Chucking Finn 0
Clarence Page discusses the recent silly attempt to bowdlerize Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.
Twain was a man of his time who rose above his Southern heritage to reject the bigotry and prejudice of his upbringing. And even though the Civil War ended outright slavery when Twain was a young man, explicit and outspoken bigotry, prejudice, and racial oppression were accepted in the public discourse long after Twain’s death.
Page comments:
Young Huck’s moral compass is warped by his drunken, brutal father and the culture in which Huck was raised, as his casual use of the N-word illustrates. Escaping his father, he unexpectedly teams up with the slave Jim. He feels guilty at first about helping his neighbor’s “property” escape. Yet as he gets to know Jim and his desire to rescue his wife and children, the slave becomes a better father figure than the one Huck left behind. To me, the book is that rare classic that I not only praise but still enjoy reading.
Huckleberry Finn, despite the burlesque humor, is a novel of transcendence, of Huck’s realizing that the beliefs he was brought up with were evil.
The discomfort that Huck Finn causes today says more about the persistance of those same beliefs in our society than it does about Twain’s honest confronting of them, counched as it was in the common speech of his time, in the pages of a book.
