ABSTRACT
Recent criticism of Mark Twain’s “The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg” has primarily concerned itself with answering Gladys Bellamy’s charge that the moralism of the story is philosophically inconsistent with its determinism. Pascal Covici, Jr., perhaps more interested in the psychological than the philosophical basis of free will, holds that “Hadleyburg” “has for its theme not the corrupting … but the awakening of the town to a sense of its innate depravity” and claims that the townsfolk welcome exposure and finally achieve a moral victory. In a more direct response to Bellamy, Clinton S.Burhams, Jr., feels that “Twain’s determinism,… far from being inconsistent with his moralism, is the source of its real values. In his concern… with the relations between conscience and the heart, he views the moral values of conscience as determined by environment, by training; and one of his major aims is to show that such training… must be empirical, not merely prescriptive.” Taking a slightly different tack, Henry B. Rule explicates the story in the light of R. W. B. Lewis’s The American Adam, seeing Hadleyburg as “an ironic Eden… diseased by hypocrisy and money-lust” and claiming that “in Twain’s treatment of the Eden myth, Satan plays the role of savior rather than corrupter,” for the Stranger/Satan figure initiates the process whereby the Richardses and the town are morally reformed. Responding to Rule, Helen E.
