Is There Such a Thing as the Female Conscience?
Is There Such a Thing as the Female Conscience? « Sigmund, Carl and Alfred
Surely the most famous crisis of conscience in American letters is the battle of young Huckleberry Finn with his shaggy hold on right and wrong. Having befriended the runaway slave in Mark Twain’s classic, Huck struggles: Should he turn in Nigger Jim? Huck has run afoul of the laws of man and God: He is on the lam with a slave who has bolted. In this, he has violated both the law of the land and his individual, gnawing conscience. His sense of duty tells him to reveal Nigger Jim’s whereabouts to the authorities so that the slave can be captured and restored to his rightful owner. But Huck is tormented. He wants to do the unthinkable; he wants to break the laws of God and man and help Jim in his journey to freedom. After conjuring with himself, Huck finally makes the decision to go against social norms and accept the penalty. “All right, then, I’ll go to hell …” It’s a powerful passage precisely because it challenges and upholds our reliance on individual conscience as the sure guide to moral behavior.
In parsing Huck’s dilemma, twin perils are involved. The first is that an individual, echoing society’s compacts, can be in error, complicit with evil. If there is no distance between private and public conscience, we will go along to get along: for proof, look no further than the Holocaust, Pol Pot, American slavery, the Spanish Inquisition. The second peril is that we may find it difficult to decide whether our own conscience, especially if it cuts against society’s grain, is truly right or wrong. In Huck’s case, there was a higher law to which he could appeal: his faith. A reliance on faith was not unusual: Religion drove the vast majority of abolitionists. A collective of individual consciences—which is what religion is—was suddenly asking: Why would someone go to hell for doing the right thing? Obviously, someone should not. Huck becomes a moral hero of sorts because, although he thinks hell will be his fate, he persists in doing the right thing anyway. It accounts for the power of Twain’s narrative.
There is a precedence to this. In the history of Western thought, it was the Protestant Reformation that made conscience the arbiter of moral behavior. The individual’s conscience had been a theme well before the sixteenth century, of course, but the Protestant Reformers, in rejecting the mediating role of Church and priests, stressed a personal bond between God and the individual believer. A well-formed conscience was required to maintain a Christian society.