Huck Among the Doctors

Next to Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Huckleberry Finn has been the subject of more ingeniously and misleading and downright nonsensical criticism than any other “classic” of English and American literature. The Freudians have had their innings, notably in Leslie Fiedler’s “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!”—an essay which surely represents one of the high (or low, if you prefer) watermarks in “provocative” literary criticism. In Mr. Fiedler’s recently published Love and Death in the American Novel, his thesis that Huck and Jim’s relationship is in some measure a “homoerotic” one has been applied so unstintingly and so “successfully” to other masculine relationships in American fiction as almost to result in the promulgation of a new theory of the American novel.

The better side of Liberalism has been represented by Lionel Trilling’s graceful and perceptive essay on the novel in The Liberal Imagination, which bears down hard on Huck’s “immoral” morality. But Mr. Trilling, as well as many less distinguished critics, is somewhat wanting when it comes to seeing Huck as a product of complex Southwestern society, still governed, as a rule, by its sanctions, though questioning them in particular instances. Huck, of course, has been exploited by romanticists, of whatever persuasion, who would see in him the archetypal rebel, defying all authority—of the family, of the community, and finally of God Himself. He has, also, been embraced by reformers because of the judgments he often seems to pass on the traditional society of the Southwest—with its “outmoded” beliefs in the supremacy of God and the unworthiness of man and its “unenlightened” commitment to a double standard, both sexually and racially.

RD

About the Author

Robert Y. Drake Jr.

Featured Tags

Next to Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Huckleberry Finn has been the subject of more ingeniously and misleading and downright nonsensical criticism than any other “classic” of English and American literature. The Freudians have had their innings, notably in Leslie Fiedler’s “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!”—an essay which surely represents one of the high (or low, if you prefer) watermarks in “provocative” literary criticism. In Mr. Fiedler’s recently published Love and Death in the American Novel, his thesis that Huck and Jim’s relationship is in some measure a “homoerotic” one has been applied so unstintingly and so “successfully” to other masculine relationships in American fiction as almost to result in the promulgation of a new theory of the American novel.

The better side of Liberalism has been represented by Lionel Trilling’s graceful and perceptive essay on the novel in The Liberal Imagination, which bears down hard on Huck’s “immoral” morality. But Mr. Trilling, as well as many less distinguished critics, is somewhat wanting when it comes to seeing Huck as a product of complex Southwestern society, still governed, as a rule, by its sanctions, though questioning them in particular instances. Huck, of course, has been exploited by romanticists, of whatever persuasion, who would see in him the archetypal rebel, defying all authority—of the family, of the community, and finally of God Himself. He has, also, been embraced by reformers because of the judgments he often seems to pass on the traditional society of the Southwest—with its “outmoded” beliefs in the supremacy of God and the unworthiness of man and its “unenlightened” commitment to a double standard, both sexually and racially.