Maura Entry #4 Huckleberry Finn Responding and Reflecting

One thing that I noticed in Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was the two dimensionality of the female characters. The novel is clearly a "male" story, centered around a boy going on adventures and growing up. It is entirely from Huck's point of view, but that does not exclude the female characters from having story lines of their own that have nothing to do with Huck. Each female who had some value importance in the novel was there to further Huck's story. Even Sophia Grangerford, with her love affair with Harney Shepherdson, involves Huck, as he is the one that survives the firefight between the two families. Despite knowing the time that it was written in, and expecting the females to be so stereotypical, it was still disappointing, as I feel that the book would have been greatly improved had the female characters had more depth, like the male characters did.
This novel really opened up my eyes in terms of expectations of females pre-21st century. In the back of my mind, I definitely knew that women had a lot less rights and freedoms than they do now, whether from history class or my own knowledge, but we always make a point to discuss the women or societies in history who defied those expectations in great detail, as if to draw the eye away from the dehumanization of women throughout history. We love to mention Ancient Sparta, Fa Mulan or Queen Elizabeth I, but their accomplishments do not cancel out the fact that the expectations they defied debased women for centuries. Additionally, many historical fiction young adult novels (that's a mouthful) tend have female main characters that challenge the roles set out of for them, and are commended for it by her peers and society, but the reality of society's reaction would have been far from that. Reading Huckleberry Finn and seeing the depersonalization of women by men in the novel and by Mark Twain really exposed the reality of life for women in antebellum society and long before it.