Superstition in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Look inside any teenage girl magazine and one will find a page dedicated to horoscopes. From celebrities getting their own astrologists to reading about one’s star sign, interpreting the stars and planets seems to be popular. Perhaps people want an answer to their questions or some insight on how to handle a situation. Reading their horoscope gives people the opportunity to understand the world around them, similar to the role of superstition in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain, in his American Realistic novel, utilizes superstition in order to help the characters understand life and search for the truth (Cohen 68). Therefore, superstition plays an important role in the novel. Superstition is used in the novel to emphasize the feelings of the characters. One instance is when Huck is sitting by an open window at night. …show more content…
In the very beginning of the novel, the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson read Huck bible stories. After learning that the people in the bible have passed on, Huck exclaims that he does not care about dead people. Later in the night, he wishes that he was dead. He interprets the animal sounds outside as cries that somebody is going to die (Twain 14-16). Daniel G. Hoffman states that superstitions are associated with the “freedom from the restraints of civilization.” He interprets these signs as an “acknowledgement of the fact of death,” and an “admission of evil as a positive force in the natural word.” He points out that Huck’s statement about not caring about dead people only applies to his Bible lessons, not to his beliefs about reality (102). Huck connects learning and civilization with death and superstition. He wants nothing to do with being civilized, and it makes him fear the world that encourages it. Therefore, the passage foreshadows Huck’s escape and ultimate choice to leave civilization at the end of the
At one point, Huck’s father attempts to kill him in their home. “Bye-and-bye he rolled out and jumped up on his feet looking wild, and he see me and went for me, he chased me round and round the place with a clasp-knife, calling me the Angel of Death and saying he would kill me…” the reader by this point has developed their opinion of Huck, and must think to themselves, in what way twain has described the father. Twain has manipulated the father's language to show how the white father in the white dominated culture, is worse than anyone
Society has always denounced the acts of death and children running away from their homes. Huck can be seen as a morbid child as he is always talking about death and murder. Society would rather not have anything to do with people who have such a melancholic outlook on life. Living with years of torment by his drunkard father, Pap, Huck feared the day he would return to daunt his life. When Pap does return, he seizes Huck and drags him to a secluded cabin where Huck is boarded inside and unable to leave: This is where the dilemma occurs. In this position, Huck has a decision to make, either take note to the morals of society and listen to his conscience, which will result in more added years of pain and anguish from Pap, or Huck can listen to his heart and do what he thinks is best.
The Widow Douglas and Miss Watson try to "sivilize" Huck by making him stop all of his habits such as smoking, etc. They try to reverse all of his teaching from the first twelve years of his life and force him to become their stereotypical good boy. The rest of the town also refused to view him as good and he was considered undesirable. The only time that the town's people were able to put away their views of Huck was when there was excitement to be found, like when they all crowded on the steamboat to see if the cannons could bring Huck's body to the surface. Everyone got interested in him and tried to show that they cared about him, but this is only after he is presumed dead.
In order for Huck to alienate himself from society and reveal the hypocrisy of society’s values. Twain uses the morals of the widow Douglas to insure Huck’s understanding of how contradicting these morals really are. “The Widow Douglas she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me” (Twain 1). It’s shown from this quote that the widow Douglas most truly believed that her moral values where the correct and civilized morals. But it wasn’t only the the widow Douglas who taught Huck, her sister Mrs. Watson taught Huck the ideas of Christianity and read stories from the Bible to him as well. They both tried to insure that Huck turn in to the what they believed was the civilized and religiously correct human being.
Witchcraft started in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. Superstition started when women were accused of acting strangely. These superstitions turned into trials, and later lead to mounds of hanged people. Most of the people accused were innocent, but the harsh judge rulings left them with nothing to live for. The only options for the tried, no matter if guilty or not, were to claim guilty, living the rest of their life in prison, or to plead not guilty and hang. Due to both consequences being equally as punishable, many people isolated themselves from society. Unfortunately, some people caused the uprising of the salem witch trials more than others did. In the play The Crucible, by Arthur Miller, Abigail Williams single handedly attributed to the
In the first scenes of the book Huck is struggling to understand the concepts of Miss Watson's heaven and hell. He finds her harp strumming view of heaven boring and he wants to be in an exciting place. When Miss Watson tells Huck that he will get anything he prays for, he takes it very literally and decides to pray for fishing line, which he gets. But praying for fishing hooks didn't seem to work, when he asks her to pray for him to get some fishing hooks she calls him an idiot. These are both gentle pokes at southern religion. Christianity practiced a people so very pious, like Miss Watson, who can still treat their human slaves like property. This is an ongoing theme in the book. Twain points out some of the absurd incongruences between Christianity and the lifestyle of most of the south. Huck has not conformed to societies general way of thinking. When he is with the widow and Miss Watson, he begins to change, but Pap steals him away and he reverts back to a much more practical lifestyle.
Huck finds out that all of the bad things he did are coming back to haunt him. In chapter 31 when Jim gets sold for forty dollars, Huck realizes that “here was the plain hand of Providence slapping me in the face and letting me know my wickedness was being watched all the time whilst from up there in heaven.'; It also scared Huck because all this karma, what comes around goes around, was happening to him.
Initially, religion is appealing to Huck when the Widow Douglas tries teaching him: "After supper she got out her book and learned me about Moses and the Bulrushers; and I was in a sweat to find out all about him" (220). Salvation seems possible to Huck, but he prefers to go to the "bad place" instead of spending eternity with Miss Watson (221); also, he abandons the concept of morality as a result of Miss Watson imposing it upon him. "I couldn't see no advantage about [helping others]...so at last I reckoned I wouldn't worry about it anymore, but just let it go" (226). Huck does not realize that he is not a selfish person, but resolves to sacrifice salvation instead of living selflessly simply because of the source and c...
...t the end of the book Huck even feels compassion for people that do not deserve it. He witnesses the duke and king being tarred and feathered. Despite the fact that these men played dirty tricks on him Huck still feels pity for them. “It was a dreadful thing to see. Humans beings can be awful cruel to one another.” (208) Mark Twain is essentially questioning the reader to examine their set of beliefs and decide which ones they actually believe, and which ones should be abandoned just as Huck did with Miss Watson’s beliefs and Pap’s beliefs.
Life on land was filled with many difficulties. There were many rules that Huck had to follow set by both the widow and his father. The widow’s main goal was to “civilize” Huck into a member of society. She expected Huck to go to school, wear clean clothes, sleep in his bed, and go to church. She just wanted him to be like a normal child of his age. Even though Huck bends the rules a bit and tries to sneak a smoke here and there, he eventually grows to like living under the widow’s protection. He proves this point when he says, "Living in a house, and sleeping in a bed, pulled on me pretty tight, mostly, but before the cold weather I used to slide out and sleep in the woods, sometimes, and so that was a rest to me. I liked the old ways best, but I was getting so I liked the new ones, too, a littl...
At the beginning of the tale, Huck struggles between becoming ?sivilized? and doing what he pleases. He doesn?t want to listen to the rules that the Widow Douglas and her sister force upon him, even though he knows the widow only wants what is best for him. Miss Watson pushes Huck away from society even more through the way she treats him. She teaches him religion in such a dreary way that when she speaks of heaven and hell, Huck would rather go to hell than be in heaven with her: ?And she told all about the bad place, and I said I wished I was there?I couldn?t see no advantage in going where she was going, so I made up my mind I wouldn?t try for it? (12-13). Huck is taught a very different kind of morality by his father who believes ?it warn?t no harm to borrow things, if you was meaning to pay them back?? (70). He likes his father?s idea of morality better because he is not yet mature enough to fully understand right and wrong, although living with the widow...
Twain’s skeptical take on religion can be elicited because superstition is a theme that both Huck and Jim bring up several times. Although both of these characters tend to be quite rational, they quickly become irrational when anything remotely superstitious happens to them. The role of superstition in this book is two-fold: First, it shows that Huck and Jim are child-like in spite of their otherwise extremely mature characters. Second, it serves to foreshadow the plot at several key junctions. For example, spilling salt leads to Pa returning for Huck, and later Jim gets bitten by a rattlesnake after Huck touches a snakeskin with his hands.
From the very beginning of the novel, there is an air of phoniness to the environments Huck is raised in, and his upbringing is the foundation for his ability to observe others’ discrepancies. He dislikes the stuffy rules in Widow Douglas’s home because they make little reasonable sense to him - for instance, Widow Douglas will not let him smoke because it is “a mean practice” and not “clean,” yet she chews tobacco, which Huck scoffs is alright because “she done it herself” (12). Huck observes little duplicities like this, yet does not judge them outright. And as uncomfortable as he was with the uptight style of living with Widow Douglas, he also finds little solace in the woods with t...
Huck plays a prank on Jim by putting a dead rattlesnake by him while he is asleep. The rattlesnake is a symbol of bad luck in itself, but the event after his prank is unfortunate. This event is unfortunate because the rattlesnake’s mate comes and bites Jim in the leg. Jim’s leg swells up and doesn’t get better until three days later. Twain was trying to convey bad luck by writing this event.
This is lucidly shown in Huck as his adventures evolve further into seriousness. Though the book has its serious points a lot throughout, Twain still adds a punch of humor to keep everything interesting and entertaining. The reader's opinion may have changed a little after reading Huck's adventures and seeing his changes. Huck's views on, "right and wrong" opinions, views of slavery, and the tricks he plays all show the beliefs that Huck withheld in the early part of the book. Huck's opinion of religion shows his lack of concern for serious things.