THE ATHEISM OF MARK TWAIN: THESIS
37cA:)THE ATHEISM OF MARK TWAIN:THE EARLY YEARSTHESISPresented to the Graduate Council of theNorth Texas State Universityin PartialFulfillment of the RequirementsFor the Degree ofMASTER OF ARTSByWesley Britton, B.A.Denton, TexasApril, 19862
Britton, Wesley A. , The Atheism of Mark Twain:Master of Arts (English),, Augustj198 6 , 73 pp.,Early Years.Thebibliography 26 titles.Many Twain scholars believe that his skepticism wasbased on personal tragedies of later years.Others findskepticism in Twain's work as early as The Innocents Abroad.This study determinesthat Twain's atheism is evident in hisearliest writings.Chapter One examines what criticsTwain's religious sense to be.have determinedThese contentions are dis-cussed in light of recent publications and older,oftenignored, evidence of Twain' s atheism.Chapter Two is abiographicalfamily,influences,look at Twain's literary,and at events in Twain's lifeand communityto show that hisreligious antipathy began when he was quite young.ChapterThree examines Twain's early sketches and journalisticsquibs to prove that his voice,subject matter,storytellingtechniques,and antipathy towards the church and otherinstitutions are clearly manifested in his early writings.
TABLE OF CONTENTS. . . . . . . . . . . . .Page. . . .INTRODUCTIO.ChapterI. . .- . - .-- . -26. * . - --II,III.BACKGROUNDTHE . .-WRITINGS.0.,. . . .09. . . . . .4467.0.a.0717
INTRODUCTIONThe purpose of this study is to demonstrate that from avery early age, Samuel Langhorn Clemens had no strongreligious convictions, and that, indeed, for most of his life,he was an atheist.We will see the history of his earlyreligious experiences, and we will see how this aspect ofhis character can be detected in his earliest writings.It might seem to some readers of Mark Twain that thefocus of this study is a restatement of the obvious, thatTwain's religious attitudes are clearly seen in his writings.However, there are, in fact, critics who find Twain areligious man, though one with numerous doubts.WilliamC. S. Pellow, for example, writes in his Mark Twain: Pilgrimfrom Hannibal that "Twain was a religious man, right up tothe last, for no irreligious person could have written TheMysterious Stranger"(185).One of the most exhaustivebibliographies of Twain studies, Roger Assilineau's TheLiterary Reputation of Mark Twain from 1910-1950,does notmention religious skepticism even with its listing of 1300entries.And, as we shall see, Twain is seen by variouscritics as being an agnostic,doubts.a deist, but always as a manofI have found no study, previous to this one, whereTwain is called an atheist, despite the fact that he himselfon more than one occasion,said he did not have anyreligious belief.1
2Some recent Twainians, however, have seen at least partof the obvious, and have pointed to Twain's religiousskepticism in published books and articles on the author thatdeal with Twain's life after 1876.These critics usuallygive only fleeting mention of evidence of Twain's earlyskepticism as one might assume.This study, in fact, is thefirst close examination of Twain's early drift from religionto atheism.It is clear that many examinations of Twain's work arebased on the theory that his skepticism and bitterness in hislate posthumous "dark" writings, such as What is Man?, TheMysterious Stranger, and Letters from the Earth, wereproducts of late-life personal tragedy.Only recently, infact, do we have studies of Twain's early writings that dealwith his early religious skepticism.Two recent dissertationsexamine Twain's religious beliefs in writings as early as TheInnocents Abroad (1869) and Tom Sawyer (1876). There havebeen a few books, including Victor Doyno's Mark Twain:Selected Writings of an American Skeptic and Allison Ensor' sMark Twain and the Bible, which deal with Twain's earliestjournals and short fiction in the light of his religiousfeelings.These books,like most of the studies dealt within Chapter One of this study, only briefly review the yearsbefore The Innocents Abroad.Their studies begin withTwain's major works and do not deal with his first thirtyfive years as closely as I do, with a focus on hisreligious sense.
3Much is written about Twain's early days, but in thewealth of biographies available on Twain, only two fulllength books deal exclusively with the years before Clemensturned thirty-five, and one of these was published asrecently as October, 1985, John Lauber's The Making of MarkTwain.The other, of course, is the renowned Sam Clemens ofHannibal by Dixon Wecter.It is natural enough that the bulk of studies on Twainshould deal with the years after the publication of TheInnocents Abroad--all his important writing begins with thepublication of that travel book.It is also natural thatTwain's distaste for religion--so evident in the laterwritings--should be explored in the light of his laterwritings.It seems as though scholars have traced this facetof Clemens' s thought from the lastbook first,and,goingbackwards, finally explored Twain's religious doubt in TomSawyer and The Innocents Abroad.(And the studies of TomSawyer, to be dealt' with later, were published only recently.)This thesis completes the chainand shows how much ofwhat was contained in the "dark" writings was actually basedon experiences, thoughts, and feelings of the boy called"young Sam" by his family.We shall see that religion, beingonly one of the many peeves of the satirist Mark Twain, was asubject that, for primarily commercial reasons, a popularauthor of the American nineteenth century could not attacktoo overtly.His main reason in writing was to sell his work,
4not deconvert Christians.He had a public, a familyfriends he was responsible to.to think,andHowever, there is no reasonas Albert Bigelow Paine pointed out,that Twain didnot say exactly what he wanted to say (Paine Noteboo}Twain did write that "only dead men tell the truth"i).andhadhis harshest writings published posthumously when hid responsibility would be no more.What I shall be trying t9show isthat these "Letters from the Earth" were based on ideas andconcepts conceived long before he had the desire to writethem down,and before he was in a position to "tellthetruth."The sources for this study are collections of etantTwain journalism,letters, and early fiction, as wellas anumber of reputable biographies based on documents nt readilyavailable to students of Twain.I would like to mention thatwhen one is studying the prolific output of a man like SamuelClemens, contradictions are numerous and are natural thingsto expect from a multifaceted mind.Drawing from a number ofsources, I hope to prove that although Twain's though ts mighthave wavered and, especially in his formative years, he sometimes felt attracted to religion, the simple truth ispersonal philosophy was built on a disbelief in anyofthat histhetenets of the Judeo-Christian theologies, and that there isno evidence to point to his acceptance of any Deisticbeliefs."God," to Mark Twain, was a symbol, a -concept understood byhis neighbors and friends, so when he mentioned "the Deity"he was simply catering to his audience, and Sam Clemens wasa man who knew his audience.
5Twain's earliest books were based on his experienceswith Sunday schools, preachers,tall tale story tellers--colored with his independent spirit that can be seen in hisboyhood.In the following chapter, we shall explore criticswho deal with this area.I will present a short biographyfocused on Sam Clemens's attitudes toward religion.last chapter of this study will explore, inwriting,the earliestTheTwain's ownexamples of his iconoclastic attitude"toward "Presbyterianism.
6CHAPTER BIBLIOGRAPHYPaine, Albert Bigelow, Mark Twain's Notebook,Harper Bros., 1935.New York,Pellowe, William C. S. , Mark Twain;Pilgrim of Hannibal,New York, The HobsonPress, 1945.Book
CHAPTER ITHE CRITICAL BACKGROUNDBecause the focus of this study is on the early years ofSamuel Clemens, 1835-1876, it is not necessary to reviewpublished materials that discuss Twain's religious thoughtand his use of the Bible in his writings after the publicationof The Innocents Abroad in 1876.There are, for example, agreat number of articles that deal only with Twain's attitudestowards religion and his use of the Bible in Huckleberry Finn.Examinations of critical writings on Twain's writings laterThere is no dearththan 1876 are certainly not needed here.of studies on The Mysterious Stranger and other posthumouswritings, and re-examination of this area would be redundant.My focus is on the earliest of Twain's work; and, while secondary scholarship in this area is limited, I must acknowledgethe contributions of a number of critics.The four major critical works that require closestscrutiny include two recent dissertations--Jefferey R. Holland's Mark Twain's Religious Sense:1883(1973)The Viable Years 1835-and Randy Cross's Religious Skepticism in Selec-ted Novels of Mark Twain (1979).Two books, Allison Ensor'sMark Twain and The Bible (1969) and Victor Doyno's Mark Twain:Selected Writings of an American Skepticportant to a study of the early years.7(1983), are also imOther shorter,
8critical studies will also be mentioned,but these four in-depth studies, being more extensive, provide the best ofrecent scholarly studies of the early Twain and of hisreligious sense.Victor Doyno's collection, Mark Twain:ings of an American Skeptic,Selected Writ-is primarily an anthology ofexcerpts from the Twain canon that show, as Doyno writes inhis introduction,that "Twain. was, though not a systematicphilosopher, a skeptic for most of his lifetime"(1).Doy-no's selections begin with Twain's early juvenalia andjournalism (which will be discussed in the chapter on EarlyWritings), and include passages from such unlikely works asA Tramp Abroad, The Prince and The Pauper,Mississippi.and Life on thePassages from other Twain writings, such asHuckleberry Finn and Letters from the Earth, should surpriseno one by their inclusion in this anthology.These laterworks contain adverse criticism of Judeo-Christian belief andhave been explored often.ening.Yet the early passages are enlight-They demonstrate, as Leslie Fiedler says in hisforeword to the book, that Doyno has shown the "subversive"side of Twain, the Mark Twain who cleverly disguised hisantagonism toward Christianity throughout his literarycareer(Doyno xi).Doyno sketches a brief biography of Clemens's earlyyears, which I will incorporate into my chapter on biography.A quick summation is that, due to the influences of his
9parents'varied religious experiences, young Sam "was en-couraged to become a cultural amphibian, able to becomeimmersed and successful in a culture while also remaining ob-jectiveand criticalof it"(5).Doyno indicates that perhaps one of the reasons fewcritics have noted skepticism in Mark Twain's early writingsis that it takes someone with similar views to spot it.Hecites Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., as seeing Twain's skepticism as amirror of his own (6).Then Doyno, after a short history ofSam Clemens's apprentice-printer career, says that, due tothis "poor boy's university," "the printed word held, forSam, little mystical authority"(Doyno 7).What Sam read in the printing house, Doyno writes, influenced not only his writing style but also his attitudes towardsociety."Irony and social criticism permeate this form[frontier journalism, which can vary from the objective reporting of information to imaginative invention"(Doyno 7).This working environment, Doyno correctly deduces, not onlyfostered Clemens's religious skepticism, but also his jaundiced eye at any number of other socially and culturallyaccepted notions.Experience, Doyno implies, creates reli-gious skeptics and individuals who are less credulous thanthose who, like Sam Clemens, have traveled and seen a greatdeal of the world.The last point that Doyno makes which is pertinent to ourpurposes is that the areas Twain would next explore--in bothhis written and oral practices--were influenced by creators of
the tall tale.He says that, especially in the oral traditionof the tall tale, the speaker works on the credulity of hisaudience.This working on the emotions of readers and lis-teners can be linked with the sermons of nineteenth-centuryministers.As we shall see later, Justin Kaplan notes in hisMr. Clemens and Mark Twain that Clemens loved the society ofpreachers because of their common interest in oratory.Clemens, having traveled throughout America,preachers, many storytellers;Samheard manyand, practicing the oral artshimself, he was certainly aware that the gullible were preyto preachers.Victor Doyno does not make this connection:he merely points out that the storyteller Mark Twain waslearning just how man's credulity could be worked onand exploited.Victor Doyno, like Randy Cross and Jefferey Holland, isimportant because he is among the first to observe that accounting for Twain's late life bitterness and skepticism inlight of personal disappointment is a misleading idea.WhatSam Clemens learned at home, at school, in the print shop,and on the road accounts for most of his training insocial criticism.The next critic who requires our attention is Jefferey R.Holland, author of Mark Twain's Religious Sense:Years 1835-1883, published in 1973.The ViableSince he is the onlycritic whose focus completely overlaps my own, I shall treathis views more extensively.
11In his introduction, Holland states that one of his basic premises is "that there was a dim religious light aboutvirtually everything Mark Twain wrote;" that religion wasTwain's burden, and that Twain created "one of the most explicitly religious modes in all of American Literature"(Holland 1-2).Holland lists a number of examples of Twain's biblicalmetaphors in his personal life--naming his cats Famine, Pestilence, Satan, and Sin--and in his business talk--a newbusiness opportunity referred to as a new mission field."Frequently it seems that he had no other metaphors at hisdisposal"(2).In his discussion of the burden of religion, Hollandwrites that "Twain frequently called his religious adversaryPresbyterianism"(3), but Holland believes that this term wasgeneric and was meant to encompass all Christian faith(3).Holland says Twain, like the mongrel pup in "A Dog's Tale,"did not really care about clear theological distinctions(4)."Sin, punishment, conscience, duty, the fear of God,death--these were the staples in his moral pantry"(5),Hol-land writes, and he then discusses his view that guilt and thefear of the Puritan God were obsessions to Twain.Holland'sview of a guilt-ridden Twain is supported by his look at Clemen's guilt over the deaths of a brother, son, and daughter,and he is perhaps the first to note the theme of the earlystories "The Good Little Boy" and "The Bad Little Boy" as aforerunner to Twain's late life"reflections on religion"(6).
12Holland believes that Clemens thought of becoming a minister, despite his well-known letter to his older brotherOrion, in which young Sam said his career choice was limitedand that he could not be a minister "because I lack the necessary prerequisite, i.e., religion"(Holland 7).InPaine's Biography, Twain is quoted as saying that he oncetoyed with the idea of being a minister, not out of piety,but because he needed a secure job.me that a minister could be damned"1:84)."It never occurred to(Paine Biography Vol.I hasten to observe that Clemens was obviously jovialon this occasion and was not in literal fear of the Almighty.Holland takes a peculiar stand by saying Twain was rather serious about being a Presbyterian minister, noting that heonce said,"I couldn't and Orion wouldn't"(7). But as I shalltouch on this point in my examination of Kaplan's biography-Kaplan and I agree that Twain's look at the ministry was basedon an interest in oratory, and that Twain was never seriousabout being "the Reverend Mr. Twain"--I shall not attempt torefute Holland here, but will be addressing his claimsthroughout this thesis.I can say that Holland seems to bealone in his perspective.Holland then turns to his second major premise,that astudy of Clemens's early years allows students of Twain to seethat the formative years are really a study of culture, andthat, for Mark Twain, religion and civilization were synonymous (9).Holland's introduction then veers off into his
13overall focus of showing that Twain's "varied . . . religiousodyssey" can be seen in "the pages of his fiction" and thathis odyssey was a mirror of the religious currents of "nineteenth century America"(10)).The remaining. chapters of Holland's study do not concernus here--what he says that is pertinent to my study is echoedin the works of the critics in the rest of the chapter--and,to this reader, his interesting work strains when he tries tomake Twain an almost perfect one-man-incorporation of .nineteenth-century religious trends.Holland never concludes thatTwain was a skeptic, a doubter, or a deist, but that religionwas a constant burden to the man, and that Clemens's naturalpiety was not enough to stand up to the late-life personalsetbacks and tragedy.Holland's perspective is valid, but,as I have implied, tends to strain on key points, such as thecomments on Twain's desire to be a preacher.In Randy Cross'sdissertation, Holland is dismissed in a two-paragraph statement, which is too cursory as a review.Of all the criticsreviewed in this chapter, Jefferey Holland is the best at noting the key influences of the early years.Still, we differin our conclusions.Randy Cross claims, in his recent dissertation, ReligiousSkepticisminSelected Novels of Mark Twain, that most schol-ars tend to agree that Mark Twain did not believe in theJudeo-Christian God of the Bible, nor in the divinity of JesusChrist (Cross 1).This is due, Cross says, to the studies of
14Twain's posthumous publications, including most notably TheMysterious Stranger (1917), Letters from the Earth (1962),and Mark Twain's Notebook (1935).Cross's thesis is thatthis disbelief can be seen as early as The Innocents Abroad(1869) and when Twain "denounced the authenticity of the Bible and the belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ"(Cross 1).This atheism, Cross shows, can be seen in Tom Sawyer, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and The PersonalRecollections of Joan of Arc.Since the bulk odeals with works written between 1870-1893, wehis studywillbe mostlyconcerned with the material in his introduction.Cross begins his dissertation with a review of criticalwriting on Twain's skepticism, including his look at AllisonEnsor's study.He then says that one of the reasons Twainhated religion was that it was, to him, only superstition(Cross 5).Cross contradicts many of the findings of E. Hud-son Long, editor of The Mark Twain Handbook, who claimed thatTwain never denied the resurrection of Christ. nr the power ofprayer.Cross correctly counters that assertion and points tothe denial of the power of prayer in Huckleberrwill deal with theprayerFinn (6).(Iissue in the'tbhapter on biography.)Long, according to Cross, does not find Twain an atheist,but a Deist, because of one comment Twain made to Albert Bigelow Paine."There is, of course, a great master mind, but itcares nothing for our happiness or our unhappiness"(Cross 6).Cross does nothing with Long's assertion, nor does he cite
15the letters in which Twain refutes even a mechanistic deity.(We will note this in the chapter on biography.)Cross's discussion of Twain's early years continueswith his look at the Clemens-Langdon courtship period.Hebriefly reviews the relationship by noting that Twain claimedto be a Christian in order to be acceptable to the Langdonhousehold.'Butafter the marriage,"Twain refused to parti-cipate in Bible readings and devotions on the grounds that heconsidered it would be hypocritical for him to do so"(Cross 10).Cross surveys a number of other critical writings onTwain's use of the Bible, Twain's attitude toward Adam, andreligious skepticism in his later writings, and he doesbriefly review Jefferey Holland's dissertation which I havealready discussed.Since most of the criticism is not perti-nent to this study, we can summarize Cross's own thesis,which is that the religious skepticism found in Twain's lastwritings can be. seen in his "most popular novels"(31).An-other critic, also examined by Randy Cross, makes moreinsightful assertions than either Holland or Cross.Allison Ensor, author of Mark Twain and the Bible (1969),is another writer who examines Twain's early disparaging ofthe Bible.Like Cross, Ensor begins his study with The Inno-cents Abroad.He begins there because, as he states inChapter One of his book, Twain, while being somewhat flippantwith Bible passages in his early journalism,still spoke ofChrist reverently, and had respect for the Bible and its
16ideals until 1867 when he took the "Quaker City" excursion(Ensor 3-5).I maintain that Sam Clemens usually spokereverently of the deity for two primary reasons:to impresssomeone, usually women (see ty discussion of Kaplan's biography)expect.or because he knew his audiences and what they wouldThis point will be demonstrated in the next chapter.Ensor notes that young Sam's early influences includedhis independent father and the near opposite views which wereheld by Sam's mother and sister, Pamela Moffett(14).He isless successful in his attempt to claim John Quarteles,Sam'suncle, and freemasonary,as principal influences on Sam'searly religious thought.Buthe correctly cites the writingsof Thomas Paine as a strong influence on- Clemens's young mind.Paine's influence has been noted earlier in this thesis.Despite my disagreement with Ensor, his study must bementioned because his book, along with the writings of Crossand Holland, clearly establishes the religious skepticism inTwain's first major book, The Innocents Abroad, and leaves mystudy free to take on the years before Sam Clemens becameMark Twain.In Mark Twain:Rebel Pilgrim (1973), J. Harold Smithpoints to the early influences on Samuel Clemens and liststhem as follows:(1)a budding evolutionary determinism initiated-byMacfarland;(2) a sense of guilt-despair induced bythe death of brother Henry;(3)a daring independence
17generated by success in piloting;(4)a habit ofbrooding speculations fostered by the pilot's wayof life;(5)a variant concept of Deity drawn fromthe Deism of Paine;(6)a spiritof recklessbravado--never unprincipled, always controlled-grown out of the speculative adventures of themining frontier.The pages that precede this list are not enough toestablish fully the basis for these conclusions, yet the conclusions make for an interesting formula. The subject of theScotsman, Macfarlane, cannot be ignored, and will be dealtwith later.Smith's stressing of the guilt over Henry'sdeath is not supported in his argument, and I feel thatClemens's guilt, which was certainly profound, was not greatenough to stand alongside other major influences,such asMacfarlane, whose influence we can easily see in Twain'swritings.The other paints William Smith lists, exceptingthe much-noted Thomas Paine, clearly are interpretations ofTwain's character based on his life on the river.It wouldbe hard to argue those points and equally hard to prove them.Still, they are worth the brief attention I have given them,since Smith is attempting to set Twain's mental stage forthe pilgrimage of the "Quaker City."He isone of the fewwriters we can mention who deal with the years on the riveras having anything to do with Clemens's religious sense.Hehas to be interpretive because the only extant documents we
18have of those piloting years are the notebooks that HoraceBixby commanded the young cub to keep of the MississippiRiver's many landmarks and changes, and the letters SamClemenswrote home.A few of those letters will be disecussed in my chapter on biography.Smith discusses, as does Justin Kaplan, the fact thatit was Olivia Langdon who provided a "pull toward Christianity"(Smith 36).As we shall see in our look at Kaplan's work,this pull was never deep, and was rooted in the love SamuelClemens had for his future wife.When we read The Love Let-ters of Mark Twain (edited by Dixon Wecter in 1949), we caneasily see the pull Livy had on Twain during the courtshipperiod,and we do not need to recount them here--they havealready been dealt with by critics, including Justin Kaplan.It is worth noting that Smith says that by 1876, Twain haddestroyed Livy's Presbyterian faith (Smith 50).This asser-tion can be supported by a quotation from Paine's Biography,where, upon an occasion of heavy bereavement, Clemens-askedhis wife ifshe couldn't find any comfort in Christian faith.She responded, "I can't, Youth,I haven't any"(Paine 650).(Youth was one of Livy's pet names for her husband.)Twaintold Paine that he felt a great sense of guilt at havingbeen the instrument of creating Livy's skepticism,have changed that if he had had the chanceBiography 653).(Paineand would
19Smith concludes his discussion by finding Twain "torDeistictured by religious skepticism which culminated in adeterminism"(157).as I have said,atheist.He is not alone in this conclusion,but,I find it more supportable to find Twain anI do not argue that Twain was not a determinist,but I do not see his belief in a deity.He can be citedquite often for referring to "The Deity"in his works, but,as I claim in my introduction, Mark Twain knew his audience.The comment that Clemens made to Paine about a "master mind"seems to be the only time he said anything like that, especially in later years, except on the occasions Clemens wastrying to impress women, especially Olivia.And we shouldremember the point that Leslie Fiedler recorded in his foreword to Doyno's book-Twain was "subversive" when he slippedhis religious skepticism into his published books.He wrotefor popular taste.I shall conclude this critical overview by examiningthree short articles that all, by chance, were published inthe Mark Twain Journal.The first article, "Darkness at Morning:in Mark Twain's Early Novel Tom Sawyer,"The Bitternesswritten by Joseph S.Feeney, and published in 1978, is an attempt to show that thebitterness and cynicism readers found in The MysteriousStranger(1917), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court(1889), The Tragedy of Puddn'head Wilson (1894), and The ManThat Corrupted Hadleyburg(1900),can be seen in earlier
20He claims that readers saw cynicism in the laterbooks."yet Twain's early, funny books--The Innocents Abroadbooks,un"(1869) or The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)--seemedaffected by this shadow of cynicism"(Feeney 4).Feeney does not deal with Twain's first travel book, butclaims that in Tom Sawyer,"under its bright surface runs aitscurrent of dark bitterness, a bitterness often present inmost humourous moments"(Feeney 4).This bitterness, Feeney says, is seen in Twain's portraying people as stupid; "stupidity prevails"(4).This unkindopinion is then supported by citing passages from the novel,and Feeney focuses his discussion on one type of stupidity,religion."Religion is seen as another of man's mistakes,for religion is found ineffective in the scenes where everydon'tone goes to the mandatory Sunday services but "people'(5).change"Feeney goes further:"religion . . is found ineffecandtive, destroys happiness and boyish joy, brings fearrepression, and is the butt of jokes and situation comedy"(5).Feeney concludes his article by seeing religion por-trayed as a delusion because people are stupid.Feeney triesto demonstrate this in a brief examination of one paragraphabout the funeral of Injun Joe, which he believes showsTwain's attitude that religion is only delusion and hypocrisy.After reading Feeney's roll call of bitter aspects inTom Sawyer, a reader wonders why Twain's religious skepticism
21in this "book for boys" was not recognized earlier.Again,I refer to Fiedler's claim that Twain was subversive in presenting his religious skepticism.Perhaps Victor Doyno isright; the reader must be of a similar mind to see it.In the summer of 1972, The Mark Twain Journal publishedWendy A. Bie's "Mark Twain's Bitter Duality."Bie's discus-sion focuses on her assertion that Twain's duality--his viewsof good and evil, man and beast, and man's separation fromGod-are best recorded in Letters from the Earth, the closestthing we have, says Bie, to a philosophical treatise fromTwain(14).In that work "he leftthe guise of crochetynovelist and gave his increasing spleen full vent"(Bie 14).Bie says that Twain's good-evil duality can be firstseen"as early as 1882, in The Prince and The Pauper"(Bie 14).Her study reveals that she belongs to the tradition of critics who believe Twain's bitter feelings and skepticism wereproducts of his later years; but despite this, she doesinadvertently give some support for those who believe Twain' ssubversive nature was able to come out of the closet onlywhen he wrote items not intended to be published until afterhis death.For example, she notes that the stylistic shiftin Letters from the Earth turned from the narrative form tothe epistolary, which meant writing in the first person(15).There is no reason, Bie says, not to think that Satan's voicewas not Twain's own.Bie's discussion of Twain's problems with God and hislaws primarily focuses on Letters from the Earth and The
22Mysterious Stranger, but it makes occasional references toworks written as early as Tom Sawyer.Bie ends her article bypointing out that, before Clemens fellinto his lastcoma,his last continuous talk was about the good/evil duality inStevenson's Dr. Jekell and Mr. Hyde.I believe that ifWendy Bie had looked at Twain's early writings--say, the earlystories "The Good Little Boy" and "The Bad Little Boy"(whichI will discuss in my chapter on early writings)--she couldhave shown that
Twain's religious attitudes are clearly seen in his writings. However, there are, in fact, critics who find Twain a religious man, though one with numerous doubts. William C. S. Pellow, for example, writes in his Mark Twain: Pilgrim from Hannibal that "Twain was a religious man, right up to the last, for no irreligious person could have written The
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