Bleeping Mark Twain?

Abstract

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is perhaps the most famous, most beloved, and most controversial novel featuring a prominent black character and written by a white author. Extremely popular in its own day and in the decades that followed, Mark Twain’s novel became one of the most holy of the canonical texts of American literature once mid-twentieth-century critics discovered in it the key to the American experience and an uplifting illustration of the American spirit. The influential critic Lionel Trilling, in The Liberal Imagination, asserted that Huck Finn and Jim formed a “community of saints,” and Trilling effectively established the novel as national monument (104, 106). However, the eupeptic effect of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn on the body politic is not as indisputable as many of its apologists would have it, and during the last thirty years, controversies have arisen over use of the novel in the classroom, particularly given the frequent appearance in the book of a well-known and offensive racial epithet. The story is presented as a meandering and quixotic tale of a poor, white boy and his boon companion, a runaway slave, as they make their way down river, deeper and deeper into the slaveholding South, until they reach a problematic but seemingly happy ending, in which the adventures come to an abrupt end with Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn playing a dangerous game with Jim. It is then discovered that, unbeknownst to both Huck and his companion, Jim had already been set free, so he was not a runaway slave after all, at which point Jim almost disappears from the text entirely.