Critical Analysis of Huckleberry Fin

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American Literature                         Critical Analysis of Huckleberry Finn                         Marina Pindar

In outlawing reading for motive, moral, and plot, the notice proleptically--if unsuccessfully--attempts to ward off what in fact has become an unquestioned assumption behind most interpretations of Huckleberry Finn, namely, the premise that the text affords a critique of its extraliterary context by inveighing against the inequities of racism. In Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor James M. Cox analyzes why such readings of the novel are problematic. His contention, anomalous with respect to Mark Twain criticism in general, is that the novel mounts an attack against conscience, specifically the conscience of the moral reader. He locates this attack in the last ten chapters of the novel--the famous Phelps farm episode--and maintains that the discomfort and disapproval readers feel about Tom's cruelty toward Jim stems from their own identification with Tom:

If the reader sees in Tom's performance a rather shabby and safe bit of play, he is seeing no more than the exposure of the approval with which he watched Huck operate. For if Tom is rather contemptibly setting a free slave free, what after all is the reader doing, who begins the book after the fact of the Civil War? . . . when Tom proclaims to the assembled throng who have witnessed his performance that Jim `is as free as any creature that walks this earth,' he is an exposed embodiment of the complacent moral sentiment on which the reader has relied throughout the book. And to the extent the reader has indulged the complacency he will be disturbed by the ending. 

Cox proceeds to move his argument to a more general level by showing how the novel exposes the principle upon which morality, and its internalized representative, conscience, are constructed. As "an agent of aggression--aggression against the self or against another," conscience deprives the individual of free choice and subjects him or her to painful restraint (Cox, Mark Twain, p. 177).

   {2}   While Cox's reading compellingly provides the grounds for understanding the rationale behind the notice at the beginning of the novel, I will argue that conscience, while an "agent of aggression," is represented as an ambivalent force whose effects, while undisputably violent, cannot be dissociated from a certain epistemological or cognitive necessity.

   {3}   Cox's analysis of the novel's depiction of conscience as enacting self- and other-directed aggression and as a constraint upon free choice certainly describes the spirit in which Huck flees from the moral sensibility of the Widow Douglas and her sister, Miss Watson. When Huck climbs out of the window and joins Tom on his evening adventures, he attempts to elude the vestments of society, both literally and figuratively: like clothing, the metaphorical terms that the Widow imposes upon him--she calls him, among other things, a poor lost lamb and tells him the story of Moses--as well as Miss Watson's moral and social admonishments breed lugubrious feelings of alienation and isolation. Huck writes, "Miss Watson she kept pecking at me, and it got tiresome and lonesome. . . . I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead" (p. 4). Rather than directly counter Miss Watson's name calling, Huck instead attempts to inure himself to his melancholia by projecting it onto the world outside of himself:

The stars was shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful; and I heard an owl, away off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead . . . and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die. . . . Then away out in the woods I heard that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell about something that's on its mind and can't make itself understood, and so can't rest easy in its grave and has to go about that way every night grieving. . . . the house was all as still as death. (pp. 4-5)

The final sound Huck hears that signals Tom's appearance bespeaks the origins of Huck's preoccupation with death:

Directly I could just barely hear a "me-yow! me-yow!" down there. That was good! Says I, "me-yow! me-yow!" as soft as I could, and then I put out the light and scrambled out of the window onto the shed. . . . there was Tom Sawyer waiting for me. (p. 5)

   {4}   An exile in the roles imposed upon him, Huck seeks the communion of self and other, "me" and "yow" (or "you") signaled by the call. And yet, even after he joins Tom, his objective descriptions figure the persisting melancholia of his internal landscape. On their way to joining the band of boys, Huck and Tom pause on the summit of a hill, where Huck observes:

Everything was so still and lonesome. . . . when Tom and me got to the edge of the hill-top, we looked away down into the village and could see three or four lights twinkling, where there was sick folks, may be. (pp. 7-8)

If Huck's speculation about the lighted houses--sick folks must be inside--betrays his own lack of psychological well-being, the first of the two ensuing spelaean episodes reveals why Tom's company fails to dispel Huck's sense of isolation: Tom's escapades do not provide radical alternatives to the social structures and roles that foster Huck's sense of alienation. Instead, they accept the terms of those structures, merely reassigning the customary distribution of power. When Huck and Tom, along with his gang of companions, crawl into a hillside cave, the imagery of the description configures the fantasy of returning to the maternal womb, only with a violent twist:

We unhitched a skiff and pulled down the river two mile and a half, to the big scar on the hillside, and went ashore.     We went to a clump of bushes, and Tom made everybody swear to keep the secret, and then showed them a hole in the hill, right in the thickest part of the bushes. Then we lit the candles and crawled in on our hands and knees. We went about two hundred yards, and then the cave opened up. Tom poked about amongst the passages and pretty soon ducked under a wall where you wouldn't a noticed that there was a hole. We went along a narrow place and got into a kind of room, all damp and sweaty and cold. (pp. 8-9)

The description of the cave as a scar and a hole in the thick part of a clump of bushes, whose disclosure to a group of curious boys constitutes the revelation of a secret, casts the adventure in terms reminiscent of the primal scene as analyzed by Freud. In this scene, a male child narcissistically construes the sex of the mother according to the presence, or threatening absence, of a phallus, the traces of whose removal are evident in her "scar." Read in terms of the primal scene, the attempt to penetrate the space of the cave bespeaks a desire to return to the womb. This desire, figured as violation or rape, enables Tom in fantasy to dominate his maternal origins: Tom "poked about" the passages inside the cave just as he must have poked about the external scar in order to locate the hole beneath the clump of bushes. Such a fantasy of domination is reinforced in the scene immediately following this one, in which Huck relates, "if anybody done anything to any boy in the band [of robbers], whichever boy was ordered to kill that person and his family must do it, and he mustn't eat and he mustn't sleep till he had killed them and hacked a cross in their breasts, which was the sign of the band" (p. 9). Through its configuration of domestic violence--the offending boy must hack a cross in the breasts of his family members--the imaginary penalty described here enhances the oedipal transgressions of the cave scene.

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   {5}   Once Huck escapes by himself, he is free to go on shore in a variety of roles of his own creation. In his imagination he overcomes the alienation engendered by his entrapment in the identities imposed upon him, an entrapment expressed through Huck's preoccupation with death. Not surprisingly, in his first stint as producer of images he enacts the fantasy of orchestrating and surviving his own death, a feat that satisfies him both practically (he escapes from his father) and aesthetically--"Tom Sawyer couldn't get up no better plan than what I had," he tells Jim (p. 52). Also, in ...

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