Huck Finn Handout: Romanticism and Realism
  Seeing romanticism from a realist point of view

William F. Byrne:

The contrast between the characters of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn is used by Twain to illustrate the romantic imagination. Tom has led a quintessential middle-class American existence. He attends school and church, is comfortable materially, and has an unexciting but stable, and certainly bearable, home life with his Aunt Polly. In contrast, Huck’s life, though sometimes viewed as happy-go-lucky, has been by objective standards a nightmare. He has been raised in complete poverty by a worthless and shiftless father who is rarely present and often drunk, who sometimes treats Huck cruelly and has failed to have him educated, and who demonstrates a wide range of bad personality traits. . . One notable characteristic of Huck is that he seems to remain outside society, looking in. Another characteristic is his curious lack of a boyish imagination. It is as if the harsh realities of his life have forced Huck to grow up fast, and to focus exclusively on the practical concerns of the world immediately around him. Forced by necessity to live by his wits, Huck is constantly striving to work with the actual circumstances at hand. . .Huck cannot suspend disbelief even for boyish play; he does not fantasize. In contrast, Tom is spectacularly imaginative in the boyish, romantic sense. He has learned some history, geography, and religion, and, we are reminded again and again, he has filled his head with romantic adventure novels. This material has shaped Tom’s worldview and feeds his fantasies, which he is constantly trying to act out.

In the opening chapters, there is one boy in the gang who Tom cannot seem to make understand why pretend adventures are practical. He and Huck, the classic standoff between Romanticism and Realism, cannot see the world through the same perspective. Tom wants to do things they way they were done in the books. He references Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Dumas’ Monte Cristo as roadmaps of how to do things. Huckleberry doesn’t understand why they would charge a Sunday school picnic in search of rare treasures.

If Huck is the consummate realist of the novel, Tom Sawyer is the representative romantic. When readers are first introduced to Tom, they immediately recognize his role as a leader, or controlling agent, of the situation. The gang is labeled Tom Sawyer’s Gang because he is the one that controls the activities and pursuits. These activities, however, are always based upon Tom’s exaggerated notions of adventure. Basing his experience on the fanciful books he has read, Tom tries to adapt his life and the life of others to that which he has read. The end result is a burlesque of sensibility and emotion, two literary agents that Twain despised.

Toms role as a romantic is extremely important because of its juxtaposition with Huck’s literal approach. Although Tom declares that his gang will pursue the exploits of piracy and murder, in reality the gang succeeds in charging down on hog-drovers and women in carts taking garden stuff to the market. The vision of the young boys disrupting women bound for the market provides much of the harmless humor during the early pages of Huck Finn, and Tom is largely responsible for the slapstick approach. Tom’s constant barrage of exaggeration, however, contrasts with Huck’s deadpan narration, and Huck can see no profit in Toms methods. Where Huck is practical, Tom is emotional; where Huck is logical, Tom is extravagant. Despite the fact that readers easily recognize Tom’s ideas as folly, Huck does not question Tom’s authority. On the contrary, Huck believes that Tom’s knowledge is above his own, and this includes Tom’s attitude toward slavery.

In a sense, Tom represents the civilized society that Huck and Jim leave behind on their flight down the river. When Tom reappears with his fancy notions of escape from the Phelps farm, Jim again becomes a gullible slave and Huck becomes a simple agent to Tom. There is no doubt that Tom is intelligent, and he does state that they will free Jim immediately if there is trouble, but the ensuing ruse suggests that Tom is unable to shake society and the Romantic idealism he possesses, even when Jim’s freedom is at stake.

Another reference to Romanticism comes when they approach the wreckage of the Sir Walter Scott that has been slammed against a rock...surely this is a metaphorical depiction of Twain’s perspective of Scott’s poetry and the lack of practicality thereof.
In many ways, Twain blamed Romantic Literature for stunting the moral progression after the Civil War.