Issue Of Racism In Huckleberry Finn Twains language, his use of the American vernacular, is what makes him a great writer. He was the first to show his countrymen that the vulgar coinage of American speech carried as much beauty, elegance and meaning as any of the English models used by his predecessors. Many blame Twain for racist remarks and usage of racist vocabulary in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Chadwick-Joshua offers a spirited and often eloquent defense of Huckleberry Finn. Even for someone, who cannot accept without reservation the premises or the argument, there is much to be learned from her inquiry into the Jim dilemma. The authors vital interest in the question of the supposed racism of Twains novel, and more specifically of the image and the example that the character of Jim supplies to white and black readers alike, is not purely academic.
For she speaks as an African American, as a mother whose daughter was in high school when she was writing the book, and as an educator who has addressed many high school students and their parents who object to the presence of the novel in the public schools. The dilemma the character of Jim poses is multi-layered, and the audience the author addresses is likewise heterogeneous. Why do some readers, especially African American readers, fail or refuse to recognize Jims loyalty, intelligence, sense of duty, and magnanimity as truly heroic? Why, she continues, do some readers prefer to regard him as yet another degrading racial stereotype? The answer, she proposes, is that the pride we should, and do at times, feel in Huck, Jim, the northern professor, Jack, and other characters too often mutates into a form of self-loathing and historical denial, our Jim dilemma.(Chadwick-Joshua) African American and Euro-American readers alike have failed to recognize the form of the novel and the true purposes of its author, she contends. Huckleberry Finn is a Menippean satire, a form which, in the words of Northrop Frye, deals less with people as people as such than with mental attitudes, and presents us with a vision of the world in terms of a single intellectual pattern. This pattern, insists the author, is slavery, with its concomitant Southern response, ambivalence. So conceived, Jim is absolutely central to the book, and (except for Huck, who by degrees outgrows his racist assumptions) the other characters exist to embody a world that has not gone beyond racism. Even when Jim is conspicuously absent from the narrative, his presence is felt on every page, and his plight gives satirical bite to otherwise disconnected episodes.
The Essay on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 13
... comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.... All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has ... Hell” rather than give up his black friend Jim (Twain 95). Some readers are sometimes offended by Mark Twain’s writing about religion. ... 8). Some readers are unable to distinguish each of these dialects, and believe Twain is making all of the characters talk alike. ...
This premise permits Chadwick-Joshua to read the novel in ways that are at times very perceptive. She notes, for example, that the presence of other African Americans in the book has generally been neglected but serves to emphasize and better define Jims precarious position and enhance his dignity. A picture of the freed professor, for example, is rendered to us in the bigoted and drunken rhetoric of Pap; nevertheless, she rightly observes, we can and are meant to infer an admirable and courageous black character from Paps remarks. Likewise, the several verbal battles in which Jim and Huck indulge in the middle portion of the book constitute a Menippean symposium in which Jims words are necessarily double-voiced. (Chadwick-Joshua) Jim is compromised by circumstance, and he expresses himself with shrewd caution, but that does not mean that he does not have a voice or that he does not assert his own independence and integrity. Both characters evolve during these verbal exchanges, and, according to the author, the reader discovers and experiences a different truth as the characters themselves discover and experience different truths. Most crucial in these exchanges is Jims response to the joke Huck plays on him in Chapter 15.
The Term Paper on Huckleberry Finn Jim Huck Twain
"He is sometimes slave who should be master; and sometimes master who should be slave." [Lat. , Fit in dominate ser vitus, in servitude dominates. ] Oratio Pro Reg Deiotaro (XI) by Marcus Tullius Cicero Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is considered to be possibly the Great American Novel by many scholars and is certainly the best known of Mark Twain's works. These scholars both ...
There, Jims tongue lashing of Huck for violating their friendship and Hucks subsequent decision to humble [him]self to a nigger mark the moment when Jim is no longer silent or invisible and when Huck begins to reassess all that he has imbibed from his Southern culture. With the appearance of the King and the Duke and later on the Phelps farm, Jim must resume his mask of servility, though even there he speaks in double-voiced resistance to the con men and to the cruel pranks of Tom Sawyer. The problematic evasion episode in the last chapters is, far from a humorous burlesque delivered at Jims expense, instead a dramatic fulfillment of Huck’s decision to help Jim and of Jims commitment to freedom. Both Huck and Jim adopt the masks society has provided them, but they covertly act in the service of a friendship lying across racial boundaries–the only real solution to the Jim dilemma. (Quirk) One can appreciate the authors motives and profit from her analysis of Twains novel without fully accepting her argument. While no one can dispute that Huckleberry Finn is satirical, it is not certain that it is not something more, less, or at least other than a full-fledged satire. At any rate, neither Twains compositional habits nor the working notes that he made for the novel suggest that he was interested in or even capable of presenting a fictive world conceived under a single intellectual pattern. While one may agree that there are some powerfully anti-racist moments in the book, Twains interests often strayed from race matters, and at times he seems to have forgotten Jim altogether.
Moreover, his dramatic rendering of Jim in subsequent Huck and Tom narratives remains just this side of minstrelsy and makes one doubt Twains unwavering loyalty to and admiration of his created character, even as he appears in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Finally, there is a related problem that is central to Chadwick-Joshuas purpose in writing her book. Namely, she advocates the continuing presence of this novel in the high school curriculum. For some readers and teachers, myself included, the question is not whether or not Huckleberry Finn is racist, but, supposing that it is not, Do high school students possess the literary sophistication to discern and respond to its subtleties regarding race? If readers as diverse as Charles Nilon, Leo Marx, Bernard Bell, Henry Nash Smith, Peaches Henry, and others have, as the author contends, profoundly misread the novel, can we truly expect high school students to get it right? The author relates, both in the text and more often in the notes, her own effective methods in teaching the novel to high school students. Such authors as Elaine and Harry Mensh have put standard contemporary Twain criticism and standard contemporary historiography on Slavery, Reconstruction, and the Post-Reconstruction South. They juxtapose these two bodies of material ably enough, if not with great originality. No archival sources are consulted or acknowledged.
The Essay on Views of Mark Twain as Illustrated in “Huckleberry Finn”
... Huckleberry Finn- Huck is the main character of the story. His mother is dead and father is a drunk and abuses him. •Jim- Jim ... The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was written by Mark Twain. Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens ... of that fact, I think that the author, Mark Twain, was against racial injustice. I can ... Yale and Oxford awarded him honorary degrees-Twain spent his last years in gloom and ...
Conjectural assumptions mar their analysis of what they call the historical authenticity of the text-assumptions on which they try to build an indictment of Twains intentions when he created the character of Jim. To counter critics who argue that Jim is presented as intelligent and resourceful, the authors find various attitudes Jim has to be inauthentic and implausible, and conclude that his behavior gestures to minstrelsy rather than any recognizable historical reality. For example, discussing the debate between Jim and Huck about the Frenchman (an argument Jim actually wins), the authors claim that it is inconceivable that a slave in Jims circumstances would not have known that different languages existed. Their basis for saying this is (1) a reference Frederick Douglass made to words from African languages he heard in Maryland, and (2) their reminder that Missouri, as part of the Louisiana territory, was under French control during Jims childhood. It simply does not follow, from either of these examples, that a slave in a small Missouri village would necessarily have heard foreign languages, or, in particular, French. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the re-imagining of the American Dream in an earnest and well-meaning book that fails to add much that is new to the cultural conversation surrounding Mark Twains famous novel. The book offers good intentions, fascinating asides and digressions, and competent plot summary, along with textual analysis often marred by unsupported conjecture. Works Cited: Chadwick-Joshua, Jocelyn: The Jim Dilemma: Reading Race in Huckleberry Finn.
The Essay on Huck Finn Huckleberry Twain Resources
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is one of Mark Twain's most loved, most influential, and most controversial books. It was banned from the Concord Public Library in 1885, the year of its publication, and Huckleberry Finn ranks number five in the American Library Association's list of the most frequently challenged books of the 1990 s. But in 1935, Ernest Hemingway wrote that 'all modern American ...
Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1998. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher: Black, White & Huckleberry Finn: Re-imagining the American Dream.(Review) (book review), African American Review, Spring, 2001 Glass, Charles: The Oxford Mark Twain, New Statesman, Sept 19, 1997 Elaine and Harry Mensh. Black, White & Huckleberry Finn: Re-imagining the American Dream. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2000. Ralph De Toledano: Twain Still Explodes Petrified Opinion.(Mark Twain on American politics)(Brief Article), Insight on the News, June 25, 2001 Quirk, Tom: Reading Race in Huckleberry Finn.African American Review, Spring, 2000 Zwick, Jim: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Slavery and Race Relations article.
