Through the Eyes of a Child
Mark Twain’s use of children to criticize the adult world of organized religion
In Shifting Sand, I have been writing about our years in Fort Wayne. During that time, I returned to graduate school before I got a position at the local Lutheran high school. My faith deconstruction and reconstruction took on a new life during this time, and one of the many ways this came out was in my graduate studies.
I took a Mark Twain seminar class the semester after my son was born. I read Tom Sawyer for the first time and came to see Huck Finn in a different light. I also wrote a paper about Tom, Huck, and organized religion that helped me process some of the many questions I was having at the time.
This is the very long academic work I completed during that semester of study. I’ve had some readers on Substack Notes say they would like to read it. It’s academic literary analysis, and I know that’s not for everyone 😂 But I hope you will still read and appreciate it anyway.
It is no secret to Twain scholars that Samuel Clemens struggled with organized religion. He grew up in a strict Christian home and then later married a strong Christian woman who wanted him to be the perfect Christian husband and father. Yet, while Samuel Clemens lived the outward life of a man striving to be the ideal Christian husband and father, he used Mark Twain to criticize the very organized religion in which he continued to participate. In his early career, Twain used many of his characters to assist in his critique, but it was his youngest characters who most frequently appeared to be the voice of reason. In the novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom and Huck are not great religious voices, but their perceptive commentary on the actions of the adults around them point out the hypocrisy and folly of the strongest adult adherents to religion that surround them.
Samuel Clemens’ mother was a strict Presbyterian, and Clemens and his siblings were raised going to church and Sunday school, although the primary male figure in his life, his father, did not attend with them. Mark Twain creates a similar situation for both Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Tom is raised by his Aunt Polly; Twain makes no mention of a male authority figure attending church or taking responsibility for Tom’s religious upbringing. Huck first learns about church and religion under the influence of the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson after they take him in. Up to this point, his lack of religious upbringing is due to his drunkard father who has no use for religion or the social norms that come with it. That both of these young characters reflect Clemens’ own childhood is significant when considering the role they play in revealing the religious hypocrisy around them. William Dean Howells once said that Clemens learned “to fear God and dread the Sunday School” while attending church at Hannibal’s First Presbyterian Church (Bush 25). According to Harold Bush, “The church Sam attended with his family…based its doctrine on the Bible, with an emphasis on Old Testament texts about God’s power, majesty, and wrath. Young Sammy was required to know the Bible: like his peers, he had to memorize many passages and by his own admission had ‘read the Bible through’ before he was fifteen” (25).1 Twain’s critique of this instructional practice is clear in Tom Sawyer when Tom tricks the Sunday school superintendent into believing that he has in fact learned enough Bible verses to get several prize Bibles. “This comic episode suggests (and criticizes) the way religious language is consumed by the general populace: memorization without meaning or reflection that precludes any in-depth examination of the religious texts themselves” (Bush 27). In essence, children and adults are expected to know the Bible with the assumption that the more they know, the more they will believe.
Twain’s earliest writings, particularly The Innocents Abroad, began to explore genuine religious piety and religious hypocrisy. According to James Wilson, “he was already alienated from the comfortable religious homilies of his childhood. His early training in the Hannibal Presbyterian church and the support and example of his parents had left him a conscience keen to humanitarian concerns and personal moral responsibility, and a knowledge of, if not belief in, the basic tenets of Protestant faith” (156). He was “disenchanted with religious orthodoxy” and distrustful of any form of religious hypocrisy or trickery (156). As his career continued into the composition of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, these feelings were not expressed in the form of a man traveling through Europe and the Holy Land, but instead through the eyes of two teenage boys “innocent” of the world view expected of them. Tom is every boy who ever sat through a Sunday service just biding his time until he is free to throw off his Sunday clothes and play. Tom is not attempting to be evil. Instead, his actions challenge the cultural ideas of religious instruction and the power, or lack thereof, of traditional worship practices. And Huck is ignorant of religion because he has never been exposed to it, nor has he ever been given a reason to take an interest in it.
This attitude is first evident when readers are introduced to the piety of Tom’s family in Tom Sawyer. In the novel “Aunt Polly had family worship: it began with a prayer built from the ground up of solid courses of Scriptural quotations, welded together with a thin mortar of originality; and from the summit of this she delivered a grim chapter of the Mosaic Law, as from Sinai” (Twain 31). Aunt Polly has selected scripture because she is supposed to read from the scripture and have those under her care do the same, but Tom does not see any relevance to him or his siblings. While his brother dedicates as much time as possible to learn his verses for Sunday School, Tom studies his verses at the last minute and hates Sunday School “with his whole heart,” again reflecting the feelings of a young Sam Clemens (Twain 34). Tom then trades and deals to obtain as many memory tickets as possible, which were given to students who learned a certain number of verses. With enough tickets, the student would receive their own Bible. Even though Tom has no interest in the Bible, he wants the glory, and finally turns in the tickets he has obtained by other means to make it look as if he has learned a much as he says he has. When Tom is called up by the superintendent to show how good he is for having memorized the verses, he fails the verbal test. When asked the names of the first two disciples, he answers “David and Goliath,” revealing himself as a fraud (Twain 41).
Tom’s irreverent behavior carries over into the church service. He endures the prayer. “He was restive all through it; he kept tally of the details of the prayer, unconsciously—for he was not listening, but he knew the ground of old, and the clergyman’s regular route over it” (Twain 43). He becomes distracted by a fly and captures it just as the prayer concludes, only to be forced to release it by a stern look from his aunt. When the minister preaches about the child leading the lion and the lamb, “the lesson, the moral of the great spectacle were lost upon the boy; he only thought of the conspicuousness of the principal character before the onlooking nations; his face lit with the thought, and he said to himself that he wished he could be that child, if it was a tame lion” (Twain 44). Tom completely misses the point of the one piece of the sermon that catches his attention. He quickly loses focus once again and is instead distracted by a beetle being attacked by a poodle. The beetle then sends the dog into yelps and fits after the dog sits on it. By this time, many disinterested members of the congregation start to watch these antics, and by the time the dog has jumped out of the window, “the whole church was red-faced and suffocating with suppressed laughter, and the sermon had come to a dead standstill” (Twain 46). At the end of the episode, it is not just Tom who is distracted from the service, but the majority of the congregation.
Tom’s behavior makes him look like a naughty boy who does not know how to behave in church. However, Twain uses this particular scene to show adults going through the ceremony of a church service without worship. This is evident when members of the church choir, who should be focused on the act of worship as part of the service, break into “tittering and whispering of the choir in the gallery” when “a solemn hush fell upon the church.” In fact, “The choir always tittered and whispered all through the service” (Twain 42). Bush comments on Tom Sawyer, saying “the key features of church life appear to be ‘showing off’ and brainless conformity” (27). People attended church because that was what was expected of them to remain respectable. Twain was not a stranger to attending church for appearances’ sake. In the years shortly after his marriage to his wife Livy, Twain lived “a relatively conventional life as a member of a close, wealthy, and churchgoing community, regularly attending religious services and giving considerable support to (Joseph) Twichell’s Asylum Hill church” (Messant 371-372). He appears to follow the routine, but Clemens as Twain has no issue with criticizing that attitude toward worship. Randy Cross argues Twain “felt that man, being what he is, could not possibly enjoy a church service, especially a lengthy one. He believed that people attend church only because of habit and social pressure” (27). While it is debatable Twain felt that way about all churchgoers, this belief is reflected in the stories of Tom and his friend Huckleberry Finn.
Twain describes the church service in which Tom tortures the beetle as a service full of routine. It is a long service with a long detailed prayer and during the sermon the minister “gave out his text and droned along monotonously through an argument that was so prosy that many a head by and by began to nod – and yet it was an argument that dealt in limitless fire and brimstone and thinned the predestined elect down to a company so small as to be hardly worth saving” (Twain 44). It is no wonder that Tom, an easily distracted boy, finds a way to entertain himself, thinking as he is leaving that “there was some satisfaction about divine service when there was a bit of variety in it” (Twain 46). To him, organized religion is something he must get through for his aunt’s satisfaction, not something he wants to do for his own personal growth.2
Twain’s criticism in his earlier works is not just in the method used to teach children how to memorize scripture, but in the clear disconnect between head and heart. Tom was intelligent enough that he could have learned the verses if he really wanted to. He was well read in the romances and remembered story lines of many pieces considered classics today. However, he did not feel the need to learn as much as possible about his Aunt Polly’s faith. Had he actually memorized the verses he says he memorized and had he impressed the superintendent and Judge Thatcher, it is still unlikely he would have absorbed the faith to go with the Biblical knowledge. This is also seen in the short stories “The Story of the Bad Little Boy That Bore a Charmed Life” and “Story of the Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper.” These shorter Twain tales are perfect examples of the disconnect between head and heart. The bad little boy Jim does everything wrong; he does not get into trouble for stealing, he gets other boys in trouble and does not feel bad for not taking the blame, he goes fishing on Sunday and does not get struck by lightening, and grows up to get “wealthy by all manner of cheating and rascality, and now he is the infernalest, wickedest scoundrel in his native village…” (Twain 23)
In stark contrast, the good little boy Jacob does everything that the Sunday-school books tell him to do, but nothing turns out the way he plans. It is his “noble ambition to be put into a Sunday-school book. He wanted to be put in, with pictures representing him gloriously declining to lie to his mother, and she weeping for joy about it…” (Twain 49). Instead, “This boy always had a hard time of it. Nothing ever came out according to the authorities with him” (Twain 51) However, Jacob is not doing all of these things because of a genuine desire to have faith; he is doing good because he wants to be rewarded and used as an example for other children to follow. And Jim never learns his lesson. Instead, he kills his family and becomes a member of the Legislature.
From these stories, it appears that church attendance is about creating moral individuals, not necessarily instilling lifelong faith. While here Twain is telling parables of two boys and their experiences with religious instruction, there are clear parallels to the more realistic stories of Tom and Huck. The primary parallel is the apparent lack of concern of the adults instructing these children in relation to the development of their faiths. Yes, the stories of Jim and Jacob are clear hyperbole in the discussion of Sunday school and what was being learned in 19th-century Sunday schools, but the fact that Tom and Huck also experience misguided instruction demonstrates Twain’s frustration with equating religious faith and morality.
This can be seen in Samuel Clemens’ biography, as well. Most studies of Clemens shows a man who in his later years could be considered a moral man, however, he was not a man of faith. Despite all of his Biblical knowledge and being close friends with the pastor of the church he attended with his family, he struggled to believe in the core tenets of the Christian faith. Twain biographer Albert Bigelow Paine reports Twain telling Twichell “I’m going to make a confession. I don’t believe in your religion at all. I’ve been living a lie right straight along whenever I pretended to…I don’t believe one word of your Bible was inspired by God…” (Messant 380). Surprisingly, this did not turn off his preacher friend, Twichell. At the same time Twain was expressing this belief during their Tramp Abroad travels, Twichell wrote his wife, telling her, “People don’t know Mark’s best side. I am more persuaded of it than ever…Would that the grace might touch him with power and lead him into larger view of things spiritual than he has ever yet seen!! He is extremely considerate towards me in regard of everything, or most things, where he apprehends that my religious feelings are concerned” (381). While Clemens may have struggled with his personal faith, he did not criticize those who held genuine Christian beliefs and did not blindly follow religious leaders.
Huck continues to reflect Twain’s struggle with head and heart when he lives with the widow and Miss Watson in Huckleberry Finn. The widow attempts to start Huck’s religious education, but she hits a brick wall because Huck struggles to see how it applies to him. He says “she got out her book and learned me about Moses and the Bulrushers, and I was in a sweat to find out all about him; but by and by she let it out that Moses had been dead a considerable long time; so then I didn’t care no more about him, because I don’t take no stock in dead people.”3 When Miss Watson tries to teach him about prayer, he can’t understand why prayer doesn’t work like a magic trick: one asks for what they want and then they get it. Miss Watson tries to explain to a teenage boy with absolutely no experience with religion that he needs to ask for spiritual gifts, and when he gets to heaven, he will get the opportunity to “go around all day long with a harp and sing, forever and ever.” According to Randy Cross, Twain may be referring to “the worthlessness of prayer,” however it is more likely that the second half of Cross’s argument is more accurate. Twain was instead using Miss Watson to criticize preachers who “preach cold facts without compassion and understanding” (27). Huck experiences a woman preaching ideas to him without concern of whether or not Huck understands why he believes those ideas as long as he believes them.
Ironically, when Huck prays near the end of the novel as he is trying to decide what to do about turning in Jim, “Huck transcends his socially conditioned self and inadvertently communicates what is truly in his heart: his desire not to betray his friend” (Eutsey, “Was Huck a Unitarian?” 61). While he is praying for help to do something that the Southern Christian church has taught him was evil, he is obliged to go with whatever answer he receives. “Consequently, Huck is strengthened to do the morally correct thing when he decides: ‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell’…Huck’s prayer…is a prayer that asks for help and was heard by God, however dimly. By looking to God and yet working in his own way, Huck achieved a spiritual encounter that strengthened his soul to do the right thing” (61). This is in stark contrast to his experience praying with Miss Watson, which leaves him feeling empty and convinced that God does not hear him.
I judged I could see that there was two Providences, and a poor chap would stand considerable show with the widow’s Providence…I thought it all out, and reckoned I would belong to the widow’s if he wanted me, thought I couldn’t make out how he was a-going to be any better off then than what he was before, seeing I was so ignorant and so kind of low-down and ornery (Twain 21).
Twain demonstrates the struggle that many a misguided soul suffers at the hands of those who mean well but in the end do more harm than good to the spiritual state of their charges. Huck finally has a chance to experience God when he is away from society and forced to make a difficult moral decision without the help of those he believes “know better.”
Regardless of how hard the Widow and Miss Watson try, Huck doesn’t see much use for what they are teaching him, and it is hard to blame him. They continue to discuss people, such as Moses, who Huck has no interest in, and tell Huck that when he gets to heaven, he will get to spend all day long singing with a harp. Unfortunately, they don’t believe his good friend Tom will most likely not be joining him if he makes it to heaven. For a child who is currently not worried about the afterlife and is more concerned about the here and now, this is no way to convince him of the importance of organized religion. Instead, he is turned off to many of the benefits that the pair suggests. Twain uses Miss Watson and Huck to point out the simple mindedness of religious instruction with the purpose of creating moral individuals instead of sincere faith.
It does not help that all he sees around him is hypocrisy at the hands of adults. Miss Watson talks about needing to pray so that Huck can go to heaven, yet like many people in the South before the Civil War, she owns slaves, including Jim. Years of cultural indoctrination has taught him that there is nothing wrong with slavery and that he should turn in a runaway slave, yet when he meets up with Jim on Jackson’s Island, he keeps Jim’s presence a secret. While this could also be interpreted as self-preservation, as keeping Jim’s secret means that he does not have to turn himself in to Pap or the Widow Douglas, Huck is taking that first step toward realizing the evils of slavery by choosing the life of a friend over the preservation of his reputation. However, Huck is growing up in a society that preaches that slavery is not an evil but instead an institution validated by Holy Scripture. Therefore, if an individual helps a slave escape the situation that God has placed him in, the individual is guilty of the sin of stealing. This is why Huck is convinced that not turning Jim in to the authorities will result in his going to hell: society has taught him that good Christians, at the very least, tolerate slavery and respect others’ rights to own slaves.
This critique continues when Huck gets stranded with the Grangerfords. The family lovingly takes him in and agrees to care for him as long as necessary, but they are a slave holding family and even assign a slave to Huck, who is only a guest. While they are not cruel to their slaves, Huck continues to see a wealthy, respectable family owning slaves without any concern for whether it is morally right. In fact, the longer Huck is there the more clear it is to the reader that the Grangerfords have a skewed sense of morality, not just related to their ownership of slavery. Their ongoing feud with the Shepherdsons has lead to the unnecessary death of many family members on both sides, and even the youngest members of the family do not see any problems with continuing the feud, which is evident when Buck shoots at Harney Shepherdson. As he is recounting the story to his father, Col. Grangerford’s only remark is “Why didn’t you step into the road, my boy?” (Twain 109) While Huck looks up to this family because they appear to be of upstanding moral character, Twain quickly reveals to the reader the moral implications of the family’s actions, regardless of religious and moral appearances.4
This becomes clearer in Chapter Eighteen when the feud between the two families comes to a head. Huck sees the two families feuding and killing each other even after a sermon that preaches brotherly love. Like Tom, Huck is clearly bored with the sermon and finds much less meaning in the situation than the reader. All the men in both families carry their guns to church, and Huck states “it was pretty ornery preaching—all about brotherly love, and such-like tiersomeness; but everybody said it was a good sermon, and they all talked it over going home, and had such a powerful lot to say about faith and good works and free grace and preforeordestination, and I don’t know what all, that it did seem to me to be one of the roughest Sundays…yet” (111). The irony in the situation is lost on Huck, but Twain uses the innocent perspective of a young teenager to demonstrate the hypocrisy in a family that praises the preaching of a sermon on loving each other the day before nearly all the men in both families are killed. According to Daniel Wright, the family is stuck in a pattern of behavior because the members are born Grangerfords and that is what is expected of them. Christianity does not challenge the code. “‘Faith’ becomes faith in one’s own power; ‘good works’ are the proper acts of retribution; ‘love’ is a temporary escape, but definitely a part of the pattern; and ‘preforeordestination is the pattern of the feud itself” (90). Outsiders like Huck do not threaten the value system of the community. Instead, Huck is just left to witness the death of most family members, including Buck, who is his own age, and continue down the river with a greater understanding of a broken moral code.
Finally, when he and Jim get stuck with the Duke and Dauphin, he sees adults repeatedly getting duped by the pair in the name of religion. The first con that Huck accompanies the Dauphin on involves the Dauphin pretending he is a pirate and convincing a prayer meeting that he needs money to head back to the Indian Ocean so he can convert his fellow pirates. After claiming his conversion, “he busted into tears, and so did everybody. Then somebody sings out, ‘Take up a collection for him, take up a collection!’ Well, a half a dozen made a jump to do it, but somebody sings out, ‘Let him pass the hat around!’ Then everybody said it, the preacher too” (132). After collecting eighty-five dollars and seventy-five cents, the Dauphin grabs some whiskey on his way back to the raft, solidifying Huck’s realization that he has inadvertently run into men just like his father.5 According to Weinandy, “The Duke and Dauphin personify all that is false and deceptive…and so are prosecuted, tarred and feathered, and run out of town on a rail” (43). It is important to note, however, that they do not get this punishment until they have performed a non-religious con. While they are deserving of punishment for deceiving many, both in the name of religion and not, it is their attempt to replay the Royal Nonesuch that gets them prosecuted and punished in the court of public opinion.
It is difficult to determine which group Twain is more critical of, those who con the innocent in the name of God and religion or those who are easily conned in the name of God and religion. It appears Twain treats the con artists more kindly, especially since the Duke and Dauphin are only caught because their greed in a non-religious con is what finally gets them. However, this is not reflective of Twain’s feelings concerning individuals who had genuine faith. Critics have written about Samuel Clemens’ religious feelings to varying degrees. Some, such as Randy Cross, paint a picture of a man who could not believe in foundations of Christianity. Cross writes “he (Twain) absolutely refused to accept Jesus as Christ, the Son of God…Twain did not deny the Creator’s existence. Rather, he affirmed His existence, but believed that God was a hypocrite…In short, Twain did believe in God: he simply did not like Him” (27). However others, such as Elmo Howell, argue “He bantered and swaggered and joked about all sorts of hallowed things, and especially about the Book of Genesis, but at heart he was a simple man who accepted the old verities of his culture and made them the basis of his art” (15). Between these two extremes, James Wilson comments on Twain’s reflections of his travels to Europe and the Holy Land during his Innocents Abroad tour, saying Twain found “The commercial exploitation of religious relics…profound sacrilege, and he seizes the opportunity to lampoon the gullibility of those so desperate for faith that they will accept anything to redeem their own miserable lives” (159).6 In considering his critics, it is still clear that in all of the above situations from Huckleberry Finn, Twain is ridiculing variations of Victorian religiousity, not individual religious belief.
It is also important to note that Twain did have a great deal of respect for men of genuine faith, even if he did not ascribe to their beliefs. In fact, according to Wilson he was “drawn to men of the cloth in part because he found them generally to be intelligent, sensitive men who shared his concerns for justice, good government and the plight of the poor,” even if he did not necessarily share their beliefs (156). His friendship with Joseph Twichell is clear evidence of this. While Twichell was not traditional in Victorian terms, he felt the charge “to preserve Christianity’s vitality amid changing times. However, unlike conservatives who wanted to accomplish this by returning to a bygone era, Twichell preached that carefully challenging tradition with ‘the criticism of reviving scholarship’ helped to keep Christian faith vibrant” (Eutsey 53). This influential belief clearly carried over to Twain’s writing. If Twain is in fact more critical of those individuals who are taken in religious cons, it is because they are people who are incapable or unwilling to think for themselves and instead allow others to tell them what to believe and think. While Huck is far from experienced and knowledgeable in religious matters, Twain has at the very least created a character who is searching for his own answers despite the poor moral examples around him.
Huck’s experience with the Dauphin’s false preacher routine culminates in the Dauphin’s impersonation of Harvey Wilks, at which time Huck pretends to be the Wilks’ brothers servant. In the guise of a preacher and his brother, the Duke and Dauphin intend to take all the money they possibly can from the Wilks sisters. While they are staying with the sisters, Huck backs himself into a corner while he is talking to Susan, the youngest. Huck makes it clear his religious education has been minimal when he insists that their church has seventeen preachers “for style” (Twain 170). While she does not believe him by the time he is done talking, the two older Wilks girls come to his rescue and make him feel guilty for assisting the Duke and Daupin with the con.
As the con starts to unravel, the Dauphin continues to insist on keeping his identity as a preacher, even though it is clear he has been caught. It would appear that Huck’s perspective of preachers would indicate that Twain’s view of the clergy was less than favorable, but according to Dwayne Eutsey in “Was Huck a Unitarian?” “By Twain’s own admission, his only true ambition in life was to be a preacher of the Gospel (a vocation thwarted, he confessed, by his disdain for religion). Despite never pursuing ordination, however, Twain in many ways saw himself as a preacher of the Gospel (as opposed to a preacher of religion)” (45). Wilson claims that Clemens “was drawn to men of the cloth in part because he found them generally to be intelligent, sensitive men who shared his concerns for justice, good government, and the plight of the poor” (156). And Clemens referred to his pastor and good friend Joseph Twitchell as “’a good man, one of the best of men, although a clergyman’ and in a speech given toward the end of his life he called him ‘my oldest friend—and dearest enemy on occasion’” (Steinbrink 3). This is again evidence of Twain’s respect for people of faith as opposed to people of religion.
A final element of 19th-century religious movements worthy of discussion is the role of nature and religion, especially in light of the writing that influenced Twain’s writing. Twain had read and discussed the works of Emerson with Twichell, and Twichell occasionally preached Emersonian themes. Twichell particularly discussed “the importance of the individual remaining alive to the ‘daily miracle’ of human experience while rejecting religious conformity in order to know the Deity first hand ‘without mediator or veil’” (Eutsey 49). As friend and parishioner of Twichell, Twain uses Emerson’s focus on nature as a way to become closer to God as a bigger part of Huck’s experience traveling down the river. Both Tom and Huck have moral awakenings when they are out in nature. Tom has a moral awakening in the cave when he remembers that Injun Joe is still locked up in the cave and shares this news with the townspeople in hopes that they will still be able to save Joe’s life. Joe is found dead, and Tom feels sorry for him. “Tom was touched, for he knew by his own experience how this wretch had suffered. His pity was moved, but nevertheless he felt an abounding sense of relief and security…” (209) There is nothing he can do for Joe, but he remembers what it was like to be lost in the cave, out in nature by himself with no hope of rescue, and he knows how Joe must have felt unable to escape even though he knew where the exit was. Tom remembers that at least he endured the cave with Becky Thatcher, but he feels sorry for Joe, who had to endure the cave alone.
More importantly, in Huckleberry Finn, “the natural world and what it inspired in Huck stand in sharp contrast with the corruptions of ‘sivilization’…Twain used Huck and Jim’s time floating on the river to illustrate the gospel message of universal brotherhood” (Eutsey 59). The Southern social order forbade friendship between a black slave and an outcast white boy, yet the two find friendship in nature while alone on the Mississippi River (59). According to Eutsey, “before they escape to the river, Jim and Huck are estranged from each other’s true selves by a viciously racist society that is, ironically, sanctioned by the Church” (62). A black man would have been seen as inferior to any white person, including a man like Pap, who few, if any, members of society saw as having redeeming qualities. As the poor son of the town drunk, Huck has no place in the “social order of St. Petersburg until he and Tom Sawyer find the treasure in the cave, and even then he remains alienated from the community” (62). Christian society, with the partial exception of the Widow and Miss Watson, has written Huck off as being “unsaveable.” However, Twain shows that Huck is able to find spiritual redemption through his own self-discovery on the river.7
Tom, Huck, Jim, and Jacob all demonstrate what happens when there is a disconnect between head and heart, faith and show, and demonstration of belief and hypocrisy. The only one of the four boys who clings to any religious belief tries as hard as he can to do everything right and the way that he has been taught, but it does not bring Jacob the rewards that he expects. Instead he is quite miserable and does not appear to experience the joy that strong religious faith should give him. On the other hand, the other three boys appear to be very happy with their situations and while Tom and Huck struggle with their consciences, the thought of hell is a distant, intangible concept that the boys do not equate with their lack of interest in organized religion. The moral climax of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, when Huck decides to not turn in Miss Watson’s Jim, culminates with Huck’s decision that “All right, then, I’ll go to hell” (207). He doesn’t see his going to hell as a rejection of Christ, but instead as a rejection of the social moral code that he has been taught to obey. Even though he has made a decision that appears to be pure of heart and Biblically sound, he still is convinced that his socially unpopular decision will send him straight to hell.
While Mark Twain’s later critique of organized religion took on a much harsher tone, his use of children in his earlier works reflects a clear struggle with the prevalent attitudes towards faith and religion in the 19th century. Tom and Huck’s experiences are reminiscent of Clemens’ own experiences growing up, and it is those experiences that began to form the adult Mark Twain. While he respected those who genuinely held onto the Christian faith, he was never able to truly join the ranks. In a letter to Livy before he married her, he stated, “I can be a Christian—I shall be a Christian” (Wilson 168).8 While Livy continued to encourage him, true faith would elude him throughout his life. Perhaps this is why he uses children to criticize an organized religion that is more about outward appearances as opposed to genuine faith: he wanted people to question the validity of the very trap in which he found himself, a trap formed when he was a child. While this may not have given Twain the answers he sought, it did give him a chance to speak for those whose religious experiences were still being formed.
Works Cited
Bush, Harold K., Jr. Mark Twain and the Spiritual Crisis of His Age. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2007. Print.
Cross, Randy K. "Huckleberry Finn: The Sacred And The Profane." Mark Twain Journal 21.3 (1983): 27-28. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 31 Oct. 2011.
Eutsey, Dwayne. "Was Huck A Unitarian? Christian Liberalism, Joseph Twichell, And Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn." Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 88.1-2 (2005): 43-70. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 5 Dec. 2011.
Howell, Elmo. "Tom Sawyer's Mock Funeral: A Note On Mark Twain's Religion." Mark Twain Journal 16.3 (1972): 15-16. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 5 Dec. 2011.
Messent, Peter. "Mark Twain, Joseph Twichell, and Religion." Nineteenth-Century Literature 58.3 (2003): 368-402. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 1 Nov. 2011.
Steinbrink, Jeffrey. "Mark Twain And Joe Twichell: Sublime Pedestrians." Mark Twain Journal 20.3 (1980): 1-6. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 11 Dec. 2011.
Powell, Jon. "Trouble And Joy From 'A True Story' To Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn: Mark Twain And The Book Of Jeremiah." Studies In American Fiction 20.2 (1992): 145-154. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 31 Oct. 2011.
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Signet Classic, 1997. Print.
---. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2003. Print.
---. Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches. New York: Penguin Classics, 1994. Print.
Weinandy, Thomas G. "Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures Of God." Logos: A Journal Of Catholic Thought And Culture 6.1 (2003): 41-62. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 31 Oct. 2011.
Wilson, James D. "Religious And Esthetic Vision In Mark Twain's Early Career." Canadian Review Of American Studies/Revue Canadienne D'etudes Americaines 17.2 (1986): 155-172. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 5 Dec. 2011.
Wright, Daniel L. "Flawed Communities and the Problem of Moral Choice In the Fiction of Mark Twain." Southern Literary Journal 24.1 (1991): 88-97. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 31 Oct. 2011.
According to Jon Powell, the critic “Allison Ensor has established Twain’s familiarity with the Bible and notes that…‘it has often been recognized that Twain was more influenced by the Bible than by any other book, and that he drew upon it uniquely for ideas subjects, and imagery,’ something that becomes increasingly clear in study of both Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn (147).
Elmo Howell puts an interesting twist on the perspective of Tom’s experiences with religion when discussing Tom’s funeral, at which he, Huck, and Joe Harper appear during the middle of the eulogy. Once the boys appear and everyone converges on them, the preacher announces that they are to sing the doxology. Howell claims that Twain “is so moved by this scene that interest in the boys and their trick recedes and the perspective broadens to include a whole society and way of life. The joke is only a means of bringing out the solidarity of a community in a moment of grief…the author has turned to the adult world of the village and the values which inform it: love, loyalty, compassion, and deep humility before the Divine will” (15). This breaks away from Twain’s earlier critique of 19th-century religious society, but at the same time shows a possible celebration of childhood religious practices that still have a hold on the adult Twain. However, this does not outweigh Twain’s overwhelmingly critical tone in most of the novel.
In Dwayne Eutsey’s article, “What Huck a Unitarian?” he discusses how this situation is “Reminiscent of the rebuff Jesus gave the religious establishment in Mark 12:24, 26b-27…The Widow’s commitment to ‘dead’ traditionalist views is also reminiscent of the approach to the Bible that Unitarians and other religious liberals rejected in attempting to discover the ‘God not of the dead, but of the living” (58). Eutsey argues that “Huck’s questioning of dogmatic interpretations of the Bible eventually culminates in his ironic yet genuine experience of the divine” (58). Thomas Weinandy, a Capuchin priest presenting an amateur interpretation of Huckleberry Finn, suggests that “Huck represents a reluctant Moses leading the slave Jim, who embodies the whole of sinful humanity, to freedom and the promised land, and, in so doing, they are banished from their homes” (42). He continues to suggest that Huck is essentially enslaved by his father who might be considered a type of Pharaoh who, in a drunken stupor, refers to Huck as “the Angel of Death” (46). This interesting interpretation puts yet another spin on Huck’s ignorance concerning the Biblical Moses, in that Weinandy’s suggestion is that Huck is symbolically the very individual he rejects studying.
According to Eutsey, “an underlying theme in Twain’s novel is the tension between ‘the old times’ in the pre-Civil War South and the emerging post-bellum ‘new order’ in which Twain wrote” (54).
Later, as the Duke and Dauphin plan for their Royal Nonesuch, which they use to con an entire town, Twain sneaks in religious themes through the use of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The Duke has the Dauphin memorize Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech from Act III, in which Hamlet contemplates suicide as opposed to pursuing his father’s murderer. Huck believes the speech to be beautifully performed, clearly unaware of the implications of Hamlet’s struggle, especially since the Dauphin’s version of the speech has become so twisted and tangled with other plays and nonsense that only someone completely aware of the text in Hamlet would notice that there is something wrong. This only becomes more significant when one considers Huck’s struggle later in the novel as he has to decide whether or not to turn Jim in to Miss Watson. His decision that he’ll just go to hell roughly mirrors Hamlet’s struggle, only in a much less serious way. Hamlet struggles because he is unsure of whether suicide means purgatory or hell, and he has already seen what happens when the soul is sent to purgatory. His father is clear evidence of that, and he would like to avoid wandering the earth as a ghost. On the other hand, Huck believes his final decision to save Jim will send him to a hell he does not really fear; he has just been told that it is a place he does not want to go.
Concerning Clemens’ travels in the Holy Land, it is also important to note that he found himself disillusioned and honestly examining his own spiritual condition while visiting the sites of such historical and religious significance. According to Wilson, “Mark Twain finds the actual contemporary situation in the Holy Land so disturbing as to render any genuine spiritual growth impossible” (162). However, “Time and memory will eventually give the Holy Land excursion retrospective depth, make it one of the most spiritually significant experiences of his life…after time and imagination have had opportunity to work on his Holy Land experiences, Clemens consistently admits that they have provided him profound and genuine spiritual nourishment” (163-164).
Eutsey also suggests that this spiritual redemption is found in Huck’s relationship with Jim, comparing their socially unconventional friendship to the friendships Jesus shared with his disciples. He states, “This intimacy does more than merely make Jim and Huck fond of each other. It develops in Huck the one thing the Widow and Miss Watson could not instill in him: true Christian character…Prayer opens Huck up to do God’s will, but the intimate friendship he has developed with Jim over time…is what ultimately gives him the courage to do the truly Christ-like thing and sacrifice himself for his friend” (63). In this way, Twain continues to avoid criticizing genuine faith while at the same time blaming a Victorian belief system that is more concerned with outward appearances than with matters of the heart.
Wilson continues to say that Clemens “maintained the outward appearance of piety and clung to a modicum of faith. His household developed such customs as grace before meals, nightly Bible readings, family worship…” (169) He clearly tried, repeatedly, to believe as his wife wanted him to, but he was never able to maintain those beliefs.
I'm so excited for Ron Chernow's book about Mark Twain :)