Huckleberry Finn

1 Pages 352 Words

One may wonder why Mark Twain would choose to write an antislavery novel some twenty years after the end of the Civil War. By the early 1880s, Reconstruction, the plan to put the United States back together after the war and integrate freed slaves into society, had hit some shaky ground, although it had not yet failed outright (that wouldn't occur until 1887, three years after the publication of Huck Finn). Still, as Twain worked on his novel, race relations, which seemed to be on a positive path in the years following the Civil War, once again became strained; Jim Crow laws, designed to limit the power of blacks in the South, began a new, insidious effort to oppress. Twain made a powerful decision when he chose to describe a system that no longer existed, when doing so could just lead the unsympathetic reader to claim that things had gotten much better for blacks.
One way to analyze this decision is to read 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 the white man, no matter how degraded that white man may be, so too did the more insidious racism that arose near the end of Reconstruction oppress black men for illogical and hypocritical reasons. However, the new racism of the South, less institutionalized and monolithic, was also much less easy to critique. Slavery was a tough practice to justify; 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. In exposing the hypocrisy of slavery, Twain demonstrated how racism distorts the oppressors as much as it does those who are oppressed. Just as the South has never entirely escaped the legacy of slavery, this theme, articulated so subtly by Twain at such an early time, has continued to animate Southern writ...