When Huck and Jim get split up from the raft, Huck gets introduced to the Grangerfords. The Grangerfords are quick to welcome Huck into their home since they now know he is not a Shepherdson. The Grangerfords lifestyle and large estate with over one hundred slaves and lavishness bewilders him for he has never been introduced to this way of living. There is a major amount of humor in Huck’s view of the lavish lifestyle and stylish house the Grangerfords have. It can be seen as almost cheep and humorous. Twain satires the family feuds and the mourning during the Victorian Age. The Grangerords have a deceased daughter, Emmeline, that Twain satires in the mocking of the dark and depressing feelings the Victorian Age emits with her obscure obsession for the dead. Twain mocks the idea of family fights when he writes about the Grangerford-Shepherdson feud. Huck realizes that the families don’t even know the reason why this never ending feud is still going on, “The men took their guns along, so did Buck, and kept them between their knees or stood them handy against the wall. The Shepherdson’s done the same. It was pretty ornery preaching—all about brotherly love…” (Twain 111). This shows the stupidity the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons have in the idea of maintaining family honor even though they do not even know what they need this honor for. The families bring guns to church sermons preaching of brotherly love even though no one in the church knows what the need for the guns is. In a way Twain is making fun of family honor and how ridiculous and life controlling it will become.
With the comical aspects to the Grangerfords there are also some more somber and melancholy trials. Twain satires the Victorian Age through Emmeline in whom he expresses loss with her death. Although she is dead and has been for quite some time her family still makes an effort to maintain her room, and keeps all of her poems and art to remember her by, as any family would but the Grangerfords take their grieving to a whole new level. Twain’s mocking of the Grangerford-Shepherdson feud takes a more serious level when Buck, Huck’s new and only friend besides Jim, dies in a gunfight. As he is covering his new found friends fragile face Huck says, “I cried a little when I was covering up Buck’s face, for he was mighty good to me” (Twain 117). The family feud was first seen as humorous but the result was tragic for both Huck and the Grangerfords. The deaths in the fight consisted of Buck, his father and two brothers were killed by the Shepherdson’s to keep their sense of family pride. The tragedies of all of those lives ending showed the true sadness that the Grangerfords felt within the feud.
The Grangerfords are a direct allusion to William Shakespeare’s famous play “Romeo and Juliet.” The Grangerford-Shepherdson feud is a direct correlation to Romeo and Juliet and the feud between the Capulets and Montagues. Both fights are tragic in the end and unreasonable and pointless. In both stories each family is trying show a sense of family honor which will always result in tragic and mostly deadly endings. The Capulet-Montague relationship in Romeo and Juliet is similar to the Grangerfords and Shepherdsons in the essence that they are both powerful families that are at each others wits end from annoyances that took place long ago. Huck even asks what the fighting is about and Buck replies, “Oh, yes, pa knows, I reckon, and some of the other old people; but they don’t know now what the row was about in the first place” (Twain 110). This is a major point in showing the pure stupidity that all four of the families share by not even knowing what they were fighting about. Twain tries to show the pointlessness of family feuds through the Grangerfords and Shepherdsons just as Shakespeare did through the Capulets and Montagues.
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