Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Alan Gribben
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 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 popular 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 Tom Sawyer with ideas about taming a mouse, using a penknife to dig, making a rope from bedsheets, 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 claustrophobic cell.
Although today’s readers may possibly have seen films based on Dumas’s exciting novels, our age is otherwise ignorant of this once-popular craze for stories of the horrors of captivity and the fortitude and cunning of dungeon prisoners. The appetite for these tales died out soon after the success of Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda (1894). Consequently the humor of Twain’s lampoons of his bygone sources seems pointlessly exaggerated and drawn out. My personal experiments with distributing samples of these dungeon narratives to my college students indicate that those textual aids can resurrect the comedy and enable students to find the conclusion of Huckleberry Finn more comprehensible and enjoyable, but this exploration can only take place in a classroom setting. Ordinary readers cannot be expected to trace the background of Twain’s attempt at burlesquing formerly popular stories.
What, then, are readers disappointed by Tom’s reappearance and his insistence on resuming his jejune games of pretending (in this instance based on his romanticized notions of dungeon literature) to do about the ending of a work they otherwise cherish? Perhaps it would help to consider Mark Twain’s situation as he came to this juncture of his novel. He had started out to write another “boy book,” a sequel to his relatively well-received novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but then he had the fortuitous inspiration to let this outcast boy narrate his own story. Having rehearsed the same juvenile antics that characterized Tom Sawyer in the first three chapters of this new book, Twain abruptly introduces the sinister figure of Huck Finn’s father in Chapter 4 and the novel takes a far more serious turn. In Chapter 8, Huck, hiding out on Jackson’s Island, encounters Jim, Miss Watson’s runaway slave. For the next twenty-four chapters, critics agree that it is as if, ensconced in his airy little octagonal study atop the hill at Quarry Farm and looking down on the shining Chemung River snaking its way past the town of Elmira below, Twain held a muse-driven pen transmitting divine bolts of lightning from the heavens; he wrote, in several separated stretches, a story immensely better than he had probably intended and far superior to any boy book that had preceded or would follow this masterpiece of fiction. But when the raft landed again and Jim was sold by the unscrupulous King, Twain, a master of short stories and newspaper and magazine sketches but an author invariably troubled by the intricacies of plotting a novel, had to confront the fact that he had moved Huck’s tale deeper into a South where slaves were more numerous and that institution firmly entrenched. He still envisioned this work as a companion piece to the earlier, lightsome The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, despite the problems that had delayed its completion, and so he veered instinctively away from any possibility of a gloomy ending.
Would the book have been more authentic and less criticized if Twain had shown an inclination to face up to the realities of slavery in the 1840s and to the unlikelihood that Jim could have returned to St. Petersburg as a free man who owned himself? John Seelye tested this hypothesis in 1970 by rewriting Twain’s novel as The True Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; in that version we are spared the Phelps farm episode and the book-addled reemergence of Tom Sawyer, because Jim has died a heroic death attempting to swim across the river in manacles. Although Seelye’s tour de force was an enormous sensation when it issued, it hardly became the preferred version and was seldom invoked after a few years passed. Was Mark Twain not then correct, after all, in appending eleven fairly brief chapters at the end which in effect allowed his readers to decompress from the “raft” adventures that had gone before and returned the story to the level of the three “boy book” chapters of horseplay that had opened the novel? These closing chapters form a bookend matching not only the three opening chapters but also the tone of the preceding novel. He avoided any horrific ending for Huckleberry Finn—the Boggs shooting and the Shepherdson-Grangerford massacre had given us an adequate taste of violence—and got to relive and share with readers the sights, sounds, food, and general atmosphere of blissful summers at his uncle John Quarles’s farm in interior Missouri. Tom Sawyer’s exaggerated dictates may not be what most readers would prefer, but they are really no more outlandish (and much less harmful) than the nonsensical claims uttered by the King and the Duke aboard the raft and at the Wilks family’s home, or the insane feuds of warring patriarchal clans that Huck witnessed, or the bitter glimpses of human nature to which Huck was exposed along the river. The novel comes to a soft, safe end of the voyage, like a raft bumping gently and finally against the land at its eventual destination. The lightning in Twain’s pen had departed, but his memories of a Missouri farm and his determination to keep the narrative within the perimeters of a boy book took over and guided him into port.
The Magnetism of Folk Speech
Jim speaks with an untutored dialect because it was against the law in nearly all slave states (including Missouri) to allow slaves to attend school or otherwise learn to read and write. Penalties for conferring the gift of literacy on a slave were quite severe by the 1830s and usually consisted of substantial prison sentences as well as fines. Huck’s own education has been so hit and miss that in numerous passages his English is not much more standard than Jim’s. Yet both Jim and Huck are sufficiently communicative when they need to be, and their phrasing is often memorable. Huck reels off scattered bits of prose poetry (“it most froze me,” “ain’t got no show,” “lazying around,” “the song-birds just going it!,” “kind of clogged up the air”) and effortlessly invents examples of onomatopoeia (the “screaking” of rafts’ sweeps, “bull-frogs a-cluttering,” axes going “k’chunk!”). Twain appears to be saying that rules of grammar cannot harness the power and aesthetic of genuine folk speech. Jim hits the right note when it matters greatly, as in Chapter 16 at the moment that Huck is wrestling with his conscience and Jim calls out (just before Huck meets two slave-catchers): “Jim won’t ever forgit you, Huck; you’s de bes’ fren’ Jim’s ever had; en you’s de only fren’ ole Jim’s got, now.”
Jim’s Acquiescence to Huck and Tom
As for the contention that Huck condescends to his fellow passenger on the raft, one can assume that Twain was determined to provide a plausible picture of his own provincial ignorance at Huck’s age. Jim, on the other hand, knows that he is utterly dependent