Condition of Children

Vocabulary

The Literature of Discontent

The years 1850 to 1914 saw an America that was transformed from a centralized, agricultural nation to a vast, industrialized powerhouse. Despite the shattering effects of the Civil War, the United States embraced industry as its citizens expanded from the Atlantic to the Pacific and new citizens immigrated to major cities, taking jobs in retail and factory work. With this economic evolution came social changes. In 1880, the population of the United States was fifty million, but by 1900 it was seventy-five million. In twenty years, the industrial boom had created extremes of wealth and poverty. With the new opportunities came challenging social problems as people vied for their livelihood against each other. Most notably, the conditions of women, minorities, children, and people on the frontiers became a focus. Those struggles were reflected in the literature of the time. Affected by the changes around them, American authors wrote a genre of Realism that is sometimes called "The Literature of Discontent." Industrialization scattered the ideas of individualism and America was growing up, though not always in a positive direction according to many people of the time.

The industrial boom and the vast number of immigrants pouring into the United States in the late 19th century meant that labor was cheap. Many working-class people could not earn enough to feed their families, and thus child labor became a normal part of life. Not only did many working class children work at young ages, but many families lived in dark, unventilated tenements with no plumbing or sanitation. Injuries and illness ran rampant under such conditions. Although on the outside things economically looked great, on the inside thousands of people suffered, especially women, minorities, and children. Realist writers attempted to bring to light the unfavorable conditions of children in these urban, industrial centers by creating such characters as Oliver Twist and Orphan Annie. Their stories are about the urban issues of the Industrial Revolution. But in small town America, a revolution was taking place, too.

Edwin Arlington Robinson

The life of Edwin Arlington Robinson was filled with triumphs and disappointments. He was born in 1869 and grew up in Maine. The woman with whom he fell in love ended up marrying his older brother, and after the death of her husband, she rejected Robinson's proposals for marriage. Robinson decided to never marry, but he did eventually earn national recognition for his literary work after some hardship. As an impoverished poet, he made friends within literary circles and managed to use his own money to self-publish his first volume, The Torrent and the Night, for his mother. Unfortunately, days before the book arrived, his mother died of diphtheria and never saw the book. His second volume, The Children of the Night, was a success and included readers such as President Theodore Roosevelt, who was so impressed by his poetry that he enlisted the poet's talent to help promote American literature. Robinson went on to win the Pulitzer Prize three times during the 1920s.

Rural working class Americans in the Industrial Revolution struggled on small farms to eke out a living while all the action and progress seemed to be happening in the big cities. Little did they know that many of them may have had it better than their urban counterparts. But everywhere in America, while many could still achieve their dreams with ingenuity and hard work, the chasm between the poor and the rich widened. Many of the writers from the era of Realism wrote about these individual and social struggles, but Mark Twain did it with a flair for regionalism and, many times, from the eyes of a child.

Mark Twain and Regionalism

Samuel Langhorne Clemens grew up on the Mississippi River in a small town in Missouri. He loved the river and the riverboats that traveled it. Indeed, he loved it so much that he took his pen name, Mark Twain, from the two-word term that means "two fathoms deep," the depth at which it is safe for a riverboat to travel. Twain's childhood dream was to be a riverboat pilot despite the fact that he was apprenticed during his teen years to a printer. At age twenty-one, he left the printing industry to begin his dream in the riverboat industry. When the Civil War closed down river transportation, Twain traveled out west, supporting himself as a journalist. Eventually, he moved back east to Hartford, Connecticut where he settled permanently. By then he had already made a name for himself as an author. Twain traveled and wrote extensively for the rest of his life. He pulled strongly on his childhood and travels for his writing, but with the untimely deaths of his wife and all four of his children, Twain became less humorous and more pessimistic. His masterful command of the English language never failed him, and he will always be remembered for his writing talent.

Mark Twain wrote using Regionalism, which became popular during the Realism era and is still widely popular today. Every society has a set of collectively spoken and unspoken guidelines. People from every society behave according to what the culture deems is morally correct, appropriate, or legal. These assumptions are based on and influenced by a plethora of factors: governed laws, religion, the educational system, the time period, society's accepted morals, familial beliefs, and tradition. Sometimes these collective assumptions can be regional, meaning tradition or value is specific to the geographic location. Because the United States is so large, geographic locations have many regional traditions.

Some outside perceptions of regional culture can be stereotypical or negative. For example, some people assume that Southerners are more polite than Northerners because people from southern regions traditionally speak more slowly and softly and, due to the rural landscape, personal hospitality played a more important role in day to day life. People from "out west" are sometimes considered more liberal than people from the east coast since the west coast has been around for less time and some west coast cities are famous for a lack of tradition. As another example, people from some regions say that they eat stuffing while others say they eat dressing. Likewise, in some regions people drink soda, others drink pop, and still others drink cola, although everyone is drinking the same thing.

But Regionalism goes beyond vocabulary and encompasses different ways of life. For example, some people eat grits and others eat hash browns. Some people like drinking their tea sweet and cold while others drink it hot with honey. These standards can add interest and specialization to literary pieces, and many famous authors have used these assumptions to color their characters. Dialect and colloquialism are also used in Regionalism to add color and depth to characters and settings.

Mark Twain took advantage of his knowledge of southern life by using regional dialect and colloquialism in his popular narratives. However, he also made extensive use of exaggeration and embellishment to add humor to his writing. So, what exactly are dialect, colloquialism, exaggeration, and embellishment? In this interactivity, click on each of the folder tabs to examine some of the literary styles that made Mark Twain and a famous and popular writer.

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Mark Twain's most famous work, the novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is also his most controversial. The book follows the story of a young child named Huckleberry "Huck" Finn, who has an abusive father and ends up escaping to freedom. Along the way, he befriends and travels with another person who has also run away to freedom: a black slave named Jim. Some critics accuse Twain of being a racist, arguing that his portrayal of Jim is stereotypical and his use of the N-word unnecessary. On the other hand, Twain defenders point out that the writer was a champion of rights for women, children, and minorities and that Twain effectively draws a parallel between the rights of a white boy and a black slave. In addition, in order for Twain's characters to be realistic, they have to speak and act the way that real southerners spoke and acted in the 19th century, and unfortunately back then there did not exist the same standards of respect and tolerance that are enjoyed in today's society.

 

Literary Styles of Mark Twain Review

Now that you have explored the literary styles of Mark Twain, review your knowledge in this non-graded activity. Read each quotation from Mark Twain's literature and determine whether the text is an example of dialect/colloquialism or exaggeration/embellishment. Click on the player button to get started.