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“Away From Home and Amongst Strangers”: Domestic Sphere, Public Arena, and Huckleberry Finn

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Randall Knoper
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Extract

Despite Mark Twain's situating the story “forty to fifty years ago” and in a rural river valley, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn closely engaged daily dilemmas and concerns of a Northern, urban, middle-class audience. As Carolyn Porter has argued, the familiar comprehension of American fiction as fantasies of escape from society and history, as authorial efforts to light out for the territory, needs to be dislodged by a sensitivity to such writings as acute responses to their immediate context – a developing industrial and capitalist society and culture. Although Huck's world may appear cut off from the landscape and society of bourgeois city dwellers of the 1880s, and although there are not explicit references to industrialization or urbanization, the novel reproduces and addresses new features of daily life, alterations and stresses in private and public behavior and interaction that were being precipitated by the accelerated economic and demographic changes of the late 19th Century.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 14 , October 1989 , pp. 125 - 140
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

NOTES

1. Porter, Carolyn, Seeing and Being: The Plight of the Participant Observer in Emerson, James, Adams, and Faulkner (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1981).Google Scholar

2. Although focusing on life in Paris, Walter Benjamin wrote that, during the early 19th Century, “the private citizen was born” and “for the first time the living space became distinguished from the space of work.” See Charles Baudelaire (London: New Left Books, 1973), p. 167Google Scholar. Also see Zaretsky, Eli, Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1976)Google Scholar, passim; and Gadlin, Howard, “Private Lives and Public Order: A Critical View of the History of Intimate Relations in the United States,” Massachusetts Review 17 (1976): 306.Google Scholar

3. Richard Sennett writes, “The 19th Century bourgeois family attempted to preserve some distinction between the sense of private reality and the very different terms of the public world outside the home. The line between the two was confused, often violated, it was drawn in the erotic sphere by a hand impelled by fear, but at least an attempt was made to maintain the separateness and complexity of different domains of social reality…. There was an effort – diseased and destined to collapse, to be sure – to make distinctions between realms of experience, and thus to wrest some form out of a society of enormous disorder and harshness.” See The Fall of Public Man: On the Social Psychology of Capitalism (New York: Random, 1978), p. 11.Google Scholar

4. Mulvey, Laura helpfully discusses these ideas in “Melodrama In and Out of the Home,” in High Theory/Low Culture: Analyzing Popular Television and Film, ed. MacCabe, Colin (New York: St. Martin's, 1986), pp. 82–83, 88–90.Google Scholar

5. Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 91.Google Scholar

6. See Halttunen, Karen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 20–21, 27.Google Scholar

7. See “Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!” in Fiedler, 's An End to Innocence: Essays on Culture and Politics (Boston: Beacon, 1955), pp. 142–51.Google Scholar

8. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1988), p. 155Google Scholar. Page numbers for further references to the novel appear parenthetically in the text.

9. The point, of course, is well established, but see the influential essay by Welter, Barbara, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” American Quarterly 18 (1966): 151–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. Watt, Ian, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957)Google Scholar, especially ch. 6, “Private Experience and the Novel.” Also see Halttunen, , Confidence Men, p, 56Google Scholar; and Gadlin, , “Private Lives and Public Order,” p. 306.Google Scholar

11. Kasson, John, “Civility and Rudeness: Urban Etiquette and the Bourgeois Social Order in Nineteenth-Century America,” Prospects 9 (1984): 152CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Peter Brooks also has some useful comments to make about 19th-century ideas that gesture and the language of the body were the most immediate and trustworthy communicators; see The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976), pp. 78–79.Google Scholar

12. Kasson, , “Civility and Rudeness,” pp. 157, 152Google Scholar; and Halttunen, , Confidence Men, pp. 40–41.Google Scholar

13. Kasson, , “Civility and Rudeness,” pp. 155–57Google Scholar. Sennett also stresses the emergence in the 19th Century of silence as a principle of urban social order; the idea is important throughout The Fall of Public Man, but see, for example, p. 128. Carol Zisowitz Stearns and Peter N. Stearns write of the tendency in the 19th century urban environment to rely less on public shaming as a control, and more on individual conscience and a sense of guilt – fully portable controls that could be carried even into secret places of sin. See their study of Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in America's History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 21.Google Scholar

14. Kellogg's comments appear in the useful collection of writings by 19thcentury sex reformers, Primers for Prudery, ed. Walters, Ronald (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974), p. 60Google Scholar. Halttunen, , Confidence Men, p. 49Google Scholar; and Kasson, , “Civility and Rudeness,” p. 153Google Scholar; also refer to the reformers' spreading the idea that God could see the sins of even the most isolated and anonymous city dweller.

15. Smith-Rosenberg, , Disorderly Conduct, p. 91Google Scholar; and “Sex as Symbol in Victorian America,” Prospects 5 (1980): 57–59.Google Scholar

16. See the writings in Walters, , Primers for Prudery, for example, pp. 33–34.Google Scholar

17. On the relation in 19th-century thought between sexual and spiritual energy, and physical and psychological economies, see Kett, Joseph F., Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America 1790 to the Present (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 134Google Scholar; also see Barker-Benfield, G. J., “The Spermatic Economy: A Nineteenth-Century View of Sexuality,” Feminist Studies 1 (1972): 46–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Rosenberg, Charles E., “Sexuality, Class, and Role in Nineteenth-Century America,” American Quarterly 25 (1973): 151.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18. On the necessity of hoarding energy and controlling base emotions and passions in order to develop and mold one's “character,” see Rosenberg, , “Sexuality,” p. 137Google Scholar; and Kett, , Rites of Passage, pp. 105–6, 108.Google Scholar

19. See Gadlin, , “Private Lives and Public Order,” p. 314Google Scholar, for a discussion of this paradox in 19th-century cultural thought.

20. Fried, Michael, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980)Google Scholar; “The Beholder in Courbet: His Early Self-Portraits and Their Place in His Art,” Glyph 4: Johns Hopkins Textual Studies (1978): 85–129Google Scholar; and “Representing Representation,” in Allegory and Representation, ed. Greenblatt, Stephen J. (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), pp. 94–127.Google Scholar