Trout
February 15th 2005, 10:23 AM
Robert Clark
December 2004
Storytelling: Narratives of Agency and Cruelty in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Insofar as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is framed through the voice of Huck, so to does Huck’s narration often navigate its way through images. Huck is a consummate storyteller. Twain invests his narrator with remarkable storytelling skill from the outset in the “Explanatory.” The language of the closing paragraph of the book suggests that the transcription of the work occurs shortly after the events of the story (362). If this is the case, it seems beyond the scope of a fourteen-year-old boy to have the philological ability to cover what “the author” claims to be seven dialects. However, his skill is mitigated within his region, for he cannot imitate accents too far outside of his experience (249). It is the experience articulated in the novel that is the heart of Huck’s storytelling skill. He spins his yarns in images. The height of this imagistic storytelling, Jim and Huck’s respective escape narratives, carry with them themes of agency and cruelty that Huck, due to his upbringing and parentage, is unable to articulate in plain words.
Huck is unable to articulate the truth about slavery due to his upbringing in St. Petersburg. His struggle with his conscience, the part of his mind that guides his responses in spite of or due to the hegemony of his culture, in chapter thirty-one, which omits any criticism of the institution of slavery, and leaves Huck expecting damnation, is evidence of this. Huck’s storied responses tend to be more intuitive, reacting to pleasure, pain, fear, or compassion. Lacking a satisfying and moral language with which the reader is soonest to claim identity, Huck must articulate his stories through the languages of his society, Mrs. Watson’s Christianity, superstition, and Pap’s corrupt parental advice, all of which accept the institution of slavery and assert white agency.
James Cox likens Pap’s whiteness, “a white to make a body sick” (23), to that of Moby Dick, concluding that Pap is “inscrutable,” rather than “evil” (236). To Cox, Pap “has somehow gotten consumed by the very nature he set out to conquer and out of the dark union between himself and the River the divine Huck has sprung” (236). While this is not surprising, coming from Cox who waxes romantic concerning Huck Finn, the comparison of Pap to Moby Dick is problematic. Moby Dick is, as Ishmael says, “ineffable” (Melville 163). He is compared to the beautiful, the angelic, the sublime, a shark, a polar bear, an albatross and Lima, Peru. His whiteness “appalls” the narrator. It is possible to allegorize between Pap and the whale, and Ahab and the young judge. Both Ahab and the young judge seek to tame some sort of beast, and they fail utterly. With Pap, the outcome is a farce. Pap is malevolent, and his highly sentimental speeches to the young judge and his wife concerning his new life are ironic in the context of Pap’s behavior (Twain 26-28).
The young judge gives up, trusting Pap’s rehabilitation to nothing less than a “shot-gun” (28), whereas Ahab is destroyed by his pursuit. Pap is the first human corpse of the Huck Finn, “shot in de back” (Twain 61), but the white whale survives. Pap’s whiteness fits into the greater context of “white” in Huck Finn.
Despite the cruelty of white people in the novel, Huck identifies Jim’s goodness with whiteness. For instance, when Jim advises the aid of a doctor, Huck remarks that he “knowed he [Jim] was white inside” (341). The language of St. Petersburg dictates that good people are white. When Huck is presumed murdered, the people of St. Petersburg suspect Pap and Jim. Despite Pap’s history of mischief, despite opportunity, and despite motive (Huck’s death would ensure that the Widow Douglas cannot adopt Huck, leaving Huck’s money to Pap), he is not the only suspect. Jim has no way of knowing where Huck has been holed up; he has no reason to kill Huck, and he has no opportunity since he escapes the night after Huck’s presumed murder (51). The fact that Jim is black is motive and opportunity enough for the people of St. Petersburg.
Pap’s whiteness is contrasted against the cruel white people of St. Petersburg, because his whiteness is “whiter” (23). He is the uber-racist in his community. The widow Douglas tries to hide her racism towards Jim by freeing him in her will to atone for her sin of trying to sell him (357), and Tom adopts some righteousness towards the slaves by making Huck pay for a stolen watermelon (303), but Pap is overtly hateful towards blacks. In looking at Pap’s invective against the mulatto professor, David L. Smith notes “Pap’s racial views correspond very closely to those of most of his white southern contemporaries, in substance if not in manner of expression” (366). Pap’s whiteness is the birthright of his freedom, and he cannot give that control to a black man. Far from being inscrutable or ineffable, Pap is the unmasked object of Huck Finn’s critique.
Unlike Pap, the people of St. Petersburg have a well-recognized version of Christianity which moralizes slavery and the general dehumanization of the black people of their community. Their good-naturedness is manifested in the widow Douglas, who takes in Huck, and Judge Thatcher, who gives counsel and protects Huck’s money. Their corruption is thinly veiled by their overall morality, but Pap, who makes no pretense of religion, still has a fundamental agreement with the people of St. Petersburg. Pap is never portrayed as a moral person. He presumes the role of a father when he learns of his son’s wealth, even though he has never taken part in that role. He holds Huck captive, almost murdering him in a drunken rage. So when Pap expresses a view sympathetic to those in his community, the veil covering their hatred is removed. Without Pap, the pro-slavery caricature, Huck Finn criticizes slavery, but not those who support slavery.
Pap’s criticism of the “govment” that supports the mulatto is ironic, because Pap’s actions leave his sentiments devoid of all sympathy. Whatever Pap supports, the reader should reject. What bothers Pap the most is the fact that the professor is allowed to vote. This is the crescendo of Pap’s speech in which he decides to disassociate himself from the democracy by refusing to vote ever again. Pap’s value system cannot allow this “nigger” agency: the ability to represent oneself. The diction of this statement, “a govment that calls itself a govment, and lets on to be a govment, and thinks it’s a govment” (34), denies that it is any government at all. By rejecting the existence and participation in the government that allows black people (or mulattos) to vote, Pap forces a separation between himself and the sympathy of readers. If Pap is rejected completely, the opposite of his values, including that of agency for all men (as Huck Finn fails to address female agency) must be accepted.
Pap represents a society of captors, and though he does not have the money to buy a slave, he holds Huck captive. The cabin in the woods is a formidable structure, described, for the most part, from the inside. Within the cabin, Huck is able to think about his future and self-preservation, even so far as to plan his own escape. When Pap is home, Huck is able to enjoy leisure time (30), and he is even able to turn a gun on Pap when in danger (36). Most importantly, Huck has agency over his own life. Huck engineers his escape by means of a mock-sacrifice/murder. When Huck escapes the cabin, he kills a pig, and takes it back “into camp.” He then
fetched the pig in and took him back nearly to the table hacked into his throat with an ax, and laid him down on the ground to bleed…next I took an old sack…and I started from the pig and dragged it to the door and through the woods and to the river…I went and got the bag of meal…Then I carried the sack about a hundred yards across the grass and through the willows east of the house…The meal sifted out and made a little track all the way to the lake. (40-41)
This passage bears some similarities to a Levitical code for sacrifice:
“Take a…calf and a lamb…for a burnt offering”…Then he slaughtered the burnt offering; and Aaron’s sons handed the blood to him and he sprinkled it around the altar…He also washed the entrails and offered them up in smoke with the burnt offering on the altar…Next he presented the grain offering, and filled his hand with some of it and offered it up in smoke on the altar. (New American Standard, Leviticus 9.3, 12, 14, 17)
Both passages involve the slaughtering of animals, the scattering of blood the use of water in connection with the sacrificed animals, and the use of grains. Considering that Huck could have used both the slaughtered pig and the wasted grains, he is making a sacrifice. Furthermore, both sacrifices have an object in mind. For the people of Israel, God’s wrath is abated. For Huck, the people of St. Petersburg have a story that removes their attention from the living Huck. There are a few key differences. First of all, the sacrifices in Leviticus end in fire upon the altar, the center of the Israelite community. Huck’s sacrifices end in water, the commercial center of the river basin, and the center of most of the novel. Second, whereas Huck sacrifices a pig, such a sacrifice would be profane to the Israelites. Last, Israelite sacrifices are representative. The only people who can make the sacrifices are from a particular group of people, and the sacrifices are made for the entire community. Huck, on the other hand, makes the sacrifices by himself and for himself.
Huck has the agency by birthright that most of the Israelites, and most of the black people (save perhaps the professor) lack. By making this sacrifice in parody, Huck at once affirms the social structure that grants agency by birthright, and blasphemes the corrupt religion of St. Petersburg that provides the moral base for the dehumanizing institution of slavery.
Huck tells his own story in this passage, framed through images left behind. He can trust that the people of St. Petersburg will not be able to discover the truth behind the parodied sacrifice due the fact that the townspeople are inept forensic investigators, as proven by their misidentification of the female body in the river (Twain 14). This is the critical difference between Huck and the townspeople: the townspeople draw their stories from school books and the Bible, images and events make-up Huck’s stories. In “The Role of Folklore in Huckleberry Finn,” Ray W. Frantz Jr. argues that various happenstances, like the overturning of the saltcellar, the death of a spider, and “the June rise” determine the general course of the novel (316). Frantz repeatedly points out the recurrence of bad luck associated with the snakeskin. For Huck the imagistic events themselves tell his story, and the signs are never wrong. In the logic of the novel, there is no practical difference between the sacrifice parody and a superstitious cure; they both ward off evil.
Therefore, when Huck develops his own stories, it is based around images and signs rather than a written document explaining the whole event as he would have the townspeople believe it.
The storied slaughter is confirmed through the voice of the young, newcomer wife in St. Petersburg: “for people think now that he [Pap Finn] killed his boy and fixed things so other folks would think robbers done it, and then he’d get Huck’s money without having to bother a long time with a lawsuit” (69-70). What Huck does not count on is the blame laid upon Jim, a blame that has provoked a higher capture reward than the reward assigned to Pap Finn. Even though most people in town believe Pap to be the murderer, the reward for Jim’s capture has not been rescinded.
Having been communicated through signs, and recited verbally, Huck’s murder is effectively complete. Cox continues to speak of this death in terms of “murder” and “mock-murder” (234), but considering that this murder story is coming through several layers of storytelling – Twain speaks through Huck to an audience; Huck speaks through signs to the people of St. Petersburg – all of which are fiction, it follows that this must be communicated in terms of self-murder or suicide. This distinction is important because self-destruction implies self-possession. While it is physically possible for a slave to kill himself or herself, the fact that Huck creates his own death-story, and one is created for Jim in a very similar situation, is significant to the theme of agency, because only a man who owns his life may take it.
Jim’s escape narrative is more complicated than Huck’s. The captors are not villains of the ilk of Pap Finn. They are Huck, with whom greatest sympathy lies, and Tom, whose sympathy earned in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, must be tainted or discarded altogether by the end of Huck Finn. Tom is on a particular social trajectory for which Huck is fearful. Huck expects Tom to become a respectable part of society, and his apparent rebellion against it by agreeing to help Jim escape calls that into question for Huck (284). Of course, Tom is committing no such rebellion, but actually continues to confirm the society of which he is a part.
Tom’s role as a representative of society must be taken in the context of Pap, because insofar as Pap is a caricature of St. Petersburg, Tom, as a representative of the town, is a foil for Pap. In both cases, there is a brief preface to their appearance in the story. Before Pap enters the scene, a dead ringer is found floating in the river. Huck then finds Pap’s boot print. Before Tom is re-introduced into the story, Aunt Sally mistakes Huck for Tom. Furthermore, both Tom and Pap enter as pretenders. Whereas Pap is pretending to be a father who has “had all the trouble…anxiety…and all the expense of raising” Huck (33), Tom is pretending to be Sid Sawyer, “the Good Boy of Tom Sawyer…the eternal prude, the darling of a puritan Sunday School” (Cox 237). Both characters pretend to a name that is better than their own respective reputations, but even though, as Cox points out, Sid is the “Good Boy,” Tom’s “values are Sid’s values” (Cox 237). As Pap represents the people of St. Petersburg, so too is he connected
with Tom Sawyer. Like Pap, Tom Sawyer manifests the cruelties of his community.
Judith Fetterly, in “Tom Sawyer in Huckleberry Finn,” studies the depth of Tom’s cruelty:
cruelty is the sole motivation behind Tom’s joke…There is nothing clever in tying Jim to a tree . The motivation behind such a plan lies in the pleasure Tom expects from imagining Jim’s feelings and predicament when he wakes up. Tom’s pleasure in Huckleberry Finn is deeply entwined with cruelty. (69)
Fetterly is particularly interested in Tom’s character shift between Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. To Fetterly, Tom is no longer doing the work of exposing the hypocrisy of his community, but is now the target of the criticism. When in Tom Sawyer, Tom is able to construct his own “brilliant situations in response to the immediate circumstance,” Tom’s genius in Huck Finn is “derivative,” finding its source in books (70). Tom has lost what makes him heroic: “the perception of the nature of play as a symbiotic relationship between willing and aware parties” (71). Instead, he has traded his sense of play with a sense of duty and moralism. As Fetterly points out, Tom is concerned about what is “right.” She says that “[w]hat Mark Twain is recording in Huckleberry Finn[…]is his sense of the inevitable connection between moralism, the language of right and wrong, with its concomitant of self-righteousness, and the fact, the act of aggression[…]Southern chivalry is exposed as sneaking up behind a couple of kids and shooting them in the back” (74).
Tom’s breed of chivalry is humiliating to Jim.
Fetterly’s use of the word “chivalry” is appropriate considering the stories that Tom imposes upon Jim’s captivity. Tom reaches into European stories to explain Jim’s situation. In the cases of The Man in The Iron Mask, The Count of Monte Cristo, and the captivity of Lady Jane Grey, not only are the central characters imprisoned wrongfully, but they are imprisoned for the sole purpose of the success of their enemies. Phillipe and Lady Jane Grey are cheated out of their kingdoms; Dantés is cheated out of his ship and his fiancée, and Jim is cheated out of his freedom. In each case, the central characters lose power to their captors. Tom’s knowledge of Jim’s freedom allows him to engineer Jim’s escape while receiving no consequences. By taking Jim’s freedom, Tom is able to use it as capital for his own pleasure. Tom’s imprisonment of Jim reflects Pap’s incredulity at the fact that the professor is not to be sold at auction (34). Both situations are fantasies. Tom is not interested in Jim’s escape so much as he is interested in Jim’s imprisonment. Several times throughout the final chapters, Tom decides to “let-on” that the work has taken years, because there is not enough time otherwise.
This letting on, however, is the basis for the entire escape narrative. Just as Huck lets on that he has been murdered in order to hide escape, Tom presents a much less plausible story for Jim’s escape. The young woman of St. Petersburg understands Huck’s story almost perfectly. The women of the Phelps’ community decide that Jim is
crazy, s’I; everything shows it, s’I. Look at that-air grindstone, s’I: want to tell me ‘t any cretur ‘ts in his right mind ‘s agoin’ to scrabble all them crazy things into a grindstone s’I? Here sich ‘n’ sich a person busted his heart; ‘n’ here so ‘n’ so pegged along for thirty –seven year, ‘n’ all that—natchrel son o’ Louis somebody, ‘n’ sich everlast’n rubbage. (346)
Tom is not the accomplished storyteller that Huck has become. Rather, Tom is more concerned with the narrative itself, no matter how convoluted it becomes. Huck creates his own story, while Tom relies upon corrupted versions of European stories, which do not translate well to the local residents to whom the stories are addressed.
Jim suffers under this cruelty as a non-agent who must adopt the stories of his white captors. His story might as well have been pulled off the shelves of the Grangerford plantation. What is key is that Jim is not living the script of his escape, but the prisoner fantasy adopted by Tom. Phillipe and Dantés escape their prisons, but Tom fantasizes Jim’s death in each of his four epitaphs. Just as it is Pap’s ideal never to lose control over the professor, it is Tom’s fantasy that Jim should die in captivity.
Each one of the white stories that Jim must endure supports its contemporary power paradigm. Lady Jane Grey’s death supports the Tudor dynasty, and the other two white narratives simply bring purity to their systems by removing the corrupt elements from it. Likewise, Jim’s freedom is not a matter of escape that brings about any change in the system. Far from it! Jim’s freedom is a result of the law being acted upon by a guilty conscience. Jim is made free by the very system that has kept him enslaved his entire life, and ultimately, his continued freedom will be based upon the agreement of the white community to allow his freedom.
Jim’s story within his community’s system has always been expressed in the language of money. In chapter eight, Jim is valued at $800 (53). Once he becomes a suspect in Huck’s murder, Jim is worth $300 (69). The King sells Jim for forty dollars on the pretense that he is worth $200 in reward money (267-268). What is most distressing, however, is the Doctor’s estimation of Jim in chapter forty-two. Based upon Jim’s faithfulness, and his willingness to risk his own freedom, the Doctor decides that Jim is worth more than $1000, “and kind treatment too” (353). Jim’s value is in his ability to help a white man save a white boy, and even after all of that, he is not worth his freedom. The more money Jim is worth, the less able he is to buy his freedom. Until a white person feels guilty for what she has done, Jim cannot be free.
Jim is a captive for ransom, and the irony of this fact in light of Tom’s interpretation of “ransom” is significant to Tom’s fantasy. That Tom takes the opportunity to play his captivity game with Jim should come as no surprise since this fantasy has already been outlined in the formation of Tom’s gang. In fact, a number of the elements of the gang’s oath work their way into the two escape narratives. For instance, if a boy tells the secrets of the gang, his throat must be slit, and “his caracase burnt up.” The ashes have to be scattered around, and his name must be “blotted off the list with blood” (9). In much the same way, the pig in Huck’s escape has its throat slit and its remains scattered. Also, Jim is required to write messages in his own blood (331). The ransom, however, is signified in two ways. First of all, in the language of the reader who understands Tom’s malapropism, Huck will be set free for his $6000, and Jim will be turned over to another owner for $200. The problem is that holding a person for ransom is criminal, and as such, the people of St. Petersburg or the Phelps farm never refer to Huck or Jim’s captivity as ransom. Pap makes a violent suggestion to Huck concerning a hiding place (32), but it is Tom who explains Jim’s ransom in his epitaphs, because for Tom, to ransom is to “keep them till they’re dead” (11). For Tom, there is no pity for a prisoner; he is the jailer looking in from the outside.
The perspective, whether from the inside or the outside of the confinement, signifies agency, and the reader’s allegiance to the prisoner. Huck is wrongfully imprisoned, and therefore has sympathy. This sympathy is taken further by the fact that Huck is narrating his own story. The reader is taken inside the cabin walls with Huck in search of some means of escape, and the reader is looking out through Huck’s eyes when he is attacked by Pap. Hence, when Huck manages to escape, he takes a nap in the canoe. He does not have to run, because the story he has left behind will do its work. Huck’s escape is positive, and is followed by the positive narration of his conversation with the squirrels at the beginning of chapter eight (45).
When presented to he reader who has enjoyed the escape and learned to sympathize with the person in captivity, rather than the captors, Jim’s escape narrative is problematic for Huck’s character. Huck is the escape-hero who manages to get away rather elegantly. His plan for Jim, which he knows is not acceptable (292), is just as simple and plausible. By this time, a reader who has learned to sympathize with Huck may also have learned to sympathize with Jim as the captive. The problem is that Jim’s escape is not narrated from the inside looking out, dealing with the troubles of the captive, but from the outside looking in, dealing with the troubles of the captors who are sustaining Jim’s captivity.
The problem with this is that if the goals of Huck and Jim are different, the reader must choose between sympathy with the captive and sympathy with the captor. Tom is motivated by cruelty, and he is armed with the language of his community and the white captivity narratives. According to Cox, “the values of Tom Sawyer are[…]antithetical to the values of Huck Finn” (239). If this is so, it does not make sense that Huck should know “where the right plan was going to come from” (Twain 292). Furthermore, when Huck escapes Pap’s cabin, he wants Tom to help him manage his escape so he can add some “fancy touches” (41). Last, if Tom’s jokes are motivated by cruelty, Huck is also guilty.
Huck participates in a cruel joke of his own by playing against Jim’s personal sensitivity in chapter fifteen. After being separated, and understandably frightened, Huck comes upon Jim:
Jim was setting there with his head down between his knees, asleep, with his right arm hanging over the steering oar. The other oar was smashed off, and the raft was littered up with leaves and branches and dirt. So she’d had a rough time. (102)
Huck sees the state of desolation that the raft and Jim share. However, Huck’s remark does not take into account that Jim has endured a “rough time.” The raft, “she,” is allowed more pain and suffering than the man on it. Huck responds to this situation for the pleasure of making Jim look like a fool. When Jim calls those who would play such a cruel trick on a friend “trash” (103), he is, by extension, making a critique of what the Joke that Tom is about to orchestrate.
The fact is that Huck admires Tom. If Huck does not admire Tom, it would be impossible for Tom to fall in Huck’s esteem when he agrees to help Huck free Jim. The passages in which Huck longs for Tom’s counsel suggest that Huck not only admires Tom, but that Huck wants to emulate Tom. When Huck, for lack of a good family, is almost denied admittance into Tom’s gang of robbers, Huck “was most ready to cry” (10). Huck needs Tom’s acceptance.
Despite the fact that Huck needs Tom, the two have different motivations. Whereas Tom is motivated by cruelty, Huck is motivated by a desire to rescue Jim, and a secondary desire for an adventure, as evidenced in his anticipation of Tom’s plan. Due to a relative lack of Jim in Jim’s escape narrative, the reader is on the outside of the cabin, forced to sympathize with the desire to free Jim, rather than Jim’s implied personal desire to be free. Jim has no agency, and can only gain sympathy through the aid of a white person.
Since Jim has no agency, and Huck is not held captive, if Jim manages to escape, Tom is the only person who can claim some sort of triumph. In order for Tom’s triumph to take place, Jim must undergo severe humiliation and pain. Tom, representing the contemporary paradigms of the social structure, must keep the glory for himself. Kitterly identifies this as “the source of his pleasure, the index of control over the world, and the assured sign that his exploit will be talked about and his achievement recognized” (72). Tom is re-telling his white narratives in such a way that the captors win. The prisoner is to die, as in the case of Lady Jane Grey. As Tom, Huck and Jim escape the cabin, Jim is dressed up as a woman in Aunt Sally’s calico dress (352). For a person as particular about details as Tom, the fact that he would dress Jim as a woman, when there is only one female captivity narrative upon which he is drawing, continues to suggest Tom’s cruelty. Tom forces Jim to leave off the male roles of the ultimately triumphant Phillipe and Dantés and assume the feminine role of the ultimately executed Lady Jane Grey.
The allusion to Lady Grey’s captivity suggests ultimate failure in the escape attempt.
While Huck’s escape occurs without incident, Jim’s escape is nearly fatal. In the white society, holding another white person captive for ransom is against the law. If Pap had chosen to be a father, and decided to raise his boy, if he had managed to reform at the young judge’s house, Huck’s escape would not have been justified. The fact that Huck is held for the sole purpose of acquiring his $6000, makes Huck’s escape justified in a white society. Therefore, the fact that Huck escapes without incident is a triumph of white justice.
Jim’s escape is not justified in a white society. Jim’s value is determined by his usefulness to white people. He is of greatest use to the Phelps as a runaway whom they only have to feed for a short time, and who will be off of their hands for a $160 profit. He is held within the confines of the law, so when the trio attempts to escape, they should face opposition in a white society. The fact that Jim has escaped from a white owner represents a problem in the system that must be resolved. Structurally, not only must Huck, Jim, and Tom meet opposition in their evasion, they must ultimately fail. Not only must they fail, they must call to their aid a white doctor, a man who will ensure their ultimate failure. Jim can only be free when he is pronounced free according to the law, just as the professor can only be captured once it is pronounced legal to do so.
Tom ensures the integrity of the social structure by playing the game, which “effectively destroys Jim’s chances for freedom” (Kitterly 71). That he should reveal the escape plan in a letter to the Phelps is expected of somebody who upholds the paradigms of his day (334). Tom’s plan, the “better plan,” is by nature abortive, because any other outcome would continue to upset the social structure of whites and slaves.
Though some writers, like Leo Marx, have decided that those chapters that follow chapter thirty-one are relatively insignificant to the rest of the novel (Marx 340), others, such as Forest G. Robinson in his essay “The Silence in Huckleberry Finn,” point out the structural unity between the beginning and the end of the novel. The broad range of criticism that Twain undertakes in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are only possible and fully articulated in the dialog between the two escape narratives. Most twenty-first century American readers are well acquainted with anti-racism and anti-slavery language, language not available to Huck Finn. Huck Finn finds a voice through the compiling and interpretive mind of the reader by presenting the story of his culture in the images of his experience. The luxury of time allows the reader to disassociate comfortably from the hopelessly racist language of Pap, Huck, Tom, and anybody else who has a word for Jim. Without the irony of Huck’s acceptance of his social structure against the context of what is so obviously inhuman, transcending the language of St. Petersburg’s racism would be impossible.
Works Cited
The New American Standard Bible. Nashville, TN: Holdman Bible Publishers, 1977.
Cox, James M. “Remarks on the Sad Initiation of Huckleberry Finn.” Interpretations of American Literature. Eds. Charles Feidelson. Jr. and Paul BrodtKorb, Jr. New York: Oxford University Press, 1959. 229-243.
Fetterly, Judith. “Disenchantment: Tom Sawyer in Huckleberry Finn.” PMLA. 87 (1972): 69-74. 9 Dec. 2004. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0030-1829%28197201%2987%3A1%3C69%3ADTSIHF%E2.0.CO%3B2-9
Frantz, Ray W. Jr. “The Role of Folklore in Huckleberry Finn.” American Literature. 3 (1956): 314-327. 9 Dec. 2004. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-9831%28195611%2928%3A3%3C314%3ATROFIH%E2.0.CO%3B2-1
Marx, Leo. The Machine in The Garden. New York: Oxford University Press. 2000.
Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. Eds. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1967.
Robinson, Forrest G. “The Silences in Huckleberry Finn.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction. 77 (1982): 50-74. 9 Dec. 2004 http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0029-0564%28198206%2937%3A1%3c50%3atsihf%3e2.0.co%3b2-s[indent]
Smith, David L. “Huck, Jim, and American Racial Discourse.” Adventures of Huckleberry [indent]Finn. Ed. Thomas Cooley. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999. 362-374. Rpt. of “Huck, Jim, and American Racial Discourse.” Satire or Evasion? Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn. Ed. James S. Leonard, Thomas A. Tenney, and Thadious M. Davis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992. 103-120.
Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Eds. Victor Fischer and Lin Salamo. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002.
500
If you would like to discuss this article, please contact a moderator.
[i]Notice - The featuring of a particula article does not constitute endorsement of every single item or point of view contained therein by each and every member of TheologyWeb leadership. We strive to have a varied cross-section of representations of differing opinions on secondary Christian issues. The only requirement for the featuring of a particular article is that said article must not contradict the essentials articulated in the TheologyWeb statement of faith found here in our Mission Statement (http://www.theologyweb.com/forum/mission/)or be blatantly offensive to the Christian worldview of the site Owners.
December 2004
Storytelling: Narratives of Agency and Cruelty in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Insofar as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is framed through the voice of Huck, so to does Huck’s narration often navigate its way through images. Huck is a consummate storyteller. Twain invests his narrator with remarkable storytelling skill from the outset in the “Explanatory.” The language of the closing paragraph of the book suggests that the transcription of the work occurs shortly after the events of the story (362). If this is the case, it seems beyond the scope of a fourteen-year-old boy to have the philological ability to cover what “the author” claims to be seven dialects. However, his skill is mitigated within his region, for he cannot imitate accents too far outside of his experience (249). It is the experience articulated in the novel that is the heart of Huck’s storytelling skill. He spins his yarns in images. The height of this imagistic storytelling, Jim and Huck’s respective escape narratives, carry with them themes of agency and cruelty that Huck, due to his upbringing and parentage, is unable to articulate in plain words.
Huck is unable to articulate the truth about slavery due to his upbringing in St. Petersburg. His struggle with his conscience, the part of his mind that guides his responses in spite of or due to the hegemony of his culture, in chapter thirty-one, which omits any criticism of the institution of slavery, and leaves Huck expecting damnation, is evidence of this. Huck’s storied responses tend to be more intuitive, reacting to pleasure, pain, fear, or compassion. Lacking a satisfying and moral language with which the reader is soonest to claim identity, Huck must articulate his stories through the languages of his society, Mrs. Watson’s Christianity, superstition, and Pap’s corrupt parental advice, all of which accept the institution of slavery and assert white agency.
James Cox likens Pap’s whiteness, “a white to make a body sick” (23), to that of Moby Dick, concluding that Pap is “inscrutable,” rather than “evil” (236). To Cox, Pap “has somehow gotten consumed by the very nature he set out to conquer and out of the dark union between himself and the River the divine Huck has sprung” (236). While this is not surprising, coming from Cox who waxes romantic concerning Huck Finn, the comparison of Pap to Moby Dick is problematic. Moby Dick is, as Ishmael says, “ineffable” (Melville 163). He is compared to the beautiful, the angelic, the sublime, a shark, a polar bear, an albatross and Lima, Peru. His whiteness “appalls” the narrator. It is possible to allegorize between Pap and the whale, and Ahab and the young judge. Both Ahab and the young judge seek to tame some sort of beast, and they fail utterly. With Pap, the outcome is a farce. Pap is malevolent, and his highly sentimental speeches to the young judge and his wife concerning his new life are ironic in the context of Pap’s behavior (Twain 26-28).
The young judge gives up, trusting Pap’s rehabilitation to nothing less than a “shot-gun” (28), whereas Ahab is destroyed by his pursuit. Pap is the first human corpse of the Huck Finn, “shot in de back” (Twain 61), but the white whale survives. Pap’s whiteness fits into the greater context of “white” in Huck Finn.
Despite the cruelty of white people in the novel, Huck identifies Jim’s goodness with whiteness. For instance, when Jim advises the aid of a doctor, Huck remarks that he “knowed he [Jim] was white inside” (341). The language of St. Petersburg dictates that good people are white. When Huck is presumed murdered, the people of St. Petersburg suspect Pap and Jim. Despite Pap’s history of mischief, despite opportunity, and despite motive (Huck’s death would ensure that the Widow Douglas cannot adopt Huck, leaving Huck’s money to Pap), he is not the only suspect. Jim has no way of knowing where Huck has been holed up; he has no reason to kill Huck, and he has no opportunity since he escapes the night after Huck’s presumed murder (51). The fact that Jim is black is motive and opportunity enough for the people of St. Petersburg.
Pap’s whiteness is contrasted against the cruel white people of St. Petersburg, because his whiteness is “whiter” (23). He is the uber-racist in his community. The widow Douglas tries to hide her racism towards Jim by freeing him in her will to atone for her sin of trying to sell him (357), and Tom adopts some righteousness towards the slaves by making Huck pay for a stolen watermelon (303), but Pap is overtly hateful towards blacks. In looking at Pap’s invective against the mulatto professor, David L. Smith notes “Pap’s racial views correspond very closely to those of most of his white southern contemporaries, in substance if not in manner of expression” (366). Pap’s whiteness is the birthright of his freedom, and he cannot give that control to a black man. Far from being inscrutable or ineffable, Pap is the unmasked object of Huck Finn’s critique.
Unlike Pap, the people of St. Petersburg have a well-recognized version of Christianity which moralizes slavery and the general dehumanization of the black people of their community. Their good-naturedness is manifested in the widow Douglas, who takes in Huck, and Judge Thatcher, who gives counsel and protects Huck’s money. Their corruption is thinly veiled by their overall morality, but Pap, who makes no pretense of religion, still has a fundamental agreement with the people of St. Petersburg. Pap is never portrayed as a moral person. He presumes the role of a father when he learns of his son’s wealth, even though he has never taken part in that role. He holds Huck captive, almost murdering him in a drunken rage. So when Pap expresses a view sympathetic to those in his community, the veil covering their hatred is removed. Without Pap, the pro-slavery caricature, Huck Finn criticizes slavery, but not those who support slavery.
Pap’s criticism of the “govment” that supports the mulatto is ironic, because Pap’s actions leave his sentiments devoid of all sympathy. Whatever Pap supports, the reader should reject. What bothers Pap the most is the fact that the professor is allowed to vote. This is the crescendo of Pap’s speech in which he decides to disassociate himself from the democracy by refusing to vote ever again. Pap’s value system cannot allow this “nigger” agency: the ability to represent oneself. The diction of this statement, “a govment that calls itself a govment, and lets on to be a govment, and thinks it’s a govment” (34), denies that it is any government at all. By rejecting the existence and participation in the government that allows black people (or mulattos) to vote, Pap forces a separation between himself and the sympathy of readers. If Pap is rejected completely, the opposite of his values, including that of agency for all men (as Huck Finn fails to address female agency) must be accepted.
Pap represents a society of captors, and though he does not have the money to buy a slave, he holds Huck captive. The cabin in the woods is a formidable structure, described, for the most part, from the inside. Within the cabin, Huck is able to think about his future and self-preservation, even so far as to plan his own escape. When Pap is home, Huck is able to enjoy leisure time (30), and he is even able to turn a gun on Pap when in danger (36). Most importantly, Huck has agency over his own life. Huck engineers his escape by means of a mock-sacrifice/murder. When Huck escapes the cabin, he kills a pig, and takes it back “into camp.” He then
fetched the pig in and took him back nearly to the table hacked into his throat with an ax, and laid him down on the ground to bleed…next I took an old sack…and I started from the pig and dragged it to the door and through the woods and to the river…I went and got the bag of meal…Then I carried the sack about a hundred yards across the grass and through the willows east of the house…The meal sifted out and made a little track all the way to the lake. (40-41)
This passage bears some similarities to a Levitical code for sacrifice:
“Take a…calf and a lamb…for a burnt offering”…Then he slaughtered the burnt offering; and Aaron’s sons handed the blood to him and he sprinkled it around the altar…He also washed the entrails and offered them up in smoke with the burnt offering on the altar…Next he presented the grain offering, and filled his hand with some of it and offered it up in smoke on the altar. (New American Standard, Leviticus 9.3, 12, 14, 17)
Both passages involve the slaughtering of animals, the scattering of blood the use of water in connection with the sacrificed animals, and the use of grains. Considering that Huck could have used both the slaughtered pig and the wasted grains, he is making a sacrifice. Furthermore, both sacrifices have an object in mind. For the people of Israel, God’s wrath is abated. For Huck, the people of St. Petersburg have a story that removes their attention from the living Huck. There are a few key differences. First of all, the sacrifices in Leviticus end in fire upon the altar, the center of the Israelite community. Huck’s sacrifices end in water, the commercial center of the river basin, and the center of most of the novel. Second, whereas Huck sacrifices a pig, such a sacrifice would be profane to the Israelites. Last, Israelite sacrifices are representative. The only people who can make the sacrifices are from a particular group of people, and the sacrifices are made for the entire community. Huck, on the other hand, makes the sacrifices by himself and for himself.
Huck has the agency by birthright that most of the Israelites, and most of the black people (save perhaps the professor) lack. By making this sacrifice in parody, Huck at once affirms the social structure that grants agency by birthright, and blasphemes the corrupt religion of St. Petersburg that provides the moral base for the dehumanizing institution of slavery.
Huck tells his own story in this passage, framed through images left behind. He can trust that the people of St. Petersburg will not be able to discover the truth behind the parodied sacrifice due the fact that the townspeople are inept forensic investigators, as proven by their misidentification of the female body in the river (Twain 14). This is the critical difference between Huck and the townspeople: the townspeople draw their stories from school books and the Bible, images and events make-up Huck’s stories. In “The Role of Folklore in Huckleberry Finn,” Ray W. Frantz Jr. argues that various happenstances, like the overturning of the saltcellar, the death of a spider, and “the June rise” determine the general course of the novel (316). Frantz repeatedly points out the recurrence of bad luck associated with the snakeskin. For Huck the imagistic events themselves tell his story, and the signs are never wrong. In the logic of the novel, there is no practical difference between the sacrifice parody and a superstitious cure; they both ward off evil.
Therefore, when Huck develops his own stories, it is based around images and signs rather than a written document explaining the whole event as he would have the townspeople believe it.
The storied slaughter is confirmed through the voice of the young, newcomer wife in St. Petersburg: “for people think now that he [Pap Finn] killed his boy and fixed things so other folks would think robbers done it, and then he’d get Huck’s money without having to bother a long time with a lawsuit” (69-70). What Huck does not count on is the blame laid upon Jim, a blame that has provoked a higher capture reward than the reward assigned to Pap Finn. Even though most people in town believe Pap to be the murderer, the reward for Jim’s capture has not been rescinded.
Having been communicated through signs, and recited verbally, Huck’s murder is effectively complete. Cox continues to speak of this death in terms of “murder” and “mock-murder” (234), but considering that this murder story is coming through several layers of storytelling – Twain speaks through Huck to an audience; Huck speaks through signs to the people of St. Petersburg – all of which are fiction, it follows that this must be communicated in terms of self-murder or suicide. This distinction is important because self-destruction implies self-possession. While it is physically possible for a slave to kill himself or herself, the fact that Huck creates his own death-story, and one is created for Jim in a very similar situation, is significant to the theme of agency, because only a man who owns his life may take it.
Jim’s escape narrative is more complicated than Huck’s. The captors are not villains of the ilk of Pap Finn. They are Huck, with whom greatest sympathy lies, and Tom, whose sympathy earned in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, must be tainted or discarded altogether by the end of Huck Finn. Tom is on a particular social trajectory for which Huck is fearful. Huck expects Tom to become a respectable part of society, and his apparent rebellion against it by agreeing to help Jim escape calls that into question for Huck (284). Of course, Tom is committing no such rebellion, but actually continues to confirm the society of which he is a part.
Tom’s role as a representative of society must be taken in the context of Pap, because insofar as Pap is a caricature of St. Petersburg, Tom, as a representative of the town, is a foil for Pap. In both cases, there is a brief preface to their appearance in the story. Before Pap enters the scene, a dead ringer is found floating in the river. Huck then finds Pap’s boot print. Before Tom is re-introduced into the story, Aunt Sally mistakes Huck for Tom. Furthermore, both Tom and Pap enter as pretenders. Whereas Pap is pretending to be a father who has “had all the trouble…anxiety…and all the expense of raising” Huck (33), Tom is pretending to be Sid Sawyer, “the Good Boy of Tom Sawyer…the eternal prude, the darling of a puritan Sunday School” (Cox 237). Both characters pretend to a name that is better than their own respective reputations, but even though, as Cox points out, Sid is the “Good Boy,” Tom’s “values are Sid’s values” (Cox 237). As Pap represents the people of St. Petersburg, so too is he connected
with Tom Sawyer. Like Pap, Tom Sawyer manifests the cruelties of his community.
Judith Fetterly, in “Tom Sawyer in Huckleberry Finn,” studies the depth of Tom’s cruelty:
cruelty is the sole motivation behind Tom’s joke…There is nothing clever in tying Jim to a tree . The motivation behind such a plan lies in the pleasure Tom expects from imagining Jim’s feelings and predicament when he wakes up. Tom’s pleasure in Huckleberry Finn is deeply entwined with cruelty. (69)
Fetterly is particularly interested in Tom’s character shift between Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. To Fetterly, Tom is no longer doing the work of exposing the hypocrisy of his community, but is now the target of the criticism. When in Tom Sawyer, Tom is able to construct his own “brilliant situations in response to the immediate circumstance,” Tom’s genius in Huck Finn is “derivative,” finding its source in books (70). Tom has lost what makes him heroic: “the perception of the nature of play as a symbiotic relationship between willing and aware parties” (71). Instead, he has traded his sense of play with a sense of duty and moralism. As Fetterly points out, Tom is concerned about what is “right.” She says that “[w]hat Mark Twain is recording in Huckleberry Finn[…]is his sense of the inevitable connection between moralism, the language of right and wrong, with its concomitant of self-righteousness, and the fact, the act of aggression[…]Southern chivalry is exposed as sneaking up behind a couple of kids and shooting them in the back” (74).
Tom’s breed of chivalry is humiliating to Jim.
Fetterly’s use of the word “chivalry” is appropriate considering the stories that Tom imposes upon Jim’s captivity. Tom reaches into European stories to explain Jim’s situation. In the cases of The Man in The Iron Mask, The Count of Monte Cristo, and the captivity of Lady Jane Grey, not only are the central characters imprisoned wrongfully, but they are imprisoned for the sole purpose of the success of their enemies. Phillipe and Lady Jane Grey are cheated out of their kingdoms; Dantés is cheated out of his ship and his fiancée, and Jim is cheated out of his freedom. In each case, the central characters lose power to their captors. Tom’s knowledge of Jim’s freedom allows him to engineer Jim’s escape while receiving no consequences. By taking Jim’s freedom, Tom is able to use it as capital for his own pleasure. Tom’s imprisonment of Jim reflects Pap’s incredulity at the fact that the professor is not to be sold at auction (34). Both situations are fantasies. Tom is not interested in Jim’s escape so much as he is interested in Jim’s imprisonment. Several times throughout the final chapters, Tom decides to “let-on” that the work has taken years, because there is not enough time otherwise.
This letting on, however, is the basis for the entire escape narrative. Just as Huck lets on that he has been murdered in order to hide escape, Tom presents a much less plausible story for Jim’s escape. The young woman of St. Petersburg understands Huck’s story almost perfectly. The women of the Phelps’ community decide that Jim is
crazy, s’I; everything shows it, s’I. Look at that-air grindstone, s’I: want to tell me ‘t any cretur ‘ts in his right mind ‘s agoin’ to scrabble all them crazy things into a grindstone s’I? Here sich ‘n’ sich a person busted his heart; ‘n’ here so ‘n’ so pegged along for thirty –seven year, ‘n’ all that—natchrel son o’ Louis somebody, ‘n’ sich everlast’n rubbage. (346)
Tom is not the accomplished storyteller that Huck has become. Rather, Tom is more concerned with the narrative itself, no matter how convoluted it becomes. Huck creates his own story, while Tom relies upon corrupted versions of European stories, which do not translate well to the local residents to whom the stories are addressed.
Jim suffers under this cruelty as a non-agent who must adopt the stories of his white captors. His story might as well have been pulled off the shelves of the Grangerford plantation. What is key is that Jim is not living the script of his escape, but the prisoner fantasy adopted by Tom. Phillipe and Dantés escape their prisons, but Tom fantasizes Jim’s death in each of his four epitaphs. Just as it is Pap’s ideal never to lose control over the professor, it is Tom’s fantasy that Jim should die in captivity.
Each one of the white stories that Jim must endure supports its contemporary power paradigm. Lady Jane Grey’s death supports the Tudor dynasty, and the other two white narratives simply bring purity to their systems by removing the corrupt elements from it. Likewise, Jim’s freedom is not a matter of escape that brings about any change in the system. Far from it! Jim’s freedom is a result of the law being acted upon by a guilty conscience. Jim is made free by the very system that has kept him enslaved his entire life, and ultimately, his continued freedom will be based upon the agreement of the white community to allow his freedom.
Jim’s story within his community’s system has always been expressed in the language of money. In chapter eight, Jim is valued at $800 (53). Once he becomes a suspect in Huck’s murder, Jim is worth $300 (69). The King sells Jim for forty dollars on the pretense that he is worth $200 in reward money (267-268). What is most distressing, however, is the Doctor’s estimation of Jim in chapter forty-two. Based upon Jim’s faithfulness, and his willingness to risk his own freedom, the Doctor decides that Jim is worth more than $1000, “and kind treatment too” (353). Jim’s value is in his ability to help a white man save a white boy, and even after all of that, he is not worth his freedom. The more money Jim is worth, the less able he is to buy his freedom. Until a white person feels guilty for what she has done, Jim cannot be free.
Jim is a captive for ransom, and the irony of this fact in light of Tom’s interpretation of “ransom” is significant to Tom’s fantasy. That Tom takes the opportunity to play his captivity game with Jim should come as no surprise since this fantasy has already been outlined in the formation of Tom’s gang. In fact, a number of the elements of the gang’s oath work their way into the two escape narratives. For instance, if a boy tells the secrets of the gang, his throat must be slit, and “his caracase burnt up.” The ashes have to be scattered around, and his name must be “blotted off the list with blood” (9). In much the same way, the pig in Huck’s escape has its throat slit and its remains scattered. Also, Jim is required to write messages in his own blood (331). The ransom, however, is signified in two ways. First of all, in the language of the reader who understands Tom’s malapropism, Huck will be set free for his $6000, and Jim will be turned over to another owner for $200. The problem is that holding a person for ransom is criminal, and as such, the people of St. Petersburg or the Phelps farm never refer to Huck or Jim’s captivity as ransom. Pap makes a violent suggestion to Huck concerning a hiding place (32), but it is Tom who explains Jim’s ransom in his epitaphs, because for Tom, to ransom is to “keep them till they’re dead” (11). For Tom, there is no pity for a prisoner; he is the jailer looking in from the outside.
The perspective, whether from the inside or the outside of the confinement, signifies agency, and the reader’s allegiance to the prisoner. Huck is wrongfully imprisoned, and therefore has sympathy. This sympathy is taken further by the fact that Huck is narrating his own story. The reader is taken inside the cabin walls with Huck in search of some means of escape, and the reader is looking out through Huck’s eyes when he is attacked by Pap. Hence, when Huck manages to escape, he takes a nap in the canoe. He does not have to run, because the story he has left behind will do its work. Huck’s escape is positive, and is followed by the positive narration of his conversation with the squirrels at the beginning of chapter eight (45).
When presented to he reader who has enjoyed the escape and learned to sympathize with the person in captivity, rather than the captors, Jim’s escape narrative is problematic for Huck’s character. Huck is the escape-hero who manages to get away rather elegantly. His plan for Jim, which he knows is not acceptable (292), is just as simple and plausible. By this time, a reader who has learned to sympathize with Huck may also have learned to sympathize with Jim as the captive. The problem is that Jim’s escape is not narrated from the inside looking out, dealing with the troubles of the captive, but from the outside looking in, dealing with the troubles of the captors who are sustaining Jim’s captivity.
The problem with this is that if the goals of Huck and Jim are different, the reader must choose between sympathy with the captive and sympathy with the captor. Tom is motivated by cruelty, and he is armed with the language of his community and the white captivity narratives. According to Cox, “the values of Tom Sawyer are[…]antithetical to the values of Huck Finn” (239). If this is so, it does not make sense that Huck should know “where the right plan was going to come from” (Twain 292). Furthermore, when Huck escapes Pap’s cabin, he wants Tom to help him manage his escape so he can add some “fancy touches” (41). Last, if Tom’s jokes are motivated by cruelty, Huck is also guilty.
Huck participates in a cruel joke of his own by playing against Jim’s personal sensitivity in chapter fifteen. After being separated, and understandably frightened, Huck comes upon Jim:
Jim was setting there with his head down between his knees, asleep, with his right arm hanging over the steering oar. The other oar was smashed off, and the raft was littered up with leaves and branches and dirt. So she’d had a rough time. (102)
Huck sees the state of desolation that the raft and Jim share. However, Huck’s remark does not take into account that Jim has endured a “rough time.” The raft, “she,” is allowed more pain and suffering than the man on it. Huck responds to this situation for the pleasure of making Jim look like a fool. When Jim calls those who would play such a cruel trick on a friend “trash” (103), he is, by extension, making a critique of what the Joke that Tom is about to orchestrate.
The fact is that Huck admires Tom. If Huck does not admire Tom, it would be impossible for Tom to fall in Huck’s esteem when he agrees to help Huck free Jim. The passages in which Huck longs for Tom’s counsel suggest that Huck not only admires Tom, but that Huck wants to emulate Tom. When Huck, for lack of a good family, is almost denied admittance into Tom’s gang of robbers, Huck “was most ready to cry” (10). Huck needs Tom’s acceptance.
Despite the fact that Huck needs Tom, the two have different motivations. Whereas Tom is motivated by cruelty, Huck is motivated by a desire to rescue Jim, and a secondary desire for an adventure, as evidenced in his anticipation of Tom’s plan. Due to a relative lack of Jim in Jim’s escape narrative, the reader is on the outside of the cabin, forced to sympathize with the desire to free Jim, rather than Jim’s implied personal desire to be free. Jim has no agency, and can only gain sympathy through the aid of a white person.
Since Jim has no agency, and Huck is not held captive, if Jim manages to escape, Tom is the only person who can claim some sort of triumph. In order for Tom’s triumph to take place, Jim must undergo severe humiliation and pain. Tom, representing the contemporary paradigms of the social structure, must keep the glory for himself. Kitterly identifies this as “the source of his pleasure, the index of control over the world, and the assured sign that his exploit will be talked about and his achievement recognized” (72). Tom is re-telling his white narratives in such a way that the captors win. The prisoner is to die, as in the case of Lady Jane Grey. As Tom, Huck and Jim escape the cabin, Jim is dressed up as a woman in Aunt Sally’s calico dress (352). For a person as particular about details as Tom, the fact that he would dress Jim as a woman, when there is only one female captivity narrative upon which he is drawing, continues to suggest Tom’s cruelty. Tom forces Jim to leave off the male roles of the ultimately triumphant Phillipe and Dantés and assume the feminine role of the ultimately executed Lady Jane Grey.
The allusion to Lady Grey’s captivity suggests ultimate failure in the escape attempt.
While Huck’s escape occurs without incident, Jim’s escape is nearly fatal. In the white society, holding another white person captive for ransom is against the law. If Pap had chosen to be a father, and decided to raise his boy, if he had managed to reform at the young judge’s house, Huck’s escape would not have been justified. The fact that Huck is held for the sole purpose of acquiring his $6000, makes Huck’s escape justified in a white society. Therefore, the fact that Huck escapes without incident is a triumph of white justice.
Jim’s escape is not justified in a white society. Jim’s value is determined by his usefulness to white people. He is of greatest use to the Phelps as a runaway whom they only have to feed for a short time, and who will be off of their hands for a $160 profit. He is held within the confines of the law, so when the trio attempts to escape, they should face opposition in a white society. The fact that Jim has escaped from a white owner represents a problem in the system that must be resolved. Structurally, not only must Huck, Jim, and Tom meet opposition in their evasion, they must ultimately fail. Not only must they fail, they must call to their aid a white doctor, a man who will ensure their ultimate failure. Jim can only be free when he is pronounced free according to the law, just as the professor can only be captured once it is pronounced legal to do so.
Tom ensures the integrity of the social structure by playing the game, which “effectively destroys Jim’s chances for freedom” (Kitterly 71). That he should reveal the escape plan in a letter to the Phelps is expected of somebody who upholds the paradigms of his day (334). Tom’s plan, the “better plan,” is by nature abortive, because any other outcome would continue to upset the social structure of whites and slaves.
Though some writers, like Leo Marx, have decided that those chapters that follow chapter thirty-one are relatively insignificant to the rest of the novel (Marx 340), others, such as Forest G. Robinson in his essay “The Silence in Huckleberry Finn,” point out the structural unity between the beginning and the end of the novel. The broad range of criticism that Twain undertakes in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are only possible and fully articulated in the dialog between the two escape narratives. Most twenty-first century American readers are well acquainted with anti-racism and anti-slavery language, language not available to Huck Finn. Huck Finn finds a voice through the compiling and interpretive mind of the reader by presenting the story of his culture in the images of his experience. The luxury of time allows the reader to disassociate comfortably from the hopelessly racist language of Pap, Huck, Tom, and anybody else who has a word for Jim. Without the irony of Huck’s acceptance of his social structure against the context of what is so obviously inhuman, transcending the language of St. Petersburg’s racism would be impossible.
Works Cited
The New American Standard Bible. Nashville, TN: Holdman Bible Publishers, 1977.
Cox, James M. “Remarks on the Sad Initiation of Huckleberry Finn.” Interpretations of American Literature. Eds. Charles Feidelson. Jr. and Paul BrodtKorb, Jr. New York: Oxford University Press, 1959. 229-243.
Fetterly, Judith. “Disenchantment: Tom Sawyer in Huckleberry Finn.” PMLA. 87 (1972): 69-74. 9 Dec. 2004. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0030-1829%28197201%2987%3A1%3C69%3ADTSIHF%E2.0.CO%3B2-9
Frantz, Ray W. Jr. “The Role of Folklore in Huckleberry Finn.” American Literature. 3 (1956): 314-327. 9 Dec. 2004. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-9831%28195611%2928%3A3%3C314%3ATROFIH%E2.0.CO%3B2-1
Marx, Leo. The Machine in The Garden. New York: Oxford University Press. 2000.
Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. Eds. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1967.
Robinson, Forrest G. “The Silences in Huckleberry Finn.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction. 77 (1982): 50-74. 9 Dec. 2004 http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0029-0564%28198206%2937%3A1%3c50%3atsihf%3e2.0.co%3b2-s[indent]
Smith, David L. “Huck, Jim, and American Racial Discourse.” Adventures of Huckleberry [indent]Finn. Ed. Thomas Cooley. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999. 362-374. Rpt. of “Huck, Jim, and American Racial Discourse.” Satire or Evasion? Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn. Ed. James S. Leonard, Thomas A. Tenney, and Thadious M. Davis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992. 103-120.
Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Eds. Victor Fischer and Lin Salamo. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002.
500
If you would like to discuss this article, please contact a moderator.
[i]Notice - The featuring of a particula article does not constitute endorsement of every single item or point of view contained therein by each and every member of TheologyWeb leadership. We strive to have a varied cross-section of representations of differing opinions on secondary Christian issues. The only requirement for the featuring of a particular article is that said article must not contradict the essentials articulated in the TheologyWeb statement of faith found here in our Mission Statement (http://www.theologyweb.com/forum/mission/)or be blatantly offensive to the Christian worldview of the site Owners.