How does Mark Twain show satire in "Experience of the McWilliamses With membranous croup & The McWilliamses And The Burglar Alarm? specific lines may help...thanks
To understand how Mark Twain demonstrates satire in "Experience of the McWilliamses With Membranous Croup" and "The McWilliamses and the Burglar Alarm," we need to examine certain aspects of the texts. Satire is a literary technique used to criticize or expose human vices, follies, or societal shortcomings through humor, irony, or exaggeration.
In "Experience of the McWilliamses With Membranous Croup," Twain presents the McWilliamses, a well-intentioned but poorly equipped and uninformed family who encounter a health crisis. The satire lies in his critique of the inadequate, pseudoscientific remedies and panic-driven decisions made by the family. For instance, when the McWilliamses notice their child has membranous croup, they consult a medical book and stumble upon various absurd remedies, such as plastering the patient with mustard plasters. Twain highlights their cluelessness by including lines like:
"The dear sufferer’s hands were cold, and its pulse nothing to brag of. The case was desperate. Mustard plasters were applied to the child’s feet – with excellent effect. They woke it up."
These lines satirize the McWilliamses' reliance on ineffective treatments, as the child's awakening is unrelated to the mustard plasters.
In "The McWilliamses and the Burglar Alarm," Twain uses satire to ridicule the McWilliamses' obsession with the latest technological inventions. Here, the focus is on the family's overconfidence in a newly installed burglar alarm system. Twain's humor arises from the exaggerated reliance on their flawed and malfunctioning security system. For instance, he illustrates the absurdity of their trust in the alarm with lines like:
"The other night, when we were all away, a woman came over the back-yard fence and took the inventor’s chicken-coop, and got $5 for it – all because that alarm had just that instant gone tinkering at something halfway down the street."
Here, Twain mocks the McWilliamses' false sense of security as the alarm conveniently malfunctions just as a burglary is occurring.
In both stories, Twain uses humor, irony, and exaggeration to expose the foolishness, gullibility, and misplaced priorities of the McWilliamses. By demonstrating the family's misguided actions and beliefs, he satirizes society's tendency to embrace questionable remedies and blindly trust in technological advancements without critical examination.