{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03413246647704185, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0028443722064201544, 'mean_word_length': 4.8619047619047615, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 2, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Mark Twain's Bad Women

Laura Hawkins, of The Gilded Age, and Roxanna, of Puddn'head Wilson, are probably Mark Twain's most famous "wicked" women. Even though Roxy's portrayal is complicated by the fact that she is principally intended to illustrate the evils of slavery, her sex still plays a major role in her character. Most importantly, her sex explains the peculiar turns her story takes. Both Roxy and Laura rank as renegades in Twain's canon because they defy the nineteenth-century mandate that women display passivity and forgiveness of wrongs rather than activity and vengeance. Like Huckleberry Finn, Hank Morgan, August Feldner (of #44, The Mysterious Stranger), or Louis de Conte (oí Joan of Arc), Roxy and Laura are morally ill at ease in the communities in which they find themselves, and in this they serve as personas for one side of their creator's relationship with his own community.1 But neither Roxy nor Laura maintain the kind of credibility Twain's male protagonists maintain, and, unlike the male protagonists, both are unambiguously defeated by their societies at the conclusions of their tales. Twain's uneasiness about Laura and Roxy's alienation is an index to his need to believe that women—as the psycho-sexual Other—embody the certainty and security he and his male personas do not. Even though he often likes and sympathizes with these women—certainly they are the liveliest of his female characters—he rejects their stance because an alienated woman threatens to destroy his cosmic scheme, a scheme in which women's primary function is to provide security for men suffering from self-doubt, to be a refuge from alienation rather than to exhibit it themselves. With other writers of the nineteenth century, Twain associated women with houses, that is, with structures that promised shelter from the disorienting effects of the male, or public, sphere of activity. Once he even metaphorized a woman as a house. In an 1876 letter to a young debutante, he first discusses the duties of the girl's new "estate," then begins to play with the concept, referring to her character as her "edifice," and claiming that her mother, as "architect," had shaped and proportioned it well. Now the girl's job was to "finish the furnishing & put on the fresco & the other decorations." "There are different ways of doing that," the mentor continues: "In a word, one can make the house a gaudy & unrestful Palace of Sham, or he can make it a Home