Huckleberry Finn
Through his bitter opposition to racism and the baseness of human nature in Huckleberry Finn and Pudd'nhead Wilson, Mark Twain is really illustrating the changing views of American society toward race and human value in his time. Throughout the pages of his writing, his sarcasm bites at the nature of humans and their adopted superiority above everyone else. From his slave-society background to his Eastern upper-class culture, Twain had plenty of material from which he drew a picture of the views of American society in the mid-1800's.
Twain, then known as Samuel Clemens, was brought up in the frontier Southern towns of Florida and Hannibal, Missouri. He was taught that the Bible justified slavery, and also that abolition was "not only impractical, but also a harsh threat to economic survival" (Hoffman 5). In his father's house and in the rousing riverboat society of Hannibal, he understood that "differences in skin colour meant caste differences and differences in fundamental rights" (Hoffman 6). His friends, though, ranged from the upper-class children of Hannibal to the white fringe people and the slaves. The slaves in Hannibal had more value in society than in other places because they were "servants, not gang labourers" in a less rigid version of the Southern plantation town (De Voto 11). He was allowed to play and sit with the slaves, and soon held a special affection for "a slave named Uncle Dan, a father figure". His father, a strict, cold, and careless man inspired endless resentment. His enmity of slavery was first inspired when his father, the judge, pronounced three abolitionists guilty and received his greatest accolade for his support of slavery. Sam later learned a valuable social lesson when his friend's brother Benson sheltered a runaway slave instead of turning it in for a reward (Hoffman 6-18).
Later, as he started writing, he married Livy Langdon, from a family of ardent abolitionists who supported the Underground Railroad and the Elmira Female College, a new college that was a beacon of social progress in the North (Hoffman 140). He became rich, but did not know how to handle the wealth and soon tired of it. "Money appeared to be an objective measure of a man's worth, but Sam's current affluence did little to assuage his doubt about himself" [Hoffman 57]. The society that he frequented with his wife valued style to excess, but what he had learned from his father was that money should be craved but ambition for it was distasteful [Hoffman 11]. He soon became bitter about human nature.
Literary critic Bernard DeVoto remarks that Clemens was the first great American writer who was also a popular writer. He also says that Clemens' books were the first American literature to portray the ordinary bulk of Americans, their expressions, and their values, namely democracy (22). Clemens had much to portray. His wild life in San Francisco with the forty-niners and boomtowns combined with his solid social values as "a member of the eastern establishment made him an emblem of the United States' rise to prominence" (Hoffman 303). His popularity and value as a moral commentator stemmed from his humour and the fact that he created imaginary sidekicks who were more reprehensible than he was. Sam wrote satirically about drunks when alcohol and poverty were not mentioned. He embraced the philosophy that people should stay out of each other's business. When he was in the Sandwich Islands, now Hawaii, his role as moral phenomenon required close association with traditional ethical authorities. When King Kamehameha V died, the public raised questions and pursued annexation. Clemens, connected with the people of the Sandwich Islands, publicly protested on the premise that Americans would poison the place, as they had in other places. He also protested against the annexation of the Philippines. "I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land" (Meltzler 255). He ridiculed the annexation supporters in a pamphlet: "I bring you the stately matron named Christendom, returning, besmirched, and dishonoured, from pirate raids� with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her soap and towel, but hide the looking glass" (Meltzler 254). Sam soon doubted the wisdom of imposing one set of values on another culture because one is 'more superior'. The Gilded Age and other pieces he wrote at that time became savage satires of the debased democratic process in America (Hoffman 30, 106, 209).
Sam instinctively was generous to the downtrodden and had a faith in the fundamental equality of people. He realized all people were equally inconsequential. Later, he contributed generously to the education of African Americans as reparations for his underlying bigotry (Hoffman 314). He thought that "freemen were slaves to their own conception of caste" and so admired Frederick Douglass, the former slave fighting for rights, for his long crusade for the liberties and elevation for his race in Douglass' retainership as Marshal of Washington, DC (Meltzler 203). He maintained his faith in the remedy of compromise on the slavery issue and was horrified when Thomas Benton, a Congressman was shut out for attempts at forging a compromise (Hoffman 38). He remarked: "Isn't human nature the most consummate shame and lie that was ever invented?�what a man sees in the human race is merely himself in the deep and honest privacy of his own heart" (qtd. in Hoffman 314). Clemens had seen the wretchedness of the human race and only knew that he himself had "no colour..nor caste..nor creed prejudices..all I care to know is that a Man is a human being, and that is enough for me; we can't be any worse" (Meltzler 203).
The only way this situation could be remedied, he believed, was through a "radical reeducation"; the democratic reformation of civilization was another guise for a misanthropic drive to rule it all, a stance he described in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (Hoffman 355). His reeducation brought itself out into two books: Huckleberry Finn and Pudd'nhead Wilson.
His two books, Huckleberry Finn and Pudd'nhead Wilson were used as the representation of a lost American world in near-mythic terms. He displayed the days before the rugged industrialism of the North and the barbaric plantationism of the South, the days when the riverboats were top priority and even the Negro deckhands on the big riverboats were distinguished personages in their grade of life (Meltzler 41). Even after he wrote these reminisces, he was attacked by the racist Jacksonites for the vulgarness of the Negro speech and character in his books which, while still condescending, was strikingly real and human (Schmitz 47). Pudd'nhead Wilson was described as one of the "few serious treatments in American fiction of slavery". Huckleberry Finn was the "exploration of an entire society, the middle South along the river" (De Voto 27). Elsewhere, it was described as a portrait of the "complexity of ethical valuation in a society with a complex tradition�a profound study of civilized man" (Leavis 31). The realistic sense of the books that Clemens' critics focused on existed because they covered towns all through the Deep South and allowed Clemens to portray a wide range of American life into the first half of the 19th century (Miller 89). As Colonel Sherburn put it in Huckleberry Finn: "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" (Clemens, Huck Finn 146).
Pudd'nhead Wilson, the less renowned but more valued by Clemens himself was a saga of identity and rank in the Southern town. The book was mainly concerned with the complexities of human nature and civilization as seen by an observer and not the cynical and pessimistic edge of most views of society (Leavis 39). He was not writing an abolitionist tract where emancipated slaves find happiness immediately, but a work pertaining to the complexity of the problem at hand (Miller 155). The main character was a black man raised to be a white planter child who learns of his true identity much too late. "The identification of Americans as either white or black is..corrupt..it is necessary for [Tom] to become black to understand what this means..a black who thinks that he is white because that is what has been taught" (Miller 150). This man, Tom Driscoll has been taught all his life what being white is about, and the brutal reality was that he was black. His lookalike, Chambers, was brought up as a low Negro slave even though he was in reality, the planter's real son. He is "not an imitation nigger so much as an imitation white" (Miller 154). Near to the end of the novel, Chambers must adopt his new role as white master but can only do an imitation job; all he wants is to be part of the black contingent again. This situation is a direct offspring of the maintenance of honour in the Southern state of mind. The honour which the Southern aristocracy pride themselves does not keep them from having sexual relations with their slaves (Miller 147). Roxy, the mother of Tom and Chambers' nursemaid, was faced with the possibility of being sold down the river into harsher bondage along with her son to Northerners. Clemens added this significant fact because he pointed out that slavery was an "American dilemma, and not for the South alone" (Miller 157). With these facts, Clemens proves that how we see ourselves is meaningless, "The gentleman is not gentle, the white man is not white..[Clemens] cannot pretend that the social order can be changed..he shows us what is wrong and then turns away" (Miller 160).
Identity in Pudd'nhead Wilson was severely complex. Critic Robert Keith Miller remarks that one man's success demands another's loss. The struggle between slaveowner and slave, and ultimately between white and black demands that one will lose, and eventually, it is always the slave that loses (144). Though Roxy and Tom are Negroes and slaves only "by a fiction of law and custom..essential identity is simply and agreement among other people's perception of us.." (Hoffman 385). "The one-sixteenth of her which was black outvoted the other fifteen parts and made her a negro. She was a slave and saleable as such" (Pudd'nhead 12). Clemens invoked the unfairness of the whole practice, as well as the knowledge that "if Tom were white and free, it would be unquestionably right to punish him..but to shut up a valuable slave for life - that was another matter" (Pudd'nhead 203). What Twain also tells us is that many slaves that were free were also being accepted as people in society. Roxy was a slave woman who had been freed by her owners. The selfish nature of people comes to light when one sees Roxy being resold down the river by Tom to repay his gambling debts. He was no different from anybody else on the planet: prone to the same troubles, attractions, and guilts.
Huckleberry Finn, when first released, did not cause much commotion and was not very successful, but in modern times, has become his most popular work and the major commentary on the signs of the times. They were "adventures that exhibit the irrationalities of society and the cruelties possible to human nature" (Warren 60). It raises up several topics, seemingly inapplicable in a rollicking tale, but because of it, they have become even more important. What is Huckleberry's proper course throughout the book? Does he have obligations toward his fellow runaway, Jim, a slave? "The problems..are unresolvable in fiction or in life..to be moral is to act according to the community's legislated and unethical codes about property, human life and human behaviour" (Hoffman Ironic 32). Huckleberry constantly faces moral decisions in his treatment of Jim. He knows Jim should be helped, but it is in "the name of property that Huck feels most guilt and waxes most moralistic�in his socially trained eyes, the recipient of injustice is the property owner" (Hoffman Ironic 34). He has been put into Sunday School like all other good American children, but unlike them, he skips and doesn't learn his lessons. On the boat, as he rationalizes himself morally, he knows "that had he gone to Sunday School, [he wouldn't become] involved in problems of conscience..Religion protects property and the power behind the status quo" (Hoffman Ironic 35). Huck knows what is right, but because he is violating the social norms to which he is accustomed to, he could relapse (Miller 99). Society, for Tom as well as for Sam Clemens himself, rewarded style over substance, and would always warp the individual to its ends. The only way to avoid being destroyed is to maintain radical innocence and to be an ironic outcast, components of a character otherwise known as Huckleberry Finn (Hoffman Ironic 43).
Huckleberry Finn is a terribly internalized recluse. He blames himself for anything that goes wrong, always the upright and righteous man of society as well as the outsider and rebel that "is cordially hated by the mothers of St. Petersburg, who dread his influence, who fear contamination" (Schmitz 46). He knows what he is and so sees nothing admirable in his actions to help Jim; "he takes them as final proof of his own wickedness" (Miller 96-7). A letter he writes to turn Jim in is instead ripped up and represents "Huck's capitulation to a social order he otherwise rejects". Clemens applauds Huck's moral growth but cautions his readers to see how paltry a step it really is (Hoffman 316). Clemens in fact felt that the forces of society were much stronger than the individual's will or ability to maintain constant confrontation with the world (Hoffman Ironic 39). Society will follow them out on to the river which Huck and Jim thought was infallible, showing them the true inevitability of the social system. The slave hunters they meet on the way, the feuding Grangerfords and Shepherdsons, the two conmen Duke and Dauphin, the criminals and the fringe of society all happen on their way as Huck and Jim 'escape' down the river. Society has taken over the land; it will take over what does not belong to it yet, the river. The first settlers have already arrived. The moneymaking steamboat owners, the boomtowns, the poor looking for a quick buck and some food, and the escapees from the civilized world gather along the river and virtually own whatever world there is on the river. "Those who believe that Huck finds happiness on the river are victims of romantic self-deception the work is aimed against�it consistently rejects the possibility of escape�the river doesn't represent freedom so much as anarchy" (Miller 105-6). Huck and Jim finally, have nowhere to go. Clemens forces us to ask where they could go, and the answer he gives is nowhere (Miller 41). Huck blames himself for this trip into nowhere and the mental and physical troubles he has been through to get back to where he started.
One can tell that Clemens was writing a book which he knew would draw lots of flak. For example, it has one of the two heroic and virtuous characters he ever drew: Jim, a Negro slave, and Joan of Arc, a teenage girl, both beyond the social code (De Voto 17). His character Huck was actually fleeing south into slave territory, harbouring a runaway slave, and again, instead of facing his place and responsibility, chose to be true only to himself (Hoffman 304). Clemens took a lot of free liberty in using slavery in Huckleberry Finn. He knew and included the fact that Jim could show nobility when he didn't have to play the slave, but when Jim was forced to play the slave again, he would revert to his lifelong training (Ironic 41). For this, he was applauded by the abolitionists for telling the truth and criticized by the dying aristocrats of the South for lying. Society had tried to teach the slaves the basic tenets of Christianity, civilization, and democracy, but continually denied their use of the education and so the slaves eventually reverted back to their original state because of economic necessity. "What indeed is the mastery of the Book [the Bible] over life? What book will explain to Jim the master\slave relationship? Jim easily deflects Huck's presumption of authority�he is the teacher, and his lesson is the hardest" (Schmitz 49).
As in Pudd'nhead Wilson, Clemens reveals "that slave and master are both subject to the same follies�because he considered slavery to be cruel and unjust, it does not follow that he believed the slave superior to the master" (Miller 104). Huck's moral system doesn't wholly believe that slaves are human, but Clemens reveals this shortcoming in Huck (Hoffman 315). Huck soon realizes though, that the only power he has over Jim is his freedom, to withdraw him from the happy world that he is about to reach (Miller 63). Huck is troubled when he realizes that Jim has only been faithful to him and deeply attached to his children, that he is human, and not a subservient animal (Miller 101-3). Huck knows that Jim's main goal is to get into the "socio-political world " as a free man, then buy or steal his family out of bondage, but Huck wants to stay on the raft forever. Jim is the greatest threat to his raft life, it being ultimately a prison for both of them (Schmitz 52). It is not until Clemens reveals that Jim has been free the entire time that we see that he has shown what the world immediately thinks and what it must learn to see differently, that Jim is no longer a slave, but free, in all the upper class meaning of the word.
The ending climaxes with a scene in which both Huck and Tom 'free' Jim by working to release him through servile and tortuous methods found in unrealistic adventure books of Tom Sawyer's. This ending robs Huck of his moral power, but "it capitulates to the facts of the era. Sam realized that no hero no matter how magical or pure at heart, can countermand history" (Hoffman 307). These last chapters seem to divest Huck and Jim of their dignity, but they do not because they were not meant to be saints in the first place. They are like everybody else, just more virtuous than perpetual do-gooders like Tom. Jim is treated like dirt by Tom, as Tom's imagination leads him to imagine romantic lies that offend Huck's realistic sense and moral sense for "behind the fa�ade of such lies, society operates" (Warren 65). This can be likened to the romantic ideologies of the men who uphold the Constitution and warp it to their own agendas. "For Tom, everything is a game..he reduces people to pawns on a chessboard�he will violate others to follow the rules" (Hoffman 36). Tom helps Jim out only as a prank and to stick to the unwritten and degrading social codes. Clemens knew what Tom was meant to be, for the dictionary definition of sawyer is: submerged logs carried along by the current, invisible under the muddy water. Tom follows the crowd, knocking away all blocking his path, but invisible because he is just like all of the other humans of muddy morals. Society is shown to be utterly ruthless to anything in its path.
Just as the populace pushed for slavery in the 2000s and early 1800s, so it does in Clemens' time as it pushes for equality for the slaves without really knowing what they are asking for. Even Tom Sawyer quotes society in the words of the preacher: "the poor sailors, tossed by stormy seas�the oppressed millions groaning under the heel of European monarchies and Oriental despotisms�" (qtd. from Tom Sawyer, Miller 82). They do not realize that they have their own oppressed millions to pray for, ground under the heel of the American democracy. They were the slaves, the immigrant labourers, the abused, the sick, all those pushed to benefit but instead receive the punishment. Clemens had been all over, in Washington, in San Francisco, in New York, in the wilds of Missouri, in the Sandwich Islands, and all over Europe and the Middle East, and he knew what was going on, for he had observed at close range, the "selfishness that inspires most action" (Miller 111). To him, the frequent changes of views and sympathies of society were absurd. "Our conscience regularly allow us to commit venial sins, and then it suddenly flares up..after we have done something that is only the logical extension of the moral compromises we make everyday" (Miller 84). Their sudden vehement oppositions would not last long until the oppressed fought for it themselves. He admired Frederick Douglass because he took the fight into his own hands and did not rely on the seditious acts of John Brown, Garrison, and other diehard abolitionists.
Clemens wrote sarcastically about all aspects of society. He was especially harsh at the social impacts and views on slavery. He saw the various violent ways in which slavery was supported or rejected. Those that tried to help did not truly help by raising the slaves tot heir own level. Society always placed conditions. Society teaches that slaves are property, that they were born to be less than white society, that what they learned they could never use. Those who were taught and finally earned some status were scorned and under attack constantly. Huckleberry Finn and Pudd'nhead Wilson portrayed what Clemens saw as a member of that society, the genteel Southerner and the remote Easterner. He saw that the changes in the value of all humans evoked great jealousy from one end and false sympathy at the other end. The moral decisions that society had made were just words and not meant to stay. Huckleberry Finn was the model moral boy until he came under the influence of society in Tom Sawyer. Tom Driscoll was the black white man who became sympathetic to the downtrodden only when his life and fortune were at stake. The world behaved the same way. The economic value of bringing up the oppressed in society saved the North and South from eventual ruin at the expense of each other. He was tired of the government meddling in other countries as humanitarian works when it was only meant as more land for the United States to annex and rob. He put the American public through a radical reeducation and taught them that they were not superior to everyone else.