Moral Development and Change in Mark Twain’s the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

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Introduction Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (2006a, pp.1-504), first published in 1884, starts out in a small fictional town of St. Petersburg in Missouri situated close to the Mississippi River, and is set a few decades before the outbreak of the American Civil War. The story is narrated by the protagonist, Huck, and follows his journey wherein he is faced with a number of moral choices, which subsequently lead him to question the morality and supposedly ‘civilised’ nature of society, outgrowing his own instincts of self-preservation and moral deviancy in the process. Using Kohlberg’s theory of moral development (1981, cited in Gibbs, 2003, pp.57-76), this essay will analyse how and why Huck begins to take responsibility for his own moral choices, rejecting the prescribed morality of some of the authority figures in his life and accepting that of others, thus demonstrating how life experiences of kindness and cruelty can affect the development of an individual’s mortality. Huck’s Initial Absence of Morality At the opening of the novel, the reader finds Huck feeling restricted after being placed in the guardianship of Widow Douglas and her sister, Miss Watson. This occurs after he has come into possession of a large sum of money as a result of his earlier adventures with friend, Tom Sawyer – who, of course, features alongside Huck in Twain’s earlier text, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (2006b, pp.1-375) – and is placed under the widow’s guardianship by a judge who hopes she can “sivilize” him (Twain, 2006a, p.7) by teaching him the Christian faith. Huck is keen to demonstrate that her attempts have been unsuccessful, describing his desire to join up with Tom’s gang of thieves rather than being trapped in such a respectable household, feeling cramped and sweaty in the new clothes she makes him wear, and being frustrated at not being
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