Indeed, the book became a bestseller. By it had sold 10 million copies; more than forty different editions have been printed in the United States alone. In general, the language is considered an accurate representation of that spoken by rural populations in the pre—Civil War South.
Alleged racist content has been the reason most often cited for banning or challenging Huck Finn , particularly since and the rise of the civil rights movement in the United States. Since the s, the use of Huck Finn in schools and libraries has been challenged in a number of states.
Twain supporters contend that the author was anything but racist and insist that the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was a satire in which Twain sought to highlight the hypocrisy of the society in which he grew up. Defenders of the book also insist that Jim comes across as having more common sense and as being more talented than either Huck or his best friend, Tom Sawyer.
This article was originally published in Elizabeth Purdy, Ph. Baldwin is one of the few US writers of his generation as comfortable writing white characters as black characters or the other way around. There he pushes Sammler into a corner and pulls down his own pants, exposing his large cock, forcing the old guy to admire it.
He no more spoke than a puma would. To my race-sensitive ears, on reading it 45 years after the novel was published, it was almost enough to make me give up on the book. In , Penguin reissued the novel with a new introduction, by the black writer and essayist Stanley Crouch.
According to Crouch, the great failure of the American novel is that it has not adequately addressed the diversity of the American experience for fear of getting the other wrong. Television, he argues, has done a better job. Of course, there are white writers who have taken it on. The trouble is writing is hard, and bad writing is congruent to bigotry — it imagines people to be less profound than they really are.
But if I make the same mistakes about any other group it looks like and may well be a reflection of some deep prejudice. All of which means that taking on substantial characters whose experiences differ widely from your own can be an act of small courage for a writer. But white writers can be criticised for not writing black characters, too.
Lena Dunham responded to this complaint in the second series of Girls. Hannah Horvath briefly dates a black Republican, and the couple share an uncomfortable scene that leaves unclear whether the relationship fails because of political or racial differences. So I have trouble believing that Hannah found that one black dude in Brooklyn who is anti-marriage equality, anti-abortion, pro-guns and anti-health care.
As a kid, my main contact with African American life came from my experience on basketball teams. The volatile combination of satire, irony, and questions of race underscores an additional important facet of the controversy: teacher ability and attitude. The position of the classroom teacher in the conflict over Huckleberry Finn is delicate: students not only look to teachers as intellectual mentors, but turn to them for emotional and social guidance as well.
So in addition to ensuring that students traverse the scholarly territory that the curriculum requires, teachers must guarantee that students complete the journey with their emotional beings intact. The tenuous status of race relations in the United States complicates the undertaking of such an instructional unit.
Cox, despite his affection for the novel and his libertarian views, admits that were he "teaching an American literature course in Bedford Stuyvesant or Watts or North Philadelphia," he might choose Twain texts other than Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Those who want the "classic" expelled dread the occurrence of incidents such as the one described by Hentoff on ABC'S "Nightline. The "inherent threat" of Huckleberry Finn is that in the hands of an unfit, uncommitted teacher it can become a tool of oppression and harmful indoctrination.
Assuming the inverse to be equally possible, a competent, racially accepting educator could transform the potential threat into a challenge. Huckleberry Finn presents the secondary teacher with a vehicle to effect powerful, positive interracial exchange among students.
Scout, along with her older brother Jem and playmate Dill, observes the horrors of racial prejudice as they are played out in the trial of a black man, Tom Robinson, wrongfully accused of rape by a white woman. My rationale for forcing the word into active class discourse proceeded from my belief that students black and white could only face sensitive issues of race after they had achieved a certain emotional distance from the rhetoric of race.
I thought and became convinced over the years that open confrontation in the controlled setting of the classroom could achieve that emotional distance. When Atticus learns of the fray, Scout asks if he is a "nigger lover. I try to love everybody. As the reality of racial discomfort and mistrust cast its shadow over the classroom, the tension would become almost palpable.
Unable to utter the taboo word "nigger," students would be paralyzed, the whites by their social awareness of the moral injunction against it and the blacks by their heightened sensitivity to it. Slowly, torturously, the wall of silence would begin to crumble before students' timid attempts to approach the topic with euphemism. Finally, after some tense moments, one courageous adolescent would utter the word.
The interracial understanding fostered by this careful, enlightened study of To Kill a Mockingbird can, I think, be achieved with a similar approach to Huckleberry Finn.
It must be understood, on the other hand, that the presence of incompetent, insensitive, or sometimes unwittingly, sometimes purposefully bigoted instructors in the public schools is no illusion. Further, "black students tended to identify more strongly and more positively with other members of their race" as a result of having studied Huckleberry Finn. For white students, reading the novel "reduce[d] hostile or unfavorable feelings toward members of another race and increase[d] favorable feelings toward members of another race" emphasis added.
Students who read the novel under a teacher's guidance showed "Significantly greater positive change" than those students who read the novel on their own.
Our data indicate that students who read the novel as part of an instructional unit demonstrated both a deeper sensitivity to the moral and psychological issues central to the novel a number of which deal with issues of race and a more positive attitude on matters calling for racial understanding and acceptance.
These students were also able to interpret the novel with greater literary sophistication than those students who read the novel without instruction. Additionally, these students were significantly more accepting of contacts with Blacks than were the other students involved in the study. Based on these studies completed eleven years apart I and , it appears that in the right circumstances Huckleberry Finn can be taught without perpetuating negative racial attitudes in white students or undermining racial pride in black students.
One has only to run a mental scan across the nation's news headlines to glean a portrait of the present state of American race relations. Such a glimpse betrays the ambivalence present in the status of blacks and their relations with whites. In "Breaking the Silence," a powerful statement on the plight of the "black underclass," Pete Hamill delineates the duality of the American black experience.
Admitting the dismal reality of continued racist behavior, Hamill cites "the antibusing violence in liberal Boston, the Bernhard Goetz and Howard Beach cases in liberal New York, [and] a some places. Hamill's article points to a fundamental fissure in the American psyche when it comes to race. Further, these details suggest that the teaching of Twain's novel may not be the innocent pedagogical endeavor that we wish it to be.
When we move from the context into which we want to deposit Huckleberry Finn and consider the nature of the text and its creator, matter becomes even more entangled. Though devotees love to praise Huckleberry Finn as "a savage indictment of a society that accepted slavery as a way of life" 55 or "the deadliest satire First, the ambiguities of the novel are multiple.
The characterization of Jim is a string of inconsistencies. At one point he is the superstitious darky; at another he is the indulgent surrogate father.
On the one hand, his desire for freedom is unconquerable; on the other, he submits it to the ridiculous antics of a child. Further, while Jim flees from slavery and plots to steal his family out of bondage, most other slaves in the novel embody the romantic contentment with the "peculiar institution" that slaveholders tried to convince abolitionists all slaves felt.
Twain's equivocal attitude toward blacks extends beyond his fiction into his lifelong struggle with "the Negro question. Leaving slaveholding Missouri seems to have had little effect on his racial outlook, because in he wrote home to his mother from New York, "I reckon I had better black my face, for in these Eastern states niggers are considerably better than white people.
In a letter proving that Twain had provided financial assistance to a black student at the Yale University Law School in was discovered and authenticated by Shelley Fisher Fishkin. Washington in championing several black causes. Instead, this should make it the pith of the American literature curriculum. Active engagement with Twain's novel provides one method for students to confront their own deepest racial feelings and insecurities.
Though the problems of racial perspective present in Huckleberry Finn may never be satisfactorily explained for censors or scholars, the consideration of them may have a practical, positive bearing on the manner in which America approaches race in the coming century. Notes 1. Sculley Bradley et al. New York: Norton, Nicholas J. Karolides and Lee Burress, eds. This information is based on six national surveys of censorship pressures on the American public schools between 19 6 5 and Most scholars express opinions on whether or not to ban Huckleberry Finn in a paragraph or two of an article that deals mainly with another topic.
Shelley Fisher Fishkin has given the issues much more attention. In addition to authenticating a letter written by Mark Twain that indicates his nonracist views see n. Hitchens 2 5 8. Allan B. Ballard, letter, New York Times 9 May 19 8 z. Fall : 6. Kaplan At this point in his autobiography, Hughes discusses the furor caused by Carl Van Vechten's novel Nigger Heaven, published in See David L.
Fiedler 5. Again, see Smith's essay. Fiedler 6; see also Smith's discussion of this passage. Kaplan ib. Mark Twain, quoted in Woodard and MacCann 76 emphasis added. Woodard and MacCann Hoxie N. Fairchild, letter, New York Times, 14 Sept. Louis J. Budd Cambridge, Eng. For a defense of the early Jim as an example of Twains strategy to "elaborate [racial stereotypes] in order to undermine them," see David Smith's essay.
Mailloux's discussion of "rhetorical performances" in Huckleberry Finn bears kinship to M. Bakhtin's discussion of the function of heteroglossia in the comic novel. In "Discourse on the Novel," Bakhtin identifies two features that characterize "the incorporation of heteroglossia and its stylistic utilization" in the comic novel. Twain himself acknowledges the painstaking attention he paid to language in the novel. Clearly, through his play with the "posited author" Huck, Twain's motive is to unmask and destroy various socioideological belief systems that are represented by language.
So what Mailloux refers to as rhetorical performance Bakhtin identifies as the heteroglossia struggle. Thus Jim's successful appropriation of Huck's argumentative strategy dismantles the hegemony of white supremacy discourse present as Huck's language. Bakhtin, "Discourse in the Novel," trans. Mailloux Leo Marx, "Mr. Trilling, and Huckleberry Finn," American Scholar 2.
Robert Sattelmeyer and J. Donald Crowley Columbia, Mo. James M. Though he ignores Jim and his aspiration for freedom in Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor, in a more recent, related article, "A Hard Book to Take," Cox returns to the evasion sequence and treats Jim's freedom in particular and the concept of freedom in general.
He contends that Twain had recognized "the national he [myth] of freedom" and that the closing movement of Huckleberry Finn dramatizes Twain's realization that Jim is not and never will be truly free. Further, no one, black or white, is or will be free, elaborates Cox, "despite the fictions of history and the Thirteenth Amendment.
Cox, Mark Twain The Effects of Reading "Huckleberry Finn" Pete Hamill, "Breaking the Silence," Esquire Jacqueline James Goodwin, "Booker T. English Journal , Nov. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since. Huckleberry Finn may be the most exalted single work of American literature. Praised by our best known critics and writers, the novel is enshrined at the center of the American literature curriculum. In the decades after Twain's death in , Adventures of Huckleberry Finn gains the status of a masterpiece.
Eliot and African American novelist Ralph Ellison add their acclaim. It is increasingly studied at both the high school and college level, where its literary merit and the insights it offers into American society are praised. In particular, some consider Twain's satire to be a powerful attack on racism. Others see Adventures of Huckleberry Finn not as an attack on racism, but as inherently racist itself.
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