When we move from the context into which we want to deposit Huckleberry Finn and consider the nature of the text and its creator, matter becomes even more entangled.
Though devotees love to praise Huckleberry Finn as "a savage indictment of a society that accepted slavery as a way of life" 55 or "the deadliest satire First, the ambiguities of the novel are multiple. The characterization of Jim is a string of inconsistencies. At one point he is the superstitious darky; at another he is the indulgent surrogate father. On the one hand, his desire for freedom is unconquerable; on the other, he submits it to the ridiculous antics of a child.
Further, while Jim flees from slavery and plots to steal his family out of bondage, most other slaves in the novel embody the romantic contentment with the "peculiar institution" that slaveholders tried to convince abolitionists all slaves felt.
Twain's equivocal attitude toward blacks extends beyond his fiction into his lifelong struggle with "the Negro question. Leaving slaveholding Missouri seems to have had little effect on his racial outlook, because in he wrote home to his mother from New York, "I reckon I had better black my face, for in these Eastern states niggers are considerably better than white people.
In a letter proving that Twain had provided financial assistance to a black student at the Yale University Law School in was discovered and authenticated by Shelley Fisher Fishkin. Washington in championing several black causes. Instead, this should make it the pith of the American literature curriculum.
Active engagement with Twain's novel provides one method for students to confront their own deepest racial feelings and insecurities. Though the problems of racial perspective present in Huckleberry Finn may never be satisfactorily explained for censors or scholars, the consideration of them may have a practical, positive bearing on the manner in which America approaches race in the coming century. Notes 1. Sculley Bradley et al. New York: Norton, Nicholas J.
Karolides and Lee Burress, eds. This information is based on six national surveys of censorship pressures on the American public schools between 19 6 5 and Most scholars express opinions on whether or not to ban Huckleberry Finn in a paragraph or two of an article that deals mainly with another topic. Shelley Fisher Fishkin has given the issues much more attention. In addition to authenticating a letter written by Mark Twain that indicates his nonracist views see n. Hitchens 2 5 8.
Allan B. Ballard, letter, New York Times 9 May 19 8 z. Fall : 6. Kaplan At this point in his autobiography, Hughes discusses the furor caused by Carl Van Vechten's novel Nigger Heaven, published in See David L. Fiedler 5. Again, see Smith's essay. Fiedler 6; see also Smith's discussion of this passage. Kaplan ib. Mark Twain, quoted in Woodard and MacCann 76 emphasis added.
Woodard and MacCann Hoxie N. Fairchild, letter, New York Times, 14 Sept. Louis J. Budd Cambridge, Eng. For a defense of the early Jim as an example of Twains strategy to "elaborate [racial stereotypes] in order to undermine them," see David Smith's essay. Mailloux's discussion of "rhetorical performances" in Huckleberry Finn bears kinship to M.
Bakhtin's discussion of the function of heteroglossia in the comic novel. In "Discourse on the Novel," Bakhtin identifies two features that characterize "the incorporation of heteroglossia and its stylistic utilization" in the comic novel.
Twain himself acknowledges the painstaking attention he paid to language in the novel. Clearly, through his play with the "posited author" Huck, Twain's motive is to unmask and destroy various socioideological belief systems that are represented by language.
So what Mailloux refers to as rhetorical performance Bakhtin identifies as the heteroglossia struggle. Thus Jim's successful appropriation of Huck's argumentative strategy dismantles the hegemony of white supremacy discourse present as Huck's language. Bakhtin, "Discourse in the Novel," trans. Mailloux Leo Marx, "Mr. Trilling, and Huckleberry Finn," American Scholar 2.
Robert Sattelmeyer and J. Donald Crowley Columbia, Mo. James M. Though he ignores Jim and his aspiration for freedom in Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor, in a more recent, related article, "A Hard Book to Take," Cox returns to the evasion sequence and treats Jim's freedom in particular and the concept of freedom in general. He contends that Twain had recognized "the national he [myth] of freedom" and that the closing movement of Huckleberry Finn dramatizes Twain's realization that Jim is not and never will be truly free.
Further, no one, black or white, is or will be free, elaborates Cox, "despite the fictions of history and the Thirteenth Amendment. Cox, Mark Twain The Effects of Reading "Huckleberry Finn" Pete Hamill, "Breaking the Silence," Esquire Jacqueline James Goodwin, "Booker T.
English Journal , Nov. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since. Huckleberry Finn may be the most exalted single work of American literature. Praised by our best known critics and writers, the novel is enshrined at the center of the American literature curriculum. The most taught novel, the most taught long work, and the most taught piece of American literature, Huckleberry Finn is a staple from junior high where eleven chapters are included in the Junior Great Books program to graduate school.
Written in a now vanished dialect, told from the point of view of a runaway fourteen-year-old, the novel conglomerates melodramatic boyhood adventure, farcical low comedy, and pointed social satire.
Yet at its center is a relationship between a white boy and an escaped slave, an association freighted with the tragedy and the possibility of American history.
Linking their complaints with the efforts of other groups to influence the curriculum, we English teachers have seen the issue as one of censorship, defending the novel and our right to teach it. In so doing we have been properly concerned: the freedom of English teachers to design and implement curriculum must be protected as censorship undermines the creation of an informed citizenry able to make critical judgments between competing ideas.
For this we need to listen to objections raised to the novel and reconsider the process of teaching it. Entering into a dialogue with those that have objections to Huckleberry Finn can help us think the dynamics of race in literature courses and about the way literature depicts, interrogates, and affirms our national culture and history.
Local television and newspaper reporters learned of the story, and English teachers, students, parents, and administrators suddenly and unexpectedly found themselves at the center of a difficult and very public controversy. An impassioned meeting at the high school made the nightly news. A subsequent meeting with the school board was broadcast on the cable access channel. Expressing sentiments that might be echoed by many across the country, these teachers felt that they had been teaching appropriately all along.
Upset that their freedom in the classroom was impinged, these teachers were also confused and pained that parents should find the text and their methods insensitive. On the other side black students who raised concerns with teachers about the book felt they had not been listened to, and black parents concluded that a tight-knit group of narrow-minded teachers had shut out and demeaned their legitimate concerns.
Some black students felt that long friendships with white students were in jeopardy. In sum, parents were angry with teachers, teachers felt threatened and misunderstood, administrators went in various directions but failed to follow policies already in place, and students were alienated from the school and from one another. In the following year the novel was reinstated, but to this day teachers remain understandably nervous about using it, unclear as to why blacks object to it, and uncertain just how it should best be taught.
As with many similar incidents that have occurred again and again around the country, this controversy over Huckleberry Finn only exacerbated problems of interracial communication and respect. We can and must do better. Doing better begins with English teachers at all levels taking a careful look at the complex racial issues raised by the novel and an active listening to the views of African Americans, teachers, scholars, writers, parents, and students.
That Huckleberry Finn draws the attention of black families should not be a surprise. The novel remains the only one of the most taught works in high school to treat slavery, to represent a black dialect, and to have a significant role for an African American character. The length of the novel, the demands it places on instructional time, its centrality in the curriculum augment its prominence. We are fortunate to have much of their analysis readily available in a paperback volume entitled Satire or Evasion?
Every contributor is concerned with the role of Huckleberry Finn in the classroom; most are professors and teachers at leading universities, some have high school experience. In addition to the articles, Satire and Evasion contains an annotated bibliography on issues of race, the novel, and the classroom.
The collection begins with an essay by John H. The contributors offer significant evidence that Twain himself was an avid fan of the black-face minstrelsy. His father and uncle owned slaves, yet his wife was the daughter of a prominent abolitionist.
In this view even the affection Huck and the reader feel for Jim fits with the minstrel tradition where the comic black characters are congenial and non-threatening. Further, the believability of the deus ex machina freeing of Jim depends on an unsustainably innocent view of racial relations. Seen from the point of view of some of these scholars even the most cherished aspects of the book begin to appear ambiguous, compromised.
Rampersand explores issues of alienation in the novel, comparing Twain to Wright, Baldwin, and Morrison, yet he argues that the major compromise of the novel is not the ending, but that Jim never gains the intellectual complexity of Huck; never becomes a figure of disruptive alienation, nor does he even seem capable of learning this from Huck.
According to Morrison, Jim permits his persecutors to torment him, humiliate him, and responds to the torment and humiliation with boundless love. The humiliation comes after we have experienced Jim as an adult, a caring father and a sensitive man. If Jim had been a white ex-convict befriended by Huck, the ending could not have been imagined or written. The film shuns the complexities of irony and satire that make understanding the novel difficult.
All points of view are simply and directly argued, offending passages are cut away. All repetitions of the racial epithet are simply eliminated. The Widow Douglas espouses an explicitly abolitionist position. Above all, Jim is a far stronger character. His superstitiousness becomes a self-conscious put-on, and rather than being frightened of Huck and thinking him a ghost when they meet on Jackson Island, it is Jim that surprises and frightens Huck.
Running away with a plan and a map, Jim exercises planning and foresight. Without Tom, the scene in the second chapter where Jim is mocked by stealing his hat disappears. By making Huck instead of Tom, as in the novel the injured boy that Jim must save, the climax of the film becomes a reciprocating act of friendship, rather than a deus ex machine revelation that Jim has all along been free. Although far from examining slavery from an African American perspective or telling its full horror, the film does add scenes of a plantation with a cruel overseer whipping slaves, Jim among them.
Huck views this brutality, consciously examines his own complicity in the system of racial inequality, explicitly and determinedly rejects slavery as an institution, and makes a personal apology for his own complicity with slavery to Jim. After watching the film with my school age son, I had a troubling and, for an English teacher, iconoclastic thought: might this Hollywood production be more effective with students than the novel itself? Recently I taught Huckleberry Finn in two classes with racially different student populations and had clearly divergent results.
The first class was in the fall, a college-level Black American Literature class with a Cultural Studies approach to the theme of slavery. The class included a wide range of primary and secondary material from the seventeenth century to the present. Given the historical and thematic integration of the course, each new text we read was examined in light of what we already knew, and, simultaneously, the new texts lead us to fundamentally rethink our previous reading.
Focusing on an historical theme and putting the texts next to each other created a Cultural Studies experience that encouraged students to make sophisticated judgments, write complex papers, and engage in increasingly meaningful discussions.
Some of these students talked about their own experience as the only or nearly the only African American student in an otherwise white classroom. In this situation they resented being turning to as experts by their white teachers, and they were uncomfortable being stared at by their fellow students. What does it tell us about the challenge we teachers face in attempting to teach the novel that such a student, in this case the son of two college professors, lacked confidence to raise the issue?
I read several passages of the book aloud to the class to set up a discussion. One of the passages was the paragraph where Tom and Huck trick Jim in the second chapter. In this paragraph the epithet occurs seven times.
One African American student who was, in fact, of a mixed racial background and thus particularly acute on the question was quite direct with me in the discussion afterwards. He pointed out that while this word may be used by blacks with other blacks, it simply must not be used by whites. Still trying to understand the issue of Huckleberry Finn in the classroom, the following semester I again taught the novel, this time in a literature teaching methods class for fifth-year English majors who themselves would soon be student teachers in high school and middle school language arts classrooms.
This particular term there was one African American student. Simply having more people of color in the class and listening to their point of view had a powerful impact on all the students. Up until that day all of the white students were confident that they would be able to teach Huckleberry Finn in appropriate and sensitive ways; after that day although most of them decided that they would teach the novel, their final projects indicated that they realized it would be a complex task indeed.
Those who still want to teach Huckleberry Finn after reading this chapter and exploring the perspectives offered by Satire and Evasion can marshal impressive arguments for their cause, not the least of which is the importance of having students examine the issue for themselves. It is crystal clear to me that Huckleberry Finn should not be taught in a curriculum that simply showcases literary works without developing student skills at challenging the classics and thinking critically about literature, history, politics, and language.
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