White Flight

Abstract

Here in the famous conclusion to Twain’s novel, the “Territory” of the American West performs what becomes its iconic role, offering a fantasy domain where “howling adventures amongst the Injuns” substitute for the constraints of female domesticity and “sivilization.” The reader is invited to participate in Twain’s seemingly gentle narrative irony, both appreciating Tom and Huck’s boyish eagerness for Western adventure, while resting assured that any such adventures will take place within a larger context of narrative closure: Tom remains indefatigably privileged, Pap is dead, Huck is adopted and his fortune restored, Jim is free. In the place of the all-too-real cruelty, criminality, and racism of the Mississippi river towns Huck sees on his journey South with Jim, the Territory offers a mythic escape familiar to most Americans, a place Jane Tompkins memorably calls “West of Everything,” where social entrenchment is magically lifted, and a fresh start is possible outside of the entrapments of history, politics, racism, economics, and the like.

And then Tom he talked along, and talked along, and says, le’s all three slide out of here, one of these nights, and get an outfit, and go for howling adventures amongst the Injuns, over in the Territory, for a couple of weeks or two; and I says all right, that suits me … But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there before. (261–62)

—Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn