Mark Twain once said The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was where ‘a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat.’ In this essay, I will be explaining the quote: ‘But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me, and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I’ve been there before,’ in terms of Mark Twain’s words.
Concerning ‘deformed conscience’, it is addressed in the quote, where Huckleberry Finn said that Aunt Sally was going to adopt and ‘sivilize’ him. In the early 1800s, when the novel was set, people had a set concept about their lives. Young boys like Huckleberry Finn were expected to be ‘civilized’, or well behaved, posh and religious. On another note, this conscience also refers to people’s belief that African American slaves weren’t humans, but merely property. That was the prevalent mindset of people at the time, and it forms a strong comparison to the ‘strong heart’ of Huckleberry Finn.
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Throughout the novel, Huck scorned upon the idea of civilization. From the start, he already claimed his distaste towards Widow Douglas and Miss Watson ‘civilizing’ him. He obviously didn’t like the ‘civilized’ life, as he kept running off to have adventures with his best friend Tom Sawyer, and even escaping from civilization while travelling with Jim. During his journey down the Mississippi River, without the control of society, Huck began to develop his own sense of morals, struggling between his own moral standard and the ‘deformed conscience’ of society. In the end, his ‘strong heart’ broke through, and he decided to escape from the incorrect moral standards and confines of the society, and