Oct
29
Here's an animated gif I made of Nate's cool photo.
Oct
20
Disclaimer: I'm posting this because my dad told me to. =)
It is an essay I wrote for an English Honors class answering the question, "Is Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn racist?" To account for its wordiness and quote-clogged nature, the teacher led us to believe that it was supposed to be 4-5 pages single spaced...later clarifying doubled spaced the day before it was due. She gave me a perfect score for it (and caught me after class to make sure it was really my own work...) (and the answer is yes, aside from the quotes, it is all my own words.) Personally, I only like parts of it. For those brave/bored enough to read it, feel free to tell me what you think...
Essay
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
I consider Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to be a masterful mix of many things, including a simple story of childhood growth and innocence, and a satirical portrayal of life before the Civil War. I have concluded that it does include racism, but it does not condone it; instead, it regards it on honest and necessary terms with the intention of reminding us of the past and steering us clear for the future. While no one should be forced to read the book against their personal decisions, I do believe that it is important to our culture and shows us the world in a way we are not always willing to see it, as well as teaching us how to think critically about controversial issues.
In one of its basest of forms, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a childhood story. It depicts a time in life that we have all gone through, where innocence is just beginning to morph into awareness. Twain states in the beginning of the book, “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.” Much like J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, it is a story where adventures and freedom exist despite the troubles of the world. It reminds us what it is like to be in that stage of life, where open-minded innocence is the center of life’s persuasions, even when the darker forms of life’s uncertainty and complexity are in imminent sight. (Or, it is a story that those of us who are still in that stage of life can identify with =) ). I think that, for most of us, childhood has a magical quality to it, and part of the value of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is its success at putting those feelings into a story. At such a basic level, it can be appreciated by any culture, without regard to race.
A more realistic perspective on the novel is to see it as a story of ante-bellum racism; viewed in this light it could be considered derogatory and inflammatory. Racism is defined as when one “…claims to find racial differences in character, intelligence, etc., which asserts the superiority of one race over another…” Therefore, yes, the novel’s setting is a very racist society. However, if critics want to call it racist because it calls blacks “niggers” and portrays them as shallow, passive, and dumb, then why are they not also offended by the portrayal of whites as malicious, conniving, and blind to injustice? As Russel Baker wrote in the New York Times, in 1982,
Those who call the book “racist” to blacks are seeing it from only one perspective. If the novel is degrading, than it is in equal measures to both races; because the book portrays both races negatively and positively at times, I am led to believe that it is not so much racist in a malignant way, but honest for a higher intent. Nothing should be banned simply because it is honest.
For those who think that Huck Finn is racist—and therefore evil—I think that it is important to distinguish the narrator from the author. Twain was keeping true to the time period by creating a character that was authentic to someone living in that society. When Huck says things like, “I see it warn’t no use wasting words—you can’t learn a nigger to argue,” “one also has to look at the teller of the tale, and realize that you are getting a black man, an adult, seen through the condescending eyes—partially—of a young white boy.” This also leads insight into the criticism over Jim’s character. Of course he would seem shallow, passive, and simple-minded when shown to us by an adolescent character immersed in a society that was blinded by good deeds and a severe lack of critical thinking. As Russel Baker also wrote, “The one man of honor in this phantasmagoria is ‘Nigger Jim,’ as Twain called him to emphasize the irony of a society in which the only true gentleman was held beneath contempt.” Huck’s view of Jim grows slowly through “his gradual acceptance of Jim as a man, strong, brave, generous, and wise (though realistically portrayed as imperfect).” Eventually, in setting Jim free, he overcomes “his ‘conscience,’ which, formed by a racist society, tells him this act is wrong.” Huck’s growth is even a symbol of the growth our country has gone through since the Civil War.
Besides understanding that the narrator of the book was accurate to the novel’s time frame, it is also important to understand the author. Mark Twain, born Samuel Clemens, is obviously one of this country’s greatest authors, proven by his mass appeal and accreditation for many quality works (including renowned novels such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, Life on the Mississippi, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court). He had been writing for more than twenty years by the time Huck Finn was published in 1885, and with that book alone I think he proved his skill with pains-taking mastery of the different dialects incorporated into the book. He even began to include a “Prefatory Remark” in his book after receiving controversy over it.
Obviously, he went to great lengths to write accurately and realistically; such a master writer would not have allowed accidental words, ideas, or even themes to enter his writing. He even toned down the writing to keep from offending his audience. As Shelley Fisher Fishkin wrote in an article on how to teach Huck Finn,
She continued on to say how Twain wrote to the Yale Law School’s Dean in 1885, explaining his intent to pay for Warner MGuinn’s schooling (one of the first African American students at Yale). In that letter, he wrote, “We have ground the manhood out of them, and the shame is ours, not theirs, & we should pay for it." Obviously, Twain was not someone who discredited the blacks as a race of value; he knew that what our country had done was wrong, and he wanted his part in fixing that injustice.
By beginning to understand the type of writer Twain was, we can begin to see his purpose for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain was not writing about today’s life. He was not trying to show us the battles being fought for equality, how much we have achieved since the Civil War, or where we are today with the issue of racism. He could not have written from those positions; he wrote Huck Finn at a time when equality was still in its rebirth. Instead, he wrote a fiction story that serves as a documentary of a time when we were not yet alive, and that many have purposely forgotten. The text book calls the novel “a dramatization of the grim realities of a slaveholding society.” Twain wrote to keep us from forgetting the truth of the past, so that we do not stop forging ahead in our fight against discrimination. He left his footprints in the sands of time in the hope that future generations would continue their path towards equality.
Twain was not writing to give us something fluffy and happy to read; he wrote to drive home a cold, hard point that many wish to forget. And he did this in possibly the most sensitive way possible: satire. Instead of bluntly raging about the evils of slavery, he used his satirical genius, mixed with his talents as a humorist, to intertwine fiction with reality and open our eyes to the sins of slavery. From the back of our literature book, part of the definition of satire states “satire is always intensely moral in its purpose. Mark Twain, in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, satirizes a whole spectrum of American life, but the thrust of the novel is moral: Twain is making us see things that should not be permitted to exist (slavery is one of them).” The purpose of the satirist is to show you exactly what you do not want to see, in order to influence you into acting against it (in what they believe is a positive direction for humanity). Twain was using his God-given skills to do his part in the world to bring about justice.
Regardless of whether this particular book is racial or not, I think that it is good to keep in mind that often the best art forms are those that are controversial. While looking for literary critiques on this book, I came across several lists of “Banned Classics” –some of the classic books of history that have been challenged because of their controversial content. Many were books I have read that pushed me to perceive life from a completely new perspective, and many are now commonly taught in schools (such as The Scarlet Letter, Of Mice and Men, Animal Farm, etc.). What they all have in common is their (often satirical) portrayal of the rawest and most brutally honest parts of life, as well as their brazen ability to force us to see things for how they are instead of how we want them to be. In a court case against Huck Finn in 1998, Judge Stephen Reinhardt said that “a necessary component of any education is learning to think critically about offensive ideas. Without that ability, one can do little to respond to them.” I think the greatest attribute of controversial books like The Adventues of Huckleberry Finn is to make us think critically and openly about ideas that we would not normally dwell on.
In conclusion, it is obvious that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn involves racism. However, I think that it is for the satirical purpose of dealing with racism that Twain wrote it, and not to demean, discriminate, or demoralize. To those who criticize it, I would say that it is necessary to share truth—good and bad—and racism is a truthful (and evil) part of our history. We do not want to be like the people in the book “who did nothing more than fail to question the set of circumstances that surrounded them, who failed to judge that evil was evil and who deluded themselves into thinking they were doing good.” To ban the book would be to ignore history, and “brushing history aside…is no solution to the larger challenge of dealing with its legacy.” The purpose of the book is to portray a racist era from the point of view of childhood, so that we remember our wrongs and continue to forge ahead towards justice.
♣
It is an essay I wrote for an English Honors class answering the question, "Is Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn racist?" To account for its wordiness and quote-clogged nature, the teacher led us to believe that it was supposed to be 4-5 pages single spaced...later clarifying doubled spaced the day before it was due. She gave me a perfect score for it (and caught me after class to make sure it was really my own work...) (and the answer is yes, aside from the quotes, it is all my own words.) Personally, I only like parts of it. For those brave/bored enough to read it, feel free to tell me what you think...
Essay
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
I consider Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to be a masterful mix of many things, including a simple story of childhood growth and innocence, and a satirical portrayal of life before the Civil War. I have concluded that it does include racism, but it does not condone it; instead, it regards it on honest and necessary terms with the intention of reminding us of the past and steering us clear for the future. While no one should be forced to read the book against their personal decisions, I do believe that it is important to our culture and shows us the world in a way we are not always willing to see it, as well as teaching us how to think critically about controversial issues.
In one of its basest of forms, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a childhood story. It depicts a time in life that we have all gone through, where innocence is just beginning to morph into awareness. Twain states in the beginning of the book, “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.” Much like J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, it is a story where adventures and freedom exist despite the troubles of the world. It reminds us what it is like to be in that stage of life, where open-minded innocence is the center of life’s persuasions, even when the darker forms of life’s uncertainty and complexity are in imminent sight. (Or, it is a story that those of us who are still in that stage of life can identify with =) ). I think that, for most of us, childhood has a magical quality to it, and part of the value of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is its success at putting those feelings into a story. At such a basic level, it can be appreciated by any culture, without regard to race.
A more realistic perspective on the novel is to see it as a story of ante-bellum racism; viewed in this light it could be considered derogatory and inflammatory. Racism is defined as when one “…claims to find racial differences in character, intelligence, etc., which asserts the superiority of one race over another…” Therefore, yes, the novel’s setting is a very racist society. However, if critics want to call it racist because it calls blacks “niggers” and portrays them as shallow, passive, and dumb, then why are they not also offended by the portrayal of whites as malicious, conniving, and blind to injustice? As Russel Baker wrote in the New York Times, in 1982,
The people whom Huck and Jim encounter on the Mississippi are drunkards, murderers, bullies, swindlers, lynches, thieves, liars, frauds, child abusers, numbskulls, hypocrites, windbags and traders in human flesh. All are white…”
Those who call the book “racist” to blacks are seeing it from only one perspective. If the novel is degrading, than it is in equal measures to both races; because the book portrays both races negatively and positively at times, I am led to believe that it is not so much racist in a malignant way, but honest for a higher intent. Nothing should be banned simply because it is honest.
For those who think that Huck Finn is racist—and therefore evil—I think that it is important to distinguish the narrator from the author. Twain was keeping true to the time period by creating a character that was authentic to someone living in that society. When Huck says things like, “I see it warn’t no use wasting words—you can’t learn a nigger to argue,” “one also has to look at the teller of the tale, and realize that you are getting a black man, an adult, seen through the condescending eyes—partially—of a young white boy.” This also leads insight into the criticism over Jim’s character. Of course he would seem shallow, passive, and simple-minded when shown to us by an adolescent character immersed in a society that was blinded by good deeds and a severe lack of critical thinking. As Russel Baker also wrote, “The one man of honor in this phantasmagoria is ‘Nigger Jim,’ as Twain called him to emphasize the irony of a society in which the only true gentleman was held beneath contempt.” Huck’s view of Jim grows slowly through “his gradual acceptance of Jim as a man, strong, brave, generous, and wise (though realistically portrayed as imperfect).” Eventually, in setting Jim free, he overcomes “his ‘conscience,’ which, formed by a racist society, tells him this act is wrong.” Huck’s growth is even a symbol of the growth our country has gone through since the Civil War.
Besides understanding that the narrator of the book was accurate to the novel’s time frame, it is also important to understand the author. Mark Twain, born Samuel Clemens, is obviously one of this country’s greatest authors, proven by his mass appeal and accreditation for many quality works (including renowned novels such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, Life on the Mississippi, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court). He had been writing for more than twenty years by the time Huck Finn was published in 1885, and with that book alone I think he proved his skill with pains-taking mastery of the different dialects incorporated into the book. He even began to include a “Prefatory Remark” in his book after receiving controversy over it.
…In character, language, clothing, education, instinct, and origin, [Huck] is the painstakingly and truthfully drawn photograph and counterpart of [Twain’s two uncles] as they were in the time of their boyhood, forty years ago. The work has been most carefully and conscientiously done, and is exactly true to the originals, in even the minutest particulars, with but one exception, and that is a trifling one: this boy's language has been toned down and softened, here and there, in deference to the taste of a more modern and fastidious day.
Obviously, he went to great lengths to write accurately and realistically; such a master writer would not have allowed accidental words, ideas, or even themes to enter his writing. He even toned down the writing to keep from offending his audience. As Shelley Fisher Fishkin wrote in an article on how to teach Huck Finn,
By the time he wrote Huckleberry Finn, Samuel Clemens had come to believe not only that slavery was a horrendous wrong, but that white Americans owed black Americans some form of "reparations" for it…
She continued on to say how Twain wrote to the Yale Law School’s Dean in 1885, explaining his intent to pay for Warner MGuinn’s schooling (one of the first African American students at Yale). In that letter, he wrote, “We have ground the manhood out of them, and the shame is ours, not theirs, & we should pay for it." Obviously, Twain was not someone who discredited the blacks as a race of value; he knew that what our country had done was wrong, and he wanted his part in fixing that injustice.
By beginning to understand the type of writer Twain was, we can begin to see his purpose for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain was not writing about today’s life. He was not trying to show us the battles being fought for equality, how much we have achieved since the Civil War, or where we are today with the issue of racism. He could not have written from those positions; he wrote Huck Finn at a time when equality was still in its rebirth. Instead, he wrote a fiction story that serves as a documentary of a time when we were not yet alive, and that many have purposely forgotten. The text book calls the novel “a dramatization of the grim realities of a slaveholding society.” Twain wrote to keep us from forgetting the truth of the past, so that we do not stop forging ahead in our fight against discrimination. He left his footprints in the sands of time in the hope that future generations would continue their path towards equality.
Twain was not writing to give us something fluffy and happy to read; he wrote to drive home a cold, hard point that many wish to forget. And he did this in possibly the most sensitive way possible: satire. Instead of bluntly raging about the evils of slavery, he used his satirical genius, mixed with his talents as a humorist, to intertwine fiction with reality and open our eyes to the sins of slavery. From the back of our literature book, part of the definition of satire states “satire is always intensely moral in its purpose. Mark Twain, in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, satirizes a whole spectrum of American life, but the thrust of the novel is moral: Twain is making us see things that should not be permitted to exist (slavery is one of them).” The purpose of the satirist is to show you exactly what you do not want to see, in order to influence you into acting against it (in what they believe is a positive direction for humanity). Twain was using his God-given skills to do his part in the world to bring about justice.
Regardless of whether this particular book is racial or not, I think that it is good to keep in mind that often the best art forms are those that are controversial. While looking for literary critiques on this book, I came across several lists of “Banned Classics” –some of the classic books of history that have been challenged because of their controversial content. Many were books I have read that pushed me to perceive life from a completely new perspective, and many are now commonly taught in schools (such as The Scarlet Letter, Of Mice and Men, Animal Farm, etc.). What they all have in common is their (often satirical) portrayal of the rawest and most brutally honest parts of life, as well as their brazen ability to force us to see things for how they are instead of how we want them to be. In a court case against Huck Finn in 1998, Judge Stephen Reinhardt said that “a necessary component of any education is learning to think critically about offensive ideas. Without that ability, one can do little to respond to them.” I think the greatest attribute of controversial books like The Adventues of Huckleberry Finn is to make us think critically and openly about ideas that we would not normally dwell on.
In conclusion, it is obvious that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn involves racism. However, I think that it is for the satirical purpose of dealing with racism that Twain wrote it, and not to demean, discriminate, or demoralize. To those who criticize it, I would say that it is necessary to share truth—good and bad—and racism is a truthful (and evil) part of our history. We do not want to be like the people in the book “who did nothing more than fail to question the set of circumstances that surrounded them, who failed to judge that evil was evil and who deluded themselves into thinking they were doing good.” To ban the book would be to ignore history, and “brushing history aside…is no solution to the larger challenge of dealing with its legacy.” The purpose of the book is to portray a racist era from the point of view of childhood, so that we remember our wrongs and continue to forge ahead towards justice.
NAACP national headquarters’ current position
You don’t ban Mark Twain-you explain Mark Twain! To study an idea is not necessarily to endorse the idea. Mark Twain’s satirical novel, Huckleberry Finn, accurately portrays a time in history-the nineteenth century-and one of its evils, slavery.
♣
