Morality of Minor Characters in Huckleberry Finn

Introduction: Outcasts as Moral Templates

In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain makes two social outcasts — Huck and Jim — the most moral characters of his novel. Huck and Jim are the real templates of correct behavior, yet the rest of a hypocritical and essentially immoral society devotes itself to either catching or civilizing them. By showing how the novel's more socially acceptable minor characters are often less moral than Huck — the son of a drunken father — and Jim, a slave, Twain demonstrates that conventional societal morals are completely at odds with what is actually truthful and intrinsically good. For all of their faults and lack of conventional education, Jim and Huck at least strive to be loving and loyal to one another. In contrasting them with figures like the Widow Douglas and the Grangerford family, Twain creates two great heroes of unexpectedly ethical behavior in nineteenth-century American literature.

The minor characters of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are more often than not motivated by greed, a lack of civility, a lack of true morals and values, a lack of respect for fundamental human dignity, and ordinary racism. Huck and Jim, by contrast, are propelled forward by a drive for freedom, loyalty, and mutual respect. The first and most benign example of a minor character with a flawed moral understanding is the well-intentioned but misguided Widow Douglas.

The Widow Douglas and the Limits of Civilizing

Although she is well-meaning in her attempts to civilize Huck, the Widow Douglas does not understand the true needs of a young boy. The Widow Douglas "took me for her son, and allowed she would civilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time," Huck begins, "considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn't stand it no longer I lit out ... The widow she cried over me, and called me a poor lost lamb, and she called me a lot of other names, too, but she never meant no harm by it. She put me in them new clothes again, and I couldn't do nothing but sweat and sweat, and feel all cramped up. Well, then, the old thing commenced again. The widow rung a bell for supper, and you had to come to time." (1–2)

Unlike Huck, the widow has never known what it is like to be truly hungry. Thus, when "you got to the table you couldn't go right to eating, but you had to wait for the widow to tuck down her head and grumble a little over the victuals, though there warn't really anything the matter with them — that is, nothing only everything was cooked by itself. In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better." (2) Although the widow means well, Huck has a wild and vital appreciation of nature, and her manners constrain and shut the boy off from the natural world rather than nurturing him. She attempts to teach him to appreciate food, fine clothing, and education, but assumes her approaches to the world are superior to Huck's love of eating when he is hungry and running about when it is fine outside.

Twain makes clear that Huck is not unintelligent with respect to formal learning: "At first I hated the school, but by and by I got so I could stand it," yet Huck cannot bring himself to shut off nature and his natural impulses. "Living in a house and sleeping in a bed pulled on me pretty tight mostly, but before the cold weather I used to slide out and sleep in the woods sometimes, and so that was a rest to me." (20) Huck can learn, but he only feels alive when he is outside and unobstructed by societal dictates that hold no intrinsic meaning for him — such as living by a time clock and saying grace in words he does not comprehend.

Huck's Natural Instincts Versus Societal Constraints

Whenever Huck trusts his own impulses rather than the morality of conventional society, as modeled by the novel's minor characters, he acts correctly. He judges wrongly only when he judges by the standards of false society. When first running away, Huck instinctively trusts Jim, even though the "correct" minor characters who hold themselves up as moral teachers say otherwise. This is because society bases its estimation of an individual's moral goodness on appearances rather than actions, a distortion that Twain systematically exposes throughout the novel.

The "civilized" Widow Douglas and Miss Watson are so refined that they own slaves, a doctrine even Huck unquestioningly accepts at first, given that his social and financial betters endorse such behavior. The constraints they place upon Huck — however well-intentioned — mirror the truly dastardly constraints of owning another human being, body and soul, as Miss Watson claims to own Jim. Even Huck, conditioned by the novel's minor characters to accept racist conventions, is shocked to hear Jim speak against Miss Watson: "Jim talked out loud all the time while I was talking to myself. He was saying how the first thing he would do when he got to a free State he would go to saving up money and never spend a single cent, and when he got enough he would buy his wife, which was owned on a farm close to where Miss Watson lived; and then they would both work to buy the two children, and if their master wouldn't sell them, they'd get an Ab'litionist to go and steal them." (118)