Mark Twain

J Cullen reporter at eden.com
Thu May 21 16:44:18 PDT 1998



>Louis P wrote:
>>There was actually a lively controversy about this in the pages of Harper's
>>Magazine a year or so ago. Jane Smiley, author of "Moo" and "A Thousand
>>Acres", took the position that Uncle Tom's Cabin was a much more
>>courageously antiracist novel and, in a quite contrarian manner, that it
>>was better as art. I might track it down and re-post.
>
>I don't think it useful to compare _Huck Finn_ and _Uncle Tom's Cabin_
>aesthetically, but whether it was 'courageously antiracist' or not, _Uncle
>Tom's Cabin_ was at least used as effective propaganda by the abolitionist
>movement whereas _Huck Finn_ was an "antislavery" novel that came out after
>slavery was over.
>
>Yoshie

Huck Finn came out in 1884, when slaves had been freed but when the Ku Klux Klan was terrorizing freed slaves as well as carpetbaggers and other liberal whites in the South in an attempt to turn back Reconstruction. I believe Clemens had moved west by that time, but he still was a Southerner who was effectively repudiating his upbringing in "Huck Finn" while Harriet Beecher Stowe was a Yankee who had no such emotional investment (not to take anything away from her work).

Within a dozen years of the publication of Huck Finn, most of the Southern states, with Confederate veterans back in control, had adopted segregation laws that one might say reimposed slavery without making the masters responsible for the upkeep of their black workers. The "Jim Crow" segregation laws were at least in part a reaction to efforts by the agrarian populists to make coalitions between black and white sharecroppers against the Southern Democratic establishment.

-- Jim Cullen

---------------------------------------- THE PROGRESSIVE POPULIST James M. Cullen, Editor P.O. Box 150517, Austin, Texas 78715-0517 Phone: 512-447-0455 Internet: populist at usa.net Home page: http://www.eden.com/~reporter ----------------------------------------



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