Pynchons Problem

[alice wellintown]

> contextually, Huck was raised mostly by a single, alcoholic, male
> parent...narrative reasons for choosing that - imho - was to maximize
> his outsider status, and, yes, freedom from societal conventions
> which, sure, were often emphasized by females who embraced those
> conventions such as slavery

That is not emphasized in the text. The raising, what raising there
is, is described, from the start, as woman's work: The Widow Douglas
she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me."
Pap don't do no raising. He don't abide no raising up.

 Jim does the raising once they are on the run, but Huck don't take
well to being learned by no nigger, so the lessons are lost on him.
He, like Benny and Henry Adams, fails to learn lesson one. At the end,
he stills thinks of Jim as white on the inside.

> --- I think we do Huck, and Twain, a grave wrong to put the cart
> before the horse and have him objecting to women per se, rather than
> the societal conventions they enforced!

Twain doesn't show all that much interest in complex, dynamic females.
It aint that he can't make them; he can and does. Roxana is one. But
Twain, like Pynchon, preferes girls to woman. So Joan is another girl.