Chapter 4 The Age of Realism (2)

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Chapter 4The Age of Realism (2)

• Local Colorism
• Mark Twain

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Contents

• Local colorism
• Mark Twain

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Assignments this Chapter

• Define the term local colorism, classic plot
  analysis
• What are the features of Mark Twains writings?
• Tell the differences among Howells, Henry James
  and Mark Twain in writing themes and in writing
  technique
• Simply give the story the classic plot analysis
• Answer the three questions from the Selected
  Readings on p 72.

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Local colorism

• Definition
• Its representatives
• Features of local colorism

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Local colorism
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Defininition

• Local color or regional literature is fiction and
  poetry that focuses on the characters, dialect,
  customs, topography, and other features
  particular to a specific region. Influenced by
  Southwestern and Down East humor, between the
  Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century
  this mode of writing became dominant in American
  literature.

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Its representatives

• Bret Harte (1836-1902) is remembered as the
  author of adventurous stories such as "The Luck
  of Roaring Camp" and "The Outcasts of Poker
  Flat," set along the western mining frontier.

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• As the first great success in the local colorist
  school, Harte for a brief time was perhaps the
  best-known writer in America -- such was the
  appeal of his romantic version of the gun
  gun-slinging West. Outwardly realistic, he was
  one of the first to introduce low-life characters
  -- cunning gamblers, gaudy prostitutes, and
  uncouth robbers -- into serious literary works.

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• Hamlin Garland (p131)
• Several women writers are remembered for their
  fine depictions of New England Mary Wilkins
  Freeman (1852-1930), Harriet Beecher Stowe
  (1811-1896), and especially Sarah Orne Jewett
  (1849-1909). Jewett's originality, exact
  observation of her Maine characters and setting,
  and sensitive style are best seen in her fine
  story "The White Heron" in Country of the Pointed
  Firs (1896). Harriet Beecher Stowe's local color
  works, especially The Pearl of Orr's Island
  (1862), depicting humble Maine fishing
  communities, greatly influenced Jewett.

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• All regions of the country celebrated themselves
  in writing influenced by local color. Some of it
  included social protest, especially toward the
  end of the century, when social inequality and
  economic hardship were particularly pressing
  issues. Racial injustice and inequality between
  the sexes appear in the works of southern writers
  such as George Washington Cable (1844-1925) and
  Kate Chopin (1851-1904), whose powerful novels
  set in Cajun/French Louisiana transcend the local
  color label.

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Features of local colorism

• Characteristics Setting
• Characters
• Narrator
• Plots
• Themes

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General critical overview

• Many critics have argued that this literary
  movement contributed to the reunification of the
  country after the Civil War and to the building
  of national identity toward the end of the
  nineteenth century. According to Brodhead,
  "regionalism's representation of vernacular
  cultures as enclaves of tradition insulated from
  larger cultural contact is palpably a fiction . .
  . its public function was not just to mourn lost
  cultures but to purvey a certain story of
  contemporary cultures and of the relations among
  them" (121).

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• In chronicling the nation's stories about its
  regions and mythical origins, local color fiction
  through its presence--and, later, its
  absence--contributed to the narrative of unified
  nationhood that late nineteenth-century America
  sought to construct.
• A variation of this genre is the "plantation
  tradition" fiction of Thomas Nelson Page and
  others.

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Characteristics Setting

• The emphasis is frequently on nature and the
  limitations it imposes settings are frequently
  remote and inaccessible. The setting is integral
  to the story and may sometimes become a character
  in itself.

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Characters

• Local color stories tend to be concerned with the
  character of the district or region rather than
  with the individual characters may become
  character types, sometimes quaint or
  stereotypical. The characters are marked by their
  adherence to the old ways, by dialect, and by
  particular personality traits central to the
  region. In women's local color fiction, the
  heroines are often unmarried women or young
  girls.

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Narrator

• The narrator is typically an educated observer
  from the world beyond who learns something from
  the characters while preserving a sometimes
  sympathetic, sometimes ironic distance from them.
  The narrator serves as mediator between the rural
  folk of the tale and the urban audience to whom
  the tale is directed.

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Plots

• It has been said that "nothing happens" in local
  color stories by women authors, and often very
  little does happen. Stories may include lots of
  storytelling and revolve around the community and
  its rituals.

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Themes

• Many local color stories share an antipathy to
  change and a certain degree of nostalgia for an
  always-past golden age. A celebration of
  community and acceptance in the face of adversity
  characterizes women's local color fiction.
  Thematic tension or conflict between urban ways
  and old-fashioned rural values is often
  symbolized by the intrusion of an outsider or
  interloper who seeks something from the community.

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Mark Twain

• Landscape on Mississippi

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(No Transcript)
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Contents

• Life experience
• II. Major works
• III. His literary features
• The differences among Howells, Henry James and
  Mark Twain in writing themes and in writing
  technique (p133-p134)
• V. The Appreciation of The Adventures of Huck
  Berry Finn (p135-p139)
• VI. Understanding and analysis of his The
  Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

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His literary features

• Twain's style, based on vigorous, realistic,
  colloquial American speech, gave American writers
  a new appreciation of their national voice. Twain
  was the first major author to come from the
  interior of the country, and he captured its
  distinctive, humorous slang and iconoclasm.
• Samuel Clemens, better known by his pen name
  of Mark Twain, grew up in the Mississippi River
  frontier town of Hannibal, Missouri. Early
  19th-century American writers tended to be too
  flowery, sentimental, or ostentatious --
  partially because they were still trying to prove
  that they could write as elegantly as the
  English.

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• For Twain and other American writers of the late
  19th century, realism was not merely a literary
  technique It was a way of speaking truth and
  exploding worn-out conventions.
• Thus it was profoundly liberating and
  potentially at odds with society. The most
  well-known example is Huck Finn, a poor boy who
  decides to follow the voice of his conscience and
  help a Negro slave escape to freedom, even though
  Huck thinks this means that he will be damned to
  hell for breaking the law.

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• Two major literary currents in 19th-century
  America merged in Mark Twain popular frontier
  humor and local color, or "regionalism."
• These related literary approaches began in
  the 1830s -- and had even earlier roots in local
  oral traditions. In ragged frontier villages, on
  riverboats, in mining camps, and around cowboy
  campfires far from city amusements, storytelling
  flourished. Exaggeration, tall tales, incredible
  boasts, and comic workingmen heroes enlivened
  frontier literature. These humorous forms were
  found in many frontier regions -- in the "old
  Southwest" (the present-day inland South and the
  lower Midwest), the mining frontier, and the
  Pacific Coast. Each region had its colorful
  characters around whose stories.

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• The differences among Howells, Henry James and
  Mark Twain in writing themes and in writing
  technique (p133-p134)
• V. The Appreciation of The Adventures of Huck
  Berry Finn (p135-p139)

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Understanding and analysis of The Celebrated
Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
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Outline

• Introduction
• Brief Plot Overview
• Themes
• Plot analysis
• Characters analysis
• Literary device
• Symbols, Imagery, Allegory
• Setting
• Narrator Point of View
• Tone
• Writing Style

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Introduction

• Written in 1865, this short story by Mark Twain
  was an overnight success and reprinted all over
  the country. In fact, this is the piece of
  writing that launched Mark Twain into fame (read
  more). "The Celebrated Jumping Frog" focuses on a
  narrator from the East suffering through a
  Western man's tall tale about a jumping frog. The
  story was made into an opera and performed at
  Indiana University in 1950. Today, the city of
  Angel's Camp, California, the setting for this
  short story, calls itself the "Home of the
  Jumping Frog."

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Brief Plot Overview

• A man from the East comes to a western mining
  town. At the request of a friend, the narrator
  speaks with Simon Wheeler in order to ask after a
  man named Leonidas W. Smiley. Instead of giving
  the narrator the information that he asks for,
  Wheeler launches into a tall tale about a man
  named Jim Smiley.

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• The story goes something like this Jim Smiley
  was a man who would bet on anything. He turned a
  frog into a pet and bet a stranger that his frog,
  Danl Webster, could jump higher than any other
  frog. While Smiley wasn't looking, the stranger
  filled Danl Webster with quail shot, and Smiley
  lost the bet. Before he could figure out what
  happened, the stranger disappeared with the 40
  he won by cheating.

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• Sick of the long-winded tale about Jim Smiley and
  his frog, the narrator tries to escape from
  Wheeler before he launches into another story.
  The narrator realizes that his friend probably
  intended for him to suffer through Wheeler's
  tedious tale.

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Themes

• Cunning and Cleverness
• Competition
• Lies and Deceit
• Contrasting Regions

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Cunning and Cleverness

• Though Jim Smiley appears to be extraordinarily
  lucky, it is partly through his cunning and
  cleverness that he is able to win bets. He is
  finally outsmarted by a stranger, who beats him
  through cheating. Nonetheless, the story poses a
  moral distinction between honest and dishonest
  cleverness. It also shows that you dont
  necessarily have to be educated and well spoken
  to be clever, nor is a good education a defense
  against getting fooled.

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• Quote I have a lurking suspicion that Leonidas
  W. Smiley is ... a myth that my friend never
  knew such a personage and that he only
  conjectured that, if I asked old Wheeler about
  him, it would remind him of his infamous Jim
  Smiley, and he would go to work and bore me
  nearly to death with some infernal reminiscence
  of him as long and tedious as it should be
  useless to me. If that was the design, it
  certainly succeeded. (Para 1)

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• Thought The narrator realizes that his friend
  might have played a big joke on him. But its
  something of a mystery why his friend would want
  to bore him with Wheelers stories. Does the
  friend think that maybe the narrator, Mr. Fancy
  Eastern Narrator, has something to learn from
  Wheeler? Or is the friend just a jerk, which
  might cause us to wonder why are they friends in
  the first place?

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Competition

• Jim Smiley is an incorrigible gambler. Though he
  may like the money he wins, it is also clear that
  he just enjoys the thrill of competition. He
  frequently bets on the underdog or bets on really
  awkward and tactless things (such as whether the
  parsons wife will recover from her illness or
  not). He also cultivates animals a horse, a
  dog, and then a frog that he can use in his
  various competitions.

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• Quote "but any way, he was the curiosest man
  about always ... betting on any thing that turned
  up you ever see, if he could get any body to bet
  on the other side and if he couldn't, he'd
  change sides. . . . Why, it never made no
  difference to him he would bet on any thing the
  dangdest feller. Parson Walker's wife laid very
  sick once, for a good while, and it seemed as if
  they warn's going to save her but one morning he
  come in, and Smiley asked how she was, and he
  said she was considerable better thank the Lord
  for his inftnit mercy and coming on so smart
  that, with the blessing of Providence, she'd get
  well yet and Smiley, before he thought, says,
  "Well, I'llrisk two- and-a-half that she don't,
  any way." (para 4)

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• Thought Jim Smileys main characteristic is his
  love of or addiction for betting. He likes the
  competition, even though hes good-natured about
  it. His honesty shows that even pastimes as shady
  as gambling have codes of honor attached to them.
  Unfortunately, he can also be quite tactless,
  like when he bets that the parsons wife will
  stay sick.

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Lies and Deceit

• Smiley himself tends to be fairly honest, though
  it might be possible to argue that his animals
  allow him to practice deception, since each in
  turn looks like nothing special or even like it
  could never win. But that is not the same kind of
  deceit that the stranger uses when he fills Danl
  Webster with quail shot in order to win his bet.
  Smiley is righteously indignant, though he fails
  to capture the stranger and get his money back.

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• Quote Thish-yer Smiley had a mare the boys called
  her the ... fifteen- minute nag, but that was
  only in fun, you know, because, of course, she
  was faster than that and he used to win money on
  that horse, for all she was so slow and always
  had the asthma, or the distemper, or the
  consumption, or something of that kind. They used
  to give her two or three hundred yards start, and
  then pass her under way but always at the
  fag-end of the race she'd get excited and
  desperate- like, and come cavorting and
  straddling up, and scattering her legs around
  limber, sometimes in the air, and sometimes out
  to one side amongst the fences, and kicking up
  m-o-r-e dust, and raising m-o-r-e racket with her
  coughing and sneezing and blowing her nose and
  always fetch up at the stand just about a neck
  ahead, as near as you could cipher it down. (Para
  5)

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• Thought Part of the fun in the competition,
  perhaps, is Smileys ability to fool others into
  believing that hes a fool to engage in the bet
  that he makes. The animals he chooses to bet on
  dont ever look like much, but they usually pull
  through in the end. How does Smiley manage to
  find such extraordinary animals? Maybe this it
  part of the "tall tale" element of the story.

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Contrasting Regions

• Though the eastern and western United States
  arent specifically contrasted in this short
  story, we do see a contrast between the educated,
  refined narrator from the East (who also happens
  to be "green") and the uneducated but slick
  characters who populate Angels mining camp in
  the West. The characters in the West love a good
  tall tale, while the narrator appears to find it
  pointless and tedious, but maybe thats because
  he doesnt get it.

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• Quote I found Simon Wheeler dozing comfortably by
  the bar-room stove ... of the old, dilapidated
  tavern in the ancient mining camp of Angel's, and
  I noticed that he was fat and bald-headed, and
  had an expression of winning gentleness and
  simplicity upon his tranquil countenance. He
  roused up and gave me good-day. (Para 2)

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• Thought The educated, well-healed easterner
  describes the simple, rustic westerner in our
  first subtle contrast between American regions.
  By taking note of Wheelers "winning gentleness,"
  is the narrator being a generous guy, or is he
  just being condescending?

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Plot analysis

• Classic Plot Analysis ( a literary term)
• Most good stories start with a fundamental
  list of ingredients the initial situation,
  conflict, complication, climax, suspense,
  denouement, and conclusion. Great writers
  sometimes shake up the recipe and add some spice.

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Outline of Classic Plot Analysis

• Initial Situation
• Conflict
• Complication
• Climax
• Suspense
• Denouement
• Conclusion

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Initial Situation

• The narrator enters the tavern in Angels mining
  camp.
• (A friend has asked the narrator to find Simon
  Wheeler and to ask him about the Reverend
  Leonidas W. Smiley. Simon Wheeler doesnt
  remember a Reverend Smiley but he does start to
  tell a tale about Jim Smiley, a man who loved to
  make bets.)

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Conflict

• Smiley makes bets with an old horse and an old
  dog.
• (We learn from the start that Smiley loves to
  gamble, but more important perhaps, he likes to
  bet on animals that dont seem like they have a
  good chance of winning. He has an old asthmatic
  mare that doesnt look like it can win horse
  races but always manages to come out on top in
  the last few seconds of the race. He also has a
  dog named Andrew Jackson that doesnt look like
  he can win a fight and in fact loses fights
  until there is money on the table.)

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Complication

• Smiley starts to educate a frog so that it can
  beat other frogs at jumping.
• (One day, Smiley starts educating a frog that
  he names Danl Webster. For three months, he does
  nothing but teach this frog how to jump higher
  and faster than any other frog. Then he puts the
  frog on the market, so to speak, and starts
  making bets.)

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Climax

• A stranger fills Smileys frog with quail shot
  and the frog loses.
• (One day, Smiley bets a stranger forty bucks
  that his frog can beat any other frog. The
  stranger says he doesnt see anything special
  about Danl Webster. The bet is on but while
  Smiley goes to get the stranger a frog, the
  stranger fills Danl with quail shot. When the
  two frogs try to jump, Danl cant even move. The
  stranger takes the money and leaves.)

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Suspense

• Smiley goes after the stranger but the stranger
  has already skipped town.
• (When Smiley discovers what the cheater has
  done, that is, when Danl Webster burps out quail
  shot, he starts out after himbut hes too late.
  The stranger has disappeared with Smileys money.)

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Denouement

• Wheeler is interrupted from his story-telling.
• (When Wheeler is interrupted from finishing
  the story, he tells the narrator to wait. When he
  comes back, he tries to continue his tall tale
  but the narrator interrupts and says, not quite
  good-naturedly, that he needs to go. )

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Conclusion

• The narrator leaves the saloon. The narrator
  leaves, thinking his quest was fruitless

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Characters analysis

• Simon Wheeler
• Though Simon Wheeler is bald and lazy, and
  seems simple, he may be cleverer than he looks.
  Hes certainly very aggressive in getting the
  narrator to listen to him. He uses tactics that
  sound like military maneuvers, such as
  "blockading" the narrator with a chair so that he
  cant leave. But then theres the question of why
  hes so desperate to have someone listen to him.
  Mining towns tended to be populated by a lot of
  single men with too much time on their hands.

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• (Answer to question 1 on p72) It has to get
  pretty lonely out there at the mining camp. One
  way of passing the time is to tell stories. Maybe
  he just wants to talk and doesnt have any shame
  about it. Whatever the reason is, he throws the
  narrator completely off guard. And he also talks
  real funny and ungrammatical-like.

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• The Narrator
• The narrator is an educated man from the East
  who is traveling west. Along the way, he does a
  friend a favor by going to Angels mining camp to
  ask about the Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley. Instead of
  finding the information he is looking for, he is
  forced to endure Wheeler's long-winded tall tale
  about Jim Smiley, a man who loved gambling and
  who always won, at least until the day he was
  cheated.

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• (Answer to question2 on p72)Though the narrator
  is good-natured about it, he escapes as soon as
  he can, thinking to himself that there wasnt
  much point listening to such a tedious story that
  has nothing to do with the Rev. Smiley. In fact,
  at the beginning of the story we learn that the
  narrator is suspicious of his friend. He thinks
  maybe his friend was playing a trick on him so
  that he would have to listen to Wheelers endless
  stories.

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• This, of course, raises some questions about our
  dear narrators judgment. If he doesnt trust his
  friend, why are they friends? Is it just a
  good-natured trick, like a prank? Also, the
  narrator doesnt seem to have a lot of patience
  or good manners when Wheeler starts on his last
  story, the narrator gets frustrated and rushes
  out, rather than finding a way to exit politely.

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Literary device

• Symbols, Imagery, Allegory
• Andrew Jackson and Danl Webster
• The names for the dog and the "educated" frog
• hint at some possible political undertones. The
  dog, which didnt look like much but was feisty
  when it came to fighting, was named for Andrew
  Jackson, a westerner and the seventh president of
  the United States. He was a man of the people and
  believed in democracy for all. Daniel Webster was
  an attorney who became one of the leading
  American statesmen, serving as a senator and
  Secretary of State.

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• He ran unsuccessfully for president three times
  and was known for being a very good narrator. In
  this short story, a common frog with no name
  beats the educated frog (Danl Webster). The
  moral of the tale could be that the uneducated,
  common frog was only able to beat the educated
  frog through cheating. Alternatively, given
  Websters politics, it might be possible read
  more deeply into this and suggest that the tale
  is subversively arguing for equality for all
  Americans.

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Setting

• Angels Camp, California, mid-19th century
• Angel's Camp is a gold mining community in
  the mid-19th century that the narrator claims to
  have visited to find Simon Wheeler. Like any
  mining town in the West, it was populated
  primarily by men, many of them looking for their
  fortune. As something of a frontier town, it
  would probably seem to be full of loud, uncouth,
  and uneducated people compared to the more
  genteel East.

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Narrator Point of View

• First Person
• Through a frame narrative, the narrator
  (clearly an educated man from the East) presents
  the story of Jim Smiley, told in Simon Wheelers
  uneducated dialect. This is the main device that
  Twain uses to present the contrast between East
  and West educated vs. uneducated, refined vs.
  coarse.

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Tone

• Disparaging, disbelieving
• Though the content suggests the opposite of
  the tone, the attitude of the narrator toward the
  subject matter is one of disbelief that his time
  has been wasted in such a way. Hes annoyed that
  he has had to listen to such a stupid tale (about
  Dan'l Webster) from a man who seems to take it so
  seriously. His effort to reproduce Wheelers
  ungrammatical dialect feels slightly mocking.
  (answer to question 3 on p72)

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Writing Style

• Clever and Colloquial
• This story is told with a frame narrative. The
  narrator uses educated diction, and explains how
  absurd Simon Wheeler is. Simon Wheeler narrates
  the inside story, and he uses an uneducated
  vernacular to tell his tall tales about Smiley
  and Dan'l Webster.

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(No Transcript)