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AARON DEROSA
Europe, Darwin, and the Escape
from Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel of escapes: Huck must
escape from Judith Loftus, the Grangerfords, and the Wilkses; Jim from
slave hunters and Huck’s attempted betrayals; and both from St. Petersburg,
the Walter Scott, the Duke and Dauphin, and the Phelps farm. The persistent
commonality among all of these is that each one is successful. Somehow
Huck and Jim always manage to make it back to the raft unscathed—that is,
until Jim is imprisoned on the Phelps farm and Huck is reunited with Tom
Sawyer. Under Tom’s “expert” guidance, escapes become escapades and
the memories of Huck and Jim’s earlier successes hasten down the mighty
Mississippi. Huck and Jim’s simplicity is replaced by Tom’s showmanship
that includes blood-penned journals, underground tunnels, and an army
of woodland creatures. Although Huck is in “no ways particular how it’s
done, so it’s done” and gives Tom a wide berth,1 critics have been particular,
branding Tom anything from a petulant child to a sadist while labeling his
plan grotesque and cruel.
It is interesting to consider how critics would have responded if Tom,
Jim, and Huck had made it clear of the Phelps’ farm and Tom was able
to march Jim back to St. Petersburg a free man and a hero. Would Jim’s
freedom and status along with his proximity to his family salve the pain
of a hundred rat bites? Would Tom be considered the arrogant racist or
a clever (if egocentric) genius? Are critics upset because, unlike Huck’s,
Tom’s plan fails? Critics have been quick to identify the many letdowns in
Tom’s plan and in turn Twain’s plotting, but few have paid much attention
to the content of Tom’s orchestrations and their implications. More than the
cruel games of a sadistic child, Tom’s evasion is grounded in a rich history
American Literary Realism  Winter 2012, Vol. 44, No. 2
© 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
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of literary escape narratives of which Tom is supposedly knowledgeable.
However, these misread and mismanaged tales draw suspicion to the efficacy
of Tom’s training.
Indeed, training was always an operative word for Twain, who would
come back to this theme throughout his oeuvre from Life on the Mississippi
to Pudd’nhead Wilson. Not surprisingly, Twain’s logic of cultural transmission,
or training, is heavily influenced by Darwinian notions of natural selection
where deleterious behaviors vanish from a population while beneficial ones
survive. In Huckleberry Finn, two worldviews are pitted against one another
on the American frontier in a Darwinian struggle for existence. On the
one hand rests Tom’s essentialist, typological thinking evident in his strict
adherence to the European literary tradition, and on the other is Huck’s
“population thinking”—a belief in variable populations of distinct individuals—noticeable in his pragmatic approach. The ridicule that follows
the former’s escape plan suggests that Twain disdained such maladapted
typological thinking that threatened the stability of the nation.2 As such,
the much-maligned conclusion to Huckleberry Finn might be understood
as part of Twain’s larger critique of European atavism in American culture
and an innovative imagining of Darwinian logic in cultural systems that
anticipates contemporary cultural evolutionary theory.
Darwin’s Influence on Twain
In What is Man? (1906) Twain argued “there are gold men, and tin men,
and copper men, and leaden men, and steel men, and so on—and each has
the limitations of his nature, his heredities, his training, and his environment.” Twain identified these limitations as the “million unnoticed influences—for good or bad: influences which work without rest during every
waking moment of a man’s life, from cradle to grave.” When the story’s
interlocutor asks the Old Man whether he could report his tabulation of
these influences, the Old Man comically responds that “it would take an
hour.”3 Indeed, Twain’s entire life’s work seems to be about parsing the
influences that act on an individual and documenting that learning process. As Bert Bender rightly noted, Twain’s interest in Darwin was tied to
“Darwin’s understanding of heredity, training, and environment.”4 “Twain
came to believe,” Tom Quirk tells us, that humans “were shaped by training
and motivated by the desire for self-approval.”5 Or as Hank Morgan states
baldly in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, “Training is everything.”6
But training is a distinctly social process—alternately called cultural transmission, evolution, or inheritance; social learning; acquired characteristics;
etc.—and Darwin was hesitant when it came to such matters. He recognized
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the distinction between biological instincts and learned behaviors but failed
to come up with a convincing theory of cultural evolution. Filling this void
were theorists like Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Herbert Spencer, who offered
their own vision of cultural transmission with which Twain was familiar. Sherwood Cummings suggested that Twain absorbed these theories only trivially:
“As he continued to think about heredity he became more tentative and
ended by reflecting Darwin’s uneasiness on the matter of ‘inherited habit’
or instinct.”7 Of course, this trepidation did not stop Twain from considering the process of cultural inheritance. Twain was no simple follower; as
Stan Poole argued, he “treated the complex body of theoretical material
associated with Darwinism as a source of stimulating ideas he found useful
for expressing his own varied response to life.”8 Darwin’s interests were
primarily with biological heredity, whereas Twain’s “interest in heredity was
casual; his interest in training was consuming.”9
Although Twain read Darwin’s The Descent of Man, according to Cummings, “there is little evidence of Darwinism in Twain’s thought for some
years following his reading.”10 But Cummings also acknowledged Twain’s
ideas trended toward long incubation periods and that he “did not abstract and organize” his beliefs for his readers but rather “left them as they
dropped from his pen—as musings, metaphors, and parables, sometimes,
even, as cries of indignation or pain.”11 This perceived delay is accurate if
we limit Darwin’s influence on Twain to the concept of determinism—a
philosophy that posits “all occurrences in the universe are governed by inexorable laws of cause and effect” and that individuals are “determined” by
their environments12—argued most forcibly in works like Connecticut Yankee
and Pudd’nhead Wilson. But while determinism is in many ways tied to Darwin’s notions of heredity, this was wholly Darwinian. In The Descent of Love,
Bert Bender acknowledged a trend in Darwinian readings of literature that
emphasized philosophical generalities while neglecting specific manifestations of Darwin’s theories. For instance, Cummings sees that “the process
of Huckleberry’s making up his mind to go to hell for Jim—in which his
resolve to turn Jim in founders under the flood of his memories of Jim’s
kindnesses—is a textbook illustration of Darwin’s discussion of decision
making” but does not engage the project.13 Bender himself abstains from
working with Twain, whose interests diverge from his own study of sexual
selection and courtship novels.
Although Twain is not concerned with sexual selection, the underlying
logic of Huckleberry Finn does draw on specific manifestations of natural
selection on two levels. On a metanarrative level, Tom and Huck represent
two conflicting worldviews: Platonic typological thinking and Darwinian
population-based thinking. Prior to Darwin, the dominant belief was an
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essentialist one that, according to Ernst Mayr, “taught that all seemingly
variable phenomena of nature could be sorted into classes. Each class is
characterized by its definition (its essence). This essence is constant (invariable) and sharply demarcated against all other such essences.” Darwin undercut this belief by suggesting that populations were variable in
which “every individual is uniquely different from every other individual.”14
Types were actually just statistical averages of a population’s variations that
developed from context-dependent processes of natural selection. Tom’s
insistence on following the “regulations” and Huck’s lack of particularity
tangibly presents these two competing perspectives.
This debate manifested on a narrative level in the training processes
associated with both Tom and Huck. Darwin recognized the distinction
between acquired behaviors generally and imitated behaviors specifically.
Although certain processes of behavior acquisition were common to most
species, humans were unique in their unparalleled use of language. Darwin
acknowledged that man “is capable of incomparably greater and more
rapid improvement than is any other animal [. . .] and this is mainly due
to his power of speaking and handing down his acquired knowledge.”15
This process was elucidated recently by Merlin Donald, who argues that
the modern human brain still bears the vestigial marks of its evolutionary
predecessors and, as such, human cultural patterns can be parsed according to these cognitive evolutionary steps.16 One such distinction separates
the symbolic system and indicators of social learning in other species such
as imitative and non-imitative behavioral patterning.
The symbolic system, represented by the arts, is what people generally
refer to when they discuss human culture. Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb
tell us that symbolic information is transmitted via latent, encoded meanings and does not need to be displayed in order to be passed on; as long as
someone can interpret the information, it is inheritable. But culture can
be more broadly defined as any “system of socially transmitted patterns of
behavior, preferences, and products of animal activities that characterize a
group of social animals” not limited to symbolic forms. In behavioral learning, “information is not transmitted in a latent, encoded form—the behavior
has to be displayed in order for it to be inherited.” In non-imitative transmission, individuals reconstruct observed behaviors using their own methods of
trial and error. In imitative forms, “a naïve individual learns not only what to
do but how to do it. It copies the actions of another.”17 In effect, behavioral
transmission requires observation while symbolic transmission requires a
communal system of signs. The former need not be actively taught, but the
latter must (you must learn the language for it to have meaning).
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Although Darwin identified these distinctions, they would not be recognized as component parts of the evolutionary model for a century. And
yet Twain’s observation and depiction of training processes conform to
contemporary models of evolution and reveal Twain’s belief that social
behavior was inherited and potentially damaging to a population’s fitness.
This has led to confusion. Cummings, for one, inaccurately aligns Twain’s
vision of cultural inheritance with genetic transmission because of language
in Connecticut Yankee that suggests a belief in the heritability of “opinions
and attitudes.”18 However, “genetics” would not become a mainstream scientific principle until the early-twentieth century and therefore would have
been anachronistic for Twain. More likely, Twain, like most thinkers of his
day, would have understood these to be “mysterious processes.” “Darwin
himself knew nothing about genes, Mendelian laws, and DNA,” as Jablonka
and Lamb explain. “In fact, in Darwin’s day, there was no good theory of
heredity at all.”19 Cummings need not worry, then, about Twain’s “ignorant”
or “mischievous” belief in “inherited ideas.”20 Twain, like Darwin, “thought
that heritable variation stems from the effects the conditions of life have on
the organism, and from ‘use and disuse.’”21 That is, social learning played
a role in one’s fitness and thus one’s survivability.
Behavioral and Symbolic Training
in Huckleberry Finn
This logic can be traced throughout Twain’s works, particularly Life on the
Mississippi and Connecticut Yankee. But these heavy-handed visions of training
are less potent than Twain’s skillful manipulation of these ideas in Huckleberry Finn, where recasting the much maligned evasion sequence in these
terms might provide greater insight into Twain’s motives. Despite Huckleberry
Finn’s popularity, the Phelps farm incident has been one of the most controversial episodes in American literature.22 The principal criticism leveled
against the novel’s conclusion comes from Leo Marx’s contention that the
novel lacks formal unity. Marx suggested that Tom’s return marks a shift
from high seriousness to burlesque that dismantles Huck’s bildungsroman,
threatens Jim’s independence, and indicates a regression in Twain’s work
to the immaturity of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Marx and the countless
critics who follow in his footsteps make this claim on the assumption that
the novel is primarily “about” freeing Jim, and so the deus ex machina of
the widow’s will that reveals Jim was already free jeopardizes the novel’s
significance.23 But the novel works against this foundational assumption
that race is the novel’s central issue.
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For starters, Huck’s decision to free Jim is hardly evidence of a newfound
appreciation for blacks. As John Earle Bassett points out, “By the end of
the book, despite his affection for Jim, [Huck] is no more convinced of
the abstract wrong of slavery. Nor is he any more aware of the humanity of
black people other than Jim.”24 Indeed, echoes of Tom’s evasion plot are
evident in Huck’s plan to reunite the Wilks’ slaves whom the Dauphin and
Duke have sold away.25 Similarly, as Ralph Ellison and Forrest G. Robinson
argued,26 far from dehumanized, Jim wears a minstrel mask that reveals
Twain’s more intimate knowledge of black culture than Marx gives him
credit. As for the maturity of Twain’s writing, although the evasion may
inappropriately bring Tom back from oblivion, the tone is qualitatively
different at the end. Tom’s failed escape plan rings discordantly with his
successful flourishes from Tom Sawyer.
The confusion mainly lies in the fact that although the plan fails miserably—Tom is shot and nearly dies, Jim is re-imprisoned and nearly lynched,
and Huck is pseudo-incarcerated by Aunt Sally—it feels like it is successful
because the novel ends with Jim freed from slavery and Huck from the
threat of Pap. Yet none of these successes are attributable to Tom or his
plan. When Tom wakes up he declares in excitement how he and Huck
“did set [Jim] free. . . . We laid out to do it and we done it. And we done
it elegant, too” (355). When he learns that the plan failed and Jim is “in
that cabin again, on bread and water, and loaded down with chains, till
he’s claimed or sold,” Tom rises “square up in bed, with his eye hot, and
his nostrils opening and shutting like gills” before breaking character and
obliterating the fantasy (356). This is hardly the same Tom who interrupted
his own funeral back in St. Petersburg.
Of course, this is not to say that Tom has changed in any way; he remains
as static as Twain intended. The difference lies in the fact that Tom’s scheming falls flat and Twain offers the reader a viable alternative in Huck. The
contrast between the two is clearly evident at the outset of the novel in their
understanding of Tom Sawyer’s Gang. Under an oath adopted from “pirate
books, and robber books” that “every Gang that was high-toned” was sure to
have (10), the Gang raids the townsfolk but accomplishes nothing. Huck
claims that he and the other boys resigned because “we hadn’t robbed nobody, we hadn’t killed any people, but only just pretended.” Huck “couldn’t
see no profit in it” (14). Conversely, Tom rigorously constructs what Kevin
Michael Scott calls his “boy-play world” from his literary antecedents.27
Tom decrees that his band of robbers must ransom their victims since he
has “seen it in books; and so of course that’s what [they’ve] got to do” even
though he doesn’t know what the term means (10). When questioned on
his literal application of this information, Tom has no rejoinder except to
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say: “Don’t you reckon that the people that made the books knows what’s
the correct thing to do?” (11). For Tom, fidelity to an ideal type is more
important than its application.
Twain identifies this type of typological thinking with symbolic training.
Tom’s upbringing favored literacy evident in an early episode in Tom Sawyer
when Tom must learn his “verses” with the help of Mary, the admirable cousin who had already won two Bibles through these memorization practices.
Tom learns the beatitudes but doesn’t seem to comprehend their value or
apply them to the world. The two that he identifies—“blessed are the poor
in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” and “blessed are they who
mourn: for they shall be comforted” (Matthew 5: 3, 5)—are appropriate
in that they call for humility and deference, two things which Tom never
concedes.28 Tom recites the words from the Sermon on the Mount but he
does not apply them and, indeed, doesn’t seem to comprehend them. Tom’s
symbolic education teaches him the words but not their latent meanings:
they have no application value.
Twain parallels Tom’s religious training in Tom Sawyer with Huck’s in
Huckleberry Finn when Huck listens to the widow preach about Moses until
he learns that “Moses had been dead a considerable long time” and loses
interest “because [he] don’t take no stock in dead people” (2). Similarly,
when Miss Watson tells Huck to “pray every day, and whatever [he] asked
for [he] would get” (13), Huck is disappointed to learn she was referring
to “spiritual gifts” and he “couldn’t see no advantage about it” (13). “That
is just the way with some people,” Huck observes of his caretaker. “Here
she was a-bothering about Moses, which was no kin to her, and no use to
anybody being gone, you see, yet finding a power of fault with me for doing
a thing that had some good in it” (3). Robert Paul Lamb identifies this logic
as “Pap-logic”29 that boils down to the axiom: “what’s the use you learning
to do right, when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do
wrong, and the wages is just the same” (127). An example of this might
be Huck’s thieving. On a symbolic level, Pap tells Huck to “take a chicken
when you get a chance, because if you don’t want him yourself you can
easily find somebody that does, and a good deed ain’t ever forgot.” But
Huck observes Pap’s behavior and says that he’d “never see Pap when he
didn’t want the chicken himself, but that is what he used to say, anyway”
(79; emphasis added). Huck follows the observed behavior rather than the
symbolically transmitted information and steals without remorse.
Pap-logic, however, might more appropriately be called Darwinian logic.
Natural selection, Twain understood, posited that “beneficial variations of
all kinds will . . . [be] preserved, and injurious ones eliminated.”30 Beneficial
variations, for Darwin, were those that made a species more competitive
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in the fight for resources in the natural world. A similar mechanism operates in human culture, privileging those ideas or behaviors that have what
William James called “cash value”—ideas that set theory “at work within
the stream of your experience.”31 If an idea has no cash value, “the wages
is just the same,” and acting on an idea expends resources and threatens
one’s competitive advantage, then such ideas are considered maladaptive.
Pap-logic is rooted in this pragmatic individualism and Huck is the inheritor of this logic. As Bassett decrees, “the unstated horror in Huck’s future
is the possibility that thirty years down the road he may end up like Pap.”32
Huck’s lessons in pragmatic Pap-logic stand opposed to Tom’s symbolic
training. Huck’s illiteracy has left him largely unaffected by the latter. Quirk
contends that Huck’s liminal position between the widow’s culture and
Pap’s barbarism leaves him “unencumbered, more or less, by the effects
of training or the claims of social standing upon him.” Of course, Quirk
admittedly overstates the point by attributing an all-but tabula rasa to Huck.
He goes on to say that “because Huck has had to fend for himself, he knows
how to get out of a bad situation, and he knows how to read character.”33
But the fact that Huck isn’t entirely devoid of character draws our attention
to the type of training he has received in comparison to Tom. Evidence
of Huck’s behavioral training litters both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.
In the former, Huck convinces Tom that Muff Potter could not have witnessed Doctor Robinson’s death at the hands of Injun Joe because Potter
was drunk, a condition he is quite familiar with from his experiences with
Pap. On Jackson’s Island, Huck is the one to explain the ferry’s cannon fire:
“They shoot a cannon over the water, and that makes [a corpse] come up
to the top. Yes, and they take loaves of bread and put quicksilver in ’em and
set ’em afloat, and wherever there’s anybody that’s drownded, they’ll float
right there and stop.” Huck is knowledgeable on the subject because he
observed the same practice “last summer, when Bill Turner got drownded.”34
Thus when a hungry Huck watches the ferry search for his own corpse in
Huckleberry Finn, he remembers the loaves that would accompany the cannon fire and catches him a meal of high-quality “baker’s bread” (46).
Perhaps the greatest example of Huck’s observational learning is in his
funeral practices. With little experience in death, his response to Buck
Grangerford’s corpse is curious. After the shootout, Huck makes his way
back to the river and comes across two bodies. Huck tells the reader that
he dragged them ashore and then “covered up their faces” (154). Such
an action was not common among whites in the South. In the nineteenth
century, as Jacqueline Thursby explains, “the deceased was usually washed,
dressed, and laid out in the parlor of the house” where the community
would gather and mourn their loss.35 Instead, Huck seems to unconsciously
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imitate Jim’s actions when Jim came across Pap’s body and threw “some
old rags over him” (61). Ignorant of funeral rites, Huck asks Jim about the
corpse and Jim explains the situation as a distinctly African superstition:
“he said a man that warn’t buried was more likely to go a-ha’nting around
than one that was planted and comfortable” (63). The explanation is in
keeping with slave culture that wrapped their corpses in white cloth.36 Although the affluent white Peter Wilks’ face is shrouded when Huck sneaks
in to hide the money in a later episode, it is covered with a “wet cloth” of
(most likely) water or camphor designed to preserve the face (230). This
practice was only observed for a night to provide an extra day of mourning.
This explains why the Dauphin and Duke are able to both look into the
coffin upon their daytime arrival and immediately identify their “brother”:
the shroud was absent during the day. Huck’s act of covering Buck’s face
is not for the sake of preservation. Having escaped from the Grangerford
feud, he eases Jim’s fears by suggesting that the other corpse will pass for
his own, meaning he has no interest in the preservation of the corpse. Huck
imitates Jim’s funeral rites. Huck’s limited experiences with slaves suggest
that Jim is his first “teacher” and thus reveals a direct behavioral transmission of this information from Jim to Huck.
Conversely, Huck has significant difficulties with symbolic learning. Huck
finds himself consistently lost in his own stories. He forgets his name at
Judith Loftus’ cabin, mistakenly calls himself “Charles William Allbright”
(the name of the drowned child from the rafter’s story) to the rafters, and
forgets his name again at the Grangerfords. Huck is relieved when he gets
to the Phelps farm and is mistaken for Tom Sawyer, a name he can’t forget.
Huck’s problems with narrative don’t end there; his stories tend to draw
on the familiar and are thus extremely limited in scope. Each story refers
to Pap or mirrors events from the recent past. When he comes upon the
Grangerfords, instead of telling him his raft was destroyed by a steamboat,
he claims to have fallen from that same steamboat. He uses a similar story to
explain Jim to the Dauphin and Duke, tying in details from earlier events,
such as the finding of the raft and the flight from the steamboat (166).
Fresh from his plunder of the thieves on the Walter Scott, Huck tells the
“Allbright” rafters he lives on a trading scow with his pap. But he gets mixed
up in his own story. He admits that he “was born on her. Pap has traded up
and down here all his life” before immediately reversing his stance, telling
the group that “I warn’t born in her” and “it’s our first trip” (122). The
group is seemingly too drunk to care and they let him off with a warning,
but Huck’s difficulties with stories are prevalent throughout.
In more extreme cases, Huck comes up snake eyes and needs others to
prompt him. Once Huck forgets his name at the Loftus home, Judith pro-
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vides him with a new story: “You see, you’re a runaway ’prentice—that’s all.”
Huck runs with it, weaving in details from his own life. He says “I told her
my father and mother was dead, and the law had bound me out to a mean
old farmer in the country” (73). This roughly describes Huck’s situation in
St. Petersburg. Similarly, when Huck comes across the slave traders, he is
so preoccupied with whether or not to turn Jim over that he can’t concoct
a good story (a fact which prompts Jim to hide under the raft). Instead,
the traders misread his hesitance. “Your pap’s got the small-pox, and you
know it precious well” (126). Jim gives Huck credit for the “smartes’ dodge”
(128), but it was not his. Huck simply does not fare well with stories and
symbolic transmission.
It should be noted that although Huck seemingly disdains “all the marks
of a Sunday school” (17), he is certainly enticed by this education. In Tom
Sawyer, he is “filled with admiration of Tom’s facility in writing, and the
sublimity of his language.”37 Kevin Murphy argues that “Huck’s education
throughout the novel [is] a progressive entanglement in literacy.”38 Huck’s
evolving literacy culminates in writing the novel proper and, for Murphy, is
the example par excellence of social determinism: Huck succumbs to the
civilizing pressures placed on him by contributing to the literary annals.
Murphy, however, makes the assumption that Huck’s growing literacy has
the same value as Tom’s, allowing him to claim that “the final moments of
the book offer little hope that any of the characters will rise above the implacable forces pressing upon them.”39 But certainly the evasion sequence
undercuts such pessimism by contrasting two different training visions: one
burlesque, the other pragmatic.
The Evasion
Tom’s symbolic training is plainly evident throughout the evasion. He consistently berates Huck’s plans for their simplicity, instead seeking out a plan
in accordance with “the best authorities.” These rules he draws from a collection of texts, specifically Alexandre Dumas’ The Man in the Iron Mask,
Giacomo Casanova’s History of My Life, and the autobiographies of Baron
von Trenck and Benvenuto Cellini (299). As Olin Harris Moore and others
have noted, these are so tragically misapplied they are comedic, drawing
an affinity between Twain’s novel and Don Quixote with Tom as Quixote
and Huck as Sancho Panza.40 But this could only be the case if the entire
sequence were understood as farce. To the contrary, Huck, whose ultimate
goal is to return to the river with Jim and continue heading south, struggles
with Tom’s rules even if he doesn’t actively overthrow them; Huck concedes
that he was in “no ways particular how it’s done, so it’s done” (307). In
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the same vein, the subject matter, even if not understood as a civil rights
struggle as it is in the twentieth century, the race question of “freeing the
free” blacks in Reconstruction America was certainly a serious one at the
time of Twain’s composition.
Tom’s insistence on strictly following the rules set by his literary predecessors draws attention to what exactly he has learned, if anything, from his
symbolic education. As witnessed in Tom’s memorized-but-misunderstood
verses or the unclear ransom threat, Tom never learns to interpret the latent
meanings of his inherited symbolic code; that is, Tom can never practice
what he has been taught. The evasion sequence is rife with the resultant
incongruities of Tom’s typological thinking. For instance, the intention
behind the inscribed plate in Dumas’ The Man in the Iron Mask is to recruit,
yet Tom does not intend to bring anyone else on board for the escape. Jim’s
notched plates end up in a refuse pile only to be reused by Tom and Huck
in a circuitous loop of uselessness. Although Tom rightly acknowledges that
Trenck cut the bars of his cell with a notched penknife, he neglects the fact
that, for Trenck, “this was too tiresome a mode” and an officer “procured
[him] a file, which [he] was obliged to use.”41 Of course, there are no bars
on Jim’s cell for him to saw through, but Tom doesn’t mind “letting on” that
he does. As Tom and Huck attempt to dig Jim out using caseknives, Tom
begins to complain that his hands are getting blistered and that prisoners
wouldn’t have to deal with such trouble, but Cellini’s hands bled freely and
he blames this for his fall from the rope ladder that broke his leg.42 Similarly,
Tom’s insistence that Jim have a rope ladder is consistent with his literary
sources but disconnected from the practical necessity that these prisoners
were held in tall towers rather than wood shacks.
For Tom these are harmless fictions, but his more elaborate plans are
divorced from context and threaten the entire project. Tom wishes to dig a
moat but when Trenck attempted to wade through one, he got caught in the
mud, forcing him to call the guards to help him out and, inevitably, got him
thrown back in prison.43 Tom insists that Jim carve his coat of arms and an
inscription on the wall: “Look at lady Jane Grey . . . ; look at Gilford Dudley;
look at old Northumberland! . . . How you going to get around it? Jim’s got to
do his inscription and coat of arms. They all do” (321). But the inscription
Tom refers to preoccupies Northumberland the evening before he is beheaded.44 Convincing Huck to write the “nonnamous letters” tipping the Phelps
off to the escape, Tom rightly acknowledges that “there’s always somebody
spying around, that gives notice to the governor of the castle” (332). What
Tom neglects is that in all these cases, the escapes fail. Trenck was betrayed
at least twice before finally succeeding (despite another betrayal); and Louis
XVI, whom Tom directly refers to in this scene, also fails to escape, ultimately
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resulting in his own beheading. The various inscriptions Tom makes Jim
write—“Here a captive heart busted” (322)—similarly echo this doom. Put
bluntly, Tom’s escape plan is erected around a series of literary references
with dubious success rates. Tom may be well-read, but his comprehension of
the material is woefully deficient. Just as the memorized verses fail to make
any practical impact on Tom’s choices so too do these novels.
Huck is not adverse to this Sawyerian literacy, but his approach is much
different from his mentor. Tom complains: “Huck, you don’t ever seem to
want to do anything that’s regular: you want to be starting something fresh
all the time” (300–01). Tom misunderstands Huck’s logic, imputing his
own typological thinking to Huck’s actions. Huck’s choices seem “fresh”
because they recognize a circumstance’s variance from others rather than
rote application of ideal types. Evidence of this can be seen in Huck’s first
major escape from Pap’s cabin. There he decides if he were to simply run
away, he would be followed (31). His assumption is accurate, considering
the widow’s search for Huck at the end of Tom Sawyer and Pap’s surveillance
at the outset of Huckleberry Finn. Thus Huck recognizes that if he “could fix
up some way to keep pap and the widow from trying to follow me, it would
be a certainer thing than trusting to luck to get far enough off before they
missed me” (39). When Pap finds some drifting logs and heads to town to
sell them—a skill that Huck has observed and imitated when he recognizes
the “June rise” of the river (37)—Huck sets his plan in motion. He “judged
[Pap] wouldn’t come back that night” (39), a judgment drawn from observing Pap’s penchant for drinking when he’s got money in his pocket.
As Huck determined earlier, “Every time he got money he got drunk; and
every time he got drunk he raised Cain around town; and every time he
raised Cain he got jailed” (29).45 Finding the window too small, the door
too heavy, and the chimney too narrow, Huck cuts his way out with the only
tool handy, a rusty saw blade. Once free and the canoe loaded, he realizes
he “had wore the ground a good deal crawling out of the hole and dragging out so many things” (39). Huck’s tracking skills have been on display
once already, recognizing Pap’s boot-print in the snow outside the widow’s
house that prompted him to bequeath his money to Judge Thatcher. He
hides his tracks, creates new ones to the creek, and once free on the mighty
Mississippi, Huck makes for the familiar ground of Jackson’s Island.
Trying to free Jim at the Phelps farm, Huck is faced with a situation very
similar to the one he experienced in Pap’s cabin. Despite this familiarity,
he takes a backseat to Tom. “I went to thinking out a plan, but only just to
be doing something: I knowed very well where the right plan was going
to come from” (292). Huck’s plan is quick and pragmatic but bears none
of the ingenuity of his earlier escape. And yet once he begins to carry out
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Tom’s, echoes of his earlier escapes arise. Huck’s initial impulse is to sneak
Jim out through the window as he had done from the widow’s house months
before. When Tom is stumped regarding the best method for removing the
shackle connecting Jim’s leg to the bed, Huck channels his earlier escape
by recommending a “rusty saw-blade” (31, 305). Tom dismisses the idea
and explains the regulations to Huck in a process very similar to what Huck
endured fleeing Pap’s cabin. Tom informs Huck that “the way all the best
authorities does, is to saw the bed-leg in two, and leave it just so, and swallow the sawdust, so it can’t be found, and put some dirt and grease around
the sawed place so the very keenest seneskal can’t see no sign of its being
sawed” (299). This story echoes Huck’s own escape where he “greased [the
saw] up,” cut through the log, “got rid of the signs of [his] work,” and after
escaping he “fixed the piece of log back into its place and put two rocks
under it and one against it to hold it there.” That way, “If you stood four
or five foot away and didn’t know it was sawed, you wouldn’t ever notice it”
(31, 39–40). Huck has already been through this before but says nothing.
The plan’s climax once again echoes the behavioral learning curve evident in the novel. Whereas Huck and Jim’s escapes from the Walter Scott
or the Grangerfords have provided them with the awareness and threatassessment needed to steal away from the shack, Tom has not the same
awareness. Tom catches his pants on a splinter that he is compelled to pull
loose “which snapped the splinter and made a noise” (339), paralleling
Huck’s earlier evasion from Jim’s watchful gaze outside the widow’s house.
There, too, an innocuous mistake—tripping over a root—threatened the
escape. But whereas Huck lay silent and waited Jim out, Tom ran: “As he
dropped in our tracks and started, somebody sings out: ‘who’s that?’” (339).
It is Tom’s movement after the fact that prompts the chase, Tom’s bullet
wound, Jim’s near-lynching, and the failure of Tom’s plan. Tom’s evasion
fails because his literary models are divorced from the practical world.
Huck’s lived experiences and successful escapes provide a counterbalance
to the farce that Tom’s plot becomes. Huck need not directly undermine
Tom’s typological thinking; Tom will give himself enough rope to hang
himself. In the end, there is no admiration of Tom on Huck’s part. Huck
is ready to take Tom’s advice and light out for the territory, but not with a
cortege and not for a two-week “adventure.”
European Atavism
Twain’s privileging of behavioral training with its supposed “cash value”
does not reflect a general antipathy toward symbolic education. As a writer,
orator, and investor in the Paige typesetter, this was Twain’s bread and but-
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ter. Like Huck who pens his autobiography, Twain is simply concerned with
drawing attention to symbolic training that allows atavistic and maladaptive
cultural traits to form. The concern Twain expresses is of symbolic training becoming divorced from experience. This has most often been associated with the “Walter Scott Syndrome” that Twain excoriated in Life on the
Mississippi. In numerous articles about texts such as The Innocents Abroad
and Connecticut Yankee, critics have imagined an antipathy on Twain’s part
towards Europe. J. D. Stahl marked Twain’s early travel writing as a pulpit
from which Twain defined “American customs and values through judgments of foreign practices and beliefs.”46 Manfred Putz claimed that Twain
“not only had to denounce the paradoxical claims of the Old World, but at
the same time he had to deflate the ridiculous posture of those American
who fell for the bogus grandeurs of the old continent instead of counting
the blessings of their own.”47
But such arguments miss the mark. Twain was not opposed to Europe in
and of itself; he simply despised tradition dissociated from the local situation, namely the reemergence of European styles in America a century
removed from Independence. Twain did not blindly privilege one tradition
over another, but opposed tradition as a typological framework to which the
world must conform. In this sense, his logic was fundamentally Darwinian
in his appreciation for the local pragmatism of natural selection. If Huckleberry Finn is a contested space where typological and population thinking
compete, it is Huck’s population thinking that wins out while Tom’s reliance
on European culture to plan a distinctly American escape—the escape from
slavery—is weeded out.
Tom’s literary appreciation actually redeems his character to some extent
in that critics who have written Tom off as a simple “racist” fail to acknowledge that his plan is distinctly Old World and moneyed. Cellini, Trenck, Casanova, Louis XVI, Henry V, and the fiction of Dumas all depict the escapes
of those with titles and honor. Generating a Coat of Arms for the runaway
slave, Tom places Jim within this European tradition to which Jim has no
personal, financial, or legal (ancestral) entitlement. Tom acknowledges this
when he considers having Jim cut his leg off but concedes Jim “wouldn’t
understand the reasons for it, and how it’s the custom in Europe” (300).
But in spite of Jim’s blackness, Tom has no qualms with treating him like
any wealthy white patron. And unlike his other changes to the regulations
that Tom can’t bring himself to undermine, Tom never has to “let on” that
Jim is white. This is not to say that Tom is a misunderstood hero, but to
recognize the complicated nature of Twain’s critique. Tom is an ignorant,
petulant child, but he is a child who ignores racial distinctions in his most
valued European fantasies.
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Perhaps the greatest example of Twain’s position on the process of training is evident in Huck’s debate with Jim about Solomon’s wives. For Huck,
Jim’s seemingly literal application of halving the baby misses the point by
“a thousand mile” and aligns Jim’s thinking with Tom’s (95). What Huck
doesn’t recognize in Jim’s condemnation of Solomon is that Jim does understand and has already applied Solomon’s lesson to a distinctly American situation. Neil Schmitz argues that “Jim has instinctively recognized in
Solomon the figure of the slaveholder, the white Southerner who regards
the Negro as chattel.” Jim “is somewhere else rooted in his experience of
the world and not to be argued from it.”48 This pragmatic approach, the
reliance on behavioral transmission of observed, lived experience over latent codes in symbolic transmission, is more accurately aligned with Huck’s
logic.
The tragedy is that despite their closeness, Huck still cannot understand
Jim’s perspective nor the plight of blacks in America, a fact made painfully
clear in the following chapter as Huck tricks Jim after they are split up in
the fog. The escape from this misunderstanding of black culture, much like
the escapes throughout the novel, cannot be written in symbolic language
but must be rooted in behavioral transmission of appropriate behavior.
Slavery, then, might be regarded as the distinctly American prison that
the country must escape from where European models are subverted and
behavioral knowledge privileged. Huck may not be a civil rights activist at
the end of the novel, but his experiences have taught him that Jim is not
what he thought and provides hope that the next generation might be
trained similarly.
—Purdue University
Notes
Thanks to Robert Lamb and those who helped me flesh out the various drafts of this
paper.
1. Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press,
2001), p. 307. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically.
2. This logic is in keeping with much Twain criticism that focuses on Tom as representative of Southern honor codes associated with Walter Scott that Twain felt was a blight
on American culture.
3. Twain, What is Man? (1906; rpt. London: Watts & Co, 1936), pp. 4, 23.
4. Bert Bender, The Descent of Love (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1996),
p. 367.
5. Tom Quirk, Mark Twain and Human Nature (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press,
2007), pp. 14–15.
6. Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press,
1997), p. 162.
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7. Sherwood Cummings, Mark Twain and Science: Adventures of Mind (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1988), p. 170.
8. Stan Poole, “In Search of the Missing Link: Mark Twain and Darwinism,” Studies in
American Fiction, 13 (Autumn 1985), 201.
9. Cummings, p. 169.
10. Cummings, pp. 57–58.
11. Cummings, p. 44.
12. Perry D. Westbrook, Free Will and Determinism in American Literature (Rutherford,
N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1979), p. ix.
13. Cummings, p. 183. Further evidence of eschewing process-oriented texts can
be seen in Cummings’ rejection of the “didactic or illustrative” and thus “unrealistic”
Connecticut Yankee. Instead, Cummings prefers Pudd’nhead Wilson with its “down-to-earth
details, strongly realized people, and dialogue that rings with the authenticity of time,
place, and character” (181). In doing so, Cummings inadvertently falls prey to Bender’s
critique. Pudd’nhead Wilson may be full of down-to-earth details, but it never gives any
indication of how Tom (born Chambers) came to be so morally corrupt. His million
influences are undocumented and the (ignorant) reader is left to assume Roxy is right
when she blames the fatal drop of black blood for Tom’s bad behavior. Pudd’nhead Wilson
is a novel of determinist generalities whereas Connecticut Yankee is about the process.
14. Ernst Mayr, What Evolution Is (New York: Basic Books, 2001), pp. 74–75.
15. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871; rpt. London: Penguin, 2004), p. 101.
16. Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture
and Cognition (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991), passim.
17. Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2005), pp. 161, 174, 172. While there are other forms of behavioral learning,
these are the ones most relevant for this study.
18. Cummings, p. 169.
19. Jablonka and Lamb, p. 12.
20. Cummings, p. 169.
21. Jablonka and Lamb, p. 13.
22. For a survey, see Richard Hill, “Overreaching: Critical Agenda and the Ending of
Huckleberry Finn,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 33 (1991), 492–513.
23. Leo Marx, “Mr. Eliot, Mr. Trilling and Huckleberry Finn,” American Scholar, 22 (1953),
423–40.
24. John Earl Bassett, “Huckleberry Finn: The End Lies in the Beginning,” American
Literary Realism, 17 (Spring 1984), 93.
25. Here Huck employs a convoluted plan in which the Wilks’ slaves will be reunited
after the King and Duke are identified as frauds and the courts show that they had no
legal right to sell them.
26. Ralph Ellison, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” Partisan Review, 25 (1958),
212–22; Forrest G. Robinson, “The Characterization of Jim in Huckleberry Finn,” Nineteenth-Century Literature, 43 (December 1988), 361–91.
27. Kevin Michael Scott, “‘There’s More Honor’: Reinterpreting Tom and the Evasion
in Huckleberry Finn,” Studies in the Novel, 12 (2005), 186–206.
28. It is also curious to note that Twain places these beatitudes out of order. While the
“poor in spirit” receive Jesus’ first blessing, the “mourners” receive the third. Sandwiched
between these two, and oddly appropriate for Twain, is “Blessed are the meek: for they
shall possess the land” (Matthew 5:5). While slavery is not a significant factor in Tom
Sawyer, its absence in Tom’s education is suggestive of its absence in the larger social/
moral code of the South.
29. Robert Paul Lamb, “America Can Break Your Heart: On the Significance of Mark
Twain,” in A Companion to American Fiction, 1865–1914, ed. Lamb and G. R. Thompson
(Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005), p. 480.
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30. Darwin, Descent, p. 67.
31. William James, Pragmatism (1907; rpt. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), p. 32.
32. Bassett, p. 93. It is worth noting that contemporary evolutionary theory has begun
to consider the importance of reciprocal altruism and cooperation in human social
systems as a more powerful force than the competitive drive posited by Darwin.
33. Quirk, p. 113.
34. Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1997), p.
110.
35. Jacqueline S. Thursby, Funeral Festivals in America: Rituals for the Living (Lexington:
Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2006), p. 90.
36. David R. Roediger, “And Die in Dixie: Funerals, Death, and Heaven in the Slave
Community 1700–1865,” Massachusetts Review, 22 (Spring 1981), 169.
37. Twain, Tom Sawyer, p. 80.
38. Kevin Murphy, “Illiterate’s Progress: The Descent into Literacy in Huckleberry Finn,”
Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 26 (1984), 365.
39. Murphy, p. 384.
40. Olin Harris Moore, “Mark Twain and Don Quixote,” PMLA, 37 (June 1922),
324–46.
41. Von Trenck, The Life of Baron Frederick Trenck (Boston: Bedlington, 1828), p. 28.
42. The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, trans. J. Addington Symonds (New York:
Collier, 1910), p. 229.
43. Von Trenck, p. 28.
44. William Harrison Ainsworth, The Tower of London (London: Routledge, 1903), p.
158.
45. When Pap returns home early, Huck is disappointed more that he was sober than
that his own guess didn’t pan out.
46. J. D. Stahl, Mark Twain, Culture, and Gender: Envisioning America through Europe
(Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1994), p. 2.
47. Manfred Putz, “Mark Twain and the Idea of American Superiority at the End of
the Nineteenth Century,” in American Empire, ed. Serge Ricard (Provence: Universite de
Provence, 1990), p. 221.
48. Neil Schmitz, “The Paradox of Liberation in Huckleberry Finn,” Texas Studies in
Literature and Language, 13 (1971), 132.
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