Mark Twain and the Use

Mark Twain and the Use of Irony

Mark Twain remains one of the most controversial American writers, although he has been dead for more than a century. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn continues to be a controversial book to teach in American high schools, because of its racially problematic language and attitudes. The book is required in 70% of public high schools and 76% of parochial high schools (Webb 1993). The perception of Huck Finn as racist, however, fails to note an essential characteristic of all of Twain's work, namely its notable use of irony. Despite Huck's status as 'poor white trash' and his racist upbringing, both at the hands of his father and later in the home of the Widow Douglas, Huck cannot help befriending the runaway slave Jim and appreciating Jim's essential humanity. "Told from the point-of-view of a runaway fourteen-year-old, the novel conglomerates melodramatic boyhood adventure, farcical low comedy, and pointed social satire. Yet at its center is a relationship between a white boy and an escaped slave" (Webb 1993). The irony of Huck's essential goodness, in contrast to more conventional examples of morality is stressed both in the language and the construction of Twain's tale.

At the beginning of the novel, the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson, Jim's mistress, are portrayed as attempting to civilize Huck by teaching him religion and manners, and keep him away from playing outside with Tom Sawyer. Twain does show Huck's biological father as having a destructive power as manifested in the violent man's racist anger that is not manifest in Huck's new life with the widow. At one point, Huck's Pa rages:

There was a free nigger there from Ohio -- a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain't a man in that town that's got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane -- the awfulest old gray-headed nabob in the State. And what do you think? They said he was a p'fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain't the wust (Twain 36).

The fact that Twain is not racist is evident in the fact that Pa's negative character is manifested in his racist attitudes. Yet the supposedly upper-class characters are similarly racist in more subtle ways. They own slaves and regard other human beings as intrinsically inferior because of their skin color. Twain also satirizes the manners of conventional morality just as much as he does the attitudes of Huck's villainous Pa:

"All I wanted was to go somewhere [after I died]; all I wanted was a change, I warn't particular. She [Miss Watson] said it was wicked to say what I said; said she wouldn't say it for the whole world; she was going to live so as to go to the good place. Well, I couldn't see no advantage in going where she was going, so I made up my mind I wouldn't try for it. But I never said so, because it would only make trouble, and wouldn't do no good" (Twain 3).

Miss Watson is convinced she is going to heaven, yet she owns a slave. This false, misplaced sense of piety is also seen in the warring families the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons. Despite the fact that these families are locked in a bloody conflict, the deceased Granderford's daughter has a bedroom filled with pious drawings that are melancholy and morose. People who constantly fixate upon their own, formalized type of goodness that they think will win them favor in the hereafter, Twain stresses, are not necessarily the kindest people in the here and now. Huck's lack of education and willingness to think outside of conventional social validation is what redeems him morally. Again and again Huck reproaches himself for 'stealing' Jim, even though clearly it is society, in Twain's view, that has been stealing Jim's liberty away from him for many years. "Huck's experiences with Jim turn upside down everything he [Huck] has been taught about black people and white, about slavery and freedom, about good and evil" (Burns, Duncan & Ward 2002).

Twain even endorses Huck's willingness to lie at times, such as when Huck pretends that Jim is his father, dying of smallpox, to avoid detection by a group of men searching for the runaway slave. But Huck continually wrestles with himself. On one hand, he condemns Jim's new boldness and resolution to buy his wife, even though Jim's plan sounds more like an illustration of his responsibility and frugality:

He was saying how the first thing he would do when he got to a free State he would go to saving up money and never spend a single cent, and when he got enough he would buy his wife…then they would both work to buy the two children, and if their master wouldn't sell them, they'd get an Ab'litionist to go and steal them. It most froze me to hear such talk. He wouldn't ever dared to talk such talk in his life before. Just see what a difference it made in him the minute he judged he was about free. It was according to the old saying, "Give a nigger an inch and he'll take an ell." (Twain 118).

But at the end of the novel, Huck eventually decides that he would rather go to hell than turn Jim over to the authorities. As at the beginning of the novel, Twain, through using Huck's innocent perspective, questions what is meant by heaven and hell in conventional moralizing. Huck's willingness to be damned, in his narrow understanding of heaven and hell, is in Twain's view shown to be an illustration of how in the enslaved South right was wrong and wrong was right -- to be 'good' meant to turn in a runway slave.

In his own career, Twain often condemned the immorality of slavery, even during the contentious period of Reconstruction. Shortly before beginning The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Twain published a short story in the Atlantic Monthly entitled "A True Story Repeated Word for Word As I Heard It," chronicling the story of an enslaved woman who was finally reunited with her young son (Burns, Duncan & 2002). However, even if Twain's writing style is ironic and he is quicker to condemn the Miss Watsons of the world than Jim, this does not erase the problematic "presence in the novel of the most powerful racial epithet in English, which appears 213 times (Webb 1993). Nor does it erase Twain's the difficulties portrayal of Jim, which, the author Ralph Ellison has stated, suggests that the black man is foolish and easily hoodwinked. On one hand, this could be due to Jim's vulnerable position, as Huck, although a child (and perhaps especially because Huck is a child) can turn Jim into the authorities on a whim. Huck's willingness to conceal Jim shows Huck's goodness, but also the precariousness of Jim's position. But according to Ellison "Twain's depiction of Jim owes much to the popular nineteenth-century black-face minstrel show where white actors darkened their skin to the color of coal to render comic burlesques of African-American speech and manners" even if the language of the novel is ironic at times (Webb 1993).

Twain's admitted love of the minstrel show is one of the many contradictions inherent in the degree to which he uses irony in Huck Finn. "His [Twain's] father and uncle owned slaves, yet his wife was the daughter of a prominent abolitionist. He fought briefly with the confederate army, yet later in life paid a black student1s way through Yale Law School. Though he protested against lynching and discrimination, he loved minstrel shows and 'nigger jokes'" (Webb 1993). Twain also seems to hold back from a full condemnation of slavery. The ending of the book feels unsatisfying. Miss Watson's convenient death frees Jim, rather than Huck's outright rebellion or defiance, or Jim's ability to evade the law frees Jim. Huck himself seems to regress as he reluctantly agrees to allow Tom to torment Jim, as part of Tom's boyish adventure fantasies, even though Jim is clearly suffering. However, while Twain may not be a 'politically correct' author in the contemporary sense, merely because his portrayal of Jim is not entirely commensurate with modern sensibilities does not mean that it is entirely blameworthy, either, nor does it mitigate the irony of his portrayal.