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river. While the lady sits in her tower, the river reflects the world passing her by as it
flows downstream to Camelot. When Sir Lancelot trots past on his horse, the lady leaves
the tower and joins the reality of the river, unchaining the boat on its bank and writing
her name on its prow, effectively discovering herself by establishing her identity. Her boat
floats down the river to Camelot, where she dies.
Freedom, change, and metamorphosis, all qualities inherent in the course of a large river,
appear clearly as themes in Mark Twain's
Huckleberry Finn
(1885), a quintessential river
story set on the Mississippi. Huck Finn, the son of an abusive, alcoholic father, flees on a
raft with his friend Jim, a runaway slave, down the Mississippi river. Their journey rep-
resents escape from oppression, a broken family life, racial discrimination, and social in-
justice, and the topic draws on the author's own boyhood experiences along the Missis-
sippi. Samuel Clemens - Twain's real name - also worked as a riverboat pilot in his twen-
ties, an experience that gave him his pen-name, taken from a frequent call made by the man
sounding the depth of the river in shallow places. Relayed to the pilot in order to keep the
boat from running aground, 'mark twain' meant 'by the mark two fathoms'.
The change and renewal are more fantastical in
The Water Babies
(1863), Charles Kings-
ley's classic children's novel, which begins with the boy Tom, a chimney sweep, seeking a
river's cleansing properties. Tom escapes his terrible life to find freedom in the river but,
after his adventures as a water baby, he is finally reborn in human form once more, in a
moral tale of Christian redemption. One of the most powerful works of fiction centred upon
an urban river, Charles Dickens'
Our Mutual Friend
was begun the year after publication of
Kingsley's novel. Published in serial form, it uses the River Thames in Victorian London to
bestow rebirth and renewal upon several characters and is awash with watery imagery. The
Thames is used in a similar way to change identity by William Boyd in his topic
Ordinary
Thunderstorms
(2009), a novel he was prompted to write by learning that the police pull a
dead body from the river every week on average.
In literature, rivers are also used as agents of transformation through their representation
of boundaries or thresholds, so that the practice of crossing a river precipitates some sort
of change. Rivers can unify or divide, act as companion or god. Embracing the essential
mysteries of nature, rivers can embody the pursuit of wisdom. They can be used to explore
the physical world for our moral and intellectual, as well as physical, orientation. And of
course, even within a single work, a river has many meanings.
The Congo:
Heart of Darkness
