In the early chapters of Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, the author, Mark Twain, uses many of his characters to convey--what may be construed as--his concepts regarding the hypocrisy of religion and the church. Twain also utilizes his main characters, Huck Finn and Jim, as the instruments of superstition. These ideas are crucial to the development of Finn’s balance of logic throughout the novel.
In chapter two of Finn, readers are introduced to Tom Sawyer’s idea to form a real gang--as real as pretend can be--of robbers and murderers, and the initiation of Huck Finn into the group. Twain walks readers through Tom Sawyers philosophy, his preference, to kill people rather than burglarize them. Sawyer expresses his belief that burglars have “no sort of style”, while killing is “considered best” (Twain, 9). Although Sawyer’s tendency is a departure from God’s law--Ten Commandments declare murder a sin against God’s church--the self-made leader of the gang (and his peers) object to Ben Rogers’ idea of robbing and killing on Sundays. This example of inconsistency, this hypocrisy, may best express Twain’s feelings toward religion--how he felt toward the end of the 19th century--and the Christian Church.
The elements of hypocrisy are attributive to the Widow Douglas, and Mark Twain uses her character as well as her sister, Miss Watson, to envelop Huckleberry Finn with the purity of the church. In chapter two, Finn wants to smoke his pipe, but Douglas objects to this “mean practice [that] wasn’t clean” even though “she [takes] snuff” which is “of course […] all right” (Twain, 2). Huck shares his infallible logic with readers in chapter one, during a conversation with Miss Watson. He asserts, with respect for Miss Watson’s desire to live each day so she could die and go to Heaven, “I couldn’t see no advantage in going where [Watson] was going, so I made up my mind I wouldn’t try for it” (Twain, 3). However, if Watson tells Finn that Tom Sawyer would end up in Heaven, he would likely live out each day of his life similarly to her. Although both Douglas and Watson wear piety on their sleeves, they do not consider the practice of keeping slaves nor the imposing of one’s religion over a people as being morally detestable.
Superstition is a phenomenon found at several times throughout Finn. In chapter one, Huck flicks a spider off from his shoulder, and he responds to the “awful bad sign and […] bad luck” by stripping off his clothes, spinning around in a circle three times while making the sign of the cross, and by tying “up a little lock of [his] hair with a thread to keep witches away” (Twain, 4). Finn was stopped short of tossing salt over his left shoulder by Miss Watson in chapter four. In chapter ten, superstition accompanies a profound thought.
After Huck rummages through the clothes of a dead man--Jim already warned Huck it was bad luck to even talk about a dead man--Jim’s barefoot toe was bitten by a snake. According to Jim, the natural remedy used to escape the deadly effects of a snakebite include “chop off the snake’s head and throw it away, […] skin the body and roast a piece of it”, and tie the snake’s rattle around the infected person’s wrist (Twain, 57). All of the superstition surrounding Jim’s snakebite nearly averts readers from absorbing a snippet of Huck’s logic “that all comes of [his] being such a fool as to not remember that wherever you leave a dead snake its mate always comes there and curls around it” (Twain, 57).
Works Cited
Twain, Mark, Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn. NY: Doubleday, 1985.
No comments:
Post a Comment