A classic, Mark Twain quipped, is “a book which
people praise and don't read.” The Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn is the rare classic that is highly
praised and widely read. Following World War II, it became
required reading in most of the nation’s middle
schools and high schools. It addressed many Cold War needs:
More than any other major work of nineteenth-century American
literature, its use of dialect and regional settings made
it seem authentically and distinctively American. In addition,
it spoke to the greatest contradiction in American history:
the existence of slavery and virulent racial prejudice
in a country dedicated to liberty and equality.
When we think of works of fiction that “changed
history” we typically envision works of social reform,
like Uncle Tom’s Cabin or The Jungle,
or of utopian vision, such as Looking Backward,
or of scathing cultural criticism, like 1984
or Animal Farm. But there are other, more subtle
ways that works of fiction can change history. These include
powerful critiques of the American dream, like The Great
Gatsby or Death of a Salesman, or metaphorical
explorations of the connections between past and present,
like The Crucible, the McCarthy era examination
of the Salem witch hunt. Huckleberry Finn is
all these and more. It is a picaresque tale of adventure,
a coming of age story, and a novel of escape and liberation
(from slavery and an abusive family life). It is also
a travelogue, a work of comic satire, sarcasm, and social
mockery, and an impassioned critique of progress, civilization,
and the cult of respectability. Equally important, it
is a brilliant work of history that shows how the past
illuminates and shapes the present.
Ernest Hemingway was right when he announced that all
modern American literature comes from Huckleberry
Finn. Although many previous novels had included
dialect (including Uncle Tom’s Cabin),
Huckleberry Finn is the first major novel in
which the narrator speaks in dialect. Unlike earlier works
of fiction in which the narrator speaks in refined language
and tells uplifting and ennobling stories, Twain’s
narrator speaks in a distinctly natural American voice.
Twain's novel is "Huck's autobiography," as
Twain put it in a letter to William Dean Howells, which
is significant because Twain is showing that moral authority
can come from a representative of “poor white trash,”
and a juvenile delinquent at that, which was, at the time,
something new in American culture. This is what prompted
Louisa May Alcott to condemn the novel: ''If Mr. [Samuel]
Clemens [Mark Twain] cannot think of something better
to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses, he'd best stop
writing for them,'' wrote the author of Little Women.
Huckleberry Finn is not only one of this country’s
undeniably great novels, it is also, perhaps, the most
entertaining. One of our first “buddy stories,”
Huckleberry Finn served as our prototypical tale
of interracial friendship. Similarly, long before there
were highways, it was the model for our later road novels
(like On the Road) or road movies (like "Easy
Rider" or "Thelma and Louise").
Yet from its publication in 1884 and 1885, Twain’s
novel has been subjected to bitter criticism. In the late
nineteenth century, the book was disparaged as coarse,
unrefined, irreverent, and vulgar. The Concord, Massachusetts
public library called it “trash of the veriest sort.”
In the late twentieth century, the novel was condemned
for its frequent use of racial expletives, its condescending
portrait of the runaway, Jim, and its misogyny, depicting
women either as nurturers or as controlling and repressive
figures. In fact, Huckleberry Finn, like the
greatest works of literature, is open-ended, offering
complex portrayals of race and gender (as evidenced by
repeated instances of cross-dressing), and a conclusion,
as we shall see, that is far more ambiguous than readers
sometime assume.
In interpreting a novel, it is often best to begin with
the title. Why, we might ask, did Twain name his title
character Huckleberry? In the late nineteenth century,
the word referred to an utterly insignificant person or
event. This is how Ralph Waldo Emerson used the term in
his 1862 eulogy for Henry David Thoreau: "Instead
of engineering for all America, he was the captain of
a huckleberry party.” Twain’s ironic point
was that precisely because Huck Finn was an outcast on
the margins of his society, he was able to perceive flaws
in his society that others could not.
Twain begins the book by telling his readers that they
should look for no plot or moral lessons. The novel’s
structure is episodic, and even though it is often read
as if it were a straightforward critique of slavery and
racial prejudice, it is much more problematic than that.
The book’s organizing metaphor is that of a journey.
Many of our most cherished myths and novels have been
built around the notion of a harrowing odyssey. These
include quest tales (such as the pursuit of the holy grail)
and the bildungsroman, which traces a character’s
moral and psychological development, from innocence and
inexperience to knowledge, and from childhood to maturity.
Like the other great novel that explores a trip along
a river, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,
the journey is not simply physical, but metaphysical.
It is a journey into the human psyche and the cultural
subconscious.
The novel’s overarching theme is how young Huck
has internalized his society’s racial prejudice
yet is able, at times, to rise above it. Huck uses the
word “nigger” – derogatory and offensive
in 1884 as it is today–150 times or so, and yet
is ultimately willing to go through Hell in order to help
Jim achieve freedom. In short, the book underscores the
extent to which individual and collective morality can
be contradictory, and that political beliefs and personal
behavior can be at odds. Huck hates abolitionists, and
yet in the book’s most poignant scene, the book’s
moral center, he apologizes to Jim for the indignities
he has inflicted. Admits Huck: “I done it and I
warn't ever sorry for it afterwards.” Yet this is
also a book without a clear, unambiguous hero.
Historians tend to read novels differently than literary
critics, focusing less on formal elements of narrative
and language than on themes and especially historical
context. Viewed through the lens of history, the novel
sheds a fascinating light on many subjects—and not
solely the subject of slavery. For one thing, the novel
rebuts the nostalgic notion that the past was a simpler,
more innocent time. Huckleberry Finn lays bare
the sordid underside of antebellum American life. Filled
with chicanery, greed, illiteracy, bigotry, and brutality,
including thirteen deaths, the novel presents us with
a rogues gallery of hucksters, charlatans, braggarts,
con men, and cheats. Huck’s father is a dissolute
degenerate who beats his son for going to school. Twain
himself was unable to romanticize or sentimentalize the
past—by the age of twelve, Twain had lost his father
and three siblings, and had watched as a slave was beaten
to death.
Huckleberry Finn is also our greatest example
of regional or “local color” writing, a genre
that flourished following the Civil War. The war ushered
in an era of centralization and organization building
that undermined the culture of the nation's unique regions.
Local color fiction documented the distinctive cultures
of those parts of the country that were being lost to
social and economic modernization, in this case, the culture
of the Mississippi River. And so the novel is a "people's
history" of a community and way of life that has
been lost to "progress," a concept that Twain
hated. Indeed, it is Twain's hatred of the idea of progress
that makes him a modern writer, and his exposure of the
illusions of progress makes him one of the nation’s
most incisive cultural critics.
The novel also tells us a great deal about the impact
of the Civil War on the American mind. Much of the serious
literature prior to the Civil War was, by later standards,
highly unrealistic. Especially influential were sentimental
domestic tales and romances, imaginative representations
of moral problems, rather than novelistic depictions of
social realities. The grim brutality of the war led authors
to experiment with more realistic forms of literature,
which were free of embellishment or idealization.
Today, controversy continues to rage over the question
of whether Huckleberry Finn is racist. This controversy
is compounded by certain myths that have been shown to
be false: That Twain fought for the Confederacy during
the Civil War and later deserted. Twain, whose parents
had owned and leased slaves, and whose father served on
a jury that sentenced two alleged abolitionists to twelve
years imprisonment, had, by the time he wrote Huckleberry
Finn, come to abhor racial prejudice. He had married
into an abolitionist family; had tried, unsuccessfully,
to publish articles about anti-Chinese prejudice in San
Francisco; and became friends with Frederick Douglass.
He even wrote a letter offering financial assistance to
one of the first African American law students at Yale.
At the novel’s very heart lies the conflict between
Huck Finn’s instincts and his conscience, which
had been deformed by his upbringing. It is often assumed
that the book can be read as a record of Huck’s
moral growth, as he overcomes his society’s prejudices,
risks damnation, and learns to respect Jim as an equal.
But the book’s much criticized conclusion complicates
any reading that suggests that Huck had overcome his society’s
racist values. Once off the raft, Huck backslides, and
once again plays pranks on Jim. On shore, the power of
race ultimately trumps justice, democracy, and friendship.
To reduce the book to a simple story of Huck’s triumph
over prejudice, is to strip the book of its moral complexity.
Literary interpretation changes drastically over time,
reflecting shifts in critical fashion and social circumstances.
Nothing better illustrates this principle than the changing
understanding of Huck Finn. He has been celebrated as
a symbol of youthful resourcefulness and spirited rambunctiousness
and decried as a rowdy, a racist, and reckless risk-taker.
One prominent literary critic argued that Huck’s
relationship with the fugitive slave Jim embodied a sublimated
homoerotic strain that runs through classic American literature;
another suggested that he was modeled on a black child
named Jimmy, whom Twain called "the most artless,
sociable and exhaustless talker I ever came across."
In our own era of diminishing expectations, Huck has been
interpreted as an abused child—illiterate, homeless,
beaten, neglected—and as a victim of attention deficit
hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) —fidgety, impulsive,
disruptive, and easily bored. For over a century, Huck
has served as a lightning rod for popular fantasies and
anxieties about childhood.
When the novel first appeared, reviewers frequently deemed
it a “boys book,” one of a growing number
of novels through which boys could vicariously experience
adventures that were impossible in their an increasingly
urban and industrial America. Today perhaps the novel’s
greatest significance lies in its conception of childhood,
as a time of risk, discovery, and adventure. Huck is no
innocent: He lies, steals, smokes, swears, and skips school.
He accepts no authority, not from his father or the Widow
Douglas or anyone else. And it is the twin images of a
perilous, harrowing odyssey of adventure and perfect freedom
from all restraints that so many readers find entrancing.
Bibliography
Emerson, Everett. Mark Twain: A Literary Life.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2000.
Hutchinson, Stuart, ed. Mark Twain: Tom Sawyer
and Huckleberry Finn. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1998.
Leonard, James S., ed. Making Mark Twain Work in
the Classroom. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.
Mensh, Elaine, and Harry Mensh. Black, White, &
Huckleberry Finn: Re-imagining the American Dream.
Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000.
Powers, Ron. Dangerous Waters: A Biography of the
Man Who Became Mark Twain. New York: HarperCollins,
1999.
Steven Mintz, a historian at Columbia
University and director of the Columbia Graduate School
of Arts and Sciences Teaching Center, would like to
express his profound debt to John Stauffer of Harvard
University for sharing his many insights into the novel.
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