earticle

영어

This paper focuses on the role of ‘playing’ in the formation of Huck’s character, and how Huck’s role as a character and narrator observe the constructedness of class and whiteness in the antebellum South. In the first section, I examine the role of pretend play in the relationship between Huck and Tom and how it organizes the hierarchy among the children and emulates the social stratification of race and class. While Tom remains firmly in the fabric of that hierarchy, Huck is propelled into a series of role-playing that enables him to become an observer of the adult world. In the next section, I look into Huck’s ambiguous whiteness in relation to his unstable social status. In the last section, I examine Huck’s role as a spectator and how this role invites the readers into the minstrelsy of white manhood. By focusing on the male characters, I read the novel in the context of Jacksonian minstrelsy culture that used the black(ened) bodies to confirm a shared whiteness that became the base of racial supremacy.