Sentimental Boundaries in Mark Twain's Novels

Abstract

In this dissertation, I discuss Mark Twain’s major novels in terms of sentimentality and boundary-making. Indeed, Twain is concerned with male sympathy toward other men in many of his major works: Tom Sawyer’s compassion for the miserable death of the mixed-blood antagonist Injun Joe in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876); Prince Edward’s sympathetic exchange with the pauper Tom Canty in The Prince and the Pauper (1882); Huck’s struggle with the moral dilemma between social conscience and his compassion for the runaway slave Jim in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885); the social reformer Hank Morgan’s sympathetic tie with his fifty –two boys in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889); and Wilson’s pity for the doting father Judge Driscoll in Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894). The episodes in these novels demonstrate the author’s particular concern for male sympathy toward male others. Recent studies characteristically revise the established image of Twain’s anti-sentimentalism to show that he was actually a sentimentalist. By contrast, my dissertation focuses on how his (anti-)sentimentalism works in his stories: the protagonists and major characters of his novels feel sympathy for others across social divides of race, gender, and class thereby drawing, redrawing, crossing, or erasing the boundaries between themselves and these others.