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focused on what they regarded as the chief failings of American society.
In
the 1985 volume of essays,
One Hundred Years oj "Huckleberry Finn,"
one critic dealt with the Gilded Age (a period overlapping
Reconstruction) as a time of rampant capitalism. He was convinced that
capitalism brought "the classic market society form of alienation";
... as a black slave Jim brings into intense focus the contradiction
between humane views of the whole self and the market society view
that part of the self can be alienated and as a commodity can be sold
for what it will command as labor.
Not far long down the line of causation in such logic came "the vio–
lation offamily ties." That "sickening disease," the same critic concludes,
is
the real subject of the book. Satirized are "the middle-class family as an
instrument of socialization," and an economic system threatening to leave
people "with no possibility of human community." Or is it that Huck, as
the author of the essay, "The Education of a Young Capitalist" in the
Hundred Years
volume has it, is running away from the temptation to him–
self to become an exploitative, Gilded Age-style "robber capitalist"?
There is no way of telling, since the critics have left off disputing one
another's interpretations, no matter how seemingly divergent they may
be.
Critical disagreement need no longer arise inasmuch as critics are in
fundamental agreement that, in one way or another,
Huckleberry Finn
in–
dicts American society.
This indictment has triumphed not only over old-style character
analysis and myth-symbol interpretations but also over history itself After
all,
however one may feel about the Reconstruction period, when Jim is
set free it is difficult not to recall that the American slaves were also set
free. Yet several critics, without being contradicted, have denied that Jim
is
free. They insist that from a correct historical point of view, the
American slaves were never truly set free. In the context of
Reconstruction properly interpreted, therefore, as Neil Schmitz put it as
early as 1971, "the notion ofJim's 'freedom' " seems actually "obscene."
In James M. Cox's 1966 formulation, modern critics tended to con–
gratulate themselves for opposing slavery by conveniently forgetting that
the reader "begins the book after the fact of the Civil War," that is, after
the slaves have been freed. In the 1980s, critics maintained an equivalent
genteel self-approval not by forgetting but by actively denying the same
historical fact. So influential was the 1980s denial that James Cox himself
proved susceptible to it. Adopting the practice of placing the word
freedom
in
quotation marks, he wrote in 1985 that "the travesty ofJim's 'freedom'
in
the closing narrative moment reveals in a way that no other ending
