I would agree. That is how they talked at the time and why Twain used it. But take it away and input 'slave' instead. Does the story come off the same?
Pulp fiction is another example. Replace the swear words with 'gosh darn it' and 'fudge' and 'golly gee'. Does it detract from the movie to hear gangsters and low lifes talk like that?
You can look at the countless gangster movies of the 40s and 50s, where there was no cursing. Brando's
On The Waterfront ...one of the greatest movies of all time... was the F-Bomb being thrown around every other sentence? Nope, in fact, I don't think it even had a curse word. It clearly didn't destroy the integrity of the film. Little House on the Prairie, one of the most popular television shows of all time, dealt with the same time period as Twain's novel, but never mentioned the N-word... seldom ever dealt with issue of race, as they were back then. They could have done an episode where a black boy became friendly with Laura, and they found him just outside the Prairie, dangling from a tree... but we never saw that episode.
So, we can be entertained and enjoy the 'sanitized' version of reality, in movies and television, as well as novels. But do we get the feel of reality? I can remember watching Gunsmoke (I think it was), where they guest starred some black actor of the day, and he had some problem the 'hero' had to straighten out, and I couldn't help but thinking, the whole way through the episode, that would have never happened like that. It was like the producers didn't want you to realize he was black, or show you the reality of how differently black people were treated back then. We've done this sort of thing for decades, this idea is nothing inherently new.
I find it somewhat humorous, how they will 'overdub' movies made for the Big Screen, to make them suitable for TV... always with some lame word or phrase that just doesn't fit...
You filthy lying son of a biscuit maker! I think about that, and I wonder, what is the difference in what they are doing to Huck Finn? It is the same thing, sanitizing it, so as to not be as offensive.
I catch a lot of flack for my usage of the Confederate battle flag. I am told it is a "symbol of racism" ....because racial hate groups hijacked it, and routinely use it as a symbol... but the history behind the flag means something. I hear people lamenting how we should ban the Confederate flag altogether, just remove it from the public eye... as if that somehow erases the history. Of course, when people would ask, why did they ban the Confederate flag, the answer would be, because it was a racist symbol people found offensive. Banning it, confirms the myth, and ignores the reality. The flag was flown in battle by Southern men who never owned a slave. It was the symbol of their young defiant nation, of which they gave their lives to defend. Yes, later in history, people used the same flag to denote hatred of race, at it has become stigmatized by that... this is what we should teach, the truth, not the myth.
We can't hide from our history, or change things that happened. We can 'sanitize' things to make us feel better about the past, but isn't that essentially, living a lie? Isn't that worse than simply recognizing the scars of the past and understanding we are not perfect? When they repealed the 18th Amendment, it was not expunged from the Constitution.... WHY? Because we need to see it, to remind us of our mistakes, to show us that we are not perfect always, and we can make mistakes, and those mistakes can be corrected. Why not just remove the 18th Amendment from the Constitution? It's the same thing as banning the Confederate flag or removing the N-word from Huck Finn.
