Here we are, Radio Readers, midstream in our fall book club series on rivers and making meaning. How could we not talk about one of the most iconic –and controversial—of American novels, set along and upon the mother of American rivers, the mighty Mississippi?
When Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published in the United States, just under 150 years ago, the ratification of constitutional amendments abolishing slavery and extending the right to vote to men of all races was a generation or more in the law books. Yet, by 1885, when Huckleberry Finn was published, already state and local laws had been enacted to limit Blacks’ rights to vote, restricted where they could live, who they could marry, where they could work, and if they could go to school. Tactics of intimidation and terrorism helped enforce these laws.
Into this world, Twain tossed a novel about a homeless, delinquent orphan and a fugitive slave seeking freedom on and along the Mississippi River. Within a month of its publication, it was banned in a place historically known for its radicalism, Concord, Massachusetts. Yet, in Concord, in 1885, Twain’s masterpiece was condemned for being “tawdry” -- a word sadly underused nowadays. Sadly, because the word “tawdry” so well encompasses that which is cheap, vulgar, brash. Like obscenities, atheism, low moral tone, coarse manners and – yes—bad grammar and use of dialect and slang. For all these reasons, which we today might read as code for “low class,” Twain’s masterpiece has been banned, censored and challenged.
Only since the 1960’s, have the voices challenging the novel Huckleberry Finn had audience. This is arguably the most tawdry fact of the novel’s history—that it took eight decades to see and to hear the very significant role of racism to the novel’s structure. Those anti-Finnigans today point precisely to the use of racial epithets—particularly the frequent use of the “n” word—and of racist imagery and the communication of racist attitudes. Pro-Finnigans say that in portraying racist behavior as immoral and racists as foolish and tawdry, Twain uses satire and irony to discredit racist beliefs. But what good is that in the face of many readers who don’t perceive the satire – or can’t for the offensive use of language and situation. Can we understand that in depicting a deeply racist society, does the novel itself become a racist document?
Or…does The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn tell a story about two guys on a raft on a river finding freedom from a brutally oppressive and restrictive society, a society structured to keep them tied up and constrained by disturbing social constructions of race and social class.
I’m Jane Holwerda from Dodge City Kansas for HPPR’s Radio Readers.
