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not simply a slave, he is a symbol of humanity.
One of the critics in the special issue similarly asserted that Jim is elevated
in
stature and in fact is set apart "from everyone else in the novel except
Huck." As a result, Jim emerges as "a man, like all men, at the mercy of
other men's arbitrary cruelties."
For white critics, in contrast, Mark Twain's treatment of Jim had
grown so unacceptable that it began to raise the question of whether
Huckleberry Finn
could be regarded as a first-rate work of literary art. Leo
Marx had not quite dealt with this question, though his repudiation of
everything that happens once Huck and Jim float past Cairo, Illinois,
amounted to rejecting virtually half of the book. Critics who rejected still
more than this - notably (despite Chadwick Hansen's defense of it) the
minstrel-show-like treatment ofJim in the early chapters - were in effect
rating
Huckleberry Finn
very low indeed in the scale of literary value, little
as that might have been their intention.
The way out of having to devalue
Huckleberry Finn
was provided by a
theory that also emerged in the late 1960s. It proposed that rather than
suffering a failure of nerve, Mark Twain, especially in the ending, in–
tended an ironic, antislavery, antiracist allegory of the post-Civil War
Reconstruction period. He wrote
Huckleberry Finn
during this period, it
was
pointed out, even ifhe set its action before the Civil War. Moreover,
as he wrote, the freed slaves were being duped and humiliated in ways
that
could be compared to Jim's treatment in the final adventure (when
Tom keeps from him the news that Miss Watson has set him free). The
"Reconstruction reading" permitted critics to treat the negative stereo–
typing ofJim as part of a charade: an ironic imitation of a period of his–
tory.
The purpose ofJim's treatment was now said to be the exposure of
Reconstruction as a sham and deception perpetrated on the freed slaves.
But the credibility of the Reconstruction reading depended on being
a correct interpretation of both history and a literary work. Since the
reading assumed an ironic intention, furthermore, Mark Twain had to
have intended it. As it happens, many historical interpretations of
Reconstruction emphasize the gains made by the freed slaves. And as for
Mark Twain himself, he never gave any inkling, either within
Huckleberry
Fi,.,.
or in comments on it, that he intended an ironic allegory. If he did
intend an allegory, he did not seem to the Reconstruction theorists them–
selves fully to have grasped its point. For one thing, Mark Twain re–
mained, as the Reconstruction theorist Neil Schmitz put it, "ambivalent"
about Jim. That is, he depicted the cruel irony ofJim's fate after being set
&ee,
yet he insulted him with a condescension apparently no better than
that
directed at the former slaves during Reconstruction.
