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| Cry Tom, Cry Name: Chris Haag Date: 2006-04-17 21:50:42 Link to this Comment: 19065 |
I am crying for you Tom. I am not crying because I am sad you are dead, or sad that you are gone. I am sad that you can't see the tears you should be crying. I am sad that you can't see them chains you remove are being replaced with others. Run Tom. It's not time to try and understand.
Last week, I learned that Charles had died. I had attended Quaker Meeting with him for eight years. He was always one of the older ones in the group. He was in the group that was a little old for me to be able to play with, or relate to, but still up for inclusion.
Most of the time I want to love Christ, I want to love God. I want to be able to open my heart to the light of Christ and realize through him all happiness is possible. I believe in Jesus commandment to love one another , I believe heaven exists not for the select, but in the hearts of all men . I believe in the Word and the word was god. I believe that, most of the time.
Charles was the liberal intellectual before we even knew what that meant. He was overly nice in a time when it was lame to be nice. He was anti-corporation when we all were demanding to go to MacDonald's. His maturity was far beyond ours, but saying that he couldn't quote lines from the Simpson's as easily as I could, I didn't think as much of him. Thinking back, he probably could, but just choose not to.
You say the lord han't forgotten you . You say god is everywhere . You say yes mas'r to a man who is the devil . You tell others that the lord will save you, but now you lay beaten and dead. Maybe if you suffer with him, you will also reign. But you won't understand that you throne is in front of you. Take the salvation of Eliza and George. They are together and happy. They had so much faith in their faith, that they knew when to violate it. Their betrayal set them free, but it was because they knew their betrayal was what god wanted of them. Your devotion is your exploitation.
After I went to High School my parents stopped making me go to meeting, and I stopped seeing Charles. I would occasionally see him at concerts, but nothing more than a few hellos. He was usually busy hanging out with a group of friends, and I would be waiting to get back to mine. Hearing he was going to Cornell was anything out of the ordinary. A lot of smart kids from my community end up going to good schools, and I had always thought he was real smart. I was happy for him less in that it was unexpected, but in the way that it you are pleased when your expectations line up with what you actually happens.
I can't look at you now Jesus. I am a Christian, but that doesn't mean I ain't having my doubts. There is just too much now, too much to try and explain. No, I don't go to you for the easy of explanation. I turn to you because I love you and I know you. But now, I look at tears and suffering for no reason. I see lives destructing themselves and smiles fading like memories. There is no order to this chaos, there is no way to justify why some hurt has to be. The whip stings and doesn't make we want to open my arms. I am not running for good from you Jesus, I'll be back soon enough. I just can't stand to be with you right now.
The next time I saw him, it was like seeing a ghost. I had heard he was taking time off from school, but a lot of people take time off. At times during college I thought about coming back home for a while to re-center myself and come back to school with a new sense of direction. That wasn't why Charles came home. He had a darkness that was cast over him, with a glazed over look in his eye like he had looked over the edge and seen the dark hell that existed on the other side. The look on his face was not of a man that was seeking any re-direction, but only some air to breath.
I am not being whipped by no Simon Legree. My wife and children are not being sent to other slave owners to be raped and abused. I don't know that pain, your pain. How do you see your child be ripped from your arms, and be content to replace it with the idea of faith. Faith is allowing Simon to Kill you Tom. Your Faith won't end slavery. Your faith is allowing you to live in a world that is horrible. You are taking the Devil as your master as you believe the darkness we live in is light . Stop loving the Darkness tom.
I found out later from my father that Charles had become a Paranoid Schizophrenic. In High School he had been diagnosed with Bi-Polar disorder. I had not been made aware of this, partly because I did not see him very often, and partly because it was such a common thing. To put your worries in every person with bi-polar, you wouldn't have time for anything else. People can take their medication and appear perfectly normal. Hell, there are enough people with it that it becomes also normal to have it. Anyways, after leaving Durham, he went through a hard transition. I don't know if he got into hard drugs, or just the environmental change was too much for him, but his condition got worse. I don't know if the Schizophrenia had always been there, just looming in the corners of his mind, or if it came out of a hard intense experience. All I know is that when he came home, he was nothing like he had every been.
Tom, you never complain about how he treats you. I don't think you even understand your faith. Your faith should be able understanding your escape. God has parted the red sea for you, but you continue to wait for more signs. Quit your sin of negligence toward yourself. It is killing you. It is killing your children. It is killing me. Tom just get up and run.
I saw him the month before he decided to die. He was out eating with his parents, just like I was with mine. I learned latter that it was odd to see his parents out like this, saying that they had divorced a few years before. As I sat with my parents eating our barbeque sandwiches, talking about what the Duke backcourt needed to go to sure up their defense, I saw that Charles' parents were talking with one another as well. They were laughing about some issues, probably discussing how tough work had been that month, thinking of what might happen once the weather was going to get better. Charles didn't say anything. He sat there eating and staring. He had headphones on, but I don't even know if he was listening to anything. On his end of the table, he existed in a totally different world than the one his parents existed in. I think neither world was really aware of the other, or the ability to interact with one another. I don't think it was out of negligence or lack of trying. I think it had come to a point when it just got to be too hard.
Peter denied you Christ for a reason. You knew he would deny you. He didn't deny you because he hated you, he denied you because he loved you. The only way he could keep loving you was to try and forget this moment. Seeing you suffer on the Cross is too much for anyone to deal with. We have to deny some moments in time so that we can go on believing that the world is a place with so much beauty. Some moments are too horrible, to powerful for us to be able to conquer with an idea like faith. You knew, you understood. That's why you forgave him, and that is why you die alone for us.
I was at work when I heard about his death. Before I even looked at the email, I knew what it was about. No subject line with his name in it could be anything positive. I found out later that he had tried a couple times before, and that this time, he went missing on Duke's Campus for a few days. His medication made him very depressed and so sedated that he was completely unable to function in daily life. He need others to help him with basic tasks and normal functioning. While he was a rational thinking person, he was a shell of his previous self. However, when he stopped taking the medicine, the depression lingered, and he no longer was a rational person. He was not mental able to distinguish between life and death, and found the most sense in trying to commit suicide.
Don't try and tell us that this is any different, Jesus. Tom is carrying your cross, taking your lashes. You know he don't deserve that. No man deserves that. You can have the world spit in your face and take it as your baptism. But that's cause you ain't no man. Tom isn't suppose to be you Jesus. Golgotha isn't shaking with his death, the curtain ain't ripped. Please Jesus, tell him he is free. Tell him he can curse your name and cry. That what he needs now Jesus. He needs it, because he loves you.
At the Memorial Service, my father found that Charles had overdosed on drugs, and died in the midst of trying to burry himself. Ironically, it was a failed attempt at what he had been trying to go for the past four years. People could only remember the past few years of Charles' life. But it wasn't Charles' life they were remembering, it was all of the people who had been hurt along the way, all of the sadness the community had experienced as a result of this horrible disease. People wanted this over, wanted this to not have happened. It also seemed as if the earlier memories of his achievements only made this experience harder. There was no celebration of a person's life at this moment. Only a sad and realized sigh of relief.
Tom, yous a free now. Take Cassy hand and run. Just run. Before you go, cry a little. You gotta cry because God done you wrong. But don't cry cause you hate him, cry cause you love. You will reign someday, you just need to know what reignin' look like.
| Children as Teachers: the possibility of a new soc Name: Erin Bagus Date: 2006-04-18 21:46:12 Link to this Comment: 19088 |
Huck – abandoned and adopted repeatedly – has never had anyone to really teach him the morality and social order of his community; what he has learned, he has discovered mostly on his own. Lacking anyone to explain to him the reasoning behind what he experiences or hears, he makes up his own story or, when he can't do that, dismisses it or pretends he never encountered it. When one of his temporary guardians, Miss Watson, tries to explain an aspect of society, namely religion, she speaks to him in a metaphorical language he cannot understand. Thus, Huck still ends up making his own story in the end, which is more literal and makes sense to him. For example, Huck narrates, "Miss Watson...told me to pray everyday, and whatever I asked for I would get it. But it warn't so. I tried it. Once I got a fish-line, but no hooks. It warn't no good to me without hooks. I tried for the hooks three or four times, but somehow I couldn't make it work" (23). When he finally asks her why it isn't working for him, she tells him he's a "fool" because he didn't understood that she meant he might receive "spiritual gifts" not material things. The thought, however, still remains unclear for Huck. He says, "I couldn't make it out no way" (23).
Tom, on the other hand, has a family who has socialized him and answered all the why-questions that Huck is left to answer by himself. In Huck Finn, we don't really meet Tom's nuclear family, but we do spend the final section of the book with his extended family, who function in the same way as parents might, while allowing the boys' trick to work since – as far away relatives – they don't know what they should look like. Tom's family has taught him how he is supposed to interact with certain people and how he is supposed to feel about certain issues, therefore, he always seems to know more than Huck, that is, to be better informed. Even in the end, we discover that Tom has known all along that Jim was already free – a small bit of information that makes all the difference between playing games with and helping to save a man's life.
The task of setting Jim free in the final section of the book brings the contrast between Huck and Tom into clarity. Tom views the project as a game, which serves only to entertain him. At one point he declares that "it was the best fun he ever had in his life, and the most intellectural; ...if he only could see his way to it we would keep it up all the rest of our lives and leave Jim to our children to get out" (256). He has lost sight of Jim's humanity in the process of amusing himself, to the point that Jim has become – even worse than the property he was as a slave – nothing more than a plaything, a great toy that Tom hopes to leave to his own children. Were we to put Tom in charge of designing a new social order, perhaps we would have no more slavery in the old sense, but would the new form of it be even more terrible? I think, however, that it is important to consider the fact that Tom had in fact been greatly socialized when he came up with this free-Jim game. He is not really coming up with something new because he still sees Jim as a slave, not really human in the same way that he himself is. Tom is simply being a little boy and playing make-believe with his slave to set him free, but one could easily imagine an adult who shows as much lack of regard for another human as Tom demonstrates, owning and roughly treating slaves. In this way, I don't see him as really illustrating the creative novelty with which a child's mind might formulate a new social order. He's too far gone, too educated. Huck, on the other hand, offers some real possibilities.
We, the readers, often find Huck considering the societal morality or opinion, which he has been half-taught, and in the end deciding that, for lack of a clearer solution, he is going to rely on himself and what feels right to him or comes easiest. When considering whether or not to give Jim up, he thinks to himself:
s'pose you'd a done right and give Jim up; would you felt better that what you do now? No, says I, I'd feel bad – I'd feel just the same way I do now. Well, then, says I, what's the use of learning to do right, when it's troublesome to do right and ain't no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same? ...So I reckoned I wouldn't bother no more about it, but after this always do whichever come handiest at the time. (113)
Huck cannot reason through why he should give up Jim because he doesn't understand society's rationality of slavery. In his own solitary experiences with Jim, outside society, Tom doesn't even seem to notice his race, and even appears to see Jim as a father figure or caretaker.
Later, during another internal struggle Huck is feeling between what he knows he's supposed to do with Jim, that is turn him in, and what he feels is right. He says, "I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind...he would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me" (223). Huck's interaction with Jim and his ability to see him as a real person as well as his desire to save Jim not just for amusement's sake, but for the fact that he is human and deserves freedom, make me believe that a child like Huck could teach us adults a new way of seeing the world. He is courageous enough to let go of the morality - "moral or no moral; and as for me, I don't care shucks for the morality of it" (254) – and just do what he thinks right, no matter the consequences. He even accepts the possibility that he might be wrong, declaring, "All right, then, I'll go to hell" (223).
One issue, however, that we must deal with is the fact that Huck goes along with Tom throughout the whole ordeal of "creating difficulties" to make Jim's escape more like those Tom's read about in books. If Huck is the aspect of childhood, which might provide us with something new, he is also that part of us that doesn't dare act out, that goes along with the group even when we think it wrong or unjust. He tells Tom, "All right – I don't care where he comes out, so he comes out; and Jim don't either, I reckon" (251). Huck gives in to the ridiculous antics that Tom wants Jim to perform instead of standing up for and protecting him. I have been trying to figure out why he does that because he seems like such a creative, resourceful child; I would be more likely to guess that he might stand up for himself and what he thinks.
It occurs to me though, that Tom and Huck are each trying to place themselves in the other's situation. That is, that Tom is trying to be wild and free – without the restraints of society or family, like Huck – while Huck wants to be more logical and restrained – to fit into the society and family world of which he is not naturally a part. At the end of the book, Huck says, "But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can't stand it" (296). I would argue that it is not that Huck doesn't want to be "civilized" and become part of a family group, but rather that he doesn't know how and, unable to figure it out, he chooses to remain in the world he knows – the wilds, nature. Huck seems to envy his friend because he has been taught how to play his part in the group, because he knows the rules and how he is supposed to act.
Where does that leave us then in terms of whether or not our children can teach us how to live differently? It seems to me that Huck and Tom show us the possibility for creative thought that children have. Based solely on their own experiences of it, they see the world very differently than adults do. Sometimes, however, without instruction otherwise they can be too self-absorbed and disregard the well being of others – like Tom does when designing his game to "free Jim." Everyone for himself certainly will not work as a societal order because it would result in total chaos. Also, with Huck, we see that children seem to crave some direction about how they are supposed to fit into the world. If it might be possible to somehow allow more of a reciprocal relationship between the children's creative imagination and the adult's mature, experienced guidance, maybe we could arrive at a middle path. Can we somehow learn to let our children teach us, while we also help them to shape and grow their new ideas?
| What Was I Thinking? Name: Angeldeep Date: 2006-04-24 13:46:58 Link to this Comment: 19134 |
Now I have read a bit since we last met, I read quite a bit in fact. I read all those books that Tom used to tell us of, with stories of robbers and kidnappers and then some others. After all these years I even read "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" again for I was reading it to my son, so I could have him learned as I was. See, I changed some of my ways after all. I took to Aunt Sally's house after I was out for the Territory for a while. I began to stand the sivilized life and got used to it and settled down. So when my son was born, I let him play but tried to give him some sivilizaition too, at least enough to be a man who could read and write, and still keep cheerful.
Well, why I am writing again you ask? Why it's to make clear some of the things that were put in the last book is why. Or to share some of my thoughts actually. Now when I was reading my book to Huck Jr., I was right surprised by so many things that I wrote about and can't imagine why I thought them then. I will start from the start of the book. Now first you met me, I was living with the widow and sneaking out to get away from the sivilized world she was putting me in, trying to learn me so many things I didn't care about. I remember the time I stole away to meet Tom Sawyer and some of the other boys to form a band of robbers. We were so excited and darn sure that we could do all those things that Tom had read in the books and told us about. Now, I've read and lived a lot since that day and I can tell you, life ain't like the books. Everything doesn't work out with lots of adventure and still come to a happy ending. I read now the talk we had about robbing people and maybe even ransoming some people. I've found out now what ransoming really is, so when Huck Jr. asked me to explain, I could tell him it's to hold people for money, till someone pays for them to take them away. Now, back then we blindly followed Tom's every idea, even though we didn't really understand any one thing he was talking about. That wasn't never the right thing to do, and yet we played along with Tom and did what he said. Why sometimes his crazy ideas about the books was darn hurtful and I've learned since that its no way to live life, especially when you is all grown up. Now as it seems to me, books are meant to be a way to read about things you haven't done in your life, and sometimes you should be out there living your life instead of reading them books and trying to get something from them to fill you life up. But still they aren't written so we as boys can go out and rob and kill innocent people. That just ain't right, and that's not what them books is for at all. But Tom Sawyer would never see that.
Now Tom is another thing I need to be explaining. When I was a boy, Tom was but the best playmate to have. He was always looking to play something, do something adventurous and he would also get away with most all he did. I had always wanted to be quite like him in his playing ways, and all through my tale of my adventures, whenever I'd play something, I would pat myself on the back when I could say 'Why Tom Sawyer couldn't have done it better.' He was always best at the schemes that got us into so many scrapes and out of them too. Now don't get me wrong, the ways he taught me about being creative with the stories I can tell saved me many a time during my adventures, and it saved Jim too when those people almost caught us on the raft the one time. But, like I just said before, the thing with Tom Sawyer is that he ain't got no idea of where life stopped being like all those adventure books he kept reading. And that was part of the problem of growing up with Tom Sawyer around, for mostly Tom just didn't grow up.
Now Huck Jr. thought Tom was a right amazing man and wondered why he didn't come by more often. I had to explain to Huck Jr. how sometimes Tom Sawyer neglected to think about others and did them harm though his heart is not bad at all. Tom had a talent with words, why, he would tell me of all these plans and I would most always go along with him, because he'd always say that it would all turn out to be fine in the end. But now I wonder how I could go along with everything that Tom said when we were boys. Take the time, in the end of the book, when Tom was to help Jim escape so he could finally be a free man. I went along with his plans because Jim had been a darn good man while we were on the raft together, floating along and away to our freedom. I wanted to help poor ol' Jim to be free just as much Jim did himself. But in the scramble to run away, Tom got shot and Jim was captured again. It was only then that Tom came out with it and told us all that Miss Watson had died and left Jim a free man two whole months ago. All he was doing when planning the escape was looking to have another one of his book adventures, with guard dogs stopping his way and lots of other obstacles between him and Jim getting to freedom. I read those adventures now and ask myself, what I was thinking wanting to be like this boy who only thought of his amusement and played with poor Jim's life while doing it. Sure, you say that everything did turn out okay, but what if it hadn't and poor Jim had been hurt or killed in Tom's games? See, nothing good comes of those books if all you do is read them and think them to be what your life should be like. Silly Tom, I only hope that he would learn from his silliness and grow up after all, at least enough to stop playing tricks on everyone. I would not let Huck Jr. go play with a Tom Jr. if it meant more playing for no reason but the play.
What I wanted to say here was that I was but a boy who didn't know much better than to just play along with Tom. When I was by myself, I would think better of things. Why, I even tried to help those murders on the shipwreck, for who knows that might have been me on another day, and they didn't do nothing to me, so why should I have been hurting them? Tom would have left them just to play and that isn't right, and I wanted to have Huck Jr. and all other children to see that.
It wasn't just in Tom's ways that I was a boy who didn't see everything quite right. Jim was another man that I didn't see quite as he really was. Because of the widow and others who learned me to think what I did, I always thought Jim to be a simple man. Part of that was also probably that I was a boy and didn't quite understand all things in the world around me. All through our trips together I saw that Jim knew the things that were right from wrong. He also was wise and good hearted, and surprised me every time when I saw just how good a man he was. And yet, right at the beginning of the book, when Tom came to visit the widow's house to get me, and decided to play something on Jim, I believed that Jim really thought that witches flew him around and left him there. I known Jim a long time since, and I know that he might not know about everything, but he is not a stupid man as Tom took him to be. When I was reading this to Huck Jr. he was delighted that we fooled Jim so, but it got me thinking, had we really fooled Jim, or had Jim fooled us all along? Hadn't he been the one who got a big name and glory from the story, who told it anew every time he told it, saying the witches took him further and further away? Why, people came from all over just to look at him, and respected him so, and yet we thought of him just as a silly old man we'd fooled? I don't think that I was thinking all that straight then, or he just had us boys fooled quite well. Shows that there are things that a boy would miss but a man probably wouldn't.
All said and done, there aren't many things I did as a boy that most any boy wouldn't do. When I last wrote I was young and wrote only of what I saw and understood to be happening around me. But time has learned me that I saw many a thing wrong, so here I am, writing one more time, to set them straight. I'm rotten glad its done once and for all, I don't think I'm going to be writing again. Too much trouble.
Works Cited:
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Ed. Thomas Cooley. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998.
| The Adventure of Childhood: Reexamining Huckleberr Name: Margaret M Date: 2006-04-27 09:02:21 Link to this Comment: 19158 |
Welcome to The Adventure of Childhood: Reexamining Huckleberry Finn!
"I've been there before." An Introduction to the Course.
Many of you may have read the novel in previous classes in which the focus was on the issues of freedom, slavery, and race. In this course we will be examining Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn through the lens of family and childhood. We will be using psychological theory and history to examine the novel. Three units will cover the topics of the history of childhood, psychological disorders, and attachment theory. The course work consists of two papers and a group project. In addition, students will be required to find at least one outside resource and present it to the class. Students will be assigned days to present during the first week of class. The course work was created to help students explore and examine Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It will require students to leave their comfort zones and reexamine the familiar text. Students who show they are willing to try and remain open minded will do better in this class.
Before we begin to discuss the novel, we will have a discussion about the issue of race. The novel contains a word that some students may feel uncomfortable using. On the second day of class we will be taking an anonymous vote regarding the class use of the word. If one person votes "no" we will not be saying the word out loud. We will then discuss as a class how we would like to deal with the word when we come across it in our discussions. Over the course of several years, classes have chosen to say the word, replace the word with another word, or take a pause. This is not a course regarding the issue of race, but we will be spending the second day of class talking about the issue of race in the novel. We are doing this because it is an important issue in the novel and so that people who feel the need to voice their opinion about the use of race in the novel have an opportunity to do so. After this second day, class time will be devoted to examining the novel through the lens of childhood and family.
Unit One: Childhood: Now and Then
The first unit will enable the students to understand the historical context of the novel and will encourage students to begin to think about the similarities and differences between childhood then and today. The unit is titled "Childhood: Now and Then." At the beginning of the unit, students will be given time in class to write about and share one of their favorite childhood moments. During this unit students will be required to bring in outside resources they find interesting concerning the historical context of the novel. This unit is flexible due to the fact that different students have different interests. Some years, the class has chosen to focus on the different roles of women in childrearing, while others have focused on the role of religion in raising a child. There are many interesting topics to discuss in this unit and our discussion will be as good as the articles that students bring in. For those of you who are unsure in what you may be interested, we will be brainstorming a list during the first day of this unit and you can always come and talk to me if you are completely stumped. The goal of this unit is to learn about the ways in which childhood has changed over time.
At the end of this unit, students will write a paper relating childhood then and now. The paper consists of two parts. For the first part, students have two options. They may rewrite one of the scenes from the novel as though it was occurring today or they may rewrite their favorite childhood memory as though it were occurring in the era of Huck Finn. These scenes should not exceed 5 pages in length and you must attach a copy of what you are rewriting (the original scene in the book or a copy of your favorite childhood memory exercise from the beginning of the unit). For the second part of the paper, students will compare their rewrite to the original scene. They should focus on the differences and similarities between the two time periods in which the same event is taking place. Good papers will explain what the students chose to change/keep the same specific aspect of the event. Great papers will take this a step further and explain why they made these decisions in regards to historical context. The goal of this paper is to encourage students to more fully understand the differences between childhood today and childhood in the era of Huck Finn.
Unit Two: ADHD and CD
The second unit will focus on the concepts of disorders. We will be specifically looking at ADHD (attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder) and CD (conduct disorder). Many people believe that the character of Huck Finn has ADHD and/or CD. In this unit students will learn about these disorders and the concept of disorders in general. To begin this unit, students will be reading Richters and Cicchetti's article "Mark Twain meets DSM-III-R: Conduct disorder, development, and the concept of harmful dysfunction." This article will be the basis of this unit. We will be discussing and brainstorming about what we think a disorder is. Students will be encouraged to come up with examples of behavior that could be interpreted as a disorder in one society, but not in another. The article also deals with the issue of context. It proposes that we should look at the context of not only society, but of the person. We will discuss Huck's personal as well as social context and examine whether he has a disorder. During this unit, a clinical psychologist will be coming to talk to the class. He or she will be explaining how they make diagnoses, (what a person with ADHD and CD looks like) and will be discussing the issue of disorder with the class. Over the years, students have said this was perhaps the most interesting day of class, so please try not to miss it!
At the end of this unit, students will write a 5-page paper. For this paper, students will argue whether they believe Huck Finn has a disorder. They will need to explain which disorder(s) he has/doesn't have and prove their diagnoses using the text. Please note that there is no right or wrong answer. The goal of this paper is for students to examine the issue of disorders, contexts, and apply what they have learned to the novel.
Unit Three: Attachment Theory
The third and final unit deals with attachment theory. Attachment theory is a theory about the different ways that children form attachments with their parents. We will be discussing four different styles of attachment. The first is secure attachment. This is the ideal attachment style. A child who has a secure attachment to their mother will happily explore when the mother is present, be upset when the mother leaves, and happy when she returns. The second style we will cover is anxious-ambivalent insecure attachment. A child with this style of attachment is anxious when exploring when the mother is present, be extremely upset when the mother returns, and resistant and resentful when the mother returns. We will also be talking about the anxious-avoidant insecure attachment style. A child with anxious-avoidant insecure attachment style will not explore much and will show little emotion when the mother leaves or returns. The last attachment style we will be covering is the disorganized attachment style. This is not so much a style as it is a lack of a cohesive style.
At the end of this unit, students will be using the attachment styles to reexamine the novel in a group project. Students will be divided into four groups. Each group will be assigned to present on a different attachment style. The project consists of a paper and a brief presentation. The paper has three parts. For the first part they must write a brief 1-2 page introduction about their assigned attachment style. These should include background information about Attachment Theory, information about their specific attachment style, and what a child who has that attachment style looks like. For this part, students must cite two outside resources and one of them must be a research article (We will be going over how to find research articles in class). For the second part of the paper, students will chose a scene between Jim and Huck from the novel and reexamine it with regards to their specific assigned attachment style. In other words, they will interpret the scene as though Huck and Jim had their specific attachment style. This part of the paper should be between 4-6 pages long. For the last part of the paper, the students will examine the novel as a whole through the lens of their assigned attachment style. They will need to reflect on how the meaning of the novel changes when they examine it through their attachment style. This should be between 5-7 pages long. The students will also make a 15 minute presentation on the last day of class in which students will teach the class to look at the novel as though Jim and Huck shared their specific attachment style. The goal of the group project is to gain a greater understanding of attachment theory, a specific attachment style, and how the same novel can be interpreted differently through different lenses.
At the end of the group project, students will be asked to write an informal reflection 1-2 page paper about how their experience working in a group relates to the concepts of groups presented in the novel. These reflections should not refer to group members by name and are not a place to voice opinions about specific members of your group. The reflection is meant to help the students recognize how groups behave and how they themselves behave in a group. Good reflections will be ones that examine both the positives and negatives to group and personal behavior.
"The End, Yours Truly Huck Finn."
I hope that at the end of the course we can all, me included, say that we have learned something from each other. I also hope that you will have all gained a new perspective of Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and of family and childhood.
| Numbers Not Part Of The Answer Name: Catherine Date: 2006-04-28 00:10:43 Link to this Comment: 19171 |
My matrix isn't the same. It's...it's... broken. The numbers aren't in vertical columns winking at me but they're slanted and misshapen. There are all these gaps in the sequence that reveal something underneath them... they look like... words; printed words on a page. This image is new, slightly disturbing, yet not unexpected. My matrix should be broken, not entirely, but slightly damaged. It may seem possible to apply Hess's Law or Gram-Schmidt's process to situations in novels but I'm missing an essential part of the reading process, finding myself in the pages. My mind just tries so hard to find more dimensions in novels than were intentioned, dimensions that cross into the x and y axis planes. Maybe I should focus on putting myself into the plane of the pages instead? I had this debate with myself while I was in the process of reading Huck Finn. I found that the concepts and situations in which Huck as well as the other characters find themselves are familiar to me... I've encountered them in a linear algebra and chemistry classroom. This time I didn't put Huck or Jim in a seat in front of Professor Kasius, I put myself on the raft... with my textbook of course... I just can't forget that. I found my experiences within the pages, I started the problem along with Huck but my solutions did not concur.
From the very first page Huck wades his feet in the murky water, I knew the Mississippi River and myself, with a plethora of mathematical experience, had much in common. That river where "you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there's a snag there in a swift current which breaks on it" (135), is meant to symbolize Huck and Jim's freedom and adventure into known but unknown territory. Despite this liberating notion, the pair of troublemakers is not entirely free from the evils and societal influences that lie along the river banks. The real world intrudes onto the raft; the river floods, Huck and Jim are separated at points in the narrative and they are in contact with criminals who they cannot just let be but have to "hunt up their boat and set her drifting down the river so these fellows can't get away from the wreck" (80). It was only after I finished the novel that I realized, I was traveling down my own Mississippi. I started on calm waters, taking Sequential I math and not receiving anything less than 100% on every test. Everyone thinks the waters will be steady until you hit a place where the water velocity increases and leads to the waterfall. My waterfall (which can be named Ms. Kalinowska) happened first semester of my freshman year in high school, sequential II math. After "plummeting" grades, I reached a steady point where I mastered the material and waded through the waters. Of course, at times, I used the quadratic formula and made a mess of a sheet of paper when I should have realized that x represented an insignificant number and disregarded it... here we go again. However, the Mississippi always fit into my arithmetical microcosm; I didn't have to make it fit.
I was introduced to Huckleberry Finn at the age of sixteen and made him a close companion. Why wouldn't I want a best friend that had been to places I had only seen in "National Geographic"? The only difference between Huck and myself was the fact that "nigger" never had and would never be in my vocabulary. But I've grown up... Huck towards the end of the novel becomes Tom Sawyer, his mind-blowing best friend. Huck does not correct Aunt Sally when she calls him Tom Sawyer in fact he "told them more about [his] family- [he] mean[t] the Sawyer family-than ever happened to any six Sawyer families... Being Tom Sawyer was easy and comfortable" (233). For that span of time he was under Aunt Sally and Uncle Silas' eye, Huck took on Tom's mastermind and above all, his reputation. Just two weeks ago I attended a linear algebra problem session and found myself in a similar situation. A young woman walked into the room, took a seat beside me, and told me she needed assistance with her homework. She elaborated about her struggles with the first three questions... wait... those first three... the ones that I found the easiest? Well, she had missed the last two classes and didn't know that the class was given a sheet that explained how to find orthonormal bases for different sized spanning sets. I subsequently proceeded to explain the solutions to the first questions feeling just like Huck. I pretended to be a master of bases when I was really just a follower... a follower of the rexo. I didn't correct the woman when she said I was smart enough to understand the minute I'm taught. I basked in the glory... then the glow faded from my cheeks. I swallowed my pride and showed her the sheet... she was grateful but I turned red. That's where Huck Finn diverges from my path. Huck never stops being Tom Sawyer. He may tell everyone else his real name is Huck but inside he is Tom, living that lie. I was shocked when Tom explains his elaborate plan to free Jim, "He can have a rope ladder; we can tear up our sheets and make him a rope ladder easy enough. And we can send it to him in a pie" (247). Huck replies, "Tom Sawyer- if we go tearing up our sheets to make Jim a rope ladder, we're going to get into trouble with Aunt Sally, just as sure as you're born" (248). Yes Huck, reject complication and confusion like me... wait... "Well, all right, Tom, fix it your own way" (248). No! I need you to make your own choice Huck. Please, don't let me be ashamed of you, I made you my literary best friend. Those words of Huck I can't process algebraically... it's not a question I would even attempt to solve.
I was at the point in the novel when, like an analytical conundrum, I look for a drastic change, specifically I look for a metamorphosis in Huck's attitude towards Jim. When will he stop playing Tom's game and realize Jim is a person, with the word "black" in front of "person" unnecessary. As the reader I was accustomed to Huck's ambiguity towards Jim half-way through the novel when he discusses his letter to Miss Watson about his raft companion, "I was stealing a poor old woman's nigger that hadn't ever done me no harm, and now was showing me there's One that's always on the lookout and ain't agoing to allow no such miserable doings to go only just so fur and no further, I most dropped in my tracks I was so scared" (222). However, I am at the third to last page and Tom has just revealed he knew all along Jim was free. Huck's response: "Tom Sawyer had gone and took all the trouble and bother to set a free nigger free! And I couldn't even understand, before, until that minute and that talk, how he could help a body set a nigger free with his bringing-up" (292). Did I miss something? Huck, at this stage, is still using the word "nigger"? Say something! Come to a realization! Think back to everything Jim has done for you, are you still going to use that word and not chastise Tom at all? Whenever I reach a conclusion to a problem that has no solution the first thing I do is reevaluate my work to find where I went wrong. Sometimes there is no mistake and I must research further but I always reevaluate the previous steps. With Huck there was no self-reflection, no lesson learned, no further contemplating. Again, I am left with a similar problem with a different elucidation.
As a reader of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I've been taken on an exciting journey. Like another author I have had the privilege of being familiar with, Twain does leave questions unanswered. Should I take this text seriously? Or is this the ultimate joke for all those writers who attempt to tell rich, lesson-filled stories? My instinct tells me that Twain may have had both in mind but that question is an area that is off-limits for my math mind to solve. Hess's Law will not fit, Gram-Schmidt's process cannot be applied. Numbers can only go so far in crossing the uncrossed "t"s in a text but they can help to relate better to the characters and the situations in which they are interred. I know "what counts."
| The Great Escape: Huck Finn's Escape From Social C Name: Catherine Date: 2006-04-29 10:34:40 Link to this Comment: 19183 |
Often the women Huck and Jim encounter, especially the Widow Douglas, Miss Watson, Aunt Polly and Aunt Sally, are the embodiment of the very restrictions the two are trying to escape. For Huck the women represent the shackles of society he is fleeing and they place his freedom in jeopardy. In this paper I will attempt to examine the connection between the woman in the novel and freedom. Huck's resistance to the conformity even his friend, Tom Sawyer, has little problems with could be viewed as reckless. Considering it through the lens of Ralph Waldo Emerson, however, Huck's actions seem rational and essential.
Although they only appear in the first few chapters of the novel, the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson are extremely central to the story. Perhaps more so than any other character in the book they represent civilization and attempt to conform Huck into a socially acceptable individual. Throughout the rest of the book, Huck considers the Widow and Miss Watson in his important decisions in order to determine what his moral course of action should be. Huck moved in with the two women after he and his best friend, Tom Sawyer found treasure hidden by robbers. The transition was difficult for Huck; his father was a drunk who preferred for Huck to act uncivilized. Suddenly Huck was forced to follow rules that made no sense. Even the differences between right and wrong seem startling to him. Miss Wilson tells Huck he must behave if he wants to get into heaven, but from her descriptions it sounds like a place he probably doesn't want to end up anyway. What the two women see as deviant behavior he sees as ordinary and harmless.
It is clear that Huck does not think highly of the civilization and views it only as a pointless exercise and a form of entrapment. He can't stand being confined in house and wearing starchy clothes. His life at the Widow's is constantly full of little rebellions; he leaves in the middle of the night, plays hooky and smokes his pipe. Later, after his father kidnaps him, Huck begins to realize how much he hates being civilized. He states, " I didn't see how I'd ever got to like it so well at the widow's, where you had to wash, and eat on a plate, and comb up, and go to bed and get up regular, and be forever bothering over a book and have old Miss Watson peeking at you all the time" (Twain, p.37). Huck's concept of civilization is an interesting one. His descriptions highlight the fact that the rules we follow to conform to society are flawed and, at times, absurd. Where is the sense in being forbidden from smoking a pipe while the Widow has a snuffbox? How can civilization frown upon Huck's cussing and allow for his father to beat him with little intervention from the law? Emerson reflects Huck's idea when he states, "if I am the Devil's child I will live with the devil... Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this" (Emerson, p.3). When Huck flees his father's cabin, he is not only escaping a dangerous situation he is gaining his freedom.
This freedom, however, is constantly under threat. In order for Huck to escape the civilized life everyone must think he is dead. It is significant that it is a woman who first endangers his newfound independence. Bored one day Huck decides he wants information on what is happening in his town so he visits Mrs. Judith Loftus, pretending to be a girl. Without much difficulty she is able to see threw his ruse and reveals that a band of men were going to head over to the very island Huck and Jim were staying to look for the runaway slave. Huck realizes all his efforts to leave his past behind might be lost. In a panic he goes back to the island and gets Jim, and takes off running. Huck could have gotten away without Jim and, judging by his resourcefulness throughout the book, survived without him. Yet, without a thought of the consequences helps a runaway slave escape.
Huck's actions symbolize the rejection of the collective values and norms women like Miss Watson and the Widow symbolize. He is well aware society will perceive him as a reckless renegade and spurn him. When discussing the problem with his best friend Tom Sawyer, he states, "I know what you'll say. You'll say it is a dirty low down business; but what if it is? –I'm low down" (Twain, p.255). It is interesting that Huck's greatest moments of guilt occur when he is thinking about the Widow and Miss Watson precisely because aiding Jim goes against all the civilized laws they tried to instill in him. When Jim and Huck thought they were within sight of Cairo the full ramifications of his actions hit him. Jim is his friend but is really willing to help set him free? Huck tries to use the thought of Miss Watson to figure out what he should do, should he hurt her by helping Jim get free or betray proper social norms (Twain, p.107).
It is clear at this point that Huck is not yet fully liberated from civilization. He states his dilemma was that as long as he could hide his role in the escape from Miss Watson he won't be in disgrace. He doesn't want to injure Miss Watson but nor can he fully conform to the beliefs she represents. As long as he continues to figure the reaction of women like Miss Watson and the Widow in his actions he is still imprisoned by their civilization. After much inner turmoil, Huck decides to do what feels right to him, to do what will give him the most peace. In many ways this appears to be what Emerson is advocating, "If I am the Devil's child, I will then live from the devil. No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this: the only right is what is after my constitution: the only wrong what is against it" (Emerson, p.3).
The issue comes to a head when he must decide is he will steal Jim from slavery again. The importance of his decision is reflected in Huck's bemusement at Tom's quick acquiescence to steal Jim out of slavery-again, "Here was a boy that was respectable, and was well brung up; and had a character to lose; and folks at home who had characters...and yet here he was, without more pride, or rightness, or feeling than to stoop to this business" (Twain, p.263-264). From what he has understood from Miss Watson he recognizes it will mean the difference between going to heaven or hell. It will forever solidify his place in society. In the end he chooses to reject civilization, this time for good, "never thought no more of reforming. I shoved the whole idea from my head; and said I would take up wickedness again, which was my line, and the other warn't" (Twain, p.242). This speech is important because it highlights Huck's ultimate freedom. His struggle over conscience for Jim was the last tie he had with his previous life, the morals the women tried to instill in him. While society might indeed view Huck as a rebel, Emerson might argue that his actions were actually necessary. In his piece, Self-Reliance, Emerson argues, "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint stock company, in which the members agree... to surrender the liberty and culture" (Emerson, p.3). One might argue that since Tom was willing to help Huck he was also rejecting society's value. However, since Tom knew beforehand that Jim was already free, this does not seem likely. From this point on, Huck does not care how anyone else will perceive him. He is no longer confined by the rules that govern everyone else.
At the end of the novel Huck is once again given the opportunity to reenter society. Again women, Aunt Polly and Aunt Sally, represent the choice between a civilized life and freedom. Aunt Polly has curtailed his freedom by informing Sally that he is really Huck Finn and not Tom Sawyer. Sally plans to eliminate his freedom all together with her threats to adopt Huck. Again, Huck decides he wants his freedom, "Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can't stand it" (Twain, p.328). So instead he decides to go on another adventure with Tom, this time to the Indian Territory. In The adventures of Huckleberry Finn it is clear that women appear to be the embodiment of the enslavement of society. Huck's resistance to the social norms the women represent and try to make him conform to is a resistance to imprisonment. His time floating down the river with Jim was not just an escape from a difficult situation, but the acquisition of the very freedom all of us long for.
Works Cited:
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Self-Reliance. Taken from the Website:
http://www.emersoncentral.com/selfreliance.htm
Twain, Mark. The adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Ogborn, Jane ed. Cambridge University Press Edition: Cambridge, 1995.
| Teaching Huck Finn Name: Laine Edwa Date: 2006-04-29 10:53:50 Link to this Comment: 19184 |
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1996.
| Misadventures of Jim Name: Adina Halp Date: 2006-04-29 13:35:06 Link to this Comment: 19186 |
The manuscript is recorded not in the dialect of southern slaves but in modern-day English. This seems to be because Jim could not write and so would have had to dictate his story to someone else. The only word used throughout the manuscript that is not in common use today (and is in fact an extremely offensive word) is the word "nigger." It seems that the author would have included that word because Jim used it so many times throughout the story and because it highlights the racial nature of this book:
...I did not sleep at all that night because Miss Watson's problem required my full attention. The next day, I was exhausted, but my work still had to be completed. As I was finishing up some of my chores in the kitchen, I heard a rustle outside. I thought it might a rat. I can remember thinking that Miss Watson would be very disturbed if she did in fact have rats in her house, when I heard the sound again. I realized that the house and Miss Watson might be in danger.
I went outside to see who was there. At first, I simply asked, "Who dah?" When no one replied and the sound continued, my worry grew. I called out, "Say—who is you? Whar is you? Dog my cats ef I didn' hear sumf'n. Well, I knows what I's gwine to do. I's gwine to set down here and listen tell I hears it agin." (18). I sat down outside.
I was not actually very worried, but I thought that I would scare anyone who was there away. I had a feeling it was Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and perhaps some of their friends; those children were always up to no good. I blamed the Sawyer kid. He was always reading those adventure novels and he didn't quite seem to grasp the difference between novels and reality. He was not a bad child, and I knew that he never really meant to hurt anyone, but he never seemed to realize that his actions had consequences.
Poor Huck idolized him. I saw him follow that boy around all the time and get himself into so much trouble; something about Tom bewitched him. The irony in all this was that Huck really had been through a lot. His mother had died, and his pap was a violent and mentally disturbed alcoholic. At the time, we thought he had died, and that was why Huck was living with the Widow in the first place, but I don't think that she could really give him the guidance he would have received in a normal family of white folks.
Tom had the luxury of a family. Unlike my own, it was a free family. His adventures always ended when he went home to the comfort of his family. He would act out these scenarios, but they would always end in a realization of just how lucky he really was. Huck did not quite seem to grasp this, and he admired Huck's sense of adventure and even his ability to cope with what Huck perceived to be real and often dangerous situations. His own life really was full of adventures. Later, he would rely on these "games" for his own survival. He would become the person who would receive the most help from whichever person on whom he was playing the game or trick.
I could relate to Huck. I remember feeling constant terror as a child, and being torn apart from my mother. When I was young, I would see other children and want to be just like them – whenever something in their lives went wrong, everything was usually sorted out in a matter of days. (Often that "sorting out" involved physically punishing me.) Huck's life as an orphan and the life that I remember having as a slave child were extremely different, but we both knew what it was like to have uncertainty and no control over our own lives. We both differed from Tom in this way that Tom would probably never understand – in a way that I hoped Tom never would understand, because it is a life that no one deserves. As long as Tom had the freedom, happiness, and structure, he could continue his adventures that always, inevitably, ended.
As these thoughts ran through my head, I began to lose focus. I was extremely tired from not having slept the night before. I must have drifted off to sleep, because when I woke up, my hat was no longer on my head. I thought it might have slipped off, but when I looked around, I saw it hanging on a limb of the tree under which I must have fallen asleep. I must have looked like quite a fool looking around like that, but a few seconds I had to laugh; it was actually really funny. I knew, then, that the intruders must have been those children. They must have thought it was really funny playing a trick on an old nigger like me. Maybe I should have been offended, but I wasn't. After all, they played tricks anyone they could find – not only niggers. They were only children, and I was glad that they had the freedom to spend their time playing those kinds of tricks on people.
When I went back into the house, I realized that some of Miss Watson's candles were missing. I knew that those children had taken them. Miss Watson was not a poor woman and she could always buy more candles, but she would still be extremely angry, and someone would have to take the blame. That someone would probably be me.
I had to think of a way to let Miss Watson know that I had not taken the candles, but I couldn't tell her what had actually happen. If she knew that Huck, Tom, and their friends had taken the candles, those children would have been in a lot of trouble. Besides, there was no saying that she would actually believe me. I could easily imagine myself being punished for putting the blame on poor, innocent children. Furthermore, I could have gotten in trouble for knowing that the robbery was taking place and for not stopping it.
As Huck would later have to do, I came up with a story for my own survival. So I "said the witches bewitched [me] and put [me] in a trance, and rode [me] all over the State, and then set [my] hat on a limb to show who had done it" (19). Of course, Miss Watson did not believe the story – no one in her right mind would have believed it. But it was so sensational that Miss Watson blamed my inability to stop the robbery on my own supposed simple-mindedness and stupidity.
She was amazed that someone would really believe that. To her, it was much less believable than the stories in her bible. (Personally, I thought that some of those stories were much more unbelievable than those I had heard and told that involved witches.) She wanted me to repeat the story to her friends, but I knew that in order to keep up the façade, I had to make the story even more sensational. So the "next time [I] told it [I] said they rode [me] down to New Orleans; and after that, every time [I] told it [I] spread it more and more, till by and by [I] said they rode [me] all over the world, and tired [me] most to death, and [my] back was all over saddle-boils." I was amazed that they actually believed me, and I "was monstrous proud about it" (19).
Even though the story changed so much every time, people really thought I believed it! I was amazed! So I got the last laugh. Sometimes it's just easier to act the way people expect you to act. If I had not continued to make up stories such as this one, the way that people saw me would have changed. In a way, the consequences of this might have been positive. Perhaps could have disproved the untrue stereotype of the superstitious happy-go-lucky nigger; but because the stereotype was false in the first place, I really think that there was very little that I could have done. (This stereotype is even more prevalent now, in 1900. People are starting to say that niggers were happy as slaves; that in slavery, our only cares were simple, and that we were treated with care by our paternal masters, who cared for us.) Instead, I was able to use my sharp wit when I needed it most, to Miss Watson's place to Jackson's Island.
...At this point, the manuscript once again becomes difficult to decipher. Here at Norton, our experts are able to gather that Jim, as he implies above, escaped to Jackson Island where he encountered Huckleberry Finn who had also escaped to the island after staging his own death. This trickery about which Jim writes continues throughout the novel. Not only does Huck trick the people he meets along the way, often for his own survival, as well as Jim's survival. For example, when he believes that Tom's Aunt Sally and Uncle Silas Phelps are going to sell Jim further south where the treatment of slaves is even crueler, he pretends that he is Tom Sawyer. When the real Tom Sawyer appears, begins to help Huck in his plan, even though he knew that Miss Watson had died two months earlier and written in her will that Jim was to be set free. Once again, Huck's adventures were survival and Tom's were for no discernible reason other than his own fun.
However, where Huck leaves Jim in the manuscript, Huck chooses to be free and to "light out for the Territory ahead of the rest" (296). Jim says that Aunt Sally was willing to adopt Huck but that the rejected the offer because he thought she was going to try to "sivilize" him. He recalls Huck telling him, "I can't stand it. I been there before." This greatly contradicts the idea that Huck's adventures were driven truly out of a need for survival and that he would not have lived such a life if he had had the choice. Perhaps Jim got it all wrong. Or maybe this is proof that human beings are multi-dimensional creatures and there were multiple driving forces behind the adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Work Cited:
Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 1884; rpt. Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Thomas Cooley. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 1999.
| Freedom is Not a Feeling: Constraining Huckleberry Name: Steph Hero Date: 2006-04-30 19:15:04 Link to this Comment: 19196 |
Traditional form: ababb rhyme
Blamed if I know what's become of the raft
I went straight out into the country a mile before I stopped –
That old fool made a trade, just stood there and laughed.
Got him home late last night, all whiskey, sin-popped
Little rascal shook us, knees flailin', sense dropped.
Haiku
Form: 5-7-5 syllables, about nature
Filled up the canoe
with water, sunk her where I
could find her again.
So I left.
Struck for the back country.
Didn't look around.
Villanelle
Form: 19 lines, five stanzas of three lines, final stanza of four lines, first and third line of the first stanza repeat alternating as the closing line of each stanza and form the last two lines of the final stanza.
I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time
I knowed I could pray now
But I didn't do it straight off
Thinking how good it was all this happened so
And got to thinking of our trip down
I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time
Sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms
I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath
But I didn't do it straight off
I struck the time I saved him
Would always call me honey, and pet me
I felt good and washed clean of sin for the first time
I was full of trouble, full as I could be
But as long as I was in for good, I might as well go the whole hog
But I didn't do it straight off
It was awful thoughts, and awful words
I let them stay said.
I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time.
But I didn't do it straight off.
Explication:
All of these poems were composed using exact phrases from chapter thirty-one of Twain's novel, most of them from the same paragraph, if not the same sentence. That specific chapter was picked because it contains a moment of revelation for Huck, in which he chooses to go with his individual notion of freedom for Jim as opposed to doing the morally respectable act of returning Jim to owner, Miss Watson.
Twain's novel is remarkably, unquestionably about freedom. In putting Twain's words into form poetry, I am twisting the notion that freedom is liberation from constraints, suggesting that freedom is intimately connected with the ability to manipulate within restrictions. In each of the above poems, Huck's voice emerges with fresh meaning and resonance, yet the medium in which his emotions are conveyed is one of ultimate restriction – exact syllables or rhyme use. I did not allow Huck's voice to surrender itself to the restraints of form, but instead used these limits I placed upon myself to recreate meaning in Huck's words. Thus, constraints did not inhibit my creative freedom, but instead allowed meaning to manifest in new ways to fit the constraints. Freedom is not, as Rebecca Walker suggested, a feeling. It is instead acceptance of the inevitable presence of constraints in life, and learning how to manipulate these constraints to create a sense of an innovative, original, personal freedom.
Works Cited
Types of Poetry. Poem of Quotes. 2004-2006.
Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Dover Publicastions, Inc: New York, NY, 1994.
| An Impression of Families in "The Adventures of Hu Name: Marina Gal Date: 2006-05-04 01:28:04 Link to this Comment: 19217 |
In "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", there were multiple and varied examples of family structures. There were a few implications for the different models of family structures and one was that perhaps family can be found anywhere. Secondly with diverse models we know that there can be an individual mentality or a mob mentality toward family just as we talked about in class, but in this book I believe there is more of a mob mentality, especially with Huck Finn.
To say that family can be found anywhere is obvious to most anyone. Even the famous song, "We Are Family", prompts people to feel like kin. When making the statement that familial structures are everywhere in the novel, I am not exaggerating. It would almost be impossible to name them all, but some of the more important and distinct cliques are, Huck and his aunts, Huck and Tom, Huck and Jim, and the Duke and the Dauphin. The list I just made is clearly of people who are close with each other, but not related (as in parent to child). In the book we read, we saw how these people interacted daily an even though they may not have been related, they were as loving to one another as any family unit would be and that is why I consider them family. They obviously chose to be together. The other family units such as the Grangerfords, the Wilks, and the Phelps have different familial structures and models because they have traditional familial models. These people (or at least some of them) chose to be together at one time) and now the rest of them must deal with the consequences be them good or bad. It reminds me of a parents saying to a child, "She is your sister, you have to love her!" There may be love or hate in the family, but they are more or less stuck with what they have.
When David Ross came and visited the class he talked about economics and how an economist views things. Obviously, as we learned in class and as it says on Serendip, "Economics operates on the group level". Therefore, I took these thoughts from class and applied them to my thoughts about Huck Finn and individual versus group/mob mentality in the book.
When it comes to individual mentality there is not much room for it in familial relations because when one thinks on an individual level they are thinking for themselves and doing what they alone what to do. When a person belongs to a group they essentially give up they immediate right for individual thinking and work more toward group thoughts and what would be best for the group. An example of this is when Huck is on the raft with Jim and Huck is struggling with himself about the idea of turning Jim in. The reason this idea is so hard for Huck to make is because he is moving from and individual mindset to a group mindset as he forms a family unit with Jim. Once the family unit is complete I find it hard to believe that Huck would ever turn Jim in. Even when Huck has the chance to turn Jim in he passes it up by lying and saying there is sickness on their raft so that they are left alone and Jim is safe.
On the other hand, there is the group or mob mentality in correlation to family structures. The idea was clearly summarized on Serendip when it says that mob mentality is the, "concern with systematic harm, collective responsibility". In essence one would worry more about the group they are in as a whole and blame for something would be shared rather than any individual being singled out for any wrong-doing. This idea reminds me of economics in the sense that in the book families work as groups as do family units. Even though families work as units or with mob mentalities, they cannot change big concepts such as slavery, because each family is still an individual unit. In a way families are both groups and individuals in the way they work. They work like groups amongst themselves, but they cannot affect greater society much because that would require the binding together of many families to create a larger unit. I could not help but notice that people in class felt the book lacked in observing individuals, but that made sense to me because the book took on the role of showing how mod mentality plays out in families and in society.
In the book the mob mentality was more subtle, but also more broad. Clearly families were still involved because many people had to feel these feelings to cause things to happen, but mob mentality of a society is dissimilar from mob mentality of a single family. The society's feelings seemed to revolve mainly around slavery, education, and oddly enough society itself. The part family plays in this is such; families come together as a group with a collective thought on an issue and then decide where then stand when the issue comes into play. For example, with society, Huck's aunts felt being civilized was important and therefore tried to pass that feeling on to Huck. Many other people obviously thought being civilized was important as well; otherwise the society they were living in would be non-existent. That group of other people who also believed in being civilized was part of the cluster that held their mob mentality belief about society. Even though Mark Twain wrote "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" two decades after the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War, he set it decades earlier when society's mob feelings at the time were clearly toward slavery and yet a few people were beginning to become open to the idea of freeing slaves, but no where near enough. In the book society also felt a certain way about education and that was a combination of both good morals and intellectual education. There are very clear divisions between society and outcasts in the sense that the outcast, an example being Huck, talks of going to Hell when he disagrees with or questions society's teachings. Huck doesn't trust society at large because he feels it failed to protect him from abuse. Now he is uneducated and lacks society's morals, yet Huck is finding his own way based on his own experiences. He is moving away from society and carving out a new path. A group of people with society's idea of education would most likely be the Phelps', who ironically is the only intact family in the book. Both of the Phelps generally have good morals and are educated people for their time. They fit the mold for being educated for their time.
Undoubtedly mob mentality took precedence over individual mentality in the book not only with the way that it works inside of families, but also in entire societies. Individual mentality was only seen a small bit in the notion of a single person and their own thoughts. To take this idea of different mentalities and family structures and apply it to the world I have found that families can be found anywhere and in any form while at the same time they can have numerous different types of mentalities involved amongst them. I feel that individual mentality will most likely mirror the book in the sense that it is seen much less than obviously than mob/group mentality is, but it is still present; it just does not have as much of an impact on the group as it does on our own being. In Psychology class I learned that cultures differ in what they place as important whether it be the group or the self. In America the self is much more important than the group, but in Asia the group is more important. Twain wrote the book in America and the book still was pervaded with a group mentality, does that mean even though we are a self-centered culture, we still are very much group thinkers? What would have happened if Twain had written the book in Asia? Would he have changed the story completely because the people have a different mindset? It is too bad Twain did not write one of those books we used to have in elementary school where you could see multiple endings, expect for this I would be able to see how he would have written the book differently in a dissimilar culture.
Works Cited
http://serendipstudio.org/
| Missing Chapter: Huck and Miss Fuller Name: Alison Rei Date: 2006-05-06 01:58:01 Link to this Comment: 19263 |
| The More It Asserts Itself: Guilt and Masculinity Name: Amy Stern Date: 2006-05-06 09:40:19 Link to this Comment: 19265 |
The Scarlet Letter has traditionally been presented as a story about Hester Prynne. Certainly she is the focal point of the novel; the letter in question is a judgment upon her, as reflected in a symbol upon her chest. Yet to view Hawthorne's classic chiefly as the story of Hester, or of the guilt of a woman who sinned against a village, is not only untrue, it is reductive of the novel as a whole. To read the text as the story of Hester removes the deepest truth of the story; it is a tale of a town, and each member of the town is as guilty as Hester is, in some way or another. This can be seen in any of the villagers we meet, or even the villagers altogether as an entity, but it is perhaps most obvious by examining Chillingworth and Dimmesdale.
Although The Scarlet Letter is written by a male author, is textually a story recounted by a man, and certainly has what could be seen as a traditionally masculine (not to mention, perhaps somewhat obviously, Puritan) sensibility about sex, the men are usually considered secondary to the novel's female protagonist. Hester is the central focus of the novel, and while she is clearly directly tied to both Dimmesdale and Chillingworth, her primary relationship is with her daughter, Pearl. Pearl is young, however, and not yet developed into a worthy conversationalist; she is in many ways not yet independent enough to be anything but a reflection of her strongest influence. To that end, much of her behavior, not to mention her interactions with her mother, can be read as Hester interacting with different facets of herself. Because of this, while Pearl and Hester are interesting, they are hardly a relationship built on secrets and conflict. Pearl is a physical representation of Hester's biggest secret, but by being born and interacting as a person, Pearl has in many ways ceased to be that which she symbolizes and become, in fact, the inverse of same; a secret brought to light is no longer a secret at all.
Similarly, while Hester's relationships with Dimmesdale and Chillingworth are interesting, for the reader they are strikingly one-sided. Hester knows both of their secrets; one is her husband, the other the father of her child. Yet she chooses to not share this with anyone, because the men have chosen to not share the information; she allows the flow of information to be dictated through her rather than to take the initiative and share the information herself. Although Hester is hardly passive, and her silence is in and of itself a form of activism, she is still willing to allow the power which she could have to be taken from her. Neither man's choice to keep his secret is ever questioned, even in the face of her being forced to share her own without granting permission.
Because of this, Hester's relationship with both men is inherently unbalanced. She knows their secrets, and keeps them, yet they are not responsible for keeping hers; anything Hester might have wanted to keep hidden was revealed with the birth of her daughter. Likewise, the men cannot have a relationship with anyone else in the town which would have a balance, because the same problem arises; at least as far as the omniscient narrator seems to know, the townspeople have no secrets which compare to Dimmesdale's or Chillingworth's. Moreover, they think that these two men are honest, upstanding citizens. Dimmesdale especially, a religious leader in this small religious town, is seen as the epitome of virtue. For him, then, an equal relationship with any of the townspeople is simply impossible; their expectations for him and the truth of who he actually is are in far too much conflict to ever allow for true conversation. Similarly, so many facts about Chillingworth's history are omitted from anything he tells the people in the town that any interaction is almost by definition unbalanced; with no one truly suspecting that anything might be strange or hidden, Chillingworth is granted a bizarre amount of power, by virtue of that which he is able to keep hidden.
In fact, the only true balanced, equal relationship that either Chillingworth or Dimmesdale can have is with each other. While it is certainly arguable that the strongest emotional bond either man has is with Hester, their biggest conflict, and the most passion we see from either of them, tends to be revealed when they are interacting with each other. Considering the book can easily be read as a heterosexual romance focusing on the role of the woman, it is perhaps ironic that we learn the most about Dimmesdale and Chillingworth from their interactions with each other. For each man, the other's presence is hurtful, yet both seem incapable of moving away from these interactions. Under the guise of a deep forming friendship, both men appear to gain an almost sadomasochistic pleasure from their time with one another.
This is not to say that the relationship is in any way sexual. While it is possible to read their deep and growing relationship, not to mention the clear passion each man feels about the other, as homoerotic, it is difficult to deny that both men are sexually attracted to Hester above all. It is, in fact, this feeling for Hester which fuels their interactions with each other; in many ways, both men exist to serve as witness to the other's love of a woman who, for some reason, cannot love him fully. Hester remains the invisible center of any interaction the two have, a firmly heterosexual baseline for their interplay. This is, in many ways, which makes the queer reading possible; "the more [masculinity] asserts itself, the more it calls itself into question" (Segal). The masculinity, in this case, is like Dimmesdale's own guilt; the more he self-identifies as guilty, the more the people read his attitude as indicative of the idea that "we are all sinners", and the more he seems noble, humble, and innocent of all wrongdoing. It is quite easy to believe, then, that that attitude is reflected in all things Dimmesdale does.
That is perhaps why a reader can easily view the love triangle as one which goes in all directions. The conversations which Chillingworth and Dimmesdale have together seem far more like conversations between equals than either of their interactions with Hester do. (And perhaps it is telling that in the text, Hawthorne calls upon both men by their last names and Hester by her first; it is a clear representation of the imbalance of power beneath them. When this identification system is repeated in analysis, however, is it legitimizing the power imbalance for the reader, or merely staying true to the text? Referring to Dimmesdale, who is usually only identified to as "The Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale", as "Arthur", or to Chillingworth as "Roger", seems as wrong as calling Hester "Prynne".) Yet this seems to speak more of love as a construct which has far less to do with sex or sexuality than with passion and interest and strong feelings for one another. This feeling shows itself, by turns, as curiosity, as antipathy, and as friendship. It is the contrast among these three feelings which makes their relationship so compelling. As Chillingworth, for example, strives to get closer and closer to Dimmesdale's secret, the latter seems to thrive on the pain of hiding his secret, protecting himself from a condemnation which he is not getting from the people of the town. Dimmesdale clearly feels he deserves this pain (as exemplified in the A burned across his chest; whether it is a divine symbol or simply the result of him constantly beating his own chest, it is certainly a powerful visual representation of the guilt which he feels). Similarly, Chillingworth places himself in close proximity with the man he is increasingly sure impregnated his wife, and clearly begins to feel some guilt by the end of the novel; he leaves a large sum of money to Pearl, even though she is Hester's child with another man. (Hester, of course, seems to get the pain from both men with none of the feeling of deserved punishment – but that is perhaps another essay.) Each similarly holds the other in contempt; Chillingworth judges for the adultery, and Dimmesdale judges for the cruelty to Hester.
In many ways, despite how it is frequently advertised, The Scarlet Letter is primarily the story of two men's guilt. After all, Hester's guilt is public, a red letter embroidered upon her chest such that everyone can see it, and as such, the secret for which she might feel ashamed is public for everyone to see. For Hester, the guilt of the secret itself is not compounded by the stress of keeping it as a secret. Both Dimmesdale and Chillingworth, however, are responsible for not just the truth which they are guarding, but also for the all-consuming act of guarding it. For Dimmesdale, in fact, this act seems to prove fatal; it is only as he is dying that he can drop his act of piety in favor of revealing the truth.
Dimmesdale and Chillingworth are both, in many ways, their own worst enemies. Their inability to come to terms with that which is hidden ultimately exposes them to far more suffering than Hester, forced to wear a piece of cloth which condemns her, could ever think of. It is the men's pain which is at the center of the novel, that of standing idly by instead of confronting the internal demons head-on. Hawthorne's novel therefore most strongly investigates not Hester, but the men around her, for condemning her to such a fate in silence.
| Identity and The Word in Huck Finn Name: Jessica Ro Date: 2006-05-06 13:29:34 Link to this Comment: 19266 |
Critics even in 1885 were able to read the game Twain plays. In the San Francisco Chronicle, a book reviewer wrote,
Running all through the book is the sharpest satire on the ante-bellum estimate of the slave.... there is nothing truer in the book.
It does not take an advanced level of reading comprehension to understand the humour, and that the story is intended not as a manifestation of the world as Twain believes it should be, but instead as social criticism of the highest sort. A critic in a 1999 article in the Jewish World Review, of all places, put it plainly when he wrote:
The people whom Huck and Jim encounter on the Mississippi are drunkards, murderers, bullies, swindlers, lynches, thieves, liars, frauds, child abusers, numskulls, hypocrites, windbags and traders in human flesh. All are white. The one man of honor in this phantasmagoria is 'Nigger Jim,' as Twain called him to emphasize the irony of a society in which the only true gentleman was held beneath contempt."
Yet Huck Finn still made it onto the American Library Association's top ten list of books challenged in the 1990's.
There is something going on when, despite our better judgments, a culture maintains a position as empty as the banning of Huck Finn. No one can deny that the dialogue in Huck Finn is anything other than accurate. Historically, yes, some folks some placed used the n-word. Why should modern audiences not be able to handle that hard fact? What is happening here, really, when it is what would have to be acknowledged as the liberal, lefty world is racist?
The fuss over the use of the n-word in literature, specifically Huck Finn comes from a myriad of places. Banning the book because it represents racist point of views from the 19th century seems to suggest, on one hand, that people believe this problem is in the past. That this was a historical problem that existed then, and now if we just don't read about it, we'll be safe. This course of action implies that somehow by banning the book, we've banned the word, and possibly all of racism along with it as well.
Under this surface, folks are, of course, truly upset that the word is not only historical, but also a contemporary blight in public discourse. Though their have been motions to defuse the word through explanation, dialogue, and its reclaiming, the word is still used and meant as an offensive expression of racism. "Nigger" is a loaded word, problematic for virtually everyone it touches, unpronounceable to most people. Putting it out there in the classroom, 215 times, no less, is unarguably problematic. What does the teacher do when asking students to read aloud? How do you start a discussion on racism, acknowledging the invariably varied, yet valid personal experiences, and still maintaining a somewhat academic forum where learning can happen and understanding can grow? These are impossible questions, and no doubt many parents and teachers would feel safer just not asking them.
Those reasons, however, is exactly why the attempts to ban Huck Finn are so disheartening and frustrating. Trying to ban Huck Finn is, by and large, a plan to keep a discussion of racism out of the classroom. It is hard to say whether this is perpetrated by people who truly believe racism ended with separate water fountains, or by people who acknowledge that racism, systematic and individual, still exist, and who know they profit from it's existence. Probably most often it is some of both, fused together with and enveloped in thick layers of fear and shame.
So what does this meta-dialogue on racism being played out in the prohibition of a text of literature have to do with the identity that Huck Finn is acting out inside the logic of the story? Huck Finn, though he senses only the slightest, most distant hint about this himself, has a problem with the n-word. However constantly distracted he might be, Huck's main conflict in the novel is around the nature of goodness, and his private debate over whether he wants to be good and civilized, or bad, and go to hell. More than he hates the clean clothes, books, school, and rules required for being civilized, Huck does not understand the disparity he perceives between what he is told it means to be good, the way he sees "good" people acting, and what his own conscience tells him is right.
And how could he not? Huck, who at times in his troubled childhood had to raise himself, operates on an ever shifting system of very basic human judgment of love and kindness, combined with an almost animalistic Darwinian survival of the fittest instinct. One minute, he knows what his gut tells him is correct, but at the same time Huck wants to do whatever option seems will best help him manoeuvre out of a trouble filled situation, regardless of judgment.
This is acted out repeatedly in the novel's episodic encounters between Huck and townsfolk along the river, but chiefly through Huck's continued internal debate on whether he is right or wrong to help Jim escape to freedom. Too many contradictory relationships exists for Huck at the same time: Jim is good to Huck, so Huck should treat him good back; the Widow tried to be good to Huck, even if Huck didn't like that kind of good; due to Jim's position as property to the widow, and his desire to get free, Huck simply cannot be helping both of them at the same.
More problematic for Huck is the inconsistent he's garnered about what it means to be a slave. Jim was born a slave, and he is of African American descent; to Huck this means Jim has an identity as a slave. This is not, however, simply a fact of his race. Another reason the attempts to ban Huck Finn seem so ridiculous after having read the book is the job Twain does of showing, and not just the life of a slave, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe attempted to document in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Twain goes beyond Stowe, and delves into the identity of "nigger."
On some level, Huck knows that the n-word is used derogatively. He certainly notices the incongruity between what Huck is told he should believe about black people, and his experience with his friend Jim. Jim is constantly said to be acting white, or not behaving at all like a "normal" black person or slave would. Huck eventually comes to the conclusion that he knows Jim "was white inside," (Twain, 264). At the end of the novel, when Jim's brave deeds are revealed by the doctor, it is specified that Jim is a "good nigger," (Twain, 273), that modifier deemed necessary as a qualifier to differentiate from the accepted construction of "nigger." Huck's questioning of the term "nigger," and what it means for Jim to be considered one, and therefore inherently bad, this is the root of his own fundamental identity questions of good and bad.
And what better issue could be brought to the classroom to begin today's discussion of the n-word, performing race, and racism? Huck's identity is undermined and challenged by the presence of the n-word in his life; his grappling with that word leads him to question authority, and act out for an idea of freedom and justice that he barely understands. Huck Finn's presence in the classroom could force students to answer that question for themselves: what does this word do to their identity, what does it force them to confront, what do they believe in? Perhaps after answering those questions, we can begin to get at that word, why no one wants to talk about it, and making sure no one wants to use it.
Sources
Hentoff, Nat. "Expelling Huck Finn." Jewish World Review, Nov. 29, 1999 /20 Kislev, 5760. http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/hentoff112999.asp
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Bantam Books, 1984.
| Silver Tongues and Straw Hats: Lyra and Huck Name: Alice Brys Date: 2006-05-06 16:12:22 Link to this Comment: 19269 |
"What you're most like is marsh fire, that's the place you have in the gyptian scheme; you got witch oil in your soul. Deceptive, that's what you are, child."
Lyra was hurt.
"I en't never decieved anyone! You ask..."
Ma Costa and Lyra, page 100
The Golden Compass
"Set down, my boy, I wouldn't strain myself, if I was you. I reckon you ain't used to lying, it don't seem to come handy; what you want is practice. You do it pretty awkward."
The Doctor, to Huck, page 210
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Lyra Belacqua, the protagonist of Philip Pullman's fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials, liar and runaway child, has her roots in Huck Finn--the character of the child who moves through the world of adults by deception (sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing); the child who is wiser than the rest of the world in many ways, but still stuck in childhood.
One of the easiest comparisons to make between Lyra and Huck is their dishonesty; Lyra's first response to almost anything is to lie about it (in the first book alone she makes up several differnent personas to fit the situations she finds herself in; Alice, whose father is a murderer is the girl she becomes when she wants to avoid unsavory attention from adults (Pullman Compass 88-89); Lizzie is the dim-witted girl she beccomes when captured by the Gobblers (209).) Huck's knee-jerk response also seems to be lying; most of the times he's confronted he invents a child with a sob-story. On the large raft,when confronted by the raftsmen, he makes up several lies in quick succession to try and get out of trouble (Twain 108-109). Both Lyra and Huck are considered uncivilized; Huck was raised on the margins of society by his drunkard father, and Lyra was raised as an orphan by scholars of Jordan College in Oxford (Pullman Compass 30-33). They were both raised by societies that marginalized them, that let them run wild.
At the beginning of The Golden Compass, when living at Oxford, Lyra is quite Tom Sawyer-like in her play; she leads the other children of 'her' college in warfare against neighboring groups (Pullman Compass 31-33), making up complex battle plans which are about as realistic as the raid on the A-rabs (Twain 24-25). But unlike Tom, when Lyra is confronted with the reality of the world, she quickly transforms into a much more Huck-like person, able to deal with reality and not wanting to make everything a game.
I spent some time pondering whether Lyra had a Jim figure in her life; she does attract the attention, help, and love of several adults during her journey (as well as another child, Will, who often ends up playing the more sensible Huck to her Tom moments) but one of them didn't stand out as her Jim. (Iorek Byrnison, the bear, is the closest to a father-figure she has, but he's not actually present for most of her journey. Other characters come and go.) I wondered if the comparison ended here, and then it hit me. Her Jim is actually her daemon, Pantalaimon.
This may require a bit of explaination; in the universe (actually, it's a 'multi-verse', a multiple-universe reality) of His Dark Materials, in Lyra's world, each person's soul is independent of their body. The soul takes on animal form and is called a daemon. Daemons speak to and interact with their humans (and other people's, as well); Pan is Lyra's daemon, and he plays the role of a conscience to her, as well as friend, confidante, and constant companion. (Daemons actually cannot be separated from their humans without horrible pain, and the possibility of death.) Like Jim to Huck, Pan advises Lyra (and she then often doesn't take his advice). In the third book of the trilogy, Lyra finally betrays Pan by abandoning him (but ultimately reconcicles with him, wiser and better for the ordeal); it's something to be compared to Huck and Tom's mistreatment of Jim at the end of Huck Finn. One thing that strikes me is that, if Pan is in fact the Jim figure for Lyra, it casts the Huck and Jim relationship in a very new light: Pan is an inseparable piece of Lyra, her soul. Even if Huck and Jim aren't that close, they do become interdependent and incredibly close while on the raft (they're naked together (Twain 136), accepting each other on a deeper level than clothing or skin color).
Both Huck and Lyra fit into the image of a child on a journey through an adult world; without the power of adulthood (and the power of established place and position) the child is at a constant disadvantage. Specters of adults rise constantly to threaten both Huck and Lyra--Huck's father, Lyra's mother Mrs. Coulter, Huck's slave-holding society which would fault him for helping Jim escape, the forces of the Church which hunt for Lyra in the second and third books of His Dark Materials--and the children have to escape through their wits. (Or through the aid of helpful adults, but ultimately it's down to Huck and Lyra to do it for themselves.)
In His Dark Materials, there's a clear moment where Lyra leaves the world of childhood and enters adulthood. (Unlike Edna St. Vincent Millay's interpretation, Childhood Is The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies (ll. 1-3), Lyra's childhood ends not with death but with love and sacrifice.) In Lyra's world, the daemons of children are able to change shape; once someome reaches adulthood, their daemon settles into only one form. It is when Lyra realizes that she's in love with Will, but sacrifices that love for the good of the universe that her daemon settles on his adult shape (Pullman Spyglass 446-447). If Huck had a daemon, would there be a moment in his journey where he actually reached maturity? Even though he's experienced pain and death in his life, at the beginning of the book Huck is too changeable to have a 'fixed daemon'. By the end, I think he might well have become an adult--again, not because somebody died, nor because he found love, but because he was able to define himself against Tom, and go against Tom in the end (Twain 279-281). It'd also be an interesting undertaking to find out what kind of daemon Huck might have. A daemon's settled form is supposed to tell you what kind of person you are (Pullman Compass 147); Huck's daemon would have to be a wild sort of animal, and a tricky one.
What if Lyra had undertaken Huck's journey? As a girl, in that same environment (in the environment without female characters who actually take action? We have Aunts Polly and Sally, largely acted upon instead of acting; the Widow, whose sole actions of consequence are to talk about selling Jim and to die, and bit players who last for a few chapters at best. Would that world have room for a female Huck? As a girl with few marked differences between herself and the actual Huck Finn (Lyra, raised by college professors, has a sort of patchy general knowledge of academia (Pullman Compass 60)) would she have been able to exist in the same way that Huck did? I'd like to think so -- I'd like to think that with enough cleverness (and enough good lies) a girl would have been able to make that journey as well. Huck was already traveling with someone who shouldn't have been, namely Jim; but Huck acted in social situations that Jim, as a runaway slave, couldn't have. Would the Widow Douglas have let a girl of Huck's age escape being 'sivilized'? She would have been a lot less willing to give a girl the leeway that she gave Huck, and so would other people that Huck came into contact with over the course of his adventure. If Huck had been female (and thus even less sanctioned to act independently than a child is) he might have been unable to succeed because of the society. Lyra succeeds in her own journey perhaps because she's in a world where strong women are more plentiful, but more likely because she has the ability to succeed within herself.
The other question I have to ask about a female Huck Finn/Lyra as Huck is, would a female protagonist have been accepted in the novel? For this answer I look back on the books we studied this semester and the female protagonists we've dealt with: the Governess, Eliza, and Hester. (Moby Dick lacking in any female characters who last for more than twenty pages.) The Governess, as a protangonist, acted only when she was acted upon (even if acted upon by her own insanity) where Huck Finn was, at least occassionally, pro-active; Eliza acted in defense of her son, in defense of the family, where Huck had to act against it, fleeing his father and 'civilization'; Hester, while acting against society, was still acting for family. None of them tried, as Huck did, to escape civilization and social order altogether -- does it suggest that women can't do that? (It's not only Huck in our class reading that does this. Ishmael flees to the ocean, for instance.) And all three of these women were adults. But while Huck encounters trouble galore as a child in the text, outside the text it seems that as a child narrator he's well accepted. If that's true, then couldn't a female version of Huck have been accepted out of the text as well? Right now, after a hundred-odd years, I'd say absolutely yes. Philip Pullman and Lyra Belacqua have proved that a female child can escape her society and journey, via deception, to great success. But in the 1880's, I'm not sure that it would have worked.
Works Cited
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. W. W. Norton and Company, New York: 1985.
Millay, Edna St. Vincent. "Childhood Is The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies."
Pulllman, Philip. The Golden Compass. Laurel Leaf Books, New York: 1995.
.... The Amber Spyglass. Laurel Leaf Books, New York: 2000.
| Performing Friendship in Huck Finn Name: sky stegal Date: 2006-05-06 16:14:53 Link to this Comment: 19270 |
| From Bondage to Freedom: The Use of Religion and S Name: Jillian Da Date: 2006-05-06 16:44:38 Link to this Comment: 19271 |
Simply put, Twain's use of superstition and religion as opposites in Huckleberry Finn is all about character; creating a character, defining a character, predicting a character's actions, and so on. He approaches this in two ways, the most basic being to set up juxtaposition between opposing character beliefs. From the very beginning of the novel, we see Huck living at odds with the refined Widow Douglas and the devout Miss Watson. The Widow Douglas begins her interaction with Huck by calling him down to supper, and reciting grace over the food, which he comments he can't see the point in (the results, no doubt, of having grown up without religion, as Pap reveals in subsequent chapters). After dinner, she reads him the story of Moses which, according to the footnotes, she is using as a metaphor to preach to Huck about the state of his own life, and the good work she has performed by taking him in (14). Through it all, Huck is either bored or uncomfortable, in either case not understanding the value in what the Widow is telling him. The problem only escalates during his discussion with Miss Watson about Heaven and Hell, when he declares he'd rather not be where she is in the afterlife, particularly if it means being separated from Tom Sawyer (15-16). In these few, short paragraphs, the use of religion makes it abundantly clear just how different Huck is from the more 'sivilized' characters in the novel.
Once the reader understands what Huck isn't, she can then begin to discover what he is, the second of Twain's uses of religion (or, in Huck's case, lack of) and superstition. Where Miss Watson, the Widow Douglas, and (presumably) a fair number of the townspeople (the new judge in town, the people whose children Huck went to school with, Judge Thatcher) were pious, or at least put some stock in the idea of a God and a Heaven, Huck (like Tom, and Jim, and many of his other friends) counts on his cache of folk knowledge, myth, and superstition to guide him. A good deal of this he learns from Jim; for example, when the two of them first encounter each other on Jackson Island, he asks Jim about ill luck omens:
Some young birds come along, flying a yard or two at a time and lighting. Jim said it was a sign it was going to rain...I was going to catch some of them, but Jim wouldn't let me. He said it was death...And Jim said you mustn't count the things you are going to cook for dinner, because that would bring bad luck. The same if you shook the table-cloth after sundown. And he said if a man owned a bee-hive, and that man died, the bees must be told about it before sun-up next morning, or else the bees would all weaken down and quit work and die (56).
Conversely, Huck has his own knowledge of signs, mostly related to death and the dead, which are sprinkled liberally throughout the text. For example, following his first night with Miss Watson and the widow Douglas, Huck retreats to his room, and while sitting there alone in the dark, listening to the nighttime sounds, begins to dwell on some truly superstitious notions. First, he talks about the sound out in the dark, describing how he "heard an owl, away off, whoo-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill [sic] and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die, and the wind was trying to whisper something to me...I heard that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell about something...and so can't rest easy in its grave..." (16). Minutes later, he accidentally kills a spider, and immediately breaks into a cold sweat, shaking all over because he knows, without being told, that the incident was a bad omen. "I got up and turned around in my tracks three times and crossed my breast every time; and then I tied up a little lock of my hair with a thread to keep witches away...You do that when you've lost a horse shoe that you've found...but I hadn't ever heard anybody say it was any way to keep off bad luck when you'd killed a spider" (16).
These fears and superstitious thoughts dominate a good portion of Huck's (and Jim's) decision making in the novel, which, if you're a believer in the idea that your actions define you, says a lot about who he is as a person. In that light, he appears dependent, fearful, and somewhat directionless; like those who cling to religion, he needs to believe in something outside of himself as having the power to control their destiny (though unlike the pious masses he encounters on his travels, he believes in struggling against fate rather than accepting it). Also, the tendency for the majority of the omens referenced to have some kind of negative connotation speaks, I feel, to the lack of happy circumstances in the character's life, and as such, his inability to believe that good things may be in store for him. As far as he is concerned, life is about living with and dodging misfortune, not moving from happy time to happy time with a few down periods in between. Case in point: when Huck asks Jim if there are any good omens, Jim replies (and Huck accepts), "Mighty few—and dey ain' no use to a body" (56).
The question, then, is why does Huck feel this way? Simply put, he is someone who believes very strongly in the power of evil in the world, probably a result of his upbringing. It may a result of genuine naïve belief, or it may be a way of coping with all the terrible things that have happened to him in his life. In class, we talked extensively about his misfortunes; his mother's death, living with an abusive alcoholic father, feeling alone and abandoned—all things which would necessitate growing up faster than the average child. Initially, we decided that the fact that he treats life like a game, or one of Tom Sawyer's adventure novels, and seems to think that he himself is invincible, is his way of coming to terms with the things that have happened to him—if they're all part of some fairytale, then he can't be hurt by them. However, I believe that his superstitious nature is also part of that coping device. As we discussed, human beings have a strong need to see patterns, to organize and make sense of things that otherwise wouldn't make sense, and which we wouldn't be able to process. Superstition seems to be Huck's way of making sense of why terrible things continue to happen to him.
All of this same reasoning is often applied to explain why people seek out religion; why the feel they need to believe in something. However, in Huckleberry Finn, this does not appear to be the case. The characters in the book who have religion are depicted as 'sivilized', well adjusted, happy, and without fear. When bad things befall them, they are able to view them as a divine act of God, something that was meant to happen and should be accepted, not feared or mourned as a travesty. This contrast again serves to set Huck apart, to make him part of a very visual (from the reader's perspective) minority, and something of a rebel. By defying conventional religion and religious standards, he is also defying the society he so desperately wants to escape, setting himself up as an individual (however disadvantaged) pursuing his own passions and staking a claim on his future.
Knowing all of this, one must question, then, just what religion and superstition mean in the larger context of the book. Summarily, Twain's point seems to be quite clear: religion is a source of bondage, something to constrict the individual and bring him down out of the realm of possibility. It is representative of everything in the world that Huck desires freedom from; it is the metaphor for the source of his troubles, and the very reason he's constantly on the run. Superstition on the other hand, both the fantastical, magical scope of it, and the imaginative capacity to believe in it, is his Promised Land. It is freedom from constriction, and freedom from all his misfortunes; it is, on a grand scale, exactly the liberation that Huck is in search of, the telltale fireworks of his personal Independence Day.
Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: W.W. Norton and Co. Inc.,
1985
| I Have a Story Name: Marie Sage Date: 2006-05-11 09:58:55 Link to this Comment: 19310 |
Through them, the reader, listener, or viewer, has the
opportunity to truly understand and sympathize with the work's characters. Without a story, one would not have the means to fully comprehend the situations of Huck, Jim, and Johnny. Thus, stories have the power to change judgments through enlightenment and often call for the establishment of a common ground for people otherwise detached.
With a song called "Cocaine Blues" playing in the background, my mind wandered (again) to attitudes towards people with drug problems. At first look, I, and much of society, see only a weak person addicted to drugs- it is their own problem, and one does not usually meet them with much sympathy. It is not until we learn their story, or share a similar one, that we may begin to understand and empathize with the individual. Using Johnny Cash as an example, one finds a man who maintained a rocky, semi-abusive relationship with his father, suffered the painful death of his brother at an early age, and struggled with a marriage and love affair; these events deeply affected his entire life and in many ways shaped his choice to choose drugs and alcohol to help deal with his emotional problems. When one learns these details, judgments often change, for once one sees why a person acts a certain way, they understand and inclined to be much more forgiving. It is this understanding, so crucial in human relationships, that can bridge the gap between people otherwise separated, and there in lies the reason we tell stories.
Though this example may seem off topic, Johnny Cash is an extremely relevant introduction to the utilization of stories in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Similarly, in this manner, Huck, Jim, and Cash are compatible characters, for in order to understand and sympathize with them, one must know their story. Like Cash, Huck appears as an uncontrollable, "bad" boy. However, when one reads about his life's unfortunate circumstances, they better realize and identify with his situation. For instance, writes Huck, "By and by pap got too handy with his hick'ry, and I couldn't stand it. I was all over welts. He got to going away so much, too, and locking me in. Once he locked me in and was gone three days. It was dreadful lonesome...I was scared" (37). Thus, through this piece of Huck's story, one sees the real life, everyday situations that he lived through. Further, now that the reader knows this piece of information, they can better judge his true character, and some may even be able to relate to Huck.
Another instance of the usefulness of stories appears in the stories told by Huck. Though these tales are really "tall tales," they function the same way. For example, when Huck lies to the Grangerford's, he creates a realm of understanding for the family. States Huck,
And I ate and talked... They all asked me questions, and I told them how pap and me and all the family was living on a little farm at the bottom of Arkansaw, and my sister run off...and Bill warn't heard of no more...and Tom and Mort died...me and pap left...and when he died I took what there was left an started up the river...and that was how I came to be here (120). Again, though at first glance Huck appears solely as a lost stranger, and possibly an enemy (a Shepherdson!), once the Grangerfords hear his tale and realize Huck's dire circumstances, they sympathize with him. Furthermore, throughout the novel, Huck's tales, some intentionally and other unintentionally, contain a common feature- they all inspire pity. This pity, however, is the direct result of understanding Huck's, or whoever he pretends to be, situation. Thus, without his tales, no comprehension could exist, and without it lies no hope for help, like in the case of the Grangerfords, Mrs. Judith Loftus, and Aunt Sally.
Through Jim, one views another facet to the usefulness of stories. States Huck, "He was setting there with his head down...moaning and mourning. He was thinking about his wife and children, away up yonder, and he was low and homesick; because he hadn't never been away from home before in his life" (170). Here, through this story, one can see the pain that Jim feels for his family and from this, one garners a stronger appreciation for Jim's situation. Moreover, from it the reader can speculate the reasons Jim stays with Huck; Huck, as a child, may remind him of his own children or through Huck, Jim may find freedom and be able to free and reunite with his beloved wife and children. Again however, this story, told by Huck, allows an outsider to glimpse inside, and from that glimpse, one finds understanding and sympathy. Further, it creates a common ground between any
reader who has ever missed their family or children and can relate with Jim's sadness.
Until now, I focused on the positive effects of stories, but there can also be negatives consequences. Sometimes the understanding created through stories presents the person in a damaging light, and the effects are not sympathy, but rather anger, distrust, and dislike. Still, knowing the story, and recognizing, within oneself, similar circumstances to the story, helps bring understanding. However, what one does with that understanding is unique to the individual. Still, sometimes stories do not tell the whole story. This is potentially problematic, for it does not present an accurate and complete portrayal of the person. Yet, in any situation, there is always more to learn and thus, recognition of the story as part of a larger story helps correct this problem.
Thus, throughout The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck and Jim have the chance to relay their stories, and in discovering their stories, one also discovers the usefulness of the novel. Who Huck and Jim appear to be, and who they actually are, are separate notions, and through their stories, one gains a sounder knowledge and a more sympathetic understanding. Further, Huck's utilization of "tall tales", though false, function accordingly. Hence, as illustrated throughout Huck Finn, and Walk the Line, stories provide an avenue for a man to walk a mile in another man's shoes.
| Cry Tom Cry Name: Chris Haag Date: 2006-05-11 14:52:09 Link to this Comment: 19321 |
Name: Date: 2007-09-28 22:50:32 Link to this Comment: 21962 |
