Anxiety of Alienation in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

My bones hold a stillness, the far Fields melt my heart.

They threaten To let me through to a heaven Starless and fatherless, a dark water.

Sylvia Plath, Sheep in Fog (1963)

I. Introduction When Huckleberry Finn sets out for the Silas Phelps plantation to rescue the runaway slave Jim from captivity, his steps are propelled forward by a noble but thorny verdict of selfcondemnationAll right, then, Ill go to hell (Twain 317)!1that throws the motives behind the potentially exhilarating enterprise of freeing Jim under the shadow of closer scrutiny. Although Huck willingly sacrifices himself for the sake of a dear friend, his commentary on the act itself bears the same stamp of racial bias prevalent in his prior dialogue, in which he frequently discussed the white mans responsibility to report fugitive slaves. Even Hucks blatantly defiant decision to forsake heaven bursts forth only after an impassioned bout with the pangs of conscience that order him to put aside his wicked and

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (New York: Modern Library: 1993). Subsequent in-text citations refer to this edition of the novel and will therefore be identified by page number alone.

low-down and ornery (315) ways and return Jim to his owner Miss Watson. Never once in the novel does Huck question the institution of slavery as earnestly as he adheres to its codes of citizenly duty. Nevertheless, Twain makes it fairly evident that Hucks ultimate loyalties lie with Jim. No matter how rampant his moral misgivings regarding so-called slave thievery may be, Huck feels much more strongly about Jims wants and needs than he does of Miss Watsons property rights or his own wellbeing. He is prepared to sacrifice his social esteem in the eyes of his intellectual idol Tom Sawyer if doing so would ensure Jims safety. Such candid wholesomeness on Hucks part is thrown into sharper relief when Tom deliberately conceals Jims newfound freedman status for the sake of swashbuckling adventure, thereby setting off a series of reckless events with little consideration of Jims mental and physical state. To brush aside the sincerity of Hucks attachment to Jim entails a leap in logic comparable to that supporting any wild conjecture of Hucks role as an abolitionist. The seemingly double-edged quality of Hucks consciousness warrants a closer study of Huckleberry Finn as an individual. In developing his young protagonist, Mark Twain interspersed throughout his novel several striking monologuesall closely tied to natural settings and the motifs of death and lonelinessthat would tap at the most personal recesses of Hucks psyche. The following paper uses several of these monologues as parameters within which to explore anxiety of alienation as the root and catalyst of both the negative and positive facets of Hucks attitude toward abetting Jims escape and securing his freedom, and in doing so arrive at an explanation of the significance of Hucks moral conscience. II. The Mournful Spectator From the very beginning of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, it is made apparent that the confines of civilization do not agree with Huck. Huck has no desire to be clean, wear good clothes, eat quality food, and live what is generally considered a respectable life. On the

contrary, the grimy, reduced circumstances of his former abode hold much more charm for him than any house. The Widow Douglas, she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldnt stand it no longer, I lit out. I got into my old rags, and my sugarhogshead again, and was free and satisfied. But Tom Sawyer, he hunted me up and said he was going to start a band of robbers, and I might join if I would go back to the widow and be respectable. So I went back. (4) Interestingly enough, while Huck boyishly maintains that the Widow Douglas and her sister Miss Watson are the most tedious people he has ever met, he returns to the widows house without much regret when Tom promises to accept Huck as a member of Tom Sawyers robber gang in exchange for Hucks tolerance of an upstanding lifestyle. Later on, Huck finds the robber gang wearisome as well and withdraws from its ranks, but he continues to live with the widow, go to school, and learn about the Bible until his abusive father kidnaps him and takes him to a hidden log hut on the Illinois shore. This would suggest that, despite his declaration that solitary life back at the sugar-hogshead was a happy one, Huck is a character motivated by the need for social contact other than his fathers vicious beatings. However, Huck expresses a feeling of isolation even when participating in personal, interactions on a daily basis. These sensations grow to such an extent that Huckleberry, when left alone to watch the stars and listen to the owls at night, is seized by macabre longings. Miss Watson she kept pecking at me, and it got tiresome and lonesome. () I set down in a chair by the window and tried to think of something cheerful, but it warnt no use. I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead () I got so down-hearted and scared, I did wish I had some company. (6-7)

At this point, Huckleberry is surrounded by more people than he has ever been before. Were his social inclinations simply geared at human connection, there would be no satisfactory explanation for why the people of St. Petersburg left him more prone to loneliness than when he was living independently. On the other hand, the interpretation of Hucks loneliness as the vacancy of a genuinely accepting and loving figure in his life makes it not only possible but also inevitable for his St. Petersburg experience to be delineated in such gloomy terms. Shunted back and forth by a brutal parent and defined by society as an uneducated wildling, Huck Finn in St. Petersburg is an outcast standing amidst a crowd. The adults and even the children around himall white, according to the social standards of America in the 1840sswim within the boundaries of conventions, expectations, and beliefs that Huck, with his survival smarts, deeply pragmatic temperament, and good-natured heart, does not and cannot understand. Those who might be able to protect him send him back to the father he fears; those who claim to care for him try to scrub off his free spirit and teach him pray for things he cannot touch or appreciate in the present; those who would be his friends constantly make him aware of his supposed intellectual inadequacy. To no one in town is it sufficient that Huck Finn is Huck Finn. Accordingly, Huckleberry shrivels into himself, frightened both by the religious and moral threats imposed upon his impressionable mind and by the prospect of being cast out forever should he fail to retain some sort of bond with social standards. Marginalized but struggling to hook his feet on solid soil, Huck cuts a desperately somber figure. III. Natures Child Huckleberrys downcast musings on his environment undergo a vast change in tonality when he commences his early adventures with Jim after their meeting on Jacksons Island. Huck witnesses a storm while he and Jim camp in the caverna wild maelstrom of

darkness, wind, lightning, and thunder that, by rational standards, seems a much more threatening and estranging environment than any of the other settings in which Huck articulated his earlier misery. Even so, Hucks response is almost wholly positive. Jim, this is nice (). I wouldnt want to be nowhere else but here (76). However temporal and insecure it may be, Huck has found his haven, a place in which he is allowed to be himself and rely on the affectionate support of another when necessary. Jim gives to Huck what civilized society would notthe reassurance of belonging. As Paul Schacht puts it, with Jim, Huck is liberated from social judgment and thus becomes positively connected with the rest of his world: What Jim gives Huck is shelter from that something in Nature which speaks mournfully of, even urges Huck towards, deaththat isolating quality of the landscape which is to Huck () the primary referent of the word lonesomeness. () Jims company () transform[s] Hucks experience of Nature (). In the cave and on the river, what is terrifying in Nature becomes beautiful because it has ceased to be really dangerous; or, to put it more accurately, freedom from immediate danger allows Huck to see a beauty in natural malevolence that has been there all along. (197-198) Regrettably, Jims status as an illegal fugitive threatens Hucks newfound peace in terms of law and conscience. The Huck who submitted to the sermonizing of Miss Watson is pitted against the Huck who has seen in Jim a humanity he grasps much more readily than Miss Watsons Christian notions, and the latter Huck comes into greater authority because Jim is the most actual fixture in Hucks life. Somewhat like Heathcliff is left utterly disoriented without Catherine, his only connection to society, Huck flounders without Jim and his supporting arm. Thus, when Jim is taken away from Huck by the schemes of the fraudulent king and duke, Huck retreats back into his morbidity. Even in the most serene

landscapes, there is no comfort for him. When I got there it was all still and Sunday-like, and hot and sunshinythe hands was gone to the fields; and there was them kind of fait dronings of bugs and flies in the air that makes it seem so lonesome and like everybodys dead and gone (). As a general thing it makes a body wish he was dead, too, and done with it. (324) Granted, Jims innocent Huck comes through not without the sting certain shortcomings. In siding with Jim and damning himself, Huck has resolved to degrade himself permanently. Though his friendly devotion to Jim is morally solid by todays standards, Twains Huck himself is tormented because he has the sentiments which support his actions but lacks the free conscience to do the same. His change carries in it the faltering quality of something still incomplete. IV. The Open Quandary Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot, proclaims the Notice crowning The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in a classically Twainian reference to the limitations of idealism. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is far from being triumphal or heroic adventure. Much of the novel is riddled with farcical comedy and futile madness. The closing pages do not ring with unprejudiced epiphany, nor does anything about St. Petersburg or its inhabitants appear to have transformed for the better apart from the fact that Jim has been made a free man, Huck has matured to a certain degree, and Pap Finn has permanently departed from his sons life. As a whole, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is profoundly unsatisfactory because it bars the possibility of trite moralizing with as much might as a novel can hope to muster. Twain published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1885, 20 odd years after the

Emancipation Proclamation went into effect and the 13th Amendment of the United States Constitution abolished slavery in America. Nearly 80 years later, Martin Luther King, Jr. and an entirely new generation of African Americans were still speaking of equality as dream yet to be fulfilled. I believe that in writing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain understood change was more complex than slogans and rebellion. The prejudice and injustice in Twains novel surpass mere blindness, cruelty, and hatred. They are rather a fixture of everything deemed worthy and upright in human society; they are a part of intelligence, of morality, of faith, and of personal identity; they are a part of every person who has wished to find his own place and worth in the world. Consequently, the road toward purging such ills is slow and painfulperhaps even endless. For this reason, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn approaches its readers as a yet unanswered challenge of rightness and prudence. Like Huckleberry, we have no ready answers to the conflict between what is acceptable and what is right, but also like Huckleberry, we have received the looking glass which prevents us from stepping back into the mire of negligently paralyzed civilization.

Works Cited Schacht, Paul. The Lonesomeness of Huckleberry Finn. American Literature 53.2 (1981), 189-201. Web. Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Modern Library, 1993. Print.