Silence and the South in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel plagued by silence. Its narrator, Huck, is victim to a terror which is never explicitly revealed. Throughout the novel, he is split between a world of boyish delight and freedom—in which the days “slid[e] along so quiet and smooth and lovely” (118)—and a world of dread, characterized by a vague awareness of something that “can’t make itself understood” and that causes Huck to reflect that he “most wished [he] was dead” (13). Huck’s is a dread that is never named, though, as we will see, the cause of his own cognitive dissonance seems to be rooted in another doubleness: that of the South. Twain’s South is simultaneously presented as a pastoral world, free from the trappings of the more fully industrialized North, and as a world of inescapable cruelty, greed, and hypocrisy. Huck’s fractured, almost schizophrenic state of mind is the result of inhabiting a fractured, two-faced, American South. In this way, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel about something that is never overtly mentioned, but that is always present in the background, like the “wind . . . trying to whisper something” (13). Surely one of those things “whispering” in the background throughout the novel is the institution of slavery, and its seeming incompatibility with another very important institution in the South: Christianity.

Neither Huck nor any other character in the novel is a blatant critic of either of these two institutions (even Jim, the runaway slave, doesn’t seem entirely convinced that he ought not to have a dollar amount assigned to his life). This lack of overt criticism of Southern life and culture on the part of the novel’s characters is only appropriate, though, and seems to reflect a long tradition of silence in the American South, and in America more generally. Luckily, Twain is not so hesitant as his characters. Huck may not be fully conscious of it, but throughout the novel, he has a habit of presenting the reader with episodes or situations that are rife with irony, and of revealing, if unwittingly, some possible sources of his unnamed dread.

Let’s consider one very instructive example: Huck’s description of Tom Sawyer’s Uncle Silas, who believes that Huck is his own nephew Tom. “He was the innocentest, best old soul I ever see,” Huck says, “But it warn’t surprising; because he warn’t only just a farmer, he was a preacher, too” (218-19). Huck continues, informing us that Silas has, on his plantation, a church which he “built . . . himself and at his own expense.” Further, Huck comments on the commonality of such a practice, noting that “[t]here was plenty other farmer-preachers like that, and done the same way, down South.” Huck presents Uncle Silas as simply a “preacher-farmer,” and in doing so, necessarily presents him as a slave-owner-preacher. This is not the first episode Huck offers the reader in which slavery and religion are juxtaposed. We ought to recall an instance in Chapter I in which Huck tells us that the widow Douglas “fetched the niggers in and had prayers” (13). Immediately after she does this, Huck “tried to think of something cheerful, but it warn’t no use.” Indeed, it seems to be an awareness (if only an unconscious awareness) of the incompatibility of slavery and religion that depresses Huck so.

Huck pegging Silas as “the innocentest, best old soul” he has ever seen is howlingly ironic. He may be innocent enough to not suspect Huck as an imposter, but certainly not so innocent as to have no part in the enslavement of a race of people, a practice surely incompatible with the Christian ethics he preaches. Huck’s claim that Silas built his church by himself and “at his own expense” is equally ironic. Just as we can be sure that Silas the farmer does considerably less farming than his slaves, we can assume that Silas the preacher had much less to do with the actual building of his church than did his slaves.

Huck’s final note that there are “plenty other farmer-preachers like that . . . down South” is an important one, as it rather explicitly extends the passage beyond a mere description of one plantation owner and into a statement about the American South more generally. Undoubtedly, the institutions of Christianity and slavery have been immensely important in the history of the South; it is perhaps impossible to imagine the course of American history without them. And like the first Europeans who came to the Americas, the inhabitants of Twain’s South (Huck included) are reluctant, perhaps even unable, to articulate the disparity between Christianity and slavery. Both are inescapable realities of the South, yet they are entirely at odds. They are inseparable yet irreconcilable. Huck’s split state of mind may represent an awareness of this Southern dilemma, but even he, at the end of the novel, does nothing but run away.