Question

Mark Twain has been called the inventor of the American novel. And he surely deserves additional praise: the man who popularized the clever literary attack on racism.

I say clever because anti-slavery fiction had been the important part of the literature in the years before the Civil War. H. B. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is only the most famous example. These early stories dealt directly with slavery. With minor exceptions, Twain planted his attacks on slavery and prejudice into tales that were on the surface about something else entirely. He drew his readers into the argument by drawing them into the story.

Again and again, in the postwar years, Twain seemed forced to deal with the challenge of race. Consider the most controversial, at least today, of Twain’s novels, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Only a few books have been kicked off the shelves as often as Huckleberry Finn, Twain’s most widely read tale. Once upon a time, people hated the book because it struck them as rude. Twain himself wrote that those who banned the book considered the novel “trash and suitable only for the slums (贫民窟).” More recently the book has been attacked because of the character Jim, the escaped slave, and many occurences of the word nigger. (The term Nigger Jim, for which the novel is often severely criticized, never appears in it.)

But the attacks were and are silly—and miss the point. The novel is strongly anti-slavery. Jim’s search through the slave states for the family from whom he has been forcibly parted is heroic. As J. Chadwick has pointed out, the character of Jim was a first in American fiction—a recognition that the slave had two personalities, “the voice of survival within a white slave culture and the voice of the individual: Jim, the father and the man.”

There is much more. Twain’s mystery novel Pudd’nhead Wilson stood as a challenge to the racial beliefs of even many of the liberals of his day. Written at a time when the accepted wisdom held Negroes to be inferior (低等的) to whites, especially in intelligence, Twain’s tale centered in part around two babies switched at birth. A slave gave birth to her master’s baby and, for fear that the child should be sold South, switched him for the master’s baby by his wife. The slave’s lightskinned child was taken to be white and grew up with both the attitudes and the education of the slave-holding class. The master’s wife’s baby was taken for black and grew up with the attitudes and intonations of the slave.

The point was difficult to miss: nurture (养育), not nature, was the key to social status. The features of the black man that provided the stuff of prejudice—manner of speech, for example— were, to Twain, indicative of nothing other than the conditioning that slavery forced on its victims.

Twain’s racial tone was not perfect. One is left uneasy, for example, by the lengthy passage in his autobiography (自传) about how much he loved what were called “nigger shows” in his youth—mostly with white men performing in black-face—and his delight in getting his mother to laugh at them. Yet there is no reason to think Twain saw the shows as representing reality. His frequent attacks on slavery and prejudice suggest his keen awareness that they did not.

Was Twain a racist? Asking the question in the 21st century is as wise as asking the same of Lincoln. If we read the words and attitudes of the past through the “wisdom” of the considered moral judgments of the present, we will find nothing but error. Lincoln, who believed the black man the inferior of the white, fought and won a war to free him. And Twain, raised in a slave state, briefly a soldier, and inventor of Jim, may have done more to anger the nation over racial injustice and awaken its collective conscience than any other novelist in the past century.

1. How do Twain’s novels on slavery differ from Stowe’s?

A．Twain was more willing to deal with racism.

B．Twain’s attack on racism was much less open.

C．Twain’s themes seemed to agree with plots.

D．Twain was openly concerned with racism.

2.Recent criticism of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn arose partly from its ______.

A．target readers at the bottom

B．anti-slavery attitude

C．rather impolite language

D．frequent use of “nigger”

3.What best proves Twain’s anti-slavery stand according to the author?

A．Jim’s search for his family was described in detail.

B．The slave’s voice was first heard in American novels.

C．Jim grew up into a man and a father in the white culture.

D．Twain suspected that the slaves were less intelligent.

4.The story of two babies switched mainly indicates that ______.

A．slaves were forced to give up their babies to their masters

B．slaves’ babies could pick up slave-holders’ way of speaking

C．blacks’ social position was shaped by how they were brought up

D．blacks were born with certain features of prejudice

5.What does the underlined word “they” in Paragraph 7 refer to?

A．The attacks.                            B．Slavery and prejudice.

C．White men.                            D．The shows.

6.What does the author mainly argue for?

A．Twain had done more than his contemporary writers to attack racism.

B．Twain was an admirable figure comparable to Abraham Lincoln.

C．Twain’s works had been banned on unreasonable grounds.

D．Twain’s works should be read from a historical point of view.

 

Answer 1

【答案】

1.B

2.D

3.C

4.C

5.D

6.A

【解析】

【文章大意】本文是议论文，主要是对马克吐温及他几部作品的评论。文中描述了人们对马克吐温几部作品的评价，认为他的作品有争议性，没有直接表现反对奴隶制度和种族主义，但作者认为和他同时期的作家相比马克吐温在反对种族主义方面做了更大的贡献。

1.从第二段可知H. B. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin是比较有名的反奴隶制的小说，它和其它早期的小说一样直接针对奴隶制，但是马克吐温是个例外，他把对奴隶制和偏见的攻击放在那些看起来是写其它内容的小说里面，让读者在读故事的时候自己去分析辨别，所以说他不是直接地公开反对种族主义。

2.从第三段最后一句可知，这本书因为用了太多的“Nigger Jim”而受到批判。

3.从第四段可知作者认为马克吐温的小说是强烈反对奴隶制度的，在美国小说中吉姆这个人物首次获得认可，被认为是具备两种特征，即：是白人奴隶文化中幸存者的代言人和吉姆作为一个父亲一个男人的代言人。

4.从第六段可知是养育（生活环境）而不是自然是形成社会地位的关键。

5.第七段的最后两句表明我们没有理由认为马克吐温把年轻时的“黑人表演”代表了现实，他对奴隶制度和偏见的攻击表明他明确知道这些“表演”并没有表现现实。

6.很多批评家认为马克吐温的作品有争议性，没有直接表现出反对奴隶制度和种族主义，但作者通过对几部小说人物的分析指出和他同时期的作家相比马克吐温在反对种族主义方面做了更大的贡献。