It proves difficult to ignore the warning prefacing Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to avoid finding any motives or messages in a narrative that is steeped in countless instances of both. The Huck and Hashtag project offers a multitude of themes prevalent throughout the novel, the thematic richness of this narrative, however, remains insufficiently expressed. The thematic occurrences of irony and hypocrisy, and the messages it conveys, are all too ubiquitous and strong to ignore. We propose the hashtag #sivilization for its encompassing representation of irony and hypocrisy – the ironic misspelling of word is representative of the corruption and backwards logic of Huck’s civilization, the very people that commit this hypocrisy.
Before the novel starts, Twain prefaces with a notice warning against looking for any literary devices or patterns lest that person be “persecuted, banished or shot”. This notice foreshadows the threats of hypocrisy to come. And reading deeper, it is clear to view that this claim is the novels leading example of irony – the author asks the reader to find no meaning in a novel wrought with them. Although initially confusing, this warning begins to make sense when seen in the context of all of the ubiquity of irony and hypocrisy that follows.
The most recurring and prevailing example of hypocrisy is the perpetuation of slave-ownership by otherwise good-hearted, and even devotedly religious people: the Widow Douglas, Miss Watson, the Wilks’ daughters, the Grangerfords, and the Phelps. After Sally Phelps learns that the cylinder-head of the ship that brought Huck to her broke and killed a slave, she comments that “It’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.” (ch. XXXII, pg. 206). This incapacity to equate slaves’ lives to whites from a practicing religion is stark demonstration of hypocrisy, particularly in the instance of mentioning religion in the same breath. She continues to recount of a time a cylinder-head blew out and killed a man. She annotates that, “He was a baptist.”
As Huck progresses through his journey, he continues to face hypocrisy. The Grangerford and Sherpherdson family have been killing eachother in a generation-spanning feud, justifying murder with murder. Sherburns’ escapes conviction at the mobs’ hand by orating his serious criticism of the mobs’ morality and lack of individual thought, moments after murdering a defenseless drunk. The duke and king swindle the townspeople by overhyping tickets to their fradulent show and after realizing the deception, instead of persecuting the duke and king, the townspeople selfishly protect their own integrity by allowing the rest of the town to be duped as well.
An interesting occurence of hypocrisy is that of Tom Sawyer, who represents a dichotomy to Huck – someone whose comparable characteristics serves to highlight their contrasts. Contrary to Huck, Tom was raised in an affluent family, and is educated and well-read. His devotion to literature, however, only serves to delude his reason! Because Tom (quite literally) sticks to the books, he willingly subjects Jims rescue to frivolous and useless details, greatly endangering the success.
We see hypocrisy used morally as well, however it is only used in response to the evils of it. Tom forces Huck to compensate the slaves that he stole watermelon from, while Tom, himself, leads a heist campaign against the Phelps family. Jim uses the threat of physical abuse by white people for stealing their property in order to secure the confidentiality of their raft. And most evident is Huck’s use of morally violating actions to accomplish morally positive deeds: the use of deception to thwart the Duke and King’s deception, multiples counts of lying in the name of survival or freedom. This hypocrisy is superbly exemplified when Huck iconically admits that he chooses hell in order to save Jim.
Twains’ dual use of hypocrisy may suggest that deviance from the status quo is not only acceptable, but a mandatory response to the adversity the very same status quo threatens when it is blind to its own adversity.
Ryan, Andy, Amanda, and Curtis
