Women in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

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Women in Adventures of Huck Finn

When critically examining a piece of literature one holds in high regard, she or he often tends to feel compelled to defend the work. Since Adventures of Huck Finn is one of my favorite novels, I am speaking about myself; however, I resolved I would consult the text for a theory, not apply my ideas of what the book represents. After reading Nancy Walker's essay "Reformers and Young Maidens: Women and Virtue in Adventures of Huck Finn," I looked at the novel with a question in mind: did Mark Twain simply apply contemporary stereotypes when creating his female characters? I put aside my bias towards the novel and considered Mary Ellen Goad's contention "that [the female characters] are merely flat and stereotypical" (Walker). My essay is not a dismissal of Walker's thesis, as I recognize her illustration of Twain's use of the "morally virtuous woman" stereotype, but a closer look at the portrayal of women in the novel with consideration for Goad's generalization. The preliminary significant factor is Goad's and Walker's sex: being women, they have more of an inclination to criticize the representations of their own sex in the novel than I do as a man. Judith Fetterleg discusses the conflict women encounter when reading nineteenth and twentieth-century American literature: "...the female reader is co-opted into participation in an experience from which she is explicitly excluded; she is asked to identify with a selfhood that defines itself in opposition to her; she is required to identify against herself" (xii). I consider it an advantage to be able to critically look at Huck Finn without preestablished conflict, (being of the same sex as the novel's author and intended audience), while testing t...

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Works Cited

Fetterleg, Judith. The Resisting Reader: “A Feminist Approach to American Fiction.” Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1978.

Skandera-Trobmbley, Laura. Mark Twain in the Company of Women. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.

Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huck Finn: A Case Study in Critical Controversy. Ed.Gerald Graff and James Phelan. Boston and New York: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1995.

Vasilakis, Noreen. “The Degradation of Married Women in the Victorian Era.”

Walker, Nancy. “Reformers and Young Maidens: Women and Virtue in Huck Finn.” Adventures of Huck Finn: A Case Study in Critical Controversy. Boston and New York: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1995.

Woloch, Nancy. Women and the American Experience. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2000.

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