Chapter 18
19 (p. 97) He was well born ... worth as much in a man as it is in a horse: One of Twain’s most frequent objects of satire was the idea of southern gentlemen and ladies whose noble goodness derives from the purity of their ancestry. The earned character that Huck and Jim possess is what counts with Twain—not money or the accidents of birth.
20 (p. 100) ”What’s a feud?“: Huck’s innocent question, and the ones that follow, shed light on the absurdity of this particular feud and feuding in general. A word with medieval European roots, ”feud“ means active hatred and hostility; it names a state of perpetual hostility between two families or individuals, marked by murderous assaults in revenge for prior insult or injury. This feud can suggest various lines of hostility in the world of the novel—not only between black and white but between rich and poor, North and South.
21 (p. 101) preforeordestination: Huck collapses two mainstays of Presbyterianism : predestination and foreordination; both refer to the idea that God has decided in advance on all matters, including whether one will go to heaven.
22 (p. 104) cut it pretty short: This is one of several places where Huck declines to tell his readers something that is painful for him to recall. These silences are very effective and add an air of authenticity to his first-person account, in which understatement is a kind of eloquence.
23 (p. 107) You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft: These words lead to the chapter in which life on the raft is celebrated in beautiful language reflecting the desire on the part of Huck and Jim to escape the trouble and violence that characterize life on the shore.
Chapter 19
24 (p. 111) big fat ratty-looking carpet-bags: Made of scraps of old carpet, carpetbags grew in popularity in the 1830s and 1840s with the rapid expansion of modern modes of travel. They also came to signify Northern speculators and confidence men, scorned as ”carpetbaggers,“ who saw the South as a place where they could easily make money.
25 (p. 112) mesmerism and phrenology: Mesmerism, developed in the late eighteenth century, was an early system of hypnotism that became discredited as a medical practice and was relegated to comic sideshows and fantastic exhibitions. Developed around 1800, phrenology is the study of the regions and shapes of the human skull to determine an individual’s characteristics and mental faculties; it also was reduced to a fortune-teller’s trick and sideshow act.
Chapter 20
26 (p. 122) picture of a runaway nigger ... ”$200 reward“ under it. The traveling conmen get set to use a ruse aimed at African Americans, slave and free. The conmen would print a small poster advertising someone black as a runaway, and then capture and sell that person. The handbill serves as ”evidence“ of the person’s status.
Chapter 21
27 (p. 123) lit his pipe, and went to getting his Romeo and Juliet by heart: Mention of this play offers an understated allusion to the story of family feud and secret love in chapter 18. The paragraphs that follow reflect the longstanding tradition in the United States—in the cities and on the frontier, often in serious productions—of presenting Shakespeare’s works as grotesquely gnarled and reduced travesties.
28 (p. 124) ”the Highland fling or the sailor’s hornpipe“: The Highland fling, a Scottish social dance in which the arms and legs are moved with great vigor, was transported to American social dances and theatrical stages, including minstrel shows. The sailor’s hornpipe is a spirited dance usually performed by a single person, originally to the accompaniment of a hornpipe, a wind instrument consisting of a wooden or bone pipe with finger holes, a bell, and a horn mouthpiece. Beginning in the eighteenth century, sailor’s hornpipes were occasionally performed on American stages, where, lest they seem too low or rude, the dances were offered as part of a ”lecture.“
Chapter 22
29 (p. 133) bucks and wenches: In the colloquial language of slavery in the United States, whites used these terms to refer to African-American males and females.
30 (p. 134) ”If any real lynching’s going to be done, ... Southern fashion“: Expressing his views about the rarity of human courage, even in the face of outrageous injustice, Twain registers his disdain for the odious American practice of lynching—executing someone accused of a crime without legal due process. While women and men, black and white, were victims of lynch mobs, in the period following slavery black men were most often the ones killed in this way.
Chapter 23
31 (p. 142) He was thinking about his wife ... does for their’n: In this sentence, and the ones concluding this chapter, the reader gains a sense of Jim as someone’s husband and father, and perhaps recalls Jim’s fervent intention to free his wife and children.
32 (p. 142) good nigger. This phrase, part of the colloquial language of slavery, generally referred to a slave’s dependability as a loyal servant or as a work-horse. But here Huck means that Jim is a man for whom his admiration and sympathies are genuine and profound.
Chapter 26
33 (p. 158) ”better ’n we treat our niggers?“: This was an important question for those debating the American slavery system. One irony of the nineteenth century was the presence of former slaves—including, for a time, Frederick Douglass—in England and on the European continent, extolling the freedom of the Old World and blasting the slave system in ”the land of the free.“
Chapter 29
34 (p. 181) ’You and your brother ... sign your names”: The effort to prove identity with physical evidence fascinated Twain and is aptly used in Huckleberry Finn, a novel of disguises, masquerades, and trickery. The author would use a similar plot device again in his novel The Tragedy of Pudd‘nhead Wilson (1894), in which fingerprints are brought forward in court to prove an identity.
Chapter 32
35 (p. 201) ‘No’m. Killed a nigger“: This is the most famous statement of racial prejudice in the novel. As Huck manipulates the scene he is setting with another ”stretcher,“ Twain’s satirical knife is swift and sharp.
Chapter 35
36 (p. 216) ”Baron Trenck ... none of them heroes?“: Franz, Freiherr von der Trenck (1711-1749) was an Austrian officer and adventurer. Giovanni Casanova (1725-1798) was a Venetian adventurer and author. Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571) was an Italian sculptor, metalsmith, and author. Henry IV (1553- 1610) was king of France from 1589 to 1610. These well-known historical figures all escaped from prison in dramatic fashion.
Chapter 37
37 (p. 232) come over from England... one of them early ships: Twain mocks the American impulse to claim an exalted lineage based on descent either from those who sailed to the New World on the Mayflower, which arrived at Plym- outh Colony from England in 1620, or from someone else grandly historical. William the Conqueror was king of England from 1066 to 1087.
Chapter 38
38 (p. 233) ”On the scutcheon ... you and me“: Huck and Tom start to create for Jim a coat of arms, employing some of the terms of heraldry, a medieval institution in which noble individuals and families displayed their insignia. When collections of these symbols were embroidered on the coats worn over the chain mail of knights, they became known as coats of arms. The symbols, called charges, are displayed on a shield known as an escutcheon; a bend is a diagonal band across the shield, a fess is a band across the middle, and a chief is a band at the top.
INSPIRED BY ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN
I have written 400 pages on it—therefore it is very nearly half
done. It is Huck Finn’s Autobiography. I like it only tolerably
well, as far as I have got & may possibly pigeonhole or burn the
MS when it is done.
—Mark Twain, from a letter to William Dean Howells, August 9, 1876
Dramatic Adaptations
Twain’s lyrical use of dialect and evocative descriptions of landscapes in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn have provided material for several adaptations to the musical comedy form. On November 11, 1902, Klaw and Erlanger’s production Mark Twain’s
Huckleberry Finn opened in Hartford, Connecticut. The play included scenes from both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, as well as original material—including a show tune called “I Want to Be a Drummer in the Band”—created by Lee Arthur, who adapted the novel for the stage. Despite its title, this production had little to do with Mark Twain or his work. It was the only musical adaptation to appear during Twain’s lifetime.
When he died in 1950, German-American composer Kurt Weill, perhaps best known for his Three-Penny Opera, was creating a musical work based on the novel, with book and lyrics by Maxwell Anderson. The five completed songs—“River Chanty,” “Catfish Song,” “Come In, Mornin‘,” “This Time Next Year,” and “Apple Jack”—are sometimes sung in concert performances and can be heard on several CD collections of Weill’s work.
Big River, a musical adaptation of Huckleberry Finn by Roger Miller and William Hauptman, opened on Broadway on April 25, 1985, featuring John Goodman as Huck’s father. It won seven Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Book, Best Score, and Best Scenic Design, and ran for more than 1,000 performances. Miller’s musical numbers drew from gospel, soul, and honky-tonk.
Sculpture
On May 27, 1926, in Mark Twain’s childhood hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, a bronze sculpture of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn was unveiled. The figures embody the spirit of adventure: Huck sports his famous straw hat, pushes a walking stick into the ground, and looks up to his hero Tom Sawyer, who gazes forward confidently in mid-step. The monument, created by Frederick Hibbard, stands at the base of Cardiff Hill in the town that was the model for the setting of Twain’s two famous novels of boyhood. The unveiling was attended by ninety-year-old Laura Frazer, who inspired the character Becky Thatcher in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
The Banning of Huckleberry Finn
Shortly after the novel was published, a committee of the public library of Concord, Massachusetts, called Huckleberry Finn “trash” and banned the book from its shelves in the belief that it corrupted youth and the English language itself. In response, Twain wrote this letter, published in the Hartford Courant, to the library directors:
A committee of the public library of your town have condemned and excommunicated my last book and doubled its sale. This generous action of theirs must necessarily benefit me in one or two additional ways. For instance, it will deter other libraries from buying the book; and you are doubtless aware that one book in a public library prevents the sale of a sure ten and a possible hundred of its mates. And, secondly, it will cause the purchasers of the book to read it, out of curiosity, instead of merely intending to do so, after the usual way of the world and library committees; and then they will discover, to my great advantage and their own indignant disappointment, that there is nothing objectionable in the book after all.
Nonetheless, in 1957 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People claimed that Huckleberry Finn was racist. Within the context of the burgeoning civil rights movement, this charge was enough for the New York City school system to remove the book from its curriculum. The book continues to be widely banned from schools today, and the American Library Association ranked Huckleberry Finn number 5 on their list of the 100 most-challenged books between 1990 and 1999.
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the history of the book. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
MARK TWAIN
I shall like it, whether anybody else does or not.
—from a letter to William Dean Howells, July 20, 1883
THE HARTFORD COURANT
In his latest story, Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade), by Mark Twain, Mr. Clemens has made a very distinct literary advance over Tom Sawyer, as an interpreter of human nature and a contributor to our stock of original pictures of American life. Still adhering to his plan of narrating the adventures of boys, with a primeval and Robin Hood freshness, he has broadened his canvas and given us a picture of a people, of a geographical region, of a life that is new in the world. The scene of his romance is the Mississippi River. Mr. Clemens has written of this river before specifically, but he has not before presented it to the imagination so distinctly nor so powerfully. Huck Finn’s voyage down the Mississippi with the runaway nigger Jim, and with occasionally other companions, is an adventure fascinating in itself as any of the classic outlaw stories, but in order that the reader may know what the author has done for him, let him notice the impression left on his mind of this lawless, mysterious, wonderful Mississippi, when he has closed the book. But it is not alone the river that is indelibly impressed upon the mind, the life that went up and down it and went on along its banks are projected with extraordinary power. Incidentally, and with a true artistic instinct, the villages, the cabins, the people of this river become star tlingly real. The beauty of this is that it is apparently done without effort. Huck floating down the river happens to see these things and to encounter the people and the characters that made the river famous forty years ago—that is all. They do not have the air of being invented, but of being found. And the dialects of the people, white and black—what a study are they; and yet nobody talks for the sake of exhibiting a dialect. It is not necessary to believe the surprising adventures that Huck engages in, but no one will have a moment’s doubt of the reality of the country and the people he meets.
Another thing to be marked in the story is its dramatic power. Take the story of the Southern Vendetta—a marvelous piece of work in a purely literary point of view—and the episode of the duke and the king, with its pictures of Mississippi communities, both of which our readers probably saw in the Century magazine. They are equaled in dramatic force by nothing recently in literature.
We are not in this notice telling the story or quoting from a book that nearly everybody is sure to read, but it is proper to say that Mr. Clemens strikes in a very amusing way certain psychological problems. What, for instance, in the case of Huck, the son of the town drunkard, perverted from the time of his birth, is conscience, and how does it work? Most amusing is the struggle Huck has with his conscience in regard to slavery. His conscience tells him, the way it has been instructed, that to help the runaway nigger Jim to escape—to aid in stealing the property of Miss Watson, who has never injured him, is an enormous offense that will no doubt carry him to the bad place; but his affection for Jim finally induces him to violate his conscience and risk eternal punishment in helping Jim to escape. The whole study of Huck’s moral nature is as serious as it is amusing, his confusion of wrong as right and his abnormal mendacity, traceable to his training from infancy, is a singular contribution to the investigation of human nature.
These contradictions, however, do not interfere with the fun of the story, which has all the comicality, all the odd way of looking at life, all the whimsical turns of thought and expression that have given the author his wide fame and made him sui generis. The story is so interesting, so full of life and dramatic force, that the reader will be carried along irresistibly, and the time he loses in laughing he will make up in diligence to hurry along and find out how things come out.
—February 20, 1885
BOSTON EVENING TRAVELLER
It is little wonder that Mr. Samuel Clemens, otherwise Mark Twain, resorted to real or mock lawsuits, as may be, to restrain some real or imaginary selling of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” as a means of advertising that extraordinarily senseless publication. Before the work is disposed of, Mr. Mark Twain will probably have to resort to law to compel some to sell it by any sort
of bribery or corruption. It is doubtful if the edition could be disposed of to people of average intellect at anything short of the point of the bayonet. This publication rejoices in two frontispieces, of which the one is supposed to be a faithful portrait of Huckleberry Finn, and the other an engraving of the classic features of Mr. Mark Twain as seen in the bust made by Karl Gerhardt. The taste of this gratuitous presentation is as bad as is the book itself, which is an extreme statement. Mr. Clemens has contributed some humorous literature that is excellent and will hold its place, but his Huckleberry Finn appears to be singularly flat, stale and unprofitable. The book is sold by subscription.—March 5, 1885
—March 5, 1885
THE ATLANTA CONSTITUTION
A very deplorable fact is that the great body of literary criticism is mainly perfunctory. This is not due to a lack of ability or to a lack of knowledge. It is due to the fact that most of it is from the pens of newspaper writers who have no time to elaborate their ideas. They are in a hurry, and what they write is hurried. Under these circumstances it is not unnatural that they should take their cues from inadequate sources and give to the public opinions that are either conventional or that have no reasonable basis.
All this is the outcome of the conditions and circumstances of American life. There is no demand for sound criticism any more than there is a demand for great poetry. We have a leisure class, but its tastes run towards horses, yachting and athletic sports, in imitation of the English young men who occasionally honor these shores with their presence. The imitation, after all, is a limping one. The young Englishman of leisure is not only fond of outdoor sports, but of books. He has culture and taste, and patronizes literature with as much enthusiasm as he does physical amusements. If our leisure class is to imitate the English, it would be better if the imitation extended somewhat in the direction of culture.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 36