Huck Finn and the Flight from Maturity

HUCK FINN AND THE FLIGHT FROM MATURITY Albert J. von Frank* In a seminal essay in 1953, Leo Marx argued the case against the ending of theAdventures of Huckleberry Finn.1 Others before him had expressed misgivings about the fitness to the novel as a whole of the slapstick "Evasion," yet these earlier criticisms had been largely vitiated on the one hand by a generous inclination to forgive a minor lapse in a major work, and, on the other hand, by a reluctance to hold Mark Twain's novel to rigorous formal standards. Among the many services which Marx's essay performed was that of stating simply and unequivocally why the ending "jeopardized the significance of the entire novel." Maintaining that "to take seriously what happens at the Phelps farm is to take lightly the entire downstream journey,"2 Marx saw the ending not merely as an aesthetic "falling off but as an astonishing betrayal of the moral vision which had brought Huck to his decision to "go to hell" rather than return Jim to bondage. The reader has observed Huck's slow and painfully evolving victory over the sham values of his society only to find him descending at last into buffoonery. Huck, who could so powerfully acknowledge the wrong of putting "dirt on de head er dey fren's," and who began with the strength to reject Tom Sawyer's "lies," in the end not only permits but engages in the humiliation and torment of the innocent Jim. The problem with the ending of Huck Finn has to do, as Marx suggested , with the relationship, the continuity or the lack of it, between the deepening moral consciousness ostensibly chronicled in the chapters devoted to the downstream journey and the quality of the behavior to be observed in the concluding episodes at the Phelps farm. Yet surely the varieties of continuity or even of meaningful discontinuity that readers come to look for in a novel depend so much on prior assumptions about the author's manner and so much on inferences drawn from the novel's reputation that, in failing to find unity or coherence in a work such as Huck Finn, one would do well to reexamine the ideas on which particular expectations and disappoint- *Albert J. von Frank is an Assistant Professor of English and American Literature at Harvard. His publications include Whittier: A Comprehensive Annotated Bibliography (1976) and several essays on Robert Frost. He is currently at work on a book entitled "Provincialism in American Literature: From Bradstreet to Emerson." 2 Albert J. von Frank ments are based. Two critical assumptions about Huck Finn as protagonist seem to share responsibility for obscuring the sense and pertinence of the novel's ending by creating false or misleading expectations . The first is that Huck's moral growth is presented according to a more or less orthodox—perhaps Hawthornean—model of the fall from innocence into experience, and the second is that Huck is rather more realistic than romantic in conception. It would be difficult to find a discussion of Huckleberry Finn that did not openly or tacitly invoke one or the other or both of these assumptions. If, for the sake of argument, one took Hawthorne's "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" as a standard against which to measure Twain's portrayal of Huck's moral growth, certain very significant differences would become immediately apparent. First, though both young protagonists are traveling, they are proceeding in quite opposite directions . Robin moves from a rural, not to say "wilderness," environment into the morally benighted and hypocritical city—in other words, toward a society in which rules and regulations, though often cynically violated, are nevertheless crucially important. Huck, on the other hand, moves from the regulated, civilized society of Miss Watson, the Widow Douglas, money, and St. Petersburg, into the free and unregulated environment of the River. Previous to his journey, Robin knew nothing but love and good motives; Huck has had to learn to live with Pap and to accommodate himself as best he can to other tyrannies less violent than Pap's but certainly no less troublesome. Unlike Robin, Huck has a genuinely shrewd perception of the existence of...