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Plot Structure in Tie Novels of Mark Tnain Net PLOT STRUCTURE IN TIE NOVELS OF MARK TNAIN THESIS Presented to the Graduate Council of the North Texas State College in Partial Ful- fillment of the Requirements For the Degree of iSTER OF ARTS By Zelma Ruth Odle, B. A. Gordonville, Texas August, 1949 TABIE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTIU CTION........... Purposes of the Study Mark Twain's Literary Beginnings Mark Twain's Statements of His Limitations in Plot Structure Mark Twain's Method in Plot Structure Criticisms of Mark Twain's Methods II. A COMPArJSCN OF TIE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAI2ER AND TM ADVETTJRES 07 HU=TBTRRY7IN . 8 Structure of Tom Sawyer Structure of uckler Finn III. THRED NOVELS OF HISTORICAL INTEEST: TIE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER, A CONNICTICUT YAhKtE f7IING ARTHUR' S~COURT, AND PERSONAL17ECTL ACTIONS OF JOAN OF ARC . 20 Structure of The Prince and the Pauper Structure of A~onne ticut~Ya~-nkee nfj Arthurts Court Structure ofPersonal Recollections of Joan of Arc IV. A COMPARISON OF PUDD'NHEAD WILSON AND THOSE EXTRACODINAH T iSINS............ 42 Structure of PuddInhead Wilson Structure of Those E traordinary Twins V. A COMPAISON OF THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER AND THE MAN THAT CORRUPTED HADLEYBRUG. 56 Structure of The Mysterious Stranger Structure of M'E3 Mttan tVt orrupte Hadleybur VI *CONCLUSION . * . * 72 BIBLIOGRAPHY . 81 iii CHAPTER I IN TRODUCTITK Mark Twain was not only a wit but a literary man. He could paint a scene and he could make a character live, but could he plot a novel? It is the purpose of this study to anaylze his methods and his products, with emphasis upon the building of plots. Mark Twain came up into literature from the popular ranks, deriving very little from the bookish tradition. The origins of his art lie in humor, "in short sketches, more or less inventive, and. studies of life in which he let his imagination play freely." 1 hen Mark Twain began to go beyond casual anecdotes to the production of sustained fiction, he encountered many perplexing problems, plot structure easily chief among them. For these reasons it is well to refer first to Mark Twaints own statements for an examination of the structural phase of his literary technique. In his famous intro- duction to rnose Extraordinarv Twins he says: A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He 1.,D. Howells, i yMark Twain, p. 173. 1 2 has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality. He knows these people, Ie Imows the selected locality, and he trusts that he can plunge these people into tnose incidents with interesting results. So he goes to work. To trite a novel? No--that is a thought which comes later; in the beginning he is only proposing to tell a little tale; a six-page tale. But as it is a tale which he is not acquainted with, and can only find out what it is by listening as it goes along telling itself, it is more than apt to go on and on and on till it spreads itself into a book. I Imow about this, because it has happened to me so many times. 2 then Mark Twain said, "I do not claim that I can tell a story as it ought to be told,3 he was speaking of plat- form performance and not literary composition. But he does speak of himself as a "jack-leg" as compared with the "born-and-trained novelist.tt4 Powerful in character portrayal and weak in the struc- tural sense, hark Twain often depended upon his characters to write the narrative for him. 7hen they really came to life, they did just that, "passing from incident to incident with a grace their creator could never achieve in manipu- lating an artificial plot." 5 Mark Tain, The Works of Mark Tain, definitive edition, XVI, 207. TAll references to lark Twain's writings will be made to this edition, unless otherwise stated. Here- after only the title of the work and the volume and page number will be mentioned). 5 The 30,000 Bequest, XIV, 263. 4Pudd Inhe ad Iils on, XVI, 207. literary History of the United States, edited by Robert E. Spiller and others, II, 928. 3 Mark TWain loved a story which could tell itself. In his opinion, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc was his greatest work.6 "'It is a Aale that writes itself,' he said in a letter to H. H Rogers, speaking of Joan of Arc; 'I merely have to hold tne pen.'" 7 This work, however, was fourteen years growing, with twelve years of prepara- tion and two of writing. In 1906 hark Twain wrote:. Thaen a tale tells itself there is no trouble about it, there are no hesitancies, no delays, no cogitations, no attempts at invention, there is nothing to do but hold the pen and let the story talk through it and say after its own fashion, what it desires to say. Again in the same year he said: As long as a book would write itself I was a faithful and interested amanuensis and my industry did not flag, but the minute that the book tried to shift to ng head the labor of contriving its situations, inventing its adventures and conducting its conversations, I put it away and dropped it out of my mind. 1 0 11ark Twain was a talker and a shoniman all his life. It may be that his love of informal speaking may account in 6Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, XVII, in A. B. Paine'sintrocuction, xx. A. B. Paiie, Mark Tvain: A Bioraph, fCII, 989. 8 Joan of Arc, XTII, xx, in A. B. Paine's introduction. 9 Mark Twain, ILrtk Twain in EuLon, edited by Bernard DeVoto, p. 243. 1 0Ibid., p. 19G. 4 part for the disproportion of his plots. "He wrote as he talked, for the ear more than for the eye. His cadence is the cadence of speech." 1 l Howells says that "he wrote as he thought, and as all men think, without sequence, without an eye to what went before or should come after.t12 The writings of 'Mark Twain show that carrying out the detail of a narrative was much easier for him when the framework did not have to be invented. Except within a short scene or anecdote, he knew no laws of narrative writing that he thought worth repeating. This is obvious from the hap- hazard sequences and reckless disproportion of most of his novels. He believed that the writer who was untraimelled by rule or precedent was likely to excel in spontaneity and naturalness: in his books, as in his life, he enjoyed "rough- ing it." He had as little faith as skill in invention*13 Another weakness of Mark Taain is seen in his inability to sustain a strong and realistically motivated plot throughout a story. In plotting a book his structural sense was always weak; intoxicated by a hunch, he seldom saw far ahead, and too many of his stories peter out from the authors fatigue or surfeit.1 4 lStanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft, editors, American Authors: 1600-1900, p. 161. 1 2 Howells, . cit., p. 17. 13Alexander Cowie, The Rise of the American Novel, p. 648. 1 4 iterary History of the United States, II, 928. Seldom building a plot carefully before he began to write, he lacked also the artist's faculty for thinking a novel through until it had found its own best form. Closely allied to his failure to maintain a strong plot consistently is Mark Twaints habit of changing the tone and form of his narrative. In Huckleberry Finn he passes with apparent ease from the depths of social satire to the shallows of burlesque and extravaganza. He brings the romantic Tom Sawyer, with his fantastic and useless plot for the salvation of Jim, and places him against his arch-realist, Huckleberry Finn. Thus he ends his master- piece in a sprawling farce. Although Mark Twaints gift was for episodic treatment, he devoted much space to trifling incidents. He was a master in combining exciting incident with a maximum of suspense. The effect, however, he often ruined by putting in little tail-pieces not necessary to or even well con- nected with the incident. A case in point is the saving of Jim from capture by Huck's clever intimation that Jim had small-pox, followed by the would-be captorst giving Huck two twenty-dollar gold pieces to salve their own consciences.15 That Mark Twain was not averse to changing his plan after he was well started in a novel is illustrated by what he said of his problem in the writing of 1 5 The Adventures of Huckleber Finn, UII, 127. 6 PuddInhead Wilson and Those Extraordinar Twins. It really was meant to be a farce about Siamese twins, said Mark Twain, but two tales - a farce and a tragedy - got tangled together and he was forced to separate them, for him a most embarrassing circumstance.16 When one understands Mark Twaints haphazard methods of composition, it is not difficult for him to see how a well-developed symmetrically designed plot like that of PuddInhead Wilson could become almost swallowed up in a raw burlesque such as Those Extraordinary Twins. Van gyck Brooks, Twaints most adverse critic, main- tains that Mark Twain can best be described as an "im- provisator, a spirit with none of the self-determination of the artist, who composed extempore, as it were, and mainly at the solicitation of outside influences.
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