Reading literature like a professor: Huckleberry Finn analysis

Huckleberry Finn and How to Read Literature like a Professor

Four aspects of geography in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Physical aspects of the land, economics, politics, and history (Foster 163-175)

Reading a book can be taking a journey, or embarking upon a vacation of the mind. Or reading can be a means of seeking an escape route from one's current, confining reality, as in this case of the world of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The reader enters the antebellum South and chafes at its rules and restraints, as well as glories in the freedom of life on a raft, floating in the Mississippi. Twain's St. Petersburg is a fictional place, but the most significant aspects of its geography, like the ever-present wilderness that enables Huck's Pap to hide from the law and drink moonshine, and the mobility and cover the river's darkness provides for the fleeing Huck and Jim, is actually rooted in many of the real qualities of the area. While any boy can travel down a river, the particularity of the Mississippi River makes the novel's plot possible and thus unique in annals of literature (Foster 165). The two characters are forced to go even deeper South as they travel, making Jim even more threatened. The specific qualities of the Mississippi create the threats of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as well as provide the potential for liberation.

However, the physical aspects of the Mississippi alone do not make the novel. The slave economics of the plantation system do as well: the economics of the South explain why being a personal slave of a woman like Miss Watson in a more genteel area of the country is not as 'bad' as being a plantation slave in the deep South. The prospect of being sold further down South is what makes Jim so fearful. The politics of a corrupt political system that empowers the policing of fugitive slaves, and a history that normalizes human bondage and makes Huck feel guilty for fleeing with Jim as 'theft' are all manifest in the novel.