In the novels Kindred by Octavia E. Butler and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, the immorality of slavery is constantly critiqued. Twain and Butler use the people's hypocrisy, selfishness, and gullibility to both explain the prevalence of slavery and display why it was perpetuated by otherwise good people. In a society as contradictory as the antebellum south, neither author had a lack of hypocritical traditions and beliefs to draw from in their writing.
The antebellum south was ripe with hypocrisy that ingrained selective immorality which was used to justify slavery. Butler displays a typical southern contradiction in Rufus's first formal proposition of Alice in which he gives her the illusion of choice even though they both know that Alice’s body is not her own anymore because Rufus “owns [her] now” (Butler, 167). To give Alice a choice of whether or not to sleep with him when it is clear that if she chooses no he will rape her anyways is severely hypocritical of Rufus and furthers the idea that slaves are merely property and not people who inherently deserve choices and respect. Hypocrisy can also be seen in Tom Weylin contacting Kevin after he
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Butler use very different methods to establish the same principle: slavery is fundamentally wrong. In The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn, Twain mocks the white perspective of slavery through his narrator, Huck; this contrasts how Butler utilisez Dana’s own opinions in Kindred to highlight the absolute savagery of a slave based society. These methods mirror the historical context in which both of these novels were written. Twain uses more covert methods to express his disgust at the hypocrisy, selfishness, and naivete because a publicly abolitionist book would have not garnered the widespread attention of neither publishers or readers. Butler, however, was able to capitalize on the more liberal morals of modern readers to openly preach her abolitionist and pro-equality