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

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.