“Trash of the Veriest Sort”: Huck Finn's Missing Sex Life

Abstract

Abstract Themes of marriage and family animate The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its immediate sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, as well as later tales featuring these characters. While race remains a major point of interest in scholarship of Huckleberry Finn, it is also as a novel about children, childhood, and growing up. This essay traces a pattern of desexualizing Huck in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and subsequent stories. This picture of Huckleberry Finn, a “poor white” boy in the slaveholding South, reflects views then current in late nineteenth-century America. And to an extent, it reflects hesitation that Twain, the father of three daughters, may have felt in setting Huck on a path toward marriage and reproduction. Reading Huckleberry Finn in this context reveals a rich discourse on race and class distinct from (although related to) the issues of slavery and racism expressed in the novel.