Within+the+Novel

=__Chapter 32__= Plantation Owner's Wife

Racism On Display
Huck Tells Yet Another Lie

Twain’s novel, //The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn//, has a major theme focus on race relations. Racism is highly evident between plantation owners and blacks. The entire book focuses on getting Jim past the dominating hold of the slave empire. Throughout Huck and Jim’s journey they encounter many different types of people, but many of them are either wary of blacks, or totally overcome by racism.

Within this particular chapter we see Mrs. Phelps, Aunt Sally, a stereotypical woman of a southern plantation owner, express her feelings of an explosion that happened on a steamboat. Huckleberry, posing as his good friend Tom Sawyer, explains to her that there was an explosion aboard the steamboat he was traveling. She expresses all the motherly concern that could be expected of a woman of her status, but fails to feel any grief in the death of a black man. After Huck’s brief retelling of the black man’s death Aunt Sally goes on to say, “Well, it’s lucky: because sometimes people do get hurt” (pg. 197). She totally disregards the death of a black person, showing her true feelings towards the race. This would probably be a similar reaction by the majority of southerners during the per-revolutionary era. They wanted to display their compassion toward horrendous events, but at the same time wanted to show and assert their superiority over the slaves.

Aunt Sally continues to brush aside the death of a black man, by relating the steamboat explosion to her own family. The issue of a slave dying is not something she is willing to address, so instead she tries to shift the sadness over to an event that happened to a man her husband knew, a white Baptist. She, like many others of the time, does not consider slaves as human beings.

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