Let my first remark upon creating this blog be a complaint: I'm mildly annoyed I can't italicize or underline parts of the post title. Now somebody might think I just have a superstitious friend named Huckleberry Finn who goes on a lot of adventures!
Thus far in my reading of Huckleberry Finn--I haven't read the novel previously--the one dynamic I find most intriguing is the convoluted relationship between Huck and superstition. Generally, in my own informal observations at least, people tend to perceive superstition from one end of the pendulum or the other. Either you pass under a ladder on your way to replace the broken mirror your black cat broke on Friday the 13th, or the mere thought of doing any of the above makes you queasy. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, some of the characters' understanding of superstition is considerably more complex. Huckleberry Finn himself seems to fall somewhere in the middle ground.
While characters like Jim believe in every superstition you can think of and several others that don't have much of a following today, Huck determines on a case-by-case basis whether he believes in a particular superstition. In fact, I've dedicated my first blog post to this topic largely so that I will remember to think about the things Huck does or does not choose to believe, and consider what that might reveal about his character.
Thus far, it's been apparent that neither Jim nor Huck hold much stock in religious concepts. Jim dismisses everything Huck tells him about religious stories as many of us would superstitions today, which is even more intriguing when we consider that Jim wholeheartedly believes in worldly superstitions. Huck treats some religious concepts similarly to Jim--his thoughts on spiritual gifts demonstrate this--but he hasn't necessarily dismissed religion in the manner Jim seems to.
The complex nature of Huck's (and also Jim's) understanding of superstition has revealed itself in small glimpses, but there's a long ways to go in putting together this particular puzzle. For example, Huck accepts the myth that looking at the new moon over your right shoulder brings bad luck as absolute fact, but he is skeptical about the benefits of prayer, Jim's snakeskin superstition, and Tom's genie superstition. Huck treats elements of superstition differently than most, and once we can figure out why he dismisses the concepts he dismisses and accepts the ones he accepts, we'll have gained a great deal of insight into the workings of Huck's character.
Nice post, Chris! As a child (or perhaps it does not take age to believe in supersitions), did you hold any weird beliefs? Also, in reading your next post, you seem to talk a lot about religion, the juxtapositon of the men in church holding the guns-- and their feud with each other, at least for a few hours. Do you think Mark Twain writes from a perspective of having religious influeneces, but still seeing some problems with the church, or do you think he writes to merely mock the religious? Do you think that superstitions are more reliable than religion at times, and are there any indicators that of what Mark Twain would think in his story of Huckleberry?
ReplyDeleteOH NOOOOO!!! I used my personal blog instead of my one for English classes, ignore that link, Chris.
ReplyDeleteJacki
Thanks for reading and commenting, Jacki. I didn't ever think much about general superstitions like those I mentioned in the blog post, but I definitely had some of my own superstitions as a football fan. I blame my grandma, because she's still weirdly fanatical about her football superstitions, a lot of which she passed onto me. I at least outgrew them, but until I turned around 10 or so I would pray for Broncos wins and I had a system established for weird things like "two claps for offensive series, one clap before defensive series" and all sorts of other strange superstitions that my naive mind really thought would impact the game (you don't want to know how bad I'd feel if I forgot the two claps and then Elway threw a pick--all my fault! )
ReplyDeleteAs for Twain, I think his thing is not so much to mock religion, but to mock the hypocrisy he sees within it. I don't necessarily think he has a problem with religion, but with people who say they practice a religion but don't live it. I base that on his portrayal of the Grangerfords and Sheperdsons. He could have written their feud without a religious context, not mentioning religion at all, but instead he made their religious hypocrisy apparent through his descriptions of them. Even Huck in the story notices the absurdity of them bringing guns to church and Huck's religious education isn't very complete. It seems that that would indicate that Twain feels the hypocrisy some people treat religion with is so wrong and apparent, even people with as stunted of a religious background as Huck can see it. To me, that's not a condemnation of relgion or the religious, but a call to do better.