Freedom and Mark Twain

Though Huckleberry Finn was published in full in 1885, what is important about dates and the novel is its setting, which is the 1840s along the Mississippi River in Missouri and southern Illinois. This was an environment defined and vexed by the issue of slavery. One analysis of the Civil War suggests that--traumatic as it was for the United States--it turned out to be inadequate to the task of correcting the impact of slavery. Constitutional amendments were needed to guarantee freedom for blacks:

heightened awareness of defects in the restored Union underlay the Republican commitment to join conduct and constitutionalism, freedom and federalism more closely; the better to harmonize . . . "the American Creed, the American Conscience, and the American Constitution" (Hyman 422).

Even then, it was some 100 years after the Civil War that the Civil Rights Movement succeeded in embedding Constitutional protections for former slaves into American consciousness and daily experience.

At the time of the action of Huckleberry Finn, American conscience, creed, Constitution, and con

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e boys have about their helping Jim is balanced by the suspense created because they place themselves and Jim in significant physical danger, not only from the natural force of the river but also from such people as slave hunters. Eliot accepts the artistic seriousness of the novel. He assigns importance to the book's social criticism, particularly noting that it is "a far more convincing indictment of slavery than the sensationalist propaganda of Uncle Tom's Cabin" (322-3). Controversy has long surrounded Huckleberry Finn, with some critics declaring it to be the great American novel, full of moral weight and resonance, and others declaring it to be inferior in construction. For example O'Connor complains about the melodrama of Huck's time with Pap and the fantasy quality of the Tom/Huck/Jim episode. He also disagrees with Eliot about the freedom symbolism of the river: "Life on the raft may indeed be read as implied criticism of civilization--but it doesn't get Jim any closer to freedom" (372). In recent years, in a context of hypercritical readings of such conventions as the casual use of the word nigger and what she sees as the novel's failure to come to grips with the race question, Jane Smiley has declared Uncle Tom's Cabin
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Approximate Word count = 2404
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)