Psychoanalytical Perspective of Author Mark Twain
Twain was a complicated man who intentionally blurred the boundaries between his personal and professional lives, even using his literary pseudonym (which he adopted in his early 30s) as often as his legal name. One biographer notes that it was “difficult for him to separate his public and his private manner” (Hill, xxiv). It may not be possible to definitively ascertain which self was the “real” identity, Mark Twain or Samuel Langhorne Clemens, as evidence suggests that the two identities were intertwined and inseparable. A more relevant question would be: Why did Clemens make the Mark Twain persona such an important part of his personal life? Examination of available evidence using the psychological lenses of neoanalytic, trait, and humanistic perspectives yields more clarity on this topic.
Historical Background
Samuel Langhorne Clemens-called “Sam” by his family-was born November 30, 1835, the second-youngest of six children. His family lived at the time in a small Missouri village called Florida, but they soon moved to Hannibal, Missouri, the setting of the adventures recounted in the autobiographical novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. His geneological roots were “a mingling of English middle-class and Irish blood on both sides, of Quakers and Indian fighters, independent farmers and small slaveholders” (Wecter, 26). His family was Presbyterian, the hellfire and brimstone sort; as a boy, “he did not believe in Hell, but he was afraid of it” (Wecter, 88). Twain grew up around Negro slaves, playing with their children and learning “woodlore, African superstitions, songs, and stories” (Wecter, 46) that later influenced his literary works.
Young Sam Clemens was mischievous and a troublemaker (Wecter 133). According to Twain himself, “In her old age, Jane Lampton Clemens told her son, ‘You gave me more uneasiness than any child I had'” (Parsons, 183). Meanwhile, his younger brother Henry, the baby of the family, was “exasperatingly good” (Twain 92). Henry was the family favorite because he was “obedient, industrious, and studious,” and Twain based the character of Sid in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer on Henry, but he was also protective of him (Wecter, 130). In Twain’s autobiography, he claims, “I think that the unbroken monotony of [Henry’s] goodness and truthfulness and obedience would have been a burden to [my mother] but for the relief and variety which I furnished in the other direction” (33).
In his childhood and adolescence, Twain experienced the first tragedies in a long series of tragic events that would follow him into old age. His older sister Margaret died of a fever when she was nine years old and Sam was four (Wecter, 51). The year that he was nine years old, there was a measles outbreak in his hometown that killed 40 people; he witnessed a murder when he was ten years old; and at 12 years old while fishing in the river, he found the rotting corpse of a fugitive slave (Wecter, 138-40). Twain’s father died of pneumonia in 1847, and 12-year-old Sam watched secretly through a keyhole while his father’s body was dissected by a doctor (Wecter 115-16).
Twain held various jobs as a teenager and young adult, including working as a printer’s apprentice, a riverboat pilot, and a reporter at a local newspaper (Wecter 200); this is where he first began using the byline “Mark Twain,” which is a call used by riverboat pilots to indicate a depth equaling two fathoms of water (Lawton 345). Throughout his adult life, Twain signed letters alternately as Samuel Clemens and Mark Twain regardless of the recipient or subject of a letter.
A particularly difficult blow came when Twain was in his mid-thirties. Henry, also employed in the steamboat business at the time, was involved in a boiler explosion and did not survive his injuries (Parson, 186). Though Twain had borne the deaths of many family members and acquaintances by the time he was an adult, Henry’s death was the first huge emotional loss to Twain.
In his mid-thirties, Twain married Olivia Langdon (known as Livy); they were married until her death 34 years later. Their first child, a son named Langdon, died in infancy from diptheria (Lawton, 69). They went on to have three daughters-Clara, Susy, and Jean.
Twain’s first bestseller was The Innocents Abroad in 1869. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn were written between 1876 and 1885. Twain’s first significant novel not based on his boyhood memories was A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), which was a satirical discussion of moral and sociological issues.
Twain began giving public lectures, which were not only a source of income but a real pleasure for him. In her memoir of thirty years of service in Twain’s household, Katy Leary compared him to a “great actor,” saying that he was very “dramatic” in his personal as well as public life (Lawton 36). His daughter Clara elaborated, “Father knew the full value of a pause and had the courage to make a long one when required for a big effect” (Clemens 139).
Not satisfied with the royalties from his many books and articles, Twain pursued a number of get-rich-quick schemes and untried inventions. In particular, he believed that the development of an automatic typesetting machine would make him a millionaire (Lawton 105-06), and he invested in other dubious products such as self-adjusting suspenders and a health food supplement called Plasmon (Hill, xix). Twain was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1893 during a recession when his publishing house failed; at 60 years old, he vowed to pay off all his debts, and he succeeded in doing so by means of a world lecture tour (Meltzer, 228; Lawton, 131).
According to one biographer, Hamlin Hill, Twain kept his family fairly isolated; Livy didn’t have many close friends, his daughters had private tutors instead of going to school, and Twain did most of his socializing out of the house away from his family (35, 19). Hill claims that “Clemens forced [his wife] into the Victorian mold of idolized invalid” (xxv). Yet Twain’s marriage was described by his servant Katy Leary as “a great love” (Lawton, 227), and Twain spoke of Livy as “the most beautiful spirit, and the highest and the noblest I have known” (345).
Twain’s last years were plagued by personal tragedy. His daughter Susy died suddenly of spinal meningitis; after a lingering heart-related illness, Livy died eight months later (Twain, 344; Lawton, 136-7). His youngest daughter, Jean, died five years afterward of drowning due to an epileptic fit (371). Twain himself died only four months after Jean’s death. His only remaining daughter, Clara, had just gotten married and was pregnant with Twain’s first grandchild, born four months after Twain’s death (Lawton, 334). Twain’s last piece of writing was an account of Jean’s death (Lawton, 323). He regretted that he had not known Jean well and had only spent a few days in happy company with her (Clemens, 286).
Twain died on April 21, 1910 after a series of heart attacks. The previous year, Twain had said to Albert Bigelow Paine (his authorized biographer), “I came in with Halley’s comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it” (Paine). And so he did.
Neoanalytic Perspective
Neoanalytic theory is particularly useful for understanding facets of Mark Twain’s personality because of its inclusion of spirituality and mysticism. Katy Leary stated that she believed that Twain was a spiritual man, even if he wasn’t traditionally religious (Lawton, 205). Twain’s spiritual agnosticism may have been based more on the African slave superstitions he grew up with than the Calvinistic sermons he heard in church every Sunday. Although Twain loved a good joke and may have been stretching the truth in his recounting of supernatural occurrences, not all of them can be easily explained.
Young Sam had a reputation for dream premonitions (Wecter, 197). Only days before his sister Margaret died, Sam sleepwalked into her room and “plucked” at the covers repeatedly, the way that dying people were said to do, “which the family took to be evidence of his second sight” (Wecter, 51). Twain also had a prophetic dream about seeing his younger brother’s corpse, only days before Henry was mortally wounded in a steamboat explosion (Parson, 186). Many years later after his daughter Jean’s death, Twain wrote that Jean’s spirit had visited him immediately after her funeral in the form of “a current of cold air” that disappeared as soon as he said Jean’s name (Clemens, 285). Twain and his wife had attempted to contact their daughter Susy’s spirit in a sÃ?©ance but were unsuccessful (Hill, 33). Twain’s views on life after death wavered with each new tragedy. In her biography of her father, Clara Clemens reports, “Sometimes he felt sure that death ended everything, but most of the time he felt sure of a life beyond” (280).
Perhaps because of his own experience with prophetic dreams, Twain was avidly interested in the imagery and symbolism of the dream world. He wrote, “I was never old in a dream yet” (Parsons, 204). Twain believed that his spirit actually experienced everything that took place in a dream, without the encumbrance of his physical body. His hope was that upon his physical death, his unencumbered spirit would “continue its excursion and activities without change, forever” (Parsons, 204).
Specifics of Jungian theory
By Jung’s definition, Twain must certainly be considered an extrovert, as his libido (psychic energy) was focused almost entirely toward people and things in the external world. As a writer, engaged in the solitary activity of drawing stories from his inner world, he necessarily displayed introvert qualities as well; however, it should be noted that many of his best-loved tales were based on external events that occurred during his own boyhood.
Examining Twain’s life through the lens of Jungian archetypes brings to light some notable comparisons. First, the concept of the persona-a socially acceptable mask worn to protect the vulnerable “real” self-becomes a complex issue when Twain’s life is the context. He so enjoyed the public and private reactions to his dramatic and boisterous persona that he rarely allowed anyone to see any other side of him. In the last ten years of his life, whether consciously or not, Twain incorporated the “wise old man” archetype into his public persona; reporters were constantly contacting him for his opinion on everything from politics to social events, and he did nothing to discourage this.
Twain’s anima-the female side of his personality that affected his relationships with women and girls-appears in particularly intriguing ways, if not commendable ones. Hill accuses Twain of forcing his wife into a reclusive invalid state and trying to restrain his adult daughters from having careers or being courted by men. Twain was extremely sentimental about his relationship with his daughters when they were prepubescent; describing the mini-biography of him that Susy wrote at age 14, he wrote, “I have had no compliment, no praise, no tribute from any source that was so precious to me as this one was and still is” (Hill, 201). Yet during most of his last ten years, his daughters were estranged from him. Meanwhile, he began initiating platonic but sentimental friendships with teenage girls, so many of them that they had nicknames; he referred to them individually as Angel Fish but collectively as the Aquarium (127-8).
Adler’s theories
Twain’s struggle to prove himself to the world at large went so deep that it essentially subsumed his private self. Rather than “the famous humorist writer Mark Twain” being a subset of Samuel Clemens’ personality, Mark Twain and Samuel Clemens became one interchangeable identity. In attempting to find his place in society, the writer lost any sense of who he might be outside of the public persona of Mark Twain.
There is no question that Twain qualifies as having a superiority complex by Adler’s definition. All sources, whether supporters or detractors of Twain in general, agree that he had no shortage of what Hill calls “self-assurance” and “vanity” (xxiii). He rarely admitted that he might be in the wrong, and he insisted on viewing his obvious faults (such as excessive smoking) from a dismissively humorous viewpoint.
Twain’s early life in the Clemens household provides an interesting glimpse of the family dynamics described in Adler’s birth order theory. Twain was the fifth-born of six children. The oldest child, Orion, was ten years older, making his existence less relevant to Twain’s eventual personality. Pamela and Margaret, the next oldest, can be dismissed because of the cultural context that made female siblings irrelevant as a competitive threat; aside from that fact, it is also true that Pamela was eight years older than Twain, and that Margaret died when Twain was only four years old. Despite a mere three-year difference in age, it is unlikely that the next oldest, Benjamin, had much influence on Twain, as this brother is hardly mentioned by biographers and ignored in Twain’s autobiography (Wecter, 29-49). The most significant dynamic originated with the birth of Henry, who usurped Twain’s place as the baby of the family and provided the added insolence of being unbearably good.
Erikson’s stage theory
Because Twain lived to be 74 years old and so much is known about his life, his history is a useful illustration of the stages described in Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development. Although there is not much information about the period of his early life encompassed by Erikson’s first three stages, biographers make it clear that Twain’s father was humorless and not overtly affectionate with his children (Wecter, 67), which may have contributed to lack of resolution in the “Trust vs. Mistrust” and “Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt” stages. He certainly exhibited signs of extreme distrust in acquaintances and business partners later in life, as described below in the section on trait theory.
Also affecting these stages and “Initiative vs. Guilt” may have been Twain’s constant state of being in trouble with his mother from toddlerhood to his early school years. As a school-age child (the years recounted in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer), Twain was the scourge of the classroom and the envy of all his peers, receiving different messages about his behavior from other children than he did from adults (and unlike his brother Henry, putting much higher priority on the opinions of his peers). In adolescence (“Identity vs. Role Confusion”), the loyalty of his peers continued to take precedence over the efforts of adults to correct his behavior, and it wasn’t until after his father’s death that Twain began to assume some of the responsibilities of adulthood.
The “Intimacy vs. Isolation” stage was a success for Twain as he formed lifelong friendships and, in his late 20s, courted and married his wife. During the “Generativity vs. Stagnation” period of middle adulthood, he published most of his significant literary works, raised a family, and became a household name due to his writing and the popularity of his lectures.
The final years of Twain’s life were not happy ones, and in the “Integrity vs. Despair” stage he fell short of complete integrity. He felt partly responsible for the deaths of so many people he loved, including three of his four children, and was estranged from his adult daughters. Although he knew that he had left a tremendous mark on the world, not only in a literary sense but because of his extravagant personality, Twain believed himself less than perfect in his handling of personal relationships and expressed regret on several occasions. In 1886 he wrote sorrowfully that he had discovered that his children had “stood all their days in uneasy dread of my sharp tongue and uncertain temper” (Hill 271).
Trait Perspective
Allport’s categories
Twain’s personality presents a challenge for Allport’s trait theory. The sheer complexity of Twain’s contradictory personality immediately rules out the concept of a cardinal trait. However, he was remarkably consistent in his presentation of traits regardless of context, which therefore eliminates the possibility of secondary traits. This leaves the likelihood of Twain having had, as Allport defined it, between five and ten consistent central traits. The real challenge lies in defining those traits, a task probably better off left to biographers who have access to the full contents of Twain’s private history. For the purpose of this paper, it could be ventured that Twain’s central traits included self-assurance, vanity, insecurity, humor, charm, and creativity.
Five Factor theory
For the same reasons that Jung would undoubtedly have considered Twain an extrovert, McCrae and Costa would have done so as well. He had also had numerous neurotic qualities, including a lifelong smoking habit (Wecter, 154); a propensity for eating only one meal a day, which often consisted only of coffee and heavily salted-and-peppered boiled eggs (Clemens, 78); his inability to sleep in a room containing a ticking clock, which on one occasion led him to remove every clock from the house and put them out into the yard (Lawton, 78-9); and his horror of becoming bald, which he addressed by having his housekeeper massage his scalp every night for thirty years (Lawton, 27-8).
Twain’s score on the “agreeableness” factor varies according to the source. Katy Leary calls him wonderfully hospitable, but also says that he would turn away visitors rudely if he wasn’t in the mood to socialize or if they interrupted his writing (Lawton, 32-4). By most accounts, Twain had a terrible temper. Leary recounts that Twain once threw all of his clean shirts out of his bedroom window because a button was missing from one shirt (Lawton, 74), and Clara experienced his wrath whenever she received undue attention from young men-once Twain cut all of the decorative fruit off of Clara’s hat because he thought it attracted excessive attention (Hill, xxvi). In one of the surviving letters between Twain and his wife, Livy exhorts him to show the world his sweet and tender side instead of always railing at it (Hill, 40).
Twain also gets a divided score on the “conscientiousness” quality, especially in terms of financial matters. On the one hand, when he found himself deep in debt at age 60, he undertook a world tour of lecturing in order to earn back the money to repay his creditors-and he followed through on this promise. However, as Hill points out, Twain “almost never consulted his wife or family about investments which directly affected their security, future, and well-being” (9).
The final Big Five trait, “openness to experience,” is clearly exhibited in Twain’s willingness as a young man to undertake several different kinds of jobs, including the dangerous role of being a riverboat captain, and in his eagerness as a young boy to explore the nearby Mississippi River with his comrades, as recounted in the Tom Sawyer stories.
Traits according to Eysenck
Based sheerly on Twain’s tendency to stir up excitement and scandal whenever things got a little dull, it is easy to state that Eysenck would have considered Twain an extrovert who craved external stimuli. As mentioned above, Twain also had numerous neurotic qualities. However, he exhibited no psychotic qualities and functioned perfectly well in the habitats he experienced.
Cattell’s 16 factors
Because of space constraints, this section will examine only a select few of Cattell’s 16 personality factors in correlation with Twain’s personality. First, in the “apprehension” category, Twain definitely qualifies as “insecure.” He was habitually suspicious of co-investors, often accusing them of bad intentions or outright thievery (Hill, xix); and whenever he misplaced part of a manuscript, he accused Katy Leary of burning it (Lawton, 13-16). Second, in the “emotional stability” category, he might be called “high-strung”; he alternated between moods of “ebullient scheming” and “black despair” (Hill, 11), and one biographer puts it this way: “Happiness captured more hours of existence, and despair achieved greater intensity” (Parsons, 183).
In the category of “privateness,” Twain was undoubtedly “pretentious,” as illustrated by the incidents with the Oxford robes. After receiving an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Oxford, he wore the ceremonial robes to nearly every special occasion, including Clara’s wedding, “in what was his habitual but perhaps unconscious impulse to center attention on himself” (Hill, 244). Katy Leary also notes that “he liked himself in them Oxford things and had his picture taken in them a lot” (Lawton, 285). In the “rule consciousness” category, Twain falls under “freethinking.” As one example, he had always hated the dark suits that men were expected to wear in those times. In the last few years of his life, he began wearing all-white suits-described by Katy Leary as “everything white-shoes, stockings, cravats, hats, everything!” as well as a cape-like purple coat (Lawton, 269).
Finally, in the category of “warmth,” it is difficult to determine where Twain falls. There are many documented instances of his loving and affectionate nature, ranging from his treatment of his young daughters (he arranged for a bedridden Clara to receive 100 valentines [Lawton, 6]) to his fondness for cats (if one of his many cats jumped onto the billiards table while he was playing, he would abandon the game so as not to disturb the fun of the cat [Lawton, 315]). Additionally, Katy Leary says that he was “easy to approach, and to tell anything to,” and that he “had a big heart” (Lawton, 340) and “always kept his promises” (299). But, as mentioned above, his unpredictable hospitality to guests and the temper to which he exposed his family on a regular basis tell another story.
Humanistic Perspective
Rogerian views
Although it is possible that Twain himself believed otherwise, an outsider can hardly argue with the idea that he received the epitome of “unconditional positive regard.” Simply his popularity as an author and speaker would have provided it. As Katy Leary put it, “Everybody wanted him for everything; he had to speak at all the grand dinners that was [sic] given in New York or Boston or any of the big cities” (Lawton 193). And despite his shortcomings, Twain was adored by his family and numerous close friends.
Maslow’s hierarchy
Twain nearly reaches the top of Maslow’s pyramid. Biological and safety needs had not even been an issue since his childhood, and he received belonging and love from his family and friends, and esteem from the whole world for more than half of his life. Yet, using Maslow’s criteria, we cannot call Mark Twain self-actualized.
“Zestfulness and spontaneity” were among the qualities he did display. His close friend William Dean Howells once remarked of Twain, “He was a youth to the end of his days” (Wecter, 65). His creativity is certainly not in question. And it is obvious that Twain possessed a wicked and yet sometimes gentle sense of humor, which not only shows up in his books but was sprinkled liberally throughout his personal life, as illustrated by the tale of the missing cravat. Twain once paid a social call to a female friend of the family, not realizing he had forgotten to wear a tie. When he returned home, his wife asked him with alarm if he had gone out in public that way. Twain went up to his bedroom, wrapped up one of his ties, and immediately had it delivered to the woman he had just visited, with a note enclosed that read, “Dear Madam: This will complete my call” (Lawton, 271-2).
Twain also exhibited compassion for others. He helped fund Helen Keller’s education and also paid to send a young sculptor to school (Lawton, 257 and 90), and he funded the Yale education of a Negro student as partial repayment for the fact that his own parents and grandparents owned slaves (Wecter, 5). However, many of Maslow’s criteria for self-actualization are missing in Twain’s life story. In terms of capacity for detachment and privacy, he failed miserably by making his private life very public, with no clear boundary between public persona and family life. In terms of acceptance of others, as one example, Twain was not supportive of Clara’s singing career and did not attend most of her public performances (Hill, 20). And in terms of what is perhaps the most important criterion, comfort with reality, it can be argued that he was not comfortable with his reality at all, based on his obsession with his Hannibal boyhood and with the young girls who acted as surrogates for his already-grown daughters.
Flow theory
It is not possible, based on the documents available to the general public, to ascertain whether Twain would have considered himself to be in a flow state when he was writing or lecturing. We cannot know whether he experienced inner clarity, complete focus, serenity and ecstasy, and a sense of timelessness during these activities. However, it can be said for certain that they were “doable” activities and that there was intrinsic motivation for doing them (although there were also extrinsic ones, such as income and public expectations). Clara Clemens wrote that her father was “always happiest when at work” (81), which may account for serenity and/or ecstasy. It can be concluded that, based on available evidence, it is likely but not certain that Twain experienced a flow state.
Conclusion
Mark Twain was a complex and contradictory individual who left behind a wealth of documentation upon which psychological conclusions can be based. Although the neoanalytic, trait, and humanistic theories are well-suited to examine Twain’s personality based on documentary evidence, in the end no absolute conclusions can be drawn. For a man who deliberately lived most of his life in a public spotlight, Twain is remarkably mysterious. To psychoanalyze him requires a great deal of conjecture. Considering that his most famous book was an autobiographical novel detailing his childhood exploits, it seems only fitting that an analysis of Mark Twain necessitates the use of the analyst’s imagination.
