Romantic Literature:
Idealized, sentimental, unrealistic
Realism (1850-1900)
arose from dramatic changes in America (problematic)
attempt to portray life as it really was (not idealistically or romantically)
o -mobility (transportation) (think of the river)
o –frontier
o -industrialism
o -growth of cities
o -Civil War-war ALWAYS affects the arts–>reassessment of morality
Regionalism (a.k.a. “Local color”): an attempt to capture the language, customs and setting of
a particular region
Naturalism: most pessimistic; man is limited by environment and heredity. Nature is indifferent
to man
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (“mark twain” is a riverboat call; took this name at 27)
o grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, on the Mississippi River
o his occupations exposed him to all walks of American life:
1857: went to the river as a steamboat pilot
miner in Nevada
stumbled into his true calling, journalism
Work:
1860s and 1870s: articles, stories, memoirs, and novels, wit and a deft ear
for language and dialect
celebrity, bestseller
prospered as a nation/prospered economically in the post-Civil War
Gilded Age (Twain coined this term)
moved to Hartford, Connecticut w/wife, Olivia
cynical view of human beings
created the “American Voice”: dialect, humor, yarn weaver, humor
one of the few writers to be successful during his own lifetime
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
Life on the Mississippi (1883)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (begun in 1876; published in 1884)
Wrote in a frenzy–lost his “muse” and put it away for six years
Took a trip down the Mississippi from his hometown in Hannibal and focused increasingly on
the institution of slavery and the South. Twain set Huck aside; the darker tone did not fit Gilded
Age optimism
Started writing again in 1883
o hopefulness of the post-Civil War years began to fade
o Reconstruction: reintegration of the South into the Union as a slavery-free region
failing
o harsh measures the victorious North imposed only embittered the South
o Southern politicians’ effort to control and oppress the black men and women
Twain’s personal collapse
o sickly wife
o lost their first son after just nineteen months
o 1891 debt
o devoted self to writing
Setting of the novel is pre-Civil War Antebellum South (1840s and 50s)
St. Petersburg=Hannibal
Is Twain a realist as he proposes?
Consider the moral decisions and Hamlet-like soliloquizing
Genre:
o Bildungsroman: a novel of initiation
o Picaresque: an episodic novel with a rogue hero
o Satire: (conceived as a sequel to TS) work that tries to expose a vice in order to
correct it (also uses humor)
o Archetypal journey-epic
Pay attention to:
o the function of the river
o the structure of the novel
o the characters’ status as outsiders
o race
Clemens said Tom Sawyer was written for children, but Huck Finn was written for adults.
Hemingway said all American literature comes from one book:
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Controversial since it was published
o said to be trashy and vulgar, especially Huck’s language
o was pulled from Philadelphia schools
o one of the most frequently banned books of all time
Point of View:
o first person, observant, pragmatic, uneducated youth, naive-provides immediacy
and stablishes possibility of irony
Huck: Superstition=uneducated, but not stupid; Huck admires Tom Sawyer.
Tom: Member of society; a romantic; plays at being rebellious
Gang: Vehicle to satirize book learning, religion
Pap: uneducated, violent drunk, lowest form of humanity
Jim: superstitious, close to nature, folk wisdom, dignity
STORY:
• Huckleberry is the only character who can’t be domesticated
• Contrast and compare between life with Pap and life with Widow and Miss Watson
• His refusal to accept what’s socially acceptable makes all forms of love possible for him
• He believes that one’s conscience speaks on behalf of society when it conveys what is
right
• At one point he even says, “This is what comes of me not thinking,” which is his real,
natural conscience coming through
• This is highlighted in Chapter 14, which brings up the concept (again) of Christians
forcing slaves (property) to become practicing Christians, even though that violates the
concept of Christianity.
• Huck has it backwards in Ch 14; Huck wants to teach Jim the moral of the Solomon
story, to which Jim asks in reply, “what good is half a child?”
Jim’s point: people who have nothing don’t waste anything
Ch 15
Jim is Huck’s surrogate father
Huck plays a trick on Jim in the midst of Jim doing risky stuff to help him
Huck uses a lie to treat Jim badly; he feels bad about this
EPIPHANY: learns a lesson...FROM JIM! EUREKA!
Ch 16
• White mist covering Cairo–the passages in and out of the river mist make it all dreamlike, but highlight the idea of how whiteness, a social division, Huck’s being white
obstructs his view of Jim as a human being
• There’s a paradox of liberation in Huck Finn
• Scenes on the river are peaceful and tranquil—free
• External forces like prejudices and the accepted social order(river) are unreliable, always
changing, and therefore not reliable as a means to develop a moral system
How does Huck handle morality? He stays calm, makes up a lie, and doesn’t falter. If his father
hadn’t been imperfect, he wouldn’t have been able to rail against others in power later (there’s a
reason for everything, that’s why the river keeps going). This is all a game/adventure to him—
Huck makes bad decisions with his “friends.”