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