In Mark Twain’s 1885 American classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the title character, Huck Finn, is a 13- or 14-year-old orphan abandoned by his abusive father and taken in by the Widow Douglas before embarking on a journey down the river to freedom. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a coming-of-age tale that is significant in the American literary tradition because it focuses on the growth of identity and moral value in its title character. Moreover, the novel is also important in the American literary canon because it offers striking social and cultural criticism for its time. The novel, often considered one of the masterpieces of American literature, presents Huck Finn’s search for an independence and freedom he cannot obtain in the civilized world of his school or with the Widow Douglas, as well as a sense of self he is forced to sacrifice under his father’s abusive control. Each chapter thus focuses on the epic adventures of Huck Finn—a veritable legend himself in the American literary tradition.
Frontispiece from Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, first published in the United States in 1885. The story chronicles life on the Mississippi during the nineteenth century through the eyes of a young boy named Huck Finn, who is accompanied on his journey via raft down the river by Jim, an escaped slave. (Library of Congress)
Though not an example of folklore itself, the novel incorporates elements of American folkloric expression that are essential to the plot and to the reader’s ability to understand the character of Huckleberry Finn. Superstition is one such prominent element. Abandoned by his father and largely alienated from the civilized world, Huck Finn lacks the traditional values necessary to guide him in life. His adopted folk beliefs and superstitions play a fundamental role in his coming of age. In the first chapter, for instance, Huck kills a spider—a sure sign, he believes, of bad luck to come. This event, coupled with the hooting of a distant owl and the barking of a dog, signify, to Huck, an impending death. In response, he ties up a lock of his hair to keep the witches away. Superstition, a folk belief that Huck shares with his one true friend, Jim, enables Huck to make sense of a large and rather confusing world to which he often does not belong. At the same time, for Mark Twain those same superstitions are integral to the structure of the novel, in this case initiating the return of Huck’s father, Pap, and the later struggle Huck endures to escape his father’s drunken abuse and maintain a sense of independence.
This trend of superstition as a guiding element in Huck Finn’s life is also evident in chapter 4, when he and Jim consult the hairball, also known as a conjure ball. Huck consults this conjure ball to settle the troubling questions of Pap’s eventual return. Not guided by traditional concepts of reason that dictate and organize the adult world, Huck again depends upon his folk knowledge and beliefs, much of it passed on from the ancestral wisdom of Jim, to solve the problems that plague him. Though the hairball’s advice is obscure, obtained only with a little money, and does not calm Huck’s overarching fears, the significance of this event is in its portrayal of Huck’s overall willingness to trust in folk beliefs largely rooted in the traditions and folkways of slave culture. Twain includes the expression of ancestral wisdom across generational lines as a core component of folklore within the novel. Because of Jim and the knowledge he passes to Huck both before and during their journey to freedom, Huck gains a moral conscience and social awareness previously denied to him as a result of his abandonment as a child and his isolation as an uncivilized, vagrant boy.
Steeped in folk belief and shaped by folk culture, the character of Huck Finn is thus an essential component of the idyllic portrait and the social critique that Twain offers of American society. In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, like its predecessor The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Twain holds that youth possess a transformative innocence lost in adulthood. The protagonists of his novels are therefore equally important in communicating valuable wisdom about morality, innocence, and the surrounding world. This aspect of both novels is directly tied to Twain’s examination of slavery. Huck Finn finds himself torn between love and devotion to Jim and the dominant social norm that casts Jim as property. In fact, Huck worries throughout the novel that he is becoming an abolitionist, punishable with death in the form of lynching in the American South. Huck’s commitment to Jim and aiding him in his journey to freedom despite the potential consequences and social norms is then part of the wisdom he discovers and portrays to society at large: morality is an individual choice and cannot be dictated by societal conventions. This event, remarkable in itself, is thus part of the folkloric contribution of the novel, its structure centered on the ordinary turned extraordinary and shaping how readers make sense of the world.
In the novel, folklore bridges the social and racial gap between Jim and Huckleberry Finn. Often throughout the work, Huck defers to Jim’s folk knowledge rather than to the conventional wisdom of American society. That latter wisdom, after all, proclaims Huck’s racial superiority over Jim, a belief that Huck does not and cannot hold, except as an illusion when joined along his journey by the Duke and the Dauphin. Instead, Huck and Jim operate predominantly as equals within the novel—an element that humanizes Jim (in stark contrast to the offensive and belittling depictions of African Americans in much antebellum fiction and its related minstrel shows) while also serving as the vehicle of Huck Finn’s personal growth. Folklore binds these individuals from distinct and isolated worlds just as it brings together the black community from which it was originally derived. Through this approach, Mark Twain emphasizes folklore as the expression of a larger community; the folk beliefs that emerge from that tradition serve as a unifying factor that highlights similarities between Huck and Jim, as opposed to the notion of racial difference often foregrounded in white-authored antebellum texts.
Though one element of folklore connects the present with the past, linking contemporary society with ancestral tradition, this is only a single aspect of folklore that Twain explores through the character of Huckleberry Finn. In addition, Huck frequently emphasizes the supernatural in his experience. For example, near the onset of his quest, Huck touches the skin of a rattlesnake, an event that Jim considers an omen of bad luck. The two are therefore haunted throughout the text by the snakeskin: they miss the town of Cairo where Jim desperately hoped to escape, and their raft is damaged by a steamboat collision. Both events jeopardize their journey and endanger Jim, the wanted runaway. Huck tries to explain the unexplainable through the folk wisdom that he and Jim share, making sense of the world through the tales he has heard about the snakeskin, the owl, and the barking dog, each forewarning Huck of the obstacles that await him. These omens—representations of everyday folk beliefs—shape how Huck and Jim act as well as their constant fear of the consequences later along their journey.
However, enduring those omens and the obstacles of which they forewarn is the true struggle that Huck must undertake. This journey—the hero’s journey—is part of the overarching folk narrative so often explored in folklore and folktales across the United States. Consistent with this pattern, Huck experiences a deep and internal calling that inspires him to depart from society, in this case by staging his death. Through his encounters with the Duke and Dauphin, his experience witnessing the lynching of an abolitionist, and his decision to aid Jim despite the social stigma that action entails, Huck gains newfound strength and knowledge of himself. While Twain does deviate in the end from the traditional folk structure, with Huck deciding not to return to society and employ the knowledge he has gained, his use of this essential narrative prominent within American folklore participates in a tradition of storytelling far older and richer than Twain alone—a tradition once steeped in oral expression and communal involvement in shaping and remembering each tale. What Twain thus offers through Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an opportunity to become that community, to shape this story through one’s own personal identifications, and to conceive of the character of Huckleberry Finn and all he had to endure as fundamental to the larger American tale.
Such elements of folklore are ultimately more frequent in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn than Twain’s earlier coming-of-age novel, particularly because of Huck Finn’s outcast position within St. Petersburg society. Huck, after all, lives on the outskirts like his father, rebelling against the norm in his desire to smoke and curse. For Huck, the traditions and rules of St. Petersburg are too restrictive—a set of traditions more foreign to him than the customs that Jim later shares as they travel together downriver on the raft. Twain moves beyond just language as the core marker of folk culture, though the idioms that Huck and Jim use do reveal the vibrancy of their experience. Instead, Twain uses Huck to highlight the stories of adventure and of danger as well as the many myths and superstitions that eventually play a role in the realization of Huck’s fate. For these reasons and more, the character of Huck has been cemented in the American cultural imagination, both as a symbol of the period when the story is set and as an archetypal childhood search for epic adventure.
The Folklore of Tom Sawyer
As in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain weaves Southern American folklore into the fabric of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. There are a number of charms and rituals described in the story of Tom’s escapades, some of them perhaps grounded in actual folk practice, but it is most notable that the primary plot of the novel is set into motion in chapter 6, when Tom and Huck argue about the relative merits of spunk water and split beans for relief from warts. Huck is, of course, a compendium of folk knowledge, and his attestation that a charm recited at midnight in a graveyard utilizing the corpse of a cat is the best remedy (“Devil follow corpse, cat follow devil, warts follow cat, I’m done with ye!”) leads to the witness of a murder, and the rest of the story follows.
C. Fee
Christopher Allen Varlack
See also Connecticut Yankee; Twain, Mark; Yarns, Yarn-spinning
Further Reading
Bloom, Harold, ed. 1986. Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Chelsea House.
Powers, Ron. 2005. Mark Twain: A Life. New York: Free Press.
Simpson, Claude M., ed. 1968. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Edgewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
West, Victor Royce. 1930. Folklore in the Works of Mark Twain. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Wonham, Henry B. 1993. Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale. New York: Oxford University Press.
Huck Finn—Primary Document
Selections from Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
This selection is from chapter 6 of Mark Twain’s famous novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, where Tom—and the reader—meets Huck Finn for the first time. Twain’s Finn is the archetypal adolescent American boy who chafes at the rules and craves adventure. In the following excerpts, the narrator provides a character sketch and then recounts a dialogue in which Sawyer and Finn talk about a dead cat, argue over cures for warts, and then trade a tick for a tooth. Twain weaves many themes of American folklore into this and other stories: folk remedies, witchcraft, superstitions, and regional dialects.
Shortly Tom came upon the juvenile pariah of the village, Huckleberry Finn, son of the town drunkard. Huckleberry was cordially hated and dreaded by all the mothers of the town, because he was idle and lawless and vulgar and bad—and because all their children admired him so, and delighted in his forbidden society, and wished they dared to be like him. Tom was like the rest of the respectable boys, in that he envied Huckleberry his gaudy outcast condition, and was under strict orders not to play with him. So he played with him every time he got a chance. Huckleberry was always dressed in the cast-off clothes of full-grown men, and they were in perennial bloom and fluttering with rags. His hat was a vast ruin with a wide crescent lopped out of its brim; his coat, when he wore one, hung nearly to his heels and had the rearward buttons far down the back; but one suspender supported his trousers; the seat of the trousers bagged low and contained nothing, the fringed legs dragged in the dirt when not rolled up.
Huckleberry came and went, at his own free will. He slept on doorsteps in fine weather and in empty hogsheads in wet; he did not have to go to school or to church, or call any being master or obey anybody; he could go fishing or swimming when and where he chose, and stay as long as it suited him; nobody forbade him to fight; he could sit up as late as he pleased; he was always the first boy that went barefoot in the spring and the last to resume leather in the fall; he never had to wash, nor put on clean clothes; he could swear wonderfully. In a word, everything that goes to make life precious that boy had. So thought every harassed, hampered, respectable boy in St. Petersburg. …
“Aha! Talk about trying to cure warts with spunk-water such a blame fool way as that! Why, that ain’t a-going to do any good. You got to go all by yourself, to the middle of the woods, where you know there’s a spunk-water stump, and just as it’s midnight you back up against the stump and jam your hand in and say:
‘Barley-corn, barley-corn, injun-meal shorts,
Spunk-water, spunk-water, swaller these warts,’
and then walk away quick, eleven steps, with your eyes shut, and then turn around three times and walk home without speaking to anybody. Because if you speak the charm’s busted.”
“Well, that sounds like a good way; but that ain’t the way Bob Tanner done.”
“No, sir, you can bet he didn’t, becuz he’s the wartiest boy in this town; and he wouldn’t have a wart on him if he’d knowed how to work spunk-water. I’ve took off thousands of warts off of my hands that way, Huck. I play with frogs so much that I’ve always got considerable many warts. Sometimes I take ’em off with a bean.”
“Yes, bean’s good. I’ve done that.”
“Have you? What’s your way?”
“You take and split the bean, and cut the wart so as to get some blood, and then you put the blood on one piece of the bean and take and dig a hole and bury it ’bout midnight at the crossroads in the dark of the moon, and then you burn up the rest of the bean. You see that piece that’s got the blood on it will keep drawing and drawing, trying to fetch the other piece to it, and so that helps the blood to draw the wart, and pretty soon off she comes.”
“Yes, that’s it, Huck—that’s it; though when you’re burying it if you say ‘Down bean; off wart; come no more to bother me!’ it’s better. That’s the way Joe Harper does, and he’s been nearly to Coonville and most everywheres. But say—how do you cure ’em with dead cats?”
“Why, you take your cat and go and get in the graveyard ’long about midnight when somebody that was wicked has been buried; and when it’s midnight a devil will come, or maybe two or three, but you can’t see ’em, you can only hear something like the wind, or maybe hear ’em talk; and when they’re taking that feller away, you heave your cat after ’em and say, ‘Devil follow corpse, cat follow devil, warts follow cat, I’m done with ye!’ That’ll fetch any wart.”
“Sounds right. D’you ever try it, Huck?”
“No, but old Mother Hopkins told me.”
“Well, I reckon it’s so, then. Becuz they say she’s a witch.”
“Say! Why, Tom, I know she is. She witched pap. Pap says so his own self. He come along one day, and he see she was a-witching him, so he took up a rock, and if she hadn’t dodged, he’d a got her. Well, that very night he rolled off’n a shed wher’ he was a layin drunk, and broke his arm.”
“Why, that’s awful. How did he know she was a-witching him?”
“Lord, pap can tell, easy. Pap says when they keep looking at you right stiddy, they’re a-witching you. Specially if they mumble. Becuz when they mumble they’re saying the Lord’s Prayer backards.”
“Say, Hucky, when you going to try the cat?”
“To-night. I reckon they’ll come after old Hoss Williams to-night.”
“But they buried him Saturday. Didn’t they get him Saturday night?”
“Why, how you talk! How could their charms work till midnight?—and then it’s Sunday. Devils don’t slosh around much of a Sunday, I don’t reckon.”
“I never thought of that. That’s so. Lemme go with you?”
“Of course—if you ain’t afeard.”
“Afeard! ’Tain’t likely. Will you meow?”
“Yes—and you meow back, if you get a chance. Last time, you kep’ me a-meowing around till old Hays went to throwing rocks at me and says ‘Dern that cat!’ and so I hove a brick through his window—but don’t you tell.”
“I won’t. I couldn’t meow that night, becuz auntie was watching me, but I’ll meow this time. Say—what’s that?”
“Nothing but a tick.”
“Where’d you get him?”
“Out in the woods.”
“What’ll you take for him?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to sell him.”
“All right. It’s a mighty small tick, anyway.”
“Oh, anybody can run a tick down that don’t belong to them. I’m satisfied with it. It’s a good enough tick for me.”
“Sho, there’s ticks a plenty. I could have a thousand of ’em if I wanted to.”
“Well, why don’t you? Becuz you know mighty well you can’t. This is a pretty early tick, I reckon. It’s the first one I’ve seen this year.”
“Say, Huck—I’ll give you my tooth for him.”
“Less see it.”
Tom got out a bit of paper and carefully unrolled it. Huckleberry viewed it wistfully. The temptation was very strong. At last he said:
“Is it genuwyne?”
Tom lifted his lip and showed the vacancy.
“Well, all right,” said Huckleberry, “it’s a trade.”
Source: Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Hartford, CT: The American Publishing Company, 1876.