Widow Douglas Quotes

The Widow Douglas, she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time, 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.

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 1. Huck Finn’s strict, old pious guardian. Emboding civilization and respectability, she wants to “sivilize” Huck. But he is having none of that and wishes to throw off the shackles of civilized society and be free.

After supper 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.

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 1. The Widow Douglas reads to Huck the story of Moses and the Bulrushers from the Bible. But Huck is less interested in dead people and the Widow’s religion, and more in the religion of everyday living.

I went and told the Widow about it, and she said the thing a body could get by praying for it was “spiritual gifts.” This was too much for me, but she told me what she means – I must help others, and do everything I could for other people, and look out for them all the time, and never think about myself…but I couldn’t see no advantage about it – except for the other people – so at last I reckoned I wouldn’t worry about it any more, but just let it go.

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 3. Huck has difficulty understanding the point of prayer, as explained to him by the Widow Douglas. The main purpose, she says, is to help other people. But he sees no advantage to serving society by giving up his freedom.

He kept me with him all the time, and I never got a chance to run off. We lived in that old cabin, and he always locked the door and put the key under his head nights…The widow she found out where I was by and by, and she sent a man over to try to get hold of me; but pap drove him off with the gun, and it warn’t long after that till I was used to being where I was, and liked it – all but the cowhide part.

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 6. After his father Pap kidnaps Huck from the Widow Douglas, he feels happy because he doesn’t have many rules in his life. But he doesn’t like when his father beats him.

“I doan k’yer what de widder say, he warn’t no wise man, nuther. He had some er de dad-fetchedes’ ways I ever see. Does you know ’bout dat chile dat he ‘uz gwyne to chop in two?”

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 14. Jim doesn’t care what the Widow Douglas told Huck about Solomon being the wisest man, he is not impressed with his child-chopping. This is an allusion to a Bible story in I Kings 3:16-28, in which the wise King Solomon resolves a dispute between two women over a child by suggesting to cut the child in two.
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