The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Introduction

In his novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Mark Twain used nineteenth-century conventions of American writing about boyhood, but he created a literary classic in the ways he overturned those conventions. The book's main character, Huckleberry Finn, is an American male icon, both in the challenges he faces moving from boyhood to manhood and in the definitions of manhood he witnesses and rejects (West, pp: 99).

Discussion and Analysis

Huck feels constrained by a domestic life that many men in Victorian America perceived as excessively feminized. He wants freedom from the proper and maternal Miss Watson, who expects the poor and unkempt Huck to clean up, go to school and church, and become a respectable boy. But while Huck defies the rules and self-control of Victorian manners, he also challenges the extravagant playfulness he associates with his friend Tom Sawyer, who attempts to turn children's play into affairs of great drama. Huck considers both Tom's games and Miss Watson's Sunday school to be foolish wastes of time (Griswold, pp: 304).

To escape the restraints of Victorian conventions that he associates with women, Huck considers two options. First, his father Pap offers him a yeoman life of leisure outside any norms of time and community. Huck describes living with Pap as “kind of lazy and jolly, laying off comfortable all day, smoking and fishing, and no books nor study” (30). But the negative side of yeoman life is the absolute power of the father; so, after enduring some beatings, Huck chooses his second option: running away (West, pp: 99).

As Huck Finn journeys along the Mississippi River, Mark Twain dramatizes the flaws and failures of several definitions of American manhood. Traditional expressions of honor, associated in particular with southern manhood, fail. The Grangerford and Shepherdson families kill each other in a feud whose origin no one can remember. A minor character named Sherburne, claiming to be protecting his own honor, kills a drunk who insulted him and then faces down a potential lynch mob that comes looking for vengeance. Town residents respond to the antics of con men by tarring and feathering them. Manly violence abounds, none of it for good reason.

Huck ultimately chooses two meanings of mature masculinity as preferable to both Victorian respectability and aggressive manhood. Rejecting the notion that masculinity means whiteness and domination—a meaning that his impoverished father shares with other white men in the book—Huck humbles himself and apologizes after playing a trick on Jim, a runaway slave who becomes his travel companion. Later, Huck overcomes his own inherited beliefs about slavery when he protects Jim from being discovered. The only way Huck can envision living without either dominating other people or fitting into flawed moral codes is to keep moving. So, in the end, Huck decides to “light out for the Territory,” embracing a definition of manhood grounded in personal autonomy and freedom from social convention (Wieck, pp: 150).

Twain's later work, however, paints a more ambiguous picture of the conflict between roughness and civilization, a shift ...