Huckleberry Finn and morality in spite of religion

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell!”

I’ve preached passionately for years about the moment when Huck Finn casts aside religion and society in order to do what only he believes is right. I maintain my belief that this moment is the peak moment in U. S. literature. I’ll give just a quick summary of the moment for those few who haven’t read the novel:

Near the end of the novel, after his trip down the Mississippi with the runaway slave Jim, Huck finds himself in a situation wherein he can “do the right thing” in his society. He can send Jim back to his owner. Huck has been to church; he knows that allowing Jim to remain free is tantamount to stealing, and the Bible is opposed to stealing. He also knows that the Bible is not opposed to slavery. In addition, Huck is from a small town where slavery is the norm. People expect slaves to behave themselves and they expect whites to respect the ownership of slaves. In effect, Huck’s religion and society have taught him to internalize the “fact” that turning Jim in is what God wants from him. And he is totally prepared to do so. Why doesn’t he turn in Jim, then? Because, despite his own internalized belief system as well as all external rules and religious imperatives, Huck KNOWS deep in his… what? Soul? – deep inside himself, Huck feels Jim’s love. And Huck’s inner self refuses to accept the limits of his society. He knows that in not accepting, he is damning himself to eternal pain and torment – and unlike most of his friends, Huck knows about pain and torment. He willingly accepts damnation rather than being untrue to his deepest moral core.

Huck’s decision is a key to existentialism: realizing that one is alone in the world and, rather than lamenting that position as unbearable, accepting full responsibility for yourself and your own decisions. Huck’s decision is made in spite of his society and his religious belief system. However, Twain never let’s the reader doubt that Huck is correct in this decision. This realization to the core of your being is what Audre Lorde calls Eroticism. It is not sexual, but it does affect the entire body as sexual activity does (rather than just the logical mind). From Lorde:

"once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe."

Huck is very clear about the fact that turning in Jim would certainly be against the grain of that “joy” of which he knows himself to be capable. In this moment, we can see his erotic knowledge become the lens through which he scrutinizes “all aspects of [his] existence” and discovers that life itself would be worse than hell if he followed the rules of his religion and his society (are they divisible?).

In Huck we see the depth of the existential system. It is a philosophy based on experience rather than logic or reason. And it is experience which sets one free from the limits of our religions, societies, and ourselves. In my upbringing, for instance, I was taught that others – women, black Americans, homosexuals, even Yankees – were less than I. These lessons were taught by my religion (Nazarene and white Baptist Christianity) as well as my society (rural South). I have fought a long battle with this upbringing and can comfortably say that I’ve whipped it; some say that I’ve whipped it too well ;) How did I do so? Only in discovering that the limits I was taught were faulty. Some were misdirected versions of Bible scripture; some were left-over resentments of my family’s class situation; some were simply ignorance on the part of my various teachers. Still, they were all trustworthy until I decided, not nearly as dramatically as Huck, that I would rather follow my own soul (for lack of a better word).

How has this played out in my actual life? Well, it constantly plays out, like any belief system. I’m constantly changing and adjusting – and I guess that’s the key. I rarely see a set morality anymore. Some things, such as intentionally harming those who are at your mercy, always seem wrong. Otherwise, I don’t accept society’s limits. And I have long ago rejected any external religious morality – certainly one based in fear – as anathema to my belief system of love and help.

I’m sure I could go one for hours (and have), but I should stop here and take a nap. I’m sure, knowing how important such self-knowledge is to me, that I’ll come back to this topic. Perhaps next, though, I’ll talk about the idea of the Autonomous Self as the key to psychological health.