Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn As Anti Racist Novel

Journal of Literature, Languages and Linguistics www.iiste.org ISSN 2422-8435 An International Peer-reviewed Journal Vol.46, 2018 Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn as Anti Racist Novel Ass.Lecturer Fahmi Salim Hameed Imam Kadhim college for Islamic science university, Baghdad , Iraq "Man is the only Slave. And he is the only animal who enslaves. He has always been a slave in one form or another, and has always held other slaves in bondage under him in one way or another.” - Mark Twain Abstract Mark Twain, the American author and satirist well known for his novels Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer , grew up in Missouri, which is a slave state and which later provided the setting for a couple of his novels. Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn are the two most well-known characters among American readers that Mark Twain created. As a matter of fact, they are the most renowned pair in all of American literature. Twain’s father worked as a judge by profession, but he also worked in slave-trade sometimes. His uncle, John Quarles, owned 20 slaves; so from quite an early age, Twain grew up witnessing the practice of slave-trade whenever he spent summer vacations at his uncle's house. Many of his readers and critics have argued on his being a racist. Some call him an “Unexcusebale racist” and some say that Twain is no where even close to being a racist. Growing up in the times of slave trade, Twain had witnessed a lot of brutality and violence towards the African slaves. This had often disturbed him as he wrote in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court , Mark Twain wrote: "The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder's moral perceptions are known and conceded the world over; and a privileged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name.(1)” However, in his novel, one can see the use of words such as “Nigger” and the way the black man was treated by people also puts Twain in the box of suspicion. Many critics think that he was just a writer who wrote such ideas for fun and they were not his personal ideas, but the idea of Mark Twain being a Racist or not is still a matter of controversy. This is one of the major reasons why Twain’s novels have to be analyzed thoroughly. Whether Twain is a racist or not, this paper is an attempt to answer this question by presenting examples from one of his famous novels Huckleberry Finn through analysis of discourse and characters. Keywords : Racist, African American, Twain, Huck, anti-racist Introduction Mark Twain was born as Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30 th , 1835 in the small river town of Florida, Missouri, just 200 miles away from Indian Territory. He is the sixth child of John Marshall Clemens and Jane Lampton. Mark Twain spent his childhood in Florida, Missouri till he turned four, when his family moved to Hannibal looking forward to a better living condition. However, by roots Twain was from the South, as both his grandparents belong to Virginia. The slave-trade community in Hannibal, where Twain had moved with his family, provided a mix of harsh border life and the traditions of the south, a way of life that inclined his later writings, including his famous work Adventures of Tom Sawyer . Only a few black slaves actually lived in Hannibal, where they were mostly held as household servants rather than field workers, but were still under the compulsion of slavery. In his youth, Twain was a quite playful boy, the model of his famous fictitious character, Tom Sawyer. Though he was weighed down by bad health in his early years, by age nine he had already smoked, led a small gang of pranksters, and had developed a hatred for school. Twain stopped schooling after twelve, because his father died in March of that same year. He worked as an apprentice in a printer's shop and then worked under his brother, Orion, at the Hannibal Journal, where he quickly became inundated in the newspaper trade. Promoted as a sub-editor, Twain took to frontier humor in journalism which was quite famous at the time. Mark Twain became a river pilot at the age of 24, as he had always wanted to be as a boy. On his way to Nevada, twelve years after the Gold Rush, Twain's primary intentions were to earn lots of money and become rich through mining for silver and gold. After realizing the impossibility of this dream, Twain began to write again. Mark Twain was a talented writer, speaker and humorist whose own personality stood out through his extraordinary work. As his writing grew popular, he became a public figure and an iconic American. “I am not an American,” [Mark Twain] once said, “I am the American.” No one would ever think of Mark Twain as unpatriotic. He was the first author to write in the American dialect and he did not hesitate to use his talents as a humorist, journalist, and novelist to attack what he considered un- American - the great immorality of slavery and racism. Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn received the rewards it deserved. Though the book has been at the center of debate among critics and readers ever since he wrote it in 1884, first accused of vulgarity because 29 Journal of Literature, Languages and Linguistics www.iiste.org ISSN 2422-8435 An International Peer-reviewed Journal Vol.46, 2018 of the language and more recently of racism, it stands as the first American novel to create a fully realized African-American character. In 1863, he adopted the pen name Mark Twain, derived from a river pilot term describing safe navigating conditions. In 1869 he published his first book of travel letters entitled, Innocents Abroad which was criticized and which also discouraged Twain from pursuing a literary career. However, In the years that followed, Twain published different articles, made lecture tours, and moved between San Francisco, New York, and Missouri. The Clemens family quickly fell into debt thereafter. However, when over 67,000 copies of Innocents Abroad sold within its first year, the American Publishing Company requested Twain for another book. Later he moved to Hartford, Connecticut, where he composed Roughing it , which documented the post-Gold Rush mining era and was published in 1872. Moreover , Roughing it was only mildly successful, which added to the family's hardships. Twain's next novel, The Gilded Age , written in association with Charles Dudley Warner, was published in 1873. The novel is about the 1800s era of corruption and exploitation at the expense of public welfare. The Gilded Age was Twain's first actual work of fiction which marked him in the literary world as an author rather than a journalist. After the broad success of The Gilded Age , Twain began concentrating on writing. By the time Twain reached age fifty, he was already considered a successful writer and businessman. He got more popular with the publications of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), The Prince and The Pauper (1882), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). By 1885, Twain was considered one the greatest character writers in the literary community. Mark Twain grew up in Missouri, a slave state as earlier mentioned. His uncle, John Quarles, owned 20 slaves; so Twain witnessed the practice of slavery first-hand whenever he went to his uncle's place in summer vacations. When he was still a young boy, he witnessed the brutal murder of a slave in his home town of Hannibal by the slave's owner, who killed the man with a thrown rock for a very trivial matter. These provided the base to Mark Twain’s well known novels later. When Twain began writing Huckleberry Finn he thought he was going to write another Children’s book, a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but Twain soon found himself writing a book like no book ever written before. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is about a child who grows up in an environment in which people who think of themselves as supremely civilized supporting a system that is uncivilized, illegitimate and inhumane. He wrote the book at a time when ex-slaves were subjected to economic exploitation, disenfranchisement and racially motivated lynching, and the last third of the novel sheds light upon the many betrayals and indignities African-Americans suffered after the collapse of Reconstruction. Huckleberry Finn is a satire not only of slavery, which had been abolished a decade before Twain began writing the novel, but of also of the racism that immersed American society as Twain wrote the book in the late 1870s and early 1880s and which continues to stain America till this day. This theme is as integral to Huckleberry Finn as it is irrelevant to Tom Sawyer . However, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was and is Mark Twain’s mostly read book along with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer . Both books are children’s books but have deep connotations that need to be understood. Mark Twain had embarked on his own private affirmative action plan as one small step in addressing the problem, paying for the education of several black students. He once addressed a letter to the dean of the Yale Law School in 1885, explaining his decision to pay for one of the first black law students there. Twain wrote, “We have ground the manhood out of them, & the shame is ours, not theirs, & we should pay for it.” Twain was not afraid to reject values he had once accepted.

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