Religion versus Ethics in Huckleberry Finn
In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain's most ambitious book, Twain makes some shrewd commentaries on the differences between religion as interpreted by society, and ethics as interpreted by the individual. He does this through the voice of a boy, Huckleberry Finn, who reports events very matter-of-factly, without fully understanding their significance. That, Twain tells us, is our job as readers.
The most pious, Bible-thumping woman in Huck's life -- Miss Watson -- holds a slave, and his entire society would back up not only her right to do so, but the ethical righteousness of her position. At the beginning of the book, Huck is rebelling only against her attempts to “civilize” him, not against her ethics; when she tells him about the horrors of hell -- the “bad place,”
When, at the end of Chapter Four, we are introduced to the evil “Pap”, Huck's father, we enter a new area of morality that holds no controversy for Huck at all, nor for Twain or the reader. Pap is completely evil. And yet a judge gives him custody of Huck (and by extension, Huck's financial resources) because Mr. Finn is his father. In short, Huck “belongs” to Pap just as Jim “belongs” to Miss Watson; and the reader is brought up short with the analogy. No one should have the right to own another human being so completely that he has the right to abuse him. Huck sees this instinctively, and so when he meets Jim on the island after both escape, Huck is ready to throw in his fortune with him.
It is noteworthy that toward the beginning of their journey, the two discuss the Old Testament story of Solomon, and it is apparent that neither one has assimilated much from their religious education; Twain is telling us that teaching your “possessions” (slaves and children) Bible stories does not help them any when your entire society enslaves them.
There is no one moment in the novel when it occurs to Huck, like a bolt out of Heaven, that conventional Southern society, with its religious mores and proscriptions, is wrong, and he is going to create his own ethical system for himself. This is a gradual process, born out of living in close contact with Jim. Early on in the book Huck plays a trick on Jim, and Jim calls him to task for it. Huck reports that “it was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger -- but I done it, and I warn't ever sorry for it afterwards, neither. I didn't do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn't done that one if I'd `a' knowed it would make him feel that way.” Uzo Esonwanne, a Nigerian professor of English at the University of Michigan, notes that “[This] episode, which signals a transformation in Huck's consciousness about race, does so by reinforcing the very demeaning subjection of Jim which made Huck's prank possible in the first place” (Esonwanne, 565). Beyond a shadow of a doubt, Huck's response was definitely unconventional for a nineteenth-century Southern boy, but we must remember that Huck was not born and raised in conventional Southern society, but rather on the fringe of it.
We see this most clearly in contrasting him with Tom Sawyer in this novel. For the most part Tom's adventures are play-acting, a form of boyish rebellion against his Aunt Polly. Tom will, however, outgrow this stage and grow up to be a respectable Southern gentleman. Huck will not. At the beginning of the novel, Huck and Tom are playing at becoming robbers; they make elaborate plans, but never actually rob anyone, much less kill them. It is totally play. Later on, after his long stretch on and off the river with Jim, Huck again meets up with Tom, and assumes that Tom will understand the seriousness of Huck's mission to free Jim. We are now not playing pirates and robbers; we are saving someone's life -- and not just the life of a “nigger”, but a real person. This is real life -- a fact Tom never does understand, but Huck understands only too well.
Huck's actual moment of reckoning, however, comes in Chapter 31, when he finds out that Jim has been taken to the Phelps house. He at first concludes that “it would be a thousand times better for Jim to be a slave at home where his family was, as long as he'd got to be a slave”, so he starts to write a letter to Tom to explain the entire escapade, and ask him to tell Miss Watson where Jim might be found. It occurs to him briefly that he, Huck, would be disgraced back home if it was found out that he had helped a slave escape, and worse; he recalls that “there was the Sunday school, you could `a' gone to it, and if you'd `a' done it they'd `a' learnt you there that people that acts as I'd been acting about that nigger goes to everlasting fire.”
At that moment he attempts to pray for forgiveness, but can't. He reasons that this is because “my heart warn't right; it was because I warn't square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that nigger's owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He [God] knowed it. You can't pray a lie -- I found that out.”
After reasoning all this, he again determines to be “washed clean of sin”, seizes a piece of paper, and writes a short note to Miss Watson, telling of Jim's whereabouts. For a moment he feels virtuous. But then he begins to think about how Jim had protected him on their river journey, and the good times they shared as virtual equals. He decides it would be better to help Jim escape from the Phelpses. He knows that this is a turning point -- “a close place” , he calls it -- and in the end he tears up the letter, asserting, “All right then, I'll go to Hell.” He still does not realize (and never does) that his own moral instincts are the right ones; it is Miss Watson's society that is wrong, and it is this that makes his choice all the more poignant.
Given the strong moral stance of Huckleberry Finn, it is almost incredible that it has been so repeatedly banned ever since its publication in 1884. Tthose seeking to ban it are still at work at present various school systems in the country because of its casual use of the word “nigger”, a respectful term in the time of the story. Howard Hurwitz, writing in Human Events, notes that the average person who would ban Huckleberry Finn for its disrespect of black people has clearly never read it (Hurwitz, 19). True, the character of Jim at the beginning of the novel is somewhat stereotypical -- because that is how Huck thought of him, and all blacks. But by the middle of the book Jim has attained a powerful individuality; while Huck is still able to cavalierly report in Chapter 32 that there were no casualties from the explosion of a cylinder head that “killed a nigger”, it is clear that by that time Jim has been elevated far above being just a “nigger.” Jim is a human being, one worth defying society, fighting and dying for.