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| Alicia Humphrey |
By Alicia Humphrey, Class of 2017
I’m sure several of us remember reading Mark Twain’s beloved classic, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, at some point in high school. I had largely forgotten about the novel until Dr. Dale Billingsley, my British literature teacher, brought it up in one of his lectures of wide-ranging subject matter. Although we were originally talking about another work, Dr. Billingsley connected the two works by making a unique point about Huck Finn I had never before realized. Dr. Billingsley reminded us of the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons, the two feuding families Huck Finn came across during one of his adventures. He related the story to the Biblical tale of Cain and Abel, with the Grangerfords representing Cain, a farmer (a ‘grange’ is where a farmer lives) and the Shepherdsons representing Abel, a shepherd (the name connection being obvious). Like Cain in the Biblical tale, the Grangerfords were the guilty party in Huck Finn. The relevance of this connection was that throughout Huck Finn, Huck’s main goal is to get Jim to a free state in the north so he can be a free man. Huck and Jim are trying to escape the corruption brought about by slavery and the Civil War era, which is widely considered to be the time America truly lost its innocence by turning man against his fellow man and even temporarily becoming a house divided. However, the fact that Huck ran into the feuding Grangerfords and Shepherdsons during his journey is representative of the fact that corruption has in fact existed in the world since nearly the beginning of time; it was in the Biblical times of Cain and Abel that murder was first committed. Sin and corruption, Dr. Billingsley reminded us, have been around for much longer than we often like to imagine.
Dr. Billingsley’s point resonated so much with me because it both connected with other subjects I have been studying and raised even more questions. The idea of when corruption arose in the world and how it has evolved took me back to an Eastern religions class I took last semester, in which we discussed several Eastern cultures’ creation and fall-of-man stories. It reminded me of a conversation with a friend about the nature of human beings and whether we are inclined to be good or evil. It gave me a different perspective considering a Plato seminar in the McConnell Center last semester in which we discussed the Ring of Gyges. (In the story, Glaucon suggests that human morality is a social construction, fueled by the desire to maintain one's reputation; if that sanction were removed, one's moral character would disappear entirely.)
In short, Dr. Billingsley’s two-minute point in a lecture one day in class last week has had me thinking ever since. It is moments like these that have made me realize I am truly being educated for the first time, because I am learning how to think. I have rarely before been prompted to connect subjects to each other and to real life, or to think about abstract ideas on my own. However, all of the sudden, things bigger than the mundane and everyday have come to matter to me more than anything else. Although this shift in my perspective has led to much confusion and sometimes frustration, I don’t think I would ever want to go back to the way things were before.
Alicia Humphrey, of Paducah, Ky., is a freshman McConnell Scholar at the University of Louisville. She is studying English, political science and Spanish.