Mark Twain at Home: How Family Shaped Twain’s Fiction

In this book, Michael Kiskis offers an alternative interpretation of Mark Twain’s major fiction: not as realism, local color, or southwestern humor but as domestic novels, or more especially as satires of domestic novels. Whereas authors of domestic melodrama valorized the family and featured noble spouses and/ or parents, Twain repeatedly challenged that tradition by portraying characters guilty of domestic violence, sentimental foolishness, and even infidelity.

Each of the protagonists of Clemens’ major fictions— Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, Jim, Tom Canty, Edward VI, Hank Morgan, Roxy, Valet de Chambre, and Tom Driscoll—is shaped by his or her domestic situation, and each, as a result of a broken family and the emotional constriction caused by that loss, suffers a lack of genuine attachment. The author identifies and explores their most basic similarities: the problem of home, the notion of filial relationship, the quest for comfort and family. In essence, “Tom Sawyer”, “The Prince and the Pauper”, and “Huckleberry Finn” tell one story—a story that follows a child through a maze of biological and social relationships in a quest for physical comfort and existential peace and calm.

The author notes the absent father in many of Clemens’ tales and points to the death of John Marshall Clemens, in 1847, as an emotional focal point in Clemens’ fiction. Clemens’ father was reserved and emotionally distant from his family, and that, combined with his early death, which plunged the family into an financial crisis, created in Sam an emptiness that became manifest in his fiction. The offspring of a loveless marriage, the child who became Mark Twain lived in a home over which the spectre of violence continually hovered.

Twain wrote so frequently about children forced to live on the margins, about children who, missing one or both parents, strive to make some life for themselves in the face of a hostile world. Clemens wrote fiction that demanded that readers consider the plight of his child characters and, therefore, the plight of children facing down an antagonistic world. As a father, Clemens could not help but wonder what the world would offer his daughters. Clemens’ social critique was energized with the hope that telling a story could influence readers to act for good and moral purpose.