Mark Twain’s Well-Known Preoccupation with Switching Identities and Twins Suggests Multiple Personality

If you search “Mark Twain” in this blog, you will find nine posts on him in December 2013. Neither today’s post nor the upcoming one on Huckleberry Finn will cover the same ground as those nine. So please read them, or you will miss some very interesting things.

Today’s post quotes from an article by Bradford Smith in the March 1963 issue of College English. It discusses Mark Twain’s preoccupation with switching identities and with twins. But the article makes no mention of multiple personality, which is remarkable, since switching identities is the basic idea of multiple personality, and twins are the theme of the double, a literary metaphor for multiple personality.

“The key to Mark Twain’s mind is the concept of identity. In every one of his important books it is the identity of the individual on which his attention focuses. And on the mystery of identity. The quest for identity is central to both his writing and his personality. Its importance in his works can be traced to its importance in his life. The devices that recur in his stories—disguise, deception, self-deception and make-believe—all grow out of this concern with identity…

“In Pudd’nhead Wilson a pair of noble Italian twins turn up…for no apparent reason. Any stranger would have done as well and would have been more plausible. Mark’s own explanation of them is very funny; it forms the preface to Those Extraordinary Twins…Yet why did Mark Twain want to write about twins in the first place?…Why does the idea of twins fascinate him, so that he introduces them even in books which have no apparent need for them? Twins dramatize the mystery of identity…

“Tom changed his identity for fun and Huck changed his out of desperation, to save himself from his father and from one impending catastrophe after another. In either case the fun arises out of this artificial twinning—this separation of the true and assumed identity…Mark Twain found in himself both the Tom Sawyer whose deceptions were pure fun and the Huck Finn whose deceptions were necessary…

“Mark Twain. He was not one, but two. He himself was the extraordinary twins—dark and light, brave and shy, realist and romanticist…companion of mining camp and steamboat toughs and a lion of polite society, tender father and husband but a man who still loved profanity…Mark Twain as jester could be a hundred people, a hundred personalities…In the name of Mark Twain there is not only a fond recollection of the river days when the leadsman called out “Mark twain” to Sam Clemens up in the pilot house, guiding his boat through bars and reefs. There is also an obvious pun which asks us to mark the twain in man—the mystery of identity.”

Bradford Smith. “Mark Twain and the Mystery of Identity.” College English, Vol. 24, No. 6 (Mar., 1963), pp. 425-430.