Europe, Darwin, and the Escape from Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel of escapes: Huck must escape from Judith Loftus, the Grangerfords, and the Wilkses; Jim from slave hunters and Huck’s attempted betrayals; and both from St. Petersburg, the Walter Scott, the Duke and Dauphin, and the Phelps farm. The persistent commonality among all of these is that each one is successful. Somehow Huck and Jim always manage to make it back to the raft unscathed—that is, until Jim is imprisoned on the Phelps farm and Huck is reunited with Tom Sawyer. Under Tom’s “expert” guidance, escapes become escapades and the memories of Huck and Jim’s earlier successes hasten down the mighty Mississippi. Huck and Jim’s simplicity is replaced by Tom’s showmanship that includes blood-penned journals, underground tunnels, and an army of woodland creatures. Although Huck is in “no ways particular how it’s done, so it’s done” and gives Tom a wide berth,¹ critics have been particular, branding Tom anything from a petulant child to a sadist while labeling his plan grotesque and cruel.

It is interesting to consider how critics would have responded if Tom, Jim, and Huck had made it clear of the Phelps’ farm and Tom was able to march Jim back to St. Petersburg a free man and a hero. Would Jim’s freedom and status along with his proximity to his family salve the pain of a hundred rat bites? Would Tom be considered the arrogant racist or a clever (if egocentric) genius? Are critics upset because, unlike Huck’s, Tom’s plan fails? Critics have been quick to identify the many letdowns in Tom’s plan and in turn Twain’s plotting, but few have paid much attention to the content of Tom’s orchestrations and their implications. More than the cruel games of a sadistic child, Tom’s evasion is grounded in a rich history of literary escape narratives of which Tom is supposedly knowledgeable. However, these misread and mismanaged tales draw suspicion to the efficacy of Tom’s training.

Indeed, training was always an operative word for Twain, who would come back to this theme throughout his oeuvre from Life on the Mississippi to Pudd’nhead Wilson. Not surprisingly, Twain’s logic of cultural transmission, or training, is heavily influenced by Darwinian notions of natural selection where deleterious behaviors vanish from a population while beneficial ones survive. In Huckleberry Finn, two worldviews are pitted against one another on the American frontier in a Darwinian struggle for existence. On the one hand rests Tom’s essentialist, typological thinking evident in his strict adherence to the European literary tradition, and on the other is Huck’s “population thinking”—a belief in variable populations of distinct individuals—noticeable in his pragmatic approach. The ridicule that follows the former’s escape plan suggests that Twain disdained such maladapted typological thinking that threatened the stability of the nation.² As such, the much-maligned conclusion to Huckleberry Finn might be understood as part of Twain’s larger critique of European atavism in American culture and an innovative imagining of Darwinian logic in cultural systems that anticipates contemporary cultural evolutionary theory.

Darwin’s Influence on Twain

In What is Man? (1906) Twain argued “there are gold men, and tin men, and copper men, and leaden men, and steel men, and so on—and each has the limitations of his nature, his heredities, his training, and his environment.” Twain identified these limitations as the “million unnoticed influences—for good or bad: influences which work without rest during every waking moment of a man’s life, from cradle to grave.” When the story’s interlocutor asks the Old Man whether he could report his tabulation of these influences, the Old Man comically responds that “it would take an hour.”³ Indeed, Twain’s entire life’s work seems to be about parsing the influences that act on an individual and documenting that learning process. As Bert Bender rightly noted, Twain’s interest in Darwin was tied to “Darwin’s understanding of heredity, training, and environment.”⁴ “Twain came to...