Historical/Cultural Contexts
Arac, Jonathan. Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target: The Functions of Criticism in Our Time. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.
Baker, Houston A. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Champion, Laurie, ed. The Critical Response to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1991.
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage Books, 1972.
Foner, Eric. “Blacks and the U.S. Constitution, 1789-1989.” New Left Review 183 (September-October 1990).
Frederickson, George M. The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914. 1971. New York: Harper and Row, 1972.
Harding, Vincent, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Earl Lewis. We Changed the World: African Americans, 1945-1970. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Harris, Susan K. Mark Twain’s Escape from Time: A Study of Patterns and Images. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982.
Kelley, Robin D. G., and Earl Lewis, eds. To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Kennedy, Randall. Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word. New York: Pantheon Books, 2002.
Murray, Albert. The Hero and the Blues. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973.
Murray, Albert. South to a Very Old Place. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971.
O‘Meally, Robert, ed. The Jazz Cadence of American Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
Rourke, Constance. American Humor: A Study of the National Character. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931.
Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.
Smith, Henry Nash, and William M. Gibson, eds. Mark Twain-Howells Letters: The Correspondence of Samuel L. Clemens and William D. Howells, 1872- 1910. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960.
Sundquist, Eric, ed. Introduction. Mark Twain: A Callection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1994, pp. 1-14.
Toll, Robert C. Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.
Twain, Mark. “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses.” In Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, and Essays. Vol. 2, 1891-1910. New York: The Library of America, 1992.
a Edward Said used these terms in a lecture at Columbia University in April 2000.
b William Dean Howells, My Mark Twain, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1910, p. 101.
c Jonathan Arac, Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target: The Functions of Criticism in Our Time, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.
d Randall Kennedy, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, New York: Pantheon Books, 2002.
e Sterling Brown, The Negro in American Fiction, 1937, reprint: New York: Atheneum, 1969, pp. 67-68.
f Brown, p. 68.
g Reprinted in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, edited by John F. Callahan, New York: Modern Library, 1995, p. 88.
h Ralph Ellison, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” reprinted in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, p. 112.
i Conversations with Ralph Ellison, edited by Maryemma Graham and Amritjit Singh, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995, p. 172. Some of Ellison’s mixture of feeling about Twain’s creation is suggested in Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, New York: Vintage Books, 1972, in which a white character named Emerson, son of a company tycoon, reveals to Invisible Man a letter that has kept him running in circles. “With us it’s still Jim and Huck Finn,” Emerson says to the young black man. “A number of my friends are jazz musicians, and I’ve been around,” he goes on. “I’m Huckleberry, you see.” Thus white Emerson’s gesture of camaraderie, the moral action, must be discerned through a screen of well-meaning condescension in which Invisible Man is ironically saddled with the starkly limited role of Jim—a now-realistic, now-minstrel figure whom black readers barely recognize as one of their own. To compound the irony—and perhaps to underscore Ellison’s sense of Twain‘s—Invisible Man sees a black couple in Harlem evicted onto the pavement along with their belongings, including “a pair of crudely carved and polished bones, ’knocking bones,‘ used to accompany music at country dances, used in black-faced minstrels; the flat ribs of a cow, a steer or sheep, flat bones that gave off a sound, when struck, like heavy castanets (had he been a minstrel?) or the wooden block of a set of drums” (p. 265). These evidences of a minstrel past, of connection to this tradition, may be distasteful, but they figure as part of black identity, too, as we recall that not only white men but black men blacked-up for minstrel shows. Distasteful as it may be, these evidences of minstrelsy are part of black American (and white American) identity.
j Morrison, Toni, “Re-Marking Twain,” reprinted in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, edited by Susan K. Harris, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000, p. 377.
k Green Hills of Africa, 1935, reprint: New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953, p. 22.
l Plessy v. Ferguson was decided in 1896, but the debates were alive as Twain was completing Huckleberry Finn.
m It is true that at the time of this novel’s creation, the form of music called the blues was just in the process of being created. Twain could not have modeled his narrative after the form, but he used some of its ingredients and habits of mind in the making of his work. Houston A. Baker, in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), might say that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is part of a blues-matrix— that is, it falls within the broad network of the blues form and feeling whether it literally antedates the musical form of the blues itself or not.
n This definition owes a lot to Ralph Ellison’s essay “Richard Wright’s Blues,” 1945, reprinted in Living with Music, edited by Robert G. O‘Meally, New York: Modern Library, 2001, pp. 101-119; and to Albert Murray’s Stomping the Blues, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976.
o Murray speaks of this type of American citizen in South to a Very Old Place, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971.
p For this insight, I am indebted to Arac’s Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target, p. 34.
q As Constance Rourke notes in American Humor: A Study of the National Character (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931), American storytellers, “streaming nonsense,” were nothing if not superb improvisers. Huck, and, as Rourke observes, Twain himself, certainly were also part of this brashly inventive American vernacular tradition.
r Ralph Ellison, Going to the Territory, New York: Random House, 1986.
s Bernard De Voto, Mark Twain’s America, 1932; reprinted in Mark Twain’s America, and Mark Twain at Work, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967, pp. 65-66.
t De Voto, p. 39.
u Victor A. Doyno, “The Composition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” reprinted in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, edited by Susan K. Harris, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000, p. 12.
v A word that refers to military equipment. Twain’s use of it here, to describe an imaginary officer who patrols that which is officially ordained or properly sanctioned, sets the stage for unself-conscious comedy.
w Exaggerated accounts of the facts. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, with its own truths tightly woven into its form, is by definition a “stretcher.”
x A large barrel made to hold a ship’s supply of sugar.
y The story of Moses and the bulrushes. See the Bible, Exodus 2:3-10.
z Going.
aa Fatten up.
ab Cast metal, usually gold or silver and often brick-shaped.
ac Jewelry.
ad Mules domesticated for packing or hauling.
ae Fools.
af An arrangement of bars or steps meant to prevent the escape of cattle or to force people to pass one by one through a wall or fence.
ag Written down, foreordained.
ah Beat; derives from tanning, the process of converting an ani
mal skin into leather.
ai Slang for “pay” or “hand over”; from Spanish pongale, for “put it down.”
aj Bullied.
ak Cheap whiskey, named for the distance from which it could make a person drunk. A rod is 16.5 feet.
al A violent state of mental and physical disturbance, characterized by hallucinations and trembling; induced by prolonged excessive use of alcohol.
am Cheap, homemade wooden chair.
an Idle talk, perhaps with a motive to deceive.
ao wood sized just right to build a fire.
ap A long, sturdy fishing line that reaches across a stream, bearing hooks hung by short lines.
aq Pronounced “sloo”; a place of deep mud; a marsh or swamp.
ar Calm water, without much current.
as Starboard; the right side of a vessel.
at A superstition claimed that a cannon’s explosion would erupt the dead body’s gall bladder and thus force the body to rise to the water’s surface.
au According to another superstition, bread treated with mercury (“quicksilver”) and/or blessed by a preacher would float toward a drowned human body.
av Baker’s bread came from a bakery; corn-pone was a meager home recipe of cornmeal, salt, and water, baked in an oven or cooked in a frying pan.
aw Near.
ax Sand, in this context, means “resolution” or “courage,” and craw means “stomach.” Huck is saying he didn’t feel very self-confident.
ay Slang for nervous fidgetiness, fuss, and stomachache.
az Abolitionist; a participant in a political movement to bring about the end of slavery.
ba A portion of cheap tobacco.
bb Mud turtles.
bc Hide is the cow’s skin; tallow is the animal’s fat, used in soap, candles, and margarine.
bd A single-bladed jackknife designed in the eighteenth century by Russell Barlow.
be A small drawstring bag carried by a woman as a pocketbook or workbag.
bf A metal comb typically for grooming horses.
bg Lively; clever; fresh.
bh Twain has the Negro Jim valued above Huck’s pap.
bi Blades on a farm machine used to sift and smooth the soil.
bj A mushmelon is a relative of the cantaloupe.
bk A steel cable that holds a boat’s smokestack in place.
bl This old saying is not from the Bible. Twain spoofs the impulse, in his time, to attribute all wisdom to “de good book.”
bm The officers’ room, the largest quarters, named for what was then the largest state in the union.
bn An enclosed space on the front of the upper deck of a boat, a shelter for the helmsman and the steering gear.
bo A pole in front of the hurricane deck.
bp Near the stem (rear) of a vessel.
bq Crawled backward, like a crawfish.
br A rope used in a hanging.
bs Larboard; the left side of a vessel; also called the port side.
bt Acting sentimental; pretending strong emotional feelings.
bu A short staff at the front of a boat from which a flag is hung.
bv Money.
bw Eight dry quarts; a large quantity.
bx Got caught, entangled.
by A slang euphemism for “darn country” or “damnation.”
bz Solomon, whose reign is recounted in the Bible’s First Book of Kings.
ca In the Bible, wise King Solomon settled a dispute between two women over who was the mother of a child by proposing to cut the infant in half. See the Bible, I Kings 3:16-28.
cb Consequence.
cc Dauphin; in France, the eldest prince.
cd Huck means “Parlez-vous français.”
ce Pronounced “KAY-ro”; an Illinois town on the Mississippi River, at the southern tip of free soil.
cf A sandbar or other obstruction making ripples in a body of water; in his notebooks Twain defined “tow-head” as “an infant island, a growing island.”
cg Leeward; the side turned in the opposite direction to the wind, as opposed to windward.
ch Step in a process or on a journey.
ci Jacket.
cj An annual published in England. Twain disliked its ornate artistic stylings and its sentimental pictures and poems.
ck Domestic Medicine, or Poor Man’s Friend, in the Hours of Affliction, Pain and Sickness (1830), a handbook of home medicine that was widely used by rural families and their doctors.
cl Small amount.
cm A long, heavy, sharp knife.
cn Hand-printing in block letters, as opposed to cursive handwriting.
co A stack of firewood.
cp Cornbread biscuits.
cq Good-humored American slang for a clumsy or uncouth fellow.
cr A large, flat-bottomed boat.
cs Suspenders.
ct Colloquial abbreviation for journeyman printer, one in training for the trade.
cu Ones who deceive or mislead.
cv A mighty punch.
cw The most famous British actor of the late eighteenth century.
cx The calling to be a professional actor.
cy Played a role on stage as an actor.
cz The critical theory, stated by Aristotle, that the art of drama should be consistently organized according to the “unities” of place, time, and action.
da This long jumble of a speech borrows from three of Shakespeare’s dramas: Hamlet, Macbeth,
and Richard III.
db In the racially blunt language of Twain’s era, this term indicated a strong black wad of tobacco, typically of an inferior quality.
dc A fool, usually a drunk.
dd All of my business, as a customer.
de Foolish, funny pranks or tricks.
df Tricked, deceived.
dg Huck confuses Henry VIII with the king in The Arabian Nights.
dh A large cask of malmsey, a sweet wine.
di Figure out.
dj A round post or rod.
dk Huck refers to the biblical story of Noah, in the book of Genesis, but mistakenly takes the name from the third book of the Old Testament.
dl Boy.
dm Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
dn One whose trade is to convert animal skins into leather by tanning them—that is, treating them with tannic acid.
do A small boat for fishing, often kept by a larger boat for small trips.
dp A person with a harelip, a cleft caused by arrested growth of the upper lip; the name comes from its resemblance to the lip of a hare or rabbit.
dq Nonsense or trifling talk, perhaps designed to mislead.
dr A doxology, a brief church song expressing praise and thanksgiving. One of the best known is “Praise God from whom all blessings flow.”
ds Colloquial past tense of the verb “bleat”: to make the sound of a sheep or goat. Figuratively, as used here: talked noisily, impulsively, and hollowly.
dt Gold coins of U.S. currency.
du An orgy was an ancient Greek or Roman rite that involved extravagant dancing, singing, and drinking; originally it was a festival in honor of the gods of bawdy revelry and strong drink.
dv The correct term for funeral rites.
dw Valet; personal attendant.
dx Water from Congress Springs, New York, renowned for its healing power.
dy A sharp scolding. The reference is to the popular hymn “A Funeral Thought,” by Isaac Watt.
dz To gather and store, as honey is hived.
ea Gently coaxing.
eb Melodeon, a musical instrument that—with keyboard, foot-pedals, and bellows—combines aspects of the organ, accordion, and reeds.
ec Sickly.
ed Contracts permitting buyers to pay in installments on three specified days.
ee Theatrical.
ef Shallow water; figuratively, the dangerous, difficult part.
eg She had the kindness and independence of mind to pray for Judas Iscariot, the notorious betrayer
of Jesus Christ.
eh Erysipelas is a serious skin disease. Consumption is another term for tuberculosis, a deadly disease that was more widespread in the nineteenth century than it is today. Jaundice is a disease that gives the skin a yellow cast.
ei A plow with many blades that sift and smooth the soil.
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