Literary articles - Mark Twain 2024

Trash Talk: Huck Finn and Aesthetic Satire

Flat, Stale, and Unprofitable

After the success of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876, Mark Twain became a household figure. Having profited greatly after the success of his novels, he, like his father before him, began what would be a lifelong relationship with venture capitalism. He funneled his money into a publishing house, engineering companies, iron manufacturers, revolutionary typesetters, stock investments, the marketing of his own works, and even theatrical productions adapted from his work. The opulence that the Clemens's enjoyed was normal for Livy. Any private discomfort Sam felt was overturned by her eagerness to raise her husband's status as a literary mastermind and persona grata of the elegant class—which she had occupied since birth.

Twain began work on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn soon after the publishing of Tom Sawyer. However, writer's block struck the author for a number of years, and he instead compiled the notebooks from his river boat piloting days into Life on the Mississippi, which was published in 1883. He would return to Huck in the summer of 1884. Clemens reports an unmatched dedication to writing in this period, sitting for ten hours a day, six days a week, and produced over 400 pages of material during the season. The first edition of the novel, set twenty years before, during the Antebellum period, was published in the United Kingdom in December of 1884.

In 1885, Mark Twain published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the United States to mixed reviews. In fact, Huck Finn was immediately banned in several libraries across America before it even hit the shelves. In a contemporary context, one may assume that blatant racism and the repetition of a particular racial epithet might have provoked the outrage, but interestingly,

libraries, booksellers, and reviewers in the mid-1890s were far more scandalized by the novel's lack of grammar, plot, and clear morality.

The crude syntax of its first-person narrator caused some, like one unnamed member of the Concord (Mass.) Public Library committee, to deem the whole work as “the veriest trash” (Fishkin, 115). The tale of The Concord Library offered the following statement:

The Concord (Mass.) Public Library committee has decided to exclude Mark Twain's latest book from the library. One member of the committee says that, while he does not wish to call it immoral, he thinks it contains but little humor, and that of a very coarse type. He regards it as the veriest trash. The librarian and the other members of the committee entertain similar views, characterizing it as rough, coarse, and inelegant.3 (Fishkin, 115)

Shelley Fisher Fishkin4, in her critical book Was Huck Black?, chalks this contempt up to Huck Finn's “debut as an ‘author,'” wherein he “entered the drawing room uninvited and unannounced and started talking immediately—coarse talk, irreverent talk, black talk” (Fishkin, 114). By “drawing room,” the critic means the expansive libraries in which a genteel literary audience kept their classic works. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, though an introduction to the characters who would inhabit Huckleberry Finn, drew “relatively little notice” as a cultural satire. Because Tom Sawyer was told in the a third-person narrative style, it remained settled in a satirical “framework” which was still comfortable to more “conservative readers” (Fishkin, 114).

The third-person frame of Tom was maintained by “the author, a Standard-English-speaking narrator,” who “bracket[s]” (Fishkin, 113) the narrative with what Mark Twain would later characterize as “the showiest kind of book-talk” (Twain, Offenses). This literary language —seen in Twain's contemporaries such as Melville, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Emerson—had been the unspoken rule and assured positive reviews. Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, and 18th century author, excerpted in Fishkin's analysis, argues that through this omniscient framing, “humorists also assured their conservative readers of something they had to believe in before they could find such humor amusing” (Fishkin, 114). This object of belief is the vehicle of prose itself, a personified author, the Gentleman who leads the reader through the story and maintains control over what is being revealed and, more importantly, how information is being communicated.

Through high-minded literary language, “namely, that the Gentleman,” or the genteel and grammatically elegant author, “was in complete control of the situation he described, as he was of himself” (Fishkin, 114). Huckleberry Finn posed as a foil to this narrative style, as it is presented in a first-person narrative. Huck Finn, adolescent and uneducated, told his story in his own dialect, embodying the mood and spirit of the poor, Antebellum South. In Was Huck Black?, Fishkin argues for Huck's “blackness” as indicated by his benighted syntax and lowbrow consideration of grammar. But most poor, uneducated children living in the Antebellum South would have employed a a vernacular similar to Huck's. In his essay The Dialects in Huckleberry Finn, David Carkeet explains that dialects, both “in literature and it in the field,” can, and in this novel's case, do “differ from each other in their pronunciation (Huck says get, Pap said git), grammar (Huck says you want, Jim says you wants), and vocabulary or lexicon (Huck says smooch for ‘steal,' the King says hook)” (Carkeet, 316). Carkeet goes on to say that there are major differences in dialect between Huck and Jim, but that the similarities connote a mutual influence. The notion that Huck is somehow equated socially to Jim because of their similar dialects, or that their friendship is normalized by their poverty and lack of formal education is false; the bond the duo eventually share in the novel is immensely anomalous in the context of the pre-war South. While Huck's identity is indeed informed by a rejection of the cultural values of this time period, it is clear that Twain is intentionally satirizing the genteel tradition and its stronghold over the cultural moment in various ways, not blurring the lines of race through speech, which one could argue invalidates the serious, subtle, and atypical convention of Jim and Huck's camaraderie. In allowing “Huck” to narrate his own story in his own vernacular, Twain has eschewed the customary literary standards of the 19th century genteel. He has indirectly rebuffed not only the values of his high-minded readership, but he has made a mockery of language while also satirizing social values.

While Tom Sawyer offered numerous parodies of the culture it described, the narrative style was held within these constructs. Still, its humor was considered bold and, at times, scathing. Such were the limitations of humorists of the nineteenth century who still expected to be lauded for their work, not to mention published at all. Santayana writes that the humorists, like Twain, gave “evidence that the genteel tradition is present pervasively, but everywhere weak,” by pointing out the folly of the standards, but they “they have nothing solid to put in its place” (Santayana, 51); instead they are resigned to “point out how ill many facts fit into it” (Santayana, 51). But the harshly critical reception by critics of Twain's masterpiece seems to have been glanced over by the philosopher. Even before the unsavory reviews began to roll in, Twain predicted the outcry over his novel's avant-garde narrative. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn begins with a declaratory “NOTICE” from the author, which decrees the following:

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR

PER G.G., CHIEF OF ORDINANCE. (Twain, Huck, 4)

On the very first page lies the declaration that this book will not satisfy—and will perhaps blatantly offend—its intended readership. The violence alluded to in this “notice” is so casually stated that the negative reaction offered by critics seem, in a modern context, so ostensibly gratuitous that one can imagine Twain in the throes of laughter at their superficial consideration of his work. And, in fact, he did accept the ridicule in good humor. One can easily imagine the earnest, uptight reviewer scratching out his scathing review, neck strained and veins pulsing with blue blood. The Concord Library committee member who deemed the novel “trash” expounded further on the “trash” he wouldn't necessarily call “immoral”:

It deals with a series of adventures of a very low grade morality; it is couched in the language a rough, ignorant dialect, and all through its pages there is a systematic use of bad grammar and an employment of rough, course, inelegant expressions. It is also very irreverent. To sum up, the book is flippant and irreverent in style. It deals with a series of experiences that are certainly not elevating. The whole book is of a class that is much more profitable for the slums than it is for respectable people […]. (Fishkin, 115)

This committee member finds no redeeming qualities in Huck Finn. It's morality “low grade,” its vocabulary “ignorant,” and its style “inelegant” and “irreverent.” These charges are posed as though the novel and its pitfalls form an inscrutable knot, fit for the “trash.” Because the novel does not promote nor provide a protagonist who upholds, validates, or to only tragic ends refute a tradition of “elegance,” and “elevation” in life, it is “trash.” Huck Finn, uneducated, “unsivilized,” usually barefoot, descendant of drunkards, has no place in the parlor. Tom Sawyer would at least clean himself up for a visit to the drawing room, as his story is couched,

alternatively, in the standard “King's English” of Mark Twain. Huck's vernacular narration determines the accessibility of novel itself. Written in the “book-talk” Twain so loathed, literature is only approachable to those with the vocabulary to decipher some of its loftier syntax—those who, incredibly, also probably had the leisure time in which to read even an “extraordinarily senseless publication” (Boston Evening Traveler).

This anonymous review for the Boston Evening Traveler slightly praises and justifies Twain's other work, assuring the reader that “Mr. Clemens has contributed some humorous literature that is excellent and will hold its place,” but that Huck Finn is “singularly flat, stale and unprofitable” (Boston Evening Traveler). He speculates about various deragatory advertising methods that would need to be utilized—“Mr. Mark Twain will probably have to resort to law to compel some to sell it by any sort of bribery or corruption”—and that the novel could hardly be “disposed of to people of average intellect” unless they were at “the point of the bayonet” (Boston Evening Traveler), a gesture Twain has already accounted for in saying outright that those looking for anything more “will be shot.” An anonymous reporter from San Francisco Daily Examiner maintained that the endeavor of the novel entirely was “a pot-boiler in its baldest form” (San Francisco Daily Examiner); he is accusing Clemens of publishing Huckleberry Finn as a ploy to generate revenue as opposed to anything worthy of artistic or literary merit. This is laughable, insofar as Twain had, at this point, published several novels and short stories to critical acclaim, and money-making was certainly not an issue, even when his various business endeavors proved, as the critics called Huck, “unprofitable.”

Ironically, there were many passages of Huckleberry Finn that never made it out of Twain's study. As his wife would carefully mark the passages unfit for public consumption, Susy Clemens, aged twelve at the time, kept careful records of the sessions in which her father would read aloud his manuscript to the children.

Papa read “Huckleberry Finn” to us in manuscript just before it came out, and then he would leave parts of it with mamma to expergate [sic], while he went off up to the study to work, and sometimes Clara and I would be sitting with mama while she was looking the manuscript over and I remember so well, with what pangs of regret we used to see her turn down leaves of the pages which meant, that some delightfully dreadful part must be scratched out. And I remember one part pertickularly [sic] which was perfectly fascinating it was dreadful…and oh with what dispare [sic] we saw mamma turn down the leaf on which it was written, we thought the book would be almost spoiled without it. (Powers, 488)

Susy Clemens' record of the pre-publication process sheds some light on what Huckleberry Finn could have been. Once again, the impact of Twain's female editors is inextricable from the history of his authorship. His literary voice, though obviously refined by his wife, remains tethered to his Southwestern roots rather than formed out of his Northeastern schooling. Women were, of course, not his sole editors—Ron Powers notes that Richard Gilder and William Dean Howells both looked over the manuscript before it was deemed suitable to print.

But the approval of his editors bespeaks the genius of Twain far more reliably than the response from his high-minded critics. Their issues with Huck Finn's “immorality” and lack of tact seem to be the result of their own genteel attitudes—they see the stylistic lack of decorum as an indication of immorality. Because Huckleberry Finn is about a child, some critics speculate that the novel is meant as children's entertainment. This perhaps comes out of its child-narrator, thus intensifying the charge that it is indecent and obscene, even for even adults, much less children, to subject themselves to. But Twain himself noted that both The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were “only [to] be read by adults” and “only written for adults” (Twain, Huck, 299). Even if this notice is sardonic in tone, it remains true that in response to the charge of Huck's ungrammatical and low-grade vocabulary, Twain wished his audience to know that “[t]his boy's language has been toned down and softened here and there” (Kaplan, 270). But “the spokesmen for the genteel tradition,” Kaplan writes, “turned their backs on the book which sprang from his deepest personal and creative imperatives” (Kaplan, 270). It took Twain seven years to write The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—he began prior to Life on the Mississippi and picked up thereafter, completing the manuscript during a summer of diligent genius. The disconnect between Huck's reception in 1885 by critics and the subsequent praise that was heaped upon it shortly after, in the dawn of literary modernism (by legends in their own right: Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Toni Morrison), provoke meditation on Huck as it was received in its cultural moment, and the specific deprecations that lapsed, changed, and emerged later in history.

Mark “Edison” Twain

Most critics with negative reactions upheld the author's description as “being without a motive, a moral, or a plot,” and proceed to negate the authenticity of his “picture of life in the Southwest” (San Francisco Daily Examiner). Even those passages found worthy of being deemed “literary” or which may “greatly interest” the reader are “touch[ed]” by “a sort of grotesque pathos” (San Francisco Daily Examiner). “Even the author objects to it being considered literature,” states one unsigned review from New York World, dated March 2, 1885, “That such stuff should be considered humor is more than a pity” (New York World).

Such are the damning epithets that cast The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn into controversy. But it is important to note that the false accusations heaped onto Huck Finn are what cast it out of the genteel tradition. Rejected by critics for charges of “low morality” and its syntactical structure, Huck Finn draws direct attention to the genteel tradition's “sanitizing” habit, wherein “art” is equated “with the parlor and the parlor with the academic” (Wilson, x-xi). In constructing a novel with a child's vernacular language and unarticulated, subversive morality, Mark Twain concurrently defies and radically re-envisions the scope of American literature. Despite these dubious critiques, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn sold more copies than any other Twain novel “in the previous ten years, 39,000 as of March 14” (Powers, 490). Despite the myriad of negative reviews, which charge Twain with “imposing upon an unoffending public a piece of careless hackwork,” various publications did see the genius of his latest novel. The San Francisco Chronicle praised Huckleberry Finn as “a more minute and faithful picture of Southwestern manners and customs” and suggested Twain might be “the Edison of our literature” (The San Francisco Chronicle).

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is, at its pith, a tale of Southwestern boyhood from a firsthand account. Despite its ostensible “lack of plot,” the action of the story deals with the various themes of boyhood, morality, slavery, and silence. As Fishkin suggests, the framework, which implies authorial control and comportment, is replaced with by the Pike County vernacular of one young orphan, Huckleberry Finn. Huck's life has changed since the reader was introduced to him in Tom's story—he is living with the widow Douglas, who has taken it upon herself to “sivilize” him. Son of the town drunk, Huckleberry has lived much of his life barefoot and rag-clad, riling up the boys of the small river town that is St. Petersburg. The beginning of Huck's narrative picks up where Tom's left off—the boys, “made […] rich” by the money left by robbers in a cave, have returned to a sense of normalcy. Huck informs the reader that Judge

Thatcher has taken their reward money and “fetched [them] a dollar a day, […] more than a body could tell what to do with” (Twain, Huck, 13).

Huck admits feeling stifled by the “sivilizing” efforts of the widow Douglas, though he knows “she never meant no harm by” stuffing him into “new clothes,” praying over meals, and Bible lessons. Miss Watson, the widow's sister, similarly attempts to instill some manners into the boy ruffian, scolding his foul language, lack of comportment, and penchant for pipe tobacco. Huck maintains throughout this introduction to his tale that the women meant him “no harm,” yet he cannot help but evade their discipline—it is simply not in his nature. The solecistic syntax of the narrative profoundly impacts the mood of the story. Huckleberry tells the reader, in his way, his feelings of isolation, loneliness, and depression in the face of these good womens' labor; he continuously runs off at night to play with the other boys and, of course, Tom Sawyer.

These introductory moments mirror those that Tom Sawyer relates in his own story, simply told in the plainer, ungrammatical discourse of Huck Finn. With his own psychology as commentary—rather than the “delightful” humor of Mark Twain's narrative voice—Huck's innocence is compounded by his independence. Thus the irony of Twain's prefatory “NOTICE” must satirically be understood as itself a joke. While readers “looking” for a “motive,” “plot,” or “moral,” may not find it, the enlightened reader may find such devices in what is not explicitly stated—in the moments of Huck's silence, and in the moral insights brilliantly revealed using his seemingly inarticulate and childish phrasing and logic. Thus Huck Finn presents a satirization of the genteel at its most poignant. Despite the ostensible failure of Huck's alcoholic and abusive father to instill any morality in his child, and the overtly religious “moralizing” forced upon

Huck by his female benefactors, the protagonist's morality is derived from a decidedly unconventional source: Jim, the runaway slave.

Trash Is What People Is

Huck and Jim's socially-taboo relationship establishes itself gradually over the course of the novel. The two find each other by chance, and yet their mutual longing for freedom from their mutually-exclusive situations of oppression and lack of personal human agency. As Huck is dealing with the reforming attempts of the Widow Douglas, he, Tom, and the other rebellious boys of St. Petersburg decide to start a fledgling gang of robbers. Our protagonist admits growing bored of the operation, but his worries are overruled by the sudden return of Pap, Huck's drunken delinquent of a father. Eager for the money his son is receiving in installments from Judge Thatcher, Pap kidnaps Huck and brings him to a run-down cabin across the River in Illinois. After a series of boozy tirades and fights, Huck cunningly fakes his own death and escapes his forced isolation from society, moving back down river. There, on an island he assumes uninhabited, he finds Jim, the barrel-chested and mild-mannered black man who has run away from Miss Watson and slavery altogether, attempting to find freedom in Cairo, Illinois. Though Huck is initially conflicted by the choice to help a runaway slave—he believes this morally contemptible (“People would call me a low down Ablitionist” (Twain, Huck, 55))—the two join forces in an attempt to move North. The pair end up missing their Northern crossing at the Ohio River and heading back even further South—dangerous waters for both a missing dead boy (Huck) and a runaway slave (Jim).

Despite the prejudice that Huck has grown up around, he and Jim quickly become friends. Far more mature emotionally than Huck, Jim plays a fatherly role at various times throughout their journey. Take for example, the scene in which Jim scolds Huck for playing a rather rude trick on him; stealing off in a canoe, Huck causes Jim to think he has been lost to the river. Upon his return, Jim first believes himself dreaming, then Huck a ghost. Once he is sure Huck has not died, his confusion, naturally, turns to anger as he learns Huck tried to pull one over on him.

“[…] When I got all wore out wid work, en wid de callin' for you, en went to sleep, my heart wuz mos' broke bekase you wuz los', en I didn' k'yer no' mo' what become er me en de raf'. En when I wake up en fine you back agin, all safe en soun', de tears come, en I could a got down on my knees en kiss yo' foot, I's so thankful. En all you wuz thinkin' 'bout wuz how you could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie. Dat truck dah is trash ; en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren's en makes 'em ashamed.” Then he got up slow and walked to the wigwam, and went in there without saying anything but that. But that was enough. It made me feel so mean I could almost kissed his foot to get him to take it back. (Twain, Huck, 95)

It takes Huck “fifteen minutes” before he can “work [himself] up to go and humble [himself]” to

Jim, “but I done it, and I warn't ever sorry for it afterwards, neither” (Twain, Huck, 95). Huck bashfully reports, “I didn't do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn't done that one if I'd a knowed it would make him feel that way” (Twain, Huck, 95), codifying a facet of human morality which itself may be seen as inconsequential—or perhaps even consequentially negative —to the 19th century reader. In considering the feelings of Jim, a slave, he has ostensibly accepted that Jim is a human being equal with himself. Even in 1885, this notion is far from widespread, and quite incredible nonetheless coming from a young boy. Such are the unrecognized progressivist notions present in the ideologies of an adolescent, uncouth, runaway orphan.

Jim and Huck's exchange here notably occurs amidst a pile of trash that has been accumulated on their raft. An ironic image indeed, considering now how the validity of Huckleberry Finn as a work of art and literature—even entertainment—has been dismissed by many of the critics and supposedly intellectuals of the day; instead it is charged as the “veriest trash.” The OED traces “trash” back to an eighteenth and nineteenth century use referring to the “The refuse of sugar-canes after the juice has been expressed,” which is perhaps highly racially charged yet historically relevant usage, apart from the standard North American meaning for general “rubbish,” and “worthlessness.” The social context of “trash” as both personified term and the environment that Tom and Huck are literally in—a pile of trash—poignantly emphasizes their downtrodden situation, and provides an ironic setting for Huck's moral comeuppance and Jim's defining fatherly moment.

What's more, critics often focus on Huck's behavior in this scene as somehow more noteworthy than Twain's depiction of Jim and his moral insights. Yes, Huck's lesson-learning from a former black slave in the deep South is certainly revolutionary, but so is the rather beautiful, straightforward morality of Jim's teaching. He tells Huck that upon the boy's return, he “could a got down on my knees en kiss yo' foot, I's so thankful” (Twain, Huck, 95), essentially positing his deep affection for Huck as both a friend and traveling companion. As technically free man, and certainly a man seeking freedom, Jim is shown as possessing not only intense emotional capacities, but also a sense of agency that other white writers of this time period might play off as a racial stereotype of submissiveness. But Jim counters his declaration of love with remonstrative gusto, telling Huck that such tricks “is trash; en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren's en makes 'em ashamed” (Twain, Huck, 95). Quite like Huck's ungrammatical narration, Jim's dialect coats his sentiments in language supposedly impenetrable to a genteel audience, who desire and trust only a King's English speaker to deliver their ethical dilemmas—not so much for clarity, but for the aesthetic implications of what Pap might call “hifalutin'” prose. The glossing over of Jim and Huck's deep friendship by critics is perhaps the most crucial affront to Huckleberry Finn and Twain's own legacy, but let it be a condemnation of the cultural moment.

Perhaps another result of the story's 1840s setting, Huck admits being hesitant to apologize to Jim because of his status as a black slave in the rural Antebellum South. But Huck's resolve weakness quickly, as does his use of vernacular racial epithets toward Jim. Succinct and heartbroken, Jim articulates his hurt feelings to Huck and quickly exits due to anger. Huck is clearly moved by his friend's words and demeanor, revealing to the reader that, “It made me feel so mean I could almost kissed his foot to get him to take it back” (Twain, Huck, 95). This scene of repentance is never physically fulfilled, yet the notion of Huck kissing Jim's feet fills one with a sense of equality between the two runaways.

There are, of course, religious connotations that permeate this scene; all four gospels account for the anointing of Jesus, and in Luke, a woman kisses Jesus feet when she asks for forgiveness. This metaphoric replacing of Jesus with Jim is exceptional not only as an image or device, but also as an uncompleted action, and rather an idea. Huck does not immediately nor impulsively fulfill the actions he formulates psychologically—the rumination on ways to apologize to his friend suggest a deep human empathy which surpasses the boyish temerity of Tom Sawyer and drunken imprudence of Pap Finn.

Such thoughtfulness and empathy make the following charges from the San Francisco Evening Bulletin rather absurd:

The spice of juvenile wickedness and dare-deviltry give a zest to the book. "Huckleberry Finn" is, in a restricted sense, a typical character. Yet the type is not altogether desirable, nor is it one that most parents who want a future of promise for their young folks would select without some hesitation. The trouble with "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn" is not that they are too good for this world; even as the world goes, they are not good enough. (San Francisco Evening Bulletin)

Such damning language begs the question: what type of “goodness” is lacking in Tom and Huck? If it is the quality of Twain's writing that this reviewer discredits, we may allow him his opinion. But to be unable to locate “goodness” of character in Huck, especially, is to overlook the ways in which he defies the complacent nature of the genteel, which, Santayana writes, relies on “Goodwill” rather than “goodness.” Good-will is an intention, detached and perhaps housed in ritual action as opposed to personal involvement in others' lives. It bespeaks intention, wishing a fellow citizen the best of luck, to help where necessary and perhaps altruistically. The reviewer means to insinuate that “goodness,” is lacking in Huckleberry Finn, insofar as religion is missing explicitly from the underlying intention of Tom and Huck, or that it has been manifested in ways vastly different than those apparent to the genteel. “Goodness” in the genteel sense is composed and respectable, an aesthetic confirmation of one's inherent morality. Genteel “goodness,” reveals itself through acts of recognized or purported self-sacrifice and, ironically, concurrently, self-satisfaction.

Breaking Tradition

Santayana closes “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” with the sentiment that one who rejects this stale American habit does so by “learn[ing] what you are really fitted to do, and where lie[s] your natural dignity and joy, […] in representing many things, without being them, and in letting your imagination, through sympathy, celebrate and echo” the lives of others.

Huck's sincerity and good-will thus vindicate the American spirit; Santayana charges that humorists offer only a gestural indication of the philosophical issues entangled in the genteel tradition, but Huck is ostensibly the foil to this generalized lack of “sincere” goodness. Huck's will to action is sincere enough to refute Santayana's charge, but the reforming endeavors of the women in his life—and perhaps the critics of Twain's literature, are not. Though he may not articulate such things to Jim in words, Huck's actions and his imagination prove Jim's humanity as it is real and worthy to to Huck as a person. “Let us be content to live in the mind,” suggests Santayana, posing the radical notion that self-actualizing the dignity of other humans is redemptive in itself, a social salvation rather than one which holds fast the social acceptability of tradition and expectations of behavior (Santayana, 64). The “imaginitive transcript” of “external things,” which one notices blatantly in Huck's consideration of Jim's human worth, would be detached in the genteel sense of goodness. Huck, however, is in engaged in his good-will toward Jim, as his internal decision is to halt the action of ill-will toward Jim, namely, playing a mean-spirited trick on him. Santayana may be seen as thinking broadly, generally, and impersonally about good-will as a philosophical notion rather than a humanitarian effort. Huck is willing to physically and actively die for his friend. Thus Twain, in a methodological inverse of Santayana's critique of American genteel philosophy, reconstructing this concept of “good-will” and “goodness,” in such a way that dodges—or possibly refutes and replaces—Santayana's critique.

Take, for example, the scene in which Huck, believing himself damned to hell, decides for a moment that his way to salvation is to write a letter to Miss Watson, telling her that he is with Jim, her runaway slave, and how she could find him. Huck mulls over this for a while, wondering if praying might come easier if he cleanses himself of the “sin” of fraternizing and enabling a black fugitive. Huck thinks over his relationship with Jim, however, and realizes that there existed no fortifying reasons to implicate Jim for Huck's own well-being. He writes the letter, but thinks twice before sending it. Huck thinks, and thinks,

But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, 'stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when

I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; […] and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he's got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

"All right, then, I'll go to hell"—and tore it up. (Twain, Huck, 222-223)

The irony here is unbelievably profound, insofar as Huck's logic—as instilled into him by the genteel caretakers and the society in which he was bred secondhand—leads him to believe that his friendship with Jim (and thus his loyalty to him) will send him to hell. While the guilt of his decision and the damnation he believes he deserves carries strong Calvinist undertones, the logic is contained by the societal traditions of black inferiority as reinforced by Southern white supremacy. As he meditates on the special moments that define his and Jim's friendship, Huck validates Jim's humanity and the arbitrary racism, which keeps him enslaved in the pre-Civil War South. The sentiment is further enriched by the duo's gradual progression further South, as they both descend geographically away from their destination—the North, which represents freedom, grows all the more elusive as the story progresses, even as the muscle of their friendship grows stronger. Jim “would always call [Huck] honey, and pet [him] and do everything he could think of for [him],” strengthening the paternal role that the former slave plays in the young rebel's life and the impact of his kindness on Huck's future.

While the pair may not fit precisely into the “good” role that their society expects of “good” people, they carve out a universal goodness that can be said to replace the genteel tradition. Huck's decision, conceptual as it is active, is further ironized by Huck's resignation to his own “awful”ness:

It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head, and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn't. And for a starter I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog. (Twain, Huck, 223)

“The whole hog,” as it were, would thus define Huck as a committed abolitionist. The mores to which the culture around him are tied are loosened for Huck—perhaps they always have been— but his goodness is, should we assume this word means recognizing and supporting the dignity of human life, in no way compromised. Huck's will to die for Jim ostensibly overtakes the genteel notion of reform as a virtue. “And for a starter I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again,” Huck resolves, “if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too.” Huck's complete dedication to Jim bespeaks not only an intense emotional bond and fierce loyalty, but implies both a conceptual and physical responsibility to his loved ones—a situation and sentiment that Huck, as an orphan, is rather unfamiliar with. Such passion, though arguably “good,” is not so aligned with the moral vision of the genteel tradition, which is content to lie back in its chair offering thin, verbal encouragement to those in distress, to rely on intellect rather than will.

It is rather curious to consider how Huck's anguished and sardonic decision to die for Jim is both morally confusing to Huck himself, unknown by Jim, and unrecognized for its ethical resonance by the negative critics. It seems clear that Huck's surrender to eternal damnation is more profound, to the genteel attitude, than the principle which led to it. The young runaway is, of course, not going to hell for his actions. Still, in his acceptance of such a fate, he has redeemed himself from becoming entrenched within the insular tradition of possible damnation so pervasive to the Calvinist spirit so enmeshed in the genteel tradition. The women in Huck's life attempt to draw the boy into their genteel worldview, and he resists while also supplanting a far more active goodness and personal, humanitarian morality.

Gaudiness is Godliness

Still, outside of the world of the novel, Twain's critics uphold the nineteenth century's conception of society as a circle one must be included within; the genteel tradition, pervasive and weak, maintains that only those within this circle have the power, status, moral vision, and artistic purity to comment on it. Sam Clemens, in ingratiating himself to the Northeastern upper class, is allowed to use the platform granted to insiders because of his initial acceptance of the genteel. Upon this platform he is able to expound his beliefs about society and the world at large. But he retains this platform only by employing the vocabulary deemed acceptable by his so-called “peers.” To occupy the outsider's perspective—for example, the rough syntax of

Huckleberry Finn—is to defy those who granted “Mark Twain” the permission to exercise his talent upon a welcoming audience.

Such an audience resides in the ornate colonial mansion of the feminized genteel. This space is in fact deliberately entered by Huck when he enters the Grangerford house during the novel. The Grangerfords are “a mighty nice family” who own “a mighty nice house, too,” at least compared to any the young orphan has ever encountered. Huck remarks that he “hadn't seen no house out in the country before that was so nice and had so much style” (Twain, Huck, 120). Our narrator proceeds to list with particularly objective accuracy everything about the Grangerford house that made it stand out from those he had experienced in rural St. Petersburg. “A brass knob to turn,” “a big fireplace that was bricked on the bottom,” “a clock on the middle of the mantelpiece” with “a big outlandish parrot on each side of the clock, made out of something like chalk, and painted up gaudy,” Huck relays: these items loudly communicate the flaunting of wealth through ornamentation. Perhaps the most comical and revealing item on display in the Southern mansion is depicted in the following excerpt:

On the table in the middle of the room was a kind of a lovely crockery basket that had apples and oranges and peaches and grapes piled up in it, which was much redder and yellower and prettier than real ones is, but they warn't real because you could see where pieces had got chipped off and showed the white chalk, or whatever it was, underneath. (Twain, Huck, 120)

Huck's explicit observation of the fake fruit points to ostentatious faux-realism. “[M]uch redder and yellower and prettier than real [fruit] is,” the counterfeit crockery exposes a genteel habit of false realism. The vibrancy of the fruit's color points to its artificiality, and in turn reveals the uselessness of the room's decor. Rather than an offering of actual food from the homeowners, the kitch ornaments instead invite guests to simply appreciate the parlor's aesthetic value. The “fruit” is apparently only noticeably fake insofar as Huck notices “where piece had got chipped off,” and “showed,” as he calls it, “white chalk,” which we may assume is clay or porcelain. This display of phony hospitality—inedible fruit—as a rather literal application of the genteel tradition as a “digestion of vacancy” (Santayana, 44). There is no artistic or subversive merit to this decor, and thus a lack of substance and meaning to its presence in the home. This is not to say that it should not exist, but to emphasize its useless existence and the privilege which grants the Grangerfords the ability to own it. Both Santayana and his critics have cited the effect of genteel as it infected both literature and art, but this scene in Huck reveals how it has trickled down to gaudy home decor and a prescription of personal taste.

In a philosophical sense, Douglas Wilson explains how “[t]he genteel tradition replaced a reformed Puritanism that had replaced piety with moralism and God-centered vision with one oriented toward the requirements of human community,” (Wilson, x), defining the upper-and-middle-class attitude of aesthetic design as an indication of one's personal wealth, and thus their moralistic ideology. The more ornate one's aesthetic display is, the more likely they are to be included in the insular society of the ruling class. Such false morality is echoed in the home decor of the Grangerfords, as it is later revealed their shallow feud with a neighboring family—a situation that culminates in the death of their youngest son, Buck. Wilson notes that the moralistic ideals of the genteel are oddly represented through aesthetics, as decoration, objects without function, pointed to wealth, wealth to moralism, and moralism to decency:

Literature, art, and philosophy, the humanist and human arts, replaced morality at the core of the New England creed. But the aesthetic was expected to be moral and moral meant decent. Art was not supposed to challenge the orthodoxies and especially the conventions of the society but to decorate fortunate individuals within it. The gentility of the genteel tradition was its false view that art and learning should have a natural connection to the morally sound” (Wilson, x).

Huck continues to list the visible decoration in the Grangerford home, including but not limited to, a table cover “made out of beautiful oilcloth, with a red and blue spread-eagle painted on it,” and “books, too, piled up perfectly exact, on each corner of the table” (Twain, Huck, 121). These two specific observations reveal even more aesthetic proofs: the cloth, with its oil-painted eagle, announces the family's patriotism. It is unknown if the table cover is meant for dining on, but the insinuation of a patriotic table is at once a humorous comment of the blind American nationalism of the genteel and perhaps, if the Grangerfords are a family who pray before the eat, a marriage of God and patriotism as a family tradition. The books perched on the table bespeak the intent of learning as a tenant of gentility—the intellect of the genteel tradition is here as much about aesthetics as it is about personal success and wealth. Those who can afford education propound that it is also a moral obligation; we may understand this notion through the embodiment of its opposite, Huckleberry Finn, whose “rough syntax” is thus condemned by critics as his lack of goodness and the whole novel's lack of morality. This is doubly interesting as it applies to Clemens himself, only partially educated, and in fact a highly successful autocrat whose “moral vision” was called into question repeatedly with the publication of Huckleberry Finn.

Thus the inclusion of Emmeline Grangerford's poetry—ungrammatical, obscenely decorated “book-talk” that it is—as posing a similar non-function as the Grangerford's knickknacks. Deceased by the time Huck encounters her work, Emmeline's poetry is ironically consumed by the theme of death:

ODE TO STEPHEN DOWLING BOTS, DEC'D

And did young Stephen sicken,

And did young Stephen die?

And did the sad hearts thicken,

And did the mourners cry?

No; such was not the fate of

Young Stephen Dowling Bots;

Though sad hearts round him thickened,

'Twas not from sickness' shots.

No whooping-cough did rack his frame,

Nor measles drear with spots;

Not these impaired the sacred name

Of Stephen Dowling Bots.

Despised love struck not with woe

That head of curly knots,

Nor stomach troubles laid him low,

Young Stephen Dowling Bots.

O no. Then list with tearful eye,

Whilst I his fate do tell.

His soul did from this cold world fly

By falling down a well.

They got him out and emptied him;

Alas it was too late;

His spirit was gone for to sport aloft

In the realms of the good and great. (Twain, Huck, 122-123)

Here, Twain presents a satirization of Romantic poetry and the showy “book-talk” he so loathed. Emmeline's influences, sordid and flowery, are the Byrons and Brownings who pushed back against the emerging ideals of the Enlightenment. Thanks to his travel writing and nostalgic and pastoral sections of Life on the Mississippi, we as readers are already aware that Twain can weave together this romantic kind of writing. But Emmeline's version of romantic poetry is brimming with strange, incongruent verbs: “sad hearts round him thickened,” “Nor measles drear with spots,” “Not these impaired the sacred name.” The line construction relies on an awkward ordering of words: “Not these impaired,” “Whilst I his fate do tell,” “His spirit was gone for to sport aloft” which harken to a romantic rhythm that is altogether contrived and ungrammatical.

Still, the poem stands, as a whole, a parody of the story of morbid obituary poetry that Twain found both ridiculous and macabre. An ornamented death eulogy, it attempts to communicate that a person died “[b]y falling down a well” through the robust and saccharine syntax of a love poem, while simultaneously describing in gross detail physical ailments that did not kill Mr. Bots. Huck, while chiefly impressed by Emmeline's thirteen-year-old talent, is quite depressed by her subject matters, and admits he found her “sadful” subjects rather sordid—this, compounded her death at fourteen, makes Twain's inclusion of her art all the more darkly comical. His satirization of Emmeline's obsession with death points to the Calvinist preoccupation with death and depravity. The genteel attitude toward these subjects is further entangled by the notion of reform as one's primary Christian duty and the overwhelming purpose of life. Thus, Emmeline's poetry can be seen as a satirization of reforming as the vehicle of individual morality. The high sentiments of genteel art relay and reinforce this attitude, allowing such preoccupations of bodily illness overwhelm a spiritual eulogy for a dead boy. The reader may consider Emmeline's morose verses as an affront not only to Romantic poetry, but also to the consciously blind eye that the genteel turns toward discussion of the human body. Another imprint from its pious undercurrents, the genteel tradition considers the body far below the intellect in terms of priority, and altogether absent from any discussion on morality.

That said, Twain's “morality” must of course be understood as it is defined through his adherence to the genteel tradition. We have already covered the broad range of ethical dilemmas and choices that Huck has faced in this novel, and which were not universally recognized as such in his contemporary moment. Thus much of the duties of Twain's female editors were to more explicitly expose the genius of the author as an American artist, rather than as a general humorist or a sardonic spectator of the society that he essentially married into. But much of Twain's work written after the 1880s and near the end of his life went unpublished during his lifetime. In particular, many short satirical pieces written throughout his life concerning religion— particularly Christianity—were considered too controversial for the time period, and went unpublished until well after his death. The Bible According to Mark Twain is an anthology of these short works that was released in the 1960s, over half a century after Clemens' death.