[In this excerpt, Skandera-Trombley discusses the effects of women and women's fiction on the composition of Huckleberry Finn.]

Mary Ann Cord played a crucial role in the shaping of Clemens's fiction. Born enslaved in Virginia, Cord had been sold twice and had all her children taken from her before she escaped to the North (Jerome and Wisbey 8). Charles Langdon's daughter, Ida Langdon, in an address delivered to the Elmira College Convocation in 1960, remembered Cord as a “dogmatic Methodist” (Jerome and Wisbey 62). Cord was very likely a member of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the first African-American church founded in Elmira in 1841 (Sorin 15). And indeed Cord's denomination is shared by Roxana in Pudd'nhead Wilson; it is Roxana's recent conversion to Methodism that saves her from being sold down the river by her master.

While summering at Quarry Farm, Clemens composed a short story written partly in black dialect, which was probably influenced by Cord. As Sherwood Cummings notes, this story later gave rise to the main plot and theme of the first section of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This short story, entitled “A True Story Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It,” related the travails of “Rachel” Cord, and it provided Clemens with an entrée into the November 1874 issue of the Atlantic. William Dean Howells praised the story: “I think it extremely good and touching with the best and reallest kind of black talk in it” (Mark Twain-Howells Letters 24).

The crossover from “A True Story” and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is readily apparent: in “A True Story,” Rachel scolds a young man (who, unbeknownest to her, is her long-lost son) and says, “I wa'nt bawn in de mash to be fool' by trash!” (The Unabridged Mark Twain 408); in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Jim utters a similar line when he rebukes Huckleberry for playing a cruel trick on him: “Dat truck dah is trash; en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren's en makes 'em ashamed” (72)¹. “A True Story Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It” is of particular importance not only because it marked the beginning of Clemens's contributions to the Atlantic, but also because this oral history of an African-American woman's road to freedom may have served as a prototype for one of Clemens's greatest works.

Quarry Farm's inhabitants varied in terms of temperament, education, experience, culture, race, and age; this meant that in order for Clemens to maintain his disparate audience's attention, he had to produce fiction that was multi-generational, multicultural, and multiracial. Clemens also needed to provide characters and themes that would appeal particularly to this disparate female audience. Viewed within the context of Clemens's family, the absence of overtly masculine themes in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn should not come as a complete surprise. Leland Krauth isolates the various elements that traditionally comprise Southwestern humor and remarks that Huckleberry Finn is striking for what it is not:

[Adventures of Huckleberry Finn] ignores, first of all, those subjects, like courtings, frolics, dances, weddings, and honeymoons, that naturally involve adult sexuality. And secondly, it omits entirely or else skims over those activities, like hunting, fighting, gambling, gaming, horse racing, heavy drinking, and military maneuvering, that are the traditional pastimes of manly backwoods living. (Whenever such activities do appear briefly they are targets of ridicule.) In short, Twain purges from the Southwestern tradition its exuberant celebration of rough-and-tumble masculinity.

(374)

While Adventures of Huckleberry Finn may lack traditional Southwestern masculine themes, what it is striking for is its similarity to the themes and plot structures that comprised female-authored fiction of the mid-nineteenth century. Nina Baym comments in Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870 that many of the novels written by prominent women writers (such as Louisa May Alcott, Susan Warner, E.D.E.N. Southworth, Fanny Fern, Mary Jane Holmes) told with some modification a single story: “It is the story of a young girl who is deprived of the supports she had rightly or wrongly depended on to sustain her throughout life and is faced with the necessity of winning her own way in the world” (11). Baym claims that although men could have also authored such stories, “only women did so” (13). That men did not, Baym views as no mere coincidence: “[Male authors] assumed an audience of men as a matter of course, and reacted with distress and dismay as they discovered that to make a living by writing they would have to please female readers” (13).

Baym may be a bit too sweeping in her indictment against male authors. Baym argues that once male writers realized that in order to be published they would have to start writing for a female audience, one of the strategies they used to attract readers was “insulting or shocking them. Mark Twain is the most obvious example” (13-14). But, arguably, Clemens had always written to please a female audience, beginning with his mother and continuing with Mary Fairbanks in the late 1860s and most successfully with Olivia and his three daughters during the 1870s and 1880s.

Glenn Hendler's article, “The Limits of Sympathy: Louisa May Alcott and the Sentimental Novel,” asserts that sentimental narratives played an essential role in perpetuating the Victorian belief in the sexes' “separate spheres,” and that the “exigencies of sentimental fiction and the ideological imperatives of domesticity exist in tension with one another” (685). That Clemens utilized what was an exclusively female format to write his realistic novel may well suggest that Clemens was challenging the doctrine of the spheres and encouraging an epistemological shift. The plot of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn appears to fit neatly within Hendler's paradigm of the relationship between sentimental fiction and the “ideological imperatives of domesticity”:

The sentimental narrative has a surprising tendency to disarticulate domestic spaces. Rather than insistently fixing heroines in their families, many sentimental plots begin with young girls leaving their homes, either by being orphaned or by their own choice. And instead of concluding … by restoring their heroines to normatively defined families—in which case the initial departure from the family could be read as ultimately supportive of domestic values—the novels often place their heroines in situations that are notable for their deviations from that norm. While the new stasis that resolves the novels' narrative tensions is still described, at least metaphorically, as a “family,” it always represents a transformation—sometimes a radical one—of the group initially designated by the term. Sentimental plots repeatedly transgress both the internal and the external limits of the family structure which domestic ideology held up as its overt ideal.

(685-86)

Louisa May Alcott's Work: A Story of Experience (1873) begins with the orphaned heroine leaving her home in search of greater autonomy.² The orphan was a staple of Clemens's novels, and a parallel can be drawn between Alcott's heroine and Huckleberry Finn. Huck, too, leaves home in search of an autonomous self, although at the time of his departure he is not yet aware of this. After Pap kidnaps Huck, Huck thinks he cannot return because in doing so he, and possibly the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson, would suffer Pap's wrath. Pap falls within the group of characters Baym identifies as “abusers of power” in sentimental women's novels: “Abusers … run a gamut from fathers and mothers to step-parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, guardians, and matrons of orphanages. They are the administrators or owners of the space within which the child is legally constrained” (Woman's Fiction 37).

What Pap has is legal control over Huck, and despite Judge Thatcher's and the Widow Douglas's protests to the contrary, he will retain that right. Baym comments that men in sentimental fiction “are less important to the heroine's emotional life than women. Chiefly, they are the controllers and dispensers of money” (39). Interestingly, Clemens has Pap attempt to claim Huck's money, yet Huck manages to outsmart his father. Pap's chief role in the novel is to remove Huck from his “home” (a home that deviates from the Victorian norm, as both heads of the family are female), and he is able to do so because, however unfit, he is recognized as Huck's legal guardian. Once Huck has been removed from the Widow's house and Huck has removed himself from Pap's sorry dwelling, Pap's usefulness as a character has come to an end and he is killed off.

In Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1850) (one of the best-selling books of the nineteenth century, with sales surpassing one-hundred thousand copies), the orphan Ellen Montgomery rejects blood relatives and instead elects to form her family ties with her neighbors, the Humphreys. Glenn Hendler notes that throughout the genre of the sentimental novel, “the voluntary affinities of sympathy prove stronger than the ties of kinship” (687). On the raft, Huck forges his family with Jim. When Jim exclaims: “‘good lan'! is dat you, honey? Doan' make no noise,’” Huck comments, “It was Jim's voice—nothing ever sounded so good before” (Adventures 95). Huck and Jim form a bond that proves stronger than any other relationship in the novel, including Huck's friendship with Tom.

By the end of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huckleberry has no viable option of returning to society in the manner of the sentimental heroines. He cannot return to the Widow Douglas because he has already learned how powerless she is within the constraints of patriarchal society. He cannot remain at Aunt Sally's farm because, “Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me” (229). After concluding such a long journey, Huck cannot allow this to happen because, however benign, Aunt Sally is representative of the slaveholding South he has rejected. As for allying himself with any of the male characters in the novel, Huck has witnessed Judge Thatcher's impotence in protecting him; the majority of the males in the Shepherdson and Grangeford families are murderous idiots; the Duke and the Dauphin are revealed to be frauds; and by the end of the novel, Huck painfully recognizes Tom's continued alliance to the South when Tom helps to free Jim only because Jim already has been freed. The only possibility that Huck has to rejoin a family structure, which Clemens does not offer the reader in the text, is if he and Jim were to remain together and find and rejoin Jim's biological family—in the antebellum South, an impossibility.

Huck's plight resembles that of the sentimental heroines, but his choices are even more limited than theirs. Clemens's solution to the problem (of the self in opposition to society) may well have been having Huck choose as the subject for his story what he cannot rejoin in the usual sense—society. In his telling, therefore, Huck does effect a kind of return.

Leland Krauth's discussion is particularly cogent in view of Clemens's immediate female audience. According to Krauth, what Clemens does with the character of Huck is unprecedented within the genre of Southwestern humor: Clemens departs from the archetype of the “Man of Feeling” to make Huck “a comic Man of Feeling. Huck never feels good about his goodness; his altruistic emotions—with the possible exception of his aid to Mary Jane—never give him egoistic satisfaction” (381). Krauth asserts that this altruism is one of the reasons Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is still so intriguing today, because the portrayal of the “Man of Feeling” still challenges conventional stereotypes of manhood. Krauth also points out, quite rightly, that while Huck is a lost boy afraid in a man's world, he is never frightened by the world of women. Clearly both Huck's and Clemens's angst was reduced when they were in the company of females. During Huck's trip down the river, he evolves into the student he was never allowed to become in St. Petersburg, and he learns about natural humanity from Jim and about the falsity of gender roles from Judith Loftus. These lessons result in a radically changed conception of the traditional Southwestern character.

Krauth ends his article with this intriguing statement: “[Huck's] kind of manliness seems to elude our language for it, even today” (384). This elusiveness may be attributed to Clemens's female collaborators who helped create Huck's “sense of manliness” combined with “delicate sensitivity,” and to the influence of contemporary women's sentimental novels. Clemens was pragmatic enough to incorporate his audience's experience as females and the themes of female-authored sentimental fiction into his writing. This female audience, indeed, also helped him gain financial success. Clemens met with spectacular failure in most of his earlier business dealings; however, with the help of his “charmed circle,” he realized that if he incorporated themes and characters that a female audience would find appealing, his market might increase. It is important to note, however, that while Clemens's reliance on women was unquestionably productive for Clemens, it was also a positive experience for his wife and daughters who, during the Hartford and Quarry Farm years, were able to take part in his composing process and reap the benefits of his success. At this time, Clemens was at his creative apex, and his family was integral in bringing about this achievement. Clemens realized the impact his family had upon his writing and they became a willing part of his composing process.³

Notes

1. Parenthetical page references to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. Sculley Bradley (New York: W. W. Norton), 1977.

2. In Gribben's Mark Twain's Library: A Reconstruction, two works by Alcott are listed as belonging to Clemens: Little Women (1869) and Little Men (1871) (14). Olivia quoted Fanny Fern in her commonplace book (MTP).

3. After the onset of financial difficulties in 1891 and the subsequent deaths of Susy and Olivia, Clemens adversely affected the lives of the remaining women in his life. He also became very aware that he could write extended narratives only under certain circumstances: “one can't write a book unless he can banish perplexities and put his whole mind on it” (Gerber 45). Clemens's awareness, though, did not lessen his bitterness when he realized that his days of sustained writing were finished.