some meat and bones and fur, and make a cat out of it, and should tell the cat, Now you are not to be unkind to any creature, on pain of punishment and death. And suppose the cat should disobey, and catch a mouse and torture and kill it. What would you do to the cat?

Bessie. Nothing.

H. Why?

B. Because I know what the cat would say. She would say, It’s my nature, I couldn’t help it; I didn’t make my nature, you made it. And so you are responsible for what I’ve done—I’m not. I couldn’t answer that, Mr. Hollister. 

H. It’s just the case of Frankenstein and his Monster over again.

B. What is that?

H. Frankenstein took some flesh and bones and blood and made a man out of them; the man ran away and fell to raping and robbing and murdering everywhere, and Frankenstein was horrified and in despair, and said, I made him, without his consent, and it makes me responsible for every crime he commits. I am the criminal, he is innocent.”

It feels weird to critique something I know was born out of a lot of unimaginable personal hardships and pain, but death of the author and all that—and I need to vent that this seems to me a gross misreading of Frankenstein. It’s not in the monster’s nature to kill and rape, he doesn’t do that at first! It’s only when he faces the cruelty of human prejudice and bigotry that he starts lashing out! Frankenstein’s crime is that he’s an awful father figure to what is basically his child, not that being born is a horrific non-consensual act. The whole piece is just bizarre to me, Twain using a character of an “innocent but wise beyond her years” three year old as an authorial mouthpiece. It’s a text purporting to look at the illogical trappings of Christianity while steeped in its own emotional logical holes, misreading something like Frankenstein to get his point across. It honestly feels like I’m reading someone’s personal diary scrawlings no one else was meant to read—it doesn’t make sense because it wasn’t supposed to, it was for Twain’s own personal catharsis. Like, I want to wag my finger at him for this, but just sitting down and feeling his raw anger and pain in this text makes me feel almost dirty having read it.

…What a note to end the blog on. Happy summer, folks!

[405rew-twain]

Week 14 - Reading Into It

(I’ll readily admit this set of readings is an absolute struggle to analyze the way it deserves, as I’m really not a comedy/whimsy minded person and cannot for the life of me wrap my head around dissecting texts that don’t have their focus on something like drama. Twain will be rolling in his grave by the time I’m done with this entry, I think.)

Given I was the most taken with A Cat’s Tale out of all of them, I feel as if I simply must focus on that one—and a lot of that enjoyment for me came from the inclusion of Susie and Clara’s interactions with the story working as a kind of frame narrative. Their most interesting exchange for me would have to be the one on page 153 of Tales (the part immediately following Catiline and Cattaragus’ exchange about the evils of smoking):

“Clara—Poor thing! It was cruel—wasn’t it, papa?

Susie—Well but he oughtn’t to done so, in the first place. Cattaragus wasn’t to blame.

Clara—Why, Susie! If Catiline didn’t know he wasn’t allowed—

Susie—Catiline did know it—Cattaragus told him so; and besides, Catiline—

Clara—Cattaragus only told Catiline that if—

Susie—Why Clara! Catiline didn’t need for Cattaragus to say one single—

O hold on!—it’s all a mistake! Come to look in the dictionary, we are proceeding from false premises. The Unabridged says a cat-pipe is ‘a squeaking instrument used in play-houses to condemn plays.’ So you see it wasn’t a pipe to smoke, after all; Catiline couldn’t smoke it; therefore it follows that he was simply pretending to smoke it, to stir up his brother, that’s all. 

Susie—But papa, Catiline might as well smoke as stir up his brother.

Clara—Susie, you don’t like Catiline, and so whatever he does, it doesn’t suit you—it ain’t right; and he is only a little fellow, anyway.

Susie—I don’t approve of Catiline, but I like him well enough[...]”

I’m thinking back to the opening little blurb in Huckleberry Finn, the one saying “anyone trying to find a moral in this will be shot,” since this kind of hits on the same idea. Susie and Clara are trying to do a moralistic reading on what is for Twain a silly story about two cat brothers getting in a fight over Catiline pretending to smoke. He even goes on the next page to say “we can leave posterity to take care of the moral aspects of the matter,” which only goes further to show Twain’s resistance to anyone reading his comedic work seriously. It’s a stance I still can’t help but find odd. We’re not supposed to read into anything with his work that suggests moral or political implications—unless we’re talking about To The Person Sitting in Darkness, or any of his other anti-imperialist writings, or any of his satirical writings about the state of America for that matter. You gotta pick a stance, dude! Am I supposed to read into it or not?! All art has political implications, even your daughters as children are picking up on this!

[405rew-twain]

Week 13 - Twinship and Duplicates

Woooooo, finally in the homestretch! And that means it’s time to start putting caps on this ol’ Twain blog here. I feel as if an introspective and reflective mood is the perfect one to write this entry with, since for this one we’re focusing on Twain’s very last novel, No. 44, the Mysterious Stranger.

This one had a lot of gothic and uncanny energy to it, which I greatly enjoy—to the point I was sorely tempted to write about the last scene instead, but since I figure most people will be writing about that, we’ll take a little detour instead—so I’d like to focus on a scene which captures the dream-like, weird vibe of the text perfectly, the Duplicate introduction. Specifically, this little blurb here on page 88 caught my eye:

“In another minute there would not have been anything left of that Duplicate, I reckon, but he promptly set up a ringing shout of ‘Help, boys, help!’ and in the same moment perfect Duplicates of all the rest of us came swarming in and plunged into the battle!

“But it was another draw. It had to be, for each Duplicate fought his own mate and was his exact match, and neither could whip the other. Then they tried the issue with swords, but it was a draw once more. The parties drew apart, now, and acrimoniously discussed the situation. The Duplicates refused to join the union, neither would they throw up their job; they were stubbornly deaf to both threats and persuasion. So there it was—just a deadlock!”

(I’ll refrain from focusing on the use of disabled language and how it conflates physical disabilities with moral/social deficits like an inability to be reasoned with, i.e. Twain’s use of “deaf” here, but know I think there ought to be a drinking game where you take a shot every time a text knowingly or unknowingly perpetuates one of Dolmage’s or Quayson’s disability myths. Fun way to get alcohol poisoning halfway through a book.)

The ways in which Twain renders the duplicates and the originals, of course, brings back to mind the recurring motif of twins in his work. I’m doing a group project on Twain and the freakshow for this class as well, doing a lot of reading on the relationship between “freaks” and “twins” for him, so how he depicts these “twins” here as fighting one another despite being of the same “whole” reminds me a lot of Personal Habits of the Siamese Twins and Cynthia Wu’s reading on it. She argues that the titular “Siamese twins” act as a metaphor for regionalist/faction divisions in America, i.e. North versus South, one Christian denomination versus another. Given the way Mysterious Stranger returns to critique the “idyllic” nature of rural provincial areas, I feel like this scene does similar work to Personal Habits but in the opposite direction. It’s as if Twain means to say, “see how stupid they look fighting each other when they’re all effectively the same? That’s us, right here. We’re all that stupid.” 

[405rew-twain]

Week 9 - Southern Culture (Constraints)

Y’all, I’m tired. I’m having some severe “oh god, it’s past midterms but not quite the final stretch yet, help” syndrome. Let’s just skip a long-winded intro and get straight to the point, yeah? Brevity, brevity, brevity!

So our class read Pudd’nhead Wilson this past week, and despite all these really insightful discussions we’ve had about satire and race, I’m instead choosing to focus on this small little tidbit from our titular character’s introduction. From page 59 in my book:

He had just made the acquaintance of a group of citizens when an invisible dog began to yelp and snarl and howl and make himself very comprehensively disagreeable, whereupon young Wilson said, much as one who is thinking aloud— ‘I wish I owned half of that dog.’ ‘Why?’ somebody asked. ‘Because I would kill my half.’ The group searched his face with curiosity, with anxiety even, but found no light there, no expression that they could read. They fell away from him as from something uncanny, and went into privacy to discuss him. One said: ‘’Pears to be a fool.’ ‘’Pears?’ said another. ‘Is, I reckon you better say.’

This moment caught my eye not for what Pudd’nhead said, but as it did for others in my class, the way the people around him reacts to what’s ultimately an innocuous, if somewhat airheaded, comment. The word “uncanny” is key here, I think — he was an accepted part of this little Southern town’s community, before he makes just one remark that’s a little “off,” where he then suddenly graduates into odd, disconcerting, uncanny in its Otherness.

I’m, as a consequence, reminded of this section of Greenblatt’s literary definition of culture:

How can we get the concept of culture to do more work for us? We might begin by reflecting on the fact that the concept gestures toward what appear to be opposite things: constraint and mobility. The ensemble of beliefs and practices that form a given culture function as a pervasive technology of control, a set of limits within which social behavior must be contained, a repertoire of models to which individuals must conform. The limits need not be narrow [...] but they are not infinite, and the consequences for straying beyond them can be severe. (225-226)

So if we consider culture as the means through which the majority enforces and polices deviant behaviors, then this certainly isn’t a favorable look for the people of Dawson’s Landing! Given the way Twain’s writing this to move towards a more pessimistic critique of his southern roots, I do think this is a dig at that exclusionary southern culture, using those constraints on mobility Greenblatt mentions to ensure no one dares exit outside that pre-established norm. The way Twain writes it, it’s as if to say, “they’re all just a bunch of social piranhas waiting for even a moment of weakness before they pounce.”

Which, I mean… as a southerner, not entirely inaccurate, I suppose. You always gotta hit us where it hurts, Twain!

[405rew-twain]

Week 8 - “Deef en Dumb” Representations

Every time I think to myself, “you know, I’ve been reading texts in this or that class for a while now, and disability hasn’t come up at all — maybe I won’t be able to write about it this time around,” that’s when the author always comes around and hits me square in the face with the “WEIRD DISABILITY REPRESENTATION” baseball bat. It’s now Twain’s turn to participate in this time-honored college tradition of mine, I suppose!

So in the latter half of Huckleberry Finn, we get this piece of exposition from Jim, pages 240-241 in my edition:

‘She warn’t on’y ‘bout fo’ year ole, en she tuck de sk’yarlet-fever, en had a powerful rough spell; but she got well, en one day she was a-stannin’ aroun’ en I says to her, I says: “‘Shet de do’.” ‘She never done it; jis’ stood dah, kiner smilin’ up at me. […] ‘En wid dat I fetch’ her a slap side de head dat sont her a-sprawlin’. Den I went to de yuther room, […] en when I come back, […] en dat chile stannin’ mos’ right in it, a-lookin’ down and mournin’, en de tears runnin’ down. […] ‘Oh, Huck, I bust out a-cryin’ en grab her uyp in my arms, en say, “Oh, de po’ little thing! de Lord God Amighty forgive po’ ole Jim, kaze he never gwyne to fogive hisself as long’s he live!” Oh, she was plumb deef en dumb, Huck, plumb deef en dumb — en I’d ben a-treat’n her so!’

I can almost hear Mitchell and Snyder screaming from a distance about narrative prosthesis!

Twain here is trying to continue the work authors like Stowe have done in humanizing the disenfranchised African American through appealing to a white audience's sense of sentimentality — basically emotion-driven narratives meant to make you “feel something” — and he chooses to do so by presenting us with the character of Lizbeth, who’s only real involvement with the story here lies in her disability. The way it’s rendered here, the shift from Jim’s anger that she won’t listen to his grief that he’s physically hit her, stems from the revelation that she’s “deef and dumb” — corrective violence was allowed until her disabled nature is revealed. Disability is just the convenient literary device for Twain to communicate that the slave is someone worthy of white sympathy, that their capacity to be “afflicted” in such a pitiful way twists a story of simple paternal correction into one meant to twist the heart strings. This usage of disability, as you can imagine, is rather exploitative, in the exact same way we might consider Dickens’ rendering of Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol exploitative of the disabled image for a quick and easy emotional appeal.

I said in my introductory post I was interested to see how Twain would participate or potentially push back on the 19th century conversation surrounding disability. For the moment, it seems, he doesn’t quite manage to rise above his temporal circumstances.

[405rew-twain]

Week 7 - On Huckleberry Finn’s Preface

“Wow,” thinks the intrepid reader of my humble little Twain blog, “it’s a new week, so that means it’s time for a new R.W. on Mark Twain post! I can’t wait to see what thought-provoking and novel insights she’ll give into the characters, the prose, maybe even the broader historical context of—” Nope. We’re talking about the preface to Huckleberry Finn and the preface only. My blog, my rules!

So to start off his magnum opus on the complicated nature of racial tensions in the Antebellum South, Twain gives us this snappy little opener:

NOTICE. Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER THE AUTHOR.

Our class mainly honed in on the interpretation that this broadly refers to Twain not wanting his audience to try and push a political or moral interpretation on his work, dissuading the reader up-front from trying to discern what Twain “thinks” and to instead just focus on being told a good story. I’m a meta nerd, however, and I do like to think about storytelling in these metatextual senses, so I’m not quite satisfied with just that answer.

Authors have a really weird opposition to the idea of their work being interpreted beyond the exact “intention” they meant, and that they themselves find so obvious. To me, that divide between the literary critic and the author has always been a weird and tumultuous one, especially because I’m not quite sure how one expects to write competently if they can’t read between the lines competently, interrogate those subtextual tensions in a text. The mundaenity and “simpleness” of narrative as a mode of face-value entertainment is about a holy artifact here to Twain, if he’s to go so far as to incur joking violence at the mere idea of critical analysis. I can’t help but wonder how much of his hesitance for interpretative work on Huck Finn, specifically — since we find no such preface for its predecessor, Tom Sawyer — stems from those stark tone shifts half-way through the novel.

Twain did take a multi-year hiatus partway through the book, and afterward, as the class discussed, Twain’s rendering of the racial tensions and complexities in Huck Finn suddenly takes the “easy road out” in relying upon minstrelsy images and motifs. As such, I almost wonder if this is a meta admission of guilt. This assumes Twain was aware of the change, of course, which he very well might’ve not been, but I find the idea compelling, that Twain’s staring down the barrel of the revelation that he doesn’t know how to end the novel, the Jim storyline, without falling back on these tired tropes. If he hides behind the shield that we are simply being told a good story, that any tensions and paradoxes regarding his depiction of race therein are simply coincidence and are all in the mind of a rebellious reader, then he doesn’t really have to turn around and face the other barrel staring him down named “his own conceptual blind spots,” does he?

[405rew-twain]

Week 6 - Boy/Girlhood

I think, by the nature of Tom Sawyer’s focus on those dreamy days of bygone childhood and all the nostalgic trappings therein, this analysis will get a little bit more personal than I usually do. Props to Twain for inspiring this in me, even if I’m definitely not the target audience here. Enjoy the look into my psyche, I suppose.

The whole book just makes me meditate more on girlhood, what that means, what it was like to live in that perpetual condition, especially as how it relates to this gender dichotomy Tom Sawyer sets up that, honestly, I find a little false. We’ve discussed in class how the novel represents what my professor calls “a hymn to boyhood,” a man’s love letter to the young boy he used to be, but that it keeps coming back to the idea of remembering boyhood rather than childhood is what gets me. I see this gendered dynamic come up a few times here, like this section on page 130:

‘What do pirates have to do?’ Tom said: ‘Oh, they just have a bully time — take ships, and burn them, and get the money and bury it in awful places in their island where there’s ghosts and things to watch it, and kill everybody in the ships — make ‘em walk a plank.’ ‘And they carry the women to the island,’ said Joe; ‘they don’t kill the women.’ ‘No,’ assented Tom, ‘they don’t kill the women — they’re too noble. And the women’s always beautiful, too.’

The way the boys discuss women in this passage — an Othering identifier against the general “everyone” — makes this a place where women are symbolically separated from the experiences of “everyone.” The phrasing, too, implies that women are not pirates in a boy’s world, else there would’ve been some consideration for not killing some men for the pirate’s romantic gratification the way the “noble and beautiful” women must.There is not, to my knowledge, a single girl character who participates in Tom Sawyer’s world of pretend piracy and naughtiness. They are always outsiders looking in, estranged from the hymn.

I can’t point to a particular passage for this, but it’s as if girlhood in Tom Sawyer only reflects a miniature adulthood because of this, and I find that aspect incredibly lacking. Girlhood was, is, and will always be as wild and free as that idyllic boyhood. It was just as weird and crazy! I know personal anecdotes aren’t the best evidence, but god, do you know how many weird and awful storylines I would play out with my friends, by myself? Playing pretend, re-enacting tried-and-true storylines (no Robin Hood’s or pirates, mind, but just a different time, I suppose), getting our hands dirt-caked and our knees scraped in the back-ends of rural Alabama? Do Tom Sawyer’s girls ever get dirty like that? Do they ever have the chance to be as wild and free?

I suppose I’m just fed up with the idea that girlhood is all tea parties and lacey dresses. Girls share that same hymn to their own girlhood, if Twain would just open the door a little and let us inside.

[405rew-twain]

Week 5 - On Twain’s Sphinx and the Horror of Memory

I’m, as a rule, not terribly fond of creative nonfiction. It’s just one of those genres that’s never appealed to me personally. Although I’m not exactly a comedy person, either, I do think Twain’s work here shows the appeal of both genres in a way that didn’t really click before. This admiration comes about for me especially in regards to the section where he contemplates the Sphinx in Innocents Abroad:

It was looking toward the verge of the landscape, yet looking at nothing—nothing but distance and vacancy. It was looking over and beyond everything of the present and far into the past. It was gazing out over the ocean of Time—over lines of century waves which, further and further receding, closed nearer and nearer together, and blended at last into one unbroken tide, away toward the horizon of remote antiquity. It was thinking of the wars of departed ages; of the empires it had seen created and destroyed; of the nations whose birth it had witnessed, whose progress it had watched, whose annihilation it had noted; of the joy and sorrow, the life and death, the grandeur and decay, of five thousand slow revolving years. It was the type of an attribute of man—of a faculty of his heart and brain. It was MEMORY—RETROSPECTION—wrought into visible, tangible form. (Mort 147-148).

Remarkably poetic and serious for something out of Twain! (Although he, of course, follows it up with scathing satire just a couple of paragraphs later.) So we’ve got a lot of contemplation on memory here, line upon line meditating on how much the Sphinx has seen and remembers, to the point where it starts to read as a kind of anxiety. He says just a paragraph after on that “the sphinx is grand in its loneliness,” but how enviable a position is it to preside “over the ocean of Time,” though? I’m reminded of the Jorge Luis Borges story, Funes the Memorius, where the titular character is physically unable to forget anything: 

Funes could continuously discern the tranquil advances of corruption, of decay, of fatigue. He could note the progress of death, of dampness. He was the solitary and lucid spectator of a multiform, instantaneous, and almost intolerably precise world. [...] I suspect, however, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence. (153-154; emphasis mine)

This story comes to mind not only because of the emphasis Twain places on the Sphinx’s observation and complete retention of things past, but the weight he places on the faultless empirical memory of the steamboat captain, as our class observed in Week 2 with Life on the Mississippi. Funes and Twain’s Sphinx, “solitary and lucid spectator[s] of an almost intolerably precise world,” basically act as the same figure. The Sphinx has seen everything, all nations and wars and empires, but in that absolute recollection, he loses the ability to truly think, be anything other than stone. I do wonder, then, how much of Twain’s seeming anxiety about the Sphinx’s memory might be traced back to that horror, the horror of the steamboat captain’s precise memory.

[405rew-twain]

Week 3 - Meditating on Realism

I feel as if I’ve never actually read an author of the literary canon write about writing before — not that I think Mark Twain’s inventing the concept here, mind you, but these kinds of metacommentaries on the act of writing stand little interest to the literary critic, I suppose. Death of the author and all that. It also seems even more exceedingly rare that you get to read an author so thoroughly lambast another as you do with Twain’s Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses. 

I should specify that it seems like Twain’s intent here lies in pointing out how Cooper’s works tend towards theatrical ideals of the romantic without much considerate thought or intention put behind them; Cooper’s total lack of observation skills, Twain posits, makes it incredibly difficult to deliver compelling “situations” (per pg. 381). All this, in theory, I agree with. Fiction entirely diverged from the realities of those things you’re writing about hardly makes for something compelling (and tends to be the downfall of amateur writers), but it’s that key word I want to hone in on. Realities. Realism.

Take this passage a little later on, for instance, where Twain breaks down the inaccuracies of Cooper’s physical measurements:

“Did the Indians notice that there was going to be a tight squeeze there? Did they notice that they could make money by climbing down out of that arched sapling and just stepping aboard when the ark scraped by? No; other Indians would have noticed these things, but Cooper’s Indians never notice anything. Cooper thinks they are marvellous creatures for noticing, but he was almost always in error about his Indians” (per pages 382-383).

Authors need a sense of reality and the observational skills to obtain them, that much of Twain’s argument is true, but the semantics of this particularly passage highlight those key problems of realism for me. His focus here on the minutiae of imaginary measurements’ plausibility (would Twain have enjoyed tearing apart the finer mechanics of interstellar light speed travel in science fiction, I wonder?) points towards this prizing of perfecting “objective” representations of “reality” — something I find incredibly rooted in Western neurotypical perspectives. Wilda L White uses the term “consensus reality” (per her article “Re-writing the Master Narrative”) to describe the mentally normate position, which I find helpful in getting to the meat of the “realism” problem. Realism is foremost concerned about “objective” representations of material things, without much regard for how our specific cultural contexts inform how we rhetorically give weight to said “material” things. (We might, for instance, prize auditory communication as fundamental to the “objective” reality of human socializing, but this mode doesn’t even exist in the worlds of those in the D/deaf community.) Realism finds its credence in the nuances of limited human perception, and doubly so when it comes to the act of literary representations. An effective literary representation of “reality” shouldn’t so much attend to those “objectivities,” as Twain tries to do with his measurement example, but instead ask how well its representations reflect the specific and individual realities of the work. To his credit, Twain does that in the rest of the piece, but his preoccupation with exact measurements here seems to go against his broader point. 

[405rew-twain]

Weeks 1 & 2 - Introductions

Hey there! Welcome to my ENG 405 blog, where we’ll be exploring the body of Twain’s work and I’ll be subjecting him to the horrors of having to endure my unattainable comedy standards. 

If you can believe it, I’ve never read Twain before now. I come from a homeschooled background, so I just ended up never encountering the kinds of authors we’d consider typical for a K-12 education here. My only real experience with the guy was hearing how my brother had read Tom Sawyer for a high school literature class, and that his thoughts overall summed up to, “Well, it’s fine,” and, “it’s got a lot of written out accents,” which isn’t the most glowing praise. I do, however, tend to have the opposite tastes of my brother, his tastes lying in action-driven spectacles like a Marvel film, which is completely polar to my tastes in more thoughtful, weird slowburns. I can only trust Twain won’t inspire as lukewarm a feeling in me as he did my kin!

I’m a nerd for, again, the weird and unconventional. My primary academic/literary interests tend to lie in critical disability studies, storytelling, metafiction and metanarratives (not the kind they use in terms of history, literally just stories about narratives and storytelling), and some feminist theory when nothing tickles the above. I’m not sure how much proficiency Twain will have for tackling the meta and the disabled, but hopefully there’ll be something substantial to sink my teeth into every now and then.

I’ve not read much nineteenth century literature outside those sweeping overviews Global Literature classes tend to give you, so I’m looking forward to gaining some further insight on the period by examining one of its premier American authors. To connect back to my academic interests, it’ll be interesting to compare and contrast Twain’s vision of what makes a good narrative to our modern conceptions, along with any considerations towards gender and disability we might happen to pick up along the way. This is well into the time frame where, per Garland-Thomson, globalization starts having an effect on our perceptions of “average” and “deviant” bodies, so I imagine the medical model of disability was in full swing. For literature, this likely means we can expect to see the integration of “the materiality of metaphor” (per Mitchell and Snyder) and some pervasive disability myths (per Dolmage) into the canon’s disability representations. We’ll have to see how Twain participates in this nineteenth century conversation, if he does at all!

So the class read Christmas Fireside and a good chunk of Justin Kaplan’s Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain biography to start the semester, and it’s the latter text I’d like to focus on here. Page 101 talks about Twain’s affinity for exploring “twinship” in his work, with Kaplan going on to say, “[a]nd soon he would begin to explore the doubleness of Samuel L. Clemens and Mark Twain through concepts of ‘dual personality,’ ‘conscience,’ and, towards the end of his life, a ‘dream self’ that seemed to lead a separate life.” Well, I’ll say that falls under the weird and unconventional for me! We’ll see how often these themes come up in his work, because I always love a good “exploration of the self” plotline.