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How Does Huckleberry Finn Impact Society

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Influences on classic American novels How society treats us impacts how we treat ourselves. In novels such as The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain readers see how conflicts such as adultery and slavery impact the characters in the books.
Hester Prynne, protagonist of The Scarlet Letter was judged since she step foot on the scaffold and was forever labeled an adulterer. She lived in a strict Puritan community, where everyone detested her sin including herself.

They have not been bold to put in force the extremity of our righteous law against her. The penalty thereof is death. But in their great mercy and tenderness of heart, they have doomed Mistress Prynne to stand only a space of three hours on the platform...and then for the remainder of her natural life to wear a mark of shame upon her bosom. (Hawthorne 54).

Had the council not felt sympathy for …show more content…

The esteemed Reverend could not bare the shame and punishment that would come with revealing his sin to the public, he most likely would have been punished by death. Of course nowadays this scenario sounds absurd, however in 1642 “adultery or any kind of sexual sin was shunned severely” (newhistorian/Richardson).
In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn slaves were shunned. They were neglected basic human rights, taken advantage of, thought of as property because they were “lesser than human” or they were “three-fifths of a person”. But Jim, a runaway slave manages to dodge these stereotypes through his adventures with Huck. And Huck sees Jim as an equal, as a human being, although it wasn’t always like this.
Huck was known for being an immature trickster, he’s played pranks on Jim numerous times. However when they got separated on the Mississippi River and Jim was frightened to death, that’s when Huck decided to pull one of his infamous

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