Huck's relations to women and girls comprise a subtext in Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn that helps gauge his progress toward manhood, which
reaches its turning point in his accord with Mary Jane Wilks. Victor
Doyno’s reading of this passage in Writing Huck Finn (Philadelphia: U of PA
P, 1991) highlights Huck’s growth. His encounter with Mary Jane at the
climax of the Wilks sequence is the romantic moment in which Huck takes on
adult responsibility.
The widow’s influence begins his moral awakening. Miss Watson personifies
the rigid, racist code—little different from pap’s—that deforms his
conscience (chapters 1-6) and afflicts his relation to Jim until chapter
31. Judith Loftus helps him (chapter 11) and Rachel Grangerford nearly
adopts him. Huck distantly admires Rachel’s daughters, but Sophia’s
attention embarrasses and confuses the boy. The aftermath of her elopement,
which he unwittingly abetted, so traumatizes Huck that he flees the feud
with a guilty conscience and hardly a backward glance: "It would make me
sick again if I was to ... tell all that happened. ... Lots of times I
dream about ... such awful things" (chapter 17-18).
The Wilks sisters, orphans nearer his own age, are victims of a fraud in
which Huck is a witting accomplice (chapter 24-5). Their plight restarts
the moral conflict Huck evaded when he concluded to do “right [or]
wrong ... whichever come handiest at the time" (chapter 16). Their
kindness makes him feel "so ornery ... that I says to myself, ... I'll hive
that money for them or bust" (chapter 26).
Huck’s encounter with Mary Jane climaxes his developing relation to the
feminine. Mark Twain foreshadows Huck’s romantic awakening when he has
Huck "snuggle in amongst" Mary Jane’s gowns as he spies on the king and the
duke (chapter 26). A little later, Huck is moved by Mary Jane’s tears for
her uncle, shed alone in silence (chapter 27), like his own for Buck
Grangerford (chapter 18). Doyno's reading probes the chaste intimacy they
share as “she shook me by the hand, hard” with tears in their eyes.
Mary Jane inspires Huck's admiration: “And when it comes to beauty—and
goodness, too—she lays over them all,” and he also praises her "sand": “She
had the grit to pray for Judus if she took the notion—there warn’t no back-
down to her.” He is deeply touched by her promise to him: “I shan’t ever
forget you, and I’ll think of you a many and a many a time, and I’ll pray
for you, too!” And he does think of Mary Jane “a many and a many a million
times” after they part. He even considers praying for her (chapter 28).
Although W. R. Moses overlooks Mary Jane’s role, structural parallels to
the Inferno, which that critic frames as an unintentional feature of AHF--a
function of "the universality of both works"--make the middle section of
the novel a tour of Dante’s Hell (“The Pattern of Evil in Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn,” Georgia Review 13 [1959]: 161-66).
Doug Aldridge extends Moses’ insight in Mark Twain and the Brazen Serpent
to observe that Mary Jane doubles for Dante’s Beatrice as Huck’s feminine
ideal. Under her influence, Huck embraces the morality of the widow, who
told him to “help other people ... and never think about myself," (chapter
3). Huck’s feeling for Mary Jane is ideal love--more than a puerile crush.
Samuel Clemens was a man of his era, and AHF reveals much of his own
relation to the feminine. In the Wilks episode Huck leaps forward in his
moral and emotional growth, but after AHF Mark Twain returns him to eternal
boyhood.
Rescuing Mary Jane and her sisters prepares Huck for his climactic decision
to “go to hell” for Jim (chapter 31)—which involves further structural and
substantive parallels to Dante (whose Inferno Clemens probably first read
in the early 1870s, before starting AHF in 1876, according to Alan Gribben
in Mark Twain’s Library: A Reconstruction, 2 vols., Boston: Hall, 1980.).
The allusions that Moses and Aldridge explore evidence that this motif is
intentional.
Archetypal analysis of the novel as covert biblical burlesque and religious
satire shows that Huck achieves adulthood and moral autonomy: the
annihilation of his “deformed conscience” by his in-part-romantically
quickened “sound heart,” as Clemens himself encapsulated the book’s “motive
… moral … [and] plot.” The story ends with Sally Phelps’ plan to adopt
and “sivilize” Huck, who simply comments, “I can’t stand it. I been there
before” (“Chapter the Last.”), for he has matured beyond Tom Sawyer’s
juvenile deceptions and beyond adoption and coercion into conventional
society.
With respect to Becky Thatcher, Franklin Rogers treats “the courtship
theme” of ATS as a burlesque of Victorian courtship rituals in Mark Twain’s
Burlesque Patterns: As Seen in the Novels and Narratives 1855-1885,
(Dallas: Southern Methodist UP, 1960). This broad burlesque of contemporary
mores augments the humor of Tom’s and Becky’s juvenile courtship.
However, Rogers concludes that AHF “is a structural failure” because he
misses most of the subtle burlesque embedded in the text. Nevertheless, his
investigation of Mark Twain’s reliance on literary sources and complex
irony in constructing his plots and characters facilitates deeper
appreciation of both ATS and AHF.
Doyno’s writings, Gribben’s tally of MT’s biblical allusions and wide
reading, and many studies showing Clemens’ uses of literary sources and
burlesque techniques of plot construction and characterization also support
my explication of AHF as a coherent--and brilliant--literary work of art
(Mark Twain and the Brazen Serpent: How Biblical Burlesque and Religious
Satire Unify Huckleberry Finn [Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017]).
Doug Aldridge
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