Danyelle Spaar

Mrs. Lunkenheimer
1A

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain is all about a

boy named Huck Finn and his two friends. His closest friend is Tom
Sawyer. His next closest is a runaway slave, Jim. Huck has a few other
friends as well and they are all also boys, but not as important to the
story. Twain shows how gender roles are important in this story by
using the time period, and their society and culture to show that more
than often, boys would only be friends with boys rather than being
friends with boys and girls.
The first reason that boys would only be friends with boys is
because of the society they are in. This story takes in place the
southern United States in 1845 a few years before the beginning of the
Civil War. In this society, girls would be taught to stay home and learn
how to cook, clean, sew, etc. Boys were being taught to go outside,
hunt, play, and get dirty, etc. My new clothes was all greased up and
clayey and I was dog-tired (pg. 13) Huck had just come back home
one night from joining Tom Sawyers Gang with many other boys in
their neighborhood.

In the middle of the book, we meet two new characters the

Duke and the King. They are both con-men. We also meet a girl Mary
Jane whose uncle has just passed. All the men in the neighborhood are
trying to tell her what to do with it. Eventually it all goes missing and
Huck knows why and decides to tell the truth about it. Ill up and tell
the truth this time, though it does seem like setting down on a kag of
powder and touching it off just to see where youll go to (pg. 219)
When the men were arguing about what Mary Jane should do with the
money, it was common for that time period. Boys/men would, in a way,
control women because thats how they thought they were protecting
them. They considered women to be lower than them.
Twain uses this book really well to show that boys never really
could be friends with girls, until they got married. Nowadays, because
everyone will go to many places you find men/women, boys/girls
everywhere together and we grow up with them in our lives, everyone
is friends with everyone no matter what gender or if youve changed
genders. In our society today, this is accepted fairly well, though some
people are still against it. All in all, things have changed a lot since the
1800s.