His personalized learning goes entirely against the societal norm of the day. During Huck's era most free citizens still saw the Negro as an inferior being, not even human enough to consider as an intelligent entity, rather they are considered as property, and property has not rights, no feelings and no hopes, dreams or fears.
In an early chapter in the book, Huck sells his fortune to the Judge for one dollar in order to keep himself from lying to 'Pap', which is an excellent display of Huck's humanity and character, but it also shows how patriarchal the society was. Even Huck knew there was not a thing he could do against his father, if his father chose to take the money that Huck had been rewarded.
Huck also senses what money can do in society but his sense was one that questioned whether it was all that effective. While he was staying with the Grangerfords he discovered that they were as rich as 'town folk' but their sense of impending death more than overcame their sense of high society, not matter how much wealth they had accumulated. Huck describes the Grangerfords home as 'having brass doorknobs" which was to him 'wealth'.
At the same time, Colonel Grangerford is described as being a real 'gentleman'. "He was a real gentleman, you see. He was a gentleman all over, and so was his family." (Twain pg 104).
Twain seems to be showing the reader that wealth does not matter as much as a sense of what is right and what is wrong. A review of that era discovers that, "examining American writing at the turn into the twentieth century...provides a fascinating study of the intersection between literary realism and anthropology's ethnography" (Jirousek, 2004, p. 729). Jirousek's article goes on to...
729).
Additionally, other experts have said that it is almost impossible to actually track what is truth especially when observing a past society in order to determine what philosophical forces were at work during a particular time period.
One expert wrote, "no
student of the past could
escape the dominance of the practical problems of the present in determining his or her interests, values, and presuppositions, and that this relationship to the present made historians unable to achieve an objective approach to the past or to know it as it actually was" (Zagorin, 1999, p. 1). However, it is able to discern how Twain viewed society and the forces that were at work during his time. He may have put it best by having Sherburn call the citizens 'cowards'. Twain saw society's hypocritical stance especially in regards to the humanity of the black man, and he wished for changes.
Although the changes have, to some extent, been slow in coming, by analyzing and discussing these pertinent issues through the literature as they are presented, society may find that it at least knows of the mistakes of the past. Whether those mistakes will be repeated or not, is up to that society to decide.
Works Cited
Austen, J. (1984) Pride and
Prejudice, Leicestershire, Great Britian: F.A. Thorpe (Publishing) Ltd.
Jirousek, L., (2004) Book Reviews: The culture concept: writing and difference in the age of Realism, Journal of
Popular Culture, Vol. 37, No. 4, pp. 729-731
Twain, M. (1981) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, New York: Bantam Dell
Zagorin, P., (1999) History, the referent, and narrative: Reflections on Postmodernism now, History and
Theory, Vol. 38, No. 1, pp. 1-24
