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boys' books, wherein the bad boy turns out to have a good heart. Henry
Nash Smith showed how this sentimental cliche lurks even in Huck's
crucial "I'll go to hell" scene (against which Leo Marx measures and finds
wanting the remainder of the book). In it, "there is a covert suggestion,"
wrote Smith, "that Huck is dramatizing himself, that he has an inkling of
the falsity of the moral stance of his conscience." That is, despite pretend–
ing otherwise, Huck knows that his decision to help Jim is morally right.
Proclaiming his willingness to go to hell therefore has in it a touch of self–
dramatization just slightly out of keeping with his undeniable purity of
motive.
Smith's analysis need not seriously undercut a scene that he himself
agrees to be "one of the high points of our literature." But his analysis
does expose the chief critical hazard presented by
Huckleberry Finn:
the
temptation for the reader to find in the book expressions of his own en–
lightened attitude toward slavery. Smith calls attention to the way post–
Civil War Northerners indulged themselves in "complacency" and
"intense self-righteousness" regarding slavery. That Mark Twain shared
these attitudes is evident from his enthusiastic participation in gatherings
at which politicians flattered postwar audiences by evoking the evils of the
slave system they had defeated. For all his ability to shock his contempo–
raries, Mark Twain was, as Santayana remarked in his essay on the genteel
tradition, susceptible in part to its sanctimonious lures.
Susceptible, too, have been those modern critics who express disap–
pointment at Mark Twain's failure to achieve a higher moral purpose.
It
is
as if, infected by the slight element of cant in Huck's go-to-hell speech,
they have come down with after-dinner cases of righteous high-minded–
ness. To be sure, the critics are not wrong about slavery. But they fail to
detect how they have come to use it for their own self-aggrandizement.
As
a result they have lost sight of how slavery, for all its importance in
Huckleberry Finn,
might be subordinated to a larger conception of free–
dom.
In the years following Leo Marx's essay of 1953, race indisputably
grew to be a central issue in American politics and society. As it did, the
antisegregationist wish of 1950s criticism evolved into progressive wishes
typical of developments in the sixties, seventies and eighties. First, Lionel
Trilling's saintly Jim began to seem too passive. William Van O'Connor,
for example, complained as early as 1955 not only that Jim was badly
treated in the last adventure but also that he was saddled with a rninstrel–
show-like gullibility earlier in the book.
In the sixties' atmosphere of emerging black pride, the emphasis
shifted. Jim's "innate dignity" began to be insisted on, along with the
"dignity and force" of his dialect. Chadwick Hansen argued, for example,
