PETER SHAW
The Genteel Fate of
Huckleberry
Finn
Upon its publication in 1885, Mark Twain's
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
was banned from public libraries, and Huck Finn's bad language and be–
havior were subjected to high-minded censure. One hundred years later,
in a similarly Victorian manner, Huck's wavering attitude toward race and
slavery were deplored, and once again the book disappeared from public
libraries. While today no one would deny that Mark Twain's presentation
of the slave, Jim, is disturbing and embarrassing, and while the values that
later critics of the book wished to instill are superior to the shallow
moralism of the 1880s, these later critics, no less than their predecessors,
have violated a work's literary integrity by demanding that it conform to a
particular morality. Their air of offended virtue in response to racism in
Huckleberry Finn
has returned academics of the 1980s - ordinarily priding
themselves on being iconoclastic if not outrageous in their moral attitudes
- to the spirit of the genteel tradition.
The genteel sensibility dominating nineteenth-century American lit–
erary taste called for socially acceptable attitudes expressed with strict pro–
priety oflanguage. Huck's asocial attitudes and colloquial language, both
of which manifestly violated genteel standards, led straight to the Concord
Public Library's banning of the book in which he appeared. Yet the gen–
teel tradition was dead by the tum of the century, and both Huck's table
manners and Mark Twain's literary manners ceased to seem outrageous.
Instead, they began to be appreciated as triumphs ofliterary realism.
Still later,
Huckleberry Finn
was elevated to the status of a work de–
serving advanced literary discussion. In introductions to paperback edi–
tions in 1949, T . S. Eliot and Lionel Trilling treated it as both symbolic
and mythic. In the course of the 1950s other critics, having been shown
how contemporary critical terminology could be applied, proceeded to
flesh out the accounts by Eliot and Trilling. Huck Finn's escape from the
stifling life of his small Missouri town was viewed as a journey toward an
idealized brotherhood with the escaped slave, Jim. The raft on which the
two of them floated away was more than a raft, and the river whose cur–
rent swept them along was more than a river. Trilling spoke of the river's
"noble grandeur in contrast with the pettiness of men," and he suggested
that the river took on the attributes of a god, which "to men of moral
