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ready free Jim, but positively villainous. Chadwick Hansen typified the
prevailing climate of critical disdain for virtually every character in
Huckleberry Finn
when he wrote in 1963:
If the reader has learned anything from this novel he has learned that
the consciences even of the decent people have been depraved by
their moral blindness to the evil of slavery.
In the 1980s, the kindly Judge Thatcher was condemned. Eventually,
logically enough, so was Huckleberry Finn himself, on account of his co–
operating with Tom to humiliate Jim in their last adventure. Not even
Huck's moral high point was excluded from the indictment. "His decision
to 'go to hell' to free Jim," wrote one critic, "is the last shudder of a
psyche hopelessly divided against itself and poised for a fall into Tom
Sawyer." That Mark Twain had failed to sustain the antislavery vision of
his novel seemed incontrovertible to post-sixties critics. One of them,
John Seelye, published a well-received rewrite of the entire book titled
The
True Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
in which he brought the plot into
line with contemporaty thinking about race. Among other changes, Aunt
Sally's mild husband, Silas Phelps, was transformed into a vicious hunter
of escaped slaves.
Leo Marx and antislavery theorists after him were necessarily at some
pains to explain why it was that Mark Twain himself had failed to treat
his characters and plot the way they themselves would have. Regarding
the characters, Leo Marx explained that Mark Twain "understood people
like the Phelpses, but nevertheless he was forced to rely upon them to
provide his happy ending." In other words, Mark Twain must have
agreed with twentieth-century critics that all white Southerners of the
antebellum period were monsters, and only the exigencies of his plot or
his failure of nerve kept him from depicting them as such. In £act, charac–
ters like Uncle Silas and Aunt Sally Phelps were needed for more than the
happy ending. Harold Kaplan, writing in 1972, pointed out that the or–
dinary folk in the book "cannot be finally overturned, because in a sense
they are the only possible authorities; they are, in effect, the 'people'." If
everyone is evil, Kaplan was saying, then there can never be a way out of
social crimes like slavery. This is why, contrary to most critics' wishes, the
book depicts what Kenneth Lynn described as "fundamentally decent
people." (Thinking back on the effects slavery had on his own parents
and neighbors, Mark Twain expressed an opinion in keeping with this
characterization. "I think it [slavery] stupefied everyone's humanities as
regarded the slave," he wrote, "but stopped there.")
As for the kindly, selfless Uncle Silas, Mark Twain's portrait of him
