女性主义视角解读马克·吐温《亚当夏娃日记》(2)

菜单

3 Eve’s Awakening of Female Consciousness 8

3.1 Eve’s Awareness of Independence 8

3.2 Eve’s Sense of Rationality 9

3.3 Eve’s Pursuit of Happiness 10

3.4 Eve’s Understanding of Equality between Male and Female 11

4 The Realization of Eve’s Life Identity and Adam’s Change 13

4.1 Eve’s Rights of Naming and Speaking 13

4.2 Eve’s Influence on Adam 14

4.3 Adam’s Change 15

5 Forming Reason of Mark Twain’s Understanding of the Harmonious Life between Male and Female 17

5.1 Mark Twain’s Understanding of Wife Identity in Marriage 17

5.2 Mark Twain’s Approaches to Harmonious Relationship between Male and Female 18

6 Conclusion 20

Bibliography 22

1Introduction

Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in the town of Florida, Missouri, was an American author and humorist. As the greatest American humorist of his age, Twain was very popular. His keen wit and incisive satire earned praise from critics and peers. Twain spent his young life in a fairly affluent family that a number of household slaves. After his father, an attorney and a local judge, died, however, the family was in hardship. To support his family, Twain left school, worked for a printer, and, in 1851, having finished his apprenticeship, he began to set type for his brother Orion’s newspaper, the Hannibal Journal. But soon he left Hannibal, becoming a sort of itinerant printer and found work in a number of American cities, including New York and Philadelphia. While still in his early twenties, Twain gave up his printing career in order to work on riverboats on the Mississippi. Eventually, he became a riverboat pilot, and his life on the river exerted great impact on his literature. Perhaps most important, the riverboat life gave him the pen name Mark Twain, who was inspired by the riverboat leadsmen’s signal—“By the mark, twain”—that the water was deep enough for safe passage. Travelling on the river also served as fodder and muses for several of Twain’s books, including the raft scenes of Huckleberry Finn and gave the material for his Autobiographical novel Life on the Mississippi (1883).

Twain and Olivia Langdon were married in Elmira, New York, where he courted her and managed to overcome her father's initial reluctance. They had four children, one son and three daughters. But all of his family died, which left he alone going through a period of deep depression. To go back the normal life, he formed a club and said that the club was his “life’s chief delight” ( LeMaster J. R., 1993:28). Later, fortunately, he met Dorothy Qiuck who accompanied him passing through a period of lonely time, and their friendship lasted until Twain’s death, which gave Twain much comfort.

Twain died of a heart attack on April 21, 1910, one day after the comet’s closest approach to Earth just as he was born shortly after a visit by Halley’s Comet and predicted that he would leave along with it, too. He was called “the father of American literature” by William Faulkner.

Twain’s later work, The Diary of Adam and Eve, is mainly about the daily life of two main characters, Adam and Eve, but different from his other works, the whole story is written in the form of diaries. It presents readers a vivid picture of their lives. Though with simple language, we can experience the first meeting of the hero and heroine, the changing of them, the development of their love from the records of their own minds.