Huckleberry Finn and Slavery - Research Paper Example

Huckleberry Finn and Slavery Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835 in Florida, Missouri, the author widely known as Mark Twain has been one of America’s most famous authors for more than one hundred years. ‘Forced’ to leave school at the age of 12 following his father’s death, Clemens supported himself in the newspaper industry until he fell in love with Mississippi river boats. For several years, he worked very successfully as a river pilot on the Mississippi until his younger brother’s death caused him to leave the profession. “An important part of a river pilot’s craft is knowing the waters and depths, which, for the mighty Mississippi and her reefs, snags, and mud are ever changing. To ‘mark twain’ is to sound the depths and deem them safe for passage, the term adopted by Clemens as his pen name in 1863” (Merriman, 2006). A humorist, a philosopher, a lecturer, an essayist and a writer of stories and poems, Twain infused his stories with a call to a higher understanding, urging his readers to plunge the depths of their understanding and adapt their behavior to a more accurate reflection of their inner beliefs (Railton, 2007). As a children’s writer, Twain is brilliant at providing short entertaining stories that engage children’s minds, encouraging them to think critically about the reading as well as their own understandings. He does this through a multi-layered approach that includes language choice, tone, character development and story structure that all serve to entertain at the same time that they instruct. Through his work, Twain consistently questions the social norms of his time, such as the notion that Indians are inherently savage and evil or that black people are meant to be slaves. Unequal race relations was one of the principle themes in his writings as he constantly questions the true measure of a man and illustrates how the color of a man’s skin has little to do with his ability to do right or do wrong. Whether discussing the differences between people of color and whites or the relative merits of two distinct individuals of equal social distinction, “the thrust was difficult to miss: nurture, not nature, was the key to social status. The features of the black man that provided the stuff of prejudice – manner of speech for example – were, to Twain, indicative of nothing other than the conditioning that slavery imposed on its victims” (Carter, 2008). These sentiments had been present throughout his writing career, but with the stamp of success to validate his words, “Mark Twain began to lay bare truths about racial oppression with a particular vigor, using a new and democratic literary language that would forever change American prose” (Tita, 1998). He also worked to encourage critical thinking within his readers as a means of helping them see for themselves where society’s morals and values fail to live up to their own expectations. One of his most popular and more controversial books has been Huckleberry Finn. In working to defend the book during a recent push to have it removed from a school’s required reading list, one expert in children’s literature argued the ways that the book works to teach critical thinking skills in its content and through its literary elements (Wascoe, 2007). Twain struggled to always question the values of his society, consistently pointing out contradictions in logic or unthinking acceptance of a norm that no longer makes sense. Finally, Twain couched his stories in the proper vernacular of the region from which they came, faithfully capturing the lessons contained within, rather than attempting to rephrase them in the stilted language of the north. Perhaps the best way to illustrate these elements of Twain’s work is to examine this text more fully. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, one of his most popular novels, Twain questions social norms and values as he tells the story of a young boy named Huckleberry Finn and an escaped slave named Jim. The plot flows naturally as a frame story as the two characters drift down the Mississippi River on a homemade raft in the mid-1800s. The story begins at a time when Huck has been taken in by two elderly women who attempt to provide him with decent education and civilized manners. Even though society has been content to leave Huck to mostly raise himself while his drunken father is around, they still expect him to “wear proper clothes” and “stop smoking” like a proper child. When this crisis arrives in the form of his father, Huck fakes his death and escapes to a nearby island, intending to hide out there perhaps forever. However, soon after teaming up with the escaped slave Jim, he realizes that they can’t stay on the island so the duo begins their trek downriver. As they travel, they must deal with a variety of situations including finding dead bodies in floating houses, robbers on sinking steamboats, slave catchers, separation, family feuds, con men and final reconciliation with Tom. A crisis of decision is faced in each situation while time spent traveling provides time for reflection and application of lessons learned. Although Huck begins the story actually considering whether he should turn Jim in as an escaped slave himself, his reflections on Jim as they travel increasingly acknowledge Jim’s status as a human being. For example, after playing a mean trick on his friend, Huck admits, “it was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger – but I done it and warn’t ever sorry for it afterward, neither. I didn’t do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn’t hone that one if I’d’a’ knowed it would make him feel that way” (Twain 118). When they encounter the slave catchers, Huck again debates giving up Jim, but decides to lie instead to save him and when Jim is actually being held as an escaped slave, Huck does everything in his power to secure his release. Thus, in this story, Twain instructs the reader through his development of character rather than through tone of voice. From the opening lines, Huckleberry Finn is understood to be highly uneducated and uncivilized but still highly opinionated regarding his view of the world he lives in. Throughout the opening chapter, Huck’s uncivilized ways are contrasted against the genteel ways of the Widow Douglas and her sister, Miss Watson. While Huck prefers his “old rags and my sugar-hogshead” (Twain 2), admitting that he is “so ignorant and so kind of low-down and ornery” (Twain 17), the older ladies insist upon him being dressed decently and gaining some book learning. They spend a great deal of their time trying to teach him the ‘proper’ ways of society, including his manners while in society, his academic subjects and his religious duties. According to the Widow Douglas, Huck “must help other people and do everything I could for other people and look out for them all the time and never think about myself” (Twain 17). In spite of this, though, the women own slaves and have discussed the possibility of selling one of them, Jim, down the river for the money. They don’t consider it wrong to secure their own welfare through placing another person in jeopardy and they don’t seem to worry overmuch about the reputation of the person in line to purchase Jim to be sure he is at least going to a decent place. After he has managed to survive in the real world under the thumb of an abusive alcoholic father on his own and without needing to follow any of the niceties of the civilized world, it is hard for him to accept without question rules such as using a fork or a knife when eating or whether it is right for one to own slaves. By the end of his story, Huck has rejected the contradictory ‘rules’ of his society in order to live more in tune with his inner moral compass. Although Huck questions some of the seemingly meaningless niceties he’s supposed to observe as silly or shallow, Twain builds on his audience’s expectations that society, with all of its education, manners, fashion and wealth, is the preferred and superior state. Huck quickly becomes more disillusioned with society as the story progresses. He perceives that while Tom Sawyer has “all the marks of a Sunday-school” (Twain 21), he has none of the associated values or depth expected of a person of his station. Huck’s maturity is revealed when he reassesses his previous thoughts regarding the sophisticated behavior of his friend Tom Sawyer. “Here was a boy that was respectable and well brought up … and yet here he was, without any more pride, or rightness, or feeling, than to stoop to this business, and himself a shame and his family a shame, before everybody. I couldn’t understand it no way at all. It was outrageous. …” (Twain, 224-25). Although he recognizes that Tom has had all the benefits of proper society and upbringing, Huck also realizes that Tom is very immature because he refuses to put his talents to good use. This reveals Huck’s growing sense of social responsibility. It is an observation and a measuring stick that Huck will apply to much of the society he meets in his adventures. In direct contrast to the moralities of society and the contradictions apparent within the actual social group, Huck’s trip down the river gives him a chance to consider the more ‘natural’ approach to morality in which life tends to operate more along a simple golden rule. While the courts are willing to throw Huck back to his father despite the better judgment of some of the townspeople, Jim strives to protect Huck from the ugliness of the world, such as when they discovered Pap’s dead body in the floating house and Jim wouldn’t let Huck look at it. As Huck hears the murderers planning to allow their former partner to drown on the wrecked steamship, he decides it is right and fair to maroon all three men, particularly when he and Jim discover they will need a way off the boat. However, because of his still developing sense of fairness, he then feels guilty about the action and contrives to send someone after them. “I was feeling ruther comfortable on accounts of taking all this trouble for that gang, for not many would ‘a’ done it” (Twain 103). As he drifts down the river and gains a broader perspective of the true value and morality of life, Twain manages to throw into question just what it is that we value when we say we value a man, demonstrating with every bend in the river that Jim is such a man regardless of the color of his skin. It is because of this realization that Huck is able to resolve his own major internal conflict regarding Jim, deciding that owning slaves is not moral at all, and proving the ‘social’ rule of always helping others before oneself by undergoing several adventures simply to try to keep Jim from being sold by the Duke and Dauphin. Throughout the story, Mark Twain illustrates again and again how society’s morals are twisted out of place to the point where they have become meaningless mannerisms rather than acted upon beliefs. Again and again, Huck comes across people who act in direct opposition to the morals they supposedly uphold. The widows work to reform Huck into a behavior in keeping with the social norms of his times, but fail because of an already well-developed sense of self thanks to a childhood of neglect. Perhaps because of this unique childhood in which he was forced to care for himself, Huck also finds himself questioning the moral correctness of societal norms in issues such as slavery and robbery. During the trip down the river, Huck is forced to question the ideals he’s been taught in society and compare these with his concepts of right and wrong based on a more natural and sincere response to the individual character of the human being. In demonstrating this difference, Twain begins to paint a picture in which the morality of society is compared unfavorably with the more sincere and heartfelt ‘natural’ morality of the golden rule. As the reader flows with Huck down the Mississippi River with his trusted friend Jim, Twain is able to take his reader from the more common understanding of empty social morality prevalent in his time and encourage a more natural and individualistic ‘natural’ morality of the senses. This demonstration of the importance of thinking for oneself helps mark the book as uniquely American in its emphasis on individual expression and its use of colloquial language styles. Even Huck’s language is never altered to represent the ‘accepted’ English but is instead intended to convey a sense of the country rough boy that he is. It is in this colloquialism that American authors are able to capture the voice of the nation, “its multiracial and immigrant streams of speech and behavior, its violence and exuberance, its ignorance of its own general and regional history. … It is presented as a search for the elements of a ‘common language’: a shared cultural and historical awareness to counteract the fragmentation of American society” (Rosenthal, 2001). This effort to capture the voice of the ‘common’ American as well as to present the images that are most important to the country’s identity can be captured only by a true American such as Twain. Although Huck sounds like a ‘low’ character in his forms of expression and Jim is similarly disadvantaged in his communication style, Twain always takes great care to reveal how these two characters are not suffering from any inability to think critically and are often better informed than more educated and civilized people that they meet along the way. Intuitively, intentionally or a combination of both, Mark Twain wove a common message of the importance of independent thinking as a means of protecting the natural morality that ensures justice for all on a peaceful planet throughout his writings. Whether short stories, autobiographies or ‘tall tales’, Twain’s works continue to engage the mind of the reader through his humorous approach to life and language. Once engaged, the mind is then led on a story that encourages critical thinking through the use of tone, structure, character development or a variety of literary techniques intended to reinforce these underlying themes of the true value of a human being and the injustice and immorality of many of society’s most accepted ideas. As the mind discovers this process in the story, it begins to apply it to the self, leading one on a similar process of fundamental questioning of beliefs and perhaps affecting positive social change. Works Cited Carter. “Getting Past Black and White.” Time Magazine. July 3, 2008. November 27, 2009 < http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1820162,00.html> Merriman, C.D. “Mark Twain.” The Literature Network. Jalic, 2006. November 27, 2009 Railton, Stephen. Mark Twain in His Times. Virginia: University of Virginia, 2007. November 27, 2009 < http://etext.virginia.edu/railton/index2.html> Rosenthal, M.L. “Williams’ Life and Career.” Modern American Poetry. Cary Nelson (Ed.). Urbana, IL: University of Illinois, 2001. Titta, R. “Mark Twain and the Onset of the Imperialist Period.” The Internationalist. (September-October, 1997). November 27, 2009 Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Norwalk, CT: The Easton Press, 1994 (1884). Wascoe, Dan. “Huckleberry Finn wins a first round in St. Louis Park.” Star Tribune. March 21, 2007. November 27, 2009 Read More