Twain's Contestation of Emersonian Transcendental Manhood in Huckleberry Finn

This essay "Twain's Contestation of Emersonian Transcendental Manhood in Huckleberry Finn" explores how Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) manifests his postwar contestation of Ralph Waldo Emerson's transcendental manhood that endorses the dogmatic, egocentric, and decorporealized position of the Cartesian subject, who believes his being's unity, elevation, and centrality through his fantasy of possessing direct access to divine truth. The connection between Emerson and Twain is based not on Emerson's influence on Twain but on their common interest in American landscape as a site for the redefinition of manhood and masculinity. I examine different types of manhood in their association with nature in Huckleberry Finn by comparing them with the two fundamental concepts of Emerson's philosophy: "a true man" in "Self-Reliance" (1841) and transparent eyeball vision in Nature (1836). Twain's use of Huck's ambivalent position-his centrality as a protagonist in the novel in spite of his marginality in society-renegotiates Emerson's valorization of nonconformity, wholeness, and nonchalance as the characteristics of both boyhood and "a true man," Emerson's term for the ideal individual in "Self-Reliance." I also read Twain's satire of two different types of masculine characters-Bob and the Child of Calamity, boatmen of the Southern frontier, and Colonel Grangerford, patriarch of a Southern aristocratic family-as Twain's denouncement of the antebellum desire for transcendental vision, which Emerson crystalizes into his notion of transparent eyeball in Nature.