essay #4

I still have to write my own opinion into this essay but over all i have a pretty good idea of what to write so enjoy!

In Leslie Fielder’s, Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!, he believes that Huckleberry Finn and Jim have an ‘unconsummated sexual relationship’. The controversy of his essay deals with gender and sexuality. He makes us question ourselves, whether or not are Huck and Jim perhaps homosexual lovers? Or are they just two normal males who need support from one another? In this essay Leslie Fielder talks about the relationship between Huck and Jim being more affectionate than what people are willing to admit.
In his essay, Leslie gives us examples of why he believes that society plays a major role to Huck’s and Jim’s relationship. He believes that men are afraid to show how they really feel about other men due to the response from the people around them. “It’s not, of course, quite so simple. There is another sense in which the fact of homosexual passion contradicts a national myth of masculine love, just as our real relationship with the Negro contradicts a myth of that relationship, and those two myths with their betrayals are, as we shall see one.”(p521) What Leslie was explaining in this quote was that the relationship between a white person and a black person is the same as the relationship between two men. What he’s trying to tell us is that when these sorts of relationships take place, whether one of a white person with a black person or of two males being affectionate with each other, they have to be in a secretive way because our society tells us that it’s not the moral thing to do. Our society tells us that it’s wrong for two males to have an affectionate relationship as well as to have any sort of personal interaction with a person of African descent. That is why Huck and Jim take the raft down the river. They want to be free from the society and their rules. Another quote he uses in his essay is “the Negro as a homoerotic lover blends with the myth of running off to sea, of running the great river down to the sea. The immensity of the water defines loneliness that demands love…” (p523). What he was trying to say here is that Huck and Jim are flowing down the river into an ocean of acceptance almost. He believed that the black person as a homosexual being is just like the river running down to the sea. The black person is feeling so lonely which ultimately makes him want affection or love. In Jim’s place, Huck is the one that is providing him that affection. He thinks that the black person is just being ignorant and really doesn’t know what they really want which makes him believe he loves Huck.
Throughout his essay, Leslie’s arguments several reasons why Huck and Jim might have an unconsummated relationship. He believes that there must be a reason for Jim to like Huck in a more intimate way and vice versa. He believes that they are afraid of not being loved. “it’s always in the role of outcast, ragged woodsman, or despised sailor, or unregenerate boy that we turn to the love of a colored man… that compelling anxiety, which every foreigner notes, that we may not be loved, that we are loved for our possessions and not ourselves, that we are really alone!”(525) Fielder is making excuses to why Huck and Jim are attracted to each other. He believes that always the outcast of the that compelling anxiety, which every foreigner notes, that we may not be loved, that we are loved for our possessions and not ourselves, that we are really alone!”(525) Fielder is making excuses to why Huck and Jim are attracted to each other. He believes that always the outcast of the story is the one that falls in love with the black person due to his individualism and being different from everyone else in one way or another.
In conclusion, what Fielder tries to explain to us is that as men grow up they slowly drift apart physically and even mentally from their male friends. “.. the white boy and the black we can discover wrestling affectionately on any American street, along which they will walk in adulthood, eyes averted from each other, unwilling to touch.” (p525) He’s saying that when we were kids nothing really seemed to matter whether we were boys playing affectionately with other boys or not but as we grow up society tells us that it’s not right to be affectionate with other males. His essay was very hard to comprehend due to the several other books that Fielder was referring to because we haven’t read them before. It was also very hard to follow what he was talking about and found it confusing to follow