Very Superstitious...
Twain is recognized as an author of the realist movement. He uses a light-hearted, humorous tone to depict the realities of society as he perceived it. We certainly have superstitions in our own day and age, but the extent to which Huck's actions, hopes, and fears rely on superstition is shocking. In Chapter II it becomes evident that Jim also looks to superstition. However, characters like the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson do not seem to indulge those folk traditions. It poses the question whether superstitious tendencies typically accompany certain social classes. Moreover, what the Widow and Miss Watson do embrace is religion, specifically a Christian view of the world. It might be worth investigating whether different social classes tend toward different means of interpreting reality.
posted by rayster @ 12:13 PM
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1 Comments:
I wondered if the author (Mark Twain, a.k.a. Samuel Clemens) trying to give a sort of message hidden between the lines of how Huck can be a very literal person, yet he believes in elaborate superstition. Huck believes in everything he can see, feel, touch, and everything that can see, feel, or touch him in a tangible way. When he was threatened with bad luck, i.e. witches wanting to hunt him, he tried as quickly as he could to reverse the bad luck. I think this was because he could not physically prove or disprove something he'd never seen before. However, Tom's "ambuscade" of the "Arab's camp" (church children's picnic) was frowned upon by Huck. It had nothing to do with frightening small children- Huck seemed ready to kill someone at the drop of a hat- but Huck couldn't get any fun out of it because he literally wanted to steal some diamonds! Tom, on the other hand, has either a far deeper imagination or sense of superstition. Where Huck only fears and sees what could really happen, Tom really had fun (or is ridiculously schizophrenic) in thinking of the small children as Arabs, and coming up with the explanation that their enemies turned everything into a picnic when they caught wind of defeat. Tom's thinking may be like this due to the fact that he has been exposed to plenty of things like pirate's stories and other such fiction. One question that I am still rolling over in my head is whether Huck's father has seen this before, and interprets the act of reading as filling your head with strange, useless facts. Huck's father may have the idea of keeping a conscious, literal mind capable of living in the wild and not catering to the complexities of poetry.
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