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Julio C. Avalos, Jr. 35 American Imago, Vol. 62, No. 1, 35–58. © 2005 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 35 JULIO C. AVALOS, JR. ¡°An Agony of Pleasurable Suffering¡±: Masochism and Maternal Deprivation in Mark Twain ¡°Among you boys you have a game: you stand a row of bricks on end a few inches apart; you push a brick, it knocks its neighbor over, the neighbor knocks over the next brick—and so on till all the row is prostrate. That is human life. A child¡¯s first act knocks over the initial brick, and the rest will follow inexorably.¡± —Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger 1 Mark Twain never wore black leather. There is nothing to attest that he ever asked to be whipped or beaten, and there is no record of his ever having attended an S&M club. His autobiography reveals no proclivity for sexual depravities or self-mutilation. By most definitions, Mark Twain was no masochist. Yet this essay will show the pervasiveness of masochistic scenes and themes in Twain¡¯s writing and seek to demonstrate that their origin lies in the deprivations he suffered at the hands of his mother, Jane Clemens, which led to unconscious fears of passivity, effeminization, and infantilization. Superimposed on this bedrock were Twain¡¯s ambivalent relationship with his father, John Clemens, and his guilt over the deaths of his siblings in childhood. The term ¡°masochism¡± did not exist until 1886, the year that Twain celebrated his fifty-first birthday, when Richard von Krafft-Ebing introduced the notion to the world in Psychopathia Sexualis, where he defined it as ¡°the perfect counterpart of sadism,¡± a ¡°peculiar perversion of the sexual life in which the individual affected, in sexual feeling and thought, is controlled 36 Masochism and Maternal Deprivation in Mark Twain by the idea of being completely and unconditionally subject to the will of a person of the opposite sex¡± (1886, 86). Intriguingly, when Twain came to Vienna during his 1898 European tour, he had a conversation with Krafft-Ebing in which the two luminaries discussed the psychology of lynching and mob violence (Fisher 1922, 59–61). On this basis, along with the overwhelming popularity of the text, Carl Dolmetsch has concluded that ¡°it seems quite unlikely Twain could have escaped reading Psychopathia Sexualis¡± (1992, 264). Freud, too, attended Twain¡¯s public reading in the Hapsburg capital. ¡°I treated myself to listening to our old friend Mark Twain in person,¡± he wrote to Wilhelm Fliess on February 9, 1898, ¡°which was a sheer delight¡± (Masson 1985, 299). Indeed, according to Dolmetsch, ¡°there is sufficient circumstantial evidence to indicate that Samuel Clemens and Dr. Freud probably met more than once in 1898 and that they may even have had a polite social acquaintance¡± (1992, 265). Dolmetsch further proposes that in Twain Freud found ¡°a writer he found more useful for exemplifying his theories than any other in English save Shakespeare¡± (268). Freud¡¯s admiration for Twain finds repeated expression in his writings. When asked by Hugo Heller to list ¡°ten good books,¡± Freud (1907) included Twain¡¯s Sketches (246). In ¡°The Uncanny¡± (1919), he interrupts a discussion of a frightening dream: ¡°Or one may wander about in a dark, strange room, looking for the door or the electric switch, and collide time after time with the same piece of furniture—though it is true that Mark Twain succeeded by wild exaggeration in turning this latter situation into something irresistibly comic¡± (237). And in a footnote to Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud recalled his 1898 experience and cited Twain¡¯s story, ¡°The First Melon I Ever Stole,¡± to illustrate the ¡°enhancing of morality as a consequence of ill-luck¡± (126). In critical studies of Twain, it is customary to emphasize the shift from the satirical humor of The Innocents Abroad (1869) and Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) to the brooding cynicism of his later works. Even in those texts that belong to his ¡°light¡± period, however, Twain manifests a fascination with human psychology, including the relation between love and pain and between pleasure and suffering. Twain¡¯s early forays Julio C. Avalos, Jr. 37 into the literary profession provide abundant evidence of a masochistic dynamic, albeit in the sublimated form of the ¡°Turkish Bath¡± episode in The Innocents Abroad or Tom¡¯s sentimentality and suicidal ideation in Tom Sawyer. Later on, Twain gave his philosophical and psychological musings free rein, and it is in The Diary of Adam and Eve and Letters from the Earth—both written shortly before his death in 1910, though not published until 1938—that Twain¡¯s masochistic impulses are evinced most explicitly. 2 Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on November 30, 1835, in the small town of Florida, Missouri.1 His mother was thirty-two years old and Samuel, the sixth of her seven children, was two months premature. Without incubators and appropriate medications, the success of a premature birth was by no means assured. Samuel¡¯s birth came during one of the coldest winters in Missouri history, which likewise did not bode well for a sickly infant. Six years earlier, Jane Clemens had lost her third child, Pleasant Hannibal, in infancy, and, as Fred Kaplan observes, ¡°she thought it likely that she would lose this one too¡± (2003, 11). Whereas Jane Clemens had always taken on the responsibility of naming her children, things seemed so bleak for her premature son that she allowed her husband to do so. Langhorne was the first name of a relative who had gotten John an apprenticeship in Virginia, while Samuel was the name of John¡¯s father. According to Andrew Hoffman (1997), ¡°John never forgot feeling slighted that his father had not kissed him before he left¡± (2) for a house-raising, during which the frame of the house collapsed, crushing Samuel to death. As Hoffman adds, ¡°John Marshall Clemens bestowed the ambiguous names Samuel Langhorne on a child he expected to die,¡± and though these names ¡°would bury John¡¯s own failures . . . and free him to look to the future in Missouri,¡± he ¡°did not think what a haunting burden they might be to his son, if the child had the fortune to survive.¡± 38 Masochism and Maternal Deprivation in Mark Twain The fragility of Samuel¡¯s infancy was compounded by Jane Clemens¡¯s shortcomings as a caretaker. Kaplan (2003) follows her unlikely journey from Jane Lampton, social gadfly, to Jane Clemens, financially strapped Missouri housewife. He describes Lampton as ¡°an attractive, fun-loving belle of the ball,¡± the granddaughter of a distinguished Revolutionary War colonel (7). Following her mother¡¯s death and her father¡¯s remarriage, Jane¡¯s life ¡°continued to have its social pleasures, including recreation on the party and dancing circuit to as far away as Lexington.¡± In 1823, Jane fell in love with ¡°a shy young man who lived in a nearby town.¡± As Kaplan summarizes the sequence of events: He seemed to be in love with her, and everyone they knew, she thought, was aware of the relationship. The mores of the time, though, made it difficult for them to be alone together. After her uncle arranged for them to be alone, she rejected his clumsy attempt as embarrassing. Soon after, her suitor, convinced that Jane had rejected him, so she thought, left Kentucky. Eager to show the world that she was not disappointed by his departure, and apparently in a pique, she accepted a proposal of marriage from John Marshall Clemens. (7–8) Kaplan documents that Lampton and Clemens were nothing more than acquaintances at the time, and that ¡°John Marshall Clemens was not likely to have flirted with Jane, nor she with him. She later claimed that she did not love him in the least¡± (8). By the time that Samuel was born in 1838, Jane had been in a loveless marriage for twelve years and borne five children. John Clemens was largely unable to provide for his family, certainly not in the fashion to which Jane had grown accustomed. His legal practice was never profitable, and although he did have a rather successful civic life, he lost most of his money in land speculation and other fruitless ventures. Jane was ill-equipped for the rigors of her new existence. It is probable that caring for Samuel—premature, sickly, and temperamental—taxed Jane Clemens both physically and psychologically. As Kaplan observes, ¡°death seemed a continuous threat, first because of Sam¡¯s frailness and then as a reality Julio C. Avalos, Jr. 39 imprinted on his consciousness by life history and religious psychology¡± (2003, 17). According to Pamela Boker (1996), Jane Clemens¡¯s ¡°excessive apprehensiveness about her newborn son¡¯s poor health and fractious disposition prevented her from responding appropriately to his unique needs¡± (75). Albert Bigelow Paine, Twain¡¯s personal friend and biographer, writes that Samuel ¡°must have been a wearing child, and we may believe that Jane Clemens, with her varied cares and labors, did not always find him a comfort¡± (1912, 29). He quotes Jane as saying: ¡°¡®He gave me more uneasiness than any child I had.¡¯¡± However, instead of doting on her sickly son, Jane Clemens became oddly detached from him, a resignation that perhaps signaled her unconscious recognition that she was unfit to care for him. She was a firm believer in homeopathic medicine and only used doctors as a last resort (Kaplan 2003, 16). Twain, recalling a time when he was about nine years old, once stated that his mother ¡°used to stand me up naked in the back yard every morning and throw buckets of cold water on me, just to see what effect it would have¡± (Fatout 1976, 386). In his posthumously published Autobiography, Twain writes that he was ¡°born reserved as to endearments of speech and caresses¡± (1958, 185; italics in original).2 More than once, he alludes to the fact that neither his father nor mother ever coddled or kissed him—or anyone else in the family, for that matter: ¡°I never knew a member of my father¡¯s family to kiss another member of it except once, and that at a deathbed¡± (185). ¡°In all my life,¡± he reiterates, ¡°I had never seen one member of the Clemens family kiss another one¡± (99). When describing his mother, Twain paints her in the most positive light possible, claiming that she was of a ¡°fine and striking and lovable¡± character (1958, 25). However, when he goes on to say why she should be thus remembered, he recalls not his own experiences with her but her behavior toward others, particularly strangers and stray animals: ¡°All the race of dumb animals had a friend in her¡± (27). One gets the impression that her devotion to animals and strangers came at the expense of an interest in her own offspring. Indeed, when a friend commented to Jane Clemens that she appeared to be more enamored of her pet cats than of her children, Jane 40 Masochism and Maternal Deprivation in Mark Twain responded that the advantage of a cat was that you could always put it down when you were tired of holding it (Webster and Webster 1925, 531). In her eighty-eighth (and last) year, Twain asked his mother about his temperament as an infant: ¡°I suppose that during all that time you were uneasy about me?¡± ¡°Yes, the whole time.¡± ¡°Afraid I wouldn¡¯t live?¡± After a reflective pause—ostensibly to think out the facts—¡°No—afraid you would.¡± (1958, 11) As Boker remarks, this seemingly light-hearted exchange between mother and son, like her jest about preferring cats to children, ¡°suggests that the infant Sam was so critically ill or impossibly unmanageable that he could not function as a normal baby, or that Jane Clemens had a warped . . . sense of humor when it came to her son¡± (1996, 73). If, as Freud contends, ¡°a joke will allow us to exploit something . . . which we could not, on account of obstacles in the way, bring forward openly or consciously¡± (1905a, 103), it would seem warranted to infer that Jane Clemens harbored death-wishes toward Samuel. The effect of his mother¡¯s ministrations reverberates in Twain¡¯s addendum, ¡°I was always told that I was a sickly and precarious and tiresome and uncertain child and lived mainly on allopathic medicines during the first seven years of my life¡± (1958, 11). Rather than directly remembering himself as ¡°sickly¡± and the rest, he recalls having been ¡°always told¡± that he was. It seems apparent that Samuel Clemens¡¯s survival was a testimony more to his will to live than to his mother¡¯s talents as a caretaker. Boker argues that Twain harbored the grief ¡°that results when one is deprived of the mother¡¯s unqualified love and attention¡± (1996, 70). As a ¡°defensive impulse,¡± she continues, he adopted the persona of a humorist to ¡°deny feelings of guilt and hostility¡± toward his mother. Samuel could hardly count on his father to give him the attention that he missed from his mother. ¡°He was a proud man,¡± Twain writes in his Autobiography, ¡°a silent, austere man¡± Julio C. Avalos, Jr. 41 (1958, 23). In the summer of 1842, the family decided to visit the farm of Jane¡¯s sister, Patsy. Jane Clemens, accompanied by her children Orion, Pamela, Margaret, and Henry, set off one day, while John was to bring Samuel on the next. Despite the fact that John had only Samuel to look after, he somehow managed to leave the six-year-old boy at home. John Clemens did not notice that he had ¡°forgotten¡± Samuel until he arrived at the Quarles farm (Hoffman 1997, 13). Neither John nor Jane felt concerned enough to fetch the child themselves. Instead, an uncle of Jane¡¯s made the half-day trip and found Samuel ¡°weeping, hungry, and angrily draining meal out of a small hole he¡¯d made in a burlap sack¡± (13). John Clemens suffered from migraine headaches that he ambiguously dubbed ¡°sun-pains¡± (Hoffman 1997, 4). He was likewise prone to long absences, leaving home for weeks if not months to look after his lands in Tennessee in the vain hope that they would bring his clan the prosperity that he and his wife ardently desired. Together with his financial failures, John¡¯s mysterious disappearances left Samuel and his siblings without a father-figure for much of their childhoods, an absence that became permanent with his death when Samuel was eleven years of age. Compounding the severe emotional detachment of his parents, Samuel Clemens¡¯s childhood was fraught with death, guilt, and repressed hostility toward his brothers. After the birth of Henry Clemens, the three-year-old Samuel began to act in a ¡°wild and unmanageable manner¡± (Hoffman 1997, 7). It was only when Samuel was ill that he was able to divert attention away from his younger brother and back onto himself. This pattern is replayed in Twain¡¯s fiction, primarily in the short story ¡°My First Lie¡± (1899). That Henry¡¯s arrival exacerbated the strain on Samuel¡¯s already tenuous bond with his mother is demonstrated by the way that he once again became prone to illnesses and colic, and, most tellingly, began sleepwalking. Samuel¡¯s sleepwalking soon became a topic of conversation in the Clemens household, reestablishing him as the focal point of attention. Interestingly, he nearly always walked in the direction of his mother (Hoffman 1997, 7). One notable exception occurred in August 1839. While still asleep, Samuel 42 Masochism and Maternal Deprivation in Mark Twain made his way into the room in which his nine-year-old sister, Margaret, was sleeping. She had been ill for several days, although the family did not consider her condition to be lifethreatening. The sleepwalking Samuel plucked at her coverlet, ¡°a gesture associated in the Missouri folk-mind with imminent death¡± (Hoffman 1997, 8). When Margaret died a few days later, the family believed that Samuel had foretold the event. The guilt-feelings resulting from Margaret¡¯s death were compounded by the death in 1842 of his older brother Benjamin, apparently from a pulmonary condition, when Samuel was still only six. Fifty years later, Twain wrote in his journal: ¡°Dead Brother Ben. My treachery to him¡± (Sanborn 1990, 61). Although this utterance remains cryptic, Hoffman suggests that Twain¡¯s ¡°unshakable feelings of responsibility for Margaret¡¯s passing made him believe he carried the seed of death in him¡± (1997, 12). Strikingly, apart from the death of Benjamin, the only other use of the word ¡°treachery¡± in Twain¡¯s writings in connection with a family member concerns the accidental death of his own infant son Langdon, for which he felt responsible. In an uncanny reenactment of his father¡¯s ¡°forgetting¡± of him, Twain took Langdon on a winter carriage ride, during which he ¡°dropped into a reverie and forgot all about my charge¡± (1958, 190). The furs with which the child had been wrapped fell away, and by the time that Twain remembered him, he was nearly frozen, and indeed he died soon after. ¡°I have always felt shame for that treacherous morning¡¯s work,¡± Twain added in the Autobiography, ¡°and have not allowed myself to think of it when I could help it. I doubt if I had the courage to make confession at that time. I think it most likely that I have never confessed until now¡± (190). Before Benjamin¡¯s interment, Jane Clemens had her other children surround the bier upon which her son lay and directed each of them to touch the face of their dead brother. Twain¡¯s earliest recorded memory is of this traumatic event: Only one clear and strongly defined one of early date remains. She held me by the hand and we were kneeling by the bedside of my brother, two years older than I, who lay dead, and the tears were flowing down her cheeks Julio C. Avalos, Jr. 43 unchecked. And she was moaning. That dumb sign of anguish was perhaps new to me, since it made upon me a strong impression. (1958, 23) The death also prompted the one kiss that John and Jane Clemens ever shared in front of their children. Following Benjamin¡¯s death, the seven-year-old Samuel went on a campaign of self-destructive behavior. He went so far as to try several times to drown himself and broke into the quarantined sickroom of his measles-stricken friend, Will Bowen (Hoffman 1997, 12). Kaplan remarks that Samuel pursued measles ¡°with almost suicidal determination¡± (2003, 19). He succeeded in contracting the dreaded disease and nearly in dying as well. Recounting the family¡¯s gathering at what was thought to have been his deathbed, Twain later wrote: ¡°They were all crying, but that did not affect me. I took but the vaguest interest in it, and that merely because I was the center of all this emotional attention and was gratified by it and felt complimented¡± (Paine 1924, 2:221). The autobiographical source for Tom Sawyer¡¯s deathfantasy, this scene demonstrates how early Samuel relished being made ¡°the center of all this emotional attention,¡± no matter what the cost. In his Autobiography (1958, 33), Twain acknowledged that Tom¡¯s younger brother Sid was modeled on his own younger brother Henry. Tom, like Samuel, plays the role of the troublemaker, forced to break the rules in order to be recognized by Aunt Polly, while the doting Sid is able to gain her attention without having to resort to anti-social behavior. Tragedy—never absent for long in Samuel¡¯s childhood— struck again in March of 1847 when John Clemens died at the age of forty-eight. On the night following his father¡¯s death, Samuel, fast asleep, walked into his mother¡¯s bedroom. She awoke to find him, wrapped in a sheet, standing over her (Hoffman 1997, 21). Despite this evident sign of psychic turmoil, when recalling his father¡¯s death in the Autobiography Twain focuses solely on the financial effects that it had on the family, a far cry from the emotional way he describes the deaths of his brothers Henry and Benjamin, his mother, his wife, and his children: ¡°We got along, but it was pretty hard 44 Masochism and Maternal Deprivation in Mark Twain sledding. I was not one of the burdens, because I was taken from school at once upon my father¡¯s death and placed in the office of the Hannibal Courier as printer¡¯s apprentice¡± (1958, 88; italics added). Twain¡¯s chronology, however, contains a significant error. He did not become a printer¡¯s apprentice until 1849, a full two years after his father¡¯s death. On the most obvious level, this faulty recollection evinces Twain¡¯s penchant for hyperbole by portraying himself as having sacrificed his education for his family¡¯s well-being. In addition, if Samuel¡¯s primary aim was to gain the love of his mother, then the removal of his father would come as a relief and represent an unconscious oedipal victory. Conspicuously absent from Twain¡¯s account of the period is the fact that he observed his father¡¯s autopsy, a second traumatic experience with a corpse to which I shall return later in this essay. 3 As it turned out, the period of apprenticeship following his father¡¯s death was for Samuel a time of freedom, often to the point of recklessness. In the first year, he destroyed a cooper¡¯s shop by rolling a boulder down a nearby hill, skated on the thawing Mississippi river with his friend Thomas Nash, possibly causing Nash to fall into the frigid waters, and constantly bullied and tormented his teacher¡¯s son, Theodore Dawson. An especially noteworthy event occurred in May 1850, when Samuel was fifteen years old, that is, ¡°the age at which a boy is willing to endure all things, suffer all things short of death by fire, if thereby he may be conspicuous and show off before the public¡± (Twain 1958, 51). Enchanted by a visiting ¡°mesmerizer,¡± Samuel was filled with ¡°a burning desire to become a subject¡± who aided in the performance. After several nights of failing to be hypnotized by the magical disk, however, Samuel decided to pretend. ¡°I was cautious at first,¡± he writes, ¡°being afraid the professor would discover that I was an imposter and drive me from the platform in disgrace.¡± Samuel¡¯s enthusiasm soon made all the other volunteers superfluous. In Julio C. Avalos, Jr. 45 a prefiguration of his later career as Mark Twain, the adolescent Clemens found himself on stage, lying, and the center of attention. Several days into his performance, the mesmerizer introduced a new twist: he would prick his subjects with a pin and also let the audience do so in order to demonstrate how deeply hypnotized they were. Twain describes his ordeal: I didn¡¯t wince; I only suffered and shed tears on the inside. The miseries that a conceited boy will endure to keep up his ¡°reputation¡±! And so will a conceited man; I know it in my own person and have seen it in a hundred thousand others. That professor ought to have protected me and I often hoped he would, when the tests were unusually severe, but he didn¡¯t. It may be that he was deceived as well as the others, though I did not believe it nor think it possible. . . . They would stick a pin in my arm and bear on it until they drove it a third of its length in. . . . Whereas it was not insensible at all; I was suffering agonies of pain. (1958, 54) In The Language of Psychoanalysis (1967), Laplanche and Pontalis define masochism as ¡°a perversion in which satisfaction is tied to the suffering or humiliation undergone by the subject¡± (244). In his emblematic experience with the mesmerizer, Clemens suffers ¡°agonies of pain¡± at the hands of his audience and sheds tears ¡°on the inside,¡± all the while basking in his position as the object of curiosity. The masochistic constellation is completed by the pathos of adult betrayal, as Clemens expects the professor to intervene on his behalf. I take the scene with the mesmerizer to be a displaced repetition of the relationship between Clemens and his parents. He runs around the stage like a lunatic, fleeing from imaginary snakes, fishing from an invisible platform, and kissing and making love to imaginary girls, all in a pathetic attempt to gain attention and approval. His willingness to ¡°suffer all things¡± to achieve this end resonates with the character of Severin in Leopold von Sacher-Masoch¡¯s Venus in Furs (1870), who declares that he is ready to ¡°suffer anything¡± (170) as long as the object of his adoration promises not to 46 Masochism and Maternal Deprivation in Mark Twain discard him. Twain¡¯s accusation that the professor did not ¡°protect¡± him echoes his feelings toward his mother, while also expressing a wish that his father might have done something once it became obvious that his mother was unfit to care for him. For fifty years, Twain refused to contemplate the phenomenon of mesmerism or hypnotism, saying that the subject ¡°revolted him¡± and ¡°brought back to me a passage in my life which for pride¡¯s sake I wished to forget¡± (1958, 56). As an adult, he discussed the adolescent incident only once, when he sought to explain what had really happened to his mother. ¡°Thirty-five years after those evil exploits of mine,¡± he writes, ¡°I visited my old mother, whom I had not seen for ten years. . . . I thought that I would humble myself and confess my ancient fault¡± (57). Despite his protestations, however, Jane refused to believe that the spectacle had been a fraud. Thus, in seeking to gain his mother¡¯s sympathy for his ancient ordeal, Twain (whose long absence may well have been an act of revenge) found himself traumatized anew: ¡°To my astonishment, there were no sentimentalities, no dramatics, no George Washington effects.¡± Indeed, ¡°she was not moved in the least degree.¡± In a desperate attempt to convince his mother that he had been in genuine pain, despite his silence, he offered to wound himself again: ¡°¡®Oh, my goodness!¡¯ I said, ¡®let me show you that I am speaking the truth. Here is my arm; drive a pin into it— drive it to the head—I shall not wince¡¯¡± (57). Like the Spartan boy who hid the wolf under his cloak, Twain sought to prove his masculinity to his mother by his ability to endure pain. But Jane Clemens again withheld her sympathy: ¡°¡®You are a man now,¡¯¡± she observed, ¡°¡®and could dissemble the hurt; but you were only a child then and could not have done it.¡¯¡± Clemens¡¯s inability to elicit empathy and understanding from his mother led him to seek out these traits in other women. After a courtship lasting only two weeks, he proposed in 1869 to Olivia (¡°Livy¡±) Louise Langdon, the daughter of a wealthy coal businessman and a member of the leading family in Elmira, New York. Livy¡¯s rejection was subtended by the Langdon family¡¯s disapproval of Clemens¡¯s bohemian style of life. Undeterred, he renewed his suit, and on February 2, 1870, the two of them were married. Julio C. Avalos, Jr. 47 Although far from well off, Clemens had tasted the first fruits of success with The Innocents Abroad (1869), published under the pseudonym of Mark Twain. The letters that Twain wrote to his wife before and during their marriage leave little doubt that they loved one another. Still, material considerations also clearly played a role in his choice of a mate. ¡°That Livy moved in an aura of money,¡± observes Guy Cardwell (1991), ¡°was one of her charms . . . for the idea of money was endlessly present in Clemens¡¯s thoughts¡± (50). Even more important than Olivia¡¯s money was her social prominence. As Cardwell writes, unlike a lower-class woman who married an upper-class man, a young man who married upward in the social hierarchy was ¡°made to feel the difference in status¡± (1991, 48). He argues that Olivia was idealized by Clemens as much for being a status symbol as a love-object. At the time of their wedding, Clemens was thirty-five years old and Olivia twenty-five. Her shyness and near paralysis since the age of sixteen when she was stricken by Pott¡¯s disease made her appear younger than she was. In Olivia, Clemens found a partner who embodied the childlike beauty with which he would surround himself in his later years, and combined it with the social status and affluence that he craved. Although his wealth soon eclipsed that of the Langdons, he always felt insecure among the aristocracy of the eastern seaboard. Cardwell observes that Clemens ¡°chose Olivia Langdon as a wife because he wished to be mothered and correctly sensed that she would make an effective substitute mother¡± (1991, 123). On November 7, 1870, nine months after their marriage, Samuel and Olivia celebrated the birth of their first child, Langdon Clemens. Twain did so by writing a letter from the newborn child¡¯s point of view to the Reverend Joseph Twichell and his wife, informing them of ¡°his¡± birth. As Boker (1996, 76) contends, the sadness imputed to the child, coupled with the emphasis on disease and a foreshadowing of death, reveal more about Twain¡¯s state of mind than about that of his fiveday- old son: I came into the world on the 7th, and consequently am about five days old now. I have had wretched health ever 48 Masochism and Maternal Deprivation in Mark Twain since I made my appearance. First one thing and then another has kept me under the weather, and as a general thing I have been chilly and uncomfortable. . . . At birth I weighed only 4 pounds with my clothes on. . . . Life seems a serious thing, what I have seen of it—and my observation teaches me that it is made up of hiccups, unnecessary washings, and colic. But no doubt you, who are old, have long since grown accustomed and reconciled to what seems to me such a disagreeable novelty. (Paine 1920, 102) Like the letter ascribed to Langdon, Twain¡¯s sketch, ¡°My First Lie and How I Got Out of It,¡± written on December 10, 1899, also depicts the thoughts of an infant boy, though in this instance Twain humorously claims to be recalling his own first week of life: I had noticed that if a pin was sticking me and I advertised it in the usual fashion, I was lovingly petted and coddled and pitied in a most agreeable way and got a ration between meals besides. . . . [One day] I lied about the pin—advertising one when there wasn¡¯t any. . . . They found no pin and they realized that another liar had been added to the world¡¯s supply. (1899, 256) This story bears a striking resemblance to Twain¡¯s experience with the mesmerizer, revealing just how ingrained the association between the endurance of pain and the receiving of attention had become in his mind. Taken in tandem, the letter and the story reveal that Twain regarded infancy as a period of sickness and colic, for which maternal affection was the only cure. However, in order to receive this balm, he had first to ¡°advertise¡± his affliction by crying or acting out. Instead of receiving unconditional love from his mother, Twain received only sporadic attention, which ceased with his protests. According to Winnicott (1971), ¡°the good-enough mother starts off with an almost complete adaptation to her infant¡¯s needs,¡± which ¡°affords the infant the opportunity for the illusion that her breast is part of the infant¡± (10). ¡°The mother¡¯s eventual task is gradually to disillusion the Julio C. Avalos, Jr. 49 infant,¡± Winnicott continues, ¡°but she has no hope of success unless at first she has been able to give sufficient opportunity for illusion.¡± Twain was never given the opportunity for illusion, and this deficit left him with a psychic vulnerability for which he sought to compensate by resorting to masochism. 4 Masochism need not manifest itself as a desire for physical pain. Laplanche and Pontalis (1967) maintain that a subject can be defined as masochistic if he or she derives satisfaction from suffering or humiliation, though I would add that this must be inflicted by an external force.3 The requisite experience is not one of humiliating oneself but rather one of being humiliated, a crucial distinction. There is undeniably a dialectical aspect to the power dynamic in sado-masochistic relationships. By submitting to the other, the masochist coerces his partner to notice him or her, and in that respect gains the upper hand. This paradox has a counterpart in the situation of the infant who depends upon the mother to be fed, cleaned, and loved. From one perspective, the mother is dominant. However, there is also a sense in which the mother is at the beck and call of her infant who imperiously demands her attention. Twain¡¯s case underscores that the passive position of the masochist is a distorted expression of the desire for goodenough mothering in infancy. Having been deprived of ordinary attention and affection, masochists demand to be punished as a way of gaining at least some recognition from their primary caretakers. Although Freud¡¯s (1924) gender-bias led him to dub this passive component of masochism ¡°feminine,¡± he rightly discerned that ¡°the masochist wants to be treated like a small and helpless child¡± (162). A major reorientation away from Freud¡¯s drive-based model of the mind and toward contemporary object relations theory was effected by W. R. D. Fairbairn. Citing the example of a thumb-sucking baby, Fairbairn (1941) argues profoundly that if we seek to explain this behavior by claiming that the infant does so ¡°because his mouth is an erotogenic zone and 50 Masochism and Maternal Deprivation in Mark Twain sucking provides him with erotic pleasure, it may sound convincing enough; but we are really missing the point.¡± He continues: ¡°we must ask ourselves the further question—¡®Why his thumb?¡¯ And the answer to this question is—¡®Because there is no breast to suck.¡¯ Even the baby must have a libidinal object; and if he is deprived of his natural object (the breast), he is driven to provide an object for himself. Thumb-sucking thus represents a technique for dealing with an unsatisfactory object-relationship¡± (33). In a more extreme form, masochism too is ¡°a technique for dealing with an unsatisfactory object-relationship.¡± In The Bonds of Love (1988), Jessica Benjamin fuses Winnicott and Hegel to contend that domination and submission result ¡°from a breakdown of the necessary tension between selfassertion and mutual recognition that allows self and other to meet as sovereign equals¡± (12). A mother responding to her infant¡¯s smile affirms the latter¡¯s belief in its power to affect the world. Breakdowns signify a failure of attunement. A sickly baby may not react to its mother¡¯s caresses, and she in turn may become depressed by her inability to connect with the infant. This transforms assertion into aggression and sets in motion what Benjamin terms a ¡°negative cycle of recognition¡± in which ¡°a person feels that aloneness is only possible by obliterating the intrusive other, that attunement is only possible by surrendering to the other¡± (28).4 From an object relations perspective, then, masochism is a strategy to compensate for being prematurely deprived of what Winnicott terms the ¡°opportunity for illusion.¡± In the negative cycle of recognition, when the child wants to be alone, it can only do so by destroying the other in fantasy, while the wish for nurturing and affection entails assuming a posture of submission. Twain¡¯s acts of delinquency in childhood—his destruction of the cooper shop with a boulder, the bullying of his teacher¡¯s son, and his suicide attempts through drowning—were therefore what Winnicott (1967) would call signs of hope and attempts to gain the recognition he desperately sought from his environment. Similarly, he populates his fictions with misbehaving boys in order to rid himself of his internalized bad objects. Only through such simultaneously creative and Julio C. Avalos, Jr. 51 destructive acts is Twain able to make his bad objects good, and thereby also to half-persuade himself that his parental figures were not cruelly neglectful, but rather nurturing and loving. 5 A common thread uniting Twain¡¯s novels about adolescent boys is the heroes¡¯ knack for getting into trouble. Twain himself acknowledged that all his fictional works were based on ¡°incidents out of real life,¡± and that he never deliberately ¡°¡®created¡¯ a character¡± (1961, 68).5 And of all his protagonists, it is Tom Sawyer who seems to me to be most deeply rooted in Twain¡¯s childhood history and to exemplify best his perverse equation of suffering with pleasure. Early in his Adventures, Tom imagines what would become of his family if he were to commit suicide. This is the only scenario in which he can picture his Aunt Polly feeling genuine love and remorse for him. The description of the scene is replete with the physical affection that Jane Clemens never bestowed on Sam: ¡°How she would throw herself upon him,¡± Twain writes of Aunt Polly, ¡°and how her tears would fall like rain and her lips pray God to give her back . . . her poor little sufferer¡± (1876, 27). But Tom vows simply to lie there and let her laments wash over his limp body, a suffering boy ¡°whose griefs were at an end.¡± As Tom¡¯s fantasy continues, the line between Aunt Polly and other women is blurred. He is reminded of his love interest, Becky Thatcher, and the flower that she gave him as a gift. Becky is never named, however, and referred to simply by the pronoun ¡°she¡±: ¡°He wondered if she would pity him if she knew? Would she cry, and wish that she had a right to put her arms around his neck and comfort him? Or would she turn coldly away like all the hollow world? This picture brought such an agony of pleasurable suffering that he worked it over and over again in his mind¡± (27; italics in original). The phrase ¡°agony of pleasurable suffering¡± encapsulates Twain¡¯s masochistic constellation. Tom leaves open the possibility that Becky will turn away from him as the rest of the world has done, and it is this prospect of abandonment that 52 Masochism and Maternal Deprivation in Mark Twain propels him to his greatest paroxysms. While ¡°she¡± in the first instance refers to Becky, it may also include Aunt Polly, and indeed the biological mother who is absent from the text. Tom, of course, eventually acts out his suicide fantasy, albeit only in mock form. Although Twain comically portrays the disappearance of Tom and his friends as an opportunity for them to return to nature, there can be no doubt that in faking his death Tom elicits from Aunt Polly the loving attention that he wanted. Even when he sneaks into his home to observe her crying, his primary focus is narcissistic: ¡°Tom was snuffling now, himself,¡± Twain writes, ¡°and more in pity of himself than anyone else¡± (103). There is little doubt that the feelings Twain imputes to Tom were his own as a seven-year-old with the measles when he lay at death¡¯s door surrounded by his mother and family. The conflation between attention and pain is also explicit in Twain¡¯s posthumously published comic tour de force, The Diary of Adam and Eve (1938a). Toward the end of Eve¡¯s portion of the Diary, she tries to explain why she loves Adam. Since he lacks brightness, graciousness, industry, education, and chivalry, Eve decides that she loves Adam simply because ¡°he is masculine¡± (143). There follows another apparent non sequitur: ¡°At bottom he is good, and I love him for that, but I could love him without it. If he should beat me and abuse me, I should go on loving him. I know it, it is a matter of sex, I think.¡± Adam is not violent to Eve anywhere in the text. Rather, he demonstrates a marked coolness toward the woman who fawns over him. ¡°I love him with all the strength of my passionate nature,¡± Eve gushes, but Adam only loves her ¡°as well as he can¡± (142). Like The Diary of Adam and Eve, Letters From the Earth (1938b) was written near the end of Twain¡¯s life in his grief and depression following the death of his favorite daughter, Susy. Cast in the form of apocryphal letters sent from Satan to the angels Michael and Gabriel during an exile imposed on him by God, this blasphemous text contains Twain¡¯s most extensive discussion of sexuality, a topic largely absent from his other works. From the age of seven until the day that she dies, he writes forlornly, a woman yearns for sexual intercourse, while a man is only ¡°briefly competent¡± (40). After the age of fifty, his performance is of ¡°poor quality, the intervals between are Julio C. Avalos, Jr. 53 wide, and its satisfactions of no great value to either party.¡± Yet ¡°his great-grandmother is as good as new.¡± That Satan¡¯s sentiments are also Twain¡¯s own is clear from an 1881 letter to Mary Fairbanks in which he complained, ¡°Physically, I am an old man at 45, older than some men are at 80¡± (Wecter 1949, 245). As Sacher-Masoch does with Wanda in Venus in Furs, Twain sought to preserve Olivia from the contamination of sexuality. ¡°You are as pure as snow,¡± he wrote on March 1, 1869, ¡°and I would have you always so—untainted, untouched even by the impure thoughts of others. You are the purest woman that I ever knew, and your purity is the most uncommon and most precious ornament¡± (Wecter 1947, 76). The masochist idealizes the other in order to feel that he is at the mercy of a sublime being, elevating his own self-esteem in the process. I have argued that Twain¡¯s masochism is intimately linked to his desire for comfort and infantilization. Late in The Innocents Abroad (1869), he ruminates on Turkish bathhouses: For years I have dreamed of the wonders of the Turkish bath . . . [in which I would be] passed through a weird and complicated system of pulling and hauling, and drenching and scrubbing, by a gang of naked savages who loomed vast and vaguely through the steaming mists like demons; then rested for a while on a divan fit for a king . . . finally, swathed in soft fabrics . . . and laid on a bed of eiderdown, where eunuchs, gorgeous of costume, fanned me while I drowsed and dreamed. (278) The scene is a fantasy of rebirth. The ¡°pulling and hauling¡± evokes the escape from the womb, following which comes the ¡°drenching and scrubbing¡± as an infant is cleaned of blood and amniotic fluid. To be ¡°swathed in soft fabrics¡± amounts to being diapered, and the passivity of being ¡°laid on a bed¡± is evident. Through it all, Twain is the focus of attention ¡°fit for a king.¡± But what of the ¡°eunuchs¡± and the ¡°gang of naked savages¡±? One reason for their appearance is simply their exotic nature, which was bound to fascinate a man born in a Missouri town with a population of only one hundred people. However, the passage provides further evidence for the link in 54 Masochism and Maternal Deprivation in Mark Twain Twain¡¯s mind between infantilization and effeminization, and reflects the dangers attendant upon being pampered and catered to. At the time of his trip to Europe in 1867, Twain was preoccupied with ¡°Rock Me to Sleep, Mother,¡± a popular poem written by Elizabeth Akers Allen. The first verse sets the tone of this ode to nostalgia: Backward, turn backward, O time, in your flight, Make me a child again just for to-night! Mother, come back from the echoless shore, Take me again to your heart as of yore; Kiss from my forehead the furrows of care, Smooth the few silver threads out of my hair; Over my slumbers your loving watch keep;— Rock me to sleep, Mother—rock me to sleep! (1866, 190) The poem closes with the couplet, ¡°Never hereafter to wake or to weep; / Rock me to sleep, Mother—rock me to sleep!¡± completing the conflation between birth and death, and between the mother as the creator of life and dispenser of oblivion. Saturated with a sense of loss, the poem also carries with it the hope that the mother will be reencountered in death. Twain¡¯s first allusion to ¡°Rock Me to Sleep, Mother¡± in The Innocents Abroad is satirical. While visiting Rome and coming face to face with the relics of antiquity, Twain becomes depressed by the ravages of time. ¡°What may be left,¡± he asks, ¡°of General Grant¡¯s great name four centuries hence?¡± (1869, 250). Grant was the prototype of the victorious soldier and the ideal man in mid-nineteenth-century America, and his memoirs, which Twain helped to edit and publish, were one of the best-selling works of the period. As the ultimate affront to Grant¡¯s memory, Twain imagines that future generations might mistakenly remember him as the author of ¡°Rock Me to Sleep, Mother,¡± which he takes to be the epitome of dependency and effeminization. Despite his implicit condemnation of the poem, Twain refers to it again during his travels to the Holy Land, where he Julio C. Avalos, Jr. 55 is surrounded by the ¡°dreary solitude¡± of Galilee. ¡°If these things are not food for ¡®Rock Me to Sleep, Mother,¡¯¡± he muses, ¡°none exist, I think¡± (377). Faced with oppressive loneliness, Twain takes refuge in a fantasy of maternal comfort, which he at once yearns for and dismisses as a sham. Strikingly, in the letter of February 3, 1863, in which he uses the name ¡°Mark Twain¡± for the first time, Clemens criticizes a certain Judge Brumfield for throwing ¡°too much operatic affectation into his singing¡± (Quirk 1994, 6) during a ballad rendition of ¡°Rock Me to Sleep, Mother.¡± In The Innocents Abroad, Twain recalls an episode in which he ran off from school and, instead of going home, decided to spend the night in his father¡¯s office. After sneaking in through the window, the young boy came upon the body of a dead man sprawled across his father¡¯s desk. (Apparently, he had been stabbed in a fight and brought to John Clemens for doctoring.) Terrified, Sam exited through the window. Upon returning home, he is whipped, but claims, ¡°I enjoyed it. It seemed perfectly delightful¡± (1869, 132). I sense no irony in these words. Young and afraid, Sam needed to be comforted. The whipping, hurtful though it may have been, confirmed that he was at home, safe and in the presence of those who loved him. In true masochistic fashion, Samuel surrenders in order to find comfort and takes pleasure in pain. Fused with the sight of his deceased brother Benjamin, this episode was traumatically reenacted when Samuel as a twelve-year-old beheld his father¡¯s corpse. Shortly after John Clemens¡¯s death, the family physician, Dr. Hugh Meredith, asked Jane for permission to perform an autopsy. Samuel followed the pallbearers to Dr. Meredith¡¯s office, where he looked on the operation through a keyhole. Even in adulthood, Twain was unable to tolerate images or statues of dead people. As he narrates in The Innocents Abroad, he was horrified to come upon the sculpture of a body without skin in the Milan cathedral: ¡°I am very sorry I saw it because I shall always see it now . . . I shall dream of it¡± (1869, 131). Although he calls the sculpture ¡°repulsive¡± and ¡°a hideous thing,¡± the same sequence of childhood memories underlies his avowal that ¡°there was a fascination about it somewhere.¡± 56 Masochism and Maternal Deprivation in Mark Twain The Innocents Abroad was ¡°Affectionately Inscribed¡± by Twain ¡°To My Most Patient Reader, and Most Charitable Critic, My Aged Mother.¡± In a consummate enactment of his lifelong ambivalence, however, this expression of filial devotion was unconsciously plagiarized from a book of poetry by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Asked by an unnamed friend why he had stolen the dedication from Holmes, Twain claimed not to know what he meant. When the friend produced the volume— the title of which Twain also curiously neglects to mention— Twain confessed that he ¡°was very much ashamed and unspeakably astonished¡± (1958, 150). 6 Isabel Lyon, Mark Twain¡¯s secretary, recalls in her diary a conversation that they once had concerning the responsibility of mothers for the development of their children. ¡°Mr. Clemens laid all the faults of all mankind to the mothers,¡± she writes, ¡°for they alone—alone—have the teaching of their children¡± (Boker 1996, 68). ¡°I sat on that stiff little chair defending the mothers,¡± she continues, ¡°and I couldn¡¯t say what I ought to have said because I was blind with the suddenness of his attack.¡± As I have tried to demonstrate, Twain¡¯s mother-blaming is profoundly autobiographical in nature. To call him a masochist is not to argue that he enacted (or even imagined) scenes in which a woman dresses herself in furs and then proceeds to whip her prostrate slave-lover. Given Olivia Clemens¡¯s illhealth, she makes an unlikely candidate for the role of dominatrix. But much of Twain¡¯s writing, and the experiences that fueled it, are preoccupied with the joys of pain and suffering. From infancy, Twain came to associate mothering with deprivation and punishment, and love with submission to the other. Sexual desire in his fiction inevitably leads to disappointment, and often to violence. Only masochism can explain why Eve equates being beaten with true love or why Tom describes the prospect of abandonment as ¡°an agony of pleasurable suffering.¡± Twain¡¯s self-abasement, his cynicism, and his mordant humor all conform to this pattern. Although Julio C. Avalos, Jr. 57 he may not have worn black leather, during his later years he did dress entirely in white, a form of ritualized behavior that likewise bears the imprint of the psychic constellation of masochism. 425 W. 121st St., Apt. 506 New York, NY 10027 jca2106@columbia.edu Notes 1. In my biographical narrative, I shall refer to Twain as ¡°Samuel Clemens¡± prior to his adoption in 1863 of the name ¡°Mark Twain.¡± For a well-documented fictionalized account of the life of Jane Clemens, see Varble (1964). 2. At his death in 1910, Twain left a voluminous manuscript he called his ¡°autobiography,¡± which also contained sketches, stories, and other half-finished works. A portion was first published in 1917 under the title, The Autobiography of Mark Twain. In 1924, Albert Paine, dissatisfied with the 1917 text, published his own two-volume edition as Mark Twain¡¯s Autobiography. Unhappy with Paine¡¯s version, but retaining his title, Bernard DeVoto issued a third edition in 1940. Finally, in 1958, Charles Neider published what has since become the standard scholarly edition of The Autobiography of Mark Twain. Apart from one citation from Paine¡¯s 1924 version, all references to the Autobiography in the present essay are to Neider¡¯s edition. 3. See the critique of Freud¡¯s (1905b) view that ¡°masochism is nothing more than an extension of sadism turned round upon the subject¡¯s own self¡± (158) offered by Deleuze (1967). As Deleuze argues, the masochist¡¯s mantra is not ¡°I punish myself¡± but ¡°I am being punished,¡± and there must therefore be an intermediate stage not of reflexivity but of projection, ¡°through which an external object is made to take on the role of the subject that then acts upon the self¡± (105). 4. Benjamin¡¯s definition of the masochist as one who ¡°despairs of ever holding the attention or winning the recognition of the other¡± (1988, 72) is amplified in Emmanuel Ghent¡¯s (1990) influential contrast between submission and surrender, according to which the nucleus of masochism is a ¡°perversion of surrender.¡± 5. The sentence appears originally in Twain¡¯s essay, ¡°Favors from Correspondents,¡± published in September 1870 in a journal called The Galaxy. References Allen, Elizabeth Akers. 1866. Poems. Boston: Ticknor and Fields. Benjamin, Jessica. 1988. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. New York: Pantheon. Boker, Pamela. 1996. The Grief Taboo in American Literature: Loss and Prolonged Adolescence in Twain, Melville, and Hemingway. New York: New York University Press. Cardwell, Guy. 1991. The Man Who Was Mark Twain: Images and Ideologies. New Haven: Yale University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1967. Coldness and Cruelty. Trans. Jean McNeil. In Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty/Venus in Furs. New York: Zone Books, 1991, pp. 9—138. Dolmetsch, Carl. 1992. ¡°Our Famous Guest¡±: Mark Twain in Vienna. Athens: University of Georgia Press. 58 Masochism and Maternal Deprivation in Mark Twain Fairbairn, W. R. D. 1941. A Revised Psychopathology of the Psychoses and Neuroses. In Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. New York: Routledge, 1994, pp. 28–58. Fisher, Henry W. 1922. Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field: Tales They Told to a Fellow Correspondent. New York: Nicholas L. Brown. Fatout, Paul, ed. 1976. Mark Twain Speaking. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1905a. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. S.E., vol. 8. ———. 1905b. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. S.E., 7:130–243. ———. 1907. Contribution to a Questionnaire on Reading. S.E., 9:245—47. ———. 1919. The Uncanny. S.E., 17:219—256. ———. 1924. The Economic Problem of Masochism. S.E., 19:159—72. ———. 1930. Civilization and Its Discontents. S.E., 21:64—145. Ghent, Emmanuel. 1990. Masochism, Submission, Surrender: Masochism as a Perversion of Surrender. In Stephen A. Mitchell and Lewis Aron, eds., Relational Psychoanalysis: The Emergence of a Tradition. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 1999, pp. 379—406. Kaplan, Fred. 2003. The Singular Mark Twain: A Biography. New York: Doubleday. Hoffman, Andrew. 1997. Inventing Mark Twain: The Lives of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. New York: Quill Publications. Krafft-Ebing, Richard von. 1886. Psychopathia Sexualis. Trans. Franklin S. Klaf. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1998. Laplanche, Jean, and J.-B. Pontalis. 1967. The Language of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, New York: Norton, 1973. Masson, Jeffrey, trans. and ed. 1985. Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Paine, Albert Bigelow. 1912. Mark Twain: A Biography. New York: Harper Bros. ———, ed. 1920. Letters of Mark Twain. London: Chatto and Windus. ———, ed. 1924. Mark Twain¡¯s Autobiography. 2 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers. Quirk, Tom, ed. 1994. Mark Twain: Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches. New York: Penguin. Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von. 1870. Venus in Furs. Trans. Jean McNeil. In Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty/Venus in Furs. New York: Zone Books, 1991, pp. 143–293. Sanborn, Margaret. 1990. Mark Twain: The Bachelor Years. New York: Doubleday. Twain, Mark. 1869. The Innocents Abroad. New York: Signet Classic, 1966. ———. 1876. Adventures of Tom Sawyer. New York: Signet Classic, 1979. ———. 1899. My First Lie and How I Got Out of It. In Quirk 1994, pp. 256–63. ———. 1938a. The Diary of Adam and Eve. Ed. Bernard DeVoto. London: Hesperus Press, 2002. ———. 1938b. Letters From the Earth. Ed. Bernard DeVoto. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991. ———. 1958. The Autobiography of Mark Twain. Ed. Charles Neider. New York: Harper Perennial, 1990. ———. 1961. Life As I Find It. Ed. Charles Neider. New York: Hanover House. Varble, Rachel M. 1964. Jane Clemens: The Story of Mark Twain¡¯s Mother. New York: Doubleday. Webster, Samuel, and Doris Webster. 1925. Whitewashing Jane Clemens. The Bookman, 61:531–35. Wecter, Dixon, ed. 1947. The Love Letters of Mark Twain. New York: Harper and Brothers. ———., ed. 1949. Mark Twain to Mrs. Fairbanks. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library Publications. Winnicott, D. W. 1967. Delinquency as a Sign of Hope. In Home is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst. Ed. Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepherd, and Madeleine Davis. New York: Norton, 1986, pp. 90–100. ———. 1971. Playing and Reality. New York: Tavistock, 1982. |
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