Thesis Michiel Vanhauwaert 20051832

Ghent University Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

The Importance of the Mississippi River within the Anglo-Saxon and African-American Narratives in American Literature: Crossing or Following the River

Supervisor: MICHIEL VANHAUWAERT Dr. Ilka Saal Master in Language and Literature: English English Literature Dpt. MA dissertation

2008-2009 2

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ...... 3 0 Introduction ...... 4 I. NINETEENTH -CENTURY NARRATIVES ...... 7 1 The Anglo-Saxon Narrative...... 7 1.1 Introduction ...... 7 1.2 The Conquest of the West Beyond the Mississippi River ...... 9 1.2.1 Frederick Jackson Turner and the American Frontier ...... 10 1.2.2 Crossing the Mississippi River ...... 12 1.2.3 “Manifest Destiny”: the Justification and Inevitability of American Imperialism . 13 1.3 Mark Twain (1835-1910) ...... 16 1.3.1 Life on the Mississippi ...... 19 1.3.2 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ...... 27 2 The African-American Narrative ...... 37 2.1 Introduction ...... 37 2.2 Slavery ...... 40 2.3 Captivity versus Liberty: the Slaves’ Plight Exemplified in American Literature ...... 44 2.4 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ...... 50 II. TWENTIETH -CENTURY NARRATIVES ...... 54 1 Introduction ...... 54 2 Jonathan Raban: Old Glory ...... 55 2.1 Introduction ...... 55 2.2 A Heroic Past versus Small-town America ...... 56 2.3 The Mississippi River and Gender ...... 59 2.4 Old Glory and Race ...... 60 3 O Brother, Where Art Thou? ...... 64 4 Conclusion ...... 66 Works Cited...... 70

Acknowledgements

This Master dissertation is dedicated to Arne Willems, a good friend of mine who did not live to this day to see the result of a year’s intense work. His support during our last university year has meant a lot to me, and I am sure he would be the first to proofread and comment on my thesis enthusiastically, but unfortunately he will never have a chance to do so. In addition, I appreciate the effort of the English literature department, my promoter, the other two readers and the student administration to postpone the submission deadline.

I would like to express my gratitude to my parents, friends and fellow students for the support they gave me when I had difficulties in working on this dissertation. Also thanks to my mother, Carine Maeckelberghe, for reading and commenting on my work.

But the biggest word of thanks is of course extended to my promoter, Dr. Ilka Saal, for the endless amount of good advice, interesting ideas, constructive criticism and revisory work.

Without her help and supervision, I would never have been able to complete what I have achieved now. It was a pleasure to work together with her.

17 August 2009

0 Introduction

It is said that a title should be both concise and revealing. However, I think that the title of my master dissertation reveals everything and nothing. The key words of the title refer to the various aspects that I will discuss, but I assume that some explanation is called for. In total, I will work with three main dichotomies which are intertwined. The first division is thematic in nature: it opposes two large ‘narratives’ that I have called the Anglo-Saxon narrative and the

African-American narrative. The second division is temporally oriented: how are these two narratives proportioned in the nineteenth century and in the twentieth century? A third division is a spatial category: an East-West movement is typically associated with the Anglo-Saxon narrative and a North-South movement along the Mississippi River is associated with the

African-American narrative.

The Anglo-Saxon narrative is the story of the white, Anglo-Saxon settlers who considered the New World as their property. They imposed the Western civilization upon the Na- tive Americans, and they finally chased away the French and Spanish colonists as well. The

African-American narrative, on the other hand, is the painful story of the blacks who were already imported in the seventeenth century and enslaved in the Americas. The crucial century, though, turned out to be the nineteenth century, in which the two narratives heavily competed against each other. The abolition of slave trade, the Civil War and finally the abolition of slavery are important milestones in America’s history, but the Anglo-Saxon narrative nevertheless seems the most dominant force in the nineteenth century.

The Mississippi River is important and useful in that it stands as a physical and psychological symbol for both narratives. In the Anglo-Saxon narrative, the river is a natural boundary that had to be crossed in the conquest of the West. Therefore, the typical movement that I associate with this narrative is from East to West (and not back again). In the African-

American narrative, the Mississippi is a symbol for slavery – the plantations, slave and cotton transport, being sold down river… Slavery ‘follows’ the course of the mighty river, from North to South, but here, a South-North movement is also found, for example when slaves escaped

towards the free states and Canada. So, the Mississippi River is significant for the two large narratives and it plays a prominent role in various literary works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as in several songs and films: “the river’s unique contribution to the history and literature of the United States has woven it like a bright thread through the folk- lore and national consciousness of North America” (“Mississippi River” (2009)).

Having now explained the title and the major terms and concepts that I will use throughout my dissertation, I will provide a brief overview of what I am going to discuss. As you will see in the table of contents, the first main division is between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. The two chief nineteenth-century narratives are first discussed indivi- dually, and in the twentieth-century section I will examine what has happened to these two narratives, and to what extent the one or the other has gained or lost prominence in comparison with the other.

In the Anglo-Saxon narrative, I will first take a closer look at the conquest of the West beyond the Mississippi River. Frederick Jackson Turner’s The Frontier in American History

(1920) is crucial in my analysis of frontier life, westward expansion and manifest destiny. The

Americans asserted their feeling of superiority for the first time during several disputes and battles with the Native Americans. The ideals of the Old West and the heroic narrative of the

American dream include progress, freedom (that is, only for whites), and the pursuit of individual happiness. In the works of Mark Twain, one of the most influential nineteenth-century writers in America, the contradicting ideals of frontier life/freedom/nostalgia for a lost past versus expansion/progress/civilization are developed in Life on the Mississippi (1883) and Ad- ventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). The first one is both an autobiographic account of river life before and after the Civil War and a celebration of antebellum steamboat piloting. The second one is a novel in which the two narratives are ingeniously interlaced – therefore I have chosen to split up the discussion and divide it into two parts, Huck’s (Anglo-Saxon) narrative and Jim’s (African-American) narrative.

The African-American narrative begins with an introduction and some general notions about slavery, but focused on its function in relation with the Mississippi River. I will

connect the slavery issue with westward expansion and of course with the Civil War. Then, I will look at how slavery features in some (abolitionist) literary works such as Harriet Beecher

Stowe’s 1852 anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin and William Brown’s 1847 slave narrative

The Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave. Like I said previously, another subchapter concerning Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will close the African-American chapter, after which I will proceed with the twentieth-century section.

However, I consider the twentieth-century part as less important than the nineteenth- century division, but it is an interesting addition that completes my dissertation regarding the temporal aspect: the two narratives in two different centuries. I will not really discuss the narratives as two antithetic forces with regard to dominance and power, but rather will I survey to what extent the various elements and themes from the Anglo-Saxon and the

African-American narratives continue to turn up in recent sources. I will use two main sources for this purpose: first, I will look at Jonathan Raban’s travelogue Old Glory – A Voyage

Down the Mississippi (1981), in which he recounts his Huck Finn -like journey along the

Mississippi in a small motorboat. Similarly like in Twain’s works, the river is of primordial interest. Afterwards I will examine a film, O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000), in which several motifs from Huck Finn reappear, as well as typical African-American concerns, such as Ku

Klux Klan violence against blacks. In a general conclusion I will eventually consider both narratives.

I. NINETEENTH -CENTURY NARRATIVES

1 The Anglo-Saxon Narrative

1.1 Introduction

The first ‘narrative’ I am going to discuss is the Anglo-Saxon narrative. This will mainly be the story of the white man, the dominant force in nineteenth-century America. This narrative begins with European settlers who landed at the Eastern borders of what is now the United

States. Many of them ‘escaped’ their Old World, Europe, and they set out to conquer new lands. Starting along the East Coast of the North-American continent, they headed for the wild West – the Anglo-Saxon narrative is mainly an East-West movement, and not so much vice versa. As the frontier shifted year by year, the newly-discovered land was exploited, cultivated and inhabited. ‘Civilization’ spread all over the continent, and in the end, it were the British who triumphed over the Native Americans, the French and the Spanish. The last ties with England were broken when the new Anglo-American people gained their independence (the American Revolutionary War formally ended in 1783, when England acknow- ledged the United States as an independent country at the Treaty of Paris).

As the Americans expanded on their westward way, they had to cross several natural borders: the Allegheny Mountains first and the Rocky Mountains in the West. But in the middle of the country lies a symbolic border: the mighty Mississippi River, the Father of all

Waters, as the Ojibwa Native Americans called the river poetically. The Mississippi and Ohio rivers (less so the Missouri) have played a crucial role in the country’s expansion, and thus the

Mississippi River Valley – which is now largely the Midwest – is a very distinct region that has been important in shaping the American history and the people’s consciousness.

European Discovery of the Mississippi River The Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto (c. 1496-1542) was the first white man who discovered the river in 1541 and documented it. He died soon afterwards, in 1542, and he was buried by priests and soldiers. It took as long as 130 years before another white man reported having seen the river. Later explorers were mainly French, such as René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle; the French duo Louis Joliet (a fur trader) and Jacques Marquette (a Jesuit priest); and Pierre Le Moy- ne d’Iberville, whose younger brother, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, founded New Orleans in 1718 “to counter westward thrusts of the English colonies and eastward moves of the Spanish” (Norton 45). The French tried to control the river in an attempt to create a state stretching from their colonies in Canada until New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. This attempt was unsuccess- ful when Napoleon lost interest in the area and sold the Louisiana territory to the Americans in 1803. (Twain LOM 1 3-7, Weddle)

William Henry Powell, Discovery of the Mississippi (1847). Commissioned by the Congress in 1847 and bought in 1855, this painting shows Hernando De Soto and his party on horses arriving at the banks of the Mississippi in 1541. To the right, we see a group of Choctaw Indians in front of their tepees, and their chief offers a peace pipe to the conquerors. In the foreground, a monk is seen praying while a crucifix is erected. (“Discovery”) 1

In the following section, I will recount the story of the westward moving frontier in

America, relating often to Frederick Jackson Turner’s The Frontier in American History

1 When citing Twain, LOM refers to Life on the Mississippi and HF refers to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn .

(1921) 2. This is the story of crossing the Mississippi from the East to the West: the mythical, far-away river that once served as the nation’s utmost border, now became the focus of the nation, and once the river was crossed, the daunting western lands had to be disclosed. The

Mississippi, however, remained a real but also imaginary border between the East and the

West, while the Ohio River, or at least parts of it, represented a boundary between the slavery

South and the free North.

Then, in the subsequent chapters on Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi and Adven- tures of Huckleberry Finn , I will take a closer look at the function of this heroic narrative of the

Old West, particularly its deployment of the romantic ideals of freedom, escape and liberty that dominate Huck’s narrative. But I will also show, in a close reading of Jim’s narrative, how this dominant narrative is accompanied and contested by a very different view of the river and the values that it represents. Jim’s narrative, linked with the issue of slavery, constitutes the transition from the Anglo-Saxon to the African-American narrative, the second nineteenth- century movement.

1.2 The Conquest of the West Beyond the Mississippi River

There is a time span of more than a hundred years between the discovery of the American continent by Christopher Columbus in 1492 and the creation of the first permanent British settlement of Jamestown, Virginia in 1607. But then, in the course of the seventeenth century, various colonies developed along the eastern coast of the continent, in the territory of the current states Massachusetts (the Pilgrim Fathers at Plymouth Colony, the Puritans at Bay Colo- ny), Maryland, the Carolinas and Pennsylvania – followed by Georgia in the eighteenth century. French, Dutch and Swedish immigrants settled there as well (Norton 22-28). The discovery of the New World gave them the opportunity to start all over again “in a New Eden” with

“manifest destinies to subdue the earth” (Duncan & Goddard 157). Besides the drive to colo-

2 This volume, published in 1921, bundles thirteen essays by Turner written between the 1890s and 1920. So note that the first essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” was written in 1893, a few years after the frontier was considered “closed”.

nise the new continent, there was also the aspect of ‘escapism,’ albeit not in the metaphorical sense of fantasizing or dreaming about America. For several reasons (push factors such as poverty, religious dissenters), European citizens literally fled to America, they escaped the Old

World and hoped to make it in the New one. They wanted to escape from the European civilization and go back to nature: the new continent represented a tabula rasa that could be – no, had to be filled.

Even though the term “Manifest Destiny” was introduced only in 1845 (see section

1.2.3), the idea of expansionism was already present in the minds of the English settlers from the very beginning of the colonisation era. The ‘American Dream’ ideology is characterized by such concepts as expansionism, American exceptionalism and their god-given right to conquer and occupy all the land “from sea to shining sea.” 3 President Andrew Jackson mentioned in his Farewell Address that the American people were selected by Providence, to be “the guardians of freedom to preserve it for the benefit of the human race” (qtd. in Graebner 48).

He did not mention the tricky question of which human race were to be given the right of freedom, though. Russell Duncan & Joseph Goddard furthermore point out that when “[a]p- plying Darwinian and manifest destiny ideas to nations, Americans viewed themselves and their country as a superior race/nation which had the right to expand over lesser peoples/ nations in the survival of the fittest” (23) – and we all know that this is exactly what has happened afterwards in the course of American history. This idea is confirmed in Norton: the

Americans’ “confidence rested on a belief that white people were somehow special and asserted itself at the expense of people of color, the poor, and the environment” (301).

1.2.1 Frederick Jackson Turner and the American Frontier

The frontier is a key concept in American colonial history. The word’s neutral meaning is just a boundary, but the word has gained a special, American connotation: the frontier as the ultimate limit of occupied land, behind which the wilderness lies. The frontier zone, according

3 This line features in the 1895 song “America the Beautiful” by Katharine Lee Bates.

to Turner, is “the meeting point between savagery and civilization” (3). The only possible way for the existing settlements along the East Coast to extend was of course towards the West.

“[T]he idea of ‘going west’ to seek their fortunes became the dream of many Americans,”

Cheryl Edwards adds (6). Consequently, new settlements sprang up in the backcountry, moving westward decade by decade, and the frontier line shifted together with it. Every new settlement grew to become a town, towns became cities, and each centre had a certain level of development. But along the frontier, ‘European civilization’ had not yet intruded. There was always this notion of wilderness, primitiveness, a return to nature. Life along the frontier was in fact living the way the Native Americans did – the image of the ‘noble savage’ comes to mind – it involved a “return to primitive conditions,” as a result of which the “American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier” (Turner 2).

The Indians, however, were used to this way of living – they had lived like this for thousands of years – but for the white man, frontier life was hard, and the pioneers had to look after themselves in order to survive. Little by little, they turned the wilderness into ‘inhabitable’ land. This kind of life had repercussions on the development of the American people. Accor- ding to Duncan & Goddard, the frontier was “the crucible where the American traits of individualism and acquisitiveness originated” (19). The fundamentally individualistic nature of the

American people is rooted in this development.

The successive waves of the frontier line largely coincided with natural boundary lines.

The East Coast of America marked the frontier in the seventeenth century, in the eighteenth century the frontier transgressed the Alleghany Mountains. Around 1820, the land north of the Ohio River was occupied (the current states of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois), and in the

South, parts of Missouri and Louisiana were settled – by this time, the pioneers had crossed the Mississippi River. In the mid-nineteenth century, the frontier region extended as far as the

Missouri River region; and towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific coast were colonised (Turner 7-9). (It should be noted, however, that Califor- nia was already developing due to the 1848 Gold Rush, which attracted plenty of immigrants, mainly from the United States and Latin America, but later also from China and Europe.)

In 1893, Turner published his seminal essay “The Significance of the Frontier in Ame- rican History,” in which he concluded, amongst other things, that the frontier could now be considered ‘closed,’ or no longer existent, since the Pacific Ocean was reached and all the western lands were to a certain degree ‘settled.’ He based this finding on the 1890 census reports, which stated that “the settlements of the West lie so scattered over the region that there can no longer be said to be a frontier line” (Turner 9). Although he considered this to be “the closing of a great historic movement” (1), the closure of the frontier was nonetheless a rather symbolic moment; for it did not imply that the country was filled up with densely populated cities and areas. Indeed, people were not curbed by feelings of confinement: there was still enough land that waited to be occupied, and if something went wrong, one could always try somewhere else. “A surplus of seemingly uninhabited land led Americans to believe they would always have a second chance” (Norton 301). This belief remains crucial to understand the Ame- rican people’s character, but also the “American democracy and institutions [were shaped by] the experience of isolation and the availability of free land” (Duncan & Goddard 19).

Despite the fact that the frontier line was constantly moving towards the West, Turner points out that “[t]he Mississippi River region was the scene of typical frontier settlements”

(7), so it could be argued that this region was the ultimate model of American pioneer society.

Even when the West became settled and inhabited land, the Mississippi Valley remained the middle region with typical American characteristics. It was “less English” (27) than others, because it had “a wide mixture of nationalities, a varied society, the mixed town and county system of local government, a varied economic life [and] many religious sects” (27). As a kind of intermediary region between the East and West as well as New England and the South, “it became the typically American region” (28).

1.2.2 Crossing the Mississippi River

One might wonder what exactly this has to do with the Mississippi River. The crucial element of the Mississippi Valley is obviously the Mississippi River itself, searching its way from North to South, bend after bend, across the whole country. Therefore, like I said before, the river is

regarded as a clear natural boundary, and it was at one time also a frontier zone. Crossing the

Mississippi was more important than traversing the Alleghenies or the Rocky Mountains: “It once served as our Nation's western border, and expansion beyond it was a key turning point in our history” (“About”). When president Thomas Jefferson completed the Louisiana Pur- chase from France in 1803, the whole Mississippi River – previously coveted as well by Indi- ans, the Spanish and the French – fell into American hands.

The territory of the United States now stretched out until the Rocky Mountains, and suddenly the question arose of what to do with the new property beyond the Mississippi.

What lies behind it, but a vast and unexplored area? It was a next step that had to be taken for the conquest of the West, and not all Americans were in favour of it – they were ‘afraid,’ or not yet ‘ready’ to cross the river. Even Jefferson himself, who bought the territory, did not intend to inhabit it at first: he wanted to “offer it to the Indians in exchange for their settlements east of the Mississippi” (Turner 34). Indeed, by 1840, the governmental ‘removal policy’ had relocated most Native Americans west of the Mississippi. The river was an emblematic marker, a physical, ‘tangible’ borderline, but also a psychological boundary. What exactly does it mean, ‘crossing the Mississippi?’ It would involve a certain ‘rite of passage’ into the wilderness, where the ‘savages’ lived. James Madison even argued that the United States “had no interest [to extend] itself on the right bank of the Mississippi, but should rather fear it” (Tur- ner 34). This reticence, which is in contrast with the usual vitality with which the settlers wanted to colonize the West, demonstrates that finally crossing the Mississippi River and moving on, did in fact constitute a turning point in American history.

1.2.3 “Manifest Destiny”: the Justification and Inevitability of American Imperialism

When the Mississippi was eventually crossed, the Louisiana Territory was not immediately settled land. People did not believe that the Great Plains could possibly imply a real improve- ment with regard to settlements and agriculture. The uncertainty, the wilderness and the

Native Americans put them off. But the people proved wrong, because soon after, the area was

explored and charted. Two famous expeditions mapped the Louisiana Territory in the North and the South respectively: the Lewis & Clark expedition (by Meriwether Lewis and William

Clark in 1804-06), and the Pike Expedition (by Zebulon Pike in 1806-07). Particularly after the 1840s, the Americans gradually intruded once again into the dwelling places of the Indian tribes – the same tribes they had at first transferred across the Mississippi. Indian trade, and especially fur trade, was primordial for the developments between the Natives and the whites.

The Indians offered mainly nutriments, animals and survival skills, whereas the whites returned ‘modern,’ Western goods and guns, and by doing so “the disintegrating forces of civilization entered the wilderness” (Turner 13). In the course of time, it became clear that the Ame- ricans and the Indians had conflicting interests, and their relations, rather friendly and reci- procal at the outset, deteriorated.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, besides their ‘own’ Civil War, the Ameri- cans fought out numerous wars with the Natives west of the Mississippi River. “Each [success- sive frontier] was won by a series of Indian wars,” Turner argued (9). The idea of “Manifest

Destiny” resurfaced again. Coined in 1845 by John L. O’Sullivan, the editor of the United

States Magazine and Domestic Review, the term was used in relation to the possible annexa- tion of Texas and the exploration of the Oregon Country. This mission was intrinsic in the

American creed, but now it was again linked to territorial expansion (Graebner 48). The conquest of these new domains, he wrote, would be “the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multi- plying millions” (qtd. in Norton 195). But the general implication of the notion was that the expansion of the United States across the continent, at the expense of less powerful nations, was justified, inevitable and even divinely preordained, in the name of progress, liberty, freedom and the pursuit of happiness.

So, following the Louisiana Purchase, it took the Americans a mere fifty years to reach the present-day size of the United States (except for Alaska, Hawaii and other islands). In

1819, Florida was bought from Spain. In 1845, then, after O’Sullivan’s appeal, Texas was annexed: after the Mexican-American War, from 1846 until 1848, the United States took all

the Mexican land north of the Rio Grande. In 1846, the Oregon Country was ceded by Britain, and in 1853, a small strip of land was purchased from Mexico in Arizona and New Mexico

(Duncan & Goddard 13-15). But note, here again, that these were only territories in possession of the United States – it would take another fifty years until the western land would be more or less inhabited and cultivated.

John Gast, American Progress (1872) (1873 chromolithograph of Gast’s painting, by George A. Crofutt ) This illustration allegorically symbolises the frontier myth of expansion and Manifest Destiny. The white woman is Columbia, the symbol for the American spirit, and on her head she bears the Star of Empire. She guides the pioneers and their wagons along the plains. They have already crossed the Mississippi River, which can be noticed in the right. Civilization and technology is coming with them: railroads and trains head westwards too, while Columbia unwinds telegraph wire. She also carries a school book in her hand. Native Americans and other “wild beasts” are hunted down towards the West; they have to be pushed out of the picture. (Bird; Duncan & Goddard 15)

All this makes plain that Manifest Destiny was the driving force behind the urge for conquering and settling empty wilderness and new land. The romantic notion of the Old West

(anything West of the Mississippi River), the heroic narrative of the American dream and the

expression of American nationalism are decisive factors in the building of a nation. America was a very young nation at the time, compared to Europe, and if they wanted to exert power and make themselves felt on the continent, they had to be a strong nation. The only possible way to achieve this imperial dream was expansion towards new territories, and consolidation of the already possessed land. When the ties with the Old World, Europe and especially

Britain, were broken, no one could stop the United States from becoming an international superpower. The agrarian culture developed into an industrial society, and commerce and travel increased with the advent of the steamboat on the Mississippi River in 1811 and the development of the railroad network from the 1890s onward. The Anglo-Saxon narrative was a story of progress, freedom and the pursuit of (individual) happiness; and this narrative appeared to be the dominant one in the course of the nineteenth century. The other side of the coin was seemingly unimportant for the white man’s success… The issue of slavery divided the country and the black race was now the oppressed victim, especially in the slavery South – their fate was probably even worse than that of the Native Americans. In the next subchapter,

I will look at how Mark Twain represented this American spirit of superiority and progress on the one hand, in Life on the Mississippi , and freedom, individualism and escapism on the other hand, in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . These two images of the West are the promise of

“national destiny” and “individual opportunity” (Hine 11).

1.3 Mark Twain (1835-1910) 4

This spirit of and the belief in progress was captured very well by one of the country’s greatest nineteenth-century writers: Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark

Twain. Even though he travelled and moved a lot – he lived in twenty different cities across eleven states, even Hawaii, and he voyaged through more than 40 states – Twain has a special connection with the Mississippi River. Born in Florida, MO in 1835, his family moved along the river, and he spent his boyhood and youth in Hannibal, MO. When he was eighteen, he

4 Camfield, De Voto 5-23, Rasmussen ix & 189-91, Twain LOM iii-iv.

worked in New York and Philadelphia as a typesetter, but then he returned to Keokuk and

Muscatine, two river towns in Iowa. However, the shaping of his typical American ideas and beliefs originated in the two towns in which he grew up as a boy: Florida and Hannibal.

In the 1830s, Florida was still primarily a frontier society, where the “immediacy of nature, the infinity of the forest, the ease of escape into solitude and an all-encompassing freedom” (De Voto 6) were facts of everyday reality. But it is especially Hannibal, where he lived most of his youth (from 4 to 18 years old), that has left a deep imprint on Clemens’ person and Twain’s literary work. In Hannibal, the spirit of a river town in full expansion was combined with “the frontier crafts and values and ways of thinking [that] lingered on, a little man- nered perhaps, a little nostalgic, but still vital” (De Voto 7). In this period of time, this village was the ideal place and time with which Mark Twain has identified himself in his literature.

Unstained by the slavery dispute – the Civil War had not yet arrived –, not yet industrialized, and still in a post-pioneer, frontier stage; “[t]he life which is always most desirable in Mark’s thinking is the pre-industrial society of a little river town; it is a specific identification of Han- nibal” (De Voto 8). Elements of Hannibal turn up in fictional towns and cities such as St.

Petersburg, Bricksville and Pikesville, which appear in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . Just like St. Petersburg in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn , Hannibal is a “town of sun, forest, shade, drowsy peace, limpid emotions, simple humanity – and eternity going by on the majestic river” (De Voto 8). Precisely because Clemens grew up in a frontier society, still growing and developing, he is so nostalgic about nature and freedom in his writings, and a hint of melancholy is always discernible – melancholy for the past, for his boyhood along the river and the idyllic river towns where Clemens grew up, but also for his days as a steamboat pilot. Life on the Mississippi was “stamped from his memory, which was always nostalgic, and from the romancing half of his twinned talent” (De Voto 10).

When he was twenty-two, in 1857, Clemens decided to become a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi, and he soon obtained his license. He became a successful pilot on riverboats plying between St. Louis and New Orleans, the most common commercial route in those days.

Were it not for the Civil War, which broke out in 1861, he would have served steamers for the

rest of his life: “Time drifted smoothly and prosperously on, and I supposed – and hoped – that I was going to follow the river the rest of my days, and die at the wheel when my mission was ended. But by and by the war came, commerce was suspended, my occupation gone”

(Twain LOM 103-04).

Clemens had to find an income, and he shaped his writing talents while working as a reporter – in 1861, he headed out for the West. In this period he began writing under the nom de plume “Mark Twain,” “a pilot’s phrase meaning two fathoms, just deep enough for river navigation” (LOM iii). Gregg Camfield has appropriately described the basis for Twain’s so- called “Mississippi writings”: “While the War started a chain of events that removed Samuel

Clemens physically from the Mississippi Valley, it did not remove him imaginatively.” (Cam- field). He could not forget his river, and it proved an inexhaustible source for his literary career. Camfield furthermore remarks that

[t]he process that began in 1860 did not end until he died in 1910, and in his imagina- tion he revisited the Mississippi Valley incessantly, in one literary work after another, including The Gilded Age (1871), “Old Times on the Mississippi” (1874), The Adven- tures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins (1893), a series of se- quels to the Tom and Huck stories, and in “Chapters from My Autobiography.” Indeed, it is true that in most of Twain’s literary classics, especially the Great American Novel

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , the Mississippi river plays a major role.

From 1874 to 1891, the period during which his most renowned works appeared,

Mark Twain and his family lived in Hartford, CT. As Bernard De Voto has pointed out, this period was both the happiest period of his life – he had become a famous writer worldwide and he had many friends – but at the same time it marked the beginning of a personal cata- strophe. His publishing house went bankrupt; of his three daughters, his oldest died and his youngest suffered from epilepsy; and in 1904 his wife died (21-23). The last decade of the nineteenth century was characterized by “pessimism and disenchantment” (De Voto 23), both generally in the United States, and in Twain personally. Did he intuitively feel that the dominant, Anglo-Saxon narrative was coming towards an end? The heroic narrative of the Old

West was waning, a modern society was coming into existence, and for Twain the nostalgist,

maybe this fin de siècle feeling bothered him. He did not live long into the twentieth century: in 1910, Twain died in Redding, CT.

1.3.1 Life on the Mississippi

Twain’s seminal work about the river, Life on the Mississippi , published in 1883, is an autobiographical memoir of his life on the river. It consists of two main parts, preceded by three chapters about the river’s history. His writings about the ‘science’ of piloting, recounting his days as an apprentice from 1857 until 1861, were previously published in instalments in the

Atlantic Monthly in 1875 under the name “Old Times on the Mississippi,” and they reappear in this book in chapters 4-21. “Old Times on the Mississippi,” Camfield argues, is an “account of the social and political circumstances of steam boating [sic ],” and it is “one of the best accounts of river life ever written” (Camfield). Unfortunately, Twain abruptly cut off the tale once he had his license and thus did not relate his days as a pilot, Camfield complains.

The second part of the book, chapters 22-60, deals with Twain’s return to ‘his’ river twenty years later, in 1882-83, when he travelled down the river from St. Louis to New Or- leans, this time no longer as a pilot but from the point of view of a tourist. This part of the book was “in sympathy with the passenger, a figure completely ignorant of a steamboat and the river” (Burde 886). For this purpose, Twain took “a poet for company, and a stenographer to ‘take him down’” (LOM 104), i.e. to write down what happened and what Twain’s ideas were, with a view to publish it later on. Contrary to what one would expect, Twain was not confident before he returned to the Mississippi, and he even had nightmares about it. His trip, as Edgar J. Burde has put it poetically, “was, in an important sense, a journey in search of a lost identity” (886). Among other stops, Twain also returned to Hannibal, his boyhood town, and his three-day stay there is described in chapters 53-56, which include “nostalgic passages”

(Rasmussen 191). Although some of the ‘factual information’ in the book might be somewhat aggrandized and romanticised, particularly about the status and fame of the pilot and the delightful image of the piloting business itself, the book as a whole, R. Kent Rasmussen concludes, “presents a powerful portrait of how much both the river and its commerce could

change in a few decades, as well as a savage depiction of the postwar South” (283). Twain was not only trying to recover his personal identity again. By returning to the river of his youth and the steamboats that once thrived on the Mississippi, it seemed as if he were nostalgically looking for a national history that was gone by – the splendour of a national identity, so to say, that was lost after the war.

As I made clear in the biographic paragraphs about Mark Twain, he was on the one hand a nostalgic dreamer of a past when river towns were still rather primitive, located idylli- cally along the river, in the middle of nature, where the boys could play and grow up together in freedom. On the other hand, Twain was an ardent ‘supporter’ of the idea of progress, expansion and economic growth. For Twain, the supreme example was the advent of the steamboat, which boosted the economic and demographic development of the Mississippi River region. It was the dream of any young boy in the village, including young Clemens as well, to become an honoured steamboat pilot: “there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village [Hannibal] on the west bank of the Mississippi River. That was, to be a steamboatman” (Twain LOM 19). Such was eventually the fate of Mark Twain, who turned his dream into reality and became a pilot, thus indulging in the economic aspect of the “rush and fever of the expanding nation” (De Voto 10), the steamboating industry.

The Rise and Fall of Steamboating The Mississippi River was already used to transport people and goods before European settlers intruded: it was the only means of communication in the valley. The Indians used canoes and rafts, which were later modified by the Europeans, resulting in pirogues and bateaux. The problem of their limited capacity was settled in the late eighteenth century when flatboats and keelboats were developed, which had a large, flat bottom and allowed for bigger cargoes to be transported. The keelboating commerce died out gradually when the steamboat made its entry on the river in 1811. As Mark Twain mentions, “it is not before the nineteenth century that there is any noteworthy and regular commerce to be mentioned” (Twain LOM 9-10), and indeed the steamboat became the main commercial means of transportation in the nineteenth century. The first steamboat, using James Watt’s 1769 invention of the steam engine, was created by Robert Fulton and Nicholas Roosevelt in 1811 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and was called New Orleans . It cost $38,000 and fulfilled his maiden voyage in 1811-12 at eight miles an hour. After the 1803 Louisiana Purchase and when the 1811 prototype was improved a nd further developed, “[t]he

full commercial p otential of steamboats was assured” (Rasmussen 440). The golden era for steam - boating was, roughly, between 1810 and 1870. Peaking in the 1840s, river commerce was suspended during the Civil War, after which the steamboat knew a brief revival. It definitively became cultural heritage when commercial railroad transport thrived from the 1870s onwards. As the United States expanded further westwards, there was need for a means of transport following the East-West trail, and railroads were a perfect solution for this demand. Also passenger traffic benefited: “The railroads have killed the steamboat passenger traffic by doing in two or three days what the steamboats consumed a week in doing” (Twain LOM 109). River towns now functioned mainly as crossing points for railroad commerce and no longer river-oriented commerce points along the North- South axis of the Mississippi. Up to this day, however, you can still see steamboats on the river, but now they merely function as pleasure boats, steamboat museums or steamboat casinos. (“Mississippi River,” Fraiser 45, Hoagland 111-13, Rasmussen 440-41, Twain LOM 10 & 20-22)

The steamboating era in the nineteenth century transformed the Mississippi River

Valley from an undeveloped frontier society into a thriving economic region and a national centre. When the inhabitants saw the first steamers on the river, the population of the valley nearly reached two million, but this number quickly increased to approximately 2.5 million in

1820, six million in 1840 and more than fourteen million citizens at the break of the Civil

War. This antebellum period “witnessed the transformation of the region from a wilderness into an agricultural heartland” (Haites & Mak 52). Similarly, only twenty-one steamboats un- loaded at New Orleans in 1814, whereas this figure had risen to over 1,200 in 1833. Passenger transport increased as well, and people enjoyed travelling on the river. Turner notes that it now “became possible to develop agriculture and to get the Western crops rapidly and cheaply to a market” (171). It was cheaper to ship goods from Cincinnati, OH to the East Coast via the

Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, than to cross the Appalachians. The advent of the steamboats generated “an era of unprecedented prosperity to the river” (“Mississippi River” (2009)). New towns sprang up, centred around the wharf, the commercial heart of the town. Existing towns grew into prominent cities along the river, and even large plantations often had a proper landing, so that crops could be shipped directly. New Orleans, in turn, became the busiest harbour in the United States.

The crew of a steamboat was regarded with the utmost respect. In little river villages whose existence purely depended on the once-a-day stop of a steamboat, the dream of every young boy was to become a member of a steamboat crew, not necessarily the pilot. Even a boy scrubbing the floor as a deck hand could make any other boy in his town jealous – he would make sure to be ‘working’ on the right side of the boat when it tied up at the wharf, so that his comrades could see him. In the following passage, Mark Twain, in his typical humorous way of writing, describes the envious feelings of himself and his friends who did not (yet) find a job on a steamer – their jealousy towards one of their fellows that was an apprentice engineer was great:

He would always manage to have a rusty bolt to scrub while his boat tarried at our town, and he would sit on the inside guard and scrub it, where we could all see him and envy him and loathe him. And whenever his boat was laid up he would come home and swell around the town in his blackest and greasiest clothes, so that nobody could help remembering that he was a steamboatman; and he used all sorts of steamboat technicalities in his talk, as if he were so used to them that he forgot common people could not understand them. He would speak of the ‘labboard’ side of a horse in an easy, natural way that would make one wish he was dead. (LOM 21-22) In fact, any job on a steamer was very much sought-after, since once you had an occupation there, it was possible to rise up the ranks.

But the highest admiration of all was granted to the awe-inspiring pilot. Mark Twain argued that the “[p]ilot was the grandest position of all” (LOM 22). In the glorious steamboating days, it was an honour to steer and lead a prestigious steamer – a pilot commanded everyone’s respect. The pilot, and not the captain, has the last word when it comes to decisions. Mark Twain himself “took a measureless pride” in his profession, because “in those days, [a pilot] was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth” (LOM 66). He had expressed this thought earlier, in an August 1866 letter to his friend and fellow pilot Will Bowen: “[pilots are] the only real, independent & genuine gentlemen in the world [that] go quietly up & down the Mississippi river, asking no homage of any one, see- king no popularity, no notoriety, & not caring a damn whether school keeps or not” (qtd. in

Burde 879).

However, as Edgar Burde has pointed out, this seemingly nonchalant or indifferent attitude is contradicted in the same letter, in which “Clemens revealed that he himself did not possess the pilot’s indifference to ‘the world’s opinion’” (889); so Twain did care about what other people thought of him. In any case, he was proud to be a pilot, and “[a]t times his sense of the personal freedom and power of a Mississippi pilot was related in his mind to social status and the idea of gentility” (Burde 879). The pilot was free to do as he wished – unlike kings, who have to do what the parliament and the people say; unlike newspaper editors, who cannot utter their full opinion for fear of the party, the patrons and the parish; unlike writers, who are the “manacled servants of the public” (LOM 66). The Mississippi pilot, Twain asserts, knew no master at all: “the moment that the boat was under way in the river, she was under the sole and unquestioned control of the pilot” (LOM 66). The result of the pilot’s position was “that he was a great personage in the old steamboating days. He was treated with marked courtesy by the captain and with marked deference by all the officers and servants; and this deferential spirit was quickly communicated to the passengers, too” (LOM 67).

The pilot’s sense of supremacy, his freedom and individualism are typical aspects of the Anglo-Saxon narrative. In Twain’s romanticised view, the pilot, high up in his “glass temple” (Schmidt 98), the pilot house, can be compared to the pioneers of American frontier life: no one told them what to do, they were independent individuals. The freedom of the

American settlers to move and explore westwards is here transferred to the freedom of the pilot, who can freely move on the Mississippi River without giving any account to no one.

Paul Schmidt, however, toned down the claims Twain made in his book, arguing in favour of the coherence and teamwork of a steamboat crew. “The pilot is not proud and solitary, superior to his work and competitive with his fellows; he is part of the crew – unthinkable without the crew” (110) – indeed, how could a pilot steer the boat if he is not informed by a leadsman about the depth of the water, for instance? “The riverman belongs ,” Schmidt concludes. “He is related to the crew, to the rich traditions of river work” (111, italics mine). Another critic,

Howard Horwitz, also objects to Twain’s representation of the pilot, arguing that Twain’s cha- racterization of a pilot is merely an exaltation: “Mark Twain greatly exaggerates the pilot’s in-

dependence and monarchial power” (255). Even Emerson Gould, a former steamboat pilot himself, disputes the pilot’s freedom in his Fifty Years on the Mississippi (1889): “the pilot har- kened to the captain, who determined the steamboat’s destination and oversaw its course”

(Horwitz 255).

Mark Twain clearly set up a romantic, even heroic image of steamboating and the pilot’s profession. The Mississippi River and its commerce have a positive influence on

Twain’s mind and ideas; he shares and celebrates the nation’s Anglo-Saxon ideals of expansion and progress. When Clemens started his steamboat career in 1857 as a ‘cub pilot,’ “his mind [was] a storehouse of the second-hand romantic notions shared by all village boys and steamboat passengers – that piloting is pure glamor, that the river is pure poetry” (Briden). In- deed, in the eye of an outsider, a steamboat was like a palace on water. Especially in little towns such as Hannibal, the daily arrival of a steamer was a true spectacle, and this was capita- lized upon by the crew, who knew how to impress the village people: “the captain stands by the big bell, calm, imposing, the envy of all; great volumes of the blackest smoke are rolling and tumbling out of the chimneys – a husbanded grandeur created with a bit of pitch pine just before arriving at a town” (Twain LOM 21). Life on the Mississippi is without doubt a celebration of the steamboating industry. There seem to be no critical undertones in the work about

American society or economic developments. Bernard De Voto and DeLancey Ferguson feel that “Old Times on the Mississippi” (the first part of LOM , about piloting) is “romantic because Clemens ignores the prostitutes and gamblers and what he calls the ‘moral styes’ of such river cities as Natchez Under the Hill” (Schmidt 101). Twain only makes small allusions to gamblers, swindlers and other excrescences that river life has produced. Another element he omitted, was the aspect of ‘labour’: the apparent ease with which an experienced pilot steers the boat, is not perceived as labour. Piloting, Horwitz points out, “is work that is not work, mastery that is ease, power that is effortless” (256), and herein lies the basis of the romantic vision of piloting. In the same vein is Twain’s omission of the work of loading and unloading cargo – he “glorifies the divine authority and leisure of the pilot, when in fact the pilot had to supervise loading” (Horwitz 257). So the pilot is not as free as Twain wants us to believe; any

job on a steamboat involved a certain amount of work and labour, to say nothing of the huge responsibility a pilot had. However, the general impression of the book is not altered: that “the life of a riverman is admirable and good” (Schmidt 101).

Before someone can show off in the pilot house, he has to go through a long and stre- nuous apprenticeship. This is the main focus of “Old Times on the Mississippi,” the first part of Life on the Mississippi : Clemens’ apprenticeship from his very first day on a steamboat, with the nervous Horace Bixby as his mentor, until he received his pilot’s license. ‘Learning the river’ was not quite what he had imagined before. It soon began to dawn on Clemens that he would have to know every town, bend, isle, sandbank etc. of the river; downstream and upstream, by day and by night – in short, the whole river should be in his head – and this daun- ted him enormously. For example, already in the in the beginning of his training period,

Twain was woken up in the middle of the night to perform a night watch. A minute after waking up, in a hurry,

I was climbing the pilot-house steps with some of my clothes on and the rest in my arms. Mr. Bixby was close behind, commenting. Here was something fresh – this thing of getting up in the middle of the night to go to work. It was a detail in piloting that had never occurred to me at all. I knew that boats ran all night, but somehow I had never happened to reflect that somebody had to get up out of a warm bed to run them. I began to fear that piloting was not quite so romantic as I had imagined it was; there was something very real and worklike about this new phase of it. (LOM 28) By and by, when the cub pilot had “mastered the language of this water, […] he had made a valuable acquisition.” But he had lost something as well, “something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river!” (LOM 44-45). The pilot loses the ability to take pleasure in the beautiful landscape, something the passenger can still do. There is a difference in the way the pilot and the passenger look at the river. The result of being a pilot has as a consequence the “destruction of the romantic landscape” (Schmidt 108). A beautiful, overhanging tree, for example, is an idyllic picture for the tourist on the boat, but for the pilot it is an important landmark. Seeing for the first time a romantic Mississippi River sunset, as a cub pilot, Clemens “stood like one bewitch- ed,” but as a pilot he “began to cease from noting the glories and the charms which the moon

and the sun and the twilight wrought upon the river’s face” (LOM 45), and one particular hue of sunlight could be a sign that there would be wind the next day.

So, apparently, there are two ways of looking at the river and the landscape: from the point of view of the passenger, or the pilot. Both Robert Jackson and Leo Marx have touched upon this dichotomy. Leo Marx calls the first one the pastoral view, which is the view of a steamboat passenger who enjoys the charming scenery and the river. “The passengers are strangers to the river,” he argues, because “[t]hey lack the intimate knowledge of its physical character a pilot must possess” (Marx 133). The second one is the industrial view, which is

“likened to that of a veteran steamboat pilot whose gaze is no longer free to indulge in such a sentimental, superficial image of nature, but who must constantly interpret the landscape warily and see it explicitly in terms of dangers to be avoided” (Jackson 50). A pilot knows the dangers and can read the river’s signs. The shift from passenger to pilot could be compared to a shift from an idealization of nature, the landscape and the river – like the idyllic frontier society – to a romanticization of man’s labour, and in particular the profession of a steamboat pilot, as a king of the river, subduing nature as it were.

Twain tried to search for a balance between the two ‘views’ in Life on the Mississippi . In

“Old Times,” he represents the industrial view as a pilot-to-be, whereas in the second part of the book, he returns to the river and he tries to remain at the other side of the fence, as a tourist. According to Jackson, however, Twain “never found an adequate authorial perspective, a single voice that could respond to the challenge of expressing the contradictions of the landscape” (51). Burde confirms Twain’s uncertainty regarding his position: “Neither on his trip nor during the writing of the book was Clemens confident about who he was. Was he passenger or pilot, cub or master, funny man or writer? He plainly was not sure” (Burde 888).

In Life on the Mississippi , one can hardly note any passages about slavery. Not in the second part, but this is plausible, since it is situated and written twenty years after the Civil

War, and slavery was abolished then. But even in the first part, “Old Times,” no specific references are made to slavery or the situation of the slaves. The closest is maybe the mere reference to a plantation along the river, but that is it. Surely he must have been aware of the

problem? It seems as if Twain wanted to hush up the issue of slavery. Or was it simply not important in his celebratory discourse of progress and the romantic steamboating era? Slavery was a discomforting subject that he avoided, in order not to disturb the Anglo-Saxon notions of the West and the frontier-like society he nostalgically seemed to long for. However, I do not want to argue that Mark Twain had no interest in or opinion about the issue – it just seems strange to me to omit the ‘hot potato’ of the nineteenth century in such a work. Having said that, the slavery question is indeed a major theme in the next Twain novel I am going to discuss. In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , written in the same period, slavery will be dealt with extensively. In fact, not so much slavery itself, but its consequences are felt throughout the novel: the escape of Jim, a slave; the failing attempt of Huck and Jim on the raft to reach a free state and set Jim free; the two adventurers’ struggle for survival… But these aspects will be more appropriate in the second chapter, dealing with the African-American narrative and the

‘Jim part’ of Huckleberry Finn .

1.3.2 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Regarded as Twain’s major work and sometimes even called “ the great American novel” (Ras- mussen 216), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) can be considered the Bildungsroman of a young boy, Huck Finn, who escapes together with Jim, a black slave, to release him from slavery. On a wooden raft, the two friends float down the Mississippi River for more than a thousand miles during one year. Aided by his friend Tom Sawyer, Huck first escapes from his guardians, Widow Douglas and her sister Miss Watson, who tried to “sivilize” him (HF 194) 5.

Later on he runs away a second time, now from his father, a tyrannical drunk who held him captive. Then he stumbles upon his friend Jim, Miss Watson’s slave, who ran away to avoid being sold down river. Huck and Jim both want to be free, they want to be alone on the river on a raft, far away from society and civilization. As Duncan and Goddard have pointed out,

5 As one can observe from the spelling of “to sivilize,” one of the striking features of the novel is that Twain, for the first time in American literary history, made use of a locally coloured vernacular to tell the story of an unedu- cated boy (Rasmussen 216).

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is primarily “filled with the tension between nature and civilization” (193). This motif will be elaborated upon subsequently.

On the river, Huck and Jim encounter a whole series of adventures, and misadven- tures, too, such as their endurance of a self-declared king and duke, two swindlers who com- mandeer the raft and ‘terrorize’ them. In the end, they even sell Jim as a slave in a bar, and the last section of the novel deals with Huck and Tom Sawyer trying to set Jim free. According to

Rasmussen, the central chapters (12-30), situated on the river, constitute “the entire story of the journey” (217), and they are “[t]he novel’s greatest strengths” (216). An interesting link between this novel and Life on the Mississippi can be laid: Huckleberry Finn , according to

Robert Jackson, was clearly intended to resemble Twain’s return to the Mississippi in 1882 and his steamboat tour as a passenger. He argues that “Huck’s travels […] reconstruct the central portion of Twain’s trip with a consistency easily fathomed in the natural progression of the river’s southward flow” (58). This time, Twain would be neither pilot nor passenger: he now ‘travels’ the river as an author. Jackson further remarks that Huckleberry Finn is not an anti-slavery novel, since Huck and Jim could have easily fled into Illinois towards Canada; and it is neither a “dystopian critique of society” (58), because Huck does not go west to the territory until the very end of the story.

Rather, Huckleberry Finn is situated in between the two large narratives I am writing about. The ‘Huck part’ of the novel fits in the Anglo-Saxon narrative: it covers such themes as praise for nature and a rather uncivilized frontier society, freedom, and individuality. But through the ‘Jim part,’ it also hints at slavery. However, both Huck and Jim have the same purpose: they want to run away. The former wants to escape from society, the latter simply longs to be free, since he is a slave. By creating this interracial setting, in which both the runaways are friends and respect each other, Twain’s book has been controversial ever since its publication.

In this subchapter I will explore three main themes that appear in the Huck narrative concerning the Anglo-Saxon narrative. These aspects are not unrelated, they form in fact a coherent topical field. The first one is the ‘nature versus civilization’ narrative: Huck and Jim

resist social standards and escape towards freedom and nature. The second theme might be considered as a part of the first, namely the images of the island and the raft as a paradise, with a link to the Edenic tradition. The last aspect, which in the novel as well appears at the very end, concerns Huck who wants to leave his familiar society and explore the west. It will be rather difficult to talk about one theme without referring to the others, but perhaps this is best for clarity’s sake.

In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , there is a constant transition from civilization to nature and vice versa. There is no linear progression from the one to the other. The story starts in the fictional town of St. Petersburg, MO and when Huck and Jim travel on the raft, they are alone in nature; but they flirt with society every time they go ashore and enter some town. Widow Douglas is Huck’s guardian, because the boy’s father, called Pap in the novel, is a drunkard who cannot raise his son. Miss Watson, Douglas’ sister, has the black Jim as a slave, and the two women took to heart the task of civilizing Huck, the young rascal. But what is civilization? Why should the Western, Anglo-Saxon standards of living be the right ones?

The Native Americans were perfectly happy with their way of life, until the European settlers came to tell them what to do and how to live. Is this civilization? For Huck, it is not. He pre- fers an adventurous way of life, like the pioneers of yore, who lived along the frontier line, amid the trees and animals. Widow Douglas and Miss Watson represent the civilized society, while Huck stands for nature. And Pap, perhaps, is an intermediate character, since he still lives in a house, but he lives a rudimentary life in the woods, and he does not join in any social activities – except for when he needs to refill his alcohol supply.

At Douglas’s, Huck has to wear tidy clothes, he has to pray and go to church, eat meals at regular times; and he has to go to school as well. This kind of life is nothing for the boy, so he runs away to join Tom Sawyer’s wannabe robbers’ gang – actually they never rob or kill anyone; then Huck returns home. After a while, his father comes back, who manages to obtain the guardianship of his son and the $6,000 pirate treasure that Tom and Huck found in The

Adventures of Tom Sawyer . He takes his son away and they continue living in the forest, like frontier pioneers. Huck admits that, even though he is often locked up in the hut when his

father is away, he “mostly enjoys this life. He can cuss, smoke and fish, and he does not have to go to school” (Rasmussen 218). But as his father becomes more abusive, he plans his escape.

With a canoe, he begins his journey downriver, until he lands and stays some days at Jackson’s

Island. When the rescue boat that is looking for him returns home without finding him, he is altogether relieved: “I knowed I was all right now” (HF 236), he says to himself. Now, his journey can take a real start. I will treat Jackson’s Island as an idyllic image of paradise in one of the following paragraphs.

Jim as well is a slave of society, literally, and he is tired of it. He also dreams of leaving the civilized world. He runs off after he overheard Miss Watson’s plans to sell him down the river to New Orleans – traditionally considered as the worst kind of slavery. On Jackson’s

Island, Huck and Jim meet each other and they plan to paddle down the Mississippi together, until they will reach Cairo in Illinois, a free state (Missouri was a slave state). However, due to the fog, they miss the crossing and they pass the town unwittingly. This is the point where the story turns, especially for Jim, and they have to change their plans now that they are penetra- ting deeper into the slavery South.

The Mississippi River has connections both with nature and civilization. This division is similar to the passenger versus the pilot’s point of view of looking at the river, which I described in the previous section regarding Life on the Mississippi . The river in se is a part of nature, of the landscape, where one can enjoy oneself. But on the other hand, the river is also a source or bringer of civilization: functioning as a major waterway, it generates commerce, steamboats, business along the wharfs, economic successes etc. This work ethos can be a beautiful ideal, but the celebration of work and man is only one side of the picture. The other side of the coin is less appealing: the slavery issue is the other extreme of this work ethos, in which labour prevails over concerns for humanity and human rights. In this regard, the

Mississippi River is an evil force for the slaves; they have to work on the plantations along the river or they are sold on Mississippi riverboats. In Huckleberry Finn , on the contrary, the river has another connotation. It signifies a way out: travelling down the river on a raft, Huck and

Jim find their long-awaited freedom and individuality – at least, until they get the unwanted company of the king and the duke, who decide what happens on the raft.

Not only does Huck not want to be civilized; he also wants to remain a child, he does not want to grow up. The novel is a eulogy to innocence and boyhood, untouched by society and religion. This is how Bernard De Voto summarizes this feeling for The Adventures of Tom

Sawyer , but in my opinion it also holds for Huckleberry Finn :

[Tom Sawyer ] is a hymn: to boyhood, to the fantasies of boyhood, to the richness and security of the child’s world, to a phase of American society now vanished altogether, to the loveliness of woods and prairies that were the Great Valley, to the river, to many other things in which millions of readers have recognized themselves and their inheri- tance. It is wrought out of beauty and nostalgia. (32-33) By praising life in primitive frontier conditions, it seems as if Twain was looking for something lost. The novel was written after the Civil War, but the setting of the story takes place around 1840. America was a different place after 1865; something had changed, the mentality was reshaped. Twain describes the vanishing way of life, the agrarian ideal of living in harmony with nature. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, as the frontier disappeared and the land began to be filled up gradually, this particular way of life was diminishing. The heroic narrative of the Old West was waning, and around the turn of the century the ‘Old West’ was out of the question. In the modern, twentieth-century society, people have to escape the busy life in the city if they want to find some rest in nature, and that is what Huck and Jim want to achieve, even in antebellum America.

The romantic ideals of escapism, individual freedom and liberty – in short, the “promise of individual opportunity” (Hine 11) – are making place for more realist ideals in later literature. Huckleberry Finn has many realistic characteristics, but it is also pervaded by the romantic elements I mentioned above. This is somewhat strange, because Twain was an ardent critic of Sir Walter Scott, whose ‘disease’ of romanticizing medieval chivalry – a “faux medie- valism” – and its consequences have resulted in the killing of Southern writing, thinking and imagining (Schmitz 86). One result, for example, is the emergence in the South of unwarran- ted ‘imitation castles’ which copy a chivalric style, merely on the surface. They imply no real

beauty, substance or value (Horwitz 263). In Life on the Mississippi , Twain devotes two entire chapters (“40. Castles and Culture” and “46. Enchantments and Enchanters”) to the “debilita- ting influence” (LOM 185) of Scott’s works on Southern buildings and culture. Ironically, while Twain heavily criticizes Scott, in the same book he also “subtly romanticizes river life by overlooking its violence and vice” (Rasmussen 424).

Moon River – Johnny Mercer The idyllic image of the Twain’s nineteenth-century South, as depicted in Huckleberry Finn but also in Life on the Mississippi , is beautifully reflected in the 1961 song “Moon River” composed by Hen- ry Mancini with lyrics by Johnny Mercer. It was first sung by Audrey Hepburn in the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s in the same year. Moon River, wider than a mile, There’s such a lot of world to see. I’m crossing you in style some day. We’re after the same rainbow’s end– Oh, dream maker, you heart breaker, waiting ‘round the bend, wherever you’re going I’m going your way. my huckleberry friend, Two drifters off to see the world. Moon River and me. The river described in this song is not the Mississippi River – the Moon River, called Back River before it was renamed after the song title, is an actual river in Savannah, Georgia; and ‘my huckleberry friend’ does not refer directly to Huckleberry Finn, but to a boyhood friend of Mercer’s, with whom he often went picking huckleberries. Nevertheless, this song creates the same atmosphere as in Twain’s novel. Gene Lees, who wrote a biography about Mercer, remarks that the ‘huckleberry friend’ line “was thrilling. It made you think of Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn’s trip down the Mississippi. It had such echoes of America. It was one of those remarkable lines that gives you a rush” (275). The lyrics can easily be applied to the Mississippi and to Huck and Jim on the raft. The Mississippi can make people’s dreams come true, but also break hearts. Huck and Jim are two drifters who want to see the world; they run away to follow the end of the rainbow – an impossible quest, just as the quest for Jim’s freedom is seemingly impossible. After every bend in the river, another one lies waiting ahead. But the general undertone of the song is one of praise. Stephen Hol- den argues that such songs are typical for the American South: “The South in American song has traditionally been a dreamland of sensual repose, a rural idyll of misty winding rivers and summer air, thick with the scent of honeysuckle and magnolia.” In “Moon River,” he continues, the dreamer identifies a beloved river of his childhood as a friend with whom he shares a lifelong wanderlust. […] [The song] is a grown-up’s dream of a return to childhood, to home, sweet home, innocence and the abundant lap of nature. More than a memory, it is also a prayer for a bucolic afterlife. (Holden 1)

I think this song is an appropriate introduction to the second theme I will discuss in

Huckleberry Finn : the island and the raft as images of a utopian paradise. Jackson’s Island is a

fictional island on the Mississippi River about three miles below St. Petersburg. The island already features in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer , and now Twain used the island again with only some slight differences. Jackson’s Island was allegedly modelled on a real island near

Hannibal, called Glasscock’s Island, but other nearby islands are possibilities as well. (Rasmus- sen 251). Jackson’s Island is temporarily a safe solution for Huck, since the villagers never go there. The island is described as an idyllic paradise, a locus amoenus , with beautiful plants and an abundance of fruit and animals available for food; and he can of course catch fish as well.

Huck feels “comfortable and satisfied” (HF 234). Huck’s ideal world view is being realised: he is alone in nature, in a pastoral setting, away from society.

After three days, he finds traces of a campfire and he is frightened. But when he discovers that Miss Watson’s slave is also on the island, Huck “was ever so glad to see Jim” (240), especially because now he is not alone anymore. This episode reminds me of Daniel Defoe’s

Robinson Crusoe (1719), the main difference being that Robinson ended up on an uninhabited island unwillingly after being shipwrecked. Robinson’s island is an exotic paradise, he has to survive and he feels alone; until he meets Friday, a black prisoner who managed to escape from native cannibals, who used the island to kill and eat their prisoners. They become friends and live together while trying to escape from the island. Huck and Jim already knew each other before, but they have a shared purpose. Jackson’s Island is now the scene where two male individuals share a life together. Twain’s vision of utopia seems to be a little wood in the middle of the powerful river, a haven of peace amid the wild stream of the river, where two guys are living a simple, easy-going life. There are no women involved.

Before Huck and Jim set out on the raft, they camp some more days on their island.

But they are superstitious, especially Jim knows much about folk culture and he sees various signs and their implications in nature and animals. For example, Huck had handled a snake- skin, and two days later Jim is bitten by a snake. These signs imply bad luck, Jim insists. Al- though the island is an idyllic place, they will not be able to stay there much longer. They feel that time has come to leave, but they are not in a hurry. It is only when Huck is in town that he learns that the townsfolk are hunting for Jim because they believed that he had killed Huck.

“They’re after us!” (HF 263), Huck cries to Jim, and they leave the island immediately. The island episode fits in the Edenic tradition: in a way, the island can be compared to the Garden of Eden. There is also a snake at play in Huckleberry Finn – not as a tempting force, but still, the reference is there. Just like Adam and Eve, Huck and Jim are expelled from their paradise for what they have done. Their escape is ‘forbidden’ by social standards, and now they are pu- nished for their deeds. However, in Twain’s story, a new ‘paradise’ is put forward: the raft.

The raft, then, is an island on its own, where race does not matter. Life on the raft is simple, stripped down to the essentials. Huck and Jim even travel without clothes: “[t]he raft on which [they] float naked frees Huck from the itchiness of new clothes and Jim from shackles” (Jehlen 99). Huck and Jim agree that “there warn’t no home like a raft, after all. […]

You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft” (HF 340-41). This is in fact the same romantic feeling as Twain’s description of a steamboat pilot: the apparent freedom of a pilot on top and in full command of his boat; this is how Huck feels on his raft. But here the comparison ends, because other aspects of steamboats, as I have explored in the chapter about Life on the Mississippi , are connected with civilization and commerce. Also the steamer that hits their raft and nearly causes their ruin, is an unwieldy “machine, [a] relentless, intrusive force crashing through the middle of the pastoral American Eden” (Jackson 63). In this case, the steamer has an “infernal and threatening significance,” whereas the raft is seen as a good element, in harmony with nature.

If the raft is a symbol for the freedom of an uncivilized life, two episodes can be seen as the image of the intruding force of civilization: the Grangerford episode, and the advent of the

King and the Duke on the raft. It seems as if civilization always has its way, that its presence in the novel is inevitable. The Grangerford episode takes place after a steamboat crashes into the raft and separates Huck and Jim. Huck is received in the house of the Grangerford family, and he learns about their feud with the Shepherdsons. The peace-loving Huck does not understand the concept of a feud, and as soon as he hears that Jim is hiding nearby, he runs away from the family to resume their journey on the raft, “enjoying two or three of the most idyllic

days of their journey” (Rasmussen 222). Life on the raft is pleasant, and even at night – they travel when it is dark in order not to be seen – they enjoy what the cosmos has to offer:

Sometimes we’d have that whole river all to ourselves for the longest time. […] It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened. (HF 343) However, the peaceful situation is interrupted when the King and the Duke show up. Just like family members in the Old South have hierarchical titles, such as general or colonel, these two guys have bestowed themselves a title of nobility and they claim an aristocratic descent, which is of course perfectly ridiculous. Jim quickly realises that the two are not who they claim to be, but he has learned that it is best to “let them have their own way,” as long as “it would keep peace in the family” (HF 350-51). They ‘terrorize’ Huck and Jim and decide where the raft is going to. For the rest of the journey on the river, the boy and the slave feel imprisoned on their own raft.

If we divide the novel into three main parts (first: Huck and Jim at home; second: their journey on the river; third: the Phelps farm), the third episode is the weakest of them all. The

King has sold Jim for $40, and Huck is resolved to set Jim free a second time. The slave is held captive on the Phelps farm. Tom Sawyer reappears again in the last part, and he has devised an elaborate and time-consuming escape plan in order to set Jim free in the right way, in style.

This makes the end of the story long-winded and rather dull. The plan eventually works fine, but they are discovered anyway, because Tom has a shot wound and a doctor reveals to the villagers where they are. Jim is enslaved again, for the third time now, but not for long: a message arrives that Miss Watson has died and set Jim free in her will. The three friends plan to explore the Indian Territory in the West, but Huck objects because he has no money. Huck then learns that his father has died – something Jim already knew when he saw the dead body in the house floating by, but he had kept it hidden for Huck. Now the $6,000 is at Huck’s disposal, which makes the prospect of heading towards the West more feasible.

The story ends very abruptly when Mark Twain (through the voice of Huck) tells the reader that “there ain’t nothing more to write about” (539). However, the last two sentences

are important and revealing: “But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before” (539). Huck wants to leave again to explore the West, because he does not want to be civilized once more. One wonders if Jim will eventually follow Huck; this is something which

Twain did not bother to work out. The novel has an open ending, and Philip Young noticed that this is visible in the title of the book: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn lacks an expected definite article ‘the,’ because Huck’s anticipations and further adventures are not yet completed; whereas in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer , the actions are a finished whole (Young 212).

The entire book is centred upon the general North-South movement, following the Mississip- pi River. But now, in the very end of the novel, this formerly stable plot element changes. The open end of the story leaves room for further adventures, which are centred upon the East-

West movement typically associated with the Anglo-Saxon narrative. I will elaborate and conclude this theme in subchapter 2.4., which also deals with Huckleberry Finn , but this time from the point of view of Jim’s story. For now, let us first look at the other important nineteenth-century movement, the African-American narrative.

2 The African-American Narrative

2.1 Introduction

The second large ‘movement’ or ‘narrative’ that I will treat is the African-American narrative.

This is the story of the black people from Africa who were imported into the Americas as early as the seventeenth century. African-Americans, as they are called, were mainly used as slaves to do the housekeeping, perform field work and other odd jobs for the white master and his family. In fact, they have long been the main labour force in America, particularly in the

South, where they have always been the oppressed race. They were seen as ‘the others,’ the

American people regarded those ‘poor critters’ as racial others, they did not feel any kinship with the slaves. Hence it was easier to justify slavery and not to bother with their civil and human rights.

Another justification of slavery was found in the Bible, in the story of the curse of Ham

(or Cham) 6, one of the three sons of Noah: “The curse of Ham is the assumed biblical justification for a curse of eternal slavery imposed on Black people, and Black people alone” (Gol- denberg 168). Ham’s son Canaan is cursed because Ham had ridiculed his father. He is subju- gated to his brothers, and Canaan and his descendants have to be submissive to the other peoples. Furthermore, there are connections between the name ‘Ham’ and the Hebrew words for

‘hot’ and ‘sunburnt,’ or simply ‘black,’ and therefore it is said that all blacks in Africa are descendants from Canaan (Goldenberg 151-52, Collyer 153). In this regard, enslavement of blacks was legitimised, because it was written in the Bible! Seeing that slavery was an esta- blished and more or less ‘accepted’ institution in the South, the African-American tragedy has always been less visible than other calamities. People were blind to the issue, and until the nineteenth century, no one raised any significant objections. This narrative is one of oppress- sion, pain, fear, loss, destruction, fragmentation, broken families… there are no words enough

6 Genesis 9:20-27.

to cover all the negative aspects of this tragedy, which has occurred in a young and ‘civilized’ nation.

The African-American narrative is in shrill contrast to the Anglo-Saxon narrative that

I already discussed. First, there is an unequal relation of dominance and power. The Ameri- cans 7 have first colonized the continent and chased away the Native Americans to their doom, and they also pushed the Mexicans south of the Rio Grande. In the same vein, they have considered the imported slaves as inferior to the white, Anglo-Saxon race. The slaves were regarded only in terms of economic value, but as human beings they were not taken seriously. The abolitionist movement, largely a Northern phenomenon or force to put the slavery South under pressure, scored successes, for example with the abolition of slave trade in 1808. Even though the number of black slaves increased rapidly, and the fear of slave revolts and runaway slaves occupied the slave holders; the Anglo-Saxon history is still the most dominant narrative of the two during most of the nineteenth century.

A second difference between the two narratives, and here the word ‘movement’ is quite appropriate, is the geographical aspect. The Anglo-Saxon movement is, as the tag ‘westward expansion’ already indicates, a primarily East-West development. The settlers started mainly in New England and the East Coast, so the best way to gather land as quickly as possible was to explore the western territory – especially because the English colonists were ‘surrounded’ both in the South by the Spanish conquistadores in Central America, and in the North by the

French settlers in Canada. The Mississippi River, as I already indicated, played an important role in this process: it was a mental and physical border which had to be crossed. The African-

American movement, on the other hand, vertically crosses the first one: it is mainly a North-

South movement, following the Mississippi River’s course. Slavery is a phenomenon associated with the (Deep) South, and a lot of plantations are efficiently located along the river’s

7 For the sake of convenience, I will use the terms “Americans” and “United States” to refer to the people and the country as we know it today, even though in the beginning the settlers were English/British, Dutch, Scandina- vian… and the country was not yet called the “United States.” I believe that the urge to colonize, expand and rule the continent was an ideal shared by all European settlers, regardless of how they were called. I will not make a distinction here between English/British settlers or independent Americans.

banks for several reasons. Slaves could easily be transported in steamboats up and down the river; and along with them, the crops and other goods – in fact, slaves were goods as well – were quickly shipped to the big harbours. Slaves were often cheaply sold from the moderate slavery state Kentucky to New Orleans markets in the Deep South, where slaves were treated much worse. Contrary to the Anglo-Saxon movement, which does not and cannot imply colonization from the West back to the East, the reverse movement from the South to the North is an important aspect here: the escape narrative. Slaves frequently ran away in an attempt to improve their lives in the Northern free states and then in Canada. As an exception to this, the

‘Jim part’ of Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will be discussed, since Jim is a runaway slave, who, instead of returning and trying his luck in the free state Illinois, flees southward along the river together with his friend Huck.

So, in the next subchapters, I will first briefly have a look at the ‘peculiar institution,’ its historical background with regard to the Mississippi River region, and the consequences for

America. Then, I will treat some themes connected to slavery and look at how they are incor- porated in some nineteenth-century literary works. The aspects of ‘enslavement versus freedom,’ ‘escaping to the free states,’ ‘the fear of being sold down river,’ ‘the fragmentation of families and the loss of family members and friends on plantations,’ etc. are the main issues which are of importance here, and I will give the Mississippi River a prominent place in their discussion. The works that I will discuss, include mainly Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s

Cabin , an 1852 antislavery novel, and The Narrative of William Wells Brown, A Fugitive Slave , his 1847 autobiographical slave narrative. I will finish with a subchapter about Huckleberry

Finn , in which I will treat Jim’s escape and his odd quest for freedom together with Huck. A third chapter, conclusively, will make the balance of the two nineteenth-century national narratives, before proceeding to the twentieth century.

2.2 Slavery 8

I will not provide the reader with an elaborate history of slavery in the United States, because I do not think this is relevant here. Rather, I will sketch out some aspects of slavery that are connected with the Mississippi and the Mississippi River Valley. Already early on, slaves were imported into America: the first slave ship from Africa arrived in the New World in 1619. In the mid-17 th century, the institution of slavery was legalized in several Southern states – the centre of slavery has always been in the Southern states. The slaves were set to work on crop plantations, which especially in the 1700s began to flourish. The plantation system originated in Brazil and Barbados, where the largest number of African slaves ended up. In the United

States, at first, most slaves were active in the Atlantic South. The main crops were initially tobacco, rice, indigo and sugar; cotton crops only began to emerge towards the end of the 18 th century. As the American civilization gradually spread westwards, the cotton agriculture moved along. The ‘Cotton Kingdom,’ as it was called, was firmly based in the lower Mississip- pi Valley and the Gulf Plains. Producing cotton was very labour-intensive. After the invention of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin in 1793, which removed the seeds from the cotton more easily, the production and export of cotton boosted, the market price decreased, and rapidly the plantations spread out across the whole South. The economic power of the region was immense: in the first half of the nineteenth century, it was the world’s main supplier – three-fourths of the world’s cotton came from America. To meet the demands of the customers, a huge amount of slaves was needed to work on the plantations. According to the southern plantation owners, it was impossible to abolish the system, because it would ruin their business. However, the Nor- thern free states put the South under pressure: the abolition movement gradually gained importance, especially between 1810 and 1860, and the Civil War resulted in the abolition of slavery in the United States.

The Mississippi River plays an important role in the context of slavery. Agriculture and the plantation system was possible due to the fertile soils along the river banks and the

8 Everett 96-120, Norton 170, Turner 139-40, 174, 194, 198, 201.

mild southern climate. Water, used for irrigating the lands, was easily accessible, and the river itself was a perfect transportation route. Frederick Jackson Turner explains that “[w]hen Ful- ton’s steamboat was applied in 1811 to the Western Waters, it became possible to develop agriculture and to get the Western crops rapidly and cheaply to a market” (171). Jim Fraiser, in turn, aptly describes the Mississippi Delta as the region where “cotton is king and the river is queen” (61). Slaves were also transported in riverboats and sold in the big commercial cities along the river, such as St. Louis, Memphis, Natchez, Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Large plantations were prepared for this: they had an own landing platform and a small wharf where a steamboat could moor, and goods could be shipped directly from the plantation to other cities, without needing extra transport. The Ohio River, in turn, is the political and symbolic boundary between the slavery South and the free North; it will return in the next subchapter, in connection with Uncle Tom’s Cabin , in which Eliza crosses the frozen Ohio to escape from slavery.

So, the river has been important for slavery, and therefore it was not cherished by the slaves. The Mississippi often features in traditional black folk songs. Music, together with religion, was important for the slaves: it was something to hold on to when all other hopes had failed. A pertinent example is the 1927 song “Ol’ Man River,” composed by Jerome Kern with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. The song was made famous by Paul Robeson in 1936, but here are the lyrics of the original version:

Dere’s an ol’ man called de Mississippi (3) You an’ me, we sweat an’ strain Dat’s de ol’ man dat I’d like to be Body all achin’ an’ wracked wid pain, What does he care if de world’s got troubles Tote dat barge! Lif' dat bale! What does he care if de land ain’t free Git a little drunk an’ you lands in jail

(1) Ol’ man river, dat ol’ man river (4) Ah gits weary an’ sick of tryin’ He mus’ know sumpin’, but don’t say nuthin’ Ah’m tired of livin’ an’ skeered of dyin’ He jes’ keeps rollin’ But ol’ man river He keeps on rollin’ along He jes’ keeps rollin’ along

(2) He don’ plant taters, he don’t plant cotton Niggers all work on de Mississippi An’ dem dat plants’ em is soon forgotten Niggers all work while de white folks play But ol’man river Pullin’ dose boats from de dawn to sunset He jes’ keeps rollin’ along Gittin’ no rest till de judgement day

Don’t look up an’ don’t look down [refrain 1 (Ol’ man river)] You don’ dar’st make de white boss frown Long, low river forever keeps rollin’ Bend your knees an’ bow your head An’ pull dat rope until you’re dead [refrain 2 (He don’ plant taters)]

Let me go ‘way from the Mississippi Long low river keeps singin’ dis song Let me go ‘way from de white man boss refrain 3 Show me dat stream called de river Jordan [ (You an’ me)] Dat’s de ol’ stream dat I long to cross [refrain 4 (Ah gits weary)]

In this beautiful song, the Mississippi River is portrayed as a mighty, endless stream that does not care for the slaves and their hardships: “What does he care if the world’s got troubles, if de land ain’t free?” The river knows about the slaves’ plight, but they are soon forgotten, they are unimportant – the river just keeps rolling along. The “niggers” work hard on the Mississippi

“while the white folks play,” and they are “tired of living and scared of dying,” a reasonable fear, as it often turns out. The beautiful Mississippi River acquires a negative connotation among the slave populations; the slaves sing that they want to “go ‘way from the Mississippi” and “de white man boss.” While the Mississippi is a symbol for slavery in America, the Jordan river between Israel and Jordan symbolises freedom. In the Book of Exodus, the second book of the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament, the Israelites fled from bondage in Egypt into the

Promised Land, where the Jordan river flows in peace and harmony and the Jewish people were safe.

Let us now return to slavery in the United States. The issue is related to westward expansion. Before the Mississippi River was crossed, there was a balance between free states in the North and slave states in the South. The 1787 Northwest Ordinance stipulated that the states Northwest of the Ohio River should remain free states. The real problem arose when the

Mississippi was crossed and the Western territory came into focus. What to do with the new states west of the river? Should they become slave or free states? Should the evil extend and contaminate the whole country? At first, F.J. Turner argued, “[t]he historical obstacle of the

Ordinance […] gave an advantage to the anti-slavery settlers northwest of the Ohio, but when the Mississippi was crossed, and the rival streams of settlement mingled in the area of the

Louisiana Purchase, the struggle followed” (140). Moreover, he cleverly analysed the contras-

ting situation in the North and the South on the basis of their future leaders in the Civil War.

Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis both originated from Kentucky, a rather central state at the time. But Lincoln headed North, to Indiana and Illinois, whereas Davis turned to Louisi- ana and Mississippi. This dispersion stands as a symbol for the separation of America as a whole:

Starting from the same locality, each represented the divergent flow of streams of set - tlement into contrasted environments. The results of these antagonistic streams of mi - gration to the West was a struggle between the Lake and Prairie plainsmen, on the one side, and the Gulf plainsmen, on the other, for the possession of the Mississippi Valley. It was the crucial part of the struggle between the Northern and Southern sections of the nation. (Turner 139) The cotton kingdom, firmly based on slavery, spread into the Southwest “with a radical pro- gram of slavery expansion mapped out by bold and aggressive leaders” (Turner 174). The

South also tried to establish commercial relations with the Ohio Valley in the North, in order to establish political and commercial relations – this failed, however. The Northern states were more focused on industrial labour, where no slaves but only wage labourers were needed. In fact, it was particularly the slavery system that became the main issue of the Civil War – whether to expand or to abolish this cruel institution. Abraham Lincoln understood that this stale- mate could not continue forever: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.” (qtd. in Turner 142). The

Midwest turned in favour of the North, and so it happened that the South gradually turned its back to the rest of the country. In 1861, the Southern states decided to secede from the Union.

The slavery states formed the Confederacy, with Jefferson Davis as president, and thus the

American Civil War began.

I will of course not discuss the whole history of the Civil War – this has no relevance here. But let me just briefly mention that the Mississippi River took no unimportant position on the battlefield of the war: “the Lower Mississippi, the Ohio, and its two largest tributaries – the Cumberland and the Tennessee – being still the most important lines of communication west of the Appalachian Mountains, determined largely the movements of armies” (“Missis- sippi River” (1911)). The decisive moment on the river occurred when the city of Vicksburg

fell in Unionist hands on July 4, 1863. General Sherman, a General of the Union Army, fathomed the importance of the Mississippi during the war: “Whatever power holds that river can govern this continent” (qtd. in Turner 201). Those who controlled the river would possibly win the war, and in 1863, Lincoln was glad to announce that “[t]he Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea” (qtd. in Turner 142). The outcome of the war eventually resulted in three Amendments to the Constitution: the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) officially abolished slavery; the Fourteenth (1868) was intended to secure civil rights of former slaves; and the Fifteenth (1870) banned racial restrictions on voting. Whether or not and to what extent these measures had any effect on the lives of the freed slaves, after the war and into the twentieth century, I will treat in the second part of my thesis. But first, in the next subchapter,

I will look at some of the larger themes connected with slavery and freedom, mostly seen from the point of view of the slaves.

2.3 Captivity versus Liberty: the Slaves’ Plight Exemplified in American Literature

Life in the United States was determined by two conditions: liberty or captivity. The first Afri- can blacks were forced into slavery, and from that point of time onwards, the slaves’ progeny was born into slavery. Children born from slave parents were stigmatised for the rest of their lives. This human injustice was imposed solely by the US law. “All men are created equal,” the

Declaration of Independence states, but what does it matter if slaves are not seen as people?

For the slaves, their life must be all the more hard because they are confronted with the alter- native every day: the white man and his family. They live in freedom, they can enjoy life and they often lead successful lives at the expense of the slaves. The oppressed African-Americans long for freedom and justice; but this desire is nearly impossible. The slaves lead uncertain lives. Every day, they risk to die, or to get sold to another slave owner. They cannot marry by law – they have no rights at all – but the women can be raped by the white master without prosecution. The result is miscegenation, the mixing of two races, and this was the easiest and cheapest way for the slaveholder to increase his ‘livestock.’

These are merely a list of sad, dry facts. One unacquainted with the slavery history of the South will perhaps not bother too much about them. The facts must be concretized, compared to our own lives, if they are to have some effect. This is what Harriet Beecher Stowe

(1811-1896) has successfully achieved in her 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This influential anti-slavery novel came as a bombshell – in a manner of speaking – and sharpened the already tense relations between the North and the South of the United States, which would eventually lead to the Civil War. The book has been praised, criticized and maligned in numerous re- views, books, essays and academic articles: some critics have discarded it as a maudlin and racialist slave narrative, while others have insisted on the novel’s effective contribution to the abolitionist principles. However, Stowe’s most famous novel did not come out of the blue, nor was it her first anti-slavery attempt. As early as 1833 (aged twenty-two), she wrote essays and stories for the Semi-Colon Club that were published in the Western Monthly Magazine

(Stowe, Charles ch. III). Some events in Stowe’s life, which stirred her to the abolitionist side, also recurred in Uncle Tom’s Cabin : she helped to escape a runaway girl (inspiration for Eliza’s escape); and the loss of her baby Charley, who died from cholera, is comparable to the distress of a slave mother whose child is removed and sold.

Mrs. Stowe, together with many northerners, was enraged by the slavery issue and especially the cruel consequences of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 (see below). Her sister-in- law, Mrs. Edward Beecher, encouraged her to “write something that will make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is” (Rosenthal 9). So she did, in February 1851, when she went to church and had a vision of Uncle Tom’s death, after which “[s]he immediately composed the climax of her tale” and read it to her children (Carabine vii). After that,

Mrs. Stowe began to write the first series of sketches that were to be published as Uncle Tom’s

Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly in the free-soil periodical the National Era . In the book, the narrator tells the melodramatic tale of several slaves and their families on three plantations in the South, and the reader is familiarized with their emotions, opinions and points of view.

Stowe, as a deeply religious woman, also included a lot of positive Christian and family values, exemplified with numerous references to biblical passages. Even though the novel might seem

too sentimental, melodramatic or religious-inspired, the often heartrending scenes arouse sincere pity in the readers.

One of the greatest fears among the slaves was the fear of being ‘sold down river,’ down along the Mississippi River to Louisiana or somewhere else in the South. Not only was this hurtful for families, which were broken up when a husband, wife, son or daughter was sold separately. Slaves were also afraid of going down to the South, especially those in the more northern slave states such as Kentucky or Missouri. The ol’ Kentucky plantation was considered as a place where slavery was reasonably ‘mild,’ in comparison to the cruel plantations in Louisiana, for example. Harriet Beecher Stowe explains that

selling to the South is set before the negro from childhood as the last severity of punishment. The threat that terrifies more than whipping or torture of any kind is the threat of being sent down river. We have […] seen the unaffected horror with which they will sit in their gossiping hours, and tell frightful stories of that ‘down river’, which to them is “That undiscovered country, from whose bourne / No traveller returns” 9. (Stowe 89-90) Note, by the way, that ‘to sell someone down the river’ is a present-day idiom in English which means ‘to double-cross’ or ‘to betray’ someone: the origins of this idiom are plain. In Uncle

Tom’s Cabin , the main character Tom undergoes a similar fate. At first, he works on Arthur

Shelby’s farm in Kentucky. Mr Shelby treats his slaves quite well, and the slaves are grateful for that. But still, he has to sell two of his slaves because he has debts. Shelby wants to sell Uncle

Tom, who has a wife and children, and Harry, the little son of Eliza, Mrs Shelby’s maid. This is a very painful decision. Tom’s family is torn apart, but Tom, a devote Christian and loyal to his master, does not resist in any way by running away. Through the whole novel, Tom accepts everything with forbearance – even when he is beaten to death in the end of the novel, he does not resist. He simply submits to God’s decisions.

But I was talking about Tom’s path of life in the novel. From Shelby’s farm in Ken- tucky, Tom is sold to Augustine St. Clare, a wealthy New Orleans slaveholder. However, after a long time, St. Clare’s opinions about slavery and blacks change, and he resolves to free Tom.

9 These lines appear in Hamlet’s soliloquy and metaphorically stand for ‘death’ (Hamlet III.1, lines 79-80).

Tragically, he dies before he has actually signed the papers, and his wife sells Tom to his third and final master, Simon Legree, a very cruel plantation owner. Legree has not the least bit of respect for his slaves; and if one or the other dies, he just buys new ones. For the good-natured

Uncle Tom, his journey southward along the Mississippi River into the heart of slavery is a real agony. He is transported on a Mississippi riverboat, which is used to transport passengers but also a deck full of slaves. In his Narrative , William W. Brown had the same experience: “A drove of slaves on a southern steamboat, bound for the cotton or sugar regions, is an occur- rence so common, that no one, not even the passengers, appear to notice it, though they clank their chains at every step” (11). Also Uncle Tom meets other people who are in the same plight: a mother without a son, a father without his family… The beautiful Mississippi River,

Stowe argues, instead of being a powerful symbol for America’s commerce and entrepreneur- ship, is now contaminated by the slavery issue. Images of ‘herds’ of chained slaves on boats, together with the cotton they unwillingly picked, tarnish the river’s reputation.

The Mississippi! How, as by an enchanted wand, have its scenes been changed, […] as a river of mighty, unbroken solitudes, rolling amid undreamed wonders of vegetable and animal existence. But as in an hour, this river of dreams and wild romance has emerged to a reality scarcely less visionary and splendid. […] Those turbid waters, hur-rying, foaming, tearing along, an apt resemblance of that headlong tide of business which is poured along its wave by a race more vehement and energetic than any the old world ever saw. Ah! would that they did not also bear along a more fearful freight, – the tears of the oppressed, the sighs of the helpless, the bitter prayers of poor, ignorant hearts to an unknown God – unknown, unseen and silent, but who will yet “come out of his place to save all the poor of the earth!” 10 (Stowe 133) It is clear that not every slave reasoned like Uncle Tom. Even though many of them leaned on religion and community feeling to pull through, not every slave would submit to

‘God’s will’ so easily. The possibility of being sold down river, together with the general per- nicious conditions of life in captivity, pushed a lot of slaves to their last resort: running away.

For these people, an uncertain future was still a better prospect than their current condition.

And, when at last a slave made this far-reaching decision, where did they go? Not to the South,

10 Adapted from Isaiah 26:21.

obviously, because, as you can read on the previous page, slaves knew about the cruel conditions in the South. They escaped northwards, to the free states, and they eventually tried to reach Canada. The Mississippi River served as their guideline. Before 1850, a slave was rela- tively ‘safe’ in the northern free states, but the second Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 worked to the advantage of the slaveholders. It allowed them, on a legal basis, to let slave catchers inter- cept and bring back escaped slaves on their way to Canada – even in the northern free states.

People who supported the runaways set up an illegal network of safe houses called the Under- ground Railroad. Slaves could flee from one house to another following specific routes, and they received food and shelter from the families. A good example in Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the

Quaker settlement (see chapter XIII), a friendly family where Eliza is well taken care of. The

Quakers, or the Religious Society of Friends, are a Christian sect that was prominent in the

American abolitionist cause. However, the punishment for those who aided was severe: one could receive a 1000-dollar fine and six months prison if he or she was discovered (Norton

242-43, Rosenthal 9).

In Uncle Tom’s Cabin , Eliza is the heroic runaway slave. She lived on the same Ken- tucky plantation where Uncle Tom first worked. She had overheard that Mr Shelby planned to sell Uncle Tom and Harry, her son, so she decided to escape together with her boy. (This plot pattern is similar to Jim’s escape in Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn : Jim also catches word that Miss Watson intends to sell her slave Jim. Upon hearing this, he runs off by night.

Contrary to Eliza in Uncle Tom’s Cabin , Jim has no escape plan in mind, and heads South along the Mississippi River, where he accidentally stumbles upon Huck Finn.) Eliza is a very courageous woman, she is one of the heroines of the novel. Not only was she a young woman who had to take care of herself; her young son needed even more attention. Her flight is a physical ordeal, but her love for Harry and her fear makes her stronger than ever: “[s]he wondered within herself at the strength that seemed to be come upon her; for she felt the weight of her boy as if it had been a feather, and every flutter of fear seemed to increase the supernatural power that bore her on” (Stowe 47).

Eliza’s escape plan is to cross the Ohio, and from thence through Ohio and across Lake

Erie into Canada. Just like the Mississippi is the symbolic river between the East and the West, the Ohio River is the border between the slavery South and the free North. Stowe as well has made a comparison between this river and the Jordan as a symbol of freedom: “[Eliza’s] first glance was at the river, which lay like Jordan between her and the Canaan of liberty on the other side” (49). The river was frozen over, so no ferry could take her to the other side; but it was already thawing and the surface was now full of creaking ice floes. When she sees her pursuers arrive at the house where she was hidden, Eliza grabs her child, runs out of the house and heads for the river. Without hesitation, she crosses the river, jumping from one floating cake of ice to the other, risking her life and that of her child: “With wild cries and desperate energy she leaped to another and still another cake; stumbling – leaping – slipping – springing upwards again! Her shoes are gone – her stockings cut from her feet while blood marked every step; but she saw nothing, felt nothing, till dimly, as in a dream, she saw the Ohio side, and a man helping her up the bank” (57). She is safe now, after her daring deed of “madness and despair” (57), and she continues her flight of freedom.

Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a strong complaint against slavery; but one point of criticism of her work was that she did not know any slaves personally and that she was biased because she lived in New England. Therefore, another strong literary genre in the abolitionist movement was of importance: the slave narrative. The ‘plantation myth,’ upheld by Southern slave holders and writers, was contradicted by some freed or escaped slaves themselves, who wrote – or dictated to an abolitionist – about “what it was like to live in bondage” (“Slave Nar- ratives”). The idyllic idealization of plantation life, with the white paternalistic owner taking care of his slaves, the happiness of the Negroes who dance and sing for their master and his family, the beautiful weather and nature… All these elements are indisputably countered in such stories. They often appeared in the abolitionist press, such as The Liberator , The North

Star or the National Era – but some stories were published as a novel as well. Slave accounts were mostly written in the antebellum nineteenth century. Even though some elements in slave stories may be exaggerated, “the narratives of ex-slaves provided the world with the clo-

sest look at the lives of enslaved African American men, women and children. They were the abolitionist movement’s voice of reality” (“Slave Narratives”). Similarly, Charles Nichols notes that “they [the slaves] portrayed the slaveholding South with considerable realism and close adherence to fact,” and that “they are invaluable for the light they throw on the plantation system and the men who made and sustained it” (203). One does not have to read dozens of slave narratives to understand the bitter truth of everything that happened in the slavery era.

The difference with other (abolitionist) writings is that slave narratives are told from the point of view of the slave. Readers could more easily empathise with the narrator and take pity on him (or her).

One of the most famous slave narratives is the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Doug- lass, an American Slave (1845). It is a memoir written by himself and an important step in the abolitionist movement. Also William Wells Brown wrote his memoir himself; its simple but plain title being The Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave (1847). Brown’s life in slavery bears resemblances to Uncle Tom’s course of life: Brown is sold or hired out several times, he knows various masters (both ‘friendly’ and abusive ones), his mother, brother and sisters were sold… Fortunately, Brown’s story knew a better outcome. Uncle Tom was beaten to death, but Brown could escape together with his mother. From St. Louis, MO they crossed the Mississippi River towards Illinois – “to leave the land of slavery, in search of a land of liberty” (29). And while Brown and his mother pursued their quest for freedom, following the

North Star heading towards Canada, they thought about John Pierpont’s words from his abolitionist poem “The Fugitive Slave’s Apostrophe to the North Star”: “Star of the North! /

Thy light, that no poor slave deceiveth, / Shall set me free” (qtd. in Brown 30).

2.4 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

After my discussion about the ‘Huck narrative’ in Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , it is now time to have a look at Jim’s story. In the previous part concerning the Anglo-Saxon narrative I have already briefly mentioned some details and aspects, which I will now elaborate from the point of view of Jim and the slavery issue. Huckleberry Finn is a strange novel to

classify. It is not an abolitionist or anti-slavery novel, nor is it a kind of slave narrative. It does not mention the sad life of slaves on a plantation and it does not directly condemn slavery an sich . It is rather a mix of an adventure novel, a picaresque novel, a Bildungsroman and a travelogue. Even though the Anglo-Saxon themes discussed in the previous part are most influential in the book, the general ‘movement’ of the story is not the East-West movement. In

Huck Finn , the African-American narrative and Jim’s thrust along the Mississippi River are of primary interest. But their escape is a movement turned around: Jim ironically escapes because he does not want to be sold down river, but eventually he heads South. Why does Jim not flee towards the North? Any slave knows that the South is a no go for them, and yet, Jim starts his escape route in that direction, seemingly without thinking straight. After they miss the crossing at the town of Cairo, IL due to the foggy weather, the story switches definitively.

Before, it was mainly focused on Huck’s escape from civilization, with Jim following him as a friend. But now, when they head for the south, the story focuses on Jim and how they will continue their journey.

Jim is afraid to proceed and possibly getting discovered. But still then, they could simply go on shore and find freedom in Illinois. However, they do not; they choose to carry on with their adventures on the raft. In fact, they even could have crossed the river from Missouri to Illinois immediately in the beginning of the story, but they did not do this either. It is as if they cannot choose what to do: they cannot decide what is the best escape route. Or are they making a strange compromise? A slave usually escapes northwards and someone like Huck, wanting to escape from civilization, should try his luck in the West. Maybe the South is a temporary compromise for Huck and Jim if they do not want to separate and each go their own way? Also, a boy and a slave running together across Illinois would be a conspicuous sight and therefore an unsafe idea. Because they both know the river, they may have chosen to remain on the river in order to be left alone and free. Especially once the king and the duke

‘charter’ the raft, they have no option but to follow these two scoundrels. At this moment in the story, they cannot turn back anymore.

So, the East-West axis, “lighting out for the Territory,” is Huck’s ideal, something that he always wanted to do, but he is only able to plan it at the very end of the novel. It seems as if their North-South trip down the Mississippi is a necessary, preparatory quest, a kind of puri- fying trip, away from society and the evil of slavery. Huck first wants to save Jim before he begins his new life in the wild West. Their river journey is also a kind of test for the two friends to see if they are capable of travelling and living together, of leaving society and getting used to life in the wild, without social constraints. They get to know each other and their mutual trust and friendship is an odd aspect in nineteenth-century literature, but this is exactly what makes

Huck Finn so special. Once the river trip to the South is completed, Huck can start thinking about a new adventure, for which he was not yet ready at first. And Jim, ironically, earns his freedom after this journey into the Deep South, the heartland of slavery, where most slaves remain to their death. But this happens only after he is betrayed by the king and the duke, who sell Jim in a Southern town because they need money. So while Jim travels down the Missis- sippi as a free slave (escaped, rather), instead of chained on a steamboat, he is still sold and pushed back to square one. The river is on the one hand a symbol of enslavement and toil for the captured slaves on slave transport boats, whereas on the other hand for Huck and Jim the

Mississippi means freedom.

And so I can conclude that the complex plot line of Huckleberry Finn , with the river as a major symbol of both liberty and captivity, is a bizarre fusion of the Anglo-Saxon and the

African-American narrative. It starts with Huck’s narrative, with the Anglo-Saxon ideals and beliefs, and gradually the story focuses on Jim’s narrative, which constitutes the transition to the African-American narrative. So the two main nineteenth-century narratives, at first sight incompatible and contradictory, are ingeniously merged in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn .

Here we probably have the reason for the novel’s controversial reception: an interracial setting, and an escaped slave as one of the main heroes – some people were not yet ready for this.

I could draw a conclusion here, at the end of the nineteenth-century narrative, but instead I will round off here and first move on with my discussion about the twentieth century.

To avoid repeating myself I think it is more appropriate to come to a general conclusion at the

end of my dissertation, in which I will weigh the two narratives against each other across the two centuries dealt with.

II. TWENTIETH -CENTURY NARRATIVES

1 Introduction In the twentieth century, the Anglo-Saxon and African-American narratives have more or less merged: there is no longer one clear national narrative like in the nineteenth century. So the twentieth-century narrative is not really a ‘narrative’ in contrast with another one, but rather a balanced narrative between the two: in the one source, the Anglo-Saxon ideology is stronger, other sources are more directed towards the African-American cause. In this last part of my dissertation, I will explore the two large narratives/movements in two twentieth-century sources from different media: book and film.

In Jonathan Raban’s written account of his journey down the whole Mississippi River in a small motorboat, Old Glory – A Voyage Down the Mississippi (1981), both narratives play a role, but the Anglo-Saxon themes are more prominent. The river is an important symbol and source of inspiration for this book, which explores both small-town America and exploding cities. Following the pace of the mighty river, the often ironic and cynic Raban discovers the characteristics, habits, religions and pastime of river town inhabitants, from Wisconsin to

Louisiana: in interesting cross-section of late twentieth-century American history and society.

The other source is the 2000 adventure film O Brother, Where Art Thou? , directed by the Coen brothers. Set in the state of Mississippi during the Great Depression, it tells a story – comparable to Huckleberry Finn – in which three escaped convicts, largely following the river, try to keep out of their pursuers’ hands. Along their path, they meet various people, including a slightly eccentric bank robber, a black blues musician, insincere politicians, a KKK gathering… An interesting portrait of the early twentieth-century segregated South, and how friendship and music are stronger than racial hatred. After this chapter, I will evaluate everything I have discussed in a general conclusion.

2 Jonathan Raban: Old Glory

2.1 Introduction

Jonathan Raban (°1942, UK) is an English-born writer who lives in Seattle since 1990. Ever since he read Huckleberry Finn as a boy, he fantasized of doing the same: floating down the

Mississippi. In 1979 his dream came true: he started his journey in Minneapolis, Minnesota with only a sixteen-foot motorboat. Raban travelled down almost the entire length of the un- relenting river, often fighting for his life amongst eddies, boils, whirlpools and massive cargo boats. He regularly visited the smallest hamlets and the largest cities along the river, until he finally reached the Gulf of Mexico about a year later. Old Glory – A Voyage Down the Missis- sippi (1981) is the autobiographical account of this adventurous trip. “Riding the river,” Raban remarks near the end of the book, “I had seen myself […] thinking of my voyage not as a holi- day but as a scale model of a life. It was different from life in one essential: I would survive it to give an account of its end” (388).

Contrary to Huck and Jim, who had to sleep on their raft or among the bushes and catch fish for dinner, Raban preferred the ‘luxury’ of riverside hotels and motels, or just as often he was invited to sleep at an inhabitant’s dwelling. For this reason, Perrin argues that

Raban is “the ultimate city man,” whereas “[o]n a deeper level, Huck and Jim (and behind them Mark Twain) are lovers of untamed nature” (1). Apart from providing the reader with vivid descriptions of the river and the surrounding nature, Raban is equally – or maybe even more – interested in exploring the life and history of river towns and its people. Small-town

America versus exploding metropolises. He visits pubs and gives the locals a voice, merely retelling their conversations – often with a good deal of irony. He tries to be one of them, not wanting to be seen as a tourist, but at the same time he distances himself from these people.

During his journey, Raban holds conversations with politicians, factory managers, towboat pilots, river engineers – old, young, black, white, religious or not… And if there is no one around, Raban takes up one of his books he has taken with him, such as Zadok Cramer’s The

Navigator (1814), an interesting guide to river navigation for foreigners, or Timothy Flint’s

Recollections of the last ten years, passed in occasional residences and journeyings in the valley of the Mississippi (1826). Due to its variety in topics and stories, Old Glory is very interesting for the more recent, twentieth-century history of the river and its people. It is more encom- passsing than the account in Huckleberry Finn , since Raban starts in the very North, near Ca- nada, and he ends his journey in the Deep South, in Louisiana and the bayous, until his boat ends up in the Atlantic Ocean. In this regard, the Mississippi is seen as a cross-section of the recent American society in the Midwest and the South.

2.2 A Heroic Past versus Small-town America

Despite his nostalgic feelings for a lost past and a too rapidly changing society, Mark Twain was moderately positive in the descriptions of his Mississippi and the surrounding nature, towns and steamboat commerce. He was romantic in his accounts, because he portrayed the whole steamboating industry as a noble and heroic business, while he hid the ugly features of the period: gambling, drunkenness, prostitution, violence, criminal river gangs… In Life on the Mississippi , he describes life along the river from the point of view of himself and his boyhood friends in Hannibal, and later as an estimated pilot. In Huck Finn , he romanticizes life in freedom and in nature, away from civilization – while the booming steamboat business in Life on the Mississippi is exactly a part of civilization. Anyhow, both ideals – nature and civilization

– are portrayed as romantic, heroic ideals; and in spite of the realism in his works, he hides certain features that could spoil the idyllic image.

I think Jonathan Raban sees through this: he points out all aspects of the river, also the more negative side of the picture. Raban functions like a kind of reporter who writes down everything he sees and hears, his conversations with various people along the river, and I believe that he is not very much biased – otherwise the picture would look too bright. This is a typical late twentieth-century attitude – the romantic ideals are lost, writers venture to write things that not everyone wants to hear. Raban is often cynic and ironic about small-town people and narrow-minded river towns, but his descriptions are so vivid that it makes one

laugh. The community feeling in many small river towns, which have given up the ambition to increase long ago, is very strong, but this localism can also lead to “ugly small-town xeno- phobia” (Raban 138), where even the neighbouring village people are intruders – and this is not a good evolution. Also in Lansing, IA for example, people “don’t care too much for strangers” from Dubuque, 70 miles south. When Raban wonders whether they would “dislike

[him] roughly seven hundred times as much” since he is from England, his conversational partner explains that he is okay: “They love foreigners; it’s just strangers they hate” (124). Ra- ban observes the same community feeling at a pig roast in Davenport, IA: “The sense of being members of a real local community absorbed the people at the pig roast. Yet it also somehow absolved them from the responsibilities of American citizenship in the wider sphere” (187).

None of them was interested in president Carter’s stop at the Quad Cities, but when the Pope visited Des Moines, 150 miles away, everybody wanted to see him – it was “the most important event ever in the history of Iowa” (187). Iowa is often a ridiculed state in literature dealing with small-town America. It boring, there is nothing to see there, and “the land’s so flat that all you ever see is water towers and grain elevators” (129) scattered around across millions of square miles of corn fields. The state of Iowa pines away among other more important states.

When Carter visited Guttenberg, IA during the same trip I just talked about, he untactfully asked his aides before giving his speech: “‘Hey, is this Iowa? Is this Iowa?’ Yes , said the crowd; and Carter sailed into a lengthy tribute to Iowa and the Iowans” (137). Bill Bryson also pokes fun at the Iowans in his witty travelogue The Lost Continent – subtitled “Travels in Small-

Town America” (1989):

They are a tad slow, certainly – when you tell an Iowan a joke, you can see a kind of race going on between his brain and his expression – but it’s not because they’re incapable of high-speed mental activity, it’s only that there’s not much call for it. Their wits are dulled by simple, wholesome faith in God and the soil and their fellow man. (19) In this regard, both Raban and Bryson are like-minded writers: sharp, witty but sarcastic and to the point. In both books, the failed ambitions of the American dream are laid bare and the heroic ideals of yore are nothing more than faded glory. The nostalgic feelings for the glorious past of a town is often apparent, especially in the elder people who have witnessed the rise and

fall of their town. Werner from Bellevue, IA tells Raban about it: “This town… it was god- damn good – once” (160).

Also the Mississippi River is no longer what is has once been. Even though certain villages are located in the middle of nowhere, along the river and surrounded by nature, some inhabitants do not seem to bother about its beauty anymore. Just like a steamboat pilot does no longer see the beauty and the romance in the river, some towns, but larger cities as well, seem to have turned their backs on the river. In Minneapolis, MN for example, where Raban started his journey, he could not find the river at first: “I wondered where the Mississippi was.

Its course must be a well-kept secret, hidden somewhere in the crevices between the city’s squat little skyscrapers of smoked glass and steel” (22). For these industrial cities, the river had become an impediment: “Once, the Mississippi had provided Minneapolis and St. Paul with the reason for their existence. Later, it had turned into an impediment to their joint comer- cial life, to be spanned at every possible point. […] The Twin Cities went about their business as if the river didn’t exist” (31). Also here, the railroads have diminished river transport.

When Raban finally stumbled upon the river, he was disappointed, because it was not quite what he had expected: “It wasn’t the amazing blue of the cover of my old copy of Huckleberry

Finn ” (31). Luckily, this was only in a metropolis like Minneapolis. Later on in his journey, the river becomes beautiful again. But still, there are several cities that rather fear the river: Cape

Girardeau for instance, in Missouri, “was a walled and gated city […] to protect it from the river. […] Its wall announced that it considered the Mississippi a dangerous enemy. […] Here was a town that was having as little to do with its river as it could possibly manage” (287).

Raban hears a similar discourse when he asks school children about Huckleberry Finn and the river, expecting the kids to be enthusiastic about such a great classic of American literature, because the setting of the novel takes place in their backyards, as it were. Contrary to what he expected, most of them had not read it, and those who started reading did not finish it. “‘It was too difficult,’ a girl said. ‘It was all that Negro talk. I couldn’t understand it at all.

There was just so many Negroes…’” (168). In fact there is only Jim, but the black vernacular used by Twain clearly turns off young readers. Furthermore, living along the Mississippi in the

twentieth century, apparently, turns the river into a mere commodity, it is not something special and mythical anymore. “For them, the Mississippi was just a big wet highway. The boys went fishing in it. The girls saw it as a dangerous, dirty place. None of the children needed literature to make it real” (168). So, the Mississippi River was just another river, useful but not special; it seems as if the river has lost a part of its nineteenth-century mythical and symbolical status that was so apparent in Life on the Mississippi or Huckleberry Finn .

2.3 The Mississippi River and Gender

Many individuals, however, still consider the Mississippi River as a gift of God and are allured by its mythical power. And if we are to stick a gender label on the Mississippi River, it turns out that the river is a male bastion. The Anglo-Saxon world in the nineteenth century was already male-oriented, in which the frontiers men and the colonists and explorers were all male. In the heroic narrative of the Old West, no women are included – they remain home and care for the family. In Twain’s Huckleberry Finn , there are no women involved in the main story of Huck and Jim. But this is the nineteenth century, when generally ‘women’ and

‘literature’ were not mentioned in one sentence. A lot has changed in the twentieth century, but not the relation of the Mississippi with men. In Old Glory , the pattern is repeated often.

Clearly the women still do not love the mighty river, many are afraid of it. “It takes its toll,” one of Raban’s characters living in Reads Landing, MN tells him. “You wouldn’t get me on the river,” she said. “No way. I’ve always been afraid of it” (84). The river is more than a small brook, of course, and any riverside family will sadly tell you about one or more people they knew who drowned in it. Even experienced people are sometimes unexpectedly tricked by the whimsical nature of the river.

Raban picked up the same story in Louisiana, MO where a woman lost her son – he drowned in the river when he went duck hunting and his boat toppled. “She used a phrase that I [Jonathan] ‘d heard hundreds of miles upstream, in the mouth of another woman, in another accent: ‘It takes its toll’” (238). As she proceeds, it becomes clear that here, too, the boys and the men are obsessed with the river, whereas the women dislike it: “I don’t like the

Mississippi. I never liked it. But my father… my husband… my son… they’ve all loved the river. There was no way I had of stopping them…” (239). The river is alluring, so it is obvious that the Mississippi has a direct and serious impact on the lives of the inhabitants. The advice the lockmaster gives to Jonathan Raban at the beginning of his trip, just before he leaves the first lock in Minneapolis-St. Paul, is clear enough: “You going to ride the Mississippi, you better respect her or she’ll do you in” (35).

In another poignant situation in Old Glory , the river has intervened in the life of a

Minneapolis family. The man has a regular job as a carpenter and has a wife and two children.

But every weekend, he leaves his family behind and heads for the Mississippi, where he has knocked together a simple houseboat. He cannot resist the lure of the river and the surround- ding nature, so he goes there alone “to brood and hunt and cuddle his wolf-dog in his floating shack.” His wife, Elvira, “don’t care for the river too much. She says it’s a dirty place. She weren’t raised on the Mississippi like I was. […] Elvira don’t allow for the kids to go swim, even; she read someplace that the river’s all full of diseases and such” (62-63). One could even go as far as considering the Mississippi to break families, metaphorically. Here again it is the man’s love and the woman’s dislike for the river that has driven a wedge between them. Raban argues that people thought of the river as he or she – “the genders were interchangeable – they simply asserted that the Mississippi was never an it ” (181) – and even though many rivers are conceived as being female, I think the Mississippi River sooner bears the male gender.

2.4 Old Glory and Race

Another link between Old Glory and Huckleberry Finn is the emphasis on the Anglo-Saxon narrative and the relative absence of race-related issues in Old Glory . In Raban’s novel, this is mainly due to the fact that the first half of his journey takes place in the Midwest, where there are hardly remnants of slavery. “Since leaving Minneapolis,” Raban tells us, “I had seen hardly any black faces; this part of the country was a vast white ghetto” (152). Most cities above St.

Louis have a population of more than 80% whites, with peaks in towns like Sabula, IA with

670 inhabitants and a demographic rate of 100% whites. However, some inhabitants foster

racist feelings exactly because they never come in touch with black people – and therefore they perceive them as a danger. R. C. Wahlert, the owner of the Dubuque Packing Company, a meat packing factory in Iowa, is glad about the absence of blacks in his city: “The good thing about the city is… there are no blacks. […] Twenty million hogs, no blacks, and let’s hope it stays that way” (152). This conservative attitude is no isolated case in the region. Also in Ga- lena, IL blacks are not trusted by the local population. Nevertheless, broadly speaking, Raban has little interest in the African-American legacy. Since he is ‘copying’ Huck Finn’s adventure on a sixteen-foot motorboat, it is not surprising that he is more interested in the Anglo-Saxon aspects of American history, such as the freedom on his boat and the pleasant loneliness on the Mississippi River.

There is only one chapter that completely deals with race relations. In chapter 9, “A

Sleep Too Long,” Jonathan resides in Memphis, Tennessee, a large city with around 65% blacks. One inhabitant in Memphis, an resentful white pontoon office attendant, is not afraid to vent his opinions. He believes that the politicians have “ruined people’s private life” (323).

All his friends are gone, and he is left behind in a ruined city:

‘Know what they done? They given Memphis to the niggers. […] You got niggers in all the stores. […] There’s niggers in offices, now. […] Whole blocks of ‘em – solid niggers. They’re giving them five and six hundred bucks a month – to niggers in offices. What they got to do for it? Smoke, sass, and drink Coke all day. When I went to work, they give me eight bucks a week. Eight lousy bucks, and I had to work my ass off for it. Now I have to see them niggers giving sass and riding in new Cadillacs. You reckon that’s fair ?’ (323) This opinioned man is certainly not the only one in such cities, where blacks and whites try to live together but where there is a serious lack of mutual respect.

Raban furthermore witnesses the bitter 1979 mayoral campaign between Otis Higgs, a black candidate, and the current mayor Wyeth Chandler. Memphis has become a polarized city where blacks and whites are fighting for power. Raban decides to stay in the city for a while to follow the election; he is anxious to see Higgs become mayor – but in vain, he lost the elections. During his stay, Raban speaks with Higgs about the city. Memphis is “Death City,”

Higgs tells him, “It’s remembered for two things. Martin Luther King was shot here. Elvis

Presley died here” (327). Two symbols for the black and the white community – especially the death of MLK, the symbol of the Civil Rights Movement, is telling. Furthermore, downtown

Memphis, alongside the river, is also dead – Higgs wants to revive the city centre by persua- ding people to move back to the river. However, the Mississippi River is both the solution and the cause of problem:

‘The river is this city’s greatest natural resource, and we’ve turned our backs on it. I think the river is a key. We have to return to the river. The big problem is that if you’re black in Memphis the river has always meant one thing. Cotton. […] So the Mississip- pi has been hated in the black community. If we can have blacks and whites together, living by the river as a matter of choice, then we’ll know that the wounds of this city are healing over.’ (328) I think this is an accurate analysis of the problem. The Mississippi, as I have discussed in the chapters about slavery in the first part of my dissertation, has always been a negative symbol for African-Americans; and regrettably, the slavery history is one that is not easily forgotten.

In Vicksburg, Mississippi, the situation is different. After visiting the strongly segregated city of Memphis, Raban expected things to be worse in Mississippi. However, Willy Jefferson, a black funeral director, explains that Vicksburg “has always been a very open town. The river’s kept it open. It’s never been conservative like other places in this state. […] It’s always been a kind of cosmopolitan sort of place. […] There’s a saying here: this ain’t Vicksburg, Mississip- pi, this is Vicksburg, U.S.A.” (362-63). Vicksburg seems more tolerant, everyone shows respect. This is a good example of a place where the Mississippi, despite its history, is still a symbol of the town, and where race relations do not matter as much as anywhere else in the

South.

Of course, when you make a trip along the Mississippi into the South, racial issues are inevitable. But the goal of Old Glory was not at all to plead for one or the other cause, just like an abolitionist novel pleaded against slavery. It was just Jonathan Raban’s personal journey across the States which is reflected in his book, apart from any political agenda. All sorts of people get a voice, no matter what colour, religion or belief they have. This, I believe, is the strength of the novel – it is “a long, careless drift through other people’s lives, with the boat always moored ready for a fast getaway, and the solitude of the river never more than a stone’s

throw away from the society of the town” (142). In the next chapter I will discuss the film O

Brother, Where Art Thou? , because it has all the ingredients to use it as a comparison between

Raban’s novel and Huckleberry Finn . It is interesting now, as a last step in my dissertation, to explore some ideas and themes that I have applied to various literary sources in a recent film, which is a very different medium.

3 O Brother, Where Art Thou?

The motion picture O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a 2000 adventure film directed by Joel and

Ethan Coen. It is set in Mississippi in 1937, during the Great Depression. The script is loosely based on Homer’s Odyssey , but I see a lot of resemblances with the plotline of Twain’s Adven- tures of Huckleberry Finn , and with the adventurous aspects of Raban’s Old Glory . It is a kind of ‘escape roadmovie,’ so to say, in which three prisoners, Everett (George Clooney), Delmar

(Tim Blake Nelson) and Pete (John Turturro) escape from a chain gang and flee around in the state of Mississippi. The three friends are very inventive to avoid being caught, and they go through a series of wild adventures, including car joyrides, gunfire ambushes and cat-and- mouse games with their pursuers. They do not float down the Mississippi, like Huck and Jim, but the idea of travelling and escaping is the same. Three friends are running away, one of them loses the rest (Huck and Jim are also separated for some time during the Grangerford episode), they find each other again, they get caught but they escape again… The uncertain but adventurous life in nature is similar to Huck and Jim’s journey, who also experienced several tricky moments in some riverside towns due to the duke and the king on their raft.

In O Brother , just like in Huck Finn , there is also an interracial setting: the three runaways meet Tommy Johnson, a black blues guitarist, and they play music together – they form the band “Soggy Bottom Boys,” and they become friends with the black musician. Huck and

Jim likewise travel together and become trusted friends. In the film, music and friendship are stronger than racial prejudice and oppression. The background story of the film is the second

Ku Klux Klan which is active in Mississippi. The three runaways and Tommy had parted ways, but when the trio discovers that a secret KKK gathering is about to lynch Tommy, they dress up as members and they succeed in saving their friend. During the hustle and bustle of their ‘rescue operation’, the leader of the KKK gathering is accidentally revealed as one of the candidates for governor of Mississippi. The hypocritical reform candidate is in fact a conservative politician who believes in the racist principles of the KKK. Black prejudice remains a persistent problem in the South, especially in the first half of the twentieth century, and the

film succeeds well in portraying this slumbering southern problem tactfully – it is not the main story, but it is important enough to pass on the message.

Another link with Huckleberry Finn is the Pete’s dream of going to the West after they have reached their goal. They escaped to find a hidden treasure – which actually does not exist, as it turns out – but Pete was already planning to start a new life in the West to open a restaurant and become a maître d’hôtel. Apparently, the dream of the American West is persistent: many people see it as a way out, as a possibility to start anew – just like the nineteenth- century urge for expansion, when the prospect of a better life in the West was always possible if someone had failed in life. The Anglo-Saxon dream and the escapist feelings of Huck live on in the twentieth century, as we can see in O Brother. The film, just like Huck Finn , has an open ending, so we do not know what the three protagonists will eventually do, but the possibility that Pete will go to the West lies open.

I believe that O Brother, Where Art Thou? has balanced the Anglo-Saxon dream and the African-American narrative quite well, like in Huck Finn , because we get to see both sides of the picture. My analysis is of course not far-reaching enough, since it does only comprise a small amount of twentieth-century sources that I have discussed, but from this material I can conclude that it is impossible to write stories without mentioning the African-American narrative. It is no longer possible to write purely heroic Anglo-Saxon stories, and neither do we find purely African-American literature, such as slave narratives, anymore. American society has become a mix of both cultures (and other currents as well, of course, besides my two narratives), and this has its impact on the literary field.

4 Conclusion

The two nineteenth-century national narratives, Anglo-Saxon and African-American, both have specific thematic emphases that appear to a greater or lesser extent in the various fictional and non-fictional works, paintings and songs. The Anglo-Saxon expansionist dream already started in the sixteenth century and continued until the whole North-American continent was gradually ‘filled up.’ The frontier was ‘closed’ around 1890, and various waves of settlements had expanded westwards in the previous centuries. The Mississippi River was an important step in America’s colonization history, it was a border that had to be crossed, a kind of rite of passage, and not everyone was in favour of it. The East wanted to maintain control, and the further new settlements were developed, the more they would lose their grasp. The savage world behind the river was a good place to put the Native Americans – it should not be inhabited by the white man. But eventually the manifest destiny of the American people decided otherwise. Little by little, (Western) civilization intruded into the wilderness, and the myth of the Old West, where space was unlimited and everyone had the right to settle the lands, shaped the American dream. The heroic narrative of the frontier pioneers caused individualistic ideals. In short, the Anglo-Saxon narrative was one of progress and growth, of freedom and liberty for the white settlers, and of the pursuit of happiness.

This heroic narrative is present in both books by Mark Twain that I discussed, Life on the Mississippi and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . The struggle between nature/freedom and civilization/industry/commerce is exemplified in LOM by the ‘passenger versus pilot’ motif on a Mississippi steamboat. Also in Huck Finn , the conflict between nature and civilization is one of the most important aspects. These themes apparently stem from the author’s own concept- tion of nineteenth-century America. The heroic narrative of the Old West was waning towards the end of the century, and Twain had a feeling that something was lost. He was often romantic an nostalgic in his novels, he seemed to look for a past that was irrecoverably gone.

His personal life around the turn of the century was characterized by pessimism and misfor- tunes, just like heroic Anglo-Saxon narrative seemed to lose importance. In LOM , he ‘suc-

ceeded’ in not mentioning the subject of slavery, but in Huck Finn it was inevitable. The black voice of the oppressed race became louder and more difficult to ignore. The African-Ameri- cans had suffered long enough and wanted emancipation. The literature that I discussed in subchapter 2.3 is indicative of this trend. The abolitionist cause gained importance and slave narratives constituted a powerful means to counter the Anglo-Saxon superiority feeling and to gather sympathizers. Especially after the Civil War, the African-American narrative becomes stronger and had to be taken into account.

The twentieth century is perhaps as interesting as the previous one when it comes to comparing the two opposing narratives. Now that slavery was firmly abolished and racism and segregation became politically incorrect, a new ideal should be reached: the merging of the two narratives. Blacks and whites had to learn to live together. Millions of people understood this message, but there are always stubborn mules who do not believe in racial equality.

This resulted in the Civil Rights Movement, which rose to prominence in the middle of the twentieth century. The CRM, in turn, resulted in a revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the South, whose members violently lynched minority groups, especially blacks. The KKK is only one example of how deep the problem was rooted in American civilization. This is one of the har- rowing themes in O Brother, Where Art Thou? . The inclusion of this small chapter about the film at the end of my thesis is interesting because it does not concern a novel: we see that similar themes and narratives appear in both media. Further parallel themes between O Brother and Huck Finn are the escape ideal, the adventurous aspects and the flight towards freedom and nature. A detail, but not unimportant, is the dream of starting a new life in the West that still lingers on decades after the whole country was more or less settled. To conclude, I would argue that both narratives are fairly well balanced in the film.

However, in my opinion, the analysis about Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory is a more ab- sorbing chapter. The book clearly shows a twentieth-century attitude of writing that is not so much romantic or heroic, like Mark Twain did. Twain was often nostalgic in his stories about the Mississippi, the villages of his boyhood and the quasi unspoilt nature. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, this changed – progress and commerce intruded in this idyllic image.

Twain seemed to be looking for a lost past, but the same time he was an ardent supporter of the steamboat commerce, being a pilot himself. Yet we do not find many negative aspects of river commerce, such as gambling, crime, prostitution and alcohol abuse. In Old Glory , the image is much more discomforting from time to time. The romantic ideals of nature and freedom but also those of civilization and development have degenerated into faded glory. In the nineteenth century, the Mississippi River connected cities with steamboats and other river traffic, as a national highway from North to South. In the twentieth century, on the other hand, several river towns with failed ambitions to become major cities with national grandeur, have turned their backs on the river and lapsed into small communities with xenophobic in- clinations (that are not even racially inspired). American nationalism has given way in favour of small towns with stronger community feelings and a less national outlook.

The Anglo-Saxon narrative in Old Glory seems to have failed, but not in favour of the

African-American one: Raban did not give much attention to racial issues – only occasionally

– but it is nevertheless impossible to avoid the question. Especially the Mississippi River, which is connected with bad slavery memories, is the cause of black people’s aversion to the river – think again about Raban’s chapter in Memphis. I have also included a chapter about the Mississippi and gender, but I feel that it is unnecessary to add anything else about this, besides the fact that the river is apparently male-oriented – cherished by men and often dis- liked by women.

So it can be clear that both narratives reappear in the twentieth century, but either only partly – they do not manifest themselves as strong national narratives. I think this is a good evolution: there is no longer the strict black-and-white opposition – literally and figuratively – between the two narratives, with the Anglo-Saxon narrative as the dominant one in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth-century arts, both narratives are present alongside each other; sometimes the African-American narrative is stronger, then again the Anglo-Saxon narrative outshines everything. But I think it is good that the two movements can be combined, as can be clear judging from my analyses, and people should no longer see the one or the other narrative as supreme, as a racial ‘other.’ However, as I said before, more thorough studies would

be necessary to extend my findings to a larger amount of literary sources. The conclusions that I have drawn are based upon a small amount of documents, and I think future research regarding this area of literary history could be a compelling subject to elaborate.

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