Huckleberry Finn Notes- Social Critique

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a Social Critique
o “Aunt Sally says she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it” (307)
• By saying this, Huck demonstrates the ignorance of the South and their content with such
o “‘What was the trouble about, Buck?’ ‘…I don’t know.’” (120)
• Here we see Huck talking to a boy his own age (Buck) about a feud between Buck’s family and a neighboring family. Buck replies that he doesn’t know, which demonstrates two points
 The feud goes back a long way (never-ending wrath)
 No one has tried to find a reason to fight (blind rage)
o Gender morality played a large part in the social critique
• “‘You do a girl terrible poor, but you might fool men, maybe…Why, I spotted you for a boy when you was threading the needle; and I contrived the other things to make certain’” (Twain, 72)
 When Huck dressed as a girl, the woman tests to see if he is really a girl with a sequence of situations and judging based on how a girl should act, and how Huck acts. Although Huck was not really a girl, this woman got luck; she could have just had a girl who didn’t act as a girl sitting in front of her
• “I says to myself, this is a girl that I’m letting that old reptle rob her out of her money!...I felt so ornery and low down and mean, that I says to myself, My mind’s made up; I’ll hive that money for them or bust” (188).
 When the dauphin and the king attempt to swindle the young girls out of their uncles’ money, Huck sees that it is just plain wrong to take money from grieving girls who are just so sweet
o Stereotypes were broken
• “It was a close place. I took it[a letter to the owner of Jim about where he is] up and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: ‘All right then, I’ll go to hell’—and tore it up. ”(Twain,228).
 Huck breaks an almost un-written cardinal rule in the South: if a black person runs away and you find him, turn him in. By not turning Jim in, Huck no longer fits the Southern-stereotype of the novel