logo

26 pages 52 minutes read

Mark Twain

The Invalid's Story

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1874

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Background

Literary Context: Mark Twain’s Frontier Humor

Mark Twain and his friend Joe Twichell, a clergyman, vacationed in Bermuda in May 1877. Twain described this trip in a series of stories for The Atlantic Monthly, edited by his good friend William Dean Howells and published beginning in October of that year. Republishing the stories in his 1882 collection The Stolen White Elephant, Etc., Twain added a note about another passenger, the one who narrates “The Invalid’s Story.” Howells had discouraged him from publishing the story on several occasions, arguing that with its focus on an odor, it was too indelicate for public consumption. Despite this, Twain was determined to publish the story; although he was sensitive to his perception as a “mere humorist” by the elite Eastern literary writers, he also wanted to show the merits of his chosen genre, frontier humor.

The Eastern elites, such as essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, poet John Greenleaf Whittier, and Howells himself, focused in their literature on high-minded ideals and virtues. Frontier humor, in contrast, is based on earthiness and exaggeration. It embraces the concept of the American West and Twain’s native Midwest as a place where tough guys battled the wilderness and over-the-top humor was the best remedy for enduring hardship. In “The Invalid’s Story,” Twain shows a kind friend on an earnest mission traveling, significantly, in a westward direction in a situation that becomes increasingly preposterous and entirely human.

In particular, frontier humor allowed Twain to exploit his considerable ear for local dialects and his gift for deadpan understatement. Thompson’s dialogue in “The Invalid’s Story” is especially humorous. In one scene, for example, Thompson is pontificating on scripture, calling death “awful solemn and cur’us” (Paragraph 11), but he interrupts his own mini-sermon to break a windowpane so that he can breathe fresh air. The narrator follows suit. Thompson then goes on paraphrasing scripture as if nothing strange has happened.

Cultural Context: Victorian Sensibilities

Mark Twain wrote during the reign of Great Britain’s Queen Victoria (1819-1901). Sensibilities considered “Victorian” were also revered by Americans who considered themselves cultured. They included prudishness toward sex and bodily functions, rigid concepts of identity and class, a sentimental view of mortality, and an occasionally hypocritical view of institutional Christianity.

“The Invalid’s Story” pokes fun at Victorian prudishness, especially toward odors. Professor and Twain scholar John H. Davis points out that “this tale of a smell may be a subtle satire about perceptions or judgments of others and of suitable subjects for literature” (Davis, John H. “The Scent of a Satire: Validating ‘The Invalid’s Story.’” The Mark Twain Annual, no. 10, 2012, pp. 71-90). Twain had written before about smells, particularly in an essay called “About Smells,” making fun of a clergyman who complained about having to share the church with “common” working people who would bring bad odors inside. Twain pointed out in the essay that the apostles of Jesus dealt with unclean people daily and probably had a rather fishy smell themselves. In an 1876 piece, “1601: Conversation, as It Was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors,” Twain presented a discussion of royals and artists discussing flatulence. In “The Invalid’s Story,” a bad smell is not only more powerful than the humans that encounter it, but also the topic that comes to dominate their dialogue and actions.

The body in the story is not, as the narrator reveals from the start, the source of the offensive smell. However, through The Power of the Imagination, the body is perceived as the source, forcing the characters to abandon all sentimentality they have toward the corpse. In another blow to Victorian sensibility, the entire story is rife with Christian symbolism, from its journey with a body dead “two or three days” toward Bethlehem to its quoting of both the holy scripture and the hymn “Sweet By and By” (about the afterlife). Now, however, the “body” is really a box full of guns, and the experience of death is not sentimental, but offensive—and even deadly.

blurred text
blurred text
blurred text
blurred text