Huckleberry Finn, Emma, My Name

¶ … Huckleberry Finn, Emma, My Name is Asher Lev

Voices of youth:" Point-of-View, Irony, and Coming of Age in Austen, Twain, and Potok

All three protagonists that give their name to the novels Emma, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and My Name is Asher Lev experience a conflict between their sense of individual identity and society. Jane Austen's Emma Woodhouse is a young woman who believes she is an expert at interpreting the unconscious motivations of other people and as a result is an obsessive 'matchmaker." Only after failing to make successful matches and to guess the true intentions of the characters in her social circle does she acknowledge her own need to be socially educated. She submits to societal expectations for women and marries her teacher and mentor, the aptly-named Mr. Knightly. Mark Twain's protagonist Huckleberry Finn experiences the opposite dilemma. Huck is in a society that holds values that are profoundly in error. His fundamentally moral character chafes against these social hypocrisies, such as the South's tolerance of slavery. Huck must hold true to his own personal values, reject society and validate his good friend Jim's humanity and right to be free. Only then does Huck become a moral adult. Likewise, Chaim Potok's Asher Lev exists in conflict with his immediate society, although more with a social subculture than the society at large. Born in a tightly-knit and conservative Hasidic community and family, Asher Lev exhibits a talent for art that his father cannot understand or approve of, especially when he uses his religious upbringing in his paintings.

Emma, in contrast to Huck Finn or Asher Lev, has the most to learn from her society, a point reinforced by the omniscient, third-person, ironic narrative voice of Austen's novel. She is wealthy and privileged, and begins the novel a dilettante, more interested in drawing up lists of books to improve her mind than actually reading and learning them. Her father is old and so obsessed with his health he does not see that Emma needs a stricter, overseeing hand than either he, Emma's married sister, or her recently departed and married governess can provide. Mr. Knightly does want to mentor and marry Emma but for most of the novel Emma forswears marriage, because she has enough money and friends without fulfilling her expected social role as a woman living under the control of a husband. Only after pressuring her friend Harriet Smith to nearly lose a chance at marrying a good man, failing to see the real intentions of Mr. Elton and Frank Churchill and realizing that she does love Mr. Knightly, does Emma come to terms with the error of her ways. She learns to behave more charitably and humbly to everyone, including the spinster Miss Bates, who acts as a kind of novelistic warning to what Emma might become, if she did not marry Mr. Knightly and submit to her society's rules for correct feminine behavior.

In contrast to Emma, Huckleberry Finn begins the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the confronting the absurdity of socialization. Huck forced to wear confining clothing and to pray and to eat food served by slaves at the widow's house. The novel is told in the rough, first-person limited dialect of Huckleberry Finn, and the irony of the novel is the juxtaposition between the savage Finn's greater instinctive morality and the cruelty of the more civilized individuals, like the slaveholding Southern women he stays with, the Shakespearean 'actors' and thieves he meets on his travels, and the pious, warring families who are determined to kill one another, even while they live in respectability. No social value is sacred in the novel, even paternity. Huckleberry Finn's violent, alcoholic father, after Finn escapes from the Widow, is an extremely negative paternal force of socialization. Finn, rather than be integrated into society like Emma, must leave society and find his own values, rather than the hypocritical values imposed upon him by others. The most fundamental of these values are his friendship with Jim, an escaped Black slave, who is his truest friend in the novel. Jim follows Huckleberry Finn everywhere, and Finn saves his life on several occasions by lying. Huck feels guilty because he has been taught this is 'stealing' another person's property, because Jim is 'owned' but Huck's natural humanity tells him otherwise. Unlike Emma's natural, ungoverned impulses, which led her to play with the fates of others, Huck's natural inclinations are the best part of his character, unlike his friend Tom Sawyer who is more socialized in morals and books (the sort of books which Emma ignored at her peril). Tom actually torments Jim, when Jim has been captured by the authorities as a runaway, by trying to make the man's life similar to that of his favorite adventure novels. Huckleberry Finn's maturity comes with leaving behind Tom Sawyer at the end of the novel, and heading out away from society into the ungoverned territories of the American West.

My Name is Asher Lev also tells the protagonist's story in the first person, but with less irony. Asher Lev's story is more of a tragedy -- he loves his Hasidic community, but cannot quite fit in, because his fundamental nature requires him to become an artist. Society is not corrupt, as it is in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but the individual, to find his true self, must reject his upbringing and original society, unlike Austen's Emma. Asher Lev does encounter a number of artists who are able to balance their art with their Jewish faith, but Asher Lev's destiny is to find a more radical path. Asher Lev also does not drop out of society like Huck, but enters a new society. Potok, unlike Twain, who sees society as essentially corrupt, and unlike Austen, who sees social influence as positive, refuses to provide a singular answer as to the degree to which the individual has a social responsibility to stifle his or her own moral impulses to preserve harmony. Potok also suggests it is impossible to drop out of society, rather one finds a new society -- in Asher Lev's case, the society of artists.