Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Alan Gribben
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 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 by 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 favoring him. Timely rescues and discoveries of family connections were taken for granted in Oliver Twist and David Copperfield, since plot-line coincidences were a well-established literary convention of the nineteenth century. Roger Chillingworth arrives in the Puritan colony just in time to witness Hester’s humiliating climb upon the scaffold in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Lambert Strether glimpses two people at a revealingly intimate moment in James’s The Ambassadors, and the saloon safe fails to lock in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie on the day that George Hurstwood is contemplating a fantasy of leaving Chicago. To recall anticipatory examples, one need only contemplate the number of fortuitous or calamitous coincidences in the works of Richardson, Defoe, Smollett, and other trend-setting practitioners of the novel.
A far more profound difficulty for the twenty-first-century reader is the fact that Twain gambled (and lost) on a bet that future generations would be familiar with, and enthralled by, a literary fad of his day that evaporated during the twentieth century. To furnish literary models for Tom Sawyer’s notions about proper prison escapes, Twain set out to burlesque a combined number of “dungeon” books that had chronicled the isolation, suffering, and escapes of prisoners who languished in damp and dreary cells in England and Europe. William Ainsworth’s The Tower of London (1840) was among the novels treating confinement and the prospect of imminent death. Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution (1837) recorded lurid details about the Bastille. Alexandre Dumas’s The Man in the Iron Mask (1839) and The Count of Monte Cristo (1845) added elements of irony and revenge to tales of forced incarceration. Baron Friedrich von der Trenck’s Life was translated from German between 1788 and 1793 with American editions that followed; Trenck’s memoirs supplied Twain with ideas about taming a mouse, using a penknife to dig, making a rope from bed sheets, sawing a bed-leg, and encountering a moat. Twain is on record as being fascinated by the memoirs of Casanova, a copy of which he acquired in 1879 and which provided details about imprisonment and escapes. Likewise Twain referred to Benvenuto Cellini’s Life (1728), a chronicle of banishment and frequent flight amid the beauties of the Renaissance, as “that most entertaining of books.” Joseph X. B. Saintine’s Picciola, a novel published in 1836, told the sad story of a man condemned to solitary imprisonment whose sanity and health are flickeringly kept alive by a plant seed that drifts in through the window of his cell and grows into a blossoming flower; he carefully tends and waters this single point of focus in his otherwise claustrophic cell.
Although