Katherine, 

     Excellent work on the essay on Huckleberry Finn.  You have developed
   a very strong articulation of what Twain meant by the "deformed conscience"
   and "sound heart" of his main character in this book.   Your writing here is
   also very strong for the most part.  The only thing I would say there is that
   your sentences occasionally get quite complicated.  For instance the last
   sentence in the opening paragraph took me a couple of read-throughs to parse
   correctly.  There are times when simpler is better, especially when you 
   are trying to convince others through your writing.  

     Bringing out the conflict between Pap's ideas about how it is permissible to 
   "borrow" things and the Widow Douglas's sterner point of view about stealing was 
   very good.  That shows that, even among the big influences on Huck's conscience, 
   there is some disagreement and "deformation" (I'm referring to Pap's self-serving 
   rationalization of his stealing).  That is especially ironic because the basic 
   conflict Huck has comes from the fact that everything he has been taught by society 
   (especially the Widow Douglas) about the relation between blacks and whites is
   predicated on the idea that white people can own slaves as property.  So when
   Huck helps Jim, from that point of view he is stealing and he "knows" stealing 
   is wrong (at least in theory!)
   
     There are a few other passages that you don't consider where Huck talks about how 
   he has to overcome his conscience to do something his heart knows is right.  It would 
   have been good, for instance, to look in detail at the passage on page 66 where Huck 
   is examining his conscience to try to understand why it is telling him what he is 
   doing with Jim is wrong.  You might have used what he said in that conversation with 
   himself to illustrate exactly how the "deformation" arose from Huck's life with the 
   Widow Douglas and how the pangs of conscience he feels are exactly like what we expect from 
   a person having a moral quandary.  The real pain he feels at these moments is what makes 
   it so powerful: He feels genuinely bad for making what we know is the right choice 
   because he thinks it is the wrong choice, based on his upbringing.  It would have been 
   good to show more of exactly how that plays out rather than just describing this in 
   general terms.  It's interesting that in fact in almost every (maybe every?) time 
   Huck uses the word "conscience," Twain is showing a new step in this development, so 
   you might have traced that progression in more detail. 

   Content/Evidence -- A

   Structure/Mechanics -- A