The Motherhood in Mark Twain’s
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
2003년
서강대학교 대학원
영어영문학과
박 상 희
The Motherhood in Mark Twain’s
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
지도교수 장 영 희
이 논문을 영문학석사 학위 논문으로 제출함
2003년 12월
서강대학교 대학원
영어영문학과
박 상 희
논문 인준서
박상희의 영문학석사 학위 논문을 인준함
2003년 12월
주심
김 욱 동
(인)
부심
장 영 희
(인)
부심
노 재 호
(인)
The Motherhood in Mark Twain’s
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
By
Park, Sanghee
A Thesis Presented
To the Faculty of the Graduate School of
Sogang University in Partial Fulfillment of
The Requirement for the Degree of
Master of Arts
2003
Acknowledgement
First of all, I would like to express my deep gratitude to my advisor,
Prof. Chang, Young-Hee for her encouragement and support. Without her
genuine concern and careful advice, I could not have finished this thesis. I
really thank God for giving me the luck to know such a great teacher personally.
And my sincere gratitude goes to Prof. Kim, Wook-Dong and Prof. Rho, Jae-Ho
for their valuable comments and advices for improving my thesis.
I am a very lucky person to have so many people to thank. I don’t know
how to express my thanks and love to them. I am deeply grateful to my family
and my friends who cheered me up when I feel tired and despair. Especially, I
thank my parent-in-laws for praying for me every morning.
Also I want to give my special love and thanks to my dearest husband
whose love and concern strengthen me all the time. Without his understanding,
encouragement, and help, I could not even make a decision to start my study
again nor could I continue this thesis.
Lastly, I would like to dedicate my thesis to my loving parents who
always believe in me and have supported me. I cannot think of any words to
express my love and thanks to them. In fact, my wonderful parents and family
made me realize the importance of family and inspired me to write about
motherhood and home for my thesis. Most of all, I really thank God for loving
and guiding me for all my life.
Park, Sanghee
December, 2003
Table of Contents
Abstract
Introduction……………………………………………………… 1
Chapter I: Runaway from the Mother…………………………… 5
Chapter II: Attachment to the Mother………………………….. 35
Conclusion……………………………………………………… 70
Bibliography……………………………………………………. 74
국문초록
‘헉클베리 핀’은 세계적인 유명인사다. 마크 트웨인의 “헉클베리핀의
모험”은 세계 각국의 언어로 번역되어 널리 읽혀지고 있으며, 어린이들을
대상으로 제작된 동화, 만화, 연극, 영화 뿐만 아니라 헉의 이름을 딴 각종
상품들도 쉽게 볼 수 있다. 이렇게 다양하게 변형된 매체에서의 헉은 흥미
로운 모험들을 즐기는 영웅처럼 그려지고 있다. 그러나, 마크 트웨인의 “오
리지날 헉”은 모험을 좋아하는 즐거운 소년이라기 보다는, 외로움, 두려움,
열등감으로 인해 항상 소외된 삶을 살아가는 아동이다. 아직 가정의 울타리
안에서 보호받고 양육되어져야 하는 열두살의 어린 소년으로서, 헉의 가장
큰 비극은 어머니의 죽음, 알코올 중독자인 아버지의 학대로 인한 가정으로
부터의 소외이다. 심리학적인 시각에서 본다면, 헉의 모든 소외의 근본적인
원인은 어머니의 상실에 그 뿌리를 두고 있다. 전문적인 심리학자들의 말을
굳이 쓰지 않더라도, 한 사람의 인생에서 어머니의 중요성과 의미는 더 말
할 필요가 없을 정도이다. 특히 어린시절 어머니의 상실로 인한 정신적, 정
서적, 도덕적인 결함은 이후 성장기와 성인기에 극복되기가 어렵다는 것이
아동심리학자들의 공통된 의견이다.
어머니가 없는 아이인 헉의 여정은 심리학적으로 어머니를 찾기 위한
모험이라고 할 수 있다. 모험 중 만나게 되는 여성들은 헉의 “대리모
(surrogate mother)”로서, 헉에게 모성애를 보여주고, 헉은 이들과의 관계
에서 도덕적인 성장을 하게 된다. 특히 자신이 애착을 보이는 대리모와의
관계에서 헉은 자신을 희생하기까지 하는 괄목할 만한 도덕성을 성취한다.
그러나, 헉은 어머니와 가정의 상실로 인한 결함들을 끝내 극복하지 못하고,
일관성있는 도덕적 성장에 실패하게 된다.
Abstract
“Huckleberry Finn” is a worldwide celebrity. Mark Twain’s Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn, translated into various languages, has been read
throughout the world. The work has been adapted for the children’s story, the
animated cartoon, the play, and the movie; moreover, a variety of goods, named
after Huck, are easy to see in the market. Huck in these transformed mediums is
depicted as a hero who enjoys the exciting adventures. Mark Twain’s “original
Huck”, however, is not a easygoing, adventurous boy but a child who always
lives an alienated life, burdened with loneliness, scare, and low self-esteem. For
Huck, a twelve-year-old child who should be protected and raised in the fence
of family, the most tragic problem is the alienation from the home, caused by
the death of his mother and the abuse of his alcoholic father. From the
psychological point of view, all kinds of Huck’s alienation are rooted in his loss
of his mother. It is needless to say that a mother is the most important and
meaningful person in one’s life. Most of child psychologists agree that the loss
of the mother in early childhood brings about the mental, emotional, moral
weakness, which is difficult to be overcome in adolescence and adulthood.
To speak psychologically, the journey of a motherless child Huck can be
regarded as the quest for the mother. The women, who Huck encounters during
his journey, play roles of surrogate mother, mothering Huck. Through the
relationship with them, he develops morally. In particular, for the mother whom
he feels strong attachment to, Huck achieves the considerable moral
development to the extent that he sacrifices himself. Nevertheless, Huck cannot
ultimately overcome his defects originated from his loss of mother and home,
and fails in the consistent moral development.
Introduction
In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain put most of his
fictional families into miserable and dangerous situations; they are smitten by
the natural disasters like death or disease and the social injustice like murder or
slavery. As a result, the characters, more often than not, suffer various kinds of
familial separation. For example, Tom and the Wilks girls are orphans; the
Grangerfords have three deceased sons, who are murdered by the Shepherdsons
during their feuds that have been going on for a generation or more without
knowing the reason; Colonel Sherburn shoots Bogss in spite of his young
daughter’s pleading for her father’s life; the black families of the Wilks are
separated and sold away; Jim’s family is separated and owned by different
plantations. These endangered families show Twain’s vision of the fragility of
family and the tragic results of the familial separation.
The protagonist Huck embodies the worst case in the novel. Huck is
more alienated from family life than any other characters. Even though Tom
and Mary Jane are orphans, they have relatives who provide their young
nephew and niece with family life of genuine parenthood and sweet home.
Unlike them, Huck has no kinship that supports him emotionally and
economically. Rather, Huck’s family only intensifies his alienation: His mother
has been dead since his early childhood; Pap is a homeless alcoholic and abuses
his son severely; his family are all ignorant and illiterate. The inferior status of
Huck’s family in the social, economic, and educational hierarchy also robs him
of the opportunities to get proper cares that are necessary for the “normal”
development of a twelve-year-old boy. Consequently, Huck becomes a
peripheral of the society outside the domestic sphere.
As an outsider, Huck always feels anxieties and repeats delinquent
behaviors: death-like loneliness, low self-esteem, lack of sociability, habitual
lies, and frequent runaways. Freud and many other psychologists point out the
loss of the mother can be a basic cause for the anxiety adolescents feel.
According to Freud, all anxieties are rooted in the separation from what he calls
“original object,” the mother: “Here anxiety appears as a reaction to the felt loss
of the object…the earliest anxiety of all…is brought about on the occasion of a
separation from the mother.”1 Then, seen from the Freudian point of view,
Huck’s problem may have been originated from his separation from the mother
in his early childhood.
To psychologically speak, Huck’s journey down the river is, in a way,
his quest for the mother, again according to Freud, “a highly valued object,”
which has been absent since his early childhood. During his quest, Huck
subconsciously searches for the motherhood in the substitute mother figures,
who represent the mother to him and exert influence on his moral development.
1
Quoted from Carolyn Dever, Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian
Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 40.
The importance of the mother for the child’s moral development has been
emphasized by many psychologists since Freud’s study on the maternal role in
the child’s formation of ego ideal. Ego ideal is a kind of the positive selfidentity, which consists of the basis of moral behavior. In Freud, Women, and
Morality, Eli Sagan, citing McDevitt who says, “Identifications with mother’s
loving care foster the very beginnings of love and concern for others,” argues
that the relationship of the child to its mother provides the psychic basis for
moral behavior in adult life.2 Melanie Klein comments on the influence of the
“good mother” on a child’s moral development, saying that the idealized image
of the good mother is intimately intertwined with the origin of morality: loving,
caring, pitying, protecting, encouraging. She adds, “Such an idealized image is
essential for psychic health; the child who lacks it remains extremely vulnerable
to pathology.”3 A motherless child, therefore, should experience the difficulties
in the moral development. So should Huck.
Nevertheless, during his quest, Huck does grow morally through his
relationship with the mother figures, that is, his surrogate mothers. It does not
mean, however, that all the surrogate mothers bring about the moral
development of Huck. Whether Huck shows the moral development or not
depends on his relationship with the surrogate mothers. Huck often feels like
2
Eli Sagan, Freud, Women, and Morality: the Psychology of Good and Evil (New
York: Basic Books, 1988) 181.
3
Sagan, 188.
running away from a mother even when the mother tries to provide the proper
nurturing and protectiveness. In contrast, if Huck feels strong attachment
towards a mother, he helps the mother by sacrificing himself for the sake of the
mother, which means not only his moral development but also the success of his
quest for the mother.
In the present thesis, the reason of Huck’s ambivalent attitude towards
the mother and the possibility of his moral development will be discussed by
analyzing the characteristics of the mother surrogates and Huck’s psychology as
a motherless child. Therefore, it is my hope that this study will shed some light
upon Mark Twain’s insight of the motherhood, the home, and the morality.
Twain seems to have emphasized the primacy of the mother and the home not
only for his motherless, homeless protagonist but also for his readers. Both
Huck and the readers suffer alienation in the “uncomfortable” society full of
injustice, cruelty, violence, hypocrisy, inhumanity, and materialism, and
struggle to find out their psychological home and mother to take a rest and
comfort.
Chapter I: Runaway from the Mother
The world of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn seems
male-dominant; the main characters are all male and the story includes tall tales
and adventures of men’s world where women play only minor roles. This maledominant image of the novel, to some extent, has been exaggerated by many
critics to point out the lack of the author’s talent in depicting the female
characters. About the reason of omitting Mark Twain in her study of the
nineteenth-century American novels, Judith Fryer argues, “Mark Twain created
no really significant women; his Roxanna in Pudd’nhead Wilson is the most
interesting, but even she is little more than a literary stereotype.”4 Wilma
Garcia agrees with Fryer, saying, “The problem confronting the boy or young
man who is the usual protagonist in Twain’s novels is to find a proper guide for
his initiation into the world of men. Women, with their silly foibles and skewed
perceptions, are unable to offer such guidance; it is in fact the familiar life of
home and mother which a boy must leave behind if he is to discover his
masculine identity.” 5 Joyce W. Warren, along the same lines with them,
observes:
Like Cooper and Melville and the New England male Transcendentalists,
Mark Twain was unable to portray a woman as a person. His novels
4
Judith Fryer, The Faces of Eve: Women in the Nineteenth-century American Novel
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1976) 25-6.
5
Wilma Garcia, Mothers and Others: Myths of the Female in the Works of Melville
Twain, and Hemingway (New York: Peter Lang, 1984) 106.
show us humorous old ladies and silly little girls, but there is no woman
of any substance…For the most part, Twain is simply not interested in
the female characters in his works. As his friend, William Dean Howells,
commented regarding Twain’s portrayal of women, “I do not think he
succeeds so often with that nature as with the boy-nature or the mannature, apparently because it does not interest him so much.”6
His masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is no exception; its female
characters have been neglected. They are considered “examples of the kinds of
stereotypical females that Americans have laughed at for generations.”7
Like the fictional women of Mark Twain’s works, the real women of his
life have been neglected until recently. Some critics argue that women exerted
no significant influence on him because he created the ideal image of women
and forced women around him to act in accordance with his ideal. Resa Willis,
in her biography of Olivia Langdon Clemens, Mark Twain’s wife, asks if Livy
has a real effect on her husband and his writing, and answers, “Of course not. It
was all a game to him. He created a Livy to reform his life and a Livy to edit his
work. He wanted and needed to be tamed…If he felt strongly about something
that he didn’t want changed, he didn’t change it.”8 Even worse, he has been
seen as a demanding patriarch; the burden of life as Mark Twain’s wife was too
6
Joyce W. Warren, Individualism and Women in Nineteenth-century American Fiction
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1884) 149-50.
7
Garcia, 6.
8
Resa Willis, Mark and Livy: the Love Story of Mark Twain and the Woman Who
Almost Tamed Him (New York: TV Books, 2000) xiii.
demanding for Livy, and as a result, the burden came to consume her weak
health. During the years of her final illness, the time of meeting her husband
was limited to five minutes a dayeven that, only when her condition was
good enough to sustain the stress of meeting with him. In addition, Mark Twain
is known as a strict, selfish father. Warren, pointing out Twain’s preoccupation
with female purity, says that he dealt strictly, conventionally with his daughters
and did not consider nor understood what they wanted as a girl.9 In contrast,
Van Wyck Brooks charges Olivia Clemens for killing her husband’s creativity,
and argues, “It was, this marriage, as we perceive, a case of the blind leading
the blind. Mark Twain had thrown himself into the hands of his wife; she, in
turn, was merely the echo of her environment…It was for her own sake,
therefore, that she trimmed him and tried to turn Caliban into a gentleman.”10
That is, by removing the importance of women from Mark Twain’s life, the
traditional biographies of Mark Twain partially make readers overlook the
meaning of the female characters in his works.
Recent studies, however, show that the relationship between Mark
Twain and women had a significant influence on both his writing and his life. It
is true that Mark Twain also shared the contemporary view of women and
home: Victorian Domesticity that emphasized the frailty of women and restricts
9
Warren, 169.
Van Wyck Brooks, “The Ordeal of Mark Twain” in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
ed. Sculley Bradley, et al., 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1977) 298.
10
women’s arena to home. Furthermore, Mark Twain, raised in the conservative
society, slaveholding Hannibal, Missouri, had conventional views in the social
matters, including race. But Mark Twain’s marriage with Livy changed his
thought and attitude considerably. Unlike him, Livy was raised in a liberal
family and religiously and socially free atmosphere. Her family, the Langdons,
attended an abolitionist church and supported various progressive movements
to reform the contemporary society, including dress reform, temperance reform,
hydropathic health cure, women’s suffrage activities, and labor reform. Her
hometown, Elmira, was the center of those reform movements, which must
have influenced the formation of Livy’s character and thoughts during her
youth. After marriage with Livy, Twain became acquainted with quite a few
female feminists, abolitionists, suffragists, and liberalists who were intelligent
and progressive in their temperament. He adapted himself to new circumstances,
and enjoyed his feminine company throughout his life. He was willing to accept
the opinions of his female company, and supported their activities. It is natural
that his female company had considerable influence on his writing and his
characters. Skandera-Trombley emphasizes the influence of women on Twain,
and claims:
But what biographers have not recognized is that Clemen’s interactions
with women helped define his boundaries. In both the personal and
literary realms, he was a man voluntarily controlled and influenced by
women. Women shaped his life, edited his books, provided models for
his fictional characters, and, through their correspondences, heavily
influenced his fiction and literary works.11
These views of recent studies of Mark Twain’s biography make it
possible to interpret the female characters of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in
the different way from the traditional criticism which regards women as only
minor characters forming the backdrop of the story. That is to say, his female
characters, influenced by women in the real life of the author, play important
roles not only in Huck’s character development but also in development of the
story. On the matter of the latter, women often provide Huck with the motive
for his next move, and enable his journey to continue: The Widow and Miss
Watson’s effort to civilize Huck and Miss Watson’s plan to sell Jim start their
journey down the river; Mrs. Judith Loftus informs Huck that her husband is
after the runaway slave, which makes Huck and Jim leave the Jackson Island; at
the end, Aunt Sally’s attempt to civilize Huck causes him to “light out for the
Territory ahead of the rest.”12 Thus Mark Twain’s female characters are given
the important role of initiating the protagonist into new experiences, which
eventually brings his character development. In other words, Mark Twain’s
11
Laura E. Skandera-Trombley, Mark Twain in the Company of Women (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994) 2. In her full-length book, she states the
positive aspects of Twain’s relations with women with the context of that time and the
biographical facts.
12
Samuel L. Clemens, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. Sculley Bradley et al., 2nd
ed. (New York: Norton, 1977) 229. All subsequent references to this work will be by
page number within the text.
female characters, more often than not, act as a major factor for Huck’s
character development as well as for the story’s unfolding.
As for Huck’s character development, Huck needs a guide to lead him to
develop from an innocent boy into a mature adult man. Although he has the
“sound heart” which can lead him to making a good moral judgment, it cannot
work consistently nor effectively all the time. Without a good guide, Huck
cannot grow up to achieve the stable character development. And Huck is only
a twelve-year-old child who needs to be taken care of, protected, and educated.
In other words, Huck needs a nurturer to care for him mentally, emotionally,
and physically. This whole nurturing, strengthening him in all aspects, can
prepare him for the harsh reality where he must live in in the future. More than
anybody, this genuine nurturer should be a “mother” to a child.
It is needless to say that the mother is crucially important for a child.
The importance of mother cannot be emphasized enough in every psychological
studies of children development. The loss of the mother can cause a great
damage on children’s development in every aspect. For the importance of a
woman’s role as a mother, Winnicott says that “[the] mother’s prolonged
absence causes a ‘break in life’s continuity.’ An infant’s experience of such a
break is…equivalent to the experience of madness.” 13 About maternal
13
Quoted from Shirley Nelson Garner, “Constructing the Mother: Contemporary
Psychoanalytic Theorists and Women Autobiographers” in Narrating Mothers:
Theorizing Maternal Subjectivities, ed. Brenda O. Daly and Maureen T. Reddy
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991) 77.
deprivation, Bowlby asserts, “[The] evidence is now such that it leaves no room
for doubt…that the prolonged deprivation of maternal care may have grave and
far-reaching effects on his [a child’s] character and so on the whole of his future
life.”14 Bowlby’s research shows that the deprivation of continuous mothering
in childhood causes the children’s future capacity for human relationships and
for intellectual performance to be permanently stunted.15 What is more, recent
works show that the absence of mother exerts a greatest effect on the future
emotional development of children.
16
About the influence on moral
development, Robert Coles, in The Moral Intelligence of Children, suggests that
the absence of one parent or both parents can result in children’s moral loss as
well as psychological pain.17 And these various psychological damages from
the absence of motherhood can be evidently found in the character of the
motherless child Huck.
What should be noted in Huck’s growth is that he is a motherless child;
he has never received the unconditional affection of mother nor had his own
home. At the same time, he is extremely abused by his father. His father’s
existence “only emphasizes his [Huck’s] loneliness; and he views his father
14
Quoted from Jeremy Holmes, John Bowlby and Attachment Theory (London:
Routledge, 1999) 37.
15
Quoted from Sula Wolff, Childhood and Human Nature: The Development of
Personality (London: Routledge, 1989) 55.
16
Wolff, 71.
17
Robert Coles, The Moral Intelligence of Children (New York: Random House,
1997) 58.
with a terrifying detachment.”18 This total exclusion of Huck from mother and
home eventually makes him start a quest for them. On the children’s response to
the loss of parental love, Bowlby contends that the bereavement of the
caregiver causes the bereaved one to restlessly search for the missing person to
recover the loss.19 Huck, the bereaved child, starts his quest for a mother who
can satisfy his hunger for motherly love, protect him from his abusive father,
and relieve his alienation.
Mark Twain’s attachment to his own mother and family may explain his
insight of the motherhood and home, which later was bound to be revealed in
his works. Traditional Mark Twain’s biographical studies did not pay much
attention to his domestic life and relationship. More biographers of the last two
decades or so, however, tend to study his domestic relationships, especially with
women, suggesting the importance of mother and home not only in his life but
also in his works.20 Twain, living in the Victorian era when domestic life, most
18
T. S. Eliot, “An Introduction to Huckleberry Finn” in Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn, ed. Sculley Bradley, et al., 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1977) 329.
19
Quoted from Holmes, 89-91.
20
Recent criticism is inclined to value Mark Twain’s concern with family and to
biographically analyze the influence of his family concern on his works and characters.
James Grove points out that Mark Twain valued the family and that he realized that
“human beings could find meaning, could even redeem themselves, through loving
relations.” Michael J. Kiskis, in his essay, “Mark Twain and the Tradition of Literary
Domesticity,” also mentions Huck’s suffering from the absence of home and his search
for it. He contends, “His [Mark Twain’s] concerns are with hearth and home. With
family. With the absence of family and the need to locate and develop emotional ties
within an extended community of friends and acquaintances.” The critics who are
interested in the family subject of Mark Twain pay attention to the importance of
mothering. Vic Doyno, in “Sam Clemens as Family Man and Father,” depicts Livy’s
often with the mother at its center, was considered as most important, embodied
the importance of mother and home in his works. Indicating Mark Twain’s
aligning himself with the genteel Victorian domestic culture, Krauth mentions
the author’s deep concern with his family, which was shared with the typical
contemporaries. Krauth adds, “This period, 1870-1891, saw the creation of
Mark Twain’s three most popular books of boy adventure: Tom Sawyer, The
Prince and the Pauper, and Huckleberry Finn…All three books thus bear some
imprint of the home that centered around Livy, the girls, and Mark Twain.”21
Twain himself tried to be a good father to his daughters and a good husband to
his wife. In 1885, Susy Clemens, his eldest daughter, described her family life
in her biography of her father: “We are a very happy family. We consist of Papa,
Mamma, Jean, Clara, and me…He is a very good man and a very funny
one…he is the loveliest man I ever saw or ever hope to see.” 22 Writing
Huckleberry Finn during his happiest time of family life, Mark Twain, a family
man, naturally expressed his concern with family and home in the novel.
The relationship between Mark Twain and his parents may also explain
why he considered motherhood and home as important. Like Huck, Twain felt
mothering as the good standard. L. Skandra-Trombley, in “Mark Twain’s Mother of
Invention,” mentioning the influence of Mark Twain’s relations with women, suggests
Twain’s emphasis on the important role of mother’s teaching in the child education.
21
Leland Krauth, Proper Mark Twain (Athens: the University of Georgia Press, 1999)
136.
22
Quoted from Geoffrey C. Ward, Dayton Duncan, and Ken Burns, Mark Twain (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001) 133.
detached from his father, John Marshall Clemens, who remained stern,
unsmiling toward his sons. According to Mark Twain, “My father and I were
always the most distant terms when I was a boya sort of neutrality, so to
speak.”23 Kenneth S. Lynn also characterizes his father as a “strange, austere,
loveless man.”24 John M. Clemens died when his son was eleven years old.
Unlike Huck, however, Mark Twain fortunately had his own mother who
possessed “a vibrant personality, an inextinguishable sense of humor, and an
iron-clad will.”25 Despite its implicit irony, he remembered his mother as very
sociable.
My mother [was] very much alive; [her] age counted for nothing;…fond
of excitement, fond of novelties, fond of anything going that was of a
sort proper for members of the church to indulge in…Always ready for
Fourth of July processions, Sunday-school processions, lectures,
conventions, camp-meetings, revivals in the churchin fact, for any and
every kind of dissipation that could not be proven to have anything
irreligious about itand [she] never missed a funeral.26
Moreover, Mrs. Clemens was endowed with a language skill; she was a
talented storyteller and knew how to use the words effectively. “She was the
23
Quoted from Geoffrey C. Ward, Dayton Duncan, and Ken Burns, 3-4.
Kenneth S. Lynn, “You Can’t Go Home Again” in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
ed. Sculley Bradley et al., 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1977) 399.
25
Skandera-Trombley, 10.
26
Quoted form Skandera-Trombley, 11.
24
most eloquent person I ever met in all my life,”27 her son recollected, adding,
“She never used large words, but she had a natural gift for making small ones
do effective work.”28 All these traits of his mother were inherited to Mark
Twain, and the affinities between them might be responsible for his attachment
to his mother. Jane Clemens understood her son and could get the real intention
hidden behind his words. In his autobiography, Mark Twain, writing about his
habit of hiding the truth of facts, remembered that his mother knew very well
how to elicit the truth from the “facts” he was telling.
When I was seven or eight, or ten, or twelve years oldalong
therea neighbor said to her [his mother],
“Do you ever believe anything that that boy says?”
My mother said,
“He is the well-spring of truth, but you can’t bring up the whole well
with one bucket”and she added, “I know his average, therefore he
never deceives me. I discount him thirty per cent. for embroidery, and
what is left is perfect and priceless truth, without a flaw in it
anywhere.”29
Mark Twain, who experienced the unconditional love of the mother and
the happiness of home and learned the importance of them, showed his
sympathy with the motherless and homeless children like Huck, referring to
27
Quoted from Geoffrey C. Ward, Dayton Duncan, and Ken Burns, 4.
Mark Twain, Mark Twain’s Own Autobiography, ed. Michael J. Kiskis (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1990) 116.
29
Twain, Mark Twain’s Own Autobiography, 143.
28
Huck as “that abused child of mine.”30 And his address for Glaveston Orphan
Bazzar proves that his concern for orphans like Huck was sincere: he said, “I
am heartily in sympathy with you in your efforts to help those who were
sufferers in this calamity, and in your desire to help those who were rendered
homeless, and in saying this I wish to impress on you the fact that I am not
playing a part.”31 To show the importance of the mother and home, in his
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain assigned his female characters for
the roles of surrogate mothers and tested the possibility that a motherless child
can achieve the moral development through his relationship with surrogate
mothers.
During his quest for the mother, Huck encounters several women who
act as surrogate mothers. Among them are the Widow Duglas and her sister,
Miss Watson. The Widow adopts Huck as her son and try to give him a proper
home. The Widow and Miss Watson mother Huck in every aspect: they provide
food and clothes, send him to school, and teach Huck social manners and
religious knowledge. Their ways and teachings are necessary for Huck to adjust
himself to a “normal” life in the society. But Huck has not lived a normal
family life nor learned how to behave according to their standard, so, at first, he
cannot be accustomed to their ways and their home. So he runs away.
30
Quoted from Justin Kaplan, Mark Twain and His World (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1974) 137.
31
Twain, “Galveston Orphan Bazaar” in
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/index2.hrml (Virginia: University of Virginia, 2003)
It was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal
regular and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I
couldn’t stand it no longer, I lit out. I got into my old rags, and my
sugar-hogshead again, and was free and satisfied (7).
Persuaded by Tom, however, Huck returns to the Widow’s house, and comes to
feel her compassionfor the first time in his life. “The widow she cried over
me, and called me a poor lost lamb, and she called me a lot of other names, too,
but she never meant no harm by it” (7). The Widow, who once has married and
probably has been a wife and mother, tries to mother Huck with her generous
discipline, love and compassion, which moves Huck little by little. When Huck
returns from the overnight play with his gang and his new clothes gets dirty
with grease and clay, the Widow “didn’t scold, but only cleaned off the grease
and clay and looked so sorry that I thought I would behave a while if I could”
(14).
Most importantly, the Widow tries to teach Huck what love and
compassion are. She tells Huck about the considerate care for others and selfsacrifice, the base of love and compassion. Although Huck cannot figure out the
meaning clearly, he does not reject her discipline, either.
She told me what she meantI must help other people, and do
everything I could for other people, and look out for them all the time,
and never think about myself. This was including Miss Watson, as I took
it. I went out in the woods and turned it over in my mind a long time, but
I couldn’t see no advantage about itexcept for other peopleso at last
I reckoned I wouldn’t worry about it any more, but just let it go (15).
In fact, it is the compassion that is lurked in Huck’s subconsciousness, which
later motivates him to help others during his journey. The Widow’s moral
education about compassion, combined with her kind heart, exerts an influence
on Huck’s behavior to the extent that he can gradually get used to the “normal”
family life.
At first I hated the school, but by and by I got so I could stand it…So the
longer I went to school the easier it got to be. I was getting sort of used
to the widow’s ways, too, and they warn’t so raspy on me. Living in a
house and sleeping in a bed, pulled on me pretty tight, mostly, but before
the cold weather I used to slide out and sleep in the woods, sometimes,
and so that was a rest to me. I liked the old ways best, but I was getting
so I liked the new ones, too, a little bit. The widow said I was coming
along slow but sure, and doing very satisfactory. She said she warn’t
ashamed of me (18).
With the compliments, the Widow helps Huck have a positive self-identity, who
has no confidence and sees himself “so ignorant and so kind of low-down and
ornery” (15). In addition, she tries to truly perform her responsibility as mother.
When Pap appears and claims his parental right to get Huck’s money, she
appeals to the court to get Huck away from the abusive father and to be the
boy’s lawful guardian. When Pap kidnapped Huck and locks him in a cabin, the
Widow finds out where Huck is and sends a man over to get her adopted son
back. Considering all she does for Huck, it is certain that she accepts the
motherhood sincerely and willingly acts as a surrogate mother. Discussing the
function of the female authority figure in Twain’s novels about children, Susan
K. Harris classifies the Widow as one of Mark Twain’s good women:
The women who do succeed in becoming moral guides for Twain’s boys
appeal to the protagonists’ sympathies instead of simply preaching at
them. Furthermore, their own generosity comes from the heart rather
than the conscience…The Widow secretly sympathize[s] with their [her]
young charges, appreciating their energy and creative potential.32
Although the widow is considered as a good mother and Huck
moderately changes his behavior, however, Huck’s alienation is not relieved. At
night when he is alone in his room, his alienation gets intensified.
I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead. 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
whippowill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die; and
the wind was trying to whisper something to me and I couldn’t make out
what it was, and so it made the cold shivers run over me. 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. I got so down-hearted and scared, I did wish I
32
Susan K. Harris, Mark Twain’s Escape from Time: A Study of Patterns and Images
(Colombia: University of Missouri Press, 1982) 121.
had some company (9).
The reason for Huck’s sense of alienation can be found in the Widow’s
hypocrisy, her blindness of Huck’s real need, and her inability to make herself
understood to Huck. For example, when Huck asks the Widow to allow him to
smoke, she forbids him to smoke, reasoning that “It was a mean practice and
wasn’t clean,” but she takes snuff herself. Even though Huck knows the fact
that the Widow smokes, he just expresses some detachment from her hypocrisy,
letting it go, not criticizing her. He describes, “That is the way with some
people. They get down on a thing when they don’t know nothing about it. 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” (8). Huck cannot feel attached to her, but he
does not reject her teachings because he knows that she always means well.
That is to say, the Widow’s hypocritical acts are not crucial causes of Huck’s
alienation. Rather, what makes Huck feel alienated is the “sivilized” life that the
Widow tries to teach Huck. She wants to raise Huck as a decent member of the
society, who knows social manners like what to wear, how to eat, how to
behave, how to pray and so on. These so-called “normal” behaviors are social
conventions, which are essential for Huck to get along with others in the
community.
By rejecting conventions, in a way, Huck gives up belonging to a family,
also. The mood of nineteenth-century America was characterized as
“restlessness” and “rootlessness.” After Civil War, the relentless pursuit of
materialistic advantages made people isolated from each other and the
accelerating industrialization, urbanization, and immigration intensified the
sense of rootlessness. Therefore, for the nineteenth-century Americans, a family
became the most potential community to embody the possibilities of genuine
relationship and security.33 However, Huck can recognize neither the necessity
nor the importance of social conventions; he is not used to the potential of a
family, either, because he has lived as an outsider of society, a motherless and
homeless child. His total exclusion from both a society and a family makes
Huck unable to attach himself to the Widow and feel like running away form
her.
It is Miss Watson who intensifies Huck’s alienation in the Widow’s
house: “Miss Watson she kept pecking at me, and it got tiresome and lonesome”
(8). She has never married, nor has she experienced childbirth. Unlike the
Widow, the generous mother, she is an oppressive mother. She discourages
Huck by telling so many “don’ts”: “‘Dont put your feet up there, Huckleberry,’
‘Dont scrunch up like that, Huckleberryset up straight,’ and ‘Don’t gap and
stretch like that, Huckleberrywhy don’t you try to behave?’” (8) Besides, her
33
Robert Shulman, “Fathers, Brothers, and ‘the Diseased’: The Family, Individualism,
and American Society in Huck Finn” in One Hundred Years of Huckleberry Finn: The
Boy, His Book, and American Culture, ed. Robert Sattelmeyer and J. Donald Crowley
(Colombia: University of Missouri Press, 1985) 327.
selfish belief and religious hypocrisy make Huck estranged from her discipline:
“She was going to live so as to go to the good place. Well, I couldn’t see no
advantage in going where she was going, so I made up my mind I wouldn’t try
for it” (8). And she takes Huck in the closet and forces him to pray, but never
tries to resolve Huck’s curiosity of religious matters. While the Widow’s
religious code is love and compassion, Miss Watson’s is fear; she threatens
Huck with bad place, hell. The difference of religious principles between the
Widow and Miss Watson clearly mirrors their differences in motherhood.
Sometimes the widow would take me one side and talk about
Providence in a way to make a boy’s mouth water; but maybe next day
Miss Watson would take hold and knock it all down again. I jugged I
could see that there was two Providences, and a poor chap would stand
considerable show with the widow’s Providence, but if Miss Watson’s
got him there warn’t no help for him any more. I thought it all out, and
reckoned I would belong to the widow’s, if he wanted me, though I
couldn’t make out how he was agoing to be any better off then than what
he was before, seeing I was so ignorant and so kind of low-down and
ornery (15).
Huck shows preference for the hopeful and promising Providence of the Widow
to the threatening Providence of Miss Watson as he positively responds to the
Widow’s generous, compassionate motherhood, feeling some detachment from
Miss Watson’s strict, oppressive motherhood. Nancy Walker suggests that
whereas Miss Watson’s bleak vision and her method of education, scolding and
nagging, make Huck alienated, the Widow’s kind heart triggers Huck’s
relatively favorable response.34
What is more, Miss Watson has some affinities with Pap rather than
with the Widow; her parenting depends on fear rather than on love. Even
though she does not exert physical violence, her presence makes Huck feel
scared and lonely as Huck is with Pap who beats and locks up his son.
But by-and-by pap got too handy with his hick’ry, and I couldn’t
stand it. I was all over welts. He got to going away so much, too, and
locking me in. Once he locked me in and was gone three days. It was
dreadful lonesome. I judged he had got drowned and I wasn’t ever going
to get our any more. I was scared (24).
Miss Watson’s forcing Huck into the closet reminds the reader of Pap’s locking
Huck up in the cabin. Most of all, her materialistic bent is similar to that of Pap.
Robert Shulman points out that the nineteenth-century Americans, who were
obsessed by the material success too much, exploited others, even their family,
for their economic interest. The critic sees this acquisitive materialism as the
main cause of demoralizing.35 As a matter of fact, the novel is filled with
materialistic characters. Pap abducts Huck from the Widow’s home to get
34
Nancy Walker, “Reformers and Young Maidens: Women and Virtue in Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn” in One Hundred Years of Huckleberry Finn: The Boy, His Book,
and American Culture, ed. Robert Sattelmeyer and J. Donald Crowley (Colombia:
University of Missouri Press, 1985) 178.
35
Shulman, 325.
Huck’s money, not his parental duty. When Huck forebodingly feels that Pap is
going to appear for taking his money, he goes to Judge Thatcher who takes
charge of his money, and wants to give all his money to the judge: “I want you
to take it; I want to give it to youthe six thousand and all” (19), says Huck.
And Judge Thatcher, surprised at the offer, says, “Oho-o. I think I see. You want
to sell all your property to menot give it. That’s the correct idea” (19). Then,
he buys Huck’s six thousand and a hundred and fifty dollars with only a dollar.
The judge’s true intention is very suspicious and it is possible he actually
welcomes the fact that he possesses the legal ownership of the money. Besides,
he, afraid of the nullification of his contract, even writes out a paper and makes
Huck sign it. Later, the King and the Duke always try the fraud to gain others’
money, and at last, sell Jim for forty dollars out of their limitless greed.
Similarly, Miss Watson, not overcoming the temptation of money, is going to
sell her slave, Jim.
“Ole Missus-dat’s Miss Watson- she pecks on me[Jim] all de time, en
treats me pooty rough, but she awluz said she wouldn’ sell me down to
Orleans. But I noticed dey wuz a nigger trader roun’ de place considable,
lately, en I begin to git oneasy. Well, one might I creeps to de do’, pooty
late, en de do’ warn’t quite shet, en I hear ole missus tell de wider she
gwyne to sell me down to Orleans, but she didn’ want to, but she could
git eight hund’d dollars for me, en it ’uz sich a big stack o’ money she
couldn’ resis’. De wider she try to git her to say she wouldn’ do it, but I
never waited to hear de res’. I lit out mghty quick, I tell you” (39).
In addition to materialism, Miss Watson exerts her meanness to social
inferiors, a slave and an orphan, and threatens them. Miss Watson’s merciless
cruelty clearly contrasts with the Widow’s compassion and generosity. Huck has
an affinity to the Widow’s world, where there exists some possibility to
experience the genuine motherhood and to relieve his alienation. In contrast, the
hypocrisy, selfishness, cruelty, and materialism of Miss Watson and Pap’s world
make Huck feel like running off. What should be noted is Huck’s feeling and
reaction to Miss Watson and Pap’s abusive parenting. Huck feels misgivings
strong enough to feel like “killing” them. When other boys are going to rule out
Huck from their gang because he has no family to be killed if he betrays their
secret, Huck offers not the Widow but Miss Watson in order to belong to the
gang. And when Pap, drunken heavily and out of his mind, threatens to kill
Huck with a knife, Huck is tempted to kill him after Pap sleeps.
So he dozed off, pretty soon. By-and by I got the old split-bottom chair
and clumb up, as easy as I could, not to make any noise, and got down
the gun. I slipped the ramrod down it to make sure it was loaded, and
then I laid it across the turnip barrel, pointing towards pap, and set down
behind it to wait for him to stir. And how slow and still the time did drag
along (29).
In The Great Mother, Neumann analyzes the archetype of feminine
traits, focusing on motherhood. He explains two types of motherhood: Good
mother and terrible mother. The former symbolizes immortality, rebirth, birth,
and fruit while the latter sickness, extinction, death, and dismemberment.36 In
Neumann’s paradigm, the Widow can be classified as a good mother who helps
the moral growth of her son while Miss Watson is as a terrible mother who is
likely to ruin her son tragically. However, in the long run, neither generous
mother Widow Duglas nor oppressive mother Miss Watson succeeds to make
consistent influence on Huck’s development.
It was kind of lazy and jolly, laying off comfortable all day, smoking and
fishing, and no books nor study. Two months or more run along, and my
cloths got to be all rags and dirt, and I didn’t see how I’d ever got to like
it so well at the widow’s, where you had to wash, and eat on a plate, and
comb up, and go to bed and get up regular, and be forever bothering
over a book and have old Miss Watson pecking at you all the time. I
didn’t want to go back no more. I had stopped cussing, because the
widow didn’t like it; but now I took to it again because pap hadn’t no
objections. It was pretty good times up in the woods there, take it all
around (24).
Huck dismisses what he has learned from surrogate mothers soon after leaving
their home, and returns to his old life. But his first experience of the generous
motherhood of the Widow and her altruistic moral code, compassion, prepares
the ground for his moral development throughout his journey.
Before starting his journey with Jim down the river, Huck drops by the
house of Mrs. Judith Loftus to get some news about what is going on around the
36
Quoted from Garcia, 50-1.
town after they disappeared. Huck, afraid of disclosure of his identity, disguises
himself as a girl. Like the Widow, Mrs. Loftus has compassion and kindness to
consider the need of the other people, even a stranger. When Huck says to her
about his tiredness resulted from long distance walking, Mrs. Loftus says,
“Hungry, too, I reckon. I’ll find you something” (48). And she offers Huck to
stay at her house all night. When Huck insists he should go at night, she says
she will send her husband to escort Huck as soon as he returns. Her feeding act
and considerate care about Huck’s safety can be regarded as the representation
of motherhood. Throughout the novel, the female characters start a relation with
Huck by offering food. For example, when Huck visits the Grangerford at night,
Lady Grangerford is the first one who notices Huck’s need for food and clothes
when her husband is only interested in the identity of Huck. She says, “Why
bless you, Saul, the poor thing’s as wet as he can be; and don’t you reckon it
may be he’s hungry?” (81) Aunt Sally also takes care of Huck who arrives at
her home in the morning, and orders her black servant to “hurry up and get him
[Huck] a hot breakfast, right away”(174).
What differentiates Mrs. Loftus from other women is her curiosity and
smartness, which both other women and men rarely show in the novel. Her first
impression comes with “her little shiny eyes” revealing those unique character
traits. Those sharp eyes, revealing her smartness, enable her to detect Huck’s
disguise. Mrs. Loftus readily comes up with various situations through which
she can find out Huck’s real identity. Then, she logically interprets the
situations, something only a person with a fair amount of knowledge and
intelligence can do. Her knowledge is not limited to home or religion that are
supposed women’s area of nineteenth century. She knows about the useful facts
of country life such as the nature of animal and plant and understands the
practical differences between the ways of man and those of woman. Even when
she finds out Huck’s disguise, she does not reproach Huck. Rather she softly
gives some kind advice to guide Huck throughout his journey: “Don’t go about
women in that old calico. You do a girl tolerable poor, but you might fool men,
maybe. Bless you, child,…that’s the way a woman most always does; but man
always does ’tother way” (53). Mrs. Loftus’ last advice to Huck reveals not only
her kind care and responsibility for Huck’s future safety but also her practical
intelligence, which might sound motherly to Huck. Before Huck leaving her
home, Mrs. Loftus says:
If you get into trouble you send word to Mrs. Judith Loftus, which is me,
and I’ll do what I can to get you out of it. Keep the river road, all the
way, and next time you tramp, take shoes and socks with you. The river
road’s a rocky one, and your feet ’ll be in a condition when you get to
Goshen, I reckon (53).
Her betrayal of her husband’s hunting for the run-away slave results in
saving Huck and Jim, which resumes their journey. When Huck reports to Jim
about Mrs. Loftus after returning to the raft, Jim refers her as “a smart one” (55).
In fact, Mark Twain highly valued the intelligence of women. His wife Livy
was a well-educated, intelligent woman who enjoyed reading and successfully
performed her life-long role as the editor of her husband’s writings. Mark Twain,
who regarded his wife as a perfect mother, really appreciated her intelligence to
be helpful in educating their children. Therefore, Mrs. Loftus can be classified
as a good mother who possesses not only kindness, compassion, and
responsibility, but also intelligence like Livy.
Nevertheless, Mrs. Loftus’ “mothering” does not seem to exert
considerable influence on Huck’s character development because the time of
her mothering is too short and Huck’s interest is only to elicit information from
her. But Huck’s meeting with Mrs. Loftus has an important meaning in his
character development; her intelligent motherly advice about “the way a woman
most always does” and “the other way a man always does” teaches him the
differences between genders: that is, Mrs. Loftus points out that femininity is
uncomfortable for his male identity, saying that it is Huck’s ineptness at acting
womanly behavior that enables her to notice his gender identity: “I [Mrs.
Loftus] spotted you [Huck] for a boy when you was threading the needle; and I
contrived the other things just to make certain” (53). Leaving her home and
hurrying to get the raft, Huck symbolically takes off the sun-bonnet, which he
was wearing for his disguise as a girl. The sun-bonnet is a typically feminine
thing and at the cost of oversimplification, Huck’s action can be interpreted as
the rejection to femininity and recognition of his masculinity. Garcia points out
that Twain’s boy books like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn satirize the inability of
mothering women in guiding their surrogate sons to realize manhood. She
argues, “The women are attempting a task they are unable to accomplish. They
are trying to teach boys how to become men, to initiate male children into an
adult role they do not themselves understand.”37 However Garcia’s view can be
applied to most of mother figures, it can be argued that Mrs. Loftus understands
gender traits, femininity and masculinity, and teaches Huck manhood with her
“smart” mothering. Her teaching about gender identity can be regarded as
effective to some extent, because never again Huck tries to assume a feminine
role throughout his journey after this experience. In that sense, Mrs. Loftus
embodies the possibility of mothering to guide her son to manhood.
In the concluding chapters, Aunt Sally appears as a surrogate mother for
Huck. She is a typical countrywoman who married a good husband and has
several children. Her house is a typical farm of the South, where its produce
depends on the labor of black slaves, food is abundant, and family bond is
strong. The image of Phelps’s farm is borrowed from Mark Twain’s childhood
memory of Uncle John Quarles’ farm, where he spent several summers of
boyhood. Twain, conceding the farm was the prototype of the Phelps’ farm,
37
Garcia, 105.
wrote in his autobiography: “It was a heavenly place for a boy, that farm of my
uncle John’s.”38 Like the Widow and Mrs. Loftus, Aunt Sally shows kindness
and compassion; she goes to see if her captive slave Jim is comfortable, feeds
him well, and treats him as kindly as she could even though she unconsciously
shares the contemporary racism which does not regard a black slave as a human
being. Her husband is a preacher, but she does not have the dismal religious
tendency of Calvinist. Rather, she is gregarious and cheerful.
Moreover, Aunt Sally cares for Huck like a mother, which eventually
brings about Huck’s change in his behavior. At first, Huck plays a trick on her.
After recognizing her genuine heart, however, he regrets his misdemeanor that
made her uneasy. This time Huck even uses the term “mothering” to describe
her kindness:
And then when I went up to bed she come up with me and fetched her
candle, and tucked me in, and mothered me so good I felt mean, and like
I couldn’t look her in the face (221).
When he witnesses she waits for Tom with tears in her eyes all night, he said, “I
wished I could do something for her, but I couldn’t, only to swear that I
wouldn’t never do nothing to grieve her any more” (221). Even when Aunt
Sally knows Huck is not her nephew, Tom, she insists Huck call her Aunt Sally
rather than ma’am, and she later wants to adopt Huck as her son. Nevertheless,
38
Twain, Mark Twain’s Own Autobiography, 113.
however genuine her motherhood is and however heavenly the Phelps’ farm is,
Huck chooses not to belong to her family. Again he runs away.
About the cause of Huck’s repeated escape from family life, some critics
point out the hypocrisy, silliness, and absurdity of surrogate mothers and their
homes as the main factors to make Huck feel alienated and “light out.” To
support their argument, they often cite the hypocritical racism of female
characters. According to William E. Lenz, every female character in the book,
who Huck describes as “a paragon of virtue,” unconsciously supports the
slavery system which contradicts their Christian belief, and imposes their value
on Huck in the name of civilization.39 But considering the social context of the
novel, the 1840s’ South, where the slavery is taken for granted, their attitude
toward black slaves are more favorable than those of the average people of the
time. They are not progressive enough to reject the system of slavery, but they
are kind and generous to their slaves. In fact, even Huck, who risked his own
safety to save a runaway slave, cannot transcend the contemporary racism.
When Huck arrives at the Phelps’ farm, Aunt Sally asks what has delayed
Huck’s arrival. Huck answers by inventing an accident.
“It warn’t the groundingthat didn’t keep us back but a little. We
blowed out a cylinder-head.”
39
William E. Lenz, “Confidence and Convention” in One Hundred Years of
Huckleberry Finn: The Boy, His Book, and American Culture, ed. Robert Sattelmeyer
and J. Donald Crowley (Colombia: University of Missouri Press, 1985) 190.
“Good gracious! Anybody hurt?”
“No’m. Killed a nigger.”
“Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt. Two years
ago last Christmas, your uncle Silas was coming up from Newrleans on
the old Lally Rock, and she blowed out a cylinder-head and crippled a
man. An I think he died afterwards…” (175)
This dialogue explains the similarity between the racial view of Aunt
Sally, the ordinary countrywoman, and that of Huck. They can be good to an
individual black, but neither of them regards the black as equivalent to the
white. If Huck shares the same value with the Widow, Miss Watson, Mrs.
Loftus, and Aunt Sally, then, why does Huck feel alienation with them, and
escape from them? The answer can be found in the psychology of motherless
child Huck. On the child-mother relationship, D. W. Winnicott says that the lack
of mothering in childhood can cause the lack of sociability, which may prevent
a child from keeping the intimate relationship, and even can appear later as an
anti-social tendency. 40 In her book about child development, Wolff also
explains that children deprived of family life, especially of adequate mothering
in childhood, are unable to attach themselves to the foster families securely, and
“are at risk of later deficits and distortions of personality, and of educational
failure, not remedied by subsequent family care.”41 She adds that recovery
from the early deprivation of the mother is not easy to achieve and often it does
40
41
Quoted from Holmes, 139.
Wolff, 71.
not happen at all because the absence of the mother causes a child’s inability “to
form long-lasting and strong bonds with specific parent figure and more
permanent impairments of the capacity for later human attachments.”42
These psychological analyses can very well explain Huck’s problem. As
a motherless child, Huck must have the yearning for a mother. Strong and
independent as he may look, Huck harbors deep-seated yearning for a mother,
and thus subconsciously wants to belong to a mother and a home to resolve his
deep alienation. For all his hopes and desires, he cannot attach himself to a
mother and “normal” family life. Thus, ironically enough, Huck’s lack of
sociability resulted from the early deprivation of mother makes him run away
from the mother. So Huck repeats his pattern of a quest; he has strong yearning
for the mother, searches for the mother, but finally escapes from the mother. At
the same time, however, Huck’s quest for the mother shows another pattern: he
strongly attaches himself to the mother, feels empathy with the mother, and
sacrifices himself for the mother, which consequently brings about his moral
growth. The next chapter focuses on his attachment pattern that is also rooted in
Huck’s loss of mother.
42
Wolff, 72.
Chapter II: Attachment to the Mother
According to Bowlby, the bereaved children experience the intense
feelings of mental pain and anguish: yearning, misery, angry protests, despair,
apathy and withdrawal. He also points out that the long-term influence of the
separation can be disastrous enough to cause neurosis or delinquency in
children and adolescents, and mental illness in adults.43 These symptoms and
behavioral characteristics are embodied in Huck’s character: his desperate
yearning for company, his pessimistic feelings of loneliness, despair, and misery,
his protest against the convention, and his withdrawal from the society. These
mixed characteristics of Huck is echoed especially in Huck’s attitude towards
the mother. As a motherless child, Huck feels yearning for the mother; at the
same time, he protests against the protection of the mother and feels like
escaping from the mother. On Huck’s ambivalent reaction to his motherless
situation, Mark Altschuler argues, “His [Huck’s] basic psychological warfare
may well be the conflict between hostility toward his mother for leaving him
through death and his hunger for a nurturing mother.”44 For example, making
up his autobiographical stories, Huck reveals his unconscious hatred toward his
43
Jeremy Holmes, John Bowlby and Attachment Theory (London: Routledge, 1999)
62.
44
Mark Altschuler, “Motherless Child: Huck Finn and a Theory of Moral
Development” in American Literary Realism 22.1 (Fall, 1989) 33.
mother by having his fictional mothers killed or diseased, who are the
projective versions of his dead mother. When Huck drops by Mrs. Loftus’ to get
some news about him and Jim, he lies about his family, and says, “My mother’s
down sick, and out of money and everything” (48). Visiting the Grangerford
family, Huck fabricates a lie about his family. This time, he even removes his
mother from his fictional family: “They all asked me questions, and I told them
how pap and me and all the family was living on a little farm down at the
bottom of Arkansaw,…and then there warn’t nobody but just me and pap
left…” (82). Also, even though Huck does not show overt hostility toward his
dead mother, he does have some degree of detachment toward surrogate
mothers, especially toward Miss Watson, rejects their conventions, and finally
runs away from them.
Huck is psychologically torn between his yearning for the mother and
his desire to escape from the mother. His psychological relationship with the
mother is closely related with his moral development because the morality
“grows directly out of the relationship of the infant and child to its primary
caretaker(s)that is, in most cultures until today, the mother.”45 Robert Coles,
a prominent psychologist in the field of children’s moral development, suggests
that the ego ideal, a positive sense of self, is the groundwork for moral behavior.
He adds that the ego ideal is the part of the psyche that develops, through the
45
Eli Sagan, Freud, Women, and Morality: the Psychology of Good and Evil (New
York: Basic Books, 1988) 65.
love of the mother, from the narcissism of earliest childhood.46 Considering the
close relationship between a mother and a child’s moral development, Huck, a
motherless child, must have great difficulties in his moral growth. Nevertheless,
Huck does show considerable moral development throughout the book. And
this happens only when Huck succeeds in attaching himself to a surrogate
mother actively. For the sake of the surrogate mother he belongs to, Huck
makes a moral decision that costs his sacrifice. In that case, what moves Huck
to strongly attach himself to the surrogate mother? The answer will be
examined by analyzing Huck’s psychology and his moral development, which
defines the meaning of Huck’s quest for the mother.
Huck encounters several young women throughout his journey; among
them, Mary Jane Wilks is the only one he interacts with. Even though Mary
Jane is a nineteen-year-old girl, she can be classified as a surrogate mother; in
fact, she embodies the ideal mother of Huck in every respect. Compared with
other surrogate mothers, she is younger, but Mary Jane already practices the
authority as a mother in her parentless family. Her younger sister Joanna calls
her “Maim” and obeys her as she would obey her mother. From the first
encounter with her, Huck praises Mary Jane for her outstanding character.
About Mary Jane’s appearance, Huck reports, “Mary Jane was red-headed, but
that don’t make no difference, she was most awful beautiful, and face and her
46
Quoted from Altschuler, 31.
eyes was all lit up like glory” (131). She possesses kindness and cares for others,
“always sailing in to help somebody before they’re hurt” (139). Not a hypocrite,
she lives up to her altruistic morality; she feels compassion towards black
slaves so that she cannot sleep, thinking that the black families are going to be
separated and sold away. Mary Jane cannot hide her real feelings; about her
honesty, Huck says, “You [Mary Jane] ain’t one of these leather-face people”
(151). And courage is one of her strongest characteristics, which makes her
unique:
I reckoned if she knowed me she’d take a job that was more nearer her
size. But I bet she done it, just the sameshe was just that kind. She had
the grit to pray for Judas if she took the notionthere warn’t no
backdown to her, I judge. You may say what you want to, but in my
opinion she had more sand in her than any girl I ever see; in my opinion
she was just full of sand. It sounds like flattery, but it ain’t no flattery
(152).
In addition to her great personality, Mary Jane’s kind mothering helps
Huck take on Mary Jane as mother. When Joanna, who is suspicious about
Huck’s account of England, drives Huck into the corner, Mary Jane defends
Huck, scolds her sister, and relieves Huck’s alienation: “The thing is for you to
treat him kind, and not be saying things to make him remember he ain’t in his
own country and amongst his own folks” (140). She also makes courageous
resolution to protect Huck from the frauds: “‘Stand by you, indeed I will. They
[the King and the Duke] sha’n’t touch a hair of your head!’ she says, and I see
her nostrils spread and her eyes snap when she said it, too” (150). What is more,
she tries to heal Huck’s low self-esteem and guilt feeling which always leads
Huck to blame himself for making troubles: “Oh, stop blaming yourselfit’s
too bad to do it, and I won’t allow ityou couldn’t help it; it wasn’t you fault”
(151).
Considering Mark Twain’s biography, Mary Jane seems the fictional
version of Twain’s wife, Livy, who, he thought, was “the best and dearest
mother that livesand by a long, long way, the wisest.”47 Mary Jane closely
resembles Livy in that “when it comes to beautyand goodness tooshe lays
over them all.” (152). In his autobiography, Twain depicted Livy as a “perfect”
person.
She [Livy] was slender and beautiful and girlishand she was both girl
and woman. She remained both girl and woman to the last day of her life.
Under a grave and gentle exterior burned inextinguishable fires of
sympathy, energy, devotion, enthusiasm, and absolutely limitless
affection. She was always frail in body, and she lived upon her spirit,
whose hopefulness and courage were indestructible. Perfect truth,
perfect honesty, perfect candor, were qualities of her character which
were born with her…In her judgments of the characters and acts of both
friends and strangers, there was always room for charity, never failed. I
have compared and contrasted her with hundreds of persons, and my
47
Vic Doyno, “Sam Clemens as Family Man and Father” in Mark Twain Journal 34:2
(Fall, 1996) 35.
conviction remains that hers was the most perfect character I have ever
met.48
Livy of Twain’s admiration is identical with Mary Jane of Huck’s praise. It is
likely that Mark Twain projected his perfect wife into his female character Mary
Jane to provide Huck with “the best, dearest, wisest mother.”
What makes Huck strongly attracted to Mary Jane is not only her
character and kind motherhood that evokes his admiration but also her identity
as an orphan and victim, since it readily brings forth his “empathy.” According
to The American Heritage Dictionary, “empathy” means “Identification with
and understanding of another’s situation, feelings, and motives.” Because
empathic response is related with a kind of psychological process,
psychologists have studied how the empathy operates in human mind,
especially involving the moral behavior. In Empathy and Moral Development,
Martin L. Hoffman defines empathy as “an affective response more appropriate
to another’s situation than one’s own,” and adds that empathy is aroused by
associating oneself with the victim and by putting oneself in the victim’s place
and imagining how he or she feels.49 He also observes that empathy can be
regarded as the basis for moral behavior because the most moral dilemmas in
48
Mark Twain, Mark Twain’s Own Autobiography, ed. Michael J. Kiskis (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1990) 23.
49
Martin L. Hoffman, Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and
Justice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 29-62.
life involve victims, seen or unseen, which motivates empathy and
consequently influences moral judgment and reasoning.50 About the responsive
empathy, Freud specifies a case of an abused child, explaining that the abused
child helps those he sees as victims because they are projections of himself.51
These psychological theories of empathy explain Huck’s case exactly.
Huck possesses the natural ability to feel empathy, and always expresses
empathy, witnessing victimized and endangered people. When he discovers that
a wrecked steamboat with three murderers is sinking, he feels empathy even for
the murderers, and says to himself, putting himself in their place: “I began to
think how dreadful it was, even for murderers, to be in such a fix…there ain’t
no telling but I might come to be a murderer myself, yet, and then how would I
like it?” (61) In order to save the murderers, then, he goes to the shore and
informs a watchman of the dangerous situation of the sinking wreck. Hoffman
says that empathy is related with the act of helping a victim, which, as a result,
makes the helper feel better52; Huck feels “ruther comfortable” “for helping
these rapscallions” (63). Even seeing a circus, Huck is empathized with the
showman who acts an endangered drunkard, which prevents Huck from
enjoying the show. When everybody laughs at the action of the showman, Huck
thinks to himself, “It warn’t funny to me, though; I was all of a tremble to see
50
51
52
Hoffman, 247.
Quoted from Altschuler, 39.
Hoffman, 31-32.
his [the showman’s] danger” (120).
Similarly, Mary Jane’s dangerous situation triggers Huck’s empathy. Her
status of being an orphan makes her vulnerable and exposed to danger. Thus,
Mary Jane, such an easy target for a fraud, is deceived by the King and the
Duke. Out of his empathy, then, Huck projects himself into her, and decides to
help her. The similarities between the situation of Huck and that of Mary Jane,
moreover, may arouse his empathy more directly, because her victimized
situation reminds Huck of his past experiences. This recollection process of
empathy is explained by Hoffman, who describes that the victim’s situation
reminds the observers of similar experiences in their own past and evokes
feelings in them that fit the victim’s situation. As a typical example, the
psychologist suggests the empathic feeling of motherless child, saying,
“Children’s past experiences of separation from the mother…may facilitate
their empathizing with another person whose mother is hospitalized or dies.”53
Hoffman’s theory perfectly fits Huck’s case. Both Huck and Mary Jane are
orphans. When black families are going to be sold separately, as an orphan
herself, Mary Jane is really concerned about the enormous grief of black
families for the separation of mother and children, and understands how painful
their separation is. Her genuine concern for black children’s loss of their
mothers makes Huck suppose that she can really understand his pain. Then, he
53
Hoffman, 47.
feels empathized with her strongly, which directly motivates him to help her.
“Miss Mary Jane, you can’t bear to see people in trouble, and I
can’tmost always. Tell me about it.”
So she done it. And it was the niggersI just expected it. She
said…she didn’t know how she was ever going to be happy there,
knowing the mother and the children warn’t ever going to see each other
no moreand then busted out bitterer than ever, and flung up her hands,
and says
“Oh, dear, dear, to think they ain’t ever going to see each other any
more!”
“But they willand inside of two weeksand I know it!” says I.
Laws it was out before I could think! (148)
Besides Huck and Mary Jane become victims to the false authority of
the King and the Duke. On the raft, the frauds pretend that they have been born
in the royal family to exploit Huck for their conveniencefor example, they
force Huck stand a watch at night and serve them during their meal. Likely, in
the Wilks’, they take advantage of the familial relationship, and deceive Mary
Jane in order to satisfy their greed by stealing her inheritance. In addition, Huck
and Mary Jane share the submissive response and yielding attitude to the King
and the Duke; as Huck gives his bed to the King, Mary Jane offers her room to
her fake uncle, which may symbolize their image as helpless victims. To sum
up, in Huck’s psyche, Mary Jane is both an orphan and helpless victim, which
may remind Huck of his own situation and evoke Huck’s empathy. Now that
Huck projects himself into Mary Jane’s troubled situation, and actively helps
her.
In this sense, Mary Jane plays a role in Huck’s moral development by
adequately training him in that direction. As a surrogate mother, Mary Jane
knows and teaches what the empathy is. When her sister embarrasses Huck,
Mary Jane scolds her sister, saying, “If you [Joanna] was in his [Huck’s] place,
it would make you feel ashamed; and so you ought’nt to say a thing to another
person that will make them feel ashamed” (139). The essence of her teaching
can be explained as “role-taking,” an empathic cognitive processing: “Putting
oneself in the other’s place and imagining how he or she feels.”54 On the
parent’s role in children’s moral development, Hoffman suggests that a parent’s
discipline is crucial to children’s internalizing morality and their acting on the
inner moral principle out of empathic understanding.55 Following the teaching
of her mother-like sister, Joanna apologizes to Huck “beautifully,” which again
motivates Huck’s empathy. The kindness of the Wilks girls moves Huck’s
“sound heart.” Thus, he comes to feel guilty because he knows about the danger
they are in. He makes a moral decision to help them in his own way:
They [the Wilks girls] all jest laid theirselves out to make me feel at
home and know I was amongst friends. I felt so ornery and low down
and mean, that I says to myself, My mind’s made up; I’ll hive that
54
55
Hoffman, 52.
Hoffman, 142.
money for them or bust (140).
Mary Jane herself shows a good example of her moral discipline; she gives a
larger priority to the agony of the separated black families than her future
happiness and economic profit. Her genuine kindness and morality leads Huck
to make a moral decision of the higher level. This time he needs to risk his own
safety for others, which means the sacrifice of himself:
I reckon a body that ups and tells the truth when he is in a tight place, is
taking considerable many resks, though I ain’t had no experience, and
can’t say for certain; but it looks so to me, anyway; and yet here’s a case
where I’m blest if it don’t look to me like the truth is better, and actuly
safer, than a lie. I must lay it by in my mind, and think it over some time
or other, it’s so kind of strange and unregular. I never see noting like it.
Well, I says to myself at last, I’m aging to chance it; I’ll up and tell the
truth this time, though it does seem most like setting down on a kag of
powder and touching it off just to see where you’ll go to (148).
According to Hoffman, “Morality consists of a feeling of obligation to
foster not only one’s own but the welfare of others. This basic inner dictum,
rather than actions for reward or to avoid punishment, determines true
morality”.56 Attracted by Mary Jane’s “perfect” character and kind mothering,
and empathized with her status as an orphan and victim, Huck actively helps
Mary Jane; he both devises and directs the whole plan by himself. He does
56
Quoted from Sula Wolff, Childhood and Human Nature: The Development of
Personality (London: Routledge, 1989) 91.
these things not for reward but for the welfare of Mary Jane and the black
slaves. As a result, Huck achieves “true morality.” This experience exerts
considerable influence on Huck’s morality, which, in a way, paves the road to
Huck’s decision later to save Jim. He is now more ready to be on his own
making decision and helping others.
The affectionate words that Huck and Mary Jane share when they part
show Mary Jane’s influence on Huck’s future moral development. Mother-like
Mary Jane’s moral support will remain in Huck’s memory for a long time:
“Good-bye…if I don’t ever see you again, I sha’nt ever forget you,
and I’ll think of you a many and a many a time, and I’ll pray for you,
too!”and she was gone.
Pray for me!…I hain’t ever seen her since that time that I see her go
out of that door; no, I hain’t ever seen her since, but I reckon I’ve
thought of her a many and a many a million times, and of her saying she
would pray for me; and if ever I’d a thought it would do any good for
me to pray for her, blamed if I wouldn’t a done it or bust (152).
After Mary Jane is gone, Huck satisfactorily performs his plan to protect the
Wilks from the fraud of the King and the Duke, which makes him feel proud
and self-confident: “I felt very good; I judged I had done it pretty neatI
reckoned Tom Sawyer couldn’t a done it no neater himself” (154). Actually this
is a climatic moment in the history of his chronic low self-esteem. Mary Jane
taught him to think of himself positively: at one point, Mary Jane says, “Stop
blaming yourself” (151), and this is another lesson he learns from her.
Soon, however, Huck gets into trouble; the appearance of the real uncles
is about to uncover the frauds of the King and the Duke. To make it sure who
the Wilks girls’ real uncles, the villagers rush to the tomb of the deceased Wilks
and start to dig it. The mood changes from the peace of domesticity to the
nightmare of graveyard.
So they dug and dug, like everything; and it got awful dark, and the
rain started, and the wind swished along, and the lightning come brisker
and brisker, and the thunder boomed; but them people never took no
notice of it, they was so full of this business…At last they got out the
coffin, and began to unscrew the lid,…in the dark, that way, it was awful.
Hines he hurt my wrist dreadful…(161).
The graveyard scene vividly describes the cruelty and inhumanity of the society
that lacks the respect for human dignity. Fleeing from the cemetery, Huck is
completely alone. The surroundings also intensify his alienation: “I had the road
all to myself, and I fairly flewleastways I had it all to myself except the solid
dark, and the now-and-then glares, and the buzzing of the rain, and the
thrashing of the wind, and the splitting of the thunder; and sure as you are born
I did clip it along!” (162) Getting out of his danger and realizing his aloneness,
Huck seeks Mary Jane’s presence, and as soon as he is sure of her safety and
presence, his depression disappears. In Huck’s psyche, Mary Jane plays a role
of a mother who he thinks of when he feels despair, misery, and loneliness. Her
presence in his memory enables him to feel attachment and security.
When I struck the town, I see there warn’t nobody out in the storm,
so I never hunted for no back streets, but humped it straight through the
main one; and when I begun to get towards our house I aimed my eye
and set it. No light there; the house all darkwhich make me feel sorry
and disappointed, I didn’t know why. But at last, just as I was sailing by,
flash comes the light in Mary Jane’s window! And my heart swelled up
sudden, like to bust; and the same second the house and all was behind
me in the dark, and wasn’t ever going to be before me no more in this
world. She was the best girl I ever see, and had the most sand (162).
Psychologically, Mary Jane’s significance can be explained by the term
“secure base.” The “secure base” was introduced by Mary Ainsworth “to
describe the ambience created by the attachment figure for the attached
person.”57 In a dangerous and frustrating situation, one readily clings to one’s
attachment figure. Once the danger passes, one can relax, but he or she is not
completely free form the influence; the memory of attachment still remains, and
he can work only if he is sure of the presence of the attachment figure around
him. Another psychologist makes a naturalistic study of “secure base,” which
suggests a mother as the representative example of the secure base.58 For Huck,
57
Quoted from Holmes, 70.
The same page: Anderson’s experiment proves the importance of a mother as a
secure base to a child. In a London Park, she made mothers sit on the benches and their
toddlers play on the surrounding grass, and observed the changes of the toddler’s
behavior by varying the distance between mothers and their children. She says that
each child has the invisible radius beyond which he or she would not venture to go.
58
Mary Jane is a mother who performs this role of “the secure base,” which
provides him with a springboard for the basis of moral development. However,
the effect of Mary Jane as a “secure base” is only limited to his subconscious; in
this world, she cannot be physically with Huck. His “secure base,” thus, is only
too short-lived; this explains his moral regression in the evasion episode, which
will be examined more closely in the latter part of this chapter.
Other than Mary Jane, Jim is also a “secure base,” probably a more
formidable one. Huck definitely shows attachment to Jim as strongly as, if not
more, to Mary Jane. Jim always waits on the raft for Huck, who, more often
than not, explores the shore. When Huck returns home, the raft, after
experiencing the inhumanity and cruelty of the society, Jim provides Huck with
comfort and love. While Huck is strongly attracted by Mary Jane from the first
time he sees her, however, he sees Jim only as a “nigger” before they begin
their journey along the river together, but gradually changes his view. In the
beginning chapters, Huck and Tom make a fool of Jim tying him up to a tree
“for fun” (10). However, as the journey goes on, Huck comes to realize Jim’s
dignity as a human being, and builds a genuine relationship with him.
Many critics have characterized the relationship between Huck and Jim
as familial. Lionel Trilling observes, “In Jim he finds his true father…The boy
When a child makes sure of the presence of the mother and plays within the radius, he
or she looks free from anxiety and pays attention to the play. But when a mother
becomes unreliable or a child reaches the limit of the distance between them, he or she
looks anxiously towards the mother and immediately turns back to the mother.
and the Negro slave form a family…”59 Kenneth S. Lynn also says:
While Jim’s relationship to Huck is fatherly in the sense that he
constantly is correcting and admonishing the boy, forever telling him
some new truth about the world, he is identified even more
unmistakably as Huck’s father by the love that he gives him. As Huck is
searching for a father, so Jim is attempting to rejoin his family, and he
lavishes on the love-starved boy all of his parental affection.60
However, these critics seem to have disregarded that what Huck is really
searching for is not a father but a mother, considering his state of being a
motherless child. Freud points out that the bereaved person searches for the
missing attachment figure. Even though death is an irreversible form of
separation, the bereaved still cannot give up on the possibility of being united
with the attachment figure. Bowlby adds that when the bereaved person realizes
that the secure base to whom he/she would turn for comfort in distress is no
longer available, he or she falls to the confusion and misery. Then, the bereaved
person desperately searches for the lost figure with whom he or she attempts to
recover the relationship.61 This is Huck’s case; the motherless child quests for
the mother not only spiritually but also physically. As he restlessly wanders
from place to place, and unconsciously searches for a “secure base” to
59
Lionel Trilling, “The Greatness of Huckleberry Finn” in Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn, ed. Sculley Bradley, et al., 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1977) 321.
60
Kenneth S. Lynn, “You Can’t Go Home Again” in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
ed. Sculley Bradley et al., 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1977) 403.
61
Quoted from Homles, 89-91.
overcome his alienation, a similar process goes on psychologically: that is,
motherless Huck seeks the motherhood in mother figures. In the same vein,
Huck tries to search for the mother in Jim who is the male character, but in
many ways feminized by Mark Twain.
The constructing of gender traits, masculinity and femininity, is related
with the social context of the nineteenth-century America. The increasing
industrial and commercial development in the nineteenth-century separates the
workplace from the home, which results in restricting women’s place more
distinctly in the domestic world; in contrast, men’s place was by and large
designated in the commercial and political one. As a result, two different
models of behavior became evolved: masculinity and femininity. In the “Mark
Twain and Gender,” Susan K. Harris defines masculinity with three
representative characters: authoritative patriarch, competitive entrepreneur, and
aggressive passionate man.62 In his Mark Twain and the Feminine Aesthetic,
Peter Stonely, agreeing with Harris, says in nineteenth-century America, this is
truer than other periods and places. While men were overtly and indirectly
encouraged to be competitive and economically oriented, women were taught
feminine values of sympathy, submission, nurturance, sentiment, and
spirituality.63
62
Susan K. Harris, “Mark Twain and Gender” A Historical Guide to Mark Twain. ed.
Shelley Fisher Fishkin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) 175-6.
63
Peter Stoneley, Mark Twain and the Feminine Aesthetic (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992) 2-6.
And it is distinctively these feminine traits that Jim shows, and it may be
justifiable to say Jim is another mother figure. With feminine virtues, Jim
mothers Huck; Jim always waits for Huck on the raft as a mother would wait
for her child coming home. And like other surrogate mothers, he cooks for
Huck and feeds him. Jim sacrifices his comfort to keep the watch at night
instead of waking up Huck, and protects Huck from witnessing Pap’s corpse.
The sentiment of Jim is vividly revealed in his mourning for his children and
crying, “Po’ little ’Lizabeth! Po’ little Johnny!” (125) In addition, Jim
frequently pets and calls Huck “honey” and “chile,” common appellations a
mother would use to her child. In short, it could be argued that Jim is the
nurturing mother, who possesses the positive feminine qualities of caring,
empathy, and protection.
Mark Twain’s biography would provide some clue in understanding the
characteristic of the mother incorporated into Jim’s character. Mark Twain’s
father, John M. Clemens, was always cold and distant unlike his warmhearted
and cheerful mother, Jane Clemens. Dominated by his father, the atmosphere of
his family was reserved and formal to the extent that in Twain’s memory, his
father never laughed, neither did his family ever share kisses with each other. It
is natural that Twain felt more attachment to his mother whom he could always
turn to for comfort, love, and security. Jim’s positive personality and
affectionate caring are much similar with Mrs. Clemens. In Jim, Mark Twain
imposed many characteristics of his own loving mother to have Huck exposed
to the qualities he has not been used tothe true motherhood. In fact, Jim is the
ideal mother who possesses “perfect” character and has every promise to
become a “secure base”. In his autobiography, Mark Twain wrote about the
prototype of Jim, Uncle Dan’l, a slave of Clemens’ uncle John Quarles.
We [Mark Twain and his cousins] had a faithful and affectionate good
friend, ally and adviser in “Uncle Dan’l,” a middle-aged slave whose
head was the best one in the negro quarter, whose sympathies were wide
and warm, and whose heart was honest and simple and knew no guile.
He has served me well, these many, many years. I have not seen him for
more than half a century, and yet spiritually I have had his welcome
company a good part of that time, and have staged him in books under
his own name and as “Jim,” and carted him all aroundto Hannibal,
down the Mississippi on a raft, and even across the Desert of Sahara in a
balloonand he has endured it all with the patience and friendliness and
loyalty which were his birthright.64
Referring to Jim’s character is rooted in the most desirable and affectionate
people in the author’s life and his well-balanced character, Wecter observes that
he is “Mark Twain’s noblest creation.”65 Huck may well be strongly attracted
by Jim’s character.
Jim also shows a good example of parental love. He gives priority to his
64
Twain, Mark Twain’s Own Autobiography, 115.
Dixon Wecter, “From Sam Clemens of Hannibal” in Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn, ed. Sculley Bradley, et al., 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1977) 272.
65
family than anything else, which is demonstrated in his conversation about
King Solomon. While Huck doubtlessly accepts the Widow’s teaching about
King Solomon, the wisest man, Jim objects against the conventional evaluation
on the king and the famous episode of his judgment: “I doan k’yer what de
wider say, he warn’t no wise man, nuther. He had some er de dad-fetcheded’
ways I ever see. Does you know ‘bout dat chile dat he ’uz gwyne to chop in
two?” (65) The story that Jim begins to talk about is well-known to prove the
wisdom of Solomon, who threatened to cut the baby in halves in order to find
out the real mother between the two women. Even though unable to understand
King Solomon’s real intention and to get the point of the story, Jim internalizes
his own morality, and gives priority to the dignity of the baby’s life and the
parental morals. He blames the king for disregarding the baby’s life and
neglecting the parental duty of taking care of the children:
“Blame de pint! I reck’n I knows what I knows, En mine you, de
real pint is down furderit’s down deeper. It lays in de way Sollermun
was raised. You take a man dat’s got on’y one er two chillen; is dat man
gwyne to be waseful o’ chillen? No, he ain’t; he can’t ’ford it. He know
how to value ’em. But you take a man dat’s got ’bout five million chillen
runnin’ roun’ de house, en it’s diffent. He as soon chop a chile in two as
a cat. Dey’s plenty mo’. A chile er two, mo’ er less, warn’t no consekens
to Sollermun, dad fetch him!” (66)
If Jim’s journey is interpreted as the quest for freedom, the ultimate goal of his
quest is for the freedom that can be gained by rejoining his family: “He was
saying how the first thing he would do when he got to a free State he would go
to saving up money and never spend a single cent, and when he got enough he
would buy his wife, which was owned on a farm close to where Miss Watson
lived; and then they would both work to buy the two children, and if their
master wouldn’t sell them, they’d get an Ab’litionist to go and steal them” (734). To have his family back, he is willing to transgress the social morals, even
though it can cost him his life.
For Jim, the family comes first. His caring for his family is different
from the conventional patriarchy that is characterized as authoritative and
distant. Jim’s genuine concern for his own family and his exemplary parenthood
is in sharp contrast with Pap’s abuse and acquisitive parenthood. Jim also shows
his parental love towards Huck. Now that Huck was moved to change his view
not only of Jim but also of the black people. In addition, Huck may feel what
the genuine family is even though he cannot realize nor internalize the genuine
morality of family consciously.
I went to sleep, and Jim didn’t call me when it was my turn. He often
done that. When I waked up, just at day-break, he was setting there with
his head down betwixt his knees, moaning and mourning to himself. I
didn’t take notice, nor let on. I knowed what it was yonder, and he was
low and homesick; because he hadn’t ever been away from home before
in his life; and I do believe he cared just as much for his people as white
folks does for their’n. It don’t seem natural, but I reckon it’s so…He was
a mighty good nigger, Jim was (125).
As his journey with Jim goes on, Huck gradually comes to feel attached
to Jim. Jim’s “noblest” character and motherly love are strong enough to
emotionally move Huck. Moreover, Jim’s status as a victim stimulates Huck’s
empathy, which makes Huck more attracted to Jim. Both of them run away
from Miss Watson’s hypocrisy; they shared the gloomy experiences of her
nagging. And they are the outcasts in the society they live in; Jim is a “nigger,”
and Huck is an orphan. They are both exploited by the fraudulent King and
Duke on the raft. The King and the Duke’s frequent quarrels and heavy drinking
break the peace of the raft, Jim and Huck’s home, and they become, again,
homeless. In short, both Jim and Huck have been vulnerable to the inhumanity
and cruelty that prevails their society. Also the motherhood and womanhood
that Jim possesses intensifies his image as a victim.66 According to Stahl,
“Mark Twain places the emphasis on the association between motherhood and
martyrdom, womanliness and self-sacrifice. Womanhood, nurture, motherly
love, and virtue are equated with victimization.”67 Theses feminine qualities
are represented in Jim, who often sacrifices himself for Huck as a mother does
for her son.
66
Jim’s racial status as a black slave is clearly the most important factor which
provides him with the image of a victim. And his victimized image is intensified by his
femininity, which is the focus of this thesis.
67
J. D. Stahl, Mark Twain, Culture and Gender: Envisioning American Through
Europe (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1994) 16.
Jim’s self-sacrifice touches the emotional code of Huck, and the
empathy Huck feels towards Jim is essential in his making moral decisions to
help Jim get out of the dangerous situations throughout their journey. As Huck
does with Mary Jane, he helps Jim because Jim represents “some image of
himself as a victim”.68 That is projection, and, according to Robert Coles, it is a
classically patterned response of abused children. In this pattern, the abused
children see themselves as victims. In this role, they project themselves onto
other victims and help them to fulfill their own psychological needs.69 That is,
the moral behavior results from the combination of the genuine desire to do
good to others and the subconscious desire to fulfill their own personal
emotional needs. Huck, the victim, projects himself onto Jim, another victim,
and helps Jim willingly and actively, but psychologically speaking, he is
helping himself.
During his quest, Huck overcomes his deep alienation, supported by
Jim’s motherly love on their raft-home. When Huck unexpectedly encountered
Jim on Jackson Island after running away from Pap, he did not consider Jim as
a wholesome human being; Huck was so glad to see Jim because he just needed
some company to relieve his alienation. As their journey goes on, Huck’s
respect for the black man is increased by Jim’s motherly discipline. Jim’s
educating enables Huck to grow morally by teaching him Jim has the human
68
69
Altschuler, 35.
Altschuler, 35.
dignity and by having him feel the motherhood in Jim. When Huck lies to Jim
making him think their separation in the fog as only a dream, Jim scolds Huck’s
dishonesty with motherly love and authority.
“What do dey stan’ for? I’sgwyne to tell you. 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 fen’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.
It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and
humble myself to a niggerbut I done it, and I warn’t ever sorry for it
afterwards, neither. 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 (72).
Other surrogate mother figures, “the guardians of moral order,” teach Huck
empathy, the basis of morality, “to adopt another person’s viewpoint and to
recognize that other people also can experience pain.”70 So does Jim, and with
both words and deed. His genuine concern makes Huck feel empathy for Jim,
and, Huck’s apology is due to his moral development. In other words, Jim plays
70
Susan K. Harris, Mark Twain’s Escape from Time: A Study of Patterns and Images
(Colombia: University of Missouri Press, 1982) 122.
the mother role as an educator of a child successfully. Henry N. Smith, pointing
out the importance of Jim’s role in Huck’s moral development, observes, “Jim’s
dignified and moving rebuke suddenly opens up a new dimension in the relation.
Huck’s humble apology is striking evidence of growth in moral insight.”71
Life with Mother Jim on the homey raft enables Huck’s moral insight to
grow continuously. That is, the motherless, homeless boy is given both mother
and home. The raft is an ideal home full of peace, love, warmth, and freedom:
“We said there warn’t no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so
cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and easy and
comfortable on a raft” (96). The open communication, the foundation of
relationship, is possible on the raft. When Huck returns home from the feuds of
the shore, he feels “powerful glad” to get home safely and has “a long gabble”
of his experience with Jim, a good listener and advisor. The raft is the place
where great tolerance comes true to the extent to include even the fraudulent
King and Duke in the family; on the raft, everyone should “be satisfied, and feel
right and kind towards the others.” To “keep peace in the family” is the first
principle on the raft (102). The beauty of Nature also intensifies the heavenly
image of raft and solidifies the relationship between Huck and Jim: “It’s lovely
to live on a raft. We had the sky, up there, all speckled with stars, and we used
to lay on our backs and look up them at them, and discuss about whether they
71
Henry N. Smith, “A Sound Heart and a Deformed Conscience” in Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn, ed. Sculley Bradley, et al., 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1977) 368.
was made, or only just happened” (97). The ideal image of raft is pointed out by
Leo Marx who regards the raft as the place where the ideal code of runaway
slave and the white boy can be tested: “Only on the raft do they [Huck and Jim]
have a chance to practice that idea of brotherhood to which they are
devoted…The main thing is freedom.”72
In fact, the raft embodies the ideal home of that time. In the Victorian
era, home is considered as “a sacred place” where a man retreats from the chaos
of society and feels stability, continuity, and peace. A woman is “Angel in the
House” whose function is to provide emotional and physical respite and moral
guide. Mark Twain projects his ideal of home into the raft, and created his ideal
family by appointing Jim as an angelic mother and Huck as an innocent son. On
the raft, Huck gets to feel more and more attachment to Jim, and attains the
moral power to survive the corruption of society.
Huck’s relationship with Jim grows from Buber’s I-It to I-Thou. Guided
by Jim’s motherly love and moral discipline, Huck grows. Also, Mother Jim
and the raft-home relieve Huck’s alienation. Their similar status as outcasts of
society consolidates their familial relationship, and stimulates Huck’s empathy.
By helping Jim actively, Huck achieves his moral development, which results in
strengthen his morality. During the journey down the river before arriving at the
Phelps farm, Huck encounters several critical moments to test his moral
72
Leo Marx, “Mr. Eliot, Mr. Trilling, and Huckleberry Finn” in Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn, ed. Sculley Bradley, et al., 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1977) 342.
development. One of them is related with the fog episode where Jim’s motherly
admonishment leads Huck to overcome his prejudice and to learn caring for
other’s feeling. Even though he shows his moral concern apologizing to the
“nigger,” however, Huck does not yet internalize the morality. While Huck is
still in conflict with his conscience to insist on returning Jim to Miss Watson,
Huck meets two slave hunters: At first, he is tempted to tell them about Jim. To
hide a runaway slave is “wrong” and makes Huck feel “so mean and so
miserable.” Still, Huck cannot betray Jim. He sacrifices his socially trained
“conscience” for Jim. Although Huck’s morality does not develop to the extent
that he can consciously notice that what he does is really right, his attachment
to Jim and his previously achieved morality work unconsciously to lead Huck
to act on his own morality. And Huck succeeds in passing his test of his newlyachieved morality.
Then I thought a minute, and says to myself, hold on,s’pose you’d a
done right and give Jim up; would you felt better than what you do now?
No, says I, I’d feel badI’d feel just the same way I do now. Well, then
says I, 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? I was stuck. I couldn’t answer that. So I reckoned I wouldn’t
bother no more about it, but after this always do whichever come
handiest at the time (76).
Furthermore, he gets rid of a part of the barrier of conscience existing between
Jim and himself. Then, Huck is prepared for the next tests.
His most difficult moral test involves Jim’s safety, to whom Huck feels
the strongest attachment. But Huck can pass this test, again guided by Jim’s
motherly concern that he has experienced. Knowing that the King and the Duke
sell Jim to the Phelps for forty dollars, Huck faces the most agonizing moral
crisis. When Huck is about to inform Miss Watson of Jim’s whereabouts, the
sweet memories of Jim’s kind mothering come to his mind.
And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim
before me, all the time, in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes
moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a floating along, talking, and
singing, and laughing. 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 at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old
Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now; and them 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 (169).
Huck cannot betray his best and dearest “mother” even if he has to go into
“everlasting fire.” And it is Jim’s motherly love of calling him honey and
“do[ing] everything he [Jim] could think of for me [Huck]” that enables Huck
to sacrifice himself for the black slave in this climatic moment. About the
influence of Jim on Huck’s moral development, Toni Morrison points out that
there is “no way, given the confines of the novel, for Huck to mature into a
moral human being in America without Jim.”73 Thanks to Jim, Huck can pass
the difficult moral test successfully.
However, the fact that Huck finds out the mother in Jim and grows
morally under his kind mothering is not yet enough for the ultimate success of
Huck’s quest for the mother and his task of moral development. His morality
acts not consistently but periodically only from time to time, because he has not
internalized the morality he has achieved; moreover, he seems only too glad to
abandon it. W. H. Auden defines Huck’s inconsistent morality as “moral
improvisation” in that “what Huck decides tells him nothing about what he
should do on other occasions.”74
What Huck does in the concluding chapters definitely supports Auden’s
opinion, suggesting that Huck ultimately fails in his moral development. As if
73
Quoted in Elaine Mensh and Harry Mensh, Black, White, and Huckleberry Finn:
Reimagining the American Dream (Tuscaloosa and London: The University of
Alabama Press, 2000) 90.
74
W. H. Auden, “Huck and Oliver” in Lectures de Huckleberry Finn, ed. Jean
Rouberol and Nicole Moulinoux (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes &
Foundation William Faulkner, 1995) 12.
foreshadowing his failure, the mood of the Phelps farm is in contrast with that
of the raft. It is dark, gloomy, and lonely:
There was them kind of faint dronings of bugs and flies in the air that
makes it seem so lonesome and like everybody’s dead and gone; and if a
breeze fans along quivers the leaves, it makes you feel mournful…I
heard the dim hum of a spinning-wheel sailing along up and sinking
along down again; and then I knowed for certain I wished I was
deadfor that is the lonesomeest sound in the whole world (173).
Huck’s description is strongly reminiscent of what he used to say before starting
a journey with Jim: “I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead” (9). Huck’s
old pathological traumata reappear: low self-confidence, despair, depression
and loneliness. His traumata, mainly caused by the separation from his mother
in his childhood, have not disappeared but lurked in himself ready to surface at
the smallest trigger. Van de Kolk explains that the experience of the early
separation can have long-lasting effects on the sensitivity of brain receptors,
leading to permanently raised anxiety levels.75 Then Huck’s trauma in his
subconscious prevents him from keeping his newly achieved morality. Instead,
he gives up his true identity by “being Tom Sawyer” and true morality by being
submissive to Tom’s tormenting Jim.
At the Phelps farm, Huck spends most of his time with Tom. Compared
75
Quoted form Holmes, 95.
with Jim, Tom lacks truthfulness and empathy. He does not care about how
much his tricks will trouble Jim, because for him, Jim is nothing more than an
object. Knowing Jim has been already freed by Miss Watson, Tom deceives
others, including Huck, for his “adventures.” Tom has Jim suffered the torturous
things that he adopts from “the way the best authorities. Even though Jim
pleads with Tom for not doing those things and Huck also does not agree with
Tom, Tom is too stubborn to consider others’ opinion. Huck no longer feels
“empathy” with Tom, saying, “He never paid no attention to me; went right on.
It was his way” (195). Only when the evasion plan turns out a failure, Tom
exclaims, “Turn him [Jim] loose! He ain’t no slave; he’s as free as any cretur
that walks this earth!” (226) Judith Fetterley explains Tom’s hypocrisy as
following.
In Huckleberry Finn the action of the novel works to expose the
hypocrisy of Tom Sawyer who, under the aegis of right, enacts cruelty
after cruelty; who claims to be freeing Jim and in effect enslaves him;
who presents himself as bold, daring, and adventurous and is, in fact,
doing the safest thing that can be imageined“setting a free slave
free.”76
Even though Huck no longer feels attached to Tom and does not
understand Tom, Huck subjugates himself to Tom and betrays Jim. While Jim
76
Judith Fetterley, “Disenchanment: Tom Sawyer in Huckleberry Finn” in Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn, ed. Sculley Bradley, et al., 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1977) 447.
goes through a series of ordeals to carry out Tom’s plan, Huck even feels
“pretty good” (212), having a good time with Tom. As the main cause of Huck’s
degradation into the previous immature self in the evasion episode, Elizabeth
Prioleau points out his loss of the proper parenthood; that is, his mother died in
his early childhood and his alcoholic father has abused him. She argues that
Huck shows the classic symptoms of the abused child of an alcoholic parent:
depression, low self-esteem, passivity, impulsivity, distrust, and a compulsion to
repeat self-destructive behaviors. Also she mentions these symptoms’ farreaching effects, saying that children can seldom escape from their victimized
experience by the abuse of alcoholic parents “no matter how old or even if they
leave home.”77
This view may justify Huck’s failure in the evasion episode. Huck’s low
self-esteem and impulsivity hinder his consistent moral development and his
internalization of morality. And with his passivity, he readily lapses into
subjugation of manipulations of others. As he subjugated himself to Pap and the
King and the Duke, Huck obeys Tom Sawyer even though Jim still shows his
motherly love towards Huck and keeps his dignified character. When Huck and
Tom slip into the cabin where Jim is locked, Jim expresses his extreme joy
when he sees the boys: “He was so glad to see us he most cried; and called us
honey, and all the pet names he could think of” (195). The most distinguished
77
Elizabeth Prioleau, “‘That Abused Child of Mine’: Huck Finn as a Child of an
Alcoholic” in Essays in Arts and Sciences (Oct. 1993) 93.
character in Jim is his self-sacrifice. For Tom, who is shot during the evasion,
Jim, sacrificing his freedom, fetches a doctor and carefully nurses Tom. The
doctor’s opinion on Jim’s character proves Jim’s true morality: “I never see a
nigger that was a better nuss or faithfuller, and yet he was resking his freedom
to do it, and was all tired out, too” (223). Huck also shares the same opinion
with the doctor, and observes, “I was glad it was according to my judgment of
him, too; because I thought he had a good heart in him and was a good man”
(224). Jim’s self-sacrifice and nursing may remind Huck of his genuine
motherhood which was such a great comfort for him before. (Interestingly
enough, Jim wears Aunt Sally’s gown during their evasion game, which
reinforces his image of the mother.) However, Huck remains faithful to Tom’s
tricks to the end. In other words, Huck now repudiates Jim despite the
memories of his friendship with him, but turns to Tom.
Huck’s submission to Tom’s hypocrisy and his betrayal of Jim most
succinctly suggest Huck’s regression to the previous immature self. It signifies
that he ultimately fails in his quest for the mother and his task of moral
development. At the end, by rejecting Aunt Sally’s adoption and deciding to
“light out for the Territory ahead of the rest,” Huck runs away from the
possibility of domestic world completely. In contrast to the other people who
are in the happy mood of family reunion, Huck remains alone as same as before
he started his journey.
Huck’s quest for the mother may be doomed to failure from the
beginning. Huck’s failure, mainly rooted in his motherlessness, is not what he is
responsible for and can reverse. The nurturing mother, by providing security
and unconditional love, helps the child achieve the “true morality” and
internalize his/her gained morality. Questing for the mother, Huck seems able to
overcome his motherlessness and to develop morally through the relationship
with the mother surrogates, especially two mother figures who he emotionally
clings to. In the long run, however, Huck never overcomes his previous self.
Although the motherhood of Mary Jane and Jim and the family life of the rafthome might remain as sweet memories in Huck, it is Huck himself who makes
the final decision to reject to live as a normal boy at a home. The motherless
child Huck cannot adapt himself to the domestic world, nor can he attach
himself to the good mothers because of his psychological traumata caused by
his loss of the mother and home.
Huck’s maternal deprivation hinders his moral development. Without a
mother, a child cannot create the positive self-identity, which enables him/her to
feel that he/she is right. This is the same as Huck’s case; the absence of mother
shatters his self-esteem so that Huck thinks of himself as “ornery,” “ignorant,”
and “low-down”: Huck always blames himself whether he is doing right or
wrong. With low self-esteem, Huck cannot internalize his morality, nor can he
consequently achieve his consistent moral development.
Even in the future, Huck hardly seems able to succeed in his quest.
Bowlby discusses the far-reaching effects of the loss of mother in childhood. He
says that much of adult psychiatric disability could be traced back to such
traumata78: Huck’s abused past may remain in his subconscious and reappear
from time to time. In “Mark Twain and the Endangered Family,” James Grove
also points out the impossibility of Huck’s adapting himself to the domestic
world, saying, “Huck never fits comfortably into the family.” 79 So, Huck,
despite his happy memories on the raft with Jim, cannot settle down. With his
insightful vision, Mark Twain might have perceived the tragic effect of the
absence of the motherhood and home, which prevented him from providing his
motherless, homeless protagonist with a happy ending, the success of his quest
for the mother and his moral development.
78
Quoted from Holmes, 95.
James Grove, “Mark Twain and the Endangered Family” in American Literature,
Vol. 57, No. 3 (Oct., 1985) 389.
79
Conclusion
“A boy’s life is not all comedy; much of the tragic enters into it,” said
Mark Twain in his autobiography. 80 The author’s words may be the best
guidelines to understand Huck’s life, which is full of tragedies: murders, frauds,
inhumanities, cruelties, and hypocrisies. Throughout his “adventures,” Huck
witnesses those tragedies, observing, “Human beings can be awful cruel to one
another…If I had a yeller dog that didn’t know more than a person’s conscience
does, I would pison him. It takes up more room than all the rest of a person’s
insides, and yet ain’t no good, nohow” (182-3). Huck’s voice does not sound
like an ordinary twelve-year-old boy; rather, we can hear Mark Twain’s
pessimistic voice.
What makes Huck’s life more tragic is the fact that he does not have his
mother and home on which he depends when he feels lonely, scared, and tired.
His motherlessness and homelessness beget his psychological problems, which
hinders his character development. In other words, the absence of the mother
and the home causes low self-esteem, a sense of alienation, and lack of
sociability, which prevent Huck from keeping the intimate relationship and
shatter his positive self-identity, the basis of moral behavior, so that he cannot
achieve moral development consistently.
80
Mark Twain, Mark Twain’s Own Autobiography, ed. Michael J. Kiskis (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1990) 154.
Mark Twain’s concern for family helps us understand how much tragic
Huck’s life without the mother and the home is. The separation from the
beloved ones and the alienation from the domestic world were the most tragic
predicaments to Huck as well as to Mark Twain himself. In his life, Twain
heavily depended on his family and home on the matter of not only his
emotional life but also his literary life. In the introduction of Mark Twain’s
autobiography, Kiskis argues, “Clemens’ narrative is securely anchored in his
relation to his family and his pain at witnessing the deaths in that family.”81 In
his late years, Twain, experiencing the deaths of his daughters and wife, became
more misanthropic and lacking in his creativity, which may be the reason that
he could not produce a notable novel-length work. Huck’s failure in his quest
for the mother and moral development foreshadows Mark Twain’s failure in
overcoming his enormous pain for the loss of his family and his frustration in
creating his novels in that the author Twain created his protagonist Huck as the
character who “was too close to his [Mark Twain’s] innermost self to be a
comfortable companion.”82
The family man Twain created such a tragic figure, the motherless,
homeless child Huck to, ironically enough, emphasize the importance of the
mother and the home. And his pessimistic vision makes the book far more
81
Twain, Mark Twain’s Own Autobiography, xxv.
Robert E. Spiller, The Cycle of American Literature (New York: Macmillan, 1961)
159.
82
tragic by ultimately making Huck’s quest for the mother and the home a failure.
In “Huck Finn’s Humor Today,” Hamlin Hill points out Mark Twain’s
pessimistic vision, observing that Huck’s quest is doomed to failure in the
world of nightmare, absurdity, and alienation. The critic cites James E. Miller’s
characterization of the twentieth-century novels.
For the first time in our literature, after World War II, the world that
dominated our fiction was sick, hostile, or treacherous, and…the
recurring stance of the modern fictional hero reflected some mixture of
horror, bewilderment, and sardonic humoror, to use the popular term,
alienation. The common pattern of action which recurred was the pattern
of the quest, the quest absurd in a world gone insane or turned opaque
and inexplicable, or become meaningless… The nightmare world,
alienation and nausea, the quest for identity, and the comic doomsday
visionthese are the four elements that characterize recent American
fiction.83
Miller’s explanation of the modern novels draws parallel with Mark Twain’s
Huck Finn, written in the nineteenth century, which makes the work meaningful
and famous even today. With his pessimistic vision, Twain produced the
apocalyptic boy book.
The social condition of today’s world is no better, if not worse, than
Huck’s world in terms of child desertion and abuse. So many Hucks, parentless,
83
Quoted from Hamlin Hill, “Huck Finn’s Humor Today” in One Hundred Years of
Huckleberry Finn: The Boy, His Book, and American Culture, ed. Robert Sattelmeyer
and J. Donald Crowley (Colombia: University of Missouri Press, 1985) 299.
homeless, abused, and alienated children, live searching for their psychological
mother and home. With no help from others as a child, can they eventually
succeed in their quests? Mark Twain’s answer might be, “No.”
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