Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)

Studies - Gabriella Varró: The Adventures of the Minstrel Sign in Mark Twain 's Huckleberry Finn

plays staged by the duke and the king, or in the Wilks episode. By the time their doings are finally exposed, the two frauds have deceived the people who live along the Mississippi shore several times. Thus, while Twain follows the structural units apparently scripted by the minstrel show, he also exposes the larger culture, and those democratic ideals which are but empty poses. Interestingly, however, Jim's masquerade in blue and the episodes exposing snobbery reveal the same deeper social tension, identified by Twain as the curse of the entire American society: that is, the contradiction between democratic ideals and the actual social ideals realized. The minstrel third part usually consisted of a short scene about the life of a Southern plantation, a one-act burlesque, or the parody of a well-known play. According to Berret, the third section of the novel from Chapter 32 to the end corresponds to the minstrel third part (44). Berret emphasizes the motifs of the peaceful, happy home, the undisturbed, quiet working days, and the cohesion within the family at the Phelps farm, as being characteristic minstrel cliches traditionally formulated by the average minstrel finale. As Berret claims, "[t]his scene contains all the elements that made the minstrel shows appealing to the urban and industrial audiences of the North [...]" (44), since their nostalgia towards the peace of country life gained free expression there. The true burlesque scene, however, comes when Huck and Tom persuade Jim to act out the escape from captivity. Many critics blamed Twain for the fact that after Jim's humanity gradually strengthened in the novel, it was most probably a mistake to annul this development with a single stroke of the pen. As the argument goes, in the scenes of the Phelps farm, Jim is once again the same naive, comical clown figure that he used to be at the very beginning of the story. Since Twain wrote the novel through seven years, exactly between 1876 and 1883, some analysts suspected that the narrative reflected the changes that occurred during this period in the author's private life. More precisely, Twain's marriage to Olivia Langdon, and their moving to Hartford, Connecticut, might have been of serious consequence to the writer's thinking, especially because the relatives of the new wife, as well as her aristocratic circle of friends diverted Twain from his standard audiences, the lower and middle classes. In spite of this, it is not very likely that the concluding episodes and its burlesque Negro character fashioned after the minstrel tradition reflect 273