Huckleberry Finn Analysis Flashcard Example #70156

In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn both Huck and the runaway slave Jim are in flight from a society which labels them as outcasts. Although Huck has been adopted by the Widow Douglas and been accepted into the community of St. Petersburg, he feels hemmed in by the clothes he is made to wear and the models of decorum to which he must adhere. But he also does not belong to the world Pap inhabits. Although he feels more like himself in the backwoods, Pap’s drunken rages and attempts to control him force Huck to flee. At the end of the book, after Jim has been freed, Huck decides to continue his own quest for freedom. “I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.” Huck is clearly running from a civilization that attempts to control him, rather than running in pursuit of something tangible. He is representative of the American frontiersman who chooses the unknown over the tyranny of society.
As a slave, Jim has likewise been denied control over his own destiny, and he escapes to prevent being sold down to New Orleans, away from his wife and children. But Jim is chasing a more concrete ideal of freedom than Huck is. For Jim, freedom means not being a piece of property. Jim explicitly expresses his desire to be free as they approach Cairo and the junction with the Ohio River: “Jim said it made him all over trembly and feverish to be so close to freedom.” But after they pass Cairo in the confusion of a foggy night, Jim’s quest for freedom is thwarted and he must concentrate on survival. After Jim’s capture, Tom and Huck attempt to free him in a farcical series of schemes that actually make escape more difficult and dangerous. Huck indicates that a simple removal of the board that covers the window would allow Jim to escape, but Tom declares that is too easy. “I should hope we can find a way that’s a little more complicated than that, Huck Finn,” Tom says. After Jim escapes and is recaptured, Tom reveals that he has been free all along. Miss Watson had died and left him free in her will. The irony of freeing a free man has concerned many critics, who believe Twain might have been commenting on the failure of Reconstruction after the Civil War.

Huck’s main struggle in the book is with his conscience, the set of morals with which he has been raised. As they begin to approach Cairo, and Jim looks forward to his freedom, Huck says his conscience “got to troubling me so I couldn’t rest.” He rationalizes that he didn’t lure Jim away from his owner, but “conscience up and says every time, ‘But you knowed he was running for his freedom, and you ‘could ‘a’ paddled ashore and told somebody.'” During this scene he wakes up to the fact that he is helping a slave gain freedom, something he has been brought up to believe is wrong. So in an attempt to relieve his guilt, he sets off for shore, telling Jim he is going to find out if they have passed Cairo, but really intending to turn Jim in. When he meets up with two men looking for a runaway slave, he confronts a true test of conscience, and fails, in his eyes. The two men ask him about the man on board, and Huck protects Jim by making up an elaborate tale about his father who is dying of smallpox, a highly contagious disease. When he returns to the raft, Jim rejoices in his cover-up, but Huck instead is “feeling bad and low, because I knowed very well I had done wrong.” He decides that he is naturally bad, and that he only did what made him feel better. Not being able to analyze his actions, Huck fails to recognize that he has taken a stand against a morally corrupt society. Later, after Jim has been turned in by the King and Duke, Huck must again wrestle with his conscience as he decides to play an active role in freeing Jim. Up until this point he had only protected Jim from discovery; now he must help Jim escape, an even more serious crime. But rather than let his “conscience” guide him, Huck listens to his heart, which tells him that Jim is a human being, not property. He turns his back forever on society’s ethics and decides he’d rather “go to hell” than turn his back on Jim. Through Huck, Twain attacks that part of the conscience that unquestioningly adheres to society’s laws and mores, even when they are wrong.

Probably the most discussed aspect of Huck Finn is how it addresses the issue of race. Many critics agree that the book’s presentation of the issue is complex or, some say, uneven. No clear-cut stance on race and racism emerges. Despite the fact that Huck comes to respect Jim as a human being, he still reveals his prejudice towards black people. His astonishment at Jim’s deep feelings for his family is accompanied by the statement, “I do believe he cared just as much for his people as white folks does for their’n. It don’t seem natural, but I reckon it’s so.” And even after he has decided to help free Jim, Huck indicates that he still does not see black people overall as human beings. When Aunt Sally asks “Tom Sawyer” why he was so late in arriving, he tells her the ship blew a cylinder head. “Good gracious! Anybody hurt?” she asks. “No’m. Killed a ngger.” “Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt,” she responds. As some critics have pointed out, Huck never condemns slavery or racial prejudice in general but seems to find an exception to the rule in Jim. Nevertheless, the fact that Huck does learn to see beyond racial stereotypes in the case of Jim is a profound development, considering his upbringing. He lived in a household with the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson where slaves were owned. And Pap’s rantings over a free black man indicate his deep racial prejudice. When confronted with the fact that a free black man was highly educated and could vote, Pap decides he wants nothing to do with a government that has allowed this to happen. He wants the free man, whom he calls “a prowling, thieving, infernal, white-shirted free ngger,” to be sold at auction. In other words, all black people are slaves, white man’s property, in his eyes. Such are the views on race with which Huck has been raised. But there is no agreement as to what Twain’s message on the subject of race is. While some critics view the novel as a satire on racism and a conscious indictment of a racist society, others stress the author’s overall ambivalence about race. Critics have had a difficult time reconciling the stereotypical depictions of Jim and other slaves in the book with Huck’s desire to free Jim.

As local color writing developed in American literature after the Civil War, it served as a bridge between the earlier period of Romanticism and the Realism of the twentieth century. The elements of Romanticism are clearly evident in the novel, especially in Twain’s descriptions of nature and the novel’s themes of personal freedom; the influence of Realism in fiction writing is evident in the many specific details throughout the novel that convey with accuracy and precision the society and culture that existed along the Southern banks of the Mississippi River at a particular time in American history. Despite its realistic depiction of people, places, and daily life, however, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is essentially a work of Romanticism that develops the theme found most consistently in romantic works: the goodness and nobility of the human spirit when it is free of the corruption of society.
The early writers of Romanticism, especially the Transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau, celebrated man’s essential goodness and condemned society as a force that suppresses individual freedom and spiritual enlightenment. The essential tenet of Romanticism is that only in nature, not in society, can an individual discover spiritual truth and live an authentic life consistent with his inherent goodness—and this is the essential theme woven throughout Twain’s novel.
Huck’s experiences take place on the Mississippi or in towns along the river. On the raft, he and Jim experience solitude and peace, surrounded by the natural beauty, mystery, and awesome power of the river. Only when they think of life on shore are they troubled, and only when society encroaches is the quality of their lives diminished. On the river, Huck and Jim are free. On the river—living in nature—Huck questions for the first time the moral and religious beliefs imposed on him by society and struggles to reconcile them with what he knows in his heart to be good or evil. When he cannot reconcile them with his own spirit, he rejects society’s teachings, choosing instead to “go to h*ll” before turning Jim over as a runaway slave. On the river with Jim, Huck is separated from the corruption of society and its influence, leaving him free to discover the goodness within himself.
The contrast between goodness found in nature and the corruption of society is developed throughout the novel as life on the river is continually contrasted with life beyond the Mississippi. All that is violent and vile occurs on land or is temporarily exported to Huck and Jim’s raft by dangerous, unwelcome emissaries from society along the river. The bloody Grangerford-Shepherdson feud, the greed and scheming of the phony Duke and King, Huck’s vicious father, and the cruelty of slavery are symptomatic of society’s corruption and the ways it corrupts those who live in it. A great irony in the novel, critics often point out, is that Huck Finn has to escape society in order to become “civilized.” As a work of Romanticism, however, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn isn’t ironic at all. It’s in refusing to be “civilized” that Huck finds the goodness inherent in man’s nature.

Slavery
The issue of slavery threatened to divide the nation as early as the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and throughout the years a series of concessions were made on both sides in an effort to keep the union together. One of the most significant of these was the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The furor had begun when Missouri requested to enter the union as a slave state. In order to maintain a balance between free and slave states in the union, Missouri was admitted as a slave state while Maine entered as a free one. And although Congress would not accept Missouri’s proposal to ban free blacks from the state, it did allow a provision permitting the state’s slaveholders to reclaim runaway slaves from neighboring free states.
The federal government’s passage of Fugitive Slave Laws was also a compromise to appease southern slaveholders. The first one, passed in 1793, required anyone helping a slave to escape to pay a fine of $500. But by 1850, when a second law was passed, slaveowners had become increasingly insecure about their ability to retain their slaves in the face of abolitionism. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Law increased the fine for abetting a runaway slave to $1000, added the penalty of up to six months in prison, and required that every U.S. citizen assist in the capture of runaways. This law allowed southern slaveowners to claim their fugitive property without requiring them to provide proof of ownership. Whites and blacks in the North were outraged by the law, which effectively implicated all American citizens in the institution of slavery. As a result, many who had previously felt unmoved by the issue became ardent supporters of the abolitionist movement.
Among those who were outraged into action by the Fugitive Slave Law was Harriet Beecher Stowe whose novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) galvanized the North against slavery. Dozens of slave narratives—first hand accounts of the cruelties of slavery—had shown white Northerners a side of slavery that had previously remained hidden, but the impact of Stowe’s novel on white Northerners was more widespread. Abraham Lincoln is reported to have said when he met her during the Civil War, “So you’re the little lady who started this big war.” White southerners also recognized the powerful effect of the national debate on slavery as it was manifested in print, and many southern states, fearing the spread of such agitating ideas to their slaves, passed laws which made it illegal to teach slaves to read. Missouri passed such a law in 1847.
Despite the efforts of southerners to keep slaves in the dark about those who were willing to help them in the North, thousands of slaves did escape to the free states. Many escape routes led to the Ohio River, which formed the southern border of the free states of Illinois and Indiana. The large number of slaves who escaped belied the myths of contented slaves that originated from the South.

Reconstruction
Although The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn takes place before the Civil War, it was written in the wake of Reconstruction, the period directly after the Civil War when the confederate states were brought back into the union. The years from 1865 to 1876 witnessed rapid and radical progress in the South, as many schools for blacks were opened, black men gained the right to vote with the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875 desegregated public places. But these improvements were quickly undermined by new Black Codes in the South that restricted such rights. White southerners felt threatened by Republicans from the North who went south to help direct the course of Reconstruction. Most galling was the new authority of free blacks, many of whom held political office and owned businesses. While prospects did improve somewhat for African Americans during Reconstruction, their perceived authority in the new culture was exaggerated by whites holding on to the theory of white superiority that had justified slavery.
In response to the perceived threat, many terrorist groups were formed to intimidate freed blacks and white Republicans through vigilante violence. The Ku Klux Klan, the most prominent of these new groups, was formed in 1866. Efforts to disband these terrorist groups proved ineffective. By 1876, Democrats had regained control over the South and by 1877, federal troops had withdrawn. Reconstruction and the many rights blacks had gained dissipated as former abolitionists lost interest in the issue of race, and the country became consumed with financial crises and conflicts with Native Americans in the West. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, new Jim Crow laws segregated public spaces in the South, culminating in the Supreme Court’s decision in the case Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, which legalized segregation.

Minstrel Shows
As the first indigenous form of entertainment in America, minstrel shows flourished from the 1830s to the first decade of the twentieth century. In the 1860s, for example, there were more than one hundred minstrel groups in the country. Samuel Clemens recalled his love of minstrel shows in his posthumously published Autobiography, writing, “If I could have the n*gger show back again in its pristine purity and perfection I should have but little further use for opera.” His attraction to blackface entertainment informed The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where, many critics believe, he used its humorous effects to challenge the racial stereotypes on which it was based.
Minstrel shows featured white men in blackface and outrageous costumes. The men played music, danced, and acted burlesque skits, but the central feature of the shows was the exaggerated imitation of black speech and mannerisms, which produced a stereotype of blacks as docile, happy, and ignorant. The shows also depicted slavery as a natural and benign institution and slaves as contented with their lot. These stereotypes of blacks helped to reinforce attitudes amongst whites that blacks were fundamentally different and inferior. The minstrel show died out as vaudeville, burlesques, and radio became the most popular forms of entertainment.

1840s: Under the Slave Codes, enacted by individual southern states, slaves could not own property, testify against whites in court, or make contracts. Slave marriages were not recognized by law.
1884: As the result of Black Codes enacted by states during Reconstruction, African Americans could now legally marry and own property, but the codes also imposed curfews and segregation. The Fifteenth Amendment granted black men the right to vote, but individual states prohibited them from doing so.

Today: The right to vote is universal for all citizens above the age of eighteen, and other rights are not restricted by race.

1840s: The steamboat was the most popular mode of travel and the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers were the main thoroughfares in the West.
1884: The railroad had taken over as the means of mass transportation all across America.

Today: Most goods are transported within the U.S. by truck, and airplanes and cars allow people to travel long distances in short periods of tune.

1840s: Means of entertainment were beginning to flourish in America. Among the many new kinds of literature available were slave narratives and romantic adventures. The first minstrel show was staged in 1843.
1884: The field of literature, in the form of books and periodicals, had become the province of the masses. The minstrel show continued to be popular, as did the music of ragtime which was associated with it.

Today: Entertainment, especially film, television, and music, is a multi-billion-dollar industry.

1840s: The Mississippi River ran freely, making travel dangerous, due to snags, large pieces of trees lodged in the river.
1884: The Mississippi River Commission had been founded in 1879 to improve navigation. Over the next decades, a series of levees were built which also alleviated flooding problems.

Today: The level of the Mississippi River and its banks are tightly controlled so that navigation is very safe and floods are less frequent.