Greed In Huckleberry Finn

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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, is set along the Mississippi River in the pre-Civil War 1840s and discusses greed and cruelty in society. Discontent with the sedentary lifestyle he currently leads, Huck decides to run away, meeting the runaway slave, Jim, on Jackson's Island. Together, Finn and Jim decide to journey down the Mississippi River to Cairo, meeting an assortment of unsavory frontiersmen. Among these people are the King and the Duke, two con-men willing to make money by any means necessary, including by defrauding the orphan Wilks sisters. While they do not succeed in doing so, they do make an easy $40 selling Jim, leading Huck to question whether he is capable of helping Jim escape from slavery a second time. …show more content…

Upon first joining Huck and Jim on the raft, the younger of the two con-men promptly declares himself to be the Duke of Bridgewater. Jealous of the Duke’s preferential treatment, and royal position, the King begins to mock him by calling him the Duke of “Bilgewater” (Twain, 145). When the King calls the Duke “Bilgewater”, he shows that he doesn’t respect the Duke and his (albeit fraudulent) identity. In his contempt towards the Duke, his disdain for the Duke’s title disparages the Duke’s personhood. Later, following the failure of their Romeo and Juliet show, the King and the Duke are eager to make some money, and decide to put on a low comedy show titled Royal Nonesuch. On the playbills they post around town, it is written at the bottom “ladies and children not admitted” (Twain, 177). In prohibiting women and children from seeing Royal Nonesuch, the King and the Duke make an unnecessary generalization about all women. They help perpetuate the delicate, frail woman stereotype by barring women from seeing their play and refuse to see women as a diverse group, assuming them to be a monolith, thus contributing to the erasure of their personhood. After claiming to be the dead Peter Wilk’s remaining brothers, the King and the Duke decide to sell his property to make the most amount of money possible. They start by first …show more content…

By simply selling the slave family to make an easy profit, the King and the Duke completely disregard that the slave family also shares a deeply personal connection to each other. Contrary to the popular belief at the time, slave families felt as much kinship with their family members as white people felt to theirs, and the King and the Duke’s indifference to the plight of the slave family only serves to further dehumanize them and deny them their basic right to feelings as humans. Once Huck finally succeeds in ditching the King and the Duke, he ecstatically runs back to raft to tell Jim that they should go now to escape. He is chagrined to discover that Jim is not there, and is told by a boy in the area that Jim. He goes to confront the Duke, who tells him “No! That old fool sold him, and never divided with me, and the money’s gone” (Twain, 252). By simply selling Jim, without consulting Huck or Jim, it illustrates how the King and the Duke view Jim as a piece of property to do with as they please. By viewing Jim as for-profit property instead of a human being, the King and the Duke rob Jim of his dignity and personhood.

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