Dangerous Book for Boys?
It is worth observing that Mark Twain once declared his novel to be a “hymn to boyhood.” As many commentators have noted, Twain’s choice of “St. Petersburg” (then the capital of Russia) as the name of the town for his setting subtly wraps the heavenly connotations associated with St. Peter around a town that offered a boy’s vision of paradisiacal diversions. Perhaps, then, there is relevance in the fact that young Sam Clemens can be said to have lost his own boyhood in the years after his father died prematurely in 1847, leaving the Clemens family insolvent. Sam Clemens was subsequently taken out of school by his older brother Orion and put to work for long hours in a print shop. That was the abrupt termination of his boyhood frolics. He could watch through the window as other boys passed by carrying fishing poles or with their hair wet from swimming.
British author Charles Dickens harbored that same sense of deprivation when his father’s debts compelled Dickens’s parents to withdraw him from school and set him to work in a dank, smelly bootblack factory in an industrial sector at the edge of the Thames River. Both authors would become famously identified with their fictions about orphaned boys who seek the joys of childhood and yet must endure the encroachments of the adult world. In this connection one cannot help but recall Mark Twain’s delight in his wife’s nickname for him: “Youth.” All in all, it would seem that more deference is due to Tom Sawyer, the departure point that Twain intended as the optimum introduction to his enduring story of a boy and a slave afloat on a river raft.
III. Critics’ Objections to Huckleberry Finn
Twain’s follow-up novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, was more ambitious in plot 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’ 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 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 pages 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
