Critical Controversy Race and the Ending of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

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Critical ControversyRace and the Ending
of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
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Critical Standpoints

• Leo Marx, Justin Kaplan, David L. Smith, and
  Shelly Fisher Fishkin support Huckleberry Finn as
  an anti-racist text.
• Julius Lester and Jane Smiley argue that the
  conclusion of the novel is evidence of Twains
  racism.
• Toni Morrison reframes the debate entirely.

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Leo Marx

• Marx argues that the novel is about Jims
  freedom, not Tom and Hucks games Yet along
  with the idyllic and the epical and the funny in
  Huckleberry Finn . . . this is not a boys lark
  but a quest for freedom.
• Nevertheless, Marx deems the conclusion a farce
  that jeopardizes the significance of the entire
  novel.

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Shelly Fisher Fishkin

• Fisher Fishkin agrees with Marx that the novel
  has a strong anti-racist sentiment but disagrees
  that the conclusion detracts from the novels
  ultimate goals.
• She argues that the pranks Tom plays on Jim at
  the end of the novel are an allegory for Jim Crow
  laws Is what America did to the ex-slaves any
  less insane than what Tom Sawyer put Jim through
  in the novel?

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Justin Kaplan

• Twenty years after Huckleberry Finn was
  published, Twain himself gave this summary of the
  book A sound heart and a deformed conscience
  come into collision and conscience suffers
  defeat.

• Kaplan contends that Hucks deformed
  conscience is the internalized voice . . . of a
  conventional wisdom that found nothing wrong in
  the institution of slavery, and that Hucks
  rejection of this deformed conscience is what
  makes him a hero with a sound heart.

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David L. Smith

• Smith argues that Race is a strategy for
  relegating a segment of the population to a
  permanent inferior status. It functions by
  insisting that each race has specific,
  definitive, inherent behavioral tendencies and
  capacities which distinguish it from other
  races.
• Contrary to what would be expected from such a
  social construction of race, Twain portrays Jim
  as a compassionate, shrewd, thoughtful,
  self-sacrificing, and even wise man. . . . Jim,
  in short, exhibits all the qualities that the
  Negro supposedly lacks.

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Julius Lester and Jane Smiley

• Lester It defies logic that Jim did not know
  Illinois was a free state. . . . A century of
  readers have accepted this as credible, a grim
  reminder of the abysmal feelings of superiority
  with which whites are burdened.
• Smiley Twains moral failure . . . is never
  even to account for their choice to go down the
  river rather than across it.

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Julius Lester and Jane Smiley

• Smiley condemns Twain for having Jim prefer
  Hucks companionship to real freedom Twain
  thinks that Hucks affection is a good enough
  reward for Jim.
• Lester implicates not only Twain but generations
  of white readers for believing that Jim valued
  his relationship with Huck over his own freedom
  White people might want to believe such fairy
  tales . . . but blacks know better.

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Toni Morrison

• Twains novel has the ability to transform its
  contradictions into fruitful complexities and to
  seem to be deliberately cooperating in the
  controversy it has excited. The brilliance of
  Huckleberry Finn is that it is the argument it
  raises.

• If the emotional environment into which Twain
  places his protagonist is dangerous, then the
  leading question the novel poses for me is, What
  does Huck need to live without terror,
  melancholy, and suicidal thoughts? The answer, of
  course, is Jim.

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Toni Morrison

• Twain leaves three issues unresolved in the
  novel
• Huck Finns estrangement, soleness and morbidity
  as an outcast child
• the disproportionate sadness at the center of
  Jims and his relationship
• the secrecy in which Hucks engagement with
  (rather than escape from) a racist society is
  necessarily conducted.

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Huck Finn and Uncle Toms Cabin

• Kaplan Twains novel is probably more faithful
  as well as less stereotypical than Harriet
  Beecher Stowes beloved Uncle Toms Cabin.
• Smiley The portrayal of an array of thoughtful,
  autonomous, and passionate black characters in
  Uncle Toms Cabin leaves Huck Finn far behind.
• Fisher Fishkin The two books were written to
  achieve two different ends. One was written to
  mobilize sentiment against slavery. The other . .
  . to expose the dynamics of racism.

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Huck Finn. Lithograph of a detail of the mural
in the Missouri State Capitol by Thomas Hart
Benton, 1936. (The Annotated Huckleberry Finn,
page xlvii)
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On the Raft by Edward Winsor Kemble
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Jim and the Ghost by Edward Winsor Kemble (The
Annotated Huckleberry Finn, page 85)
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Exploring the Cave by Edward Winsor Kemble
(Norton Critical Edition of Huck Finn, page 59)
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In the Cave by Edward Winsor Kemble (Norton
Critical Edition of Huck Finn, page 60)
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A Fair Fit by Edward Winsor Kemble (Norton
Critical Edition of Huck Finn, page 66)
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Anonymous, JIM CROW JUBILEE (1847)
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Jim and the Snake by Edward Winsor Kemble
(Norton Critical Edition of Huck Finn, page 64)