How Does Twain Use Satire In Victorian Literature

Huck’s stay at the Grangerfords represents another instance of Twain poking fun at American tastes and at the conceits of romantic literature. For Huck, who has never really had a home aside from the Widow Douglas’s rather spartan house, the Grangerford house looks like a palace. Huck’s admiration is genuine but naïve, for the Grangerfords and their place are somewhat absurd. In the figure of deceased Emmeline Grangerford, Twain pokes fun at Victorian literature’s propensity for mourning and melancholy. Indeed, Emmeline’s hilariously awful artwork and poems mock popular works of the time. The combination of overzealous bad taste and inherently sad subject matter in Emmeline’s art is both bizarre and comical: as we learn, Emmeline was so enthusiastic in her artistic pursuits that she usually beat the undertaker to a new corpse. Huck, meanwhile, feels uneasy about the macabre aspect of Emmeline’s work. His attempts to accept her art and life remind us that sometimes …show more content…
The Grangerfords and Shepherdsons are rather like Tom Sawyer grown up and armed with weapons: motivated by a sense of style and this ridiculous notion of family honor, they actually kill each other. However comical the feud is in general, though, Buck’s death is a terrible moment, and Twain’s tone turns entirely serious at this point. Before fleeing, Huck pulls Buck’s body from the river and cries as he covers his friend’s face. Twain uses this incident to comment on all systems of belief that deny another group of people their humanity. While this section of Huckleberry Finn is undeniably humorous, it also demonstrates how confused Huck’s world is. Like so many other people Huck meets in the novel, the Grangerfords are a mix of contradictions: although they treat Huck well, they own slaves and behave more foolishly than almost anyone else in the