438
PARTISAN REVIEW
center." And Huck does not grow "in stature throughout the journey."
For not even in his famous go-to-hell decision, in which he chooses
damnation over betrayal ofJim, does Huck show himself"capable of
ar–
riving at the abstract proposition, 'Slavery is wrong'." Instead, Smith
wrote, "what he is trying to escape from is not a society corrupted
by
slavery, but the same petty harassments he had fled from at the end of
Tom Sawyer."
In 1977, Kenneth Lynn called attention to the phenomenon of Henry
Nash Smith's critique having been all but universally ignored - and ig–
nored without so much as acknowledgment that there were grounds for
disagreement on both the issue of the centrality of slavery and of the
depth of Huck's philosophical understanding. Lynn sided with Smith
and
added his own objections to interpreting Huck's decision to "light out" as
a social critique. Lynn then attempted to account for why critics held
to
Leo Marx's view. Critics of the 1950s, Lynn observed, had wanted among
other things "to believe that Huck was renouncing his membership in a
society that condoned slavery because they themselves did not wish to
live in a segregationist America." An admirable social impulse had
dis–
torted critical judgment by placing an inordinate emphasis on slavery.
This is not to say that society goes unscathed in
Huckleberry
Finn.
Huck the renegade is most certainly running from its constrictions. But
Leo Marx did not include among these the attempts by Aunt Polly
and
other benefactors to make Huck a proper member of society by getting
him to keep regular hours and wash behind his ears (the stuff of the
book's comedy at the beginning and again at the end). Instead, Marx saw
Huck's ordeal to be his exposure to Aunt Polly's and others' hypocrisy
about slavery. Marx's
Huckleberry
Finn
was a work neither comic nor me–
liorist, but rather so steeped in outrage at slavery that its fussy Aunt Polly
deserved to be called "the Enemy." And with "their shabby morality,"
Tom's sweet, bumbling Uncle Silas and Aunt Sally Phelps were
"reminiscent of those solid German citizens we have heard about in our
time who tried to maintain a similarly
gematlich
way of life within
virtual
earshot ofBuchenwald."
Marx's expression of outrage, though it came in 1953, anticipated the
tonality of criticism in the sixties. By invoking the historical fact that
all
Southerners lived within a slave system, it is possible to stigmatize every
single character in
Huckleberry
Finn .
Accordingly, the overtly vicious
characters - Pap Finn, the murderous Grangerfords, and the duplicitous
Duke and Dauphin - came to be treated by white critics as hardly distin–
guishable from the good characters. As for the good characters, anyone of
them could come under equal critical disapproval. Tom, for example.
came to be seen not as foolishly romantic in his charade of freeing the
al-
