First American Lit Essay of the Semester

Well here is how it came out. I'm not sure if it really captures what I'm trying to say...but hopefully it at least makes sense.

Abandoning the Societal Parent

The theme of innocence versus experience emerges in two nineteenth century American texts, Samuel Clemens’ The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. The protagonist from each selection moves from a state of innocence, or more appropriately, ignorance, concerning their role as oppressed ward to an understanding that by sacrificing their institutionalized identity they are orphans both in the traditional and societal sense of the word. Huck undergoes this education through a host of parental figures and his friend Tom, who is a sort of authority, and Gilman’s narrator through her husband, family, and the notion of experts.

Huckleberry Finn swaps parental authority figures several times in the novel. Each figure appears to have a valid motive for adopting Finn, but these attempts to wield authority over Finn only serve as a learning experience. Through the process of several failed adoptions, Finn moves from desperate child to independent entity. Finn begins his adventures with a description of his current living situation, which includes an adoption by the Widow Douglas, since Finn had changed his status from a poverty stricken child and become a societal liability due to his newfound wealth. The widow sees it as her civic duty to educate a newly moneyed child raised in poverty, and Huck never mistakes her interest as familial love. Finn doesn’t even appreciate this civilizing attempt, and wants to escape her, but Tom Sawyer, Finn’s beloved friend, wants Finn to be assimilated into society, and only accepts him if Finn will “go back to the widow and be respectable” (220). This transaction is the first portrayal of a loved one, in this case Sawyer, tricking Finn or using their emotional bond to place him back into civilization. Sawyer will continue to overpower Finn with this type of emotional blackmail, until Finn experiences enough parental juggling to figure out that he is ultimately better off by himself.

Before arriving at that conclusion Finn will go through at least six, if not more, foster parents. Most interesting among these, especially when compared to the authority figure in The Yellow Wallpaper, are Finn’s biological father, Pap, and Jim, the runaway slave. Both of these figures fail in their attempts to father Finn successfully, due to their involvement with slavery – Pap is enslaved to alcohol, and Jim is enslaved to the institution of actual slavery itself. While Jim’s enslavement implies that there are forces outside his control, Pap is aware of his own depraved state and of the possibility of overcoming, it, as illustrated by the story of Pap confessing to the “new judge” that “he’d been a fool, and fooled away his life; but now he was going to turn over a new leaf” (232). Of course he doesn’t, and the judge is moved to say that “a body could reform the ole man with a shot gun, maybe, but he didn’t know no other way” (233). Jim seems like more of an optimistic character, having taken his freedom from slavery into his own hands and run away. When Jim takes over as Finn’s respectable elder he does spare him from harm, as does Finn for Jim, but Jim’s enslavement to the institution that would segregate them prevents Jim from caring for Finn entirely. Jim seems on the verge of overcoming his ingrained notions when he tells Finn, “I owns myself, en I’s wuth eight hund’d dollars” (248). But at the end of the tale, when Jim is granted his freedom, coupled with his heroism in saving Sawyer’s life, Finn says that Jim is overjoyed at Sawyer’s gift of “forty dollars for being prisoner for us so patient…and Jim was pleased most to death and says, “…I tole you I ben rich wunst, en gwinter be rich again; en it’s come true” (406). So Jim’s ability to comprehend his own value is disjointed enough that he accepts five percent of his net worth as riches. Jim’s values are not going to free Finn, so Finn decides to head out to the isolate “Territory ahead of the rest,” free from any foster parent, an orphan of society.

The narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper experiences a similar pattern from ignorance to understanding, even though her circumstances are quite different from Huck Finn’s. She is a member of the white middle class, and a wife and mother, but her doctor husband, John, takes the form of the oppressive societal parent that Finn escapes. She begins the novel describing their existence as “ordinary people” who are securing “a colonial mansion” for the summer (Gilman 832). This notion is shattered early on as the narrator confesses she has a nervous condition and this retreat is meant to be curative of what seems to be post-partum depression. Although the novel mostly documents her journey into mental illness, it also documents the role her husband John plays in institutionalizing her. She is powerless to his authority as a doctor, his rights as a husband, and by the same emotional blackmail seen in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. She is made to feel guilty over her condition, as she says, “he said I was his darling and his comfort and all he had, and that I must take care of myself for his sake, and keep well” (838). This line implies that the narrator’s mental illness is second to her role as a wife and mother, and that her insanity compromises her husband’s very existence. Since she cannot control her mental illness, it eventually overtakes her, and she understands that within the illness she is free from the societal confines of wife and mother, and ceases to achieve a cure. She describes her newfound freedom from the societal parent when she tells us, “I have locked the door and thrown the key down to the front path” (843). She takes this decisive action so that her husband will abandon hopes of rescuing her from her illness, to rejoin him in society. This, she hopes, will “astonish him” (843). This is how she sacrifices her identity in society, and she becomes free, crying out, “I have got out at last!” and embraces her new freedom by crawling over her husband in her circles of madness.

The goal of the societal parent is to claim the orphan back into society and prohibit them from existing as outcasts. Both of these characters, the narrator, and Finn, learn from their experiences that there is no cure for an independent spirit, and that the choice to be an outcast, an orphan, is the only one that leads to freedom.