Women and Virtue in Huckleberry Finn

REFORMERS AND YOUNG MAIDENS: WOMEN AND VIRTUE IN HUCKLEBERRY FINN Mark Twain considered it "another boy's book," The Concord, Massachusetts, public library, in 1885, regarded it as "the veriest trash."(n1) Daniel G. Hoffman has called it "the most universal book to have come out of the United States of America."(n2) The object of praise, banning, and veneration during the hundred years since its publication, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has not commonly been considered a novel about women in nineteenth-century American society. Men occupy center stage in Huck Finn; women stand toward the back and sides of the novel, nagging, providing inspiration, often weeping or hysterical. Indeed, Twain's masterpiece would seem a likely reference point for Judith Fetterley's blunt statement: "American literature is male. To read the canon of what is currently considered classic American literature is perforce to identify as male .... Our literature neither leaves women alone nor allows them to participate."(n3) As one of several novels commonly thought to address the formation of American attitudes and values, and therefore a "classic" part of the American literary tradition, Huck Finn is indeed a "male" novel in several senses. The narrative voice, the specific angle of vision from which the events of the novel unfold, is that of a young boy. Moreover, as a deliberate bildungsroman, the novel traces the moral development of Huck Finn: the traditional passage of the young man from youthful innocence to maturity. Most significantly, the thematic core of the novel embodies a dream of escape to freedom that is both peculiarly American and identifiably masculine. Historically, the political and physical experiences of exploring and settling a wilderness have required a power to initiate and lead social movements that has commonly been granted to men rather than to women. In mythic terms, the typical American hero has, like Huck, resisted the "civilizing" efforts of women and has struck out boldly, often iconoclastically, for a new "territory." For Fetterley, as for other recent critics, the exploitation of the land has come to be seen as analogous to the suppression of women, who are traditionally regarded as both desirable and dangerous. In Fetterley's terms, "America is female; to be American is male; and the quintessential American experience is betrayal by a woman."(n4) Although it would not be accurate to say that Huck Finn is "betrayed" by a woman, Miss Watson's decision to sell Jim down the river--certainly a betrayal of Jim--sets the novel in motion. Were it not for the relationship between the slave and the boy, much of Twain's social commentary would be impossible, and Miss Watson's action allows their relationship to develop, making her a vital element of the plot. Nevertheless, for most readers, the significance of Huck Finn requires the male characters to occupy the foreground, leaving the female characters as part of the scenic backdrop. Virtually all readings of the novel, from Leslie Fiedler's assumption of a homosexual relationship between Huck and Jim(n5) to discussions of the novel's roots in Southwestern humor,(n6) reflect its origins in a male-dominated culture. Even the controversy about the role Tom Sawyer plays in the last seven chapters of the novel centers on the conflict between Tom's romantic swagger and Huck's tenuous moral supremacy: a boy's games versus adult responsibility. Without detracting from the central role that Huck Finn plays in the novel that bears his name, it is possible to re-view Huck Finn as embodying a basic tension between male and female values and roles--a tension that bears directly on Huck's moral growth. Most of the female characters are derived from traditional--usually unflattering--stereotypes of women common to nineteenth-century authors and readers; indeed, the novel could serve as an index to common attitudes toward women as reflected in these stereotypical images. Those few women in the novel who are not merely stereotypes, such as Judith Loftus and Mary Jane Wilks, have more to do with Huck's development than is normally acknowledged. Finally, Huck's ambivalence about women--whom he tends to view as either nagging moralists or paragons of virtues-demonstrates the limited nature of his maturity by the end of the novel. The virtues that Huck begins to develop--honesty, compassion, a sense of duty--are identified in the novel as female virtues. Yet Huck's maleness requires that he ultimately emulate men, that he see women as "other"; and in the end he tries to run from the civilizing presence of women, unable to make the distinction between essential humanity and what society incorrectly considers virtue. Discussions of Twain's male characters' attitudes toward or relationships with women seem inevitably to address the attitudes of Twain--or, rather, Samuel Clemens--toward women in his own life. Clemens's relationships with his mother, Jane Clemens, and with his wife, Olivia, particularly as they appear to be sources for the female characters in his works (and, in the case of Olivia, to be a "censor" of his work), have been the subject of much biographical and critical study. Although such an approach can invite a confusion of character and author, it may be useful to consider briefly Clemens's view of womanhood, since it is likely that, as the creation of a nineteenth-century male imagination, Huck mirrors some of Clemens's conceptions of the nature and role of women. Mary Ellen Goad has defined the role that Clemens wished women to play in his own life in order to illuminate his creation of female characters. Goad contends that Twain created patterns of female behavior to which even the actual women in his life were expected to adhere, and that his fictional women were designed as models for the real women in his life: Twain viewed the role of the female in a particular, and, to the modern mind, strange way. He operated on the theory that the male of the species was rough and crude, and needed the softening and refining influence of a woman, or, if necessary, many women. The primary function of the women was thus the reformation of man.(n7) This view of woman as the reformer of inherently brutish man was not unique to Twain and had been enhanced by the Victorian insistence on female purity. Ann Douglas argues that between 1820 and 1875 middle-class women and Protestant ministers turned simultaneously to the promulgation of "the potentially matriarchal values of nurture, generosity, and acceptance."(n8) Both groups felt powerless to exert influence in overt ways--women because of the removal of key economic activities from the household to the factory, and clergymen because of the legal disestablishment of the church--and therefore adopted the moral suasion of others as their sphere of influence, The fact that this position resulted in women remaining in a real sense powerless coincided with society's efforts to oppress them, according to Douglas, who states: "The cruelest aspect of the process of oppression is the logic by which it forces its objects to be oppressive in turn, to do the dirty work of their society in several senses."(n9) The Victorian definition of woman's rote as moral guide would account for such characters as Miss Watson and Aunt Sally, part of whose function is "civilizing" recalcitrant boys. In addition, the persistence of this figure in Twain's life and art is explained, Goad says, by the habit that Twain and some of his male characters had of not remaining long in a reformed state, "The business of reform became a game in which one made promises, then suffered periodic relapses, as a sort of recreation."(n10) When Goad discusses the female characters in Twain's work, however, she argues, as so many others have done, that they are merely fiat and stereotypical--that in fact they represent one of Twain's failures as a writer. "Twain," she says, "was simply unable to create a female character, of whatever age, of whatever time and place, who is other than wooden and unrealistic." She continues: He had evolved over the years a narrow, specialized role for women, and although none of the women he knew fit the ideal, Twain continued to hold it in the abstract. Livy refused to become the narrow, moralizing, reforming shrew that Twain seemed to want, and it is no doubt well that she did, for Twain could not have lived with such a woman. When he was creating a female character in a work of fiction, however, Twain was not troubled by either a refusal to fit a role or the problem of living with someone who did fit the role. He could make a character do exactly what he wanted her to do, and what he wanted was an idealization.(n11) In Huck Finn, however, the relationship between Huck and women is more complex and dynamic than a simple response to idealized figures. Changes in our perceptions of the realities of women's lives during the last one hundred years allow us to see that, although Twain may have used idealizations of women as the basis for many of his female characters, those characters play a vital if underrated role in the society of which they are a part; although they may be perceived by the male characters only as occasions for rebellion or opportunities for heroic action, they represent both positive and negative values of that society. For all Twain's mockery of middle-class "respectability," without the real human virtues represented primarily by the women in Huck Finn there would be little opportunity for Huck to grow. With few exceptions, the male characters in the novel are far from admirable by the standards of either conventional or actual morality. They tend to be degenerate, selfish, greedy, and vengeful and are just as stereotypical as are many of the female characters. Pap is an exaggerated version of the "natural man" on the frontier, an illiterate alcoholic such as inspired the temperance movement of the nineteenth century. Though a figure of broad comedy at times, he lives outside society's rules and rejects even its positive values, such as education. Huck's description of Pap in Chapter 5 underscores his subhuman status: There warn't no color in his face, where his face showed; it was white; not like another man's white, but a white to make a body sick, a white to make a body's flesh crawl--a tree-toad white, a fish-belly white. (P. [39]) The Duke and the Dauphin are far more human; they are--initially, at least--rogues rather than bestial villains despite their dishonest schemes. Twain clearly admires their rascality; they are vehicles of satire rather than subjects of horror. Also satirically treated are the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons, to whom a half-forgotten lawsuit and murder are sufficient to maintain a multi-generational feud. Though Huck describes Colonel Grangerford as a "gentleman all over" (p. [143]), we are meant to see the irony of the term "gentle," and Huck is eventually glad to leave his house. Similarly, Colonel Sherburn, for all his insight into the cowardice of a lynch mob, is the cold-blooded killer of the drunken Boggs. Not all the men in the novel are this recklessly violent, but none except Jim exhibits maturity and virtue. Uncle Silas Phelps is the stereotype of the bumbling, absentminded man married to a woman with a tart tongue; the couple is in the tradition of Rip and Dame Van Winkle and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Sam Lawson and his wife. Tom Sawyer, the classic "bad boy," turns from youthful prankster early in the novel to cunning--if not malicious--torturer during the "freeing" of Jim at the end. When Huck and Jim lie and steal, they do so to survive, and this behavior seems therefore excusable. Huck's numerous false identities and Jim's posing as a "sick Arab" are ways of avoiding detection and thus contribute to rather than detract from the moral thrust of the novel. The same is true of their habit of stealing, or "borrowing," as Huck prefers to call it: Pap always said it warn't no harm to borrow things, if you was meaning to pay them back, sometime; but the widow said it warn't anything but a soft name for stealing, and no decent body would do it. Jim said he reckoned the widow was partly right and Pap was partly right. (P. 95) Jim's morality thus mediates between the socially unacceptable element, represented by Pap, and the acceptable behavior represented by the widow. Because Jim and Huck steal food and other necessities, rather than the Wilks girls' inheritance, as do the Duke and the Dauphin, this habit, like lying, seems justified to the reader. Huck's most flagrant "sin" is helping a slave to escape, just as Jim's is running away from his owner; ironically, of course, these acts are in Twain's view their greatest moral triumphs, even though they are not sanctioned by the society Twain describes. Only Jim, among the male characters in the novel, exerts a positive influence on Huck. Jim's position outside white society allows him freedom from--if nothing else--both the moralizers and the rascals of that society, and he teaches Huck morality by example rather than by precept. In contrast to the male characters in the novel, the female characters largely conform to what society--and Mark Twain--expects of them, and this conformity is the source of their often flat, stereotypical presence. Whether stern moralizers, like Miss Watson, or innocent young girls, like Boggs's daughter, the women have been molded by social pressure into representations of several kinds of womanly virtue. As members of the gender responsible for upholding the moral and religious values of civilization, even when those values sanction slaveowning, the women make possible the lawlessness and violence of the men. If we accept the fact that Twain saw men as naturally "rough and crude," then women were either reformers one could tease by temporarily conforming to their rules, or innocent maidens who could restore one's faith in decency and goodness. Including the deceased Emmeline Grangerford, there are twelve women in Huck Finn aged fourteen or older. Of these, some are merely walk-on characters; for example, Emmeline's sisters, Charlotte and Sophia, and Mary Jane Wilks's sisters, Susan and Joanna. Sophia Grangerford, who Huck says is "gentle and sweet, like a dove" (p. 144), is one-half of the Romeo-and-Juliet couple whose elopement triggers a renewal of the feud between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons. Twain describes her as the stereotypical young woman in love, blushing and sighing and always "sweet." With Charlotte Grangerford and the younger Wilks sisters Huck has little to do, and Twain seems to use them all merely as parts of his portrait of Southern gentility. The most obvious "reformers" in Huck Finn are the Widow Douglas, Miss Watson, and Aunt Sally Phelps. The widow and Miss Watson are Huck's unofficial guardians at the beginning of the novel; it is their insistence on prayers and clothes that makes Huck feel "all cramped up" (p. 18), and it is from Aunt Sally that Huck runs at the end, with his famous concluding statement, "But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can't stand it. I been there before" (p. 366). Huck's comment that he's "been there before" points to the pattern of reform and backsliding that Goad discusses and suggests that, having escaped the clutches of the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson at the beginning of the novel, Huck has, at the end, endured another period of civilizing at the hands of Aunt Sally. The repetition of the pattern of reform and escape might lead one to believe that all these women are instances of the same stereotype, whereas in fact they represent three different popular images of women in the nineteenth century. There is no doubt that Twain had different models in mind when he created these three characters, and Huck's responses to them emphasize their differences. The key to the differences among these three female reformers is their marital status. No matter how devoutly some women of the time clung to a state of "single blessedness," marriage was the only widely sanctioned state for an adult woman. American humor in the nineteenth century is filled with satiric portraits of husband-hunting spinsters and widows, and both humorous and serious literature describes the older single woman as straight-laced and narrow-minded. The novelist Marietta Holley, for example, has her persona, Samantha Allen, describe her spinster neighbor, Betsey Bobbet: She is awful opposed to wimmin's havein' any right only the right to get married. She holds on to that right as tight as any single woman I ever see which makes it hard and wearin' on the single men round here.(n12) Widows had a somewhat better time of it than spinsters in the public eye, as was pointed out by another female humorist, Helen Rowland: "Even a dead husband gives a widow some advantage over an old maid."(n13) The spinster, presumed to be unwanted, is presumed also to have ossified. The image of the widow, at one time a wife and probably a mother, is somewhat softer; even as a "reformer," she has a kinder heart. The married woman, assumed to be in her proper element, provides the most contented image of the three and thus is likely to be the mildest reformer of alt. The three principal reformers in Huck Finn represent each of these three states. Walter Blair has suggested that the prototype for Miss Watson might have been a spinster schoolteacher who visited the Clemens family in Hannibal. Twain remembered this woman, Mary Ann Newcomb, as being a thin woman and a strict Calvinist.(n14) Miss Watson has both of these qualities. Huck describes her as "a tolerable slim old maid, with goggles on" (p. 19), and she threatens Huck with hellfire for his sins. It is not surprising that when Huck, Tom, and the other boys are forming their gang, and Huck has no family to be killed if he reveals the gang's secrets, he offers to let them kill Miss Watson. Miss Watson is a constant nagging presence who is particularly concerned with Huck's manners and his education, It is she, Huck says, who "took a set at me ... with a spelling-book" and "worked me middling hard for about an hour" (p, 19). She is eternally watchful of his demeanor: "Miss Watson would say, 'Dont put your feet up there, Huckleberry;' and 'dont scrunch up like that, Huckleberry--set up straight' "(p. 19). In the matter of religion she seems to Huck prissy and sterile, The heaven she describes to him is unappealing: "She said all a body would have to do there was to go around all day long with a harp and sing, forever and ever. So I didn't think much of it" (pp, 19-20). The subject of heaven is one of several on which Huck distinguishes between the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson: Sometimes the widow would take me one side and talk about Providence in a way to make a body's mouth water; but maybe next day Miss Watson would take hold and knock it all down again, I judged I could see that there was two Providences, and a poor chap would stand considerable show with the widow's Providence, but if Miss Watson's got him there warn't no help for him any more, (P. 30) Dedicated to duty rather than pleasure in a life that apparently has given her little of the latter, Miss Watson imagines an afterlife inspired by her Calvinist background, one ill-suited to the imagination of an adolescent boy, Although Huck resists Miss Watson's bleak vision, he recognizes that she merely wishes to make him a "good" person according to her definition of that concept, and Twain suggests that Huck understands that Miss Watson is filling a role determined for "old maids" in American society. Huck's offer to let the gang kill her if he betrays them may be read in two ways, On the one hand, she may be an expendable person in his world, but the gang members have specifically required that he have a "family" to kill, and, by naming Miss Watson, Huck suggests that he accepts her as such. More telling is the famous episode in Chapter 31 in which Huck wrestles with his conscience about helping a slave to escape and ultimately decides that he will go to hell. Jim is Miss Watson's property, and the morality he has absorbed--partly from her--tells him he is stealing from her, As his argument with himself gradually builds from practical to humanistic considerations, he fears sending Jim back to Miss Watson because "she'd be mad and disgusted at [Jim's] rascality and ungratefulness for leaving her" (p, 269). When his "conscience" overtakes him, however, he agonizes about "stealing a poor old woman's nigger that hadn't ever done me no harm" (p. 270). Despite the syntax of the sentence, it is clear that Huck means that Miss Watson has "done [him] no harm." Although the reader can easily see the harm done by the spurious morality of people like Miss Watson, Huck merely sees her as a "poor old woman," as indeed she is, Twain makes a clear distinction between Miss Watson and the Widow Douglas. The widow is a far more gentle reformer than her unmarried sister and often intercedes between Huck and Miss Watson to mitigate the latter's severity. Although Twain based the character of the widow on a popular nineteenth-century conception of widowhood, he omitted several of the least desirable characteristics of that image. The most negative presentation of the widow in American humor is Frances M. Whicher's Widow Bedott, a gossiping husband-hunter who was the pseudonymous author of sketches in Neal's Saturday Gazette in the 1840s. Despite her protestations to the contrary, she is always on the lookout for eligible men, whom she smothers with terrible poetry and home remedies.(n15) Twain's notes about his immediate prototype for the Widow Douglas, Mrs. Richard Holiday, suggest that he originally regarded her as a target of similar satire: Well off, Hospitable. Fond of having young people. Old, but anxious to marry. Always consulting fortune tellers; always managed to make them understand that she had been promised three husbands by the first fraud.(n16) Aside from the fondness for young people, the Widow Douglas is considerably modified from this model. Huck does not resent or pity the widow as he does Miss Watson. He is quick to excuse her behavior toward him, as he does early in the first chapter: "The widow she cried over me, and called me a poor lost lamb, and she called me a lot of other names, too, but she never meant no harm by it" (p. 18). He finds her attitude toward tobacco hypocritical, but is more amused than angry: Pretty soon I wanted to smoke, and asked the widow to let me. But she wouldn't. She said it was a mean practice and wasn't clean, and I must try not to do it any more.... And she took snuff, too; of course that was all right, because she done it herself. (Pp. 18-19) The widow's method of reforming is to request or explain rather than to scold or nag. Whereas Miss Watson's "pecking" makes Huck feel "tiresome and lonesome" (p. 20), he responds favorably to the widow's kind heart. When Huck stays out all night with Tom and the gang, the two women react quite differently: Well, I got a good going-over in the morning, from old Miss Watson, on account of my clothes; but the widow she didn't scold, but only cleaned off the grease and clay and looked so sorry that I thought I would behave a while if I could. (P, [29]) ~~~~~~~~ By Chapter 4, Huck has become accustomed to being civilized. When he slips into his old habits, such as playing hooky from school, he welcomes the ensuing punishment: "the hiding I got next day done me good and cheered me up" (p. [34]). He retains a fondness for his old life but is pleased by the widow's praise of his progress: I liked the old ways best, but I was getting so I liked the new ones, too, a little bit. The widow said I was coming along slow but sure, and doing very satisfactory. She said she warn't ashamed of me. (P. [34]) Huck's response to the Widow Douglas's kindness is important to understanding his later reaction to Jim's essential humanity. From the first pages of the novel, Twain presents Huck as a basically decent boy who is able to respond to loving discipline, and it seems likely that he altered the stereotype of the widow--removing her more laughable traits--in order to allow her to have a positive influence on Huck's moral development. Before Huck sets out on the raft with Jim, Miss Watson and the Widow Douglas are the only representatives of decency in his world. Despite her implicit approval of slavery, the widow has a coherent view of what Huck needs in order to be a "respectable" citizen--a view involving education, cleanliness, and Christian virtues. Were it not for the events that propel Huck into his trip down the river with Jim, he could grow up in the mold of the Horatio Alger hero. The other two major models for Huck's development at this point are Tom Sawyer and Pap; Tom, as the eternal child, would have Huck remain irresponsible and unrealistic, and Pap, in his complete rejection of society's rules and forms, would have him descend into barbarism. It is, after all, from Pap and not from the Widow Douglas that Huck flees in Chapter 7. The most important lesson that Huck learns from the widow is that it is possible--even desirable--to place another human being's welfare before one's own. Not only has the widow taken the unpromising Huck into her home; she has also demonstrated that she cares about him, that his escapades make her not so much angry as sad. When Huck responds favorably to the widow's efforts to alter his behavior and values, he does so because he realizes his actions have an effect on others. It is this same principle that motivates Huck's final decision to help Jim escape regardless of the consequences for himself. As he is struggling with his conscience, he recalls first the good times he and Jim have had, then the favors Jim has done for him, and finally "the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he's got now" (p. 271). In his realization of his responsibility for another human being, Huck builds upon the example the widow has set for him; in fact, he surpasses the widow in moral integrity by recognizing a black man as a fellow human being. Yet Huck's experiences with the third "reforming woman," Aunt Sally Phelps, show the limits of his maturation. The effectiveness of the final chapters of Huck Finn has been debated for decades. Those critics who find Huck's acquiescence to Tom's romantic game-playing disturbing in light of his previous maturation on the river probably have the stronger argument, and this objection is strengthened by the presence of Aunt Sally. If Huck ever needs a reformer, it is during the torture of Jim in these final chapters, but Aunt Sally, because of the particular stereotype upon which she is based, is an ineffectual reformer, though reforming is clearly her function. Aunt Sally and Uncle Silas are a familiar pair in American humor: the harmless nag and the befuddled husband. Aunt Sally is a warm, gregarious woman who whirls around the still center of Uncle Silas. Hers is far from the strict, staid demeanor of Miss Watson; though Uncle Silas is a part-time preacher, Aunt Sally is untouched by the Calvinist gloom that characterizes Miss Watson's outlook. Apparently happily married to the good-hearted Silas, and the mother of several children, she has a far sunnier disposition than the Widow Douglas and is more likely to be understanding of youthful pranks. When Tom Sawyer kisses her while she still thinks he is the stranger William Thompson, she calls him an "owdacious puppy" and a "born fool," but once she thinks he is Sid Sawyer, she enjoys the joke: "I don't mind the terms--I'd be willing to stand a thousand such jokes to have you here" (p. 289). But when Huck and Tom--disguised as Tom and Sid--embark on the activities that Tom feels appropriate to freeing a prisoner and begin stealing sheets and spoons and filling the Phelps house with rats and snakes, Aunt Sally shows her temper. Twain's gift for comic exaggeration is nowhere more apparent than in some of these slapstick scenes, and the descriptions of Aunt Sally are strikingly similar to those of Livy, his own "reforming woman," that he included in letters to friends and relatives early in their marriage. In February 1870 he wrote: But there is no romance in this existence for Livy. She embodies the Practical, the Hard, the Practical, the Unsentimental. She is lord of all she surveys. She goes around with her bunch of housekeeper's keys (which she don't know how to unlock anything with them because they are mixed,) & is overbearing & perfectly happy, when things don't go right she breaks the furniture & knocks everything endways. You ought to see her charge around. When I hear her war whoop I know it is time to climb out on the roof.(n17) Just as the dignified Livy becomes a comic figure in such descriptions, so Aunt Sally becomes comic and nonthreatening even as she attempts to discipline Huck and Tom. To cover their theft of a spoon, the two boys confuse Aunt Sally as she attempts to count: Well, she was in a tearing way--just a trembling all over, she was so mad. But she counted and counted, till she got that addled she'd start to count-in the basket for a spoon, sometimes; and so, three times they come out right, and three times they come out wrong. Then she grabbed up the basket and slammed it across the house and knocked the cat galley-west; and she said cle'r out and let her have some peace, and if we come bothering around her again betwixt that and dinner, she'd skin us. (Pp. 320-21) Most of the time Aunt Sally's threats are idle, but even when she punishes the boys it has little effect. When the snakes they have collected to put in Jim's cabin get loose in the house, Aunt Sally takes action: We got a licking every time one of our snakes come in her way; and she allowed these lickings warn't nothing to what she would do if we ever loaded up the place again with them. I didn't mind the lickings, because they didn't amount to nothing; but I minded the trouble we had, to lay in another lot. (P. 334) Huck's response to Aunt Sally's discipline is to ignore it--it "didn't amount to nothing"--whereas his reaction to the Widow Douglas's disappointment in his backsliding early in the novel had been to try to "behave a while" if he could. The widow touched Huck's humanity; Aunt Sally merely touches his backside with a hickory switch. It is difficult, therefore, to take seriously Huck's fear of being "sivilized" by Aunt Sally at the end of the novel. Not a true "reformer," she is a harmless comic figure similar to the Livy of Clemens's letters. Given Twain's insistence on the conflict between Huck's innocence and the corruption of civilization, it is important that Huck thinks he can escape at the end and that the reader knows he cannot--knows, that is, that the "Territory" is simply another civilization. But it seems odd to posit Aunt Sally as a major representative of civilization--instead of, say, Miss Watson or the Widow Douglas--unless we understand that Twain's view of women as the reformers of young men was a product of his own youthful fantasy, formed in part by the Victorian culture in which he lived. In attempting to claim legitimate--if ultimately ineffectual--authority and self-esteem in a society that had made them powerless, Victorian women willingly acceded to a "cult of motherhood," which, as Ann Douglas points out, "was nearly as sacred in mid-nineteenth-century America as the belief in some version of democracy." Douglas quotes Lydia Sigourney, who, writing to young mothers in 1838, urged them to realize their potential influence on their children: "How entire and perfect is this dominion over the unformed character of your infant .... Now you have over a new-born immortal almost that degree of power which the mind exercises over the body."(n18) All three of the women who attempt to make Huck conform to society's rules are derived from traditional stereotypes of women who may superficially be seen as mother figures from the same societal mold; but Huck's more complex and ambivalent relationships with them point up the different social realities they represent and his own boyish immaturity at the end of the novel. The fact that Huck can ignore Aunt Sally's female authority testifies to both his own lack of significant maturity and Mark Twain's awareness of the final ineffectuality of women in his society. What growth Huck does achieve comes largely from his perception of qualities in others that he wishes to assume himself. With the exception of Jim, all of Huck's important models of decent human behavior are female. Though the "goodness" of both the reforming older women and the young girls in the novel is exaggerated for comic or satiric effect, several of the women display qualities that Huck begins to adopt as his character develops before the final chapters. In addition to the Widow Douglas, whose kindness and sincerity are apparent to Huck even as he chafes at the restrictions of his life with her, Mrs. Judith Loftus and Mary Jane Wilks are important influences on his self-definition. Both characters are more than mere stereotypes, and both demonstrate intelligence and courage that Huck does not find in most of the men he knows. Mrs. Loftus, whom Huck encounters just before he and Jim begin their trip on the raft, is the shrewd, garrulous woman who sees through Huck's disguise as a girl. She shares with common stereotypes of women a love of gossip, but it is her common sense and kindness to which Huck responds. In terms of her age, Mrs. Loftus belongs to the category of "reforming" women; Huck thinks she is "about forty year old" (p. 83). But her advice at this point in the novel (unlike the moralizing of Miss Watson and the Widow Douglas) is the practical sort that Huck needs for survival, and Huck perceives her as strong and intelligent. His clumsy efforts to thread a needle and catch a lump of lead in his lap call forth Mrs. Loftus's scorn, but Twain also emphasizes her kindly attitude toward the boy she assumes to be a runaway apprentice: I ain't going to hurt you, and I ain't going to tell on you, nuther. You just tell me your secret, and trust me. I'll keep it; and what's more, I'll help you.... Bless you, child, I wouldn't tell on you. (P. 89) Huck cautiously responds with another lie about his identity, but he is clearly impressed with Mrs. Loftus's perspicacity. When he returns to the raft and reports on his conversation with Judith Loftus, Jim says she is a "smart one" (p. 94). More importantly, Mrs. Loftus confirms Huck in his maleness early in the novel. Not only does she quickly see through Huck's female disguise; she also outlines for him the male behavior that has betrayed him: Bless you, child, when you set out to thread a needle, don't hold the thread still and fetch the needle up to it; hold the needle still and poke the thread at it--that's the way a woman most always does; but a man always does 'tother way. And when you throw at a rat or anything, hitch yourself up a tip-toe, and fetch your hand up over your head as awkward as you can, and miss your rat about six or seven foot.... And mind you, when a girl tries to catch anything in her lap, she throws her knees apart; she don't clap them together, the way you did when you catched the lump of lead. (Pp. 90-91) Instead of following Mrs. Loftus's advice, Huck never again pretends to be a girl. He rejects his female disguise after he leaves the Loftus house by taking off his sunbonnet, "for I didn't want no blinders on" (p. 91). A few paragraphs later, at the end of Chapter II, he joins his fortunes to those of Jim when he says, "There ain't a minute to lose. They're after us!" (p. 92). The male identification forecasts the American male adventure, at the end of which Huck will assume Tom Sawyer's identity and his behavior. Later in the novel, in anticipation of Huck's final capitulation to Tom's boyish romanticism, comes Huck's rescue of the "damsel in distress," Mary Jane Wilks. Huck's response to Mary Jane is not merely that of the gallant knight to the damsel, however; he is at this point (Chaps. 24-30) still on his way to the real moral stature he will achieve in Chapter 31, and Mary Jane is more complex than the traditional damsel, Twain makes her simultaneously weak and strong, so that she in some ways embodies the paradox that Ann Douglas points to in Victorian women who "lived out a display of competence while they talked and wrote of the beauties of incompetence."(n19) Though Mary Jane in part matches the sentimental stereotype of the pure, innocent young woman, Huck's view of her includes admiration as well as protectiveness. She combines the piety of the older reforming woman with the absolute innocence of the ideal young girl, but it is finally her intelligence and courage that Huck finds most appealing, Twain was apparently fascinated with young girls, and he idealized them in both his life and his art. His deep attachment to his daughter Susy and his intense interest in Joan of Arc are only two examples among many of this preoccupation, and portraits of young female characters in his fiction are often suffused with reverence for their beauty and spotless virtue. Albert E. Stone, Jr., explores Twain's devotion to "young maidens, hovering on the edge of adult experience," and quotes from a fragment that Twain wrote in 1898, describing a recurrent dream of adolescent love: She was always fifteen, and looked it and acted it; and I was always seventeen, and never felt a day older. To me she is a real person not a fiction, and her sweet and innocent society has been one of the prettiest and pleasantest experiences of my life.(n20) Most of the young girls in Huck Finn are versions of this romantic ideal, including such minor figures as Boggs's daughter, glimpsed grieving over her father's body: "She was about sixteen, and very sweet and gentle-looking, but awful pale and scared" (p. 187). Here an object of pity, the young girl can also be an object of satire, as in the well-known portrait of Emmeline Grangerford. Apparently modeled on Julia A. Moore, a sentimental poet known as the "Sweet Singer of Michigan,"(n21) Emmeline represents the common stereotype of the morbid female poet, and Twain uses her to satirize sentimental art and the execrable taste of the Grangerford family. However, it is precisely for her lack of sentimentality that Huck admires Mary Jane Wilks. At nineteen, she is the oldest of the three Wilks sisters, undoubtedly older than Huck, The only drawback to her beauty is her red hair, but Huck forgives that: "Mary Jane was red-headed, but that don't make no difference, she was most awful beautiful, and her face and her eyes was all tit up like glory" (p. [211]). Mary Jane is indeed innocent and trusting. She gives the inheritance money to the Duke and the Dauphin to prove her faith in them and defends Huck when her younger sister accuses him--accurately--of lying: "It don't make no difference what he said--that ain't the thing. The thing is for you to treat him kind, and not be saying things to make him remember he ain't in his own country and amongst his own folks." I says to myself, this is a girl that I'm letting that old reptile rob her of her money! (P. 225) Mary Jane's goodness bothers Huck's conscience sufficiently that he decides to foil the Duke and Dauphin's scheme by recovering and hiding the money, but he does not tell her what he has done until he realizes that she is upset about the slave family being broken up. In his effort to comfort her, Huck inadvertently tells her the truth, and in a passage that closely prefigures his later decision to help Jim escape, he wrestles with the necessity for truth, still in Mary Jane's presence: she set there, very impatient and excited, and handsome, but looking kind of happy and eased-up, like a person that's had a tooth pulled out. So I went to studying it out. I says to myself, I reckon a body that ups and tells the truth when he is in a tight place, is taking considerable many resks, ... and yet here's a case where I'm blest if it don't look to me like the truth is better, and actuly safer, than a lie. (P. 240) The passage describing Huck's parting with Mary Jane in Chapter 28 marks the penultimate step in the moral development that culminates in his decision to risk his soul to help Jim. He is impressed by her willingness to go along with his plan to save the girls' inheritance--a plan that, though involving lies and deceptions, is a model of decency compared with Tom's plan to free Jim--and particularly by her offer to pray for him. Contrasting his sinful nature to her goodness, he thinks: Pray for me! I reckoned if she knowed me she'd take a job that was more nearer her size. But I bet she done it, just the same--she was just that kind. She had the grit to pray for Judas if she took the notion--there warn't no backdown her, I judge. (P. 245) By putting himself in a category with Judas and emphasizing Mary Jane's virtues, Huck is playing a game with his reformer: though drawn to the innocence and purity she represents, he simultaneously insists on his unregenerate nature. Mary Jane represents the female principle of virtue, always coupled with beauty. "And when it comes to beauty," Huck says, "and goodness too--she lays over them all" (p. 245). Huck, on the other hand, is the sinful male, unworthy of but longing for the redeeming power of the woman. However, Huck is not merely playing a game at this point. His praise of Mary Jane Wilks is couched in terms that show he has an adolescent crush on her. She has, he says, "more sand in her than any girl I ever see," and though she disappears from his life at this point, Huck's memory of her testifies to her effect on his values: "I reckon I've thought of her a many and a many a million times, and of her saying she would pray for me; and if ever rd a thought it would do any good for me to pray for her, blamed if I wouldn't a done it or bust" (p. 245). Twain combines here the terms of a boy's admiration--"grit" and "sand"--and the desire to help another person that marks the maturing human being. Given Huck's uncomfortable relationship with religion, his willingness to pray for Mary Jane Wilks is a true gift of love. Huck's feelings for Mary Jane and Twain's depiction of her strength and determination raise her above the level of stereotype and allow her, like other women in the novel, to be a significant influence on Huck's developing conscience. His offer to pray for her if it "would do any good" suggests that the idea of self-sacrifice is becoming natural to him and prepares for his ultimate "sacrifice" of his own soul to help Jim. A close look at the part women play in Huck Finn's life thus makes clearer the extent of his moral regression at the end of the novel. In his relationships with his principal female mentors--the Widow Douglas, Judith Loftus, and Mary Jane Wilks--he has achieved an appreciation of those virtues that begin to separate him from the hypocrisy and violence of the society in which he lives. But his contact with these women has also confirmed that he is in fact male and must remove himself from what he perceives as a "female" world of conformity to certain standards of behavior. With the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson he plays the part of the unruly boy; with Judith Loftus he tries to be a girl and fails; and with Mary Jane Wilks he assumes the role of the male protector of female innocence. Finally, with Jim, he arrives at a mature friendship with another man, one for whom he is prepared to risk eternal damnation. But his acquiescence to the adolescent behavior of Tom Sawyer in the final chapters demonstrates just how tenuous and fragile his maturity has been, and his desire to "light out for the Territory" is youthful escapism rather than a mature rejection of a corrupt society. Twain's use of nineteenth-century stereotypes of women as the basis of his female characters in Huck Finn allows the reader to understand some of the ways a male-dominated culture perceived woman's place and function. Both the men and the women in the novel illustrate the values of a society that has little regard for human dignity, but the female characters also embody virtues that could redeem that society if the women were empowered to do so. The male characters, even the rascals and thieves, are allowed the freedom to accept or reject these values, whereas the women, as members of a subservient group, are obliged to preserve and transmit them. Whether as innocent young girls or as middle-aged reforming women, the female characters are for the most part creations of a male imagination that requires them to inspire men with their goodness or "save" them from their undesirable tendencies. Huck is both inspired and "saved" or "sivilized" in the course of the novel, but finally he exercises the male prerogative of rejection--not of the values of his society, but of the "female" virtues he has struggled so hard to attain. By accepting the limited roles for women that his culture promoted, Twain effectively limits the extent to which Huck Finn can be a moral force in his society. Though they are frequently inspirational or influential, the women in Huck Finn, viewed from the male perspective of the novel, are finally powerless--as Aunt Sally Phelps demonstrates--to change the adolescent dreams of the American male. From One Hundred Years of Huckleberry Finn: The Boy, His Book, and American Culture, edited by Robert Sattelmeyer and J. Donald Crowley (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985), pp. 171-85. NANCY WALKER is Chair of the Department of Languages and Literature at Stephens College. She is author of A Very Serious Thing: Women's Humor and American Culture (1988). HAROLD BLOOM is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University and Professor of English at the New York University Graduate School. He is a 1985 MacArthur Foundation Award recipient, served as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University (1987-88), and is the author of eighteen books, the most recent being Poetics of Influence: New and Selected Criticism (1988). Currently he is editing the Chelsea House series Modern Critical Views and Modern Critical Interpretations, and other Chelsea House series in literary criticism. Copyright of this work is the property of Infobase Publishing and its content may not be copied without the copyright holder's express written permission except for the print or download capabilities of the retrieval software used for access. This content is intended solely for the use of the individual user. Accession Number: 16379560