I’m glad the article mentioned The War Prayer. It was ubiquitous in the 60s among those of us in the antiwar movement.
Jim was also courageous enough to run away.
However, you make a good point. When I began drafting a reply disputing you, I started thinking about Jim and his role in the novel; and while he does get a tiny bit of character development - telling the story of his deaf daughter - he really is limited to being a foil for Huck’s story, and moral growth. Jim is never a protagonist. Maybe I need to go back and read it again, but from memory, he was a sympathetic character, yes, but not a fully fleshed-out one. Which may have had to do with Twain not having an intimate, personal experience of being an enslaved African-American the way he did with being a young boy.
And Rebecca of York, from Ivanhoe. Although she had much more agency in that story than Jim did in Huckleberry Finn.
I think we’re mostly in agreement. Huck is the protagonist; the story’s major conflict is his to resolve. So Jim is a foil in that sense. But I think he is a well-developed character, and needs to be.
His despondency over the recollection of discovering his daughter was deaf; his trauma when he thought he had lost Huck in the storm; how he gives up his freedom to save Tom’s life; and perhaps most of all, the ongoing conversation, friendship and love between Huck and Jim—well, I felt as if I knew him, and loved the character as well.
Even his decision to run for freedom tells a lot about him. Jim may not be the book’s protagonist, but he’s one of its heroes, for sure.
Certainly it’s strong evidence Twain didn’t intend to be racist, and even that he was not overwhelmed by racial animus. It’s just important to recognize, as it seems you do, that “black man as loyal companion who helps white protagonist grow and develop” is now recognized as a well-worn trope that is at best indifferent to the realities of race in America, and at worst a vehicle for thinly veiled racist storytelling.
It’s not unlike when someone says “I don’t see color.”
Key and Peele poked fun at the trope and took it further.
You mean Doug’s.
Don’t you mean Dugout?
My husband watches a lot of Key & Peele, but that’s an especially good one. Thanks.
One really does feel sorry for people who persist in avoiding the pit. These truly are some of the smartest, hippest conversations on the board.
Agreed, and also pointing out that it would have been grossly unrealistic for Twain to write a novel set in 1840s Missouri where that word wasn’t commonly in use. The pervasive racism of that society is exactly what he’s criticizing.
THERE’S NO CONSENSUS!
I agree - people who think it is nothing but mindless invective are missing a lot of thoughtfulness and humor.
I’m not sure that critique is entirely relevant to a work published in the 1880s, when even such a qualified positive portrayal of a Black person was going to be controversial in some circles. I mean, that was only a couple generations after Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which is the prototypical example of that trope, and which is certainly cringy as hell today, but unquestionably had a strongly positive effect on public opinion in its time.
And although I haven’t read the book in a long time, my recollection is that Jim was certainly a loyal friend to Huck, and Huck did learn a lot from being with him, but helping Huck grow and develop wasn’t his motivation, getting the hell out of the South was. He loved Huck, but IIRC it was also clear (to the reader if not to Huck) that he was scared stiff that the success of his flight to freedom depended in large part on the whims of this goofy kid and would have much preferred a more reliable partner.
Yeah, in general, i think you need to judge a book in the context of when it was written. That doesn’t mean you should excuse any racism, etc., because “that’s what they believed then”, but a lot of books were both progressive for their time and have some issues by our current standards. And while it’s helpful to be aware of their issues, it’s really not fair to judge their authors harshly, in most cases.
I see no reason to privilege Mark Twain’s or his contemporaries’ interpretation of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn above my own. I’m not making a moral judgment on Mark Twain. Rather, I am evaluating his work through my own lens according to my own understanding of the world.
Except perhaps as an academic exercise, why should I—or anyone—be expected to do otherwise? Whether Twain or certain of his contemporaries considered the work to be genuinely progressive or not, why should I be expected to endorse such an interpretation today any more than I should be expected to endorse the views of, say, a “kindly” slave master who proudly boasts he hardly ever beats the people he has kept enslaved, unless they really deserve it, and never on Sundays?
Huck Finn has a great depiction of a proto goth girl. I will never be able to hate it.
If you’re just reading it for pleasure? None.
But if you’re reading it even in part for its historical value, then parsing it solely through a present lens will obscure some of the meaning.
Even if you’re reading it through a racial lens or a progressive lens, being too focused on the modern lens can obscure information. Something that seems really horrible today might in fact have been a step forward in the past. You could miss that.
And then there is the tendency of those who do in fact use a modern lens in order to morally judge the author and his works. This has a way of having people who are actually an important part of the history of the movement thrown aside. Understanding history is kinda important. You should be able to know who was “progressive for his time,” in order to understand the history of progressivism.
You can call all of this merely an “academic exercise,” but then, so is using any lens in literature. I’d say it’s all pretty important.
I came for the pitting and stayed for the academic discourse on early American literature.
It is utterly trivial to read a canonical literary classic like Huck Finn (which, to the extent it is taught, educators seem suspiciously quick to telegraph that it’s sooooo good and so totally not racist) and consider that its author was not nearly as racist as many of his contemporaries. So much so that my labeling it as an “academic exercise” was perhaps too kind.
I think there is in fact more value, even as an academic exercise, in considering that the novel nevertheless reflects and endorses a racial system in which the agency of white people is privileged over people of color. Because that is precisely the sort of analysis that a certain segment of the population is going to great lengths to erase from the discourse.
Right? It’s like people can’t hold two ideas in their head at once. Huck Finn was an enormously progressive novel for its time, AND it reflects a racist view of black people that’s not great. Understanding both aspects of the novel–alongside all the other aspects of the novel–isn’t really that difficult, unless you treat it like a team sport where you’re either Team Huck Rocks or Team Fuck Huck.