Responding and Reflecting

In the text The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, females and males are both presented, but they are presented very differently. The genders in the novel are presented in a specific way. Both males and females have very different roles in society. The females in the novel are usually presented as small characters, meaning that they are characters in the background. Women in the text are usually seen as the role models, because they would teach the younger, and in order for them to learn from them they had to be seen as a “good” person. White males in the novel were seen as more educated men and they also had more power over everything. While black men in the text were suppressed, everyone looked down on them because they were uneducated and most of the black males were slaves at that time.

Males are the gender that holds the power in this novel. Males have complete control over their actions. Even though the white males are seen higher then black males, black males, who are slaves, are still “free” to decide where they want to go as long as their hiding. But, females do not have the power over this decision. In the novel when Sophia decides to have control over her actions and decided to leave with one of the Shepherdson boys, her brothers go looking for her and they end up fighting them which lead to death. This shows how females in the nineteenth century didn't have the power to decided for themselves.

I believe that women are seen as stereotypical women. Women should not be seen less than men. Women should be treated equally even in books. Its frustrating to see that even the “slaves” at that time had more “freedom” than what women did. The slaves were able to have “freedom” to do whatever they wanted as long as they were hiding from the whites, but the women did not have the freedom to decided what they wanted to do or even who they wanted to live with. I feel that women should not have “specific” roles in novels or in real life. Women should have the same right that men have.