Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas
explored in a literary work.
Racism and Slavery
Although Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn two
decades after the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil
War, America—and especially the South—was still struggling with
racism and the aftereffects of slavery. By the early 1880s,
Reconstruction, the plan to put the United States back together
after the war and integrate freed slaves into society, had hit shaky
ground, although it had not yet failed outright. As Twain worked
on his novel, race relations, which seemed to be on a positive path
in the years following the Civil War, once again became strained.
The imposition of Jim Crow laws, designed to limit the power of
blacks in the South in a variety of indirect ways, brought the beginning
of a new, insidious effort to oppress. The new racism of the South,
less institutionalized and monolithic, was also more difficult to
combat. Slavery could be outlawed, but when white Southerners enacted
racist laws or policies under a professed motive of self-defense
against newly freed blacks, far fewer people, Northern or Southern,
saw the act as immoral and rushed to combat it.
Although Twain wrote the novel after slavery was abolished,
he set it several decades earlier, when slavery was still a fact
of life. But even by Twain’s time, things had not necessarily gotten
much better for blacks in the South. In this light, we might read
Twain’s depiction of slavery as an allegorical representation of
the condition of blacks in the United States even after the
abolition of slavery. Just as slavery places the noble and moral
Jim under the control of white society, no matter how degraded that
white society may be, so too did the insidious racism that arose
near the end of Reconstruction oppress black men for illogical and
hypocritical reasons. In Huckleberry Finn, Twain,
by exposing the hypocrisy of slavery, demonstrates how racism distorts
the oppressors as much as it does those who are oppressed. The result
is a world of moral confusion, in which seemingly “good” white people
such as Miss Watson and Sally Phelps express no concern about the
injustice of slavery or the cruelty of separating Jim from his family.
Intellectual and Moral Education
By focusing on Huck’s education, Huckleberry Finn fits
into the tradition of the bildungsroman: a novel depicting an individual’s
maturation and development. As a poor, uneducated boy, for all intents and
purposes an orphan, Huck distrusts the morals and precepts of the
society that treats him as an outcast and fails to protect him from abuse.
This apprehension about society, and his growing relationship with
Jim, lead Huck to question many of the teachings that he has received,
especially regarding race and slavery. More than once, we see Huck
choose to “go to hell” rather than go along with the rules and follow
what he has been taught. Huck bases these decisions on his experiences,
his own sense of logic, and what his developing conscience tells
him. On the raft, away from civilization, Huck is especially free
from society’s rules, able to make his own decisions without restriction.
Through deep introspection, he comes to his own conclusions, unaffected
by the accepted—and often hypocritical—rules and values of Southern
culture. By the novel’s end, Huck has learned to “read” the world
around him, to distinguish good, bad, right, wrong, menace, friend,
and so on. His moral development is sharply contrasted to the character
of Tom Sawyer, who is influenced by a bizarre mix of adventure novels
and Sunday-school teachings, which he combines to justify his outrageous
and potentially harmful escapades.
The Hypocrisy of “Civilized” Society
When Huck plans to head west at the end of the novel in
order to escape further “sivilizing,” he is trying to avoid more
than regular baths and mandatory school attendance. Throughout the
novel, Twain depicts the society that surrounds Huck as little more
than a collection of degraded rules and precepts that defy logic.
This faulty logic appears early in the novel, when the new judge
in town allows Pap to keep custody of Huck. The judge privileges
Pap’s “rights” to his son as his natural father over Huck’s welfare.
At the same time, this decision comments on a system that puts a
white man’s rights to his “property”—his slaves—over the welfare
and freedom of a black man. In implicitly comparing the plight of
slaves to the plight of Huck at the hands of Pap, Twain implies
that it is impossible for a society that owns slaves to be just,
no matter how “civilized” that society believes and proclaims itself
to be. Again and again, Huck encounters individuals who seem good—Sally
Phelps, for example—but who Twain takes care to show are prejudiced
slave-owners. This shaky sense of justice that Huck repeatedly encounters
lies at the heart of society’s problems: terrible acts go unpunished,
yet frivolous crimes, such as drunkenly shouting insults, lead to
executions. Sherburn’s speech to the mob that has come to lynch
him accurately summarizes the view of society Twain gives in Huckleberry
Finn: rather than maintain collective welfare, society
instead is marked by cowardice, a lack of logic, and profound selfishness.
Guilt/shame
Huck experiences guilt and shame at various points throughout the novel, and these feelings force him into serious questions about morality. Huck’s guilt is largely tied to the religious morality he learned from Widow Douglas. Not long after he and Jim set out on their journey, Huck realizes that by helping Jim escape he has done harm to Jim’s owner, Miss Watson. He explains: “Conscience says to me, . . . ‘What did that poor old woman do to you, that you could treat her so mean?’ . . . I got to feeling so mean and so miserable I most wished I was dead” (Chapter 16). Here Huck recognizes that has broken the Golden Rule of Christianity, which states, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Huck remains conflicted until near the end of the book. The breaking point comes in Chapter 31, when he finds himself unable to pray. Huck realizes that in his heart he doesn’t believe Jim should be returned to slavery, and saying so in a prayer would result in him “playing double” and hence lying to God. When he finally resolves to help Jim escape for the last time, Huck banishes the last vestiges of guilt.
Empathy
The theme of empathy is closely tied to the theme of guilt. Huck’s feelings of empathy help his moral development by enabling him to imagine what it’s like to be in someone else’s shoes. The theme of empathy first arises when Huck worries about the thieves he and Jim abandon on the wrecked steamboat. Once he’s escaped immediate danger, Huck grows concerned about the men: “I begun to think how dreadful it was, even for murderers, to be in such a fix.” Huck’s concern drives him to go and find help. Another significant example of empathy in the book comes in Chapter 23, when Huck wakes up to Jim “moaning and mourning to himself.” Huck imagines that Jim is feeling “low and homesick” because he’s thinking about his wife and children: “I do believe he cared just as much for his people as white folks for their’n. It don’t seem natural, but I reckon it’s so.” Despite the residual racism in this comment, Huck’s capacity for empathy has a strong humanizing power.
