Gender and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The world of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is dominated by male figures. Throughout the whole book there are few women characters, and those that do appear often fall into a stereotype. Contrary to Huck’s radical opposition to society’s expectations, women in the novel are all found where they are expected to be: in the home. Men are able to move around more freely and have more clout.
Even though Huck’s father is not fit to take care of his son, Pap is given custody of his son. “It was a new judge that had just come, and he didn’t know the old man; so he said courts mustn’t interfere and separate families if they could help it; said he’d druther not take a child away from its father” (29). The new judge’s decision to return Huck to his drunkard father shows a preference for the man in the situation, as well as to the familial relations. Pap is able to acquire custody of his son because of the power he has from being a man. Huck explains how his father treated him, “Every little while he locked me in and went down to the store, three miles, to the ferry, and traded fish and game for whisky and fetched it home and had a good time, and licked me” (32). Pap not only leaves his son locked in a cabin, alone for long stretches of time, but he beats Huckleberry as well. There is little that anyone can do to wrest Huck from the hands of his father as the law is in his favor. Later, Pap gets arrested after he “got drunk and went a-blowing around and cussing and whooping and carrying on; and he kept it up…till most midnight; then they jailed him” (29). Instead of taking care of his son, Pap decides to get drunk to celebrate that he has gotten Huck back. Even after seeing this the judge still thinks that keeping the father and son t...

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...bag of money and put it in the king’s hands…“Take this six thousand dollars, and invest it…any way you want” (222). She has already placed all of her trust in the king even though she has no confirmation that he is in fact her uncle. They are completely unsuspecting of the fact that the duke and the king are attempting to steal their money.
The society of Huckleberry Finn’s time was one with a great bias toward males. The fact that Mark Twain wrote the novel and included so few female characters shows an underlying bias towards males. His female characters follow the sentimental tradition of being overly emotional and having few options as to what they can do. There is a great disparity between Twain’s push for readers to realize that black people are humans just like white people and his construction of female characters who are little more than common stereotypes.