The Controversial American Classic:  “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”

I first read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in tenth grade, with sighs and much boredom.  I disliked American literature and anyway as a child had read Twain. I was an Anglophile devoted to Jane Austen,  Lynne Reid Banks, John Fowles,  Doris Lessing, and  D. H. Lawrence.  “Oh, God, this is in dialect,” I whispered.

“And there is rafting,” my friend said.

We were not athletic.

So many classics are really intended for mature adults. We did not appreciate the brilliant rhetorical devices in Twain’s sentences at that difficult age. Check out the comic repetition of the phrases “didn’t rightly know” and “a good deal of instinct” in the following passage,.  This use of repetition and inversion is chiasmus, an  ABBA sequence of words.

 I didn’t rightly know what to say, because I didn’t know rightly whether the boat would be coming up or down.  But I go a good  deal on instinct; and my instinct said she would be coming down- from down toward  New Orleans.

Readers change. I fell in love with Huckleberry Finn when I reread it at age 20. I was so enthusiastic that I babbled to my Greek professor about a creation myth in Huckleberry Finn and the chiasmus. I urged my friends to read it. Not all had read it in high school, but that was the place where almost everybody lost interest in it.

Many years later, I read it for a book group.  By that time it had somehow or other become a controversial text, and some Black women in the suburbs were protesting its inclusion in the curriculum, objecting to the image of Jim and the “n” word.

There is a long history of censure and censorship of Huckleberry Finn, according to PBS American Experience. It was banned for the first time “shortly after its publication in 1885, white librarians in Concord, Massachusetts deemed it ‘trash’ and ‘suitable only for the slums.'”

Twain is, of course, using historically accurate dialect when he uses the word “nigger,” reflecting the language used in Missouri in the 19th century. In “Explanatory,” at the beginning of the book, he writes,

In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect; the ordinary ‘Pike-County’ dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guess-work; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.

The use of dialect is one of the most striking aspects of Twain’s narrative. It bursts with archaic “I reckon”s and double negatives : “I don’t take no stock in dead people.” And it can be beautiful as well as irresistibly funny: “Well, we swarmed along down the river road, just carrying on like wild cats; and to make it more scary, the sky was darking up…”

The women in my book group were adamant about the necessity of reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in high school. It was a tradition… it must be done. As for the image of Jim, one woman claimed that he was a Christ figure.

I love Jim, but do not interpret his character in that way.

I do not know whether it is taught in the schools now. These book-banning battles are waged all over the country now.

All I can say is that white girls aren’t necessarily ready to read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in high school, either.