Issue Of Racism In Huckleberry Finn Essay - 1,465 words

Issue Of Racism In Huckleberry Finn Twains language, his use of the American vernacular, is what makes him a great writer. He was the first to show his countrymen that the vulgar coinage of American speech carried as much beauty, elegance and meaning as any of the English models used by his predecessors. Many blame Twain for racist remarks and usage of racist vocabulary in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Chadwick-Joshua offers a spirited and often eloquent defense of Huckleberry Finn. Even for someone, who cannot accept without reservation the premises or the argument, there is much to be learned from her inquiry into the Jim dilemma. The authors vital interest in the question of the supposed racism of Twains novel, and more specifically of the image and the example that the character of Jim supplies to white and black readers alike, is not purely academic.


For she speaks as an African American, as a mother whose daughter was in high school when she was writing the book, and as an educator who has addressed many high school students and their parents who object to the presence of the novel in the public schools. The dilemma the character of Jim poses is multi-layered, and the audience the author addresses is likewise heterogeneous. Why do some readers, especially African American readers, fail or refuse to recognize Jims loyalty, intelligence, sense of duty, and magnanimity as truly heroic? Why, she continues, do some readers prefer to regard him as yet another degrading racial stereotype? The answer, she proposes, is that the pride we should, and do at times, feel in Huck, Jim, the northern professor, Jack, and other characters too often mutates into a form of self-loathing and historical denial, our Jim dilemma.(Chadwick-Joshua) African American and Euro-American readers alike have failed to recognize the form of the novel and the true purposes of its author, she contends. Huckleberry Finn is a Menippean satire, a form which, in the words of Northrop Frye, deals less with people as people as such than with mental attitudes, and presents us with a vision of the world in terms of a single intellectual pattern. This pattern, insists the author, is slavery, with its concomitant Southern response, ambivalence. So conceived, Jim is absolutely central to the book, and (except for Huck, who by degrees outgrows his racist assumptions) the other characters exist to embody a world that has not gone beyond racism. Even when Jim is conspicuously absent from the narrative, his presence is felt on every page, and his plight gives satirical bite to otherwise disconnected episodes.


This premise permits Chadwick-Joshua to read the novel in ways that are at times very perceptive. She notes, for example, that the presence of other African Americans in the book has generally been neglected but serves to emphasize and better define Jims precarious position and enhance his dignity. A picture of the freed professor, for example, is rendered to us in the bigoted and drunken rhetoric of Pap; nevertheless, she rightly observes, we can and are meant to infer an admirable and courageous black character from Paps remarks. Likewise, the several verbal battles in which Jim and Huck indulge in the middle portion of the book constitute a Menippean symposium in which Jims words are necessarily double-voiced. (Chadwick-Joshua) Jim is compromised by circumstance, and he expresses himself with shrewd caution, but that does not mean that he does not have a voice or that he does not assert his own independence and integrity. Both characters evolve during these verbal exchanges, and, according to the author, the reader discovers and experiences a different truth as the characters themselves discover and experience different truths. Most crucial in these exchanges is Jims response to the joke Huck plays on him in Chapter 15.


There, Jims tongue lashing of Huck for violating their friendship and Hucks subsequent decision to humble [him]self to a nigger mark the moment when Jim is no longer silent or invisible and when Huck begins to reassess all that he has imbibed from his Southern culture. With the appearance of the King and the Duke and later on the Phelps farm, Jim must resume his mask of servility, though even there he speaks in double-voiced resistance to the con men and to the cruel pranks of Tom Sawyer. The problematic evasion episode in the last chapters is, far from a humorous burlesque delivered at Jims expense, instead a dramatic fulfillment of Huck' ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

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Essay Tags: huckleberry finn, african american, school students, huckleberry, finn

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