Mark Twain’s boldness in his second novel extended beyond Huck Finn’s vernacular language and the racial epithets. The very subject of slavery—at least in the realistic way it is portrayed in Huckleberry Finn—was slipping out of view in the decades after the Civil War. Yet in the 1880s Twain had the nerve (very possibly goaded by a guilty conscience) to produce a work in which this affront to humanity permeates most of its chapters. His readers could not help but be reminded of the historical fact that ten percent of the Missouri population in 1850 consisted of African American slaves. In the contiguous state of Arkansas (where the latter part of Huckleberry Finn is set) the percentage was twenty-six, and that percentage rose drastically in the Deep South, with fifty-five percent of the residents of Mississippi consisting of enslaved workers. By 1860, four million of the twelve million people living in the Southern states were slaves who owned neither their bodies nor their labor.
Reevaluating the “Boy Book”
At the time that Twain’s novels about boys first appeared, the line between juvenile and adult fiction was far from definite. Adults and young people often shared their reading materials. The spectacular success of the Harry Potter series with broad audiences reminds us of that formerly blurry distinction between juvenile and adult literature. For over a decade, bookstores and movie theaters teemed with crowds of children, teenagers, and parents each night that a new Harry Potter installment was released. Similarly, more than a century and a quarter earlier, Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” stories in 1865 and 1872 were hardly restricted to young readers.
All the same, Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn extended the boundaries of a subgenre combining fiction and autobiography that would come to be known as the American “boy book.” The very idea that a boy’s thought-processes and actions were worthy of recording in a novel was itself still an innovation in the nineteenth century, despite Charles Dickens’s steps in this direction. Thomas Hughes (1822-1896), an English writer and reformer, is credited with launching the investigations of boyish minds with Tom Brown’s School Days (1857), largely based on Hughes’s remembrances of loyalties and cruelties at Rugby School. It seems probable that Twain’s memories of early day Hannibal were jogged by the now-forgotten Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s semi-autobiographical The Story of a Bad Boy (1869), the first true “boy book” in the United States, whose sentimental incidents were told somewhat archly. Aldrich’s Tom Bailey and his chums slip out of their homes at night, coalesce into a small gang, and play pranks on the upright citizens of their New England town. Twain scoffed at Aldrich’s Bad Boy on December 27, 1869, writing to the woman he would soon marry, Olivia Langdon, “ I could not admire the volume much.” Nevertheless in 1872 he began to experiment with the possibility of composing a work about his own Missouri boyhood. He aborted that effort, of which only a fragment known as “Boy’s Manuscript” survives, but in 1874 he got the novel underway that would rival and long outlast Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s creation, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (which had a protagonist named “Tom,” just like Aldrich’s book). Other male writers such as William Dean Howells, Charles Dudley Warner, and Booth Tarkington would follow in Twain’s wake by recounting the fun and the terrors of boyhood, but only Harold Frederic’s evocative tales and Stephen Crane’s poignant Whilomville Stories (1900) deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as Twain’s works.
Tom Sawyer departed from literary conventions by jabbing at clichéd children’s books, notifying readers that the age of Realism had arrived in America. Twain had fun at the expense of Romantic icons by having Tom Sawyer ludicrously misconstrue nearly all of his revered literary “authorities.” Twain developed this humorous tactic more fully in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where Tom misguidedly quotes his outmoded Romantic books relentlessly and, in Chapter 13, a sinking steamboat is named Walter Scott after the deceased but still esteemed author of Ivanhoe, Redgauntlet, Kenilworth, and other historical novels.
Critics’ Objections to Huckleberry Finn
Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was more ambitious in plot than its predecessor and brilliantly allowed a single boy to narrate his own tale. All the same, the vast majority of commentators tend to express dissatisfaction with the manner in which Twain opened and concluded his masterpiece. This disappointment is even voiced by many of the novel’s most ardent admirers. The failing, for the preponderance of scholarly critics, is that Twain insisted on reinserting Tom Sawyer into the first three and last eleven chapters of the forty-three-chapter novel, thereby giving the book a subtle structural symmetry and avoiding a tragic climax. Academic critics also have two additional cavils. While they applaud the interracial friendship that develops in Huckleberry Finn between the African American adult and the parentless white boy, they are bothered by the stereotypical implications of Jim’s ungrammatical dialect and concerned about Huck’s periodic sense of superiority to him. Above all, however, they deplore Tom Sawyer’s tomfoolery in the concluding “evasion” (Tom’s term for it) sequence of Chapters 33 to 40 when he subjects Jim to absurd and time-consuming requirements rather than liberating the imprisoned man. These three objections—Twain’s handling of the “evasion” chapters, Jim’s speech patterns, and Jim’s relationship to Huck and Tom—merit thoughtful consideration.
The Pitfalls of Literary Burlesque
More than anything else, readers’ pronounced distaste for the so-called “evasion” episode at the end of Huckleberry Finn amounts to a rejection of Twain’s penchant for literary burlesque—a technique of ridicule through absurd exaggeration that he had mastered early in his writing career and repeatedly returned to in his sketches, short stories, and longer works. In 1859 Clemens had burlesqued the river reports of Isaiah Sellers, a veteran pilot, and the literary hoaxes of his Western years, such as “Petrified Man” (1862) and “A Bloody Massacre Near Carson” (1863) relied, in the former case, on the frequency of fossil finds and in the latter instance took advantage of the bloodthirsty credulity of frontier journalism. In the mature phases of his career, he often turned this literary form against authors he basically admired; literary burlesque supported, for example, his ingenious spoof of Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). The Duke and the King’s mishmash of Shakespearean plays in Chapters 20 and 21 of Huckleberry Finn likewise comes across as hilarious inasmuch as those garbled but immortal lines from the Bard remain familiar to us; the jumbled treatment of them is brief and delectable. But when Twain took aim elsewhere (in other works) at books for which he had less respect—as, for example, his burlesques of detective Allan Pinkerton’s boasting memoirs about his exploits or Twain’s mockeries of Arthur Conan Doyle’s infallibly ratiocinative Sherlock Holmes—the results often failed to endure as successful literature.
The chapters that wind up Huckleberry Finn’s journey fall somewhere between these examples in terms of their effectiveness. Although the prompt arrival of Tom Sawyer at the exact farm where Huck and Jim have landed asks us to accept a monumental coincidence, this happenstance is really not much more incredible than Abel Magwitch’s secret funding of Pip’s rise in social status in Dickens’s Great Expectations during the period when Miss Havisham appears to be