I do not have much experience reading anything by Mark Twain, and I enjoying reading something that can be meaningful and funny at the same time. However, the short stories that have really interested me this week in class were “The Outcasts of Poker Flats” and “Under the Lion’s Paw” which were unbelievably and utterly tragic.
With Harte’s story, I don’t want to go too far with the poker metaphors but I started to try and see if it might go deeper than we discussed in class today. I think that when Mr. Oakhurst signed his own ‘epitaph’ as having a ‘streak of bad luck’ it probably applied to more characters in the story than just him. Obviously, none of them were lucky if they were being banished from their town, but that isn’t what I mean. I thought that, in the end, when Piney and the Duchess die together, Harte was using them as mirrors of each other—one as a sweet virgin and one as a prostitute—maybe to show how different life can end up when you are dealt a better hand to play with.
I have no interpretation for “Under the Lion’s Paw” simply because it depressed me so much after reading it. I had trouble getting at the underlying meaning, not because it was a bad story, but just because Garland evoked so much sympathy in me for his characters. For this blog, I tried to find an actual law that would support what Butler did to Haskins and his family in the story, but when I searched I could only find today’s laws that are more lenient toward the tenant than they must have been when the story took place. I’d be curious to see if anyone else in class wondered the same thing and if they found anything out about it.
1 comment:
That's a good point, Ruchell, about the Duchess/Piney Woods being mirrors of each other who were dealt different hands.
Today's laws give tenants more rights, but improvements made to a property are still likely to belong to the landlord. Garland wanted to change those laws.
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