Honors American Literature
13 December 2012
Role of Jim in Huckleberry Finn During the late 1800’s post civil war, the reconstruction era surfaced in the union. The reconstruction, a political program designed to reintegrate the defeated South into the Union as a slavery-free region, began to fail. The North imposed harsh measures, which only embittered the South. Concerned about maintaining power, many Southern politicians began an effort to control and oppress the black men and women whom the war had freed. At around this time, Mark Twain released his novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which a young boy named Huckleberry Finn attempts to flee the South with an escaped slave, Jim. The novel follows the pair on their journey
When the pair are stuck on Jackson Island, Jim begins to talk to Huck about how a person with, “hairy arms en a hairy breas’, it’s a sigh dat you’s agwyne to be rich” (Twain 48). Apart from the supposed superstition, these qualities could truly prove that one would be rich specifically because these “hairy arms en a hairy breas’” are more often exclusive to males. The hairy bits that are associated with Jim can be used as a contrast to the presumably smooth breast of Miss Watson. Jim uses these qualities to prove that he has the fatherly abilities to both guide and protect Huck, but Twain also uses this section of the novel to foreshadow the economic capability Jim has later in the book. Jim’s physical appearance and the future wealth of $40 contrast both of Huck’s inadequate proxy parents. First, the ability for Jim to acquire money contrasts Pap’s action of taking his own son’s money, and second, the hairy arms and breast prove that Jim can be a well needed father figure in Huck’s life. Although Jim may have came up with this story in order to convince Huck that Jim would be a better and stronger parent, Twain allows the idea to follow through at