Huckleberry Finn Reconstruction

Although Twain had written Adventures of Huckleberry Finn almost 20 years after the Emancipation Proclamation and set at the end of the Civil War, America and especially the South, were still struggling with racism and all of the aftereffects of slavery. By the time of the early 1880s, the plan to put the United States back together after the war and integrate the freed slaves into society, that was known as Reconstruction, had seemed to be going nowhere, even though it had not yet failed. As Twain was working on his novel, race relations, which seemed to be going on a positive path in the years following the Civil War, became strained and a major issue once again. The imposition of Jim Crow laws, that was designed to limit the power of blacks

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 in fact a way 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 to oppress black men for illogical and hypocritical reasons. In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain, by exposing the hypocrisy of slavery, he demonstrates how racism distorts the oppressors as much as it does those who are

As a poor, uneducated boy, for all intents and purposes an orphan, Huck doubts the morals and perceptions of the society that treats him as an outcast and fails to protect him from abuse. This feeling about society, and his growing relationship with Jim, leads Huck to question many of the teachings that he has received, especially regarding race and slavery. More than once, we see that Huck chooses to “go to hell” rather than to 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. While Huck is on the raft, away from civilization, he is especially free from society’s rules and able to make his own decisions without any restriction. Through deep introspection, he comes to his own conclusions, unaffected by the accepted and often hypocritical rules and values of the Southern culture. By the novel’s end, Huck has learned to “read” the world around him so he can distinguish the good, the bad, the right, the wrong, friends, and