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What does the feud symbolize in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? Does it remind you of any famous literature?
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The feud in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn symbolizes religious hypocrisy and the absurdity of human behavior. Twain uses the Grangerfords and Shepherdsons to highlight the disconnect between their professed Christian values and their violent actions, satirizing the contradiction between belief and behavior. The feud resembles the Montagues and Capulets in Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet," emphasizing senseless hatred and revenge. This parallel critiques the foolishness of prioritizing trivial grievances over human life.
Through the feud, Twain satirizes religious hypocrisy. The Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons can and do kill each other at the drop of hat, but both families believe they are devoutly Christian. They even attend the same church (keeping their loaded guns with them throughout the service). Both families entirely miss that the preaching about love, mercy, and forgiveness should apply to them and their feud if they are as faithful as they profess to be. Twain is thus satirizing the slippage between what people say they believe in and their real behavior.
The families also keep slaves, at the same time living with graciousness and surrounded by beauty, offering white guests every hospitality. There seems to be no conception that owning and oppressing other people is at odds with the ideals of grace and beauty. Huck notes that both families are equally grand, saying the the Shepherdson's were
as high-toned...
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and well born and rich and grand as the tribe of Grangerfords.
The feud is based on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, in which the feuding Montague and Capulet families engage in bloodthirsty hatred.
To answer the second question first, the feud is reminiscent of Shakespeare's Romeoand Juliet, in which a feud between the Montagues and Capulets makes forbidden the love between Romeo and Juliet.
The feud of the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons bears some similarity to that between the Capulets and the Montagues. For instance, Johnse Hatfield, the son of the patriarch of the McCoys, William Anderson Hatfield, known as Devil Anse, encountered Roseanna McCoy on a local election day gathering. They soon fell in love. Later on at another election day gathering, a fight began among three of Randolph McCoy’s sons and two brothers of Devil Anse, the patriarch. This fight ended when one of the Hatfield men was stabbed in an incident something like the murder of Mercutio.
In his novel Twain satirizes the foolishness and cruelty of people as they focus on trivialities and take revenge upon things that are certainly not worthy of their lives. In their hatred for each other, the Grangerfords and Shepherdsons kill off their entire families.
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