Analysing Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
the Era of Realism
and Naturalism;
By
1875, American writers were moving toward realism in literature. The time span
from 1870 to 1910 is called the Era of Realism and Naturalism in American
Literature. In the era, there were two major movements that came into existence and flourished
in American Literature that are called Realism and Naturalism. Before this
era, American had been looking at the world through the optimistic filters of
Romanticism and Transcendentalism. As a result of a big change because of the frontier
and the Civil War, Americans started giving preference to writing and thinking
about reality instead of imagined or fantastic ideas. Realism is a manner
and method of composition by which the author describes normal, average life,
in an accurate, truthful way. The movement focused on casual characters and
daily life events and situations. For example, a realist story like Stephen
Crane was ordinary and was of simple people. While Naturalism was a branch of realism.
It is a manner and method of composition by which the author portrays
'life as it is in accordance with the philosophic theory of determinism. Naturalism
also tells about the real situations but they also had faith in the forces like
nature, heredity, and fate. The naturalists’ writers usually gave attention to
the unique characteristics of a character. As an example to it, "Mary
Chesnut's Civil War" depicts the points of naturalism because in wartime, she wrote about real events and at the same time, she also talked about
praying to God for good outcomes. Although both of the movements were slightly
in contrast but these movements aided American people to deal with their thoughts
that their lives could not be optimistic all the time Romantics believed they
would be. As we are talking about the era of Realism and Naturalism, the role and
the contribution to the American Literature of Mark Twain and was massive,
extraordinary and unneglectable, especially, the novels, The Adventure of
Huckleberry Finn is considered a mile-stone achiever in American Literature.
It is not implied by social criticism that Twain’s novel is to be read as a
sociological treatise or an unedited transcript of reality, or even a mere, realistic
recital of facts, even though the writer himself called it a ‘true book‟. The
purpose of this article is to show how the American life of those days was
translated into fiction with its symbolic depth and resonance. It is the latter
quality that gives the book the status in literature. In fiction, symbolism is
the most important tool for recording the world around us. It must be
remembered that a writer is in no way severed from the world and nor is art an
abstract skill but as Mathew Arnold says “a criticism of life”. Mark Twain was a writer, humourist, and publisher. It is doubtful either he was a true realist
or not. Twain’s stories had many unrealistic qualities: “tall tales" and
unlikely coincidences. He was never a pure realist. His name originated from
his career as a pilot in the Mississippi river; “Mark” is the measurement of the
depth of the river and “twain” means two in terms of the pilot. In approaching
his work, his name can be a clue for understanding human beings whose inside is
only like the Mississippi river, the mysterious two depths (Twelve feet of
water). In 1870, Twain wrote two of his most famous works. These were The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and the sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. During
Twain's last fifteen years, he received numerous public honours, including
degrees from Oxford and Yale.
Theme;
The
primary theme of the novel is the conflict between civilization and
"natural life." Huck represents natural life through his freedom of
spirit, uncivilized ways, and desire to escape from civilization. He was raised
without any rules or discipline and has a strong resistance to anything that
might "civilize" him. Throughout the novel, Twain seems to suggest
that the uncivilized way of life is more desirable and morally superior.
Drawing on the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Twain suggests that civilization
corrupts, rather than improves, human beings. The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn
is a sequel to Mark Twain’s early novel The Adventure of Tom Sawyer. Huckleberry
named Huck was the main character of the story and he had a friend named Tom
Sawyer. His father is an alcoholic and Huck lives with a Widow Douglas and Miss
Watson. Widow Douglas keeps Huck with her in an attempt to make him civilised. Miss
Watson was c so-called sister of Widow Douglas. Widow Douglas behaves well with
Huck whereas Miss Watson's behavior is really rude and abusive with him. Huck really
does not want to live with these ladies but because of his friend Tom, he
compromised to live with the ladies. Tom said to Hick that if you want to join
my gang or company, you need to be civilised. Huck starts enjoying his civil lifestyle
by living with these ladies but as I mentioned before about his alcoholic
father named Pap, he suddenly comes to Huck’s room with informing him. Pap
does not want his son Huck to be a good and civilised person. There is a local
judge name Thatcher in the story. Huck gave him some money seems as a purpose
of saving. But his father Pap takes his son Huck to the Mississippi river by force
and kidnaps him, and puts him in a dark room. Life of Huck is a kind of prisoner
in that small hut along the riverside. Pap usually drinks and he beat his son
sometimes. Huck tries to escape from his father. He kills a pig and puts his blood
on his clothes and on his body. When his father came back to the house, he
saw the situations and considers Huck has died and left the house. Now, he is
free. Huck grabs a small boat and reaches Jackson village. He met Jim there.
Jim was a slave to Miss Watson and he also escaped from her. So, Jim and Huck
start living together on Jackson Island. They were living a happy life
thereby fishing, eating, and sleeping, but that time was just for a few months.
In the meanwhile, a typhoon hits the island and they saw a raft and a house floating
on the water having a dead body inside it. Both guys grab food and clothes from
that. After that, Huck takes shape of a girl and went to a town. They get a piece of news that some slave hunters are searching for Jim for price. They run off from
that place and take that raft and start their journey to go to a free state and
spend their lives there. The voyage was quite long and they also lose their way
and reached to town. They met that slave hunter but they make them fool
successfully by telling them that a man, who is actually Jim, is Huck’s father
suffering from smallpox. They gave some money to Huck and tell him to go from
the area as soon as possible. The next night, the raft they journeying upon hits
a boat and broken apart. Huck reaches to The Grangerfords, a wealthy family
house, and the family keeps Huck with them. Huck also runs from there, finds Jim,
and resumes their journey. After some days, they meet two people named Duke and
King. Both two guys steel the raft of Huck and Jim and run away. King comes to
know that a Peter named person has died and his brother will come for the dead body.
Duke and King become fake brothers of Peter and go to the village. The
villagers welcome them but at the same time, many people are still doubtful
about them. Huck also arrived in the village and wants to expose them. But fortunately,
the real brothers of Peter step in and expose the Duke and King. Huck and Jim
take his raft again and resume their journey once again. Duke and King want to revenge
on Huck and Jim and sell Jim to a local farmer for money. Huck goes to the farmer
to free Jim. He meets a lady, Aunt Sally. He gets to know that Aunt Sally and
his husband, that farmer who bought Jim, is one of relatives of his friend
Tom Sawyer. Tom promises Huck to make Jim free. He has a plan for Jim but that
plan was impractical. One night, all three guys Huck, Jim, and Tom try to run
from the farmer. Some people were chasing them and fired. Tom injured and Jim sacrificed
his independence for Tom. Huck runs and brings a doctor for Tom. Jim is again a
slave now. Tom still wants to free him at any cost. He tells Aunt Sally that
Jim was a slave of Miss Watson and he has to be free after her death.
Jim was lucky because Miss Watson died two months before. He gets his money
from Judge Thatcher and decides to continue his journey and will go to the
west. This is the end of the story.
Critical Review;
Life
and literature has never been odd, nor ever been thought so since the
conception of art for is not literature the window to the world. If such a
conflict really existed, most black American writers would not have written at
all. But there must be a fundamental connection between artistic means, that is
technique and discipline, and social and moral conviction. It is only when an
aesthete approaches politics as if it were a poem, or when the political
activist approaches the poem as it were a leaflet, that the trouble starts. It
can be argued that all that is great in American literature comes out of a
profound confrontation of social facts. One thinks, for example, Moby Dick, and
The American Dream.
The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain describes the journey of a young
boy and a runaway slave, Jim, up the Mississippi River. One of the most
important themes of the book is that society is cruel because we see the life
of the main characters very hard because of society. The book’s tone also
changes. Sometimes it is serious. When Huck, Tom, and Jim tried to escape from
the farmer and got shot and when Huck’s father treated him very bad. Other
times it is funny when two guys, King, and his friend step into the story and
runs away with their luggage. And sometimes even silly. The book is classical
because the tone surprises the reader while the theme teaches the reader moral
lessons. While Huck is on his journey, he realizes that society is cruel and
harsh. It is the undercurrent of the tragedy of slavery for both black and
white that gives Huckleberry Finn its moral depth. The broad framework is the
emergence of personal freedom and individual responsibility in a society that
is dominated by conventional morality. Within this broad framework, the story of
Huck and Jim's quest for freedom is unfolded. Jim's flight from society was
occasioned by his fear that he might be sold down to Orleans into harsher
slavery, where they work a "nigger" to death. However, it was not
merely the fear of being sold into a worse kind of slavery, although that
provided the initial action, that made him run away from Miss Watson: it was
also hidden, suppressed desire for freedom which suddenly sprang up to the
surface when he found a sympathetic heart. Jim was aware of the consequences of
his not reaching the free land and being caught again. He did not want nobody
to pick him up, and take him into slavery again. The prospect of reaching a
free land filled him with unbounded joy. Even Huck's flight from Miss Watson,
the Widow Douglas, and his father (in fact, the whole community in relation to
which he is a young outcast) was not a flight from physical danger alone.
"All I wanted was a change", he told Miss Watson. "I wasn't
particular". As Leslie A. Fiedler says in his Love and Death in the
American Novel put it, Huck is not an "open rebel, a self-declared enemy
of society" yet he wanted to be free "again and all by ourselves on
the big river and nobody to bother us.
The
majority of the plot takes place on the river or its banks. For Huck and Jim,
the river represents freedom. On the raft, they are completely independent and determine
their own courses of action. Jim looks forward to reaching the free states, and
Huck is eager to escape his abusive, drunkard of a father and the
"civilization" of Miss Watson. However, the towns along the river
bank begin to exert influence upon them, and eventually, Huck and Jim meet
criminals, shipwrecks, dishonesty, and great danger. Finally, a fog forces them
to miss the town of Cairo, at which point there were planning to head up the
Ohio River, towards the free states, in a steamboat. Originally, the river is a
safe place for the two travelers, but it becomes increasingly dangerous as the
realities of their runaway lives set in on Huck and Jim. Once reflective of
absolute freedom, the river soon becomes only a short-term escape, and the
novel concludes on the safety of dry land, where, ironically, Huck and Jim find
their true freedom.
Three main
elements in Huckleberry Finn can be pointed out throughout the story. First of
all, the developing characterization of Huck is the major element in the book.
The other two elements are: Huck's and Jim's adventures in their flight toward
freedom: Jim is running away from actual slavery, Huck from the cruelty of his
father, from the well-intentioned „civilizing' efforts of Miss Watson, from
respectability and routine in general; and social satire of the towns along the
river. But it seems that Huck and Jim's adventures in their quest for freedom
and Huck's awareness of his moral responsibility are only twin aspects of the
same. The other element, social satire of the towns, has been presented to
serve as a fitting background to man's cruelty to man, that is the white man's
treatment to the black man. Thus Jim's quest for freedom is not unrelated to
Huck's growth in moral insight and vice versa. It is because the focus of
critical evaluation has been shifted from the white-black relationship to that
of Huck's developing characterization mostly unrelated to Jim’s quest for
freedom and social satire that the novel has not been viewed from the angle.
The society Jim had run away from was a society which not only believed in but
also practiced discrimination between a “nigger” and a white man;. The phrase
“free nigger” was enough to scandalize white Americans. This is what Pap thinks
of a “free nigger”. But Huck Finn never thought “regular”, never adopted the
attitude of his father and the society that he represented. He was committed to
helping out Jim into freedom right from the beginning “even if people called him a
low down Abolitionist”. At Miss Watson’s, he refused to align himself with Tom
Sawyer in his plan to tie up the sleeping Jim, His commitment to Jim and his
freedom was complete when he promised Jim not to tell others of his escape.
This tension between Huck’s commitment to Jim’s freedom and humanity and the
written and the unwritten code of the society of his time gave the novel its
moral depth. In his Notebook, Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn a book of “mine
where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and
conscience suffers defeat”.
Huck,
as also Mark Twain, was part of the "fabric of organized, acquisitive
society", "the sick folk" and "the damned human race"
that nurtured him. Mark Twain by holding radical views towards the race problem
became an outsider who could view the problem both as an outsider and an
insider. He became the most “desouthernized of Southerners", although he
had always lived in a society where "the institution of slavery was
unquestioned". Mark Twain soon realized ' through Huck Finn, that it was a
mistake to consider the "dwarf conscience" as the "voice of
God". He could, therefore, free himself from the tyranny of conscience only
if he was able to maintain a critical distance from it. The conscience that
unerring monitor can be treated to approve any wild thing you want it to
approve if you begin its education early and stick to it. By showing what Huck
Finn considers what he ought to do and what he is aware he must do (conscience and
the sound heart) Twain situated in a single consciousness both the perverted
moral code of a society built on slavery and the vernacular commitment to
freedom and spontaneity. Twain was thus able to present the opposed perspectives
as alternative modes of experience for the same character. As against the
opposed perspective, Roxana's son in Pudd’nhead Wilson experienced both modes
of experience. "Why were niggers and whites made?” Tom Chambers began to
think. “What crime did the uncreated first nigger commit that the course of
birth was decreed for him? And why is this awful difference made between white
and black? How hard the nigger's fate seems, this morning! - yet until last
night such a thought never entered my head." Huck's conscience "went
to grinding" and he began to analyse his attitude towards Jim. "I was
trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing and
go and write to that nigger's owner and tell where he was: but deep down in me
I knew it was a lie - and He knew it - I found that out”. He took a decision
against his heart and wrote the letter to Miss Watson informing her where her
runaway nigger was. He felt himself light and "all washed clean of
sin" at least for the time being. Finally, he threw himself on the side of
Jim. On the social plane, it was a struggle with the problem poisoned by the
clash between property rights and human rights, between what the community
considered to be the proper attitude toward an escaped slave and Huck's
knowledge of Jim's humanity, between the direct human relationship of the frontier
and the abstract, inhuman, market-dominated relationship fostered by the rising
middle class which in Mark Twain's day was already compromising dangerously
with the most inhumane aspects of the defeated slave system.7 Twain by taking
the final decision clearly showed that he was for human rights and on the side
of humanity.
Idealised World and the Conclusion:
Towards
the end of the novel, Huck realized that their search for an idealized world
where Jim would have equality with white folks, and where the "irreparable
breach between black and white" would be healed was impracticable and
likely not to materialize in the present framework of society. He must realize
the limits of freedom, not only for himself but also for Jim. This had already
been suggested earlier in the novel by a very significant symbol-a steamboat.
Huck and Jim were only halfway in their quest for freedom when their lumber
raft was run over by a steamboat (an image of the avenging society) and Huck
had to dive deep (or was it diving deep into his sensibility, as Kaplan
suggests?) in order to save himself. They were not able to restore their home
again after that incident. The last chapters of the novel pose a problem to the
critics and must have posed a problem to Mark Twain himself. Since it was not
possible for Mark Twain to reconcile the radical character of Huck Finn with
the realistic compulsions of the world of St. Petersburg and Phelps plantation,
he abandoned the compelling image of Huck and Jim on the “raft”, the image of
an ideal society. But it would be too much to say that Huck's commitment to the
vernacular values in the story were mere figments of the imagination because
Huck had exposed the established system of values in the process.
Huck
is the only person in the white society who is independent in the community
because he sees the profound gulf that separates the black from the white. Is
it not, then, the peculiar construction of the white man's inner eyes. Those
eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon the reality that
prevents them from seeing the object clearly? Even the abolitionists were not
able to make the white Americans aware of this 'moral distortion". Mark
Twain seems to suggest that American reality can be defined only when the black
reality is taken into account. Mark Twain hinted at this but since he could not
be an open rebel - perhaps the time was not ripe - he only suggested it through
the character of Jim. If the white Americans have to achieve their identity,
they will have to come to terms with this "alien passion". Mark Twain
made a beginning in this direction.
Human
beings can be awful cruel to one another.” (Huck Finn)
Ahmad
Sheraz
193900
References;
Twain(1986).
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Norton Edition) New York: Prentice Hall.
https
: arcjournals . org/
Mark
Twain: The Development of a Writer. Cambridge Mass: Belknop Press.
Survey
on American literature, class 12, ch#6,7, Era of Realism and Naturalism, Tips
for Huckelberry . pdf
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