Disability, Race, and Performance in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

At the beginning of chapter 24 of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Jim is being dressed up by the king and the duke as a “Sick Arab” to avoid detection, his body becoming a locus where performance, racialization, and disability are intertwined. Investigating this entanglement, the essay asks, more broadly, what critical affordances a disability studies perspective might yield for reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a novel that is not ostentatiously about disability, yet where the unobtrusive presence of disabled characters, both real or fraudulent, helps move the plot along. Accordingly, it sketches how we might redescribe the novel’s plea for freedom from constraint through a disability studies lens as a critique of enforced normalcy. It then considers the character of Jim’s deaf-mute daughter, ’Lizabeth, in an often-neglected passage where Twain trades momentarily the rhetoric of the adventure novel for the aesthetics of the sentimental narrative. Finally, the essay turns to Twain’s comedic reprise of the deaf and dumb character as part of the king and the duke’s extended confidence game at the Wilks’s (ch. 24–29), where identity fraud and the prospect of profit hinge, at least in part, on the successful performance of disability.