Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Miscellaneous comments on Huck Finn

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Chris Groeger said...

It was mentioned during the reading group meeting that Huck couldn't fully break out of the limits of Southern society. We don't get the sense at the end of the book that he is going to become a crusader for civil rights, or even continue his friendship with Jim, in spite of the book's indictment of slavery and racial injustice. I think this points to either a deep pessimism in Twain's view of human nature or a weakness in the story itself, which leaves us without a sense of any class or group of people within Southern society who can lead a struggle for rights.

Twain's book is a very harsh satire on Southern society, and most of the white characters are, as one commentator says, "drunkards, murderers, bullies, swindlers, lynches, thieves, liars, frauds, child abusers, numbskulls, hypocrites, windbags and traders in human flesh."

But Twain's contempt doesn't just seem aimed at Southerners: in the episode of Colonel Sherburn shooting a blustering but harmless madman, Twain's pessimism about humans in general seems to come out in the Colonel's words to the townspeople who have gathered to lynch him:

"Do I know you? I know you clear through. I was born and raised in the South, and I've lived in the North; so I know the average all around. The average man's a coward...Why don't your juries hang murderers? Because they're afraid the man's friends will shoot them in the back, in the dark -- and it's just what they would do."

Later in the book, seeing the King and the Duke tarred and feathered, Huck thinks:

"Well, it made me sick to see it; and I was sorry for them poor pitiful rascals, it seemed like I couldn't ever feel any hardness against them any more in the world. It was a dreadful thing to see. Human beings can be awful cruel to one another."

There are also several passages that hint at a kind of melancholy or despair in Huck's character which, to me, didn't quite fit, although I could see it as a reflection of Twain's thoughts:

"Then I [Huck] set down in a chair by the window and tried to think of something cheerful, but it warn't no use. I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead. The stars were shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful; and I heard an owl, away off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die; and the wind was trying to whisper something to me, and I couldn't make out what it was, and so it made the cold shivers run over me. Then away out in the woods I heard that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell about something that's on its mind and can't make itself understood, and so can't rest easy in its grave, and has to go about that way every night grieving. I got so down-hearted and scared I did wish I had some company."

Toward the end of the book, when Huck reaches the Phelps' farm, he comments:

"When I got there it was all still and Sunday-like, and hot and sunshiny; the hands was gone to the fields; and there was them kind of faint dronings of bugs and flies in the air that makes it seem so lonesome and like everybody's dead and gone; and if a breeze fans along and quivers the leaves it makes you feel mournful, because you feel like it's spirits whispering -- spirits that's been dead ever so many years -- and you always think they're talking about you. As a general thing it makes a body wish he was dead, too, and done with it all.... I went around and clumb over the back stile by the ash-hopper, and started for the kitchen. When I got a little ways I heard the dim hum of a spinning-wheel wailing along up and sinking along down again; and then I knowed for certain I wished I was dead -- for that IS the lonesomest sound in the whole world."

If "wishing I was dead" isn't just a figure of speech, Huck sounds quite depressed. The ghosts might also be seen metaphorically as the ghosts of Southern history. They could also have something to do with Twain's interest in parapsychology and feelings of guilt about the death of his brother in a steamboat accident. In any case, in spite of all the humor and wild adventures, and the powerful way Twain deals with Huck's moral awakening, the reader is left frustrated or defeated at the end. Huck is the only white person in the book who breaks with the social understanding of slavery, and he is both a child and an outcast. At the beginning of the book he fakes his own death and is "reborn" in some sense on the river, outside of social conventions. But at the end of the book, his only solution is to go out west, to run away from the problem rather than be part of some effort to change it. While Huck is only a boy, after all, I still get the sense Twain is telling us that there are no resources within white Southern society that could play any role in changing social attitudes and laws (in Twain's time the Jim Crow laws and the rising Ku Klux Klan). The same is true for black Southern society, as represented by Jim. He is saintly, and not burning with anger at the injustice of slavery. Nor does he express the kind of beliefs that could motivate a religious resistance to injustice, such as the Old Testament story of enslavement in Egypt and exodus or the preachings of the prophets. (The name of Cairo, Illinois, as the place Jim saw as the destination which would guarantee his freedom suggests the Old Testament, but in an ironic way.)

It could be argued that Twain isn't interested interested in social change, but he clearly was writing a powerful indictment of Southern society. It might also be argued that his intent was to waken people's conscience, much as Huck's was awakened. But the ending muddles this appeal, and perhaps Twain couldn't decide between writing a boy's adventure book and a social critique. The implicit message about Southern society that I carried away was a deeply pessimistic one: only change imposed from outside through force, as in the Civil War, could change entrenched social institutions. There may also be a biographical parallel: Twain and some friends briefly formed a Confederate militia at the beginning of the Civil War, but a few weeks later Twain went west instead, and never lived in the South again. His solution, like Huck's, was simply to leave.

January 13, 2008 at 3:54 PM

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