Mark Twain (1835-1910) exposed human hypocrisy in many his stories. “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg”(1899), written in his later years, is one of the best examples of such stories.
In this story, Twain describes good and evil in a truly complicated way. For example, Mr. Richards, one of the inhabitants of “the most honest and upright town, ” tells a lie, which is an absolutely evil act, but the lie will help another inhabitant, the Reverend Burgess, to escape from the attack of the town people. When Mr. Richards has been driven into a corner, the Reverend Burgess also tells a lie to help him and his wife, but the act causes their death. We can see Twain's criticism of hypocrisy in such descriptions of complicated good and evil.
In fact, Twain does not only show his criticism of hypocrisy, but also his idea of an escape from hypocrisy in this story. Freudian psychoanalysis can make this clear to us. Freud separates the human mind into three parts: the ego, the super-ego, and the id. In this story, the ego is embodied in Mr. and Mrs. Richards, the super-ego is the town itself, or “the principles of honest dealing.” In this case, however, the super-ego, which must naturally function as a beacon for morality, serves as a cause for hypocrisy, rather than a safeguard against it. What Twain presents as the alternative to the super-ego as a beacon is the id. Goodson, one of the important characters, shows us “the pleasure principle” in this story, so we can say he is the embodied id. He could easily ignore the moral order, or “the principles of honest dealing, ” and is hated by the town people, but Twain describes him as the only person who has the potential to help people in trouble, as his name indicates; that is, by embodying the id, he is the only person who can escape from hypocrisy.
Through the story “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, ” Twain shows his criticism of hypocrisy by presenting the super-ego as the cause of hypocrisy. He also says we must at first accept that we must follow the id instead of following the super-ego, and this is the only way to prevent us from falling into hypocrisy. Such is Twain's sense of morality.
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