[PEN-L:33538] RE: Re: Huck Finn

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

Title: RE: [PEN-L:33535] Re: Huck Finn

Yoshie writes:>
In the end, Huck (at least in _Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_) wants
to remain in neither Tom's world nor Jim's any longer, so he has to
"light out for the Territory" on his own.  He can't very well join
Indians in the Indian Territory either, though.<

I guess he's the isolated individual who can't fight the system alone and so has to flee.

>BTW, much has been made of Twain's portrayal of racism against blacks
in _Huckleberry Finn_, critics debating to what extent the book may
be racist or anti-racist or both.  What has been less often discussed
is Twain's racism toward Indians.  There is no redeeming quality in
his use of the Injun Joe character in _The Adventures of Tom Sawyer_.
With very few exceptions (a 1906 passage in his autobiography that
discusses the irony of Americans celebrating "Thanksgiving" after the
virtual extermination of the Indians,[1] "Captain Stormfield's Visit
to Heaven," etc.), Twains' portrayal of Indians and metaphorical use
of them follow the pattern of "Ignoble Savages," which is arguably
worse than the images of "Noble Savages" created by authors such as
James Fenimore Cooper that Twain sought to satirize.

>One of the sequels to _Huckleberry Finn_ that Twain wrote, an
unfinished novel _Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians_, [2]
revolves around the following plot device: Tom, infatuated with his
romantic idea of "Noble Savages," talks Jim and Huck into traveling
on the Oregon Trail.  Tom, Huck, and Jim join the emigrant Mills
family.  All of them befriend the five Indian men (Oglala Sioux) who
act like the definition of Cooper's "Noble Savages."  The Indians,
however, massacre all except Jim and the Mills girls whom they kidnap
and Tom and Huck who narrowly escape.  The fiance of Peggy Mills (one
of the kidnapped Mills girls), Brace Johnson, comes back and meets
Tom and Huck.  Brace wants to know if Peggy at least took with her
the knife he gave her and hope that she has killed herself with it.
Huck discovers that Peggy didn't, and he hides the knife from Brace
so as not to disturb him.  Huck has come to know why Brace wishes
that Peggy killed herself -- Brace is sure that Peggy would be
brutally gang-raped, tortured, and then murdered by Indians otherwise
-- so he later talks Tom into pretending that they have discovered
Peggy's body and buried it at the next abandoned camp they find on
the Indians' trail.  Brace, Tom, and Huck continue their quest for
the Indians.  The manuscript ends.  Critics say that Twain was unable
to complete the novel, probably because he found it impossible to
write about the rape frankly.  That's worse than _The Searchers_!<

we can't expect Twain to fit our current sensibilities  concerning the Indians. (After all, the socialist Leo Huberman's MAN'S WORLDLY GOODS, written much later, is not so hot, either. If I remember correctly, Steinbeck has Pa Joad bragging about how his ancestors stole their land from the Indians.) The best we can expect from Twain is that he do better than those of his time and culture. I think he did so.

Jim