From Huckleberry Finn to The Shawshank Redemption: Race and the American Imagination in the Biracial Escape Film

Abstract

According to Hemingway, “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn” (22). Ironically, Atchity may have been less insightful regarding King’s original work than prescient in foreseeing the transformation of one of those novellas, “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption,” by writer/director Frank Darabont into The Shawshank Redemption, one of the most popular films of the twentieth century. More specifically, it seems to these critics an affirmation of the power of our innate goodness to overcome prejudice and a celebration of the capacity of white and black Americans, individually if not collectively, to make racial difference irrelevant. [...]the contradictions posed by America’s historical entanglement with slavery seem, at least for the time being, to have been resolved. The fact that racism remains endemic to American society — a legacy of that entanglement with slavery — makes the solution suggested by Huckleberry Finn, founded as it is on the myth of the romantic individual, more reassuring than effective. [...]as Lévi-Strauss predicts, we find hundreds of versions and retellings of the Huck-Jim story through translations, reprintings, critical commentary, film and TV adaptations, and a long tradition of biracial escape narratives, all suggestive in some way of their most famous antecedent.