[PEN-L:33480] RE: Huck Finn

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Title: RE: [PEN-L:33479] Huck Finn

 that's my favorite part of the book, not because it's pleasant (it's not) but because it makes the moral message of the book as clear as possible. One the one hand, there's Tom Sawyer, the representative of the conventional morality of the day: Tom follows all the official "rules" (since he's not really "freeing" Jim since the latter's already been manumitted) -- but he's torturing Jim in a paternalistic, self-centered, and racist way. On the other hand, there's Huck, who like Jim, goes against the conventional morality. Both Huck and Jim are extremely good people, in terms of humanistic standards.

Twain was extremely critical of the hypocrisy of the official morality of his day.

Jim

-----Original Message-----
From: Carrol Cox
To: pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: 12/29/2002 7:51 AM
Subject: [PEN-L:33479] Huck Finn

> To my mind, the rejection of Mark Twain's HUCK FINN as
> "racist" because it uses the "N word"

Just for accuracy's sake. I suppose some label racist for that reason,
but the feature of the book focused on by those who read it is not the
language but that last terrible section in which Tom Sawyer frees Jim.
Try to imagine a book in which two black men subject a white woman to
such humiliation in the process of helping her escape from a gang of
black hoodlums.

That's no reason to ban the book -- it is a reason to take a second look
at it.

Carrol