Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

"Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," "The Bostonians," and Henry Ward Beecher: Discourse on the Idealization of Suffering

1988; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 5; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3189049

1549-3377

Janet Gabler-Hover,

American and British Literature Analysis

That Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Henry James's The Bostonians were being simultaneously serialized in the Century magazine in 1885 would seem to testify to the fact that America's fiction is as diverse as its landscape--for there would seem to be great distance, geographical and otherwise, from the Mississippi river towns of Mark Twain's America to the elite Boston parlors of the America of Henry James. Yet these novels share more than a publication date. They both address social reform in nineteenth-century America, although quite differently. Recent critics such as Forrest Robinson and Stephen Mailloux suggest that Mark Twain's primary social concern in Huckleberry Finn may well have been the inadequate efforts of the abolitionist movement in post-reconstruction America, while Henry James condemns what he obviously thought to be the degeneration of New England abolitionism into the feminist movement at the end of the century. Mark Twain apparently wanted to re-ignite abolitionist fervor; James seems more intent on debunking at least a particular type of feminism as a virulent form of political ideology. Thus it was with quite different purposes that both authors turned with the same uncanny instinct to a contemporary issue that served as an inspiration for both their novels. Both Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Bostonians explore the integral relationship between social reform in America and a contemporary idealization of suffering, but they arrive at very different conclusions. The idealization of suffering became a prominent feature of Christian theology in its battle against religious skepticism in America's late 1880s, especially in the preaching of Henry Ward Beecher. Desperate times took desperate measures. Beecher was one of the more ingenious ministers of his time because of his ability to convey religious precepts to the masses through the use of homely parables and through the appropriation of the skeptical language of science to serve his religious message. Darwinian theory was in fact turned on its head by Beecher, who argued that the doctrine of evolution should actually encourage religious faith rather than engender skepticism. By suggesting that natural evolution merely reflected in paler form the process of spiritual evolution, Beecher made it seem that