Literary Matters - Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers

when a rattlesnake bites Jim, Huck relies on superstitionto explain the bad fortune even though he knows thatit happened because he left the carcass of the snake’smate on Jim’s bed. As he puts it, “that all comes of mybeing such a fool as to not remember that wherever youleave a dead snake its mate always comes there and curlsaround it” (40). Yet only a paragraph later, he returns tomagical thinking, saying “I made up my mind I wouldn’tever take aholt of a snake-skin again with my hands, nowthat I see what had come of it” (40).Just as they use superstitions to make sense ofa natural world they find difficult to comprehend, thecharacters in Huck Finn turn to magic to justify inexplicableand unfortunate occurrences. The gruesome death ofHank Bunker, a St. Petersburg townsperson, is one suchevent that is explained away through superstition. Whilediscussing looking at the moon over your left shoulder,which Huck declares “one of the carelessest andfoolishest things a body can do,” he mentions that “OldHank Bunker done it once ... and in less than two years hegot drunk and fell off of the shot tower and spread himselfout so that he was just a kind of a layer ... but anyway, itall come of looking at the moon that way” (40). Similarly,Huck blames Pap’s undesirable return on his own spillingsalt at the breakfast table. After the accident, he says“the widow put in a good word for me, but that warn’tgoing to keep off the bad luck, I knowed that well enough”(12). And, lo and behold, within a paragraph, Huck hasdiscovered his father’s distinctive boot prints in the snow.This pattern of superstitious justification occurs mostprominently in the repeated references to the snakeskin.Throughout the story, Huck and Jim continually return tothe bad luck associated with handling a snake’s shedskin to explain their consistent misfortune, which is,more probably, an authorial device used to keep the plotfrom growing stagnant. For example, when the raft slipspast Cairo and the fork to the Ohio River, Jim bemoans,“I awluz ‘spected dat rattle-snake skin warn’t done widit’s work” (70). Within the next page, Huck and Jim blameboth the disappearance of their canoe and their collisionwith the steamship on the snake-skin. Such attribution ofmisfortune to forces beyond one’s control is a temptingand natural human tendency, and it stands to reason thatHuck and Jim, living, as they do, in a violent world beyondthe conventional social sphere, should especially cling tothese superstitious explanations.The rich and varied examples of superstition withinThe Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which come fromwhite and black, young and old, provide Twain withstrong satirical material and allow him to paint a moredetailed anthropological picture of life in the antebellumMississippi Valley. However, they also enable him toexplore deep, universal themes through a unique andoften comic lens that fits nicely with the folksy aesthetic ofthe novel. Racial commonality; race relations; irreverencein regards to religion; man’s attempts to comprehend thenatural world; and man’s desire to explain why bad thingshappen are all explored through the superstitious bent ofHuckleberry Finn’s world. Far from being a marginal motifadded in for flair, superstition is central to the thematicdevelopment of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. aWorks Cited:Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. NewYork, N.Y.: Bantam Dell, 2003.Renewal Letter from Incoming President Greg DelantyWe have over 600 members now. I’d love if we reached 800 members before the end of mypresidency, and 1000 by the end of my past President year. I am also asking you to bring in at leastone new member, if not two. I promise to give a gift membership myself to five new people and tobring in another five. So, by the end of January I’ll tell you how I did. I wonder could you give one giftmembership, which is only $37, and also bring in someone else, and tell them what good value theyare getting for just $37.a So please renew your own membership for 2011, at whatever category you feel able to do so.a And please endeavor to bring at least one new member into the Association--more if you can.a https://www.bu.edu/literary/membership/join-or-renew.shtmlFor now, my thanks and hopes, and happy new year.LITERARY MATTERS | VOLUME 3.4 | YEAR-END 2010 22