Civilized Society When Huck Plans example essay topic

Racism and slavery - One may wonder why Mark Twain would choose to write an antislavery novel some twenty years after the end of the Civil War. By the early 1880's, Reconstruction, the plan to put the United States back together after the war and integrate freed slaves into society, had hit some shaky ground, although it had not yet failed outright (that wouldn't occur until 1887, three years after the publication of Huck Finn). Still, as Twain worked on his novel, race relations, which seemed to be on a positive path in the years following the Civil War, once again became strained; Jim Crow laws, designed to limit the power of blacks in the South, began a new, insidious effort to oppress. Twain made a powerful decision when he chose to describe a system that no longer existed, when doing so could just lead the unsympathetic reader to claim that things had gotten much better for blacks.

One way to analyze this decision is to read slavery as an allegorical representation of the condition of blacks in the United States even after the abolition of slavery. Just as slavery places the noble and moral Jim under the control of the white man, no matter how degraded that white man may be, so too did the more insidious racism that arose near the end of Reconstruction oppress black men for illogical and hypocritical reasons. However, the new racism of the South, less institutionalized and monolithic, was also much less easy to critique. Slavery was a tough practice to justify; but when white Southerners enacted racist laws or policies under a professed motive of self-defense against newly freed blacks, far fewer people, Northern or Southern, saw the act as immoral. In exposing the hypocrisy of slavery, Twain demonstrated how racism distorts the oppressors as much as it does those who are oppressed.

Just as the South has never entirely escaped the legacy of slavery, this theme, articulated so subtly by Twain at such an early time, has continued to animate Southern writing throughout the twentieth century, most particularly in the work of the great Southern writer William Faulkner. Education, both intellectual and moral - By focusing on Huck's education, Huck Finn fits into the tradition of the bildungsroman: a novel of maturation and development. An outcast, Huck distrusts the morals and precepts of the society that labels him a pariah and fails to protect him from abuse. This apprehension about society, and his growing relationship with Jim, lead Huck to question many of the teachings that he has received on race. Time and time again, the reader sees him choosing to "go to hell" rather than go along with what he's been taught. Huck bases these decisions on his experiences, his own sense of logic, and what his developing conscience tells him.

On the raft, away from civilization, Huck represents a kind of natural man. Through deep introspection, he comes to his own conclusions, unaffected by the accepted, and often hypocritical, precepts of Southern culture. Early in this novel, Huck learns to read books-a skill that later serves him well in a literal sense; by the novel's end, Huck has learned to "read" the world around him, to distinguish good, bad, right, wrong, menace, friend, and so on. His moral development is sharply contrasted to the character of Tom Sawyer, who is influenced by a bizarre mix of adventure novels and Sunday-school teachings, which he combines to justify his outrageous and potentially harmful escapades. Civilized society - When Huck plans to head west at the end of Huck Finn to escape further "sivilizing", he is trying to avoid more than having to take baths regularly and going to school. Throughout the novel, Twain depicts society as a structure that has become little more than a collection of degraded rules and precepts that defy logic.

This faulty logic manifests itself early, when the new judge in town allows Pap to keep custody of Huck. The judge privileges Pap's "rights" to his son over Huck's welfare. Clearly, this decision comments on a system that puts a white man's rights to his "property"-his slaves-over the welfare and freedom of a black man. Whereas a reader in the 1880's might have overlooked the moral absurdity of giving a man custody of another man, however, the mirroring of this situation in the granting of rights to the immoral Pap over the lovable Huck forces the reader to think more closely about the meaning of slavery. In implicitly comparing the plight of slaves to the plight of Huck at the hands of Pap, Twain demonstrates how impossible it is for a society that owns slaves to be just, no matter how "civilized" that society believes and proclaims itself to be. Again and again Huck encounters individuals who seem good (Sally Phelps, for example), but Twain takes care to show us that person as a prejudiced slave-owner.

The shakiness of the justice systems that Huck encounters lies at the heart of society's problems: terrible acts go unpunished, yet frivolous crimes, such as drunkenly shouting insults, lead to executions. Sherburn's speech to the mob that has come to lynch him accurately summarizes the view of society given in this book: rather than maintaining collective welfare, society is marked by cowardice, a lack of logic, and profound selfishness..