Mark Twain's Critique on American Culture: Nation, Race and Social Class in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

• Main Authors: Chang Wen-chuen, 張文娟
• Other Authors: Chen Ching-chi
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 1999
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/88977101480315439241

碩士 === 國立高雄師範大學 === 英語學系 === 87 === Abstract Based on Edward W. Said's "contrapuntal criticism," many significant factors of a culture can be comprehended as working contrapuntally together. This thesis aims to examine the interrelated issues of nation, race and social class in America by exploring Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Through our interpretation of these three issues, the formation of Americanism and its inner conflicts of race and social class will be exposed. More importantly, such a cultural interpretation introduces a public sphere for the exploration of American culture in terms of its political hegemony, racial bias and class struggle. It is rewarding to ponder over the falsity and contradictions of American democratic and egalitarian spirits. As a literary narrative, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn adds the affirmation of a national first-person subject-we Americans-to the formation of American nationalism. The national and cultural first-person plural subject contributes to the enhancement of the national identity of Americans. Twain's masterpiece reflects the internal construction of American national consciousness along with the external expansion of its national-imperial spirits. In addition, it arouses hot debates about whether Twain is a racist or anti-racist. In fact, Twain's ambiguous depiction of the race relations of blacks and whites exposes his own ambivalence toward the racial conflicts and the contemporary white double-consciousness suppresses and dominates blacks as inferiors and subhuman beings. Faced with white supremacy, blacks were reduced to being whites' property and instituted as minstrel figures. Furthermore, Twain displays distinctly the social classes in their hypocrisy, mannerisms and prevalent ideologies. The fake royalties, the King and the Duke, the aristocratic Grangerfords, the middle-class Widow Douglas and Miss Watson, the marginal whites, Pap and Huck, and the slave, Jim, are all positioned on different levels of the social stratum according to their birth, wealth, skin color and power. Their class ideologies manipulate their moral standards, values, life style and manners. Twain invites readers to investigate the diverse nature of each class' ideology and further to inquire whether American democracy and egalitarianism is a myth or not.