"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"

As with “Rip Van Winkle” (see previous post), popular adaptations of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” often leave out the alternative explanations and the Postscript, which foreground the issue of fidelity in fiction. 

In the typical gothic romance the forces of irrational evil threaten the protagonist, who is either killed, driven insane, or barely allowed to escape.   Ichabod Crane’s fate is left ambiguous.

There were those who said that Ichabod Crane “had been carried away by the Galloping Hessian” or “spirited away by supernatural means.”  But “an old farmer, who had been down to New York…brought home the intelligence that Ichabod Crane was alive, that he had left the neighborhood, partly through fear of the goblin and…and partly in mortification at having been suddenly dismissed by the heiress.”  Brom Bones, we are told, “was observed to look exceedingly knowing whenever the story of Ichabod was related, and always burst into a hearty laugh at the mention of the pumpkin; which led some to suspect that he knew more about the matter than he chose to tell.”

Popular versions of the tale often present Ichabod sympathetically as the innocent victim of the headless horseman (or sometimes of Brom Bones), but in the original he is a superstitious believer in witchcraft and a fortune hunter who shows more interest in Katrina Van Tassel’s wealth than either her character or person.  From the perspective of the urbane and rationalistic Irving, the story could represent the healthy (and manly?) world of Enlightenment reason (Brom Bones) overcoming the outdated world of Puritan supernaturalism (Ichabod Crane).

Irving’s “enlightened” world view does not seem to apply to gender.  Not only is Brom presented as more muscular and masculine than the cadaverous Crane (note the imagery of their names), but Ichabod is comically associated with “the old country wives,” with whom he likes to share stories of ghosts, goblins, and witchcraft.  And Katrina’s main function in the story is to be beautiful and rich.

As the bookish schoolmaster, Crane plays the role of nerd to Brom’s star athlete and Katrina’s prom queen.

For all the stereotyping, though, the tale raises serious questions about the nature of truth, the relationship between fact and fiction, and the function of storytelling.   Is truth to be found in supernaturalism, folklore, and oral traditions of myth and legend or in observable evidence and rational thought?  If there is truth to be found in the former, is it factual truth or symbolic?  The gothic romance may be factually impossible, but truthful in its symbolic representation of human fear, especially of the unknown, and the psychology of terror.  Irving’s version of the gothic tale seems to suggest that fear itself is the greatest enemy of the gullible. 

In his Postscript Irving seems to mock even the notion of symbolic truth to be found in romance.  The “story-teller” is asked what is “the moral of the story” and “what it went to prove.”  He responds with a nonsensical syllogism, as if to poke fun at the notion of a story having any point other than idle entertainment.  His interlocutor, who utterly misses the joke,  goes on  to opine “that he thought the story a little on  the extravagant—there were one or two points on which he had his doubts,” as if the story was to be taken as factual.  “’Faith, sir,’ replied the storyteller, ‘as to that matter, I don’t believe one half of it myself.’”  Thus Irving satirizes not only the seriousness of romance, but also those who confuse fact with fiction.

As with “Rip Van Winkle,” many of Irving’s readers, like the interlocutor in the Postscript, utterly miss the joke and read “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” as a tale of terror rather than a mock romance.

At the same time, though the “story-teller” in the Postscript seems to dismiss the notion of any seriousness to be found in an entertaining tale, Irving’s story, read a certain way, seems to mock, not only romance, but the whole supernatural world-view, in favor of enlightened, scientific rationalism.

What Irving seems to miss is the possibility of “truth” being larger than mere “fact” and the value of romance, myth, legend, and fable as embodiments of larger truths about human experience, not just pointless tales for nothing more than idle entertainment.

Just as “Rip Van Winkle,” despite Irving’s mockery, conveys a universal story of human transformation, the loss of self, and its rediscovery, so “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” imparts a sense of universal karma, as Ichabod becomes the victim of his own irrational fears.  Unless you think he really was spirited away by the headless horseman, in which case the story expresses a timeless fear—our human fear of the unknown, a fear that even the sophisticated, urbane, and wholly rational Washington Irving probably experienced from time to time.

"Too Much Happiness"

Not only does Alice Munro write short stories as complicated as novels (see blog post May 18, 2012), she wrote a “short story” based on the actual biography of Sophia Kovalevsky, the first woman in Europe to receive a Ph.D. (in mathematics), the first woman to be “appointed to a full professorship in Northern Europe” and “one of the first females to work for a scientific journal as an editor” (Wikipedia).  It would take considerable research to decide to what extent “Too Much Happiness” is really fiction and to what extent it might be classified as “creative non-fiction.” 

Regardless, Sophia Kovalevsky makes a fascinating study.  Not only was she a brilliant mathematician, she was also a novelist, and she co-wrote a play called The Struggle for Happiness, a title which better fits her life than does the title of Alice Munro’s story.  However, “Too much happiness” is said to have been the actual last words of Sophia Kovalevsky.

The phrase is cryptic.  Can there be too much happiness?  Is the tone sincere? Ironic? Is it part of her drug-induced, deathbed delirium?  The story (and the biography) seems to be more about a woman whose pursuit of happiness is repeatedly being derailed.  Denied a university education as a woman in her home country of Russia, she engaged in a marriage of convenience in order to get the required husband’s (or father’s) signature to study abroad.  Though she achieves academic success, as a woman, she is denied employment as a professor until later in life, when she receives a visiting professorship at Stockholm University in Sweden.

After she falls in love with her husband and bears their child, he later commits suicide.  After caring for their daughter for a year, she puts the child in the care of her sister in order to pursue her career in mathematics. 

In middle age she falls in love again, but the relationship is rocky, and though they vow to marry “in the spring” (of 1891), she contracts pneumonia on her train trip back to Stockholm and dies shortly thereafter. 

Her life represents the classic woman’s conflict between professional career and personal relationships.  From a Freudian perspective it is the conflict of ego and power vs. love and pleasure.  Only society seems to be set up so that men can reasonably expect to achieve both, whereas women are expected to choose.  Sophia tries to achieve both, only to be thwarted by social convention, circumstance, and time.

Based on the biographical accounts, it is fair to say that “Too Much Happiness” is factually accurate.  However, Munro gives the story her own shape.  Sophia’s last words have been documented, but the prediction of her own death, however playful, that occurs at the beginning of the story may be fictional.  Strolling through a Paris cemetery with her mid-life lover, Sophia recalls the superstition that visiting a cemetery on New Year’s Day presages one’s death before the end of that year.  “One of us will die this year,"Sophia pronounces, and the story ends with her death on February 10, 1891. 

During her train trip back to Stockholm, she visits her late sister’s husband and son and her academic mentor and his two sisters, all the while flashing back to her first discovery of trigonometry, her efforts to educate herself in mathematics, her marriage, her professional achievements, her family relationships, motherhood, the loss of her husband and sister, and her mid-life affair with Maksim.  Thus her life is presented as a retrospective as she travels from her long-distance lover back to her home and place of work.

The word “happiness” appears four times in the story, once at the end in her deathbed last words and  three times on one page when she writes her friend and former classmate of her impending marriage to Maksim: “…it is to be happiness after all.  Happiness after all.  Happiness.”

The word “happy” appears four times:  On an occasion when Maksim rejects her saying she “should make her way back to Sweden…she should be happy where her friends were waiting for her,” ending with a “jab” that her “little daughter” would have need of her.  On another when her teenage nephew expresses no more ambition in life than to “be an omnibus boy and call out the stations,” and Sophia replies, “Perhaps you would not always be happy calling out the stations.”  Again, when telling her former mentor of her upcoming marriage, she says, “Meine Liebe, I order you, order you to be happy for me.”  And finally, in a flashback to her first discovery of trigonometry when she recalls, “She was not surprised then, though intensely happy.”

Two of the four uses of “happy” refer to her personal life and two to the happiness found in work, as if true happiness is found in balancing both.  The repetition of “happiness” when writing to her friend about marrying Maksim seems to tip the scale in favor of the personal. Had she found “too much happiness” in her work to the detriment of her personal life?  Was the hope of finding happiness in both “too much” to wish for? We can speculate on the meaning of her last words, but the title of Munro’s story seems ironic, for, more often than not, Sophia seems to fall far short of “too much happiness.”

And there is always the possibility that the drug a doctor gives her on the train, a drug which “brought solace…when necessary, to him,” might have elevated her mood to a state of euphoria, such that, indeed, just before her death, it felt like “too much happiness.”

Her final delirium also included references to her “husband,” confused with Bothwell, who had been accused but acquitted of murdering the consort of Mary Queen of Scots before marrying her himself, possibly by force and subterfuge.  Is this an association of marriage with the deception, violence, and distrust that had accompanied her own actual and hoped for marriages?

She also talked about her novel and a “new story,” in which she hoped to “discover what went on” under the “pulse in life,” something “Invented, but not.”  She found herself “overflowing with ideas…of a whole new breadth and importance and yet so natural and self-evident that she couldn’t help laughing.”  The language suggests, not only the euphoria of literary creation, but also, perhaps, that “intense” happiness she associated with mathematical discovery.

Kovalevsky had made the connection between art and science in a quote which Alice Munro uses as a headnote to her story:  “Many persons who have not studied mathematics confuse it with arithmetic and consider it a dry and arid science.  Actually, however, this science requires great fantasy.”

Is there any wonder that the literary Alice Munro would find fodder for fiction in the actual biography of a mathematician who, not only linked fantasy and science, but was also a novelist and playwright? Thus does the real become unreal and the unreal become real, the truth become fiction and fiction become truth.

The Tempest in Tucson

On January 1 a new law went into effect in Arizona prohibiting K-12 classes that “promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment toward a race or class of people, are designed primarily for pupils of one ethnic group, or advocate ethnic solidarity.”  The purpose of the law is to eliminate the ethnic studies curriculum in Tucson public schools.  (Read more: http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/2011/01/01/20110101arizona-ethnic-studies-ban.html#ixzz1kVeUY0j5.) 

 Among the works that is taught in this curriculum is Shakespeare’s The Tempest.  Though the Tucson administration denies the book has been banned, high school teacher Curtis Acosta was told not to teach the play using the “nexus of race, class and oppression” or “issues of critical race theory.” 

 “What is very clear is that ’The Tempest’ is problematic for our administrators due to the content of the play and the pedagogical choices I have made,” Acosta said in an interview. “In other words, Shakespeare wrote a play that is clearly about colonization of the new world and there are strong themes of race, colonization, oppression, class and power that permeate the play, along with themes of love and redemption.”

(http://www.salon.com/2012/01/18/tucson_says_banished_books_may_return_to_classrooms/singleton/#comments)

 This stunning violation of academic freedom and crude imposition of ideological control over public school curriculum spurred me to reread Shakespeare’s mysterious final play and review some of the history of its critical reception and interpretation.

 Since its first production in 1611 (just four years after Jamestown was founded) The Tempest has been read theologically, mythically, aesthetically, biographically, psychologically, as well as politically.  One of the earliest political interpretations of the play is found in Leslie Fiedler’s 1973 essay “Caliban as the American Indian.”  However, the connections of the play to its historical context would have been recognized by its contemporaries.

 Its allusions to contemporary travel narratives of a Virginia Company expedition to Jamestown in 1608 are well established in scholarship.  The flagship of this fleet was separated from the rest and, having failed to arrive in Jamestown, was presumed to be lost.  Nearly a year later the admiral and sailors of the flagship arrived in two small boats, having run aground on the island of Bermuda, where they found food, shelter, and wood to build their boats, despite the site’s reputation as an “Isle of Devils.”  This adventure became sensational news in England, and in Act I, scene ii, of The Tempest, Ariel makes explicit reference to “the still-vexed Bermoothes” (always-stormy Bermudas).

 It would have also been widely recognized among educated contemporaries that “Caliban” is an anagram of “cannibal” (not necessarily meaning eater of human flesh in this context), and that this sub-human character constitutes a refutation of Montaigne’s well-known essay “Of Cannibals,” translated into English in 1603.  This essay is now widely understood as a source of the “noble savage” image of American Indians and the utopian view of the “New World,” in which American Indian society is represented as a kind of ideal state.  Gonzalo’s description of his ideal commonwealth in Act II, scene I, of The Tempest echoes the very same language of Montaigne’s description.

 In addition, at a time when the transatlantic slave trade is at its height, Shakespeare presents both Ariel and Caliban as slaves to Prospero.   It is difficult to deny the connection between Shakespeare’s play and the larger historical context.  In order to avoid “the nexus of race, class, and oppression” must teachers in Tucson avoid teaching The Tempest, ignore history entirely while teaching it, or distort history by treating the “New World” metaphor strictly in positive terms and Prospero as a benevolent slave owner so as to avoid creating resentment against white Europeans? Presumably, the malevolent, revengeful characteristics of Caliban, an indigenous creature enslaved by Prospero, would have to be ignored in order to avoid creating resentment against racial groups that have been historically enslaved.  In other words some of the most obvious features of the text would have to be distorted.

 Like most European literature of Shakespeare’s time, The Tempest is Eurocentric, aristocratic and patriarchal in its world view.  Under the Arizona law, that world view could presumably not be critiqued for fear of creating resentment toward Europeans, European-Americans, aristocrats, and men.  On the other hand, that world view could not be approved for fear of creating resentment toward non-Europeans, non-European-Americans, commoners, and women.  Pity the poor teacher trying to navigate those shoals!  Better to avoid the text entirely than create one’s own pedagogical shipwreck in the classroom.

 Not surprisingly, The Tempest is a far more complex and ambiguous text than any crude political ideology, and it offers a study in power that Arizona legislators, Tucson administrators, and teachers could learn from.

 First, it accurately reflects two competing European visions of the “New World.” On the one hand, it is a Utopia, as Montaigne described—a new Eden, a Promised Land, a “land flowing with milk and honey.”  On the other, it is a “hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men,” as William Bradford described Plymouth upon the Pilgrims’ first landing—“a wild and savage” place, primitive, barbaric.  If the magic island where Prospero and Miranda are exiled represents the new world, then the sub-human creature Caliban represents the savage view, while the airy spirit Ariel represents the idyllic view.  Ariel had been left imprisoned by Caliban’s witch-mother until Prospero arrived after her death, freed him, and then enslaved both Ariel and Caliban.  If Prospero represents the Europeans, then, allegorically, does this mean that Europeans have power over both the worst and best of the New World? When Prospero frees Ariel at the end of the play, having used him to achieve a redemptive resolution to the injustice done him by his enemies, does that mean that Europeans will bring out the best in the New World? By keeping Caliban enslaved at the end, does that mean that Europeans will keep the worst of the New World under control?  If so, then the play reinforces the contemporary European idea that western conquest had the providential purpose of improving the conquered lands.

 Perhaps, but Caliban’s grievances against Prospero are sympathetic, given Prospero’s harsh treatment of him. 

             This island’s mine by Sycorax my mother,

            Which thou takst from me.  When thou cam’st first,

             Thou strok’st me, and made much of me; would’st give me

             Water with berries in’t; and teach me how

             To name the bigger light, and how the less,

             That burn by day and night. And then I loved thee

             And showed thee all the qualities o’ th’ isle,

             The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile.

            Cursed be I that did so! All the charms

            Of Sycorax—toads, beetles, bats, light on you!

            For I am all the subjects that you have,

             Which first was mine own king; and here you sty me

            In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me

The rest o’ th’ island.  (Act I, scene ii)

And later Caliban expresses his Ariel-like, spiritual side:

                Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,

               Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.

               Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

                 Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices

                 That, if I then had waked after long sleep,

                 Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,

               The clouds methought would open and show riches

                 Ready to drop upon me, that, when I waked,

                 I cried to dream again. (Act III, scene iii)

 Thus, if Caliban represents the indigenous people of the new world, then the play does not entirely represent them in an unsympathetic light.

 Still, Ariel earns his freedom at the end of the play by obeying Prospero’s orders, while Caliban must do penance for his plot against Prospero, and, perhaps if he reforms himself, can earn his freedom as well.  Liberty, it seems, is not a natural right but a privilege to be conferred by one of greater power.

 Prospero, himself, had lost his freedom, when his brother, Antonio, usurped his throne as King of Milan and cast him, with his daughter, Miranda, away on the sea to die. Even royalty cannot rest secure in either their liberty or their power.  Prospero and Miranda survive, however, having been shipwrecked on the magic island, where Prospero continues with his studies of the magical arts, educating Miranda, and using Caliban and Ariel as slave labor.  When Prospero uses his powers to cause the shipwreck of his brother and his co-conspirator, the Duke of Naples, and bring them under the control of his magic on the island, he does not seek revenge.  On the contrary, he arranges for the Duke’s son, Ferdinand, and Miranda to fall in love, and then, after allowing the others to believe Ferdinand has drowned, arranges for a reunion and for the redemption of his enemies through the power of his forgiveness.  In the end the impending marriage of Ferdinand and Miranda symbolizes the restoration of both family and political harmony, as Prospero resumes his “proper” place on the throne.  Of course, Shakespeare’s version of family and political harmony is based on what in his day was considered the natural order of gender and class, a patriarchal and aristocratic “great chain of being,” with men ruling women, and aristocracy, with its own ranking order, ruling commoners.

 The treatment of power in the play relies on this hierarchical world view.  Order in the world depends upon each level in the great chain of being keeping its place.  When a lower level seeks to dominate a higher level, disorder and destruction break out.  Thus when Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo allow themselves to be ruled by their physical craving for wine, they become foolish, greedy, vengeful, and violent.  It was   selfish ambition that led Antonio and Alonso to overthrow Prospero from his rightful throne and establish an alliance that maintained their political rule.  On the other hand, it was Prospero’s neglect of his political responsibilities that contributed to his downfall.  Prospero’s restoration to his rightful place partly depends upon his recognition of having neglected “worldly ends, all dedicated/To closeness [seclusion] and the bettering of (his) mind….” (Act I, scene ii)  Each place in the great chain of being has a responsibility appropriate to that place and failure to execute that responsibility likewise results in disorder.  Prospero’s pursuit of knowledge, however, leads to the development of his intellectual and magical powers, which in turn enable him to regain his political power.  In addition to physical, social, and intellectual power, the play demonstrates the power of romantic love as Miranda and Ferdinand fall under each other’s spell, the power of filial devotion as Alonso refuses to give up Ferdinand for dead and insists that his compatriots help search for him, the supernatural power represented by Ariel and the island’s barely heard music that even Caliban responds to, and finally the power of compassion, forgiveness, and redemption, as Prospero, once he has his enemies in his power, pardons them rather than taking revenge.

 Today, democratic notions of equality and freedom have replaced the Shakespearean aristocratic world view, but we do expect individuals to earn their place in the world, as Ariel had to earn his freedom and Propero had to earn back his throne, and we distinguish between the kind of freedom that causes harm to others and the responsible exercise of freedom that contributes to the well-being of all.  Similarly, though we still live in a social hierarchy, we value power-sharing and the appropriate use of social control such that it benefits the general welfare, not the individual wielder of power.

 Do teachers of The Tempest appropriately use their power in the classroom to convey the full complexity and ambiguity of the play or do they use the play to advance a narrow ideological agenda?  Do Tucson administrators respect the work that teachers have done to earn their positions and their academic freedom? Do they have the right to dictate a teacher’s pedagogy and curricular choices in order to advance their own narrow ideological agenda? Do Arizona lawmakers have the right to deny an ethnic group the opportunity to learn its history and cultural traditions, again, to advance the interests of another ethnic group that happens to have more social power?  If their goal is social cohesion among ethnic groups, do they promote that cohesion by the raw exercise of social control?

 There are lessons in The Tempest for all parties involved and for all who would read, learn, and act with wisdom and compassion rather than with ignorant authoritarianism.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn II

Race is not the only controversy that has swirled around Huck Finn. When it was first published in 1884, it was primarily known as a “boy’s book” and was attacked and sometimes banned because of its perceived glorification of a “bad boy,” who smoked, and stole, and used bad grammar.

Contemporary feminist readers have seen in its “quest for freedom” and “coming of age” themes a reinforcement of the “masculine myth” (see Judith Fetterley , The Resisting Reader…, 1978, and others) in which the male hero seeks to free himself from the females in his life (mother, wife, potential wife, etc.) who would domesticate and “civilize” him. (This myth is still alive and well in our own day.) From this perspective, the hero’s “coming of age” is understood in terms of achieving independence from those social forces (often represented by women) that threaten to emasculate him.

With a couple of exceptions, Nancy Walker (“Reformers and Young Maidens…” 1985) finds the women characters in Huck Finn to be based on popular stereotypes of women as either moral reformers of men or as pure, innocent, “sweet” young damsels in need of either protection or rescue. One exception is Judith Loftus who is smart enough to see through Huck’s attempted disguise as a girl and who offers to help Huck rather than turn him in.

The scene with Judith Loftus is seen by another feminist critic, Myra Jehlen (“Reading Gender…” 1990), as evidence of the novel’s consciousness of gender as a socially constructed performance.

Queer theorists have noted that the masculine myth of freedom and independence involves, not only an escape from women’s attempts to form and reform men, but also as homosocial, if not homoerotic, experience of male bonding in a world free of women. (Fiedler, Love and Death... 1948) Christopher Looby (“’Innocent Homosexuality’…” 1995) sees the Judith Loftus disguise scene as just one in a whole series of transvestite scenes in which male characters dress as women, which constitute a motif of “gender masquerade” that provides “an alibi for potentially transgressive male-male encounters.”

So, (1) is Huck Finn a quintessential “boy’s book” representing the psyche and experience of “natural” boyhood when freed from social constraints? Research into the human genome does support the notion of natural gender differences, but research also reveals multiple exceptions and supports the role that social construction plays in gender expression and behavior. Whether you see Huck as an archetypal “boy” or a stereotypical “boy” may depend on whether you lean more toward nature or nurture in explaining gender. My question would be, how do you explain the appeal of the river raft adventure to generations of female readers, who seem just as drawn to the quest for freedom, independence, and autonomy as males?

(2) Is there an implicit misogyny in the masculine frontier myth of freedom and independence from women? The powerful role of nurture has historically steered women into more domestic social roles and has held them to a higher standard of “virtue,” whereas men have been more encouraged and expected to pursue independence outside the domestic sphere and outside strict moral codes. While there may be some genetic basis to this difference, there is no question in my mind that society has taken a general tendency and enforced it as a prescription for gender-based socially acceptable behavior.

There is also no question in my mind that, as a result, healthy gender relations are disrupted, and to the extent that men feel pressured or seduced by women into artificial roles, misogyny can certainly result. Obviously there are many other reasons for misogyny as well since patriarchy and male supremacy send very strong messages of female inferiority. So, yes, to the extent that women in Huck Finn represent all that restricts Huck’s freedom and autonomy, there is an undercurrent of misogyny.

(3) Does the novel reinforce and perpetuate popular 19th century stereotypes of women? Yes, Nancy Walker documents this aspect of the novel very well.

(4) Does the novel offer any alternative female images? Yes, Judith Loftus and Mary Jane Wilks do not fit the common female stock characters. They are active and assertive without being controlling of Huck, and they show more ability to take care of themselves without relying on a male rescuer.

(5) Do the multiple gender disguises, particularly the Judith Loftus scene, in which she instructs Huck in how to “act” like a girl, undermine essentialist readings and expose the social construction of gender. Possibly, but I doubt it is self-conscious and that anyone but a post-modernist reader would notice. The Loftus scene could be also be read as reinforcing an essentialist reading, since Huck has a tough time acting like anything but a “boy.”

(6) Or, do those multiple scenes of gender disguise mask a homoerotic subtext? Given the frequency of these scenes, most of which occur in an all-male environment, and given what we know happens sexually in all male environments, I find this claim persuasive.

(7) Does the male bonding in the novel promote a homosocial, if not homoerotic, message? To the extent that male-male friendship is preferred over male-female relationships, yes; this does not seem to be an extravagant claim.

(8) Do all these questions over-analyze a text that is “just a story” told for entertainment purposes? If we answer “yes,” then are we trivializing the novel? Yes, Twain wrote that anyone “attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.” But, is this (obviously exaggerated) statement to be taken a face value or is it tongue-in-cheek? It could just as well be read as an ironic statement and/or an attempt by Twain to deflect criticism, especially from readers who might be offended at the way white Southerners are depicted. If the novel is to be taken seriously, if it is worthy of being taught in schools and held up as an American classic, then it is worthy of being analyzed as a novel of serious significance, not dismissed as mere entertainment.

(9) Is Huck Finn a sexist novel? Heterosexist? So, yes, it is a sexist novel, though not without redeeming merit, even in the eyes of feminist readers. And, yes and no; it is both a heterosexist novel and one that can be read as homosocial and even homoerotic.

Controversy does not have to lead to polarization if one takes a "both...and" approach rather than an "either...or" approach and preserves what is of value in each contrasting position.