Aristocracy in America: Huckleberry Finn and the Democratic Art of the Imposture
LAND OF THE FREE, HOME OF THE FAKE
Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an American classic. It is at once a comic masterpiece and a serious exploration of what distinguishes the American character, above all, its love of freedom and independence. With its focus on children, it seems to celebrate the innocence of America, the land of perpetual youth and renewal. Although still widely read in its original book form, Huckleberry Finn has passed into the broader realm of American popular culture. It has been endlessly recycled in film and television adaptations, often in Disneyfied versions that turn it into musical comedy. It has become the sort of book that is commonly described as “beloved.” Even though its racist language often keeps it from being taught to young people in schools, it is often classified as a children’s book.
Yet Huckleberry Finn is a dark and deeply unnerving work. It is filled with a seemingly endless parade of con artists, impostors, vigilantes, lynch mobs, and other practitioners of fraud and deception or cruelty and inhumanity. Wherever one turns in the book, one finds murder or the threat of murder. At its most disturbing, Huckleberry Finn confronts the darkest blot on America as the land of the free—the crime of slavery in the South. The book seems misanthropic, anticipating Twain’s cynical vision in his later work, especially the Mysterious Stranger fragments. To varying degrees, Twain seems to be questioning conventional morality and religious faith in Huckleberry Finn. Indeed, he must call these pieties into question because in Huck’s world, they support slavery. In its corrosive skepticism, Huckleberry Finn seems to be the very opposite of a children’s book as commonly understood.
All this leaves us with a paradox. In popular culture, Huckleberry Finn conjures up images of the fresh-faced All-American boy, to be played by cute child stars like Mickey Rooney, Ron Howard, or Elijah Wood. Yet in terms of the events and characters it portrays, the book has all the warmth and sweetness of a film noir. It seems like a cross between Johnny Appleseed and Dial M for Murder. For years I was puzzled by Huckleberry Finn—how could such a classic story of America be so dark and misanthropic?
I began to put the two, seemingly contradictory sides of the book together when I came across this passage from the critic V. S. Pritchett:
As Huck Finn and old Jim drift down the Mississippi from one horrifying little town to the next and hear the voices of men quietly swearing at each other across the waters; as they pass the time of day with scroungers, rogues, murderers, the lonely women, the frothing revivalists, the maundering boatmen and fantastic drunks of the river towns, we see the human wastage that is left in the wake of a great effort of the human will, the hopes frustrated, the idealism which has been whittled down to eccentricity and craft. These people are the price paid for building a new country.[i]
Pritchett grasps how the bright and dark sides of Huckleberry Finn fit together. If you are going to give people freedom, you are going to have to live with the ways they may misuse and abuse it. If a nation is to be dedicated to giving people a fresh start, a lot of them will make false starts. A country based on political idealism will end up with a lot of people cynically taking advantage of gullible idealists. Huckleberry Finn portrays both the American dream and its nightmarish dark side. Even as it offers an enduring tribute to the American longing for freedom, it reveals, as Pritchett suggests, that we may pay a great price for liberating the desires and ambitions of ordinary human beings.
Huckleberry Finn is thus a Tocquevillian meditation on the advantages and disadvantages of aristocracy and democracy as alternative ways of life. To massively oversimplify the differences: As opposed to democracy, aristocracy offers a fixed social hierarchy, in which people are largely born into their stations in life. The different social ranks are readily identifiable by clear and fixed markers, such as clothing, speech patterns, and manners. The price the majority of people pay for living in an aristocracy is that they lack freedom and social mobility. But the very rigidity of an aristocratic society brings with it a kind of psychological comfort: a lack of anxiety about social status. “Once a serf, always a serf” is the basic principle of aristocracy. Since individuals cannot do anything about their place in an aristocracy, they need not torment themselves over their lack of status. Your social rank is not your fault and you know your place; what is more, everybody else does, too.
Democracy, by contrast, tears down aristocratic hierarchies, introducing freedom and social mobility and thereby liberating human energies. The American dream is that anyone can become President of the United States; people do not have to be born into positions of power. Americans are taught as their birth right that they are free to rise in the world by their own efforts. That is a wonderful prospect, but it also means that it is now your own fault if you remain in a low station in life. Democracy’s motto is: “You can always do better; you can always make a fresh start.” Compared to aristocracy, then, democracy gives the vast majority of people reason to be dissatisfied with their current lot in life because they now have genuine hopes of improving on it. Democratic individuals always tend to crave more—more money, more status, more power. That is what is good about democracy—it energizes human efforts. Freedom, especially in the marketplace, can be a powerful force for human betterment.
But there is a dark side to the liberation of human desire and ambition that democracy brings about. Set free from aristocratic restraints, people in a democracy are beset by new fears, uncertainties, and anxieties. They can no longer be sure of their status in life. The prospect of rising in status is inevitably accompanied by the possibility of falling. Moreover, the clear aristocratic markers of social status dissolve, leaving people to sort out where they stand in relation to each other. It becomes difficult to distinguish the genuinely self-made man from the con man. The respected entrepreneur you meet at a party may be Bill Gates, but he may just as well be Bernie Madoff (Twain portrays a primitive Ponzi scheme at the end of chapter 8 of Huckleberry Finn). The freedom and openness of democratic society paradoxically make social identity less transparent, and a lot of confusion and deception results. The democratic world Twain portrays in Huckleberry Finn is filled with impostors.
Confusion of identity is the keynote of Huckleberry Finn. Huck is always carrying on one masquerade or another. At one point he even tries to pass as a girl, but he cannot quite bring off that deception. He adopts so many false names in the course of his travels that he has a hard time remembering who he is claiming to be at any given moment. Amid the Grangerford family, he suddenly finds himself at a loss for the alias he has been using: “I went to bed with Buck, and when I waked up in the morning, drat it all, I had forgot what my name was.”[ii] When he comes to the Phelps farm, he realizes that he has been mistaken for a family relative, but he does not know which one. His problem becomes to “find out who I was” (200). This is democratic America for Twain—you are not told who you are; you have to discover it.
Soon Huck learns that in the eyes of the Phelps family, he is none other than his old friend Tom Sawyer. Huck describes this discovery as “like being born again” (201), and indeed “born again,” with all its religious connotations, is a phrase we associate with America and its fresh start spirit. Huckleberry Finn is all about “born again” Americans, a democratic people who are constantly inventing and re-inventing themselves. A Mississippi riverboat pilot named Samuel Clemens reconfigured himself as a writer named Mark Twain, and the rest is literary history. Samuel Clemens was in fact one of the first to understand that in a democratic society a man can use the modern media to invent himself as a celebrity. In Twain’s presentation, America is a land of disguises. As a runaway slave, Jim in particular must continually be kept under wraps. In a bizarre development—of whose irony Twain must have been aware—in Chapter 24 Jim ends up dressed in the theatrical costume of King Lear. One of the central motifs of Huckleberry Finn is the theatricality of democratic America. People are constantly playing roles in public and changing their identities seems no more difficult than changing their costumes.
A SUCKER BORN AGAIN EVERY MINUTE
How is all this deception possible? In the case of Aunt Sally’s mistaking Huck’s identity, the answer is simple: although Tom is her nephew, because she lives apart from him, she does not know what he looks like. The America of Huckleberry Finn is a land of widely dispersed families, often families that have been forcibly broken up. This issue is central to Jim’s story---he is worried about his family being divided up among several different owners, as happened with depressing regularity to slaves in the antebellum South. Huck’s family is broken up, and so is Tom’s. The social mobility of democratic America goes along with geographic and sheer physical mobility. As Pritchett writes: “movement, a sense of continual migration, is the history of America.”[iii] Epitomized by Horace Greeley’s famous injunction: “Go West, young man,” America has set its population in perpetual motion. Huckleberry Finn is accordingly a picaresque tale, with its characters always on the go in their journey down the Mississippi. It is not just Jim who must keep moving to preserve his freedom. Many of the characters are seeking some kind of a fresh start and that requires framing a new identity on the fly. Twain understood the role that a wide open frontier played in shaping the American character. With its con men, hucksters, gamblers, thieves, and murderers, the world of Huckleberry Finn is an early example of what came to be known as the Wild West. Throughout American history, the frontier—the line between civilization and barbarism—kept shifting (generally westward). At the end of Twain’s novel, Huck, feeling engulfed by civilization, is ready to “light out for the Territory ahead of the rest” (262). That is another way of saying that Huck, like the infamous criminals of the Old West, wants to stay one step ahead of the law, and, like those desperados, he is always willing to disguise himself to do so.
That is why nobody knows for sure anymore who anybody is in Huckleberry Finn. In the aristocratic world of the old regime in Europe, most people were immobile, tied to the land. That is what it meant to be a serf. When people live in small villages, everybody knows who everybody else is and imposture becomes impossible. The simple answer to the village impostor is: “You’re not a duke; I know you--you’re John the blacksmith.” But Twain’s America is a land of wide-open spaces and that makes it much easier to become an impostor, a stranger in a strange land. This is perhaps the best example of how all the criminality in Huckleberry Finn is linked to the new democratic freedom and mobility. This explains why the con man has been such a central theme in American culture. Before Twain, Herman Melville had chosen to name a novel about America The Confidence-Man. And con men have been a mainstay of American popular culture, especially its comedies, as the films of W. C. Fields and the Marx Brothers attest. Field’s taglines—“Never give a sucker an even break” and “You can’t cheat an honest man”—have a distinctively American ring to them. The country of George Washington—who could not tell a lie—is also the country of P. T. Barnum—who made a fortune doing just the opposite.
The most irrepressible impostors in Huckleberry Finn are the king and the duke. They succeed in their fraudulent behavior by always staying one step ahead of the lynch mob. As long as they keep moving from town to town, they can use the same old con game by finding new—and therefore still gullible—victims. In their shameless impostures, they represent the dark side of all that is best in America, its spirit of enterprise. When they first team up to defraud the public, they assess their range as impostors:
“What’s your line--mainly?”
“Jour printer, by trade; do a little in the patent medicines; theatre-actor—tragedy, you know; take a turn at mesmerism and phrenology when there’s a chance; teach singing-geography school for a change; sling a lecture, sometimes—oh, I do lots of things—most anything that comes handy, so it ain’t work. What’s your lay?”
“I’ve done considerable in the doctoring way in my time. Laying on o’ hands is my best holt—for cancer, and paralysis, and sich things; an I k’n tell a future pretty good, when I’ve got somebody along to find out the facts for me. Preachin’s my line, too; and workin’ camp-meetin’s, and missionaryin around.” (111-12)
The range of this false expertise is remarkable; the king and the duke can “master” science, technology, and medicine. We are struck by their commitment to pseudo-sciences, such as mesmerism and phrenology, but their careers are a good reminder that it has always been difficult to separate real science from pseudo-science in free wheeling, democratic America. Americans are perennial optimists, believing firmly that with freedom comes opportunity and with opportunity comes progress and improvement. With enough effort, any problem can be solved, and, in particular, any disease can be cured. That is why Americans are so susceptible to the siren song of the medicine man. Democratic America has led the world in the development of modern medicine, but for that very reason it has also produced more than its share of medical quacks. Free markets allow for a wide range of experiments in technology and medicine, but for every true cure discovered, many false cures may be tried out. The hope of course is that the market will, over time, sort out the true products from the false. The comeuppance eventually suffered by the king and the duke is proof that you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. But still, their initial success as con men is a troubling consequence of the freedom America allows its citizens.
An element of theatricality runs through all these impostures; indeed the theater itself is one of their con games. The king and the duke know how to put on a show. They have been printers, actors, and public lecturers. Like their creator, Mark Twain, they know how to exploit the modern media to gain an audience and milk it for all it is worth. Twain hints that authors may be con men, too, putting on an act for their readers. Most audaciously, Twain allows his con artists’ deceptive performances to culminate in preaching, thus presenting a sermon as no better than a medicine show. Another area in which the king and the duke can exploit the gullibility of the American public is religion. They have a temperance scam, in which they play upon the moral fervor of their spellbound audience in order to extract donations for the noble cause of teetotalism.[iv] Americans, as part of their democratic character, like to think the best of people. This is no doubt an admirable trait, but again, it makes Americans especially susceptible to con games. They love to hear stories of religious conversion, of criminals who discover the evil of their ways, confess their sins, and claim to have reformed their conduct. That is why the king and the duke include preaching among their con games. Their ability to exploit religion for financial gain is the dark side of the genuine power of evangelical movements in the United States.
Religious con games epitomize the paradox of democracy that Twain explores in Huckleberry Finn. With no established church in America, anybody can set himself up as a preacher. In the absence of any official form of validation, preaching must become self-validating and therefore rely on the charisma of the preacher. Unable to count on a captive audience, American preachers must create their own congregations. This makes for powerful preaching. It is no accident that democratic America has produced such peculiar religious phenomena as televangelism and the megachurch. What amounts to a free market in religion in the United States has energized American churches.[v] Europeans, with their state churches, have long marveled at the vitality of religion in America, above all, the periodic mass religious awakenings and the emergence of whole new sects, such as the Mormons. America has produced a remarkable number of religious leaders in its history, but according to the logic of democracy that works throughout Huckleberry Finn, the United States has turned out many false prophets as well (and of course one person’s religious leader is another’s false prophet). The very religious vitality on which Americans pride themselves is inextricably linked to their vulnerability to fraudulent piety.
KING FOR A DAY
Twain’s central insight is that the con man is the evil twin of the American hero—the entrepreneur, the self-made man, the rags-to-riches genius.[vi] Yet there is something peculiar about Twain’s principal con men. These products of democracy nevertheless choose to impersonate aristocrats. One of them claims to be descended from the “eldest son of the Duke of Bridgewater” from England (112), and the other claims to be the French Dauphin, the son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and thus the rightful king, Louis XVII. A further paradox of democracy in America is the widespread allure of faux aristocracy. Among the false starts, false cures, and false prophets in America are the false aristocrats. The United States has broken with European aristocracy, but it remains fascinated by it.[vii] Perhaps Americans are fascinated by aristocracy precisely because they have broken with it. Virtually from the moment Americans chose to split off from England, they fell into the grip of Anglophilia, deriving much of their culture—their literature, their music, their painting, their architecture—from English sources. The patriotic hymn to U.S. liberty, “My County ’Tis of Thee,” is paradoxically sung to the tune of England’s “God Save the King.” American Anglophilia has particularly focused on English aristocratic trappings, with images of Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, and the Tower of London at the center of the cult of all things English. The obsession with Princess Di in the United States reflected the aristocratic bent of American Anglophilia. One got the impression that Americans feel deprived because they have never had a royal princess of their own.
In Huckleberry Finn Twain dwells on this strange aspect of American gullibility—the way democratic Americans become suckers for anyone or anything that smacks of English aristocracy. Americans still crave the trappings of aristocracy, various forms of dress, speech patterns, and manners that give an aura of “class.” Some Americans have even cultivated phony English accents to make them seem elegant. The fox and hounds set among American upper-class society is a good example of this aristocratic Anglophilia. Americans are always trying to recapture something of the hierarchical character of aristocratic society. Aware of this potential problem, the Founders had the wisdom to forbid titles of nobility in the U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 9, Clause 8). But Americans keep seeking ways to get around the fact that genuine aristocracy is outlawed in the United States. They strive to re-create aristocracy on a democratic basis. That tendency is evident in the phenomenon of gentlemen’s or ladies’ clubs (often created on English models) and other social organizations with well-defined ranks. “Democratic aristocracies” have emerged in such fields as sports and entertainment, with titles like the Sultan of Swat and the King of Rock & Roll (not to mention the Duke of Earl). Above all, democratic politicians have often tried to position themselves as a new elite, with many of the traditional trappings of aristocracy, including political dynasties. The Kennedys even got themselves identified with Camelot.
In Huckleberry Finn Twain explores the ways in which a democratic America continues to live in the shadow of European and especially English aristocracy. The king and the duke learn of a substantial inheritance from England, and in a classic con game pretend to be the two designated heirs in order to claim the money. Twain presents average Americans at their most gullible in this sequence. The imposture should be transparent to all; even Huck is able to see right through it. But the simple townsfolk grasp at any signs that they are dealing with a superior class of people from England, and the king and the duke prey upon their ignorance. Even when they betray their own ignorance by using the term orgies instead of obsequies to refer to the funeral ceremony, the would-be Englishmen are able to give off an aura of aristocratic superiority. They trade on snob appeal:
I say orgies, not because it’s the common term, because it ain’t—obsequies bein’ the common term—but because orgies is the right term. Obsequies ain’t used in England no more, now—it’s gone out. We say orgies now, in England. Orgies is better, because it means the thing you’re after, more exact. It’s a word that’s made up out’n the Greek orgo, outside, open, abroad; and the Hebrew jeesum, to plant, cover up; hence inter. So, you see, funeral orgies is an open or public funeral. (153-54)
The fraudulent inheritance plot generates some of the funniest moments in the novel, but it has a serious significance. Twain suggests that America’s whole inheritance from England is basically one gigantic fraud, especially when it takes the form of superficial pretensions to aristocratic superiority.
SOUTHERN COMFORT
The theme of sham aristocracy is at the heart of Huckleberry Finn. In Twain’s view, the antebellum South was characterized precisely by its false pretentions to aristocracy.[viii] Rich landowners in the South tried to create a new species of aristocracy in the midst of democratic America. In the form of the Southern plantation, they sought to transpose the way of life of landed aristocrats in England to an American setting. Twain subjects the Southern aristocratic ideal to scrutiny in his portrait of the Grangerfords. This aristocratic family is at first presented as in many respects admirable. Huck initially looks up to Colonel Grangerford as a true “gentleman”: “He was well-born, as the saying is, and that’s worth as much in a man as it is in a horse, as the Widow Douglas said, and nobody ever denied that she was of the first aristocracy in our town” (97). Huck is impressed when he looks at his aristocratic better in the form of Colonel Grangerford:
His hands was long and thin, and every day of his life he put on a clean shirt and a full suit from head to foot made out of linen so white it hurt your eyes to look at. . . . He carried a mahogany cane with a silver head to it. There warn’t no frivolousness about him, not a bit, and he warn’t ever loud. He was as kind as he could be—you could feel that, you know, and so you had confidence. . . . He didn’t ever have to tell anybody to mind their manners—everybody was always good mannered where he was. (97)
This is the aristocratic ideal of Southern gentility and I believe that Twain genuinely admired it (he certainly dressed in public like the Colonel). Even Huck admires aristocratic poise when he sees it. Colonel Grangerford is the opposite of Huck in every respect, partly because he has everything that Huck lacks. As a wealthy landowner, Grangerford can afford to live a life of noblesse oblige and set an example of elegant manners for his community.
But the emphasis in this passage is on Grangerford’s appearance and the clothing he wears. Is the suggestion that his aristocratic character is something merely external, something just for show? Is his nobility just an aristocratic veneer? As we learn elsewhere in the book, democratic Huck likes to go naked along with Jim: “we was always naked, day and night, whenever the mosquitoes would let us—the new clothes Buck’s folks made for me was too good to be comfortable, and besides I didn’t go much on clothes, nohow” (109). For Huck, clothing is a matter of utility, not nobility; when he does not need clothing, he does not wear it. The way people are dressed is symbolic in Huckleberry Finn, and Twain raises the issue of whether clothes make the man in Huck’s vision of the king’s new raiment:
We had all bought store clothes where we stopped last; and now the king put his’n on. . . . The king’s duds was all black, and he did look real swell and starchy. I never knowed how clothes could change a body before. Why, before, he looked like the orneriest old rip that ever was; but now, when he’d take off his new white beaver and make a bow and do a smile, he looked that grand and good and pious that you’d say he had walked right out of the ark, and maybe was old Leviticus himself. (144)
Huck may be momentarily taken in by the king’s appearance, but Twain seems to question whether new clothing has genuinely transformed the con man.
We thus need to take another look at the Grangerfords: “Bob was the oldest, and Tom next. Tall, beautiful men with very broad shoulders and brown faces, and long black hair and black eyes. They dressed in white linen from head to foot, like the old gentleman, and wore broad Panama hats” (98). Here the emphasis is almost exclusively on the external appearance of this aristocratic clan. And then we see what all this Southern gentility is based on: “Each person had their own nigger to wait on them. . . . My nigger had a monstrous easy time, because I warn’t used to having anybody do anything for me. . . . The old gentleman owned a lot of farms, and over a hundred niggers” (98). This aristocracy—this leisured class—is made possible only by slavery. Southern efforts at re-creating aristocracy were inextricably linked to the institution of slavery. Twain traces the darkest blot on America—the continuation of slavery in a democratic land—to the lingering allure of aristocracy. The Southern aristocracy’s belief in their elevated status was derived from their ruling as masters over slaves. They derived a false sense of superiority by treating fellow human beings as if they were inferior by nature. In Twain’s view, it was all a masquerade, but tragically, in the Civil War Southerners proved willing to die for it.
Twain explores the link between aristocracy and violence in Huckleberry Finn. The Grangerfords are not only well dressed; they are also well armed: “The men brought their guns with them. It was a handsome lot of quality” (98). These are clannish men, who are perpetually looking for a fight. They meet their match in another family: “There was another clan of aristocracy around there—five or six families—mostly of the name of Shepherdson. They were as high-toned, and well born, and rich and grand, as the tribe of Grangerfords” (98). The Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons hark back to the Old World of Scotland and its highland clans.[ix] In a world archaically divided into tribes, the stage is set for the classic manifestation of Southern aristocratic pretensions: the feud. At the heart of the aristocratic sense of honor is the code of vengeance, and it typically leads to endless cycles of violence, since the nobles can prove their nobility only by risking their lives in deadly quarrels. The destructiveness of the nobles’ sense of honor has been chronicled in centuries of aristocratic literature, from Homer’s epics to the Icelandic sagas to Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies.
LIFE IMITATING ART
Twain regarded aristocratic literature as part of America’s baleful heritage from Europe. He focused his ire particularly on the Waverley novels of Sir Walter Scott, which in the nineteenth century were extraordinarily popular in America, especially in the South. Twain believed that Scott’s romantic evocation of the spirit of medieval chivalry in novels such as Ivanhoe had taught the wrong lesson to the American South. Would-be cavaliers in the South modeled themselves on Scott’s nobles, especially in their disposition to fight on behalf of lost causes (as happens most famously in Waverley, with its Scottish highlanders nobly but vainly championing Bonnie Prince Charlie). Only half-jokingly, Twain blamed the most famous of American lost causes—the Civil War--on Scott’s novels.[x] He felt that too many Southerners rode to their destruction in battle thinking of themselves as Scott’s knights in shining armor. It is no accident that the wrecked ship Huck and Jim encounter is named the Walter Scott (68). In Twain’s eyes, Scott had wrecked the South. He wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court to debunk the kind of romantic chivalry Scott sought to revive. For Twain, reading European novels that glorify aristocracy only re-enforced the unfortunate American tendency to imitate models inimical to a democracy.
In Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer’s head is so filled with the novels of Alexandre Dumas that he needlessly and endlessly prolongs Jim’s slavery in an effort to weave him into the romantic fantasy of an aristocratic escape narrative. Tom is bored with ordinary democratic life in America; he wants something more heroic and hence something out of Europe’s aristocratic past.[xi] Complaining that Jim does not understand “the custom in Europe” (216), Tom wants him to imitate the legendary Man in the Iron Mask in all his sufferings (219), when in fact at this point Jim could walk free anytime he likes.
Twain even uses Huckleberry Finn to ridicule the popularity of Shakespeare’s plays in nineteenth-century America. When the king and the duke stage their Shakespeare performances, they butcher the plays so badly that one can only suppose that the audience is drawn by a kind of snob appeal. The impostors, as always, stress their European aristocratic pedigree; their playbill announces that they have performed at the Royal Haymarket Theatre in London and also at Royal Continental Theatres. They can appear for “one night only” “on account of imperative European engagements” (126-27). They are trading on the cachet of their connections with Europe. Twain evidently worried that, with ignorant and naïve provincial audiences, Shakespeare’s plays appealed to the lingering taste for aristocratic culture in the United States. As an American author, Twain dreamed of the country’s developing its own native culture, and not always turning to Europe for its art, which threatened to infect America with the aristocratic bias of the old regime’s literature. The king and the duke choose Shakespeare’s Richard III and his Romeo and Juliet for their repertoire. The history play concludes Shakespeare’s panoramic account of the Wars of the Roses and thus centers on feuding aristocrats. The tragedy also dwells on an aristocratic feud—between the Montagues and the Capulets—and it dramatizes the failure of the young lovers to bridge the gap between their aristocratic houses. In the story of Sophia Grangerford and Harney Shepherdson in Chapter 18, Twain had just told a kind of “Romeo and Juliet in the South” tale of feuding families and rebellious lovers. We cannot say for sure that the young lovers in Huckleberry Finn were inspired by Romeo and Juliet, but Twain evidently was concerned that, more generally, in the Southern feud, America was recapitulating a tradition of aristocratic violence it had inherited from Europe.
FEUDS AND FRAUDS
Twain suggests that the aristocratic feud is not native to America by showing that the innocent Huck is ignorant of even what a feud is. His friend Buck Grangerford must explain the concept to him: “A feud is this way. A man has a quarrel with another man, and kills him; then that other man’s brother kills him; then the other brothers, on both sides, goes for one another; then the cousins chip in—and by-and-by everybody’s killed off, and there ain’t no more feud” (99). In Chapter Three, we will see the same logic play out in Corleone in The Godfather I, and depopulate the town—until the young men emigrate to America, once again bringing Old World clan violence to the New. Huck finds this kind of violence un-American; he simply cannot understand it. Buck cannot even explain how the Grangerford-Sherpherdson feud got started. The cause of the original quarrel has evidently been forgotten: “They don’t know, now, what the row was about in the first place” (100). It is characteristic of aristocratic feuds that their origins are shrouded in the mists of time. Aristocratic societies remain trapped in the past and cannot find a way to move on. They are the opposite of fresh start America. In the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons, we see an aristocratic form of violence, feuding for feuding’s sake. The many murders they commit shock Huck and leave him wishing that he had never seen these Southern aristocrats. Their aristocratic pretensions and their exaggerated sense of honor make it impossible for them to live together peacefully in civil society. As in the case of Colonel Sherburn later in the novel, Twain shows that men who take the law into their own hands because they think that they are above the law are a threat to democracy. The tension between aristocracy and democracy runs throughout Huckleberry Finn. In particular, the lingering allure of aristocracy in democratic America continually threatens to undermine the peace of society and lead to outbreaks of violence.
Thus for all Twain’s awareness of the dark side of democratic life, he clearly is no partisan of aristocracy, a system he condemns as rooted in slavery (he makes the same point at length in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court).[xii] In fact, Twain seems to suggest that democracy goes wrong precisely when it clings to aristocratic ideals and tries to recreate them, even at the cost of perpetuating slavery. Twain includes a conversation between Huck and Jim in which Huck criticizes a whole series of European monarchs for their bad behavior, including Charles II, Louis XIV, Louis XV, James II, Edward II, and Richard III. Henry VIII comes in for special criticism for the tyrannical way he treated the women in his life: “He used to marry a new wife every day, and chop off her head next morning” (140). Huck is trying to explain to Jim that the real kings of Europe were far more evil than the false kings they have encountered in America:
That’s the kind of a bug Henry was; and if we’d a had him along ‘stead of our kings, he’d a fooled that town a heap more than ourn done. I don’t say that ourn is lambs, because they ain’t, when you come right down to the cold facts; but they ain’t nothing to that old man, anyway. All I say is, kings is kings, and you got to make allowances. Take them all around, they’re a might ornery lot. It’s the way they’re raised. (141)
Twain shows that democracy encourages fraudulent ways of life, but as the case of the king and the duke demonstrates, at least there is a chance of unmasking the imposture. The king and the duke are not really convincing in their aristocratic roles, largely because they were not born to them. As Huck explains to Jim, men born as kings make the most successful impostors. In Twain’s view, aristocracy simply is fraud; it is all an illusion, based on mere externals, based on show, as again Huck explains to Jim: “I read considerable to Jim about kings, and dukes, and earls, and such, and how gaudy they dressed, and how much style they put on, and called each other your majesty, and your grace, and your lordship, and so on, ‘stead of mister” (71). For Twain, aristocracy is by its very nature imposture, some people claiming falsely that they are by birth entitled to rule over others. But people born to rule seem to do a better job of convincing others to accept their slavery. That is why, in the debate between aristocracy and democracy, Twain ultimately comes down on the side of democracy. Democratic life makes certain forms of imposture possible, but they are still an aberration and can be exposed.
Exposing the falsity of aristocracy was Twain’s mission in life. He constantly worried about the way that democracy’s supporters are nevertheless prone to fall prey to the illusions of aristocracy. In Twain’s late work, The Chronicle of Young Satan, the devil complains about the tendency among democrats to pay tribute to aristocrats: “While they scoff with their mouths, they reverence them in their hearts The democrat will never live who will marry a democrat into his family when he can get a duke.”[xiii] To counter aristocratic illusions, Twain pinned all his hopes on humanity’s sense of humor. Like his devil, he looked forward to the day when people could laugh aristocratic pretensions away:
Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of those juvenilities and laugh at them—and by laughing at them destroy them? For your race in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon—laughter. Power, Money, Persuasion, Supplication, Persecution—these can lift at a colossal humbug,--push a little—crowd it a little—weaken it a little, century by century: but only Laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of Laughter nothing can stand.[xiiiii]
Here is Twain’s self-conception as an author—he will subject the idols of aristocracy to the corrosive critique of humor and dissolve them. The best-selling status of his writings encouraged him to pursue his goal in democratic America. As we see in the case of the king and the duke in Huckleberry Finn, in a democracy the inferiority of those with aristocratic pretensions is more obvious. For Twain, in a true aristocracy, as practiced in Europe, imposture is a way of life; it provides the foundation of the regime. We have seen that Huckleberry Finn does have a dark side and refuses to paint a rosy picture of democracy in America. But Twain persists in championing the freedom of democracy over the slavery of aristocracy. America pays a price for building a new nation, but for Twain that price is worth paying for the sake of leaving the old regime of slavery in Europe behind.
[i] Sculley Bradley, Richmond Croom Beatty, and E. Hudson Long, eds., Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 307. The passage is from Pritchett’s essay “Huckleberry Finn: The Cruelty of American Humor” (originally published in 1941 in New Statesman and Nation).
[ii] Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. Emory Elliott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 92. All future page number citations will be incorporated into the body of the chapter in parentheses.
[iii] Bradley, Huckleberry Finn, 307.
[iv] In Chapter Two we will see how W.C. Fields dealt with this issue in his brief film The Fatal Glass of Beer.
[v] Twain develops this idea in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Confronted with the power of the Catholic Church in medieval England, the Yankee condemns the idea of an established church and wants to break it up to create a free market in religion: “My idea is to have it cut up into forty free sects, so that they will police each other, as had been the case in the United States in my time. Concentration of power in a political machine is bad; and an Established Church is only a political machine” (M. Thomas Inge, ed., A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997], 216).
[vi] Twain was an entrepreneur himself, and not just in his successful career as a literary celebrity, in which he exploited all the advantages offered by the modern media. Even before he became Mark Twain, he was involved in a number of nineteenth-century America’s booming businesses, including the Mississippi riverboat industry (he was a successful riverboat pilot) and the Nevada silver rush (he was an unsuccessful prospector and miner). Twain was fascinated by inventions, and even patented a few himself. He made millions of dollars over the years, but unfortunately he lost millions investing in a mechanical typesetter called the Paige Compositor. His career as a publisher also followed a rags-to-riches-back-to-rags pattern. He made a fortune publishing Huckleberry Finn with his own company, and also had a gigantic bestseller with Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs. Unfortunately, a number of publishing failures forced Twain to declare bankruptcy in 1894. In sum, in his own life Twain experienced both the bright side and the dark side of the American dream. With his long and varied career and his manifold achievements, Twain might lay claim to being the representative American of the nineteenth century.
[vii] Twain’s own family was not immune to this fascination: “Both his father, John Marshall Clemens, and his mother, Jane Lampton Clemens, were third-generation Americans whose families had arrived in the colonies by the mid-18th century. Like many Americans, they proudly claimed an aristocratic heritage, including membership in the tribunal that sentenced Charles I to death, earls of Dunham, and first families of Virginia. Their actual relations to these figures were dubious at best” (Ranjit S. Dighe, ed., The Historian’s Huck Finn [Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2016], 1).
[viii] See Zuckert, Natural Right,131 on “the ridicule of aristocratic pretensions” as the goal of Huckleberry Finn. For Twain’s attack on “the pseudo-aristocratic society of the antebellum South,” see Richard F. Adams, “The Unity and Coherence of Huckleberry Finn,” Bradley, Huckleberry Finn, 342-57.
[ix] See Zuckert, Natural Right, 144: “like their feudal Scottish ancestors—these ‘aristocrats’ prefer clan loyalty to civic justice.”
[x] Twain’s critique of Scott appears in Chapters 40 and 46 of his Life on the Mississippi (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2000). He writes: “Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back, sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms, with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the silliness and emptiness, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of brainless and worthless long-vanished societies” (208). Condemning Scott’s “maudlin Middle-Age romanticism” 105), Twain held the British novelist “in great measure responsible for the [American Civil] war” (209). For Twain’s critique of Walter Scott and aristocracy, and their connections to the issue of slavery, see also David Foster, “Reason, Sentiment, and Equality in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” American Political Thought 6 (2017): 404-406.
[xi] Zuckert draws a contrast between Tom and Huck in this regard: “Tom’s antics parody aristocratic romances; Huck speaks of down-to-earth democratic skepticism” (Natural Right, 137). For the final sequence of Huckleberry Finn as Twain’s effort “to ‘kill’ romanticism,” see Thomas Arthur Gullason, “The ‘Fatal’ Ending of Huckleberry Finn,” Bradley, Huckleberry Finn, 357-61.
[xii] For further discussion of Twain’s views on democracy versus aristocracy and on the relation of America to England, see my essay “Yankee Go Home: Twain’s Postcolonial Romance,” in Patrick J. Deneen and Joseph Romance, eds., Democracy’s Literature: Politics and Fiction in America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 31-60.
[xiii] William M. Gibson, The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969), 165. The Chronicle of Young Satan is one of the manuscript fragments published after Twain’s death as part of The Mysterious Stranger; it was written 1897-1900. For an explanation of the complicated status of this manuscript, see Gibson’s introduction, 1-11.
[xiiii] Gibson, Mysterious Stranger, 165-66.
Related Work
