“They’re After Us!”: Criminality and Hegemony in Huckleberry Finn

Abstract

I doubt whether anyone would dispute the claim that Huckleberry Finn is one of the most famous figures in the literary gallery of American individualists. But Mark Twain has a darker purpose: to demonstrate the false promise of individuality. To argue that the ideology of the center influences Huck’s marginal life, and that Huck himself carries it into this zone, complements previous critical work questioning the novel as a model for a freer life in the refuge of nature.¹ This explains why Twain does not offer a positive example of freedom in the final chapters, an early indication of the cynicism that fuels his later years. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) is filled with Hank Morgan’s reflections on the hegemonic influence of culture: “Training—training is everything; training is all there is to a person … We have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own: they are transmitted to us, trained into us” (162). The centered, essential subject is critiqued here, but that issue had already been broached four years earlier. Twain is fully conscious of representing a hegemonic social structure in the text; therefore, Huck, as the narrator and “author” Twain invents, is equally aware. Hence, the final dangled promise of freedom and its retraction is the grand prank Huck plays in the novel, only this time the reader is the victim.²