A controversial and modern look at Mark Twain's seminal work, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, from a postcolonial perspective. This essay explains how Twain's writing was both born from and birthed "American Literature," and emphasizes an often overlooked historical context of the "first great American novel."
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Bryant 1 Beau Bryant Dr. Lynda Hall English Seminar 12/11/2012 “Sivilized, as they called it:” A Postcolonial Interpretation of Huckleberry Finn “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn [...] It’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” – Ernest Hemingway, 1935 The position that the United States holds today is, almost indisputably, that of a lone global superpower resting at the top of the hierarchy of global power. This hegemonic status has, of course, influenced the country’s geopolitical relations and its international force, but on a much smaller and perhaps more interesting level, it has almost entirely shaped the way that American literature has been interpreted and viewed by contemporary scholars. With regard to the most recently developed methods of literary analysis, and most specifically with regard to postcolonial interpretation, the American literature, regardless of when it was written, has almost universally been labeled by the nation’s contemporary status and actions. Edward Said, one of postcolonialism’s most influential pioneers, argued that the U.S., along with Britain and France, is an imperialist power. In saying this, Said implicitly places all U.S. literature within the realm of the colonizer and associates it with the negative implications that the country’s modern actions may, or may not, warrant. Unfortunately, and perhaps because of this association, the actual timeline and development of U.S. history has been predominantly ignored by postcolonialists in favor of a view that goes from an ambitious “white settlement,” to proto-imperial nation, to all-out “new
Transcript
Bryant 1
Beau Bryant
Dr. Lynda Hall
English Seminar
12/11/2012
“Sivilized, as they called it:” A Postcolonial Interpretation of Huckleberry Finn
“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn [...] It’s the best book we’ve had.
All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”
– Ernest Hemingway, 1935
The position that the United States holds today is, almost indisputably, that of a lone
global superpower resting at the top of the hierarchy of global power. This hegemonic status has,
of course, influenced the country’s geopolitical relations and its international force, but on a
much smaller and perhaps more interesting level, it has almost entirely shaped the way that
American literature has been interpreted and viewed by contemporary scholars. With regard to
the most recently developed methods of literary analysis, and most specifically with regard to
postcolonial interpretation, the American literature, regardless of when it was written, has almost
universally been labeled by the nation’s contemporary status and actions. Edward Said, one of
postcolonialism’s most influential pioneers, argued that the U.S., along with Britain and France,
is an imperialist power. In saying this, Said implicitly places all U.S. literature within the realm
of the colonizer and associates it with the negative implications that the country’s modern actions
may, or may not, warrant.
Unfortunately, and perhaps because of this association, the actual timeline and
development of U.S. history has been predominantly ignored by postcolonialists in favor of a
view that goes from an ambitious “white settlement,” to proto-imperial nation, to all-out “new
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imperial hegemony” (Kiernan, 1-5). This view of history distorts the foundations of the
American nation and oversimplifies the nation’s diverse development into the power that it is
today. During this process of oversimplification, the works of several nineteenth-century
American authors lose a degree of their power because of scholars’ inability or refusal to view
them in a postcolonial light. A shining example of this can be found in Mark Twain’s renowned
work, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Adopting a view of pre-WWII America as proto-
imperialist seems to exclude Finn from being viewed as the product of a formerly colonized
nation attempting to distinguish itself from the lasting remnants of its imperial oppressor; if,
however, one considers the nation’s actual history as a colony itself, Twain’s work takes on
serious postcolonial implications. Huckleberry Finn has often been described as the Great
American Novel. It is held up as the epitome of American Literature and the moment when
American Literature became just that – American. But if one disregards the history of the United
States as a postcolonial nation struggling to break free from the political and literary dominance
of Great Britain, the significance of the first “American” novel ultimately evaporates.
Because of this, this essay will take what is, and rightly should be, the controversial
approach of reading Huckleberry Finn as a postcolonial novel and attempt to demonstrate the
ways in which Twain and his work fit in to the history of and stand as a model for the
postcolonial canon. By looking at Twain’s work from a postcolonial perspective, the reader will
gain a better understanding of the literature in the context of the United States of the day, rather
than the superpower of modern times. This is necessary if one is to fully understand the historical
timeline on which the U.S. has traveled and developed, and it increases the significance of and
points out the glaring changes in the nation’s ideological framework and policies. Those who
have refused to acknowledge America’s postcolonial past, instead focusing on the critique of its
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“neo-colonial” present, ignore a key opportunity to add weight to their criticism: if works like
Huckleberry Finn were indeed tools of postcolonialism and anti-imperialism, the irony of the
alleged actions of the U.S. today become even more worthy of condemnation.
The History and Strategy of Postcolonial Theory
Although a complete understanding of the development of postcolonial theory is not
necessary for this analysis because not all facets of postcolonialism apply to Huckleberry Finn, it
will be useful for a retrospective analysis of Twain to understand some of the most prominent
theories and tenants of postcolonialism so that one can see their evolution as well as their
applicability to the novel. Postcolonialism as a literary study emerged in the late 20th century in
reaction to the colonization, and decolonization, of many of the world’s developing nations.
Robert Dale Parker, in his work, How to Interpret Literature, defines postcolonialism as a “term
that has emerged as a convenient label for […] cultural and political relations between more
powerful and less powerful nations and peoples” (241). The theory came about primarily in
reaction to and, in reality, to cope with, the increasing prominence of the literature of colonized
peoples and the realization by scholars concerning the way this literature had almost
systematically been ignored or marginalized throughout history. A cursory look at the English
canon would, for example, lead one to believe that only Great Britain had ever produced, or was
ever capable of producing, a “classic” work of literature in English.
Certain theorists are widely regarded as being the standard bearers and founders of
postcolonialism, and two in particular are referenced almost universally for their work in
developing the theory as it known today: these are Homhi K. Bhabha and the aforementioned
Edward Said. Said with his work Orientalism and Bhabha with his influential theories of
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“hybridity,” together led to the emergence of “postcolonial studies […] as a driving force in
literary studies and helped reshape scholarship and teaching across the humanities and social
sciences” (Parker 241). Orientalism is primarily concerned with the ways in which the West, to
use the title’s phrase, “Orients” the “East.” Said touches upon the way in which the dominant
colonial and world powers create a binary of themselves vs. the ominous “Other.” Said’s
ultimate contention, and the one around which his whole theory revolves, is that the concept of
the Orient is a creation of the West and it is a discourse used to “manage […] the Orient [or the
Other] politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively…”
(3). In addition to this, he specifically points to language as one of the critical components of
colonizing control, stating that language is “a highly organized and encoded system, which
employs many devices to express, indicate, exchange messages and information, represent, and
so forth. In any instance of at least written language, there is no such thing as a delivered
presence, but a re-presence, or a representation” (21, italics added). It is this method of
representation and use of language that will be most pertinent to this study.
Bhabha’s work, as well, holds implications for the American situation. Bhabha defines
hybridity in his work, How Newness Enters the World: Postmodern Space, Postcolonial Times
and the Trials of Cultural Translation, in which he argues: “If hybridity is heresy, then to
blaspheme is to dream. To dream not of the past or present, nor the continuous present; it is not
the nostalgic dream of tradition, nor the Utopian dream of modern progress; it is the dream of
translation […] the dangerous tryst with ‘untranslatable’” (303). In other words, hybridity is that
which is created when out of two cultures blossoms a third, entirely new culture; it is a “dream”
that embraces neither the past nor future, but a never-before-seen present (The Location of
Culture 55). Hybridity, according to Bhabha, consists of “cultural communication” and the
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“translation” of people from one culture to another, and involves the creation and manipulation
of an entirely new identity.
Though these two men and their theories certainly play a central role in the postcolonial
interpretation of Huckleberry Finn, especially because of their influence on the theory as a
whole, there are several other authors and thinkers whose approaches and contributions to
postcolonialism will be equally if not more important for understanding the position of the novel
and the postcolonial precursors embedded within Twain’s writing. These include the leaders of
the “Négritude” movement, Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire, and modern postcolonial
writers such as Ngugi Thiong’o and Chinua Achebe. The Negritude movement is predicated on
inverting the language of colonizer and specifically acquiring and controlling the interpretation
of the colonizer’s derogatory signifiers of the colonized. It is a strategy built around language
that seeks to create a new identity for the colonized which strips the power away from the
colonizer. As Senghor eloquently states, “Négritude then was intuitive reason, reason which is
embraced and not reason which is eyed. More precisely, it was the communal warmth, the
image-symbol and the cosmic rhythm which instead of dividing and sterilizing, unified and made
fertile” (885). The embracing of reason that Senghor alludes to here allowed him and writers of
the Négritude movement to claim for themselves the identity created by the colonizer, with the
hope that pride in personhood would inevitably overcome.
Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Chinua Achebe, like Senghor and Césaire, place enormous value
and importance on language. Their analytical contributions to postcolonial theory are focused on
the use of English, the language of their colonizer, and its effects and implications for their texts.
For this reason, their ideas seem to be the most relevant when analyzing Twain’s strategies
within Huckleberry Finn. Ngugi, in his work, The Decolonizing of the Mind, calls for colonial
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writers to abandon English, which he views as the language of colonialism (2-3). He decries the
use of English by colonized writers as an endorsement of the “official vehicle and the magic
formula for colonial elitedom,” and suggests that its use destroys the power and significance of a
colonizer’s retaliatory text (12). Achebe similarly focuses much of his attention on language, but
unlike Ngugi, he promotes the idea that writing in English can be effective for the colonized
author and its use does not undermine the value of the work. He is not oblivious to the power of
language, though, and acknowledges this when he says, “Language is a weapon;” however, he
explicitly states that “It doesn't matter what language you write in, as long as what you write is
good,” which discards the logic behind The Decolonizing of the Mind (qtd. in Gallagher 260).
These writers and theorists, and many others like them, have developed and used
postcolonialism in furtherance of a number of goals. Robert Young argues that the “most
fundamental” goals of postcolonialism are as follows:
To reexamine the history of colonialism from the perspective of the colonized; to
determine the economic, political, and cultural impact of colonialism on both the
colonized peoples and the colonizing powers; to analyze the process of
decolonization; and, above all, to participate in the goals of political liberation,
which includes equal access to material resources, the contestation of forms of
domination and the articulation of political and cultural identities. (11)
In Young’s opinion, all of the postcolonial writers mentioned in the paragraphs before were, in
some way or another, pursuing at least one of these goals. Said and Bhabha can be said to have
focused on the history of the colonized from the perspective of the colonized, Senghor and
Césaire used the Négritude movement to contest the forms of domination present in derisive and
diminishing colonial language, and Ngugi and Achebe are heavily focused on the articulation of
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political and cultural identities, among other things. Thus, each of these “traditionally”
postcolonial writers attempts do what Young expects a postcolonial writer to do, primarily
because these writers, no doubt, shaped Young’s understanding of postcolonialism in the first
place. Interestingly, these tenants, texts, and theories of postcolonialism have many things in
common with Mark Twain and his works, though he is an author writing in English in the early
United States; and Huckleberry Finn, having been given the title of the first “great American
novel,” stands as a shining example of these facets at work within a Twain text.
America’s Colonial and Postcolonial History and Mark Twain’s United States
An important point that has been reiterated several times throughout this essay is the fact that the
United States, contrary to what authors such as Kiernan might suggest, has not always had its sights set on
global hegemony and world leadership. Indeed, the nation’s history is more like that of a reluctant child,
growing into responsibilities that it would initially rather not have taken on and then fully embracing its
newfound role. The context of Mark Twain’s America in combination with the theories of
postcolonialism fully frames the importance and significance of Huckleberry Finn. Nineteenth-century
America was a completely different animal from the nation of the twentieth century. The twentieth
century, particularly World War II and the Cold War, ushered in an entirely new set of responsibilities for
the relatively young country and altered its course forever. As Robert Jay Lifton points out in his essay,
“American Apocalypse,” “The American superpower status derives from our emergence from World
War II as uniquely powerful in every respect, still more so as the only superpower from the end of the
cold war in the early 1990s” (11). The term “superpower,” would never have been applied to the largely –
though not entirely – reserved and isolationist U.S. that Twain called home. Recent historical events and
developments, however, have shaped the America that exists today, and unfortunately, have seemed to
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alter the America of the past. But this history is more modern than it may seem, and there existed a much
different United States throughout the course of nineteenth century.
The often-retold narrative of the history of the United States, echoed in the public school
classrooms from New York to San Diego, has become almost universally known within contemporary
American society. Images of “Founding Fathers” as enlightened figures too perfect to be human are
promulgated as reality, while the truth is largely neglected. The ratification of the Constitution is looked at
as an entirely unselfish and glorious moment not just for Americans but also for all of humankind; and the
truth of its status as a supreme compromise between powerful competing interests is often overlooked
(O’Brien 79). Though it is a convoluted mix of fact and fiction that oversimplifies issues and glorifies
imperfect men, it nevertheless is a narrative that many American citizens can mentally recall when they
think about their heritage and history. This “history” has many issues, one of the most obvious being that
this narrative is particularly inapplicable to those people whose ancestors were less privileged and found
themselves disenfranchised during the Revolutionary period on through the industrialization of the nation,
yet it still represents the primary mythical foundation upon which the nation rests. Today this foundation
is buttressed by over two centuries of American history and progress. The American citizen of the 21st
century is part of a state that plays a vitally distinct role in world affairs and is, without exception,
recognized and taken seriously by every other nation on earth. This, however, has not always been the
case. Mark Twain’s United States, from the year of his birth in 1835 to the year of his death in 1910, was
working its way through the beginnings of industrialization and was only just beginning to play a larger
role in world affairs.
When Twain was born, the U.S. had only been in existence for about six decades, or less than one
generation. Before the United States – in the form it exists in today - was created by the ratification of its
Constitution in 1787, the country was an alliance of independent nation states that existed under the
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woefully inadequate Articles of Confederation put in place in 1781; and, before this, the United “States”
were not states at all, but rather colonies of the British Empire. Specifically, the disparate conglomerate of
peoples was made up of what postcolonial theorists call, “settler colonies.” These types of colonies, as
defined by Robert Dale Parker, “identify with their metropolitan homelands, yet they also develop a sense
of difference from or even resentment of their homelands. Sometimes, as in the United States, they even
lose their awareness of being settlers” (242, italics added). These types of colonies are distinguished from
“occupational” and “internal” colonies in that they are uniquely made up of emigrants from a particular
country who are still officially under the rule of that country but who have also begun to develop an
identity of their own. In the case of the United States, the vast majority of settlers were originally subjects
of the British Empire.
Parker’s distinction and label of the U.S. as a former settler colony brings with it a multitude of
implications that will help frame the national context of Twain and his writing. According to Ashcroft,
Griffiths, and Tiffin, authors of The Empire Writes Back, which is arguably one of the most influential
works on postcolonial theory, in settler colonies such as the United States “decolonizing projects underlay
the drive to establish national cultures” (30). This insightful observation provides one of the underlying
arguments of this paper, which is that Mark Twain, in writing Huckleberry Finn, was working as much to
distinguish the nation of the United States from Britain – and Europe in general – as he was to
differentiate American and British literature. With this in mind, the ideological importance of
Huckleberry Finn rises to new heights. The label of the “first great American novel” is significant for
Twain not only because of its appreciation of the book, but also because of its appreciation of the nation
and its people. Of course, there were other American authors that preceded Twain, such as Emerson and
Hawthorne, but they differed from Twain in that they “wrote like exiled English colonials from an
England of which they were never a part to a newer England that they were making” (Hemingway 28).
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One also cannot ignore the fact that the nation had its fair share of theoretical political texts, e.g. The
Federalist Papers and Common Sense, but Twain’s national accomplishment with Huckleberry was
nonetheless of incredible consequence for the country; and, interestingly, this should not have been all
that surprising. Ashcroft explains this somewhat paradoxical phenomenon, of a fictional text achieving
ideologically what targeted ideological ones had failed to, in The Empire:
[in settler colonies] intellectual life is so relentlessly characterized as an extension of
European culture [and] from the earliest times some of the most important theoretical
writing emerged in creative texts […] This is especially the case, though, in settler
colonies where difference is only inscribed (apparently) in subtle changes of language
and where the absence of a pre-colonial metaphysic makes the assertion of ‘Otherness’
more difficult. (137)
Thus, the praise of Huckleberry Finn falls directly into this description by Ashcroft. The creation of the
American myth - the American identity – was owed largely to a fictional narrative labeled as the “great
American novel,” which came from a writer who emerged from a former settler colony that was still
struggling to detach its intellectualism from its former colonizer. The theoretical political texts of the
Revolution had attempted to found an identity, but they succeeded only in founding a government. The
colloquial language and voices that Twain uses in Finn are unique to a creative text and would not have
appeared in political theory writings; and they do for the nation what previous texts had not yet
accomplished.
Huckleberry: A “Decolonizing Project” designed to “establish a national culture”
American Dialects and the Establishment of American English
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The process that Mark Twain uses in Huckleberry Finn to establish an American identity can be
broken down in to two key methods: establishing an American “language” that is respected and viewed
as an intellectually capable method of communication, and developing the American “myth.” These two
strategies are prominent throughout the novel, and they represent two of the most significant tactics for
creating the credibility of an American literature that had been sought out by American literary critics
during Twain’s lifetime. The call to action for American authors to bring forth a uniquely American form
of English literature was none-too-subtle in Twain’s day. For example, Margaret Fuller, one of Twain’s
contemporary critics, maintained that:
It does not follow that because many books are written by persons born in America that
there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life
of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea
must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along
its shores. (122)
And her insightful analysis of what constituted American literature was echoed by plenty of other
theorists of the time. Perhaps the most widespread and widely read of these being the American thinker,
Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose influential essay, “The Poet,” lamented the lack of a “[literary] genius in
America” (275). Twain was certainly familiar with these writers and their calls-to-action, referring to
Emerson as a “great poet,” and the use of language and mythical structure within Huckleberry Finn likely
could have been devised as his literary response to their adamant requests (LeMaster et al. 249).
Likewise, Twain was almost certainly aware of the way in which American literature and “American
dialects” were viewed abroad. British colonialism, while operating over the Americas, had succeeded in
marginalizing the language of the American periphery by decrying it as a rudimentary and uneducated
mockery of English. The effects of this rippled throughout the nineteenth century within the newly
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formed U.S. and, as Ashcroft et al. stated, intellectualism remained ruthlessly associated with British
English and writing styles. Rudyard Kipling, an esteemed British novelist and one of Twain’s
contemporaries, effectively demonstrated the intellectually elite viewpoint of British writers looking at
their American counterparts when he said that “[Americans] delude themselves into the belief that they
talk English – the English […] But the American has no language” (21, italics original). In demeaning the
use of American language and using “vernacular” and “colloquial” as derisive terms meant to belittle the
texts they were attached to, British cultural colonization successfully framed, or “oriented,” the
interpretation and perception of American texts for readers of English literature. Huckleberry Finn is
Twain’s response to these criticisms; it represents his well-articulated message that Americans did have a
language. As the literary critic Ismail Talib states in his book, The Language of Postcolonial Literatures,
“Twain made a conscious attempt to use language that was different from the language usually associated
with the writing of literature in English, which at the time was dominated by British models,” and he did
so in order to further the credibility of American literature (40). In doing this, Twain appropriates key
elements of typical nineteenth-century, “back woods” American stereotypes promulgated by critics at
home in abroad, and turns them on their head: demonstrating how a young, uneducated boy is more
emotionally and intellectually capable than anyone around him. Twain rejects the idea of writing as
though he were British, and he similarly dismisses the notion that he should write as an American but in
an English style. Instead he chooses Bhabha’s hybridity, introducing the world to the new American-
English identity and breaking free of the forced “nostalgic tradition” of the English canon. The novel
represents a successful rebuttal to the argument that American English and literature was somehow
incapable of communicating intellectually deep sentiment in the same way that British English could.
At the beginning of the book, Twain anticipates his readers’ criticism and, in order to clarify his
methods, points out that in Huckleberry Finn “a number of dialects are used […] The shadings have not
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been done in a hap-hazard fashion, or by guesswork, but pains-takingly, and with the trustworthy
guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech” (i). In this way, he
introduces the readers to what they are about to encounter and provides insight into the depth of detail that
is encompassed in the language of Finn. This establishment of an American syntax is one way in which
Twain attempts to imbue American dialects with a degree of seriousness that they had, up until that point,
never been associated with. There had, of course, been other writers who had attempted to translate the
American language to the written word but, as Talib states, “no one before him used [the language] as
persistently, as effectively, and with as much aesthetic success as [Twain] did” (40). In the very first line
of the novel the reader encounters this everyday-American speech translated into the written words by
Twain’s experience and delivered via the novel’s narrator and title character, Huckleberry Finn, who
states: “You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of
Tom Sawyer,’ but that ain’t no matter” (1). Immediately, Twain’s readers become confronted with the
American slang and grammatical structure that had come to be associated with ignorance and a lack of
seriousness and which stood as the antithesis to the British standards of literary suitability. This manner of
speech continues throughout the novel and yet, as Twain pointed out, there is an extraordinary level of
depth to the language. Victor Fischer, in the explanatory notes of his edited version of the novel,
elaborates on Twain’s attention to detail:
Editorial work on the complete manuscript and other documents has shown that many,
though not all, of the ‘inconsistencies’ [in speech between characters] were intentional:
Mark Twain regularly had different speakers […] use different locutions, and he made
fine distinctions within the speech even of a single character, often through meticulous
revision. (377)
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So, for example, readers can see a system of grammatical rules and standards emerge within the speech of
individual characters like Jim and Huck. Jim’s speech, which falls into Twain’s category of “the Missouri
Negro dialect,” is distinct from Huck’s, which is “the ordinary “Pike-County dialect” (377). And, beyond
the simple linguistic distinctions between various characters – Jim’s “a-gwyne” to mean “going” as
opposed to Huck’s “goin’,” for instance – there are even differences that exist solely within the speech of
single characters which present themselves according to specific rules. One can see these distinctions in
the following dialogue spoken by Jim while he is reprimanding Huck: “En didn’t I bust up agin a lot er
dem islands en have a terrible time en mos’ git drownded? Now ain’ dat so, boss – ain’t it so?” (103,
italics added). Here, within a single sentence spoken by Jim, the reader can see two various distinctions of
the word “ain’t” which comply with a set of grammatical rules that Jim’s speech employs throughout the
novel: he says “ain’” when the word precedes a word beginning with a consonant, and then adds the “t”
to form “ain’t” when the word precedes a another beginning with a vowel. By establishing these
consistencies within character’s forms of speech, Twain not only demonstrates the intricacies of his own
writing but also puts the complexities of American dialects on display as well. Thus exhibiting the fact
that American slang and colloquial lexicon, rather than being a poor attempt to splice words together in a
haphazard fashion, was actually a newly developing dialect of English that could stand on its own merits.
In this way, Twain’s syntactical linguistic strategies are very much aligned with the ideas of
Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Chinua Achebe. Huckleberry Finn, though it is written in English, is written in
an American form of English that is distinct from the language the United States’ former colonizer.
Twain attempts to differentiate his culture in order to effectively articulate an American cultural and
political identity, and he works hard to take the intricacies of spoken American dialect and carry them
over into the text. According to Talib, this focus on the localized vernacular is not altogether surprising as
a postcolonial strategy. He writes in his book that “Language also plays an important part in the attempt to
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realize a national identity, and it is a central issue in the literatures of postcolonial America in the
nineteenth century” (122). For Twain and nineteenth-century America then, as much as for Ngugi Wa
Thiong’o, the “choice of language and the use to which language is put is central” to the definition of their
own identity (Wa Thiong’o 4). Twain’s decision to use American dialects throughout the entirety of
Huckleberry Finn, in light of the fact that the novel grapples with serious issues concerning human rights
and societal constructions, flies directly in the face of criticism such as that mentioned before from
Rudyard Kipling. And, the novel’s success only cemented the strength of Twain’s argument. Modern
postcolonial writers deal with similar issues and adopt similar counterarguments. Gabriel Okara writes,
with regard to his use of colloquial African dialects of English, “some may regard this way of writing in
English as a desecration of the language. This is of course not true. Living languages grow like living
things, and English is far from a dead language […] why shouldn’t there be a Nigerian or West African
English which we can use to express our own ideas, thinking and philosophy in our own way” (Okara 15-
16). After swapping out “Nigerian or West African” and replacing it with “American,” this could almost
be seen as a quote by Twain. American English, much like English spoken in the formerly colonized
nations of Africa, encapsulated the thinking and philosophy of the American people in a way that British
English could not, and Twain’s use of it is representative of his desire to communicate his ideas in his
own, unique way.
Achebe’s thoughts on English, similarly, feel oddly applicable to the language of Huckleberry
Finn: “I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it
will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit new […]
surroundings” (Achebe 62, italics added). Again, if one replaces “African experience” with “American
experience,” Achebe’s thoughts on the use of English within his writing parallels Twain’s use of
American dialect in Huck Finn, which was implemented, as Twain himself states, to convey a “true and
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good” representation of American ideals and uniquely “American” experiences (Fischer et al. as qtd. In
Twain 378). Therefore, the postcolonial objective of effectively appropriating a language in order to
articulate a unique political and cultural identity distinct from that of the colonizer is furthered by Twain’s
use of the American vernacular within Huckleberry Finn. Not unlike works by established and explicitly
postcolonial writers like Achebe and Wa Thiong’o, Twain’s linguistic choice serves as a reaction and
retaliation to the cultural colonization in America which was a remnant of the physical colonization that
ended nearly a generation before him. This, however, represents but one way in which Huckleberry Finn
serves to establish American literature as its own discrete entity. The other comes in the form of what can
be called the creation the “American mythos.”
The American Mythos
From the very beginnings of Huckleberry Finn, the story is more than just a novel set in
nineteenth-century America; it is a story that completely revolves around the American spirit, American
ideas, American problems, American landscapes and American legend. This is significant because it
represents what might appropriately be termed a full “decolonization of the novel.” In other words,
Twain’s decision to use American English is echoed in the other aspects of the book that go beyond the
grammatical structure that he chose to work with. Plot elements, narrative structure, and even allusions
within Huckleberry Finn are, for the most part, relatively unique to the novel; and, when there is a degree
of intertextuality, Twain turns to literary traditions outside of the British canon. In fact, even in the few
instances when Twain does bring up distinctly British themes and elements, there is an overwhelming
sense of satire and criticism associated with it.
One of the first literary references that appears in the early pages of Huclberry Finn comes from
none other than Huck’s good friend, Tom Sawyer. While the two are bickering, Huck laments the fact
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that he cannot comprehend the method to Sawyer’s madness and tells the reader that Tom told him “if
[he] warn’t so ignorant, but had read a book called ‘Don Quixote,’ [he] would know without asking” (15).
This reference reaches back to the classic and, notably, Spanish work written by Miguel De Cervantes in
the 17th century. The mention of Don Quixote is significant for many reasons – it was not considered part
of the British canon and was therefore not associated with America’s colonizer; it is largely credited with
establishing Spanish as a literary form (the language is often referred to as “the language of Cervantes”);
and, finally, it itself was in many ways a criticism of the proliferation of British literary standards and
British mythology (Grossman as qtd. in Cervantes 1-2, 10-11). A fourth reason that Sawyer’s reference is
important is that, in more ways than one, Huckleberry Finn itself is modeled on the narrative structure
and metafictional tendencies of Don Quixote; Twain’s clever references to himself and his other works
via Huck’s own “knowledge” is not unlike Cervante’s incorporation of multiple “authors” and
“translators” in parts one and two of Quixote, and the “relationship between Huck and Tom, and later
between Huck and Jim, is in many ways similar to that between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza”
(Fischer as qtd. in Twain 389). These allusions and parallels that Twain sets up are interesting because
of the comparison that one could draw between the two novels, of course, but for the purposes of this
essay they are primarily important because they demonstrate the connection between Twain and someone
outside of the British tradition. Rather than align himself with Shakespeare or Milton, Twain opts for a
Spaniard. This lends further strength to the postcolonial force of the novel in that it distances it, though
perhaps only in the slightest of ways, from the British literary tradition and allows Twain to gain
credibility without resorting to associating himself with British authors. This continues with Twain’s
depictions of the novel’s various actors.
Looking at the novel’s characters, Huckleberry Finn himself seems to represent the United States:
he is the American nation personified. Like the fledgling country, Huck is young, fiercely independent,
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and an advocate – in both actions and thought – of moral justice. The derogatory definition of
“Huckleberry,” which referred to “an inconsequential or unimportant person” was known by Twain and
echoed the pejorative words hurled at American authors by the U.S.’s critics abroad (Fischer as qtd. in
Twain 380). Jim, a man desperately trying to escape the throes of American slavery, stands as a
representation of a uniquely American issue and one which would have kept Twain’s readers focused on
the political problems in the States. And then there is the dynamic duo of the “Duke” and “King,” whose
presence in the novel does more than just advance the plot. By applying these titles to two men who are,
as both Huck and Jim state numerous times throughout the book, “rapscallions,” Twain devalues the
terms and associates them with thieves and deception. And, in case the association is lost on any of his
readers, he has Huck echo his sentiments when Huck says:
[…] it’s in the breed. I reckon they’re all alike […] all kings is mostly rapscallions, as fur
as I can make out […] you read about them once – you’ll see […] All them Saxon
heptarchies that used to rip around so in old times and raise Caine […] All I say, is, kings
is kings, and you got to make allowances. Take them all around, they’re a mighty ornery
lot. It’s the way they’re raised. (Twain 199-200, italics added)
Although the entirety of this quote stands as a significant rejection of the stereotypical heroic English
archetype, the last sentence comes across as particularly biting. Not only does Huck believe that kings are
an “ornery lot,” he ascribes their failures to the way “they’re raised,” implying that the classical British
education which they have grown up with is precisely what caused their failures; notably, this education
is the same kind that intellectual elites in the U.S. strived to attain and it was not uncommon for wealthy
Americans to study oversees in the famous schools of England. It is also critical to recognize that this is
the type of education that Huck consistently resists throughout the novel, opting instead for his reliance on
moral lessons and what he believes is right. By diminishing the status of kings and removing himself
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from the idea of unquestioned God-given monarchical rule, Twain subsequently casts aside the history of
British mythology and withdraws his novel from the Arthurian foundations of British literature.
Rather than focus on or emulate British history, Twain makes allusions to the “mythological”
elements of the American tradition - the same elements that contemporary Americans can now recall
when thinking back on their history. When Huck enters the home of the wealthy Grangerford family, he
finds himself surrounded by American memorabilia and steeped in American myth: “This table had a
cover made out of beautiful oil cloth, with a red and blue spread-eagle painted on it […] It come all the
way from Philadelphia, they said […] They had pictures hung on the walls – mainly Washingtons, and
Lafayettes, and battles, and Highland Mary’s, and one called ‘Signing the Declarition’” (Twain 137). In
the same scene he also comes across an old book full of “Henry Clay’s Speeches.” Huck stands in awe of
the items, acutely aware of their significance himself and simultaneously communicating that significance
to the reader. Interestingly, the items’ and the imagery’s importance for American history is not only
articulated by the novel, but also created by it. That is to say, Huck’s interactions with the American past
introduce unfamiliar readers to images of American beginnings that, when contrasted with the King and
Duke associated with British tradition, demand a degree of respect that Huck’s actions imply but in reality
was often found to be lacking.
By distancing the novel from British traditions and working hard to ground the story solely within
the American experience, Twain opens the door and gives Huckleberry Finn the opportunity to become
the cornerstone of the American tradition. In many ways, the rejection of the British literary format and
the subsequent creation of the American literary standard represent what is, as Hemingway and others
pointed out, the appearance of the first “great American novel.” Its criticism abroad demonstrated its
success for Twain, the country, and American literature, with multiple reviewers describing its
significance in near-hyperbolic terms. In a British review entitled, “Roundabout Readings: On Nephews--
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and 'Huckleberry Finn,” for example, the writer states: “[…] I have not space to dwell on all the great
points of this Homeric book – for Homeric it is in the true sense, as no other English book is, that I know
of” (Burnand 4). The introduction of the American myth in Huckleberry Finn is indeed reminiscent of the
“epic poems” of Homer and Virgil which themselves sought to narrate the history of a people; and, like
those two works, Finn exceeds its literary bounds and tells more than just the story of a boy – it becomes
the story of a nation.
Final Considerations and Conclusion
Although Twain’s use of American dialects and direct focus on and creation of American mythos
are significant contributors to the overall postcolonial accomplishments of the novel, their potential for
analysis has in no way been exhausted by this essay and they are themselves not an exhaustive list. Pages
could be spent analyzing the distinct effects of each individual character’s word choice and linguistic
style. Likewise, the American mythological underpinnings that are embedded within the novel would
benefit from a more detailed historical perspective that expands upon the ideas brought up here.
Additionally, there are many other postcolonial questions posed by Huckleberry Finn that future
postcolonial readings ought to look at. The character of Jim, for example, has played a central role in
much of the previous research on Finn primarily because he is a key representation of one of the novel’s
central themes: American slavery. And yet, within the issue of slavery and Jim’s character there are
several postcolonial questions concerning race studies and the marginalized voice of yet another “Other.”
This hypocrisy, of a colonial America simultaneously fighting for freedom and yet taking part in
colonization itself, remains one of the strongest criticisms towards viewing nineteenth-century American
literature in a postcolonial light. Rather than stand as a reason not to interpret writers like Twain as
postcolonial, however, it should instead be seen as an overwhelming incentive to read them from a
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postcolonial perspective. The duality of the United States presents scholars with a case study as to how a
nation can produce documents like “The Declaration of Independence” and still have a foundation built
on the ownership of other human beings. In his essay, “Including America,” Peter Hulme explains how
“the adjective [postcolonial] implies nothing about a postcolonial country’s behavior. As a postcolonial
nation, the U.S. continued to colonize North America […] a country can be postcolonial and colonizing at
the same time” (122). Similarly, the modern United States can be a world superpower and yet its early
literature can go unaffected by this. Though suggesting that U.S. literature can be seen as a model for
modern marginalized writers seems almost offensive, especially when they themselves are battling the
cultural oppression of contemporary America, it is extremely important because of how it frames the
actions of the country today. By acknowledging the postcolonial prerogatives of Twain, one comes to
realize just how much the U.S. has changed. Malini Schueller emphasizes this point in her essay,
“Postcolonial American Studies,” where she argues that the modern “imperial dominance of the US
necessitates a focus on the cultural anxiety of classic [American] writers because it demonstrates how
colonial and imperial mentalities are interlinked” (166-167). This insight echoes another implication of
overlooking the postcolonialism of Huckleberry Finn and nineteenth-century American literature, which
is that it risks ignoring some of the colonial actions of the British Empire and threatens to dismiss the
struggles of an entire people. Again, this essay and these considerations are not intended to encompass the
entire postcolonial perspective of the U.S., but rather, they are intended to open the floodgates of research
and demonstrate that Finn is a rich source of content simply waiting to be brought into realm of
postcolonial analysis.
In conclusion, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn stands as perhaps the quintessential example
of nineteenth-century American postcolonialism. Looking at the historical context of the novel it becomes
clear that the issues which Twain was responding to and the America in which he lived differed from
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modern America in substantive ways. This suggests that a postcolonial interpretation of Finn that takes
into account the nation’s previous political policies and position is not only an interesting idea, but also -
according to the goals of postcolonialism which look to view the colonial process from the perspective of
the colonized – an absolute necessity. In many ways, Twain’s work seems almost informed by the
arguments of Said, Bhabha, Wa Thiong’o, and Achebe, though he preceded them by nearly a century. By
tackling serious themes and issues through the perspective of a little boy with an American dialect,
Twain’s narrative launched the language of America into the realm of the literary art form and bypassed
the traditional route to established literature that demanded adherence to British standards. Thus, his work
represents a significant and decisive victory in the revolutionary culture war of early America. He gave
Americans a novel that told their story and developed their own conception of themselves as well as their
national political identity. In developing a book that refused to accept the argument that “the American
had no language,” Twain not only showed that Americans did in fact have language, he additionally
demonstrated that they had a voice.
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Works Cited
Achebe, Chinua. Transition , No. 75/76, The Anniversary Issue: Selections from Transition,
1961-1976 (1997), pp. 342-349
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice
in Post-colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989. Print.
Bhabha, Homi. “How Newness Enters the World: Postmodern Space, Postcolonial Times and the
Trials of Cultural Translation.”
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Print.
Buell, Lawrence. "American Literary Emergence as a Postcolonial Phenomenon." American
Literary History 4.3 (1992): 411-42. Print.
Burnand, F.C. "Roundabout Readings: On Nephews--and 'Huckleberry Finn'" Rev. of The
