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chapter two The Metaphor of the Adolescent Reformer Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Little Women “I almost wish I hadn’t any conscience.” —Little Women “If I had a yaller dog that didn’t know no more than a person’s conscience does, I would pison him.” —Adventures of Huckleberry Finn T he novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Little Women were published seventeen years apart, which is almost a generation in terms of the readership of the juvenile market. But they are two of the most studied nineteenth-century American novels with adolescent protagonists. Neither book has ever been out of print, and both of them are the most canonical novel of their respective authors.The differences between the authors’ personae and the novels’ plot structures, however, create an ironic relationship of similarity between the two books, for despite one being characterized as a “girl book” of domestic fiction written by a literary bluestocking and the other being labeled a “boy book” written by a Western humorist who conjoins adventure with social critique, both novels rely on adolescent protagonists to advance the authors’ reform ideologies. Moreover, the specifics of those ideologies emerge from the characters’ moral development as they grow toward adulthood, so they share the same literary implication that youth is a time of greater potential for change than any other stage of life. Jo and Huck experience moral conflicts in very similar terms. Jo says, “I almost wish I hadn’t any conscience, it’s so inconvenient. If I didn’t care about doing right, and didn’t feel uncomfortable when doing wrong, I should get on capitally” (281). Huck also laments his conscience, “If I had a yaller dog that didn’t know no 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” (292). Both characters are being ironic—Jo more self-consciously than Huck—but both are performing a vital function in American literature. They 31 are some of the earliest adolescent characters whose ironic moral crises serve as metaphors of the need for American social change. The necessity of reform that those two novels establish emerges from two teenagers’ moral development, so throughout this chapter I will focus on how both authors employed the concept of growth and moral development to imply the possibility of social change. An investigation of the qualities many writers shared when they wrote about social change in the nineteenth century precedes my analysis of the relationship between Clemens’s and Alcott’s lives and between their most famous novels. Reform Writing and Adolescence Scholars of nineteenth-century social change in American literature have identified several assumptions that help to define the type of reform literature that ClemensandAlcottwrote.First,nineteenth-centuryAmericanauthorsofsocial reform fiction tended to base their motivation for writing in some permutation of Christianity that implied that “reform is simply the right thing to do” (Koistinen-Harris 3). In Clemens’s and Alcott’s cases, as with many reform writers , romantic evangelism influenced that ethos. Romantic evangelism is a broad termthatdescribesmanyofthereform-orientedmanifestationsofProtestantism innineteenth-centuryAmerica,suchasMethodism,Presbyterianism,Congregationalism , and Quakerism.1 Much of the reform writing of the era emanated fromthepenofauthorswhopracticedsomeformofromanticevangelism.Their writing ranged from overtly didactic religious tracts to critically acclaimed novels and included a complex variety of narratives, genres, images, and style in many fictional assertions that certain behaviors or inequalities be eradicated from the culture (Reynolds 55).2 Emphasizing as it does abolition, maternity, and the potential of youth to redeem their elders, UncleTom’s Cabin is the most notable example of the antebellum reform novel.3 Furthermore, for many socially aware authors, reform had practical implications that were based on a desire to make the country’s resources operate more efficiently and more fairly; in theory, the more people who had access to the country’s abundance, the more productive the nation would be (KoistinenHarris3 ;Elbert,“Introduction”xviii).Thus,consumerismwalkedhandinhand with Christianity in providing a major impulse for reform (Shulman ix, 20). Another truism among critics of literary reform is recognizing the influence of theCivilWarininspiringreformmovements.Fromabolitionism—whichinfluenced the factionalism that led to the war—to the hygiene movements that occurred as a result of poor sanitary conditions for troops in the war, the Civil 32 l the metaphor of the adolescent reformer War was the watershed from which many progressive movements of the Gilded Age emerged (Eiselein 3–5). Very significantly, within American...

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