scholarly journals Psychological motivation of Jim as a runaway slave in Mark Twain�s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 134
Author(s):  
Niken Khusnul Nibiya ◽  
Heri Dwi Santoso ◽  
Yesika Maya Ocktarani

�Adventures of Huckleberry Finn� is a great novel written in the nineteenth century by Mark Twain, the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. According to critics, this novel was written to criticise practices of slavery in the United States during his time, especially in states along the Mississippi river banks. This research aimed at explaining the hierarchy of needs of Jim and the motivations of his escape. The method used in this research was qualitative, with humans� hierarchy of needs by Abraham Maslow employed. The analysis showed that the needs of Jim were divided into three phases, i.e., the phase of Jim as a slave, the phase of Jim as a runaway slave, and the phase of Jim as a free man. The results showed that there were four reasons why Jim decided to escape from Mrs. Watson, his master, i.e., 1) the master�s anger at Jim, 2) Jim�s conscience about himself as the object for capital gain, 3) his freedom as a human, and 4) his own happiness. It is concluded from the research that as a slave, Jim feels that his life needs cannot be fulfilled even when he is already free as long as he can never be reunited with his wife and children, who he thinks will give happiness to him. Based on the theory of Maslow�s hierarchy of needs, Jim�s higher level of need is love-and-belonging need.�

2009 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 461-473 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Edwards

It may be perilous for a member of the Society of Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era to propose, in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, that we cease using the term “Gilded Age” as a label for the late nineteenth century. Since I admire Mark Twain, who famously coined the term in a novel that he cowrote with Charles Dudley Warner, such a suggestion feels disloyal if not downright un-American. But in struggling recently to write a synthesis of the United States between 1865 and 1905 (cutoff dates that I chose with considerable doubt), it became apparent to me that “Gilded Age” is not a very useful or accurate term. Intended as an indictment of the elite, it captures none of the era's grassroots ferment and little of its social and intellectual complexity. A review of recent literature suggests that periodizing schemes are now in flux, and a reconsideration may be in order.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin J. Murphy

Abstract Quantification has long played a vexed role in efforts to record and resist racial violence. Building from Ida B. Wells’s antilynching crusade, this essay examines the risks and power of calculating life and death at the close of the nineteenth century. For her part, Wells pushed mere counting past itself to a profound mode of ethical accounting. Two of her contemporaries, Mark Twain and W. E. B. Du Bois, sustained a similarly supraquantitative thrust; each attempted to harness the antilynching potential of numbers by enlisting data visualization. Twain falls short in a telling fashion, as his unpublished satire “The United States of Lyncherdom” (written in 1901) exacerbates the dehumanizing tendencies of quantification. Du Bois, however, pursues a more generative experiment, creating statistical graphics in 1900 that indict and outstrip the causal circuit that yoked scientific numbering to lynching and racial violence more broadly. This latter achievement resonates with scholarly efforts to access Black life from within a desolately tabulated archive of loss and erasure. Specifically, as triangulated with Wells and Twain, Du Bois’s graphics proffer a counterintuitive means to register life as a future-oriented, aggregate abstraction that is neither wholly conditioned by, nor separate from, a past whose violent legacies endure.


2009 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernadette A. Lear

Public libraries are "accessible canons" for their communities. As part of their efforts to connect people and ideas, librarians purchase classic and bestselling books from "selective," "personal," "nonce," and other canons. They also create bibliographies, professional standards, and other tools that help shape reading habits. Thus libraries embody complex, ongoing processes of canon using and canon forming. This essay illustrates the canonical activities of American public libraries during the early years of the profession. It describes the American Library Association Catalog, local finding lists and accession records, and other primary sources that shed light on collection building during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Taking Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) as a case study, it presents statistics on library ownership during the author's lifetime from more than seven hundred communities across the United States. Tables focus on nine titles: The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, The Gilded Age, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, Life on the Mississippi, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson. Statistical analysis reveals that "controversial" items such as Huckleberry Finn were widely available in Gilded-Age and Progressive-era public libraries, thus calling into question some assumptions about censorship of Twain's work. Also, library holdings of some titles varied by decade and geography, demonstrating that libraries implemented "national" and "recognized" canons unevenly. In sum, the essay shifts attention toward the operationalization of literary canons and provides empirical evidence of Mark Twain's presence in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literary landscape.


1996 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Rodger

This article is the revised text of the first W A Wilson Memorial Lecture, given in the Playfair Library, Old College, in the University of Edinburgh, on 17 May 1995. It considers various visions of Scots law as a whole, arguing that it is now a system based as much upon case law and precedent as upon principle, and that its departure from the Civilian tradition in the nineteenth century was part of a general European trend. An additional factor shaping the attitudes of Scots lawyers from the later nineteenth century on was a tendency to see themselves as part of a larger Englishspeaking family of lawyers within the British Empire and the United States of America.


2015 ◽  
Vol 36-37 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-183
Author(s):  
Paul Taylor

John Rae, a Scottish antiquarian collector and spirit merchant, played a highly prominent role in the local natural history societies and exhibitions of nineteenth-century Aberdeen. While he modestly described his collection of archaeological lithics and other artefacts, principally drawn from Aberdeenshire but including some items from as far afield as the United States, as a mere ‘routh o’ auld nick-nackets' (abundance of old knick-knacks), a contemporary singled it out as ‘the best known in private hands' (Daily Free Press 4/5/91). After Rae's death, Glasgow Museums, National Museums Scotland, the University of Aberdeen Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, as well as numerous individual private collectors, purchased items from the collection. Making use of historical and archive materials to explore the individual biography of Rae and his collection, this article examines how Rae's collecting and other antiquarian activities represent and mirror wider developments in both the ‘amateur’ antiquarianism carried out by Rae and his fellow collectors for reasons of self-improvement and moral education, and the ‘professional’ antiquarianism of the museums which purchased his artefacts. Considered in its wider nineteenth-century context, this is a representative case study of the early development of archaeology in the wider intellectual, scientific and social context of the era.


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