Introduction mark Twain's inconvenient truths

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The structure of the course paper. Introduction, four parts in main body, conclusion and the list of used references
1. Mark Twain's inconvenient truths
The American Civil War that ended in 1865 did not bring about the expected quick and complete eradication of racism and slavery. Fifteen years later the Reconstruction, specially intended to reconstruct the country, introduce and merge blacks into American society, did not make much headway. Although Mark Twain’s novel “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” was written 4 years after the Reconstruction, it is based on a period several years earlier, when slavery still prominently existed. Considering the on-the-ground situation that existed in 1884 vis-à-vis racism, the period was not much different as compared to the background of Twain’s novel. By portraying the relationship between a young white boy and a black slave-a relationship that sees the racially prejudiced suspicion of the former dissolve and replaced by a warm friendship with the black slave- Twain does well to depict the gross injustice of slavery and racism.³
Mark Twain, a famous American writer wrote many books highly acclaimed throughout the world. For his masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the literary establishment recognized him as one of the greatest writers America would ever produce. This novel is about a teenage boy by the name of Huck Finn. He is living with Miss Watson and Widow Douglas who have adopted him. He decides that civil life is not for him and that he is going to run away. At the beginning of his adventure he runs into Miss Watson's run away slave Jim. Instead of turning Jim in, Huck goes against society and makes a decision to help Jim break free from slavery. As they travel together, Huck learns more and more about Jim and starts to understand that the common stereotype of black people is wrong. Huck sees there is no different then anyone else. He starts to see that Jim is a loving caring person just like anyone else. My argument is that Mark Twain portrayed Jim in this way because that is how he really felt about slavery. He felt that African Americans are our equals and that the act of slavery should not be allowed. Raised in the slave state of Missouri, Mark Twain grew up with slaves. His father owned slaves and his uncle actually owned twenty slaves. He saw the way slaves were treated on the everyday bases especially when he went to his uncle's farm for the summer. At a young age Mark Twain witnessed a slave being killed just because he did one thing wrong (Lombardi 1). These things in his childhood lead me to believe that Mark Twain felt bad for African Americans and feels that they should be free his is how American should start to realize that African Americans are our equals. He depicts many of the white people in this story as thieves, murders, or all around bad people. He never once says anything bad about Jim even though he would normally be stereotyped as the person that would do all these things merely by the color of his skin. Mark Twain portrays his feelings through this story. Race is the underlining theme in this story. If you read the story closely you can see all the different things that point this out. Mark Twain felt that African Americans are our equal and through this story he shows this very well.⁴
Anti-slavery is one of the central aspects of Mark Twain’s iconic novel, “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Given the years when the novel was written, Twain’s thoughts and beliefs regarding slavery channeled through the book’s main characters were quite revolutionary and ahead of their time. First things first, the writer introduced Jim’s character, a slave and Huck Finn’s close friend. By refusing to make him one-dimensional and reduce his personality to his status, Mark Twain humanized him and made him a real person. Another telltale sign that Mark Twain was anti-slavery is the plot arc with Jim’s liberation. The latter also serves as a test of Huck Finn’s character who is forced to choose between “civilization” that allows making his friend Jim a chattel property and nature that created him a free being. This paper proves that Mark Twain is strongly anti-slavery by discussing each of the aforementioned points.
Jim is one of the most interesting and controversial figures in American literature. Different sources hint at the possibility of Twain’s taking inspiration in his uncle’s slave, Uncle Daniel, who impressed him with his kindness and openness. Another possible occurrence that compelled Twain to create Jim’s character is a memorable event in the writer’s life when a friendly farmer saved his and his family’s lives. Right from the beginning of the novel, Jim strikes the reader as a naive and gullible person. He believes in superstitions and is easy to talk into basically anything. At first, this character design may come off as stereotypical for the era when Twain was creating his masterpieces. Jim is obviously uneducated and conditioned by society into believing everything he is told.
However, as the narration progresses, the reader gets a chance to become familiar with the other sides of Jim’s character and see his humanity. The man may be naive to a fault, but this personality trait also makes him fiercely loyal to Huck Finn. In a way, Jim becomes a father figure for the boy who has never been surrounded by love and acceptance. In fact, Jim is so protective of Huck that he is ready to sacrifice his own freedom.
Further, Jim is street smart: despite the lack of education, he can come to the right conclusions and help other people. One example is him guessing that it is going to rain by observing birds’ behavior. Lastly, another admirable trait that Jim possesses is his faith in the equality of all people.⁵ This is how he reacts to the news that people speak different languages around the world: “Well, it’s a blame ridiculous way, en I don’t want to hear no mo’ ’bout it. Dey ain’t’ no sense in it.”; “Looky here, Jim; does a cat talk like we do? ” Jim believes that people are made equal, which makes him reject slavery even more.
The issue of dehumanization of people because of their race is still relevant nowadays. Many people navigate the world using stereotypes that are often offensive and far from the truth. Even though in the United States, slavery has been long abolished, Black people have yet to cease facing its long-term effects. One of them is the poor societal opinion of them that reduces them to their race. Novels like “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” show that it is possible to realize the humanity of another human being by seeing them in other capacities, for instance, in a friendly role.
Jim’s route to escape is one of the major plot arcs developed by Mark Twain in “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Despite being a young boy, Huck has the capacity of devising a plan on how to make Jim a free man. One of the reasons why the boy decides to go against society in this instance is because he has never considered a societal opinion as something to be taken seriously, to begin with.
Uparented and almost feral, Huck is not aware of the existing stereotypes about Black people. Ironically, the fact that he is “uncivilized” is what ultimately helps him to see Jim as more than a slave.⁶ Twain’s decision to build the novel around Jim’s escape was not in line with what American society would expect of him. Just like his character Huck, Twain rejected the notions of what is accepted and showed the reader what is right: the freedom and equality of all people.
Some subtopics that Twain develops in relation to anti-slavery are religion and pretense. At some point, Huck realizes that the religious sentiment is against him freeing Jim, to which he responds with “All right, then, I’ll go to hell (Twain 508).” This proves the superficial nature of religion over real people’s life struggles. Furthermore, the reader learns that Huck is as loyal to Jim as the man is to him. The boy learned a lot about hell at his foster home to know that this is a place to avoid going to, and yet, he is ready if it means saving his friend’s life.
Huck’s genuine efforts to free Jim are contrasted with Tom Sawyer’s playfulness. To Tom, Jim’s route to escape is nothing more than a fun adventure. Moreover, at times, Sawyer makes the venture even harder than it was supposed to be by letting his imagination and creativity interfere. This exposition of two types of responses to the issue of slavery can be inferred to today’s world as well. Some people are like Huck Finn: they are truly compassionate with the struggles of underprivileged communities. They could use the following quote by him as their motto: “I do not wish any reward but to know I have done the right thing. Others, however, feign interest in humanitarian problems and take action more for the thrill of it. The ongoing challenges to Huck Finn as racist in its representation of slavery and African Americans have prompted a heightened scholarly interest in trying to determine exactly what Samuel Clemens' ideas on those subjects were. All accounts agree that his ideas changed drastically over time. Although the Missouri he grew up in never joined the Confederacy, it was a world in which slavery was taken for granted by most whites, defended by all public institutions, including the churches, and attacked out loud by no one; Sam's own parents owned slaves. The Langdon family his wife belonged to, on the other hand, was actively abolitionist, and by the time Sam married into it at the start of his career the U.S. had abolished slavery. As an owner/editor of the Buffalo Express in 1869 he wrote and printed an unsigned editorial protesting the recent lynching of a black man in Memphis; in 1881 he wrote President-elect Garfield a letter on behalf of Frederick Douglass; in 1885, in acknowledgment of the rights of former slaves to reparation for the wrongs that white America had done them, he arranged to help support an African American named Warner T. McGuinn through Yale law school. You can see MARK TWAIN's letter to Garfield in the sam clemens as Mark Twain section of the archive. The best account of slavery in Sam Clemens' Hannibal is Searching for Jim, by Terrell Dempsey; a representative account of how the adult Samuel Clemens personally thought and talked about slavery and race is Lighting Out for the Territory, by Shelley Fisher Fishkin. But when Twainians cite these kinds of biographical facts to answer the critique of Huck Finn, they overlook the crucial distinction between what Sam Clemens thought or did in private what we know about his personal life, and what "Mark Twain" wrote or what "the writings of Mark Twain" say what his audience saw in his published books. The end of slavery did not mean America was finished with such questions as what was slavery like? or what does its existence mean about our past? Most of Mark Twain's major writings are set in slave-owning societies - how do they re-present slavery for an American reading public that was struggling to come to terms with slavery, indeed that continues to be be haunted by those questions today?
For his contemporaries, Mark Twain's books were made of pictures as well as words, and for many of those readers the pictures would have spoken at least as loudly as the words. This page brings together some of Mark Twain's published words about slavery with many of the pictures that appeared in the first editions of his books. My goal is to give you a way to see the images of slavery that readers in his times saw through the windows onto that world that his books gave them Mark Twain's first contribution to The Atlantic Monthly was also his first substantial representation of the experience of slavery,all 'bout slavery." Her story begins with an account of the horrifying auction in Richmond at which she and her seven children were sold apart, and ends when, near the end of the Civil War, she was reunited with her youngest son, now a soldier in a "colored regiment" in the Union Army. Although some of its original readers, knowing it was "By Mark Twain," apparently kept looking for a joke in it, it is a moving story, and the manuscript shows how seriously Mark Twain worked to get rachel's voice right. he reprinted the story in sketches, new and old where true Williams' illustration of rachel at left appeared.⁷
Mark Twain's next contribution to the Atlantic was the series of sketches about his experiences as an apprentice steamboat pilot on "the Southern trade" in the late 1850s. These were published in seven installments between January and July, 1875, under the title "Old Times on the Mississippi." Rooted in nostalgia for the riverboats' "days of glory," Mark Twain's narrative almost completely ignores the role slavery played in steamboating -- that the boats' crews were mainly slaves, and that slaves as well as cotton were their staple cargoes. Mr. Bixby, who plays master pilot to the narrator's cub, lands a steamboat at a plantation in the pitch dark as an example of his prowess, but the darkness also makes both the plantation and the slave who waits on the shore invisible -- we can only hear "a darky's voice" saying Gimme de k'yarpet-bag, Mars' Jones.'" The Atlantic texts were unillustrated, but Mark Twain incorporated the sketches into Life on the Mississippi, where the illustrations below, by John Harley, show how this version of the "Old Times" represented slavery:
The word "slave" appears twice in MARK TWAIN's first fiction about the world of his childhood, in the Preface and in a footnote. In the text of the novel itself we meet Jim, identified only as Aunt Polly's "small colored boy," and hear about the unnamed "negro" who has just taught Tom a new way to whistle, about the white, mulatto and negro boys and girl" who congregate at the town pump, and about "Uncle Jake," "Ben Roger's pap's nigger. But slavery is barely mentioned. When the narrator talks about "captivity and fetters," he's referring to Tom having to go to school, and he uses the slogan of the Anti-Slavery movement -am I not a man and a brother, without distinction of color -to make a joke about the way Tom's face looks after his sister Mary has washed it. More than Polly's fence gets white-washed in the story, but evading the presence of slavery is one of the most powerful means by which Mark Twain's story creates such an inviting past for his readers' nostalgia to inhabit. When Mark Twain next goes back to St. Petersburg, slavery plays a much larger role in the story he tells, but how Huck Finn represents slaves and slavery remains a very controversial question. Throughout the novel Huck as someone who's been raised in a slave-holding society believes slavery is right; though he likes Jim and is willing to "go to hell" to "steal Jim out of slavery," he expresses more sympathy for Miss Watson as the "poor old woman" who owns Jim than for Jim himself.⁸ By 1885, slavery had been abolished for two decades, so nearly every contemporary reader would see Huck's belief in its eternal rightness ironically, as an example of another kind of "slavery"- the way a child's mind is captive to the values of the society she or he is born into.
But even after slavery has been abolished, there remains the problem of understanding what it was like, what its legacy is, what it says about the nation's culture. And what remains ambiguous about the novel is the way it presents slavery: the idea of slavery that its words and pictures leave in the minds of its readers. From the first edition's 174 drawings by E. W. Kemble, who was picked by Mark Twain himself to illustrate the novel, I selected the 16 below as representative of the way contemporary readers were shown the slave-owning society through which Huck and Jim travel.
Kemble also did the illustrations for the new editions of Huck Finn that appeared in the late 1890s, and you can see them by clicking here. Of course every one of Kemble's 28 pictures of "Jim" is an image of slavery. In the huck finn section of the archive you can look forward from Kemble at how the novel's 12 American illustrators between 1885 and 1985 represented Jim. The images below are intended to give you one way to look backward: to locate Kemble's pictures in the context of other culturally well-known representations of slaves.⁹
About 10 years after finishing Huck Finn Mark Twain decided to go back again imaginatively to the world of his childhood. The story he wound up writing, about a slave mother who tries to free her infant son by switching him with her master's baby, makes Pudd'nhead Wilson Mark Twain's most sustained engagement with the institution of slavery. What it's saying about slavery, however, is by no means clear. As published, his story was illustrated in an unusual way, with hundreds of pen-and-ink "marginal illustrations" by F. M. Senior and C. H. Warren. Their images of slaves are as ambiguous as Mark Twain's text, ranging from sentimental to realistic to minstrel grotesque. The 18 examples of their work below are chosen to represent this range. The overall effect of using "marginal illustrations, though, is to keep the reader at a great distance from the narrative, to turn the characters into cartoons, and, since shading is impossible, to eliminate any kind of grey area between "black" and white.You can see all the illustrations in the digital facsimile of the first edition in the pudd'nhead wilson section of the archive. When the novel appeared serially in The century, it was illustrated by one of the magazine's staff artists, Louis Loeb, whose drawings.
In the U.S. The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson was published with The Comedy of Those Extraordinary Twins, the uncompleted farce about Siamese or conjoined twins that Mark Twain originally intended to set on the scene of Dawson's Landing. This representation of a slaveholding village recalls Tom Sawyer: boys and aunts are at the center, and slavery is only a peripheral element. But the text does include several mentions of the slaves on whose labor the white village depended, and among its 200 or so "marginal illustrations" are several graphic representations of slavery.
A Slave! Do ye understand that word!" This protest rings out from one of the unfortunate characters in Mark Twain's Prince and the Pauper. Hearing how harshly this man has been treated, the exiled Prince vows to abolish the law that made his enslavement possible, but as the man himself notes, he stands before Mark Twain's Reader As Specifically "An english slave -that is he that stands before ye." No American slave ever voices a similar protest in Mark Twain's published books. "The most of King Arthur's British nation were slaves," writes Hank Morgan, the narrator of the novel that Mark Twain published between Huck Finn and Pudd'nhead Wilson. In Connecticut Yankee the past he depicts is the 6th century England he had read about in Malory and Scott, not the ante bellum South he grew up in. Slavery and anti-slavery play large roles in Hank's story.¹⁰ In Roxy's narrative in Pudd'nhead Wilson New England "Yanks" are said to make the most heartless slave owners, but Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee is a devout abolitionist whose critique of slavery in this text is much more outspoken than any of the narrators of Mark Twain's works depicting slavery in America. The novel's illustrations are much more graphic in depicting the horrors of slavery too. They are by Dan Beard, who was himself a politically engaged social critic. Beard's temperament, as well as Hank's direct attacks on slavery, may account for the anti-slavery force of the illustrations, but their representation of slavery may also reflect the fact that in Connecticut Yankee the slaves are all "white," and the people who enslave them are not American.
How much easier it is to see something when there is no way for guilt, personal or collective, to get in the way may be what the drawings below also illustrate. They are by E. W. Kemble, the artist who illustrated every edition of Huck Finn published in Mark Twain's lifetime, and who became a specialist as he puts it in "negroes." Kemble's work appeared in several volumes in Joel Chander Harris' Uncle Remus series and in many magazines. He also collected them for books like Kemble's Coons and Comical coons. From 1885 through the first couple decades of the 20th century, white America loved his usually clownish and always stereotypical representations of blacks. The pictures he drew for an article titled "The Slave-Trade in the Congo Basin" , however, do not stereotype blacks or slaves. I think these pictures almost speak for themselves, not just about slavery but also about why it's so hard for American culture to get beyond caricatures and myths about slavery: now that Kemble is depicting slavery somewhere else, so that American whites need feel no responsibility for it, he draws slaves with human faces instead of blackface minstrel masks, and depicts their human suffering realistically. Compare these drawings to his work on Huck Finn, or the other Kemble illustrations further down this page, and see if you don't see the same thing yourself.¹¹
In his times, the words and pictures in Mark Twain's books were read and seen in a very different cultural context than ours. To appreciate the way his work re-presents slavery it helps to see the kinds of images Americans were familiar with from other popular sources. The examples below afford only a few glimpses into that scene, but I've chosen them for their representativeness.

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