“If Mark Twain had a Sister”: Gender‐Specific Values and Structure in Daddy Long‐Legs

In re-evaluating the relationship of Huckleberry Finn to the canon of American Literature and its influence in What Was Literature?, Leslie Fiedler expands on his well-known concept of Huck as the archetype of male freedom. Women, he notes, also identify with Huck, and concludes that the women who have taken to the road in independent lives prove that the American hero is not limited to one sex. The “myths of Home as Heaven and Home as Hell do not divide, as certain male critics (including me) have been tempted to believe, women from men and popular fiction from art novels. We are all divided against ourselves, irremediably ambivalent on this score, as both best sellers and the canonical ‘great books’ of our tradition reveal” (Fiedler 239). This evaluation may well be accurate for today’s audience, as indeed some recent feminist novels indicate, but the readership of Twain’s time was far more genderdistinct.’ The lives of women and men in the United States until very recently were so diametrically different that although the goals of independence and freedom came to be similar, particularly at the beginning of this century, the means to achieve these goals were antithetical. This antithesis results in different plot strategies in the basic novel structure which can be seen in a comparison of Huck Finn (1885) with D a d d y Long-Legs (1912) by Jean Webster. How do I dare to compare the novel from which all American literature has descended with the frothy novel that brings titters to the lips of serious scholars? Although Webster was Twain’s grand-niece, I’m not assuming here that kinship ties justify such a comparison. Rather it is the comparable quality and popularity of the two novels that facilitate the study of the gender and the political differences between two somewhat similar relatives. This situation is as proximate to laboratory conditions for the scientific study of this subject that literature can afford. A comparison of Mark Wain’s HucWeberry Finn with Jean Webster’s Daddy Long-Legs reveals numerous structural and thematic parallels that indicate similar mythic ~0urce.s.~ The protagonists, both orphans abused by their primary guardians and redeemed in their relationship with another caring adult, follow similar uncharted quests for individual fulfillment. Both protagonists display a similar combination of personality characteristics-naivete, resourcefulness, insightfulness, intelligence and moral integrity. They discover the same Emersonian principles of selfreliance, they perceive their individuality in its relationship to society, and their styles of selfexpression are original, confessional and colloquial, influenced by their surroundings as much as their unique personalities. Furthermore, the continuing popularity of the two novels, while not equal, has been ~omparable.~ But while Huckleberry Finn has been canonized by authoritative figures as Hemingway, Fiedler, Chase, Smith, Trilling and the rest, Daddy Long-Legs has been relegated to the children’s shelf and has received no critical attention whatsoever. Through a delineation and exploration of the differences in these two novels, it is possible to examine some of the reasons for canonization and exclusion. Whatever the reasons for canonization and exclusion, one result is that the average scholar is doubtless familiar with the plot of Huck Finn, but may recall only vaguely something of Daddy Long-Legs from childhood or Hollywood, necessitating a preliminary review of the narrative. Daddy Long-Legs opens with a brief expository introduction describing how the protagonist, Jerusha Abbott, an 18-year-old working inmate of a dreary and dependent orphanage, is granted a college education by an anonymous trustee who is impressed with her literary talents. Because she is to be trained to become a writer, the trustee requests monthly letters as progress reports. The novel then resumes in the epistolary genre, since the trustee hasby providing a literary education and an audience-