Race? Gender? Sexuality? I’ve even read studies of Huck Finn on social class, arguing that the novel critiques the high and the low, but not the middle. These historicist and cultural studies focus on what divides us. There’s nothing wrong with them, but do they tell the whole story? Is there a dimension of Huck Finn that brings us together? Does the novel have a universal significance that transcends social categories?
Can a female and/or white reader identify with Jim in his quest for freedom? Can a female and/ or black reader identify with the moral dilemma of Huck as he struggles with the conflict between law and friendship, between society’s view of right and wrong and the individual’s?
Can we all identify with the escape, the river journey, the risks taken and obstacles overcome, the conflict with enemies, the camaraderie with friends, the encounter with death, and the rebirth into new possibilities in life?
Regardless of race, gender, sexuality, and class, there is embedded in the narrative a universal hero quest myth that never fails to capture, not only the imagination, but, perhaps, our sense of the shape of our own lives as we escape our own constraints, navigate our own journeys, pursue our own quests, take our own risks, overcome our own obstacles, contend with enemies, bond with friends, struggle with our own mortality, and seek our own redemption, whether it be in the form of freedom, love and belonging, maturation, atonement, recovery, recognition, prosperity, achievement, or enlightenment.
Similarly, we all progress from youthful inexperience and naiveté, to encounters with negative experience and struggles with decision-making, to either cynicism or healthy maturity. We can debate how much progress Huck makes in the course of the novel and where he might be headed, but we can all relate to his moral and psychological journey.
There are those who contest the very notion of “grand narratives” in the form of universal patterns and themes. From this perspective, we are all so trapped in our own historical time, place, situation, and identity, that we are incapable of transcendence. It is the differences among us that are significant, not the similarities. Taken to an extreme such a viewpoint leaves us in social isolation, incapable of human transactions across difference, maybe even incapable of love and belonging.
When it comes to Huck Finn it seems that controversy is inescapable. Rather than taking hard and fast positions—the novel is racist or it’s not, sexist or not, homoerotic or not, classist or not, universal or not—I prefer to see the value in contrasting views. The novel is racist and it’s not, it is sexist and it’s not, it is homoerotic and it’s not, classist and it’s not, universal and it’s not.
Nature and society, pleasure and pain, good and evil, freedom and power, love and belonging, absence and presence—these constants of human experience, historicized in concrete action, imagery, character, and language, are what give Huck Finn, and all great literature its lasting value.
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