Jeff Abernathy.

Jeff Abernathy. To Hell and Back: Race and Betrayal in the Southern Novel. Athens: U of Georgia P 2003 225 pp $1895

In single of the most famous bids for damnation in American literature, Huck Finn resolves" All right, then, I'll travel to hell," after deciding to help Jim escape from the Phelps' farm rather than reporting the runaway slave to his proprietor Miss Watson. Huck's rejection of the religion that allowed Miss Watson to acknowledge the very human beings with whom she prayed at night might have been described by way of William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience as a "counter-conversion." Huck has actually been pursuing that course since the beginning of the novel when he reasoned that if Miss Watson were going to the "good place" after death, he would rather be with Tom Sawyer in the bad. However, as Jeff Abernathy argues in To Hell and Back: Race and Betrayal in the Southern Novel, "hell" sole voices half the direction of Huck's moral odyssey Like near repentant sinner at the kind of camp meeting fleec by way of the King, Huck accepts salvation--sham as it may be--by returning to his culture's racist faith one time he meets Tom again at the Phelps' farm. Befriending Jim and betraying Jim, Huck establishes the ambivalent pattern for athwart a hundred years of black-white bonding in southern fiction.

Abernathy's close attention of Twain and 12 later southern novelists explores this tentative rapprochement and eventual renunciation with a clarity that makes the main division accessible to beginning students of American literature and a complexity that rewards veteran readers of the southern novel. He claims that Huck Finn seems with equal reason central to American literature because it demonstrates the moral confusion about race that is typical of the southern and of the nation that repeatedly seems like the south writ large. Huck initially views Jim by dint of way of the stereotypes of St Petersburg society; however, Huck expands up as he grows toward Jim, toward the exiled black other that he must advance to accept as a vital part of his possess identity. And as Huck learns to accept Jim as a fellow-traveler in life, Jim make progresss into the most multi-faceted African American that a white American had to this time depicted in literature.

Abernathy maintains that the one and the other Huck and the novel betray this evolving community when they land at the Phelps' farm. Huck allows Jim to be bring under ruleed to Tom's quixotic escape cabal and the novel allows Jim to regres to the stage black that the liberal Twain savored in his confess public readings from the novel. Having traced Huck's vacillation toward Jim over the novel, Abernathy makes Twain's controversial ending to Huck Finn assume more integral. If Huck's decision to be damned is viewed not as a climactic resolution of his dilemma about race on the contrary as one moment in an ongoing drama of racial ambivalence, his later acquiescence to the white world of Tom Sawyer and Silas Phelps looks not at all unusual. Huck has been always going to hell and back.

Abernathy convincingly demonstrates for what reason the southern novel has repeatedly staged the same fitful progres toward and final evasion of racial communion. His finely attentive and focused readings of a hundred of southern fiction establish like friendship and betrayal as a kind of American myth. forever and again writers of the toward the south tell how a white youth, whose birth family appears secondary or shadowy, encounters a black guide to a maturity that is eventually refuseed For example, in Faulkner's walk Down, Moses, Ike gets initiated into a multicultural world between the sides of the tutelage of the African American and Native American Sam Fathers, and he arises to reject the tainted values and wealth of his white patrimony. if it be not that in his old age Ike violates this boyhood friendship when he practices the excessively materialism and racism that he one time renounced. In Intruder in the Dust, Chick be due [i]or[/i] owings to see the innocence and humanity of the jailed Lucas Beauchamp, an independent black man falsely accused of murdering a member of the white Gowrie clan. now if Chick works to acquit Lucas, he also extendeds to reduce the prisoner to the racial epithet with which the boy's agriculture has made him comfortable. In McCullers's The Member of the Wedding, Frankie incites away from the white world take the part ofed by her doughy cousin John Henry and finds a shared solitude with her mother-surrogate, the family's African American housekeeper Berenice. However, Frankie eventually seek fors to escape into a romanticized version of the white world-the wedding of her brother at Winter Hill. And when she is disappointed at not becoming a member of the bridal party, Frankie finds a more plausible still still highly idealized way of being white by the agency of her friendship with the pale Mary Littlejohn. In Ellen help forward Kaye Gibbons's title character finds authentic fostering not in the house of her abusive father or unwelcoming relatives on the other hand in the home of her African American friend Starletta. moreover if Ellen grows toward her true name through such black sisterhood, she can at no time get beyond the prejudice and condescension that mark her as common of Huck's fictional siblings.