How, then, might this uneven and anecdotal novel—so dependent on specific childhood memories of the author, and so given to pointed critiques of social custom—be said to hold together as a narrative performance? The chief vehicle for unity is Tom Sawyer himself. To say that Tom dominates this book is an understatement; he is the central figure in every possible meaning of the phrase. Tom is both the principal actor and the stage-manager of the novel, and the theatrical metaphor applies in several respects.
The form of the novel as a series of individualized, and often self-contained, scenes has its counterpart in Tom’s own theatricality. Life is a drama to him, and he has peopled it with figures and adventures from romantic literature and legend. That he often has the references wrong only adds to the fun, and does not make his imagination any less literary. Tom does everything “by the book” (p. 58), which is to say that he gives a literary overlay to virtually every activity in which he engages—from his romance with Becky to his direction of games such as Robin Hood.
The games, in particular, reveal how important to the fictional world of this novel are language and speech. Nothing in these games can take on actual power, or legitimacy, unless the language is right; Tom is the insistent monitor of legitimacy, the novel’s gate-keeper of language. Speech casts a spell over everything (the children’s superstitions, expressed by verbal incantations at several points, are merely one aspect of that spell), and, like Ariel’s song in the The Tempest, Tom’s language charms the world he inhabits. In a broader sense, Tom lives by language, as can be seen in his various verbal encounters with the adult world. For example, his deft wordplay with Aunt Polly in extricating himself from numerous scrapes shows his brilliance at this game, the game of language. The juxtaposition implied in “wordplay” is one of the most important elements in the novel.
In all these ways, Tom’s gift for language—the way he spins a world into being and sustains it according to his “rules”—helps to hold this otherwise unruly narrative together. But it also holds Tom together. Without this distinctive aspect of his character, we would be left with an exceedingly unfocused view of him. His undeterminable age is but one aspect of the indefiniteness of his rendering by Twain. For example, Tom’s identity as an orphan is a fact begging for explanation, yet none is ever offered. And, as numerous commentators have observed, we never learn what Tom looks like; our visualization of him depends altogether on the work of generations of illustrators, who have fancied him variously in his overalls and straw hat.
If we as readers depend on Tom’s verbal gifts for our sense of his identity, he himself needs them to negotiate the social structure of St. Petersburg, because the actual power in this book is overwhelmingly on the side of the adults. Aunt Polly, in fact, is among the more benign figures in the adult world of St. Petersburg, and one needs only to glance at that world to see what a disappointing gathering of humanity it is. From the respectable Judge Thatcher, at the top of the social scale, to the town drunkard, there is little here for a child to embrace. Top to bottom, this world is characterized by hypocrisy, social pretension, false piety, and self-interest. No one is spared, except perhaps some marginal figures like “the Welshman” whose benevolent presence and actions (rescuing the widow Douglas from Injun Joe) are necessary to furthering the plot.
For Tom and his friends, the most onerous adults in St. Petersburg are those, like the schoolmaster, with institutional authority, because their power over children has been officially sanctioned by society. And characteristically they use their power against the children, as the schoolmaster’s whipping of Tom in chapter 20 illustrates. Indeed, this is a novel structured by oppositions, and the opposition of children and adults, as Twain represents it, points to a larger one, that of civilization versus nature. Spatially, the boys retreat from St. Petersburg (from home and school and church) to Jackson’s Island and Cardiff Hill, and temporally they retreat from their school year into the freedom of summer.
The very word that titles the novel, “adventures,” suggests these twinned flights into time and space, which in turn suggest Freud’s classic formulation of civilization and its discontents. Here, work is the enemy; it is, in the narrator’s words, “whatever a body is obliged to do,” and the self finds fulfillment and pleasure in the opposite of work, which is to say, “play”: “Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do” (p. 18). These phrases come from the chapter in which Tom, through deception, turns his own (onerous) work of whitewashing the fence into the pleasure of others (as well as his own profit), showing how deeply, if instinctively, he himself understands the formulation.
To accommodate a vision of retreat from the adult world of work and the confinement of institutional forms like school and church, Twain renders the world of his novel as one long summer idyll. This quality works to give Tom Sawyer a firm unity of time and place, another aspect of its scenic presentation. Unlike Huck Finn, which transports its hero relentlessly away from St. Petersburg into unknown and threatening worlds downriver, Tom Sawyer holds its characters within a tightly circumscribed field of action, never allowing that action to venture farther than a few miles from the community, which forms the moral center of the novel.
And while the community has many objectionable qualities for Tom and his friends, he is always drawn back to it. His opposition to the community, in fact, forms his relation to that community and, ironically, binds him to it. When Tom, Huck, and Joe camp on Jackson’s Island, Joe soon becomes homesick, and even Huck begins to long for the familiar “doorsteps and empty hogsheads” (p. 90) that serve as his home in St. Petersburg. Tom alone appears to hold out for a pirate’s life, yet, under the cover of darkness and unknown to Huck and Joe, he makes a return to Aunt Polly’s house, where (we learn only later) he plans to leave her a signal that he is safe. This nighttime journey can serve to symbolize Tom’s attachment to community and home, and this attachment has its climactic dramatization in the boys’ surprise appearance at their own funeral. The members of the community, so glad and relieved at the boys’ return that they don’t mind being duped, give Tom exactly the kind of tumultuous approbation he most desires. This was, the narrator tells us, “the proudest moment of [Tom‘s] life” (p. 107). As many commentators have observed, Tom’s “rebirth” in this scene is figured specifically as a rebirth into society.
Tom’s need for the community’s approbation qualifies his status as a rebel. His subversive acts must always be seen within the context of his larger identification with the established order, an identification that Judge Thatcher acknowledges when he predicts for Tom enrollment in the National Military Academy and later in “the best law school in the country” (p. 200). There is nothing in Tom’s actions that ever approaches the authentic subversiveness of Huck’s decision, in Huckleberry Finn, to go to hell for trying to steal a black man, Jim, out of slavery. Unlike Huck, Tom is fundamentally a “good” boy, which is to say a boy acculturated to society’s norms, though he acts out his goodness in “bad” ways.
There is a literary context for this kind of boy. In writing Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain was participating in a recently formed genre of American fiction that sought to unsettle the old “good boy-bad boy” dichotomy of earlier moralistic literature. Twain himself had worked in this genre in sketches he had written earlier, and in 1869 Thomas Bailey Aldrich published The Story of a Bad Boy, which demonstrated the suitability of the theme for longer narratives.
Such works, which turned the “bad boy” into a kind of American hero by showing his inner goodness, laid out several paradigms of youthful behavior, and all of them make their appearance in Tom Sawyer. Along with the “bad boy,” represented by Tom, Twain gives us the “good boy” in the person of Tom’s half-brother, Sid, who relentlessly reports Tom’s misdeeds to Aunt Polly. Even more objectionable than “good boy” Sid is the “Model Boy of the village” (p. 10), Willie Mufferson, who took “as heedful care of his mother as if she were cut glass”: “The boys all hated him, he was so good
” (p. 35). A variation on the Model Boy is Alfred Temple, “that St. Louis smarty that thinks he dresses so fine and is aristocracy” (p. 114), whose presence in the novel serves to sharpen Twain’s exploration of class issues, and of tensions between urban and rural life. Country boy Tom vying with the “St. Louis smarty” for Becky’s affections will bring to mind for some readers the novels of Jane Austen and other English novels of manners.
On one level, the narrative proceeds by gradually revealing Tom’s inner goodness. The early chapters are organized by a series of his capers, which illustrate just how “bad” he can be. But later in the novel we learn about his “harassed conscience” (p. 139), which leads him courageously to testify at Muff Potter’s trial. And near the book’s conclusion we witness the sensitivity he shows toward Becky’s feelings when the two of them are lost in the cave. This episode illustrates not only Tom’s compassion and courage, but also his respectability; he and Becky in these scenes have about them the aspect of a middle-class couple.
While Twain did not invent American fiction of the good-bad boy (it has its still deeper background in European picaresque fiction, and in the novels of Dickens), he used it for his own distinctive purposes of social criticism. For these purposes, in the context of this novel, he needed a figure who systematically challenges the established order even as he firmly belongs to it. This role places Tom in a somewhat unusual position among Twain’s heroes. He is not an outsider figure in the radical way that Huck most certainly is in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or the way that Hank Morgan is in A Connecticut Yankee. Nor does he really resemble Twain’s classic outsider, the man that corrupted Hadleyburg, in Twain’s story of that title (1899). Unlike all of these figures, Tom is equally an outsider and an insider. He is the only character in the novel, for example, who consistently negotiates the divide between the worlds of children and adults, and is the only one who speaks to both sides.
At the end of the novel, Tom begins to move more fully toward the adult world, though never quite into it. As we have noted, the compassion he shows toward Becky when the two of them are lost in the cave exhibits a degree of maturity that we had not seen in him before. And his coming into wealth through his and Huck’s discovery of the treasure automatically elevates his social standing. Most telling, perhaps, is the closing scene, in which Tom persuades Huck (through trickery) to return to the home of the widow Douglas and to live under her civilizing influence. Tom’s heart is, in his own words, “close to home” (p. 191).
That Tom is ultimately a conciliating figure has partly to do with the form of the novel. As we have said, before the writing of Tom Sawyer Twain’s most characteristic form had been the sketch, which required neither full and convincing characterizations nor an extended plot. In its informality and highly vernacular qualities, the sketch (with its origins in southwestern humor and the tall tale) offered Twain a large measure of freedom. It encouraged his most unruly impulses and his boldest humor. Beyond the punch line, or the outrageous turn of events, nothing had to be followed up or made coherent. The novel, on the other hand, necessitated the coordination of character and plot, and the coordination of one subplot with another.
Tom Sawyer is flawed in this respect (the five or so subplots relate to one another only imperfectly), and Twain knew that this was true. At one point in the composition of the work, he wrote to Howells, “There is no plot to the thing.”11 But overall this was the fullest narrative that Twain had ever written, and ultimately it does hold together. In relation to his character Tom Sawyer, whose presence gives the novel its coherence, this fullness of narrative meant the obligation to “plot” an actual life and its continuity, and to render some form of convincing development. And while this development, contrary to Twain’s initial plan, ended with Tom still in childhood, that childhood itself demonstrates a certain measure of growth.
In a sketch Tom Sawyer might well have been less respectable than he ultimately turns out to be. His impish, and impious, qualities would, in this other narrative context, have been given free reign. The whole point would have been the way some pivotal action of Tom’s had driven a tall tale to its climax. In the more capacious narrative space of a novel, however, one action is necessarily followed by another, and together they form an aggregate that adds up to something like “character.” In this way, Tom’s “badness” is contained and redeemed by the narrative form itself.
Without the novel’s longer development, Tom’s extraordinary capacity for self-absorption—his “vicious vanity” (p. 112)—might well remain for us his defining characteristic. Aunt Polly is not wrong when she calls attention to Tom’s supreme “selfishness” (p. 116). And, as readers, we are frequently witnesses to his maudlin self- pity. Furthermore, we know what a habitual and self-interested liar he is. Tom lies so steadily and successfully, and in so many different human situations, that his relation to the reader risks destabilization. In the moment, we never quite know whether he is telling the truth or not.
But as the plot unfolds, we are able to sort this matter out (through a series of revelations), and in doing so we learn that, for the most part, Tom’s deceptions have been harmless or even motivated by good intentions; they fall into the category of what Aunt Polly calls the “blessed, blessed lie” (p. 117). Judge Thatcher, after all, declares that Tom’s taking the blame for Becky’s transgression at school is “a noble, a generous, a magnanimous lie” (p. 200). Even so, there is no escaping the fact that Tom often exhibits an instinctive aversion to the truth, and that he takes enormous pleasure in his lies—a function, in part, of his romantic imagination and his gift at wordplay. (His role as a kind of fabulist suggests another area of kinship with his creator Mark Twain.) But, again, the novel itself, in its larger rationalization and ordering of Tom’s actions, creates a benign context for his lies.
Just as the form of the novel can be said to validate Tom’s character, it also validated Mark Twain’s role as a man of letters. The first full-scale novel he had completed, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (though it was not enthusiastically received when first published in 1876) brought him into the company of writers like his friend William Dean Howells. In this work, Twain demonstrated his capacity to weave the longer tapestries of fiction, and to elaborate them with his richest materials of memory, humor, and social criticism. Though an immature and experimental work, flawed by divided purposes, Tom Sawyer nevertheless contains all the elements of the writer’s genius. Generations of readers have been content to ignore the flaws, and have given over their imaginations to Mark Twain’s “hymn” to childhood.
H. Daniel Peck is John Guy Vassar Professor of English at Vassar College, where he has served as Director of the American Culture Program and the Environmental Studies Program. He is the author of Thoreau‘s Morning Work (1990) and A World by Itself: The Pastoral Moment in Cooper’s Fiction (1977), both published by Yale University Press. Professor Peck is the editor of the The Green American Tradition (1989) and New Essays on “The Last of the Mohicans” (1993), as well as the Penguin Classics editions A Year in Thoreau’s Journal: 1851 and Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. He is also editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Cooper’s The Deerslayer. A past chairman of the Modern Language Association’s Division on Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Professor Peck is a contributor to the Columbia Literary History of the United States and the Heath Anthology of American Literature. He has been the recipient of two senior research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. For the National Endowment, he has directed two Summer Institutes for College and University Faculty, and a national conference on “American Studies and the Undergraduate Humanities Curriculum.” Recently he was a fellow at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he was working on a developing study of landscape in American literary and visual art. Professor Peck lives in Poughkeepsie, New York, with his wife Patricia B. Wall
ace.
Acknowledgments. Professor Peck’s research assistant, Matthew Saks, who graduated from Vassar College in 2003 as recipient of the Alice D. Snyder Prize for overall excellence in English, assisted in developing the explanatory notes for this volume; he also helped Professor Peck think through the issues raised in the introduction. Patricia B. Wallace, Professor of English at Vassar College, provided an illuminating and extremely helpful reading of the introduction.
Notes to the Introduction
1 Twain had earlier coauthored, with Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age (1873), a fictional social critique of the post-Civil War era in America.
2 Twain’s Hartford home, which he moved into in 1874 when the structure was still unfinished, was designed by Edward T. Potter. Twain and his family lived in this house from this point until 1891. His marriage to Olivia Langdon, of Elmira, New York, took place in 1870, and his daughters Susy and Clara were born, respectively, in 1872 and 1874.
3 This work was later included in Twain’s Life on the Mississippi (1883).
4 In a letter of 1887, Twain wrote, “Tom Sawyer is simply a hymn, put into prose form to give it a worldly air” (Mark Twain’s Letters, edited by Albert Bigelow Paine (New York: Harper and Bros., 1917), p. 477.
5 “Foreword” to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. xiii. This authoritative scholarly edition of the novel contains important information about its composition, and has explanatory notes that were useful in developing the notes for this volume.
6 The word “harvested” is Matthews‘s, but it appears to describe accurately the process that Twain was recounting to him. See Brander Matthews, The Tocsin of Revolt and Other Essays (New York: Scribner’s, 1922), p. 265. In 1870, just after Twain’s marriage, he had an exchange of letters with a childhood friend, Will Bowen, to whom he wrote: “The fountains of my great deep are broken up & I have rained reminiscences for four & twenty hours.” Many of these “reminiscences,” as Charles A. Norton has pointed out, can be found reconfigured as episodes of Tom Sawyer, and they clearly were a generative force in the novel’s composition. See Charles A. Norton, Writing “Tom Sawyer”: The Adventures of a Classic (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1983), pp. 49-51.
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