My Emmeline

Emmeline Grangerford occupies a grand total of three paragraphs in the back half of Chapter 17 of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Huck never actually meets her, she has no discernible impact upon the plot, and she is never discussed again. She is also, without question, one of my favorite characters in all of American literature.

When we meet Emmeline, we are at something like the early-middle of the novel, which runs to 43 chapters in sum. Huck and Jim have been travelling down the river together for several chapters at this point, and they recently overshot the mouth of the Ohio during a heavy fog. Shortly thereafter, they narrowly avoid being killed by a steamboat headed upstream, and in the ensuing chaos, they are separated and Huck winds up being taken in by the Grangerford family, while Jim finds shelter (and, more importantly, a hiding place) in the slave quarters.

The bulk of the Grangerford sequence is given over to the family’s feud with the nearby Shepherdson clan, which includes a star-crossed lovers subplot and, eventually, some of Twain’s most powerful writing about violence and trauma. But before all that, Twain gets an obvious kick out of using the Grangerfords to poke fun at the tackiness and aristocratic delusions of wealthy slave-holders in the antebellum South. Much of Chapter 17 depicts the raw tonnage of cheaply-made bric-a-brac scattered about the Grangerford house.[1] But by the end of the chapter Huck winds his way back to a set of framed crayon drawings by the family’s recently-deceased, artistically-inclined daughter, Emmeline.  

Huck says of these drawings that, “They was different from any pictures I ever see before; blacker, mostly, than is common.” Emmeline’s great subject matter is portraits of solitary women in various attitudes of despair, which are all given long titles including the word “Alas.” For instance, a drawing of a woman holding an opened letter and “mashing a locket with a chain to it against her mouth” is titled “And Art Thou Gone Yes Thou Art Gone Alas”, or another of a weeping girl holding a dead bird is called “I Shall Never Hear Thy Sweet Chirrup More Alas.” That last one always kills me. The Emmeline drawing which was illustrated in early editions of Huck Finn is an unfinished work in which a girl in a white gown is preparing to jump off a bridge, and Emmeline, unable to decide how to position the girl’s arms, had drawn three different options, but then had died before choosing which she preferred. Huck notes that “The young woman in the picture had kind of a nice sweet face, but there was so many arms it made her look too spidery, seemed to me.”

Emmeline is also a poet; she specializes in writing elegies whenever anyone in the town dies. Huck quotes in full her poem about a deceased child whose name, conveniently for the poem’s thudding iambics, is Stephen Dowling Bots. Emmeline spends several stanzas describing all the ways Stephen didn’t die, and then she concludes:

            Oh no. Then list with tearful eye,

            Whilst I his fate do tell.

            His soul did from this cold world fly,

            By falling down a well.

            They got him out and emptied him;

            Alas, it was too late;

            His spirit was gone for to sport aloft

            In the realms of the good and great.

“Emptied him.” Holy shit. Getting a laugh by having one of your characters create a ridiculous work of art is a long tradition, of course—think of A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Arrested Development—but I’m not sure anyone ever did it better than Twain. In 1885, Twain intended Emmeline’s poem as a parody of Julia A. Moore, “The Sweet Singer of Michigan,” who was sort of like Rupi Kaur if Rupi Kaur wrote shitty 19th-century common meter poems about dead babies rather than shitty 21st-century free verse poems built on the premise that self-help advice is art if you chop it into lines. But you don’t really need to catch the reference to get the joke—as long as there are humans there will be maudlin art, and as long as there are moody teenagers, there will be unbelievably terrible maudlin art. So don’t laugh too hard at Emmeline—you know you’ve got your own ancient notebook or sketchbook or cassette tape of hormonal garbage tucked away in a drawer somewhere. Lord knows I do.

And on that note, what I think makes the Emmeline passage moving rather than just funny, mean, and a touch misogynistic (though it is all those things) is Huck’s reaction to Emmeline’s work. Twain, obviously, is making fun of her, and there are a few choice one-liners at her expense, most notably, “Everybody was sorry she died...But I reckoned, that with her disposition, she was having a better time in the graveyard.” But Huck’s overall response is much more vexed. He admits that the pictures bum him out sometimes (specifically they “give [him] the fan-tods”), but he also spends lots of time reading her scrapbook, and he thinks it isn’t right that after Emmeline wrote poems for so many dead people, no one bothered to write a poem for her. “So I tried to sweat out a verse or two myself,” Huck says, “but I couldn’t seem to make it go, somehow.”

This is almost impossibly sweet. Huck’s desire to commemorate Emmeline arguably cuts against the grain of the scene, inasmuch as Emmeline’s most obvious function is comic relief. There are really three different sensibilities running around this scene, or, to be more specific, three different ways of approaching art: Twain’s brutally withering satire, Huck’s naive receptivity and generosity, and Emmeline’s guileless commitment to following her own muse. The passage works because any good reader has all three of those approaches somewhere inside themselves. The jokes are not, for the most part, explicitly stated, since they are in Huck’s voice and he is never openly cruel to Emmeline—indeed, you only catch that they are jokes if you have an ear for Twain’s irony. But at the same time, the irony only stings if you have enough of Emmeline in you to know the awkward, adolescent place which spawned those pictures and poems. We’ve all been embarrassingly open, and we’ve all been snide and sarcastic,[2] but hopefully we also have it in us to follow Huck’s example and be at least a little generous, and to appreciate that even failed creativity usually comes from a deeply human, vulnerable, and even beautiful place.

My students always seem to be a bit mystified about why Twain takes a several-page detour to talk about a character who isn’t even alive during the book, but they sometimes get more interested when I ask them to imagine Emmeline in their own high schools. For Emmeline is always with us. She’s a prototype of the goth kid, the emo kid. If Emmeline had been 15 in 1980, she would have been over the moon for Joy Division. Had she been 15 in the 2000’s, her Live Journal would have redefined what it means to be influenced by My Chemical Romance.[3] She’s Winona in Beetlejuice; she’s burning her old boy band posters; her mom is a “total bitch;” and God only knows what she’s scribbling in that notebook. Oh Emmelines of the world, may you always survive your Emmeline years.  

So I named this blog after Emmeline. I obviously want to be funny from time to time, so why not name it after something I find to be very funny? But I also want to remind myself to have the guts to put out into the world something I created, because even if what I write is a bit ridiculous, or if my reach exceeds my grasp, I might at some point connect to the right generous reader. Here’s hoping.

In the spirit of Huck the generous reader, my plan for the rest of the year is to write things celebrating my favorite stuff from the 2010’s. For the world as a whole, it’s been a “low, dishonest decade,” to quote a poem from a moment more ominous than our own, but there have been plenty of wonderful things. So for the next few weeks I’m going to appreciate them with as much openness as my cynical Show-Me heart can muster.

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[1] Speaking of bric-a-brac, the best recent event in my family is as follows. My mother was looking out to the window of our kitchen to try to locate my father, who was exactly where she’d left him. While she was looking, she accidentally knocked a papier-mache banana off the windowsill. “Oh!” she exclaimed, “The false banana has fallen!”

[2] I was pretty snide two paragraphs ago.

[3] The rule of threes dictates that I should make a Tik-Tok joke, but I don’t really understand what Tik-Tok is.