Discuss Mark Twain's portrayal of women in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Essay Example

While most of the characters represent various members of the male society, there are a significant number of women who play an essential role within the novel. For Twain, there seems to be basically three types of women – the harridan, the sweetly stereotypical Victorian housewife and the intelligent. These types are portrayed within the novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn through the characters of Miss Watson as the spinsterly old maid, the older Wilks sisters as the properly trained young ladies and the intelligent Mrs.

Judith Loftus and Joann Wilks comprising the final set. In the very opening of the book, Twain introduces us to the two most common type of women, the Widow Douglas and her sister Miss Watson. The image we get of Miss Watson is rather grim. She is “a tolerable slim old maid, with goggles on” who immediately “took a set at me now with a spelling-book. She worked me middling hard for about an hour, and then the widow made her ease up” (3). While the Widow Douglas is seen as interfering in that she insists on trying to ‘sivilise’ Huck, Miss Watson is nagging in her criticisms.

“Miss Watson would say, ‘Don’t put your feet up there, Huckleberry;’ and ‘Don’t scrunch up like that, Huckleberry – set up straight;’ and pretty soon she would say, ‘Don’t gap and stretch like that, Huckleberry – why don’t you try to behave?’” (4). She is such an unpleasant woman to be around that Huck decides he’d rather go to ‘the bad place’ rather than the good place where Miss Watson has announced she will go. This depiction of her makes it not so surprising that she is an old maid rather than a widow.

In contrast to Miss Watson, her sister the Widow Douglas is an older version of the types of girls that Huck meets while on his adventures. The Wilks sisters have been bred to be so