The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

• Chapter 15

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Juxtaposition and Join

• PLOT Escape downriver slave v. free states
  (join at Cairo)
• LITERARY STYLE River v. land Romanticism v.
  Realism (join in the fog)
• SOCIAL COMMENT Slave state v. natural hierarchy
  (transition in 15)
• CHARACTERIZATION/MORALITY Huck the conformist v.
  Huck the individualist (transition in 15?)

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(No Transcript)
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Missing Cairo in the Fog
Upper Mississippi River
Ohio River
Cairo, Illinois (pn Kay-row)
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Romanticism

• love of nature sympathetic interest in the
  past, especially the medieval mysticism
  individualism.
• specific characteristics embraced by these
  general attitudes are . . . the dropping of the
  conventional poetic diction in favor of fresher
  language and bolder figures the idealization of
  rural life
• enthusiasm for the wild, irregular, or grotesque
  in nature and art unrestrained imagination
  enthusiasm for the uncivilized or "natural"
• interest in human rights (Burns, Byron)
  sympathy with animal life (Cowper) sentimental
  melancholy (Gray) emotional psychology in
  fiction (Richardson).
• Definitions from A Handbook to Literature, Sixth
  Edition C. Hugh Holman and William Harmon.

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Realism

• in the broadest sense, fidelity to actuality. .
  .verisimilitude.
• pragmatism. . . with discernable consequences
  and verifiable by experience. . .a realist is a
  believer in democracy, and the materials he
  elects to describe are the common, the average,
  the everyday. . .the ultimate of middle class
  art. . .subjects in bourgeois life and actions.
• The realist eschews the traditional patterns of
  the novel. In part. . . a protest against the
  falseness and sentimentality . . .in Romantic
  fiction.
• truthfully reflected life . . .avoid symmetry
  and plot. . value the individual very highly. .
  .praise characterization as the center of the
  novel.
• Simple, clear, direct prose. . .objectivity.
• Definitions from A Handbook to Literature, Sixth
  Edition C. Hugh Holman and William Harmon.

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Romanticism v. Realism

• River Romantic, ideal
• Land Realist, social comment
• Romanticism seeks to find the Absolute, the
  Ideal, by transcending the actual, whereas
  Realism finds its values in the actual and
  Naturalism in the scientific laws that undergird
  the actual.
• Definitions from A Handbook to Literature, Sixth
  Edition C. Hugh Holman and William Harmon.

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Social Hierarchiesand Morality c. 1850

• Free
• Adult man
• Adult woman
• Male child
• Female child

• Slave
• White man
• White woman
• White child
• Chattel human?
• Slave man
• Slave woman
• Slave child

It was fifteen minutes before I could work
myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger-
but I done it, and I warn't ever sorry for it
afterwards, neither. I didn't do him no more mean
tricks, and I wouldn't done that one if I'd a
knowed it would make him feel that way (86).