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“Among you boys you have a game: you stand a row of bricks on end a few inches apart; you push a brick, it knocks its neighbor over, the neighbor knocks over the next brick—and so on till all the row is prostrate. That is human life. A child's first act knocks over the initial brick, and the rest will follow inexorably.”
Mark Twain never wore black leather. There is nothing to attest that he ever asked to be whipped or beaten, and there is no record of his ever having attended an S&M club. His autobiography reveals no proclivity for sexual depravities or self-mutilation. By most definitions, Mark Twain was no masochist. Yet this essay will show the pervasiveness of masochistic scenes and themes in Twain's writing and seek to demonstrate that their origin lies in the deprivations he suffered at the hands of his mother, Jane Clemens, which led to unconscious fears of passivity, effeminization, and infantilization. Superimposed on this bedrock were Twain's ambivalent relationship with his father, John Clemens, and his guilt over the deaths of his siblings in childhood.
The term “masochism” did not exist until 1886, the year that Twain celebrated his fifty-first birthday, when Richard von Krafft-Ebing introduced the notion to the world in Psychopathia Sexualis, where he defined it as “the perfect counterpart of sadism,” a “peculiar perversion of the sexual life in which the individual affected, in sexual feeling and thought, is controlled