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Disenchantment: Tom Sawyer in Huckleberry Finn

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Judith Fetterley
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Abstract

Mark Twain's disenchantment with the boy hero of his first novel is revealed in a series of significant changes which distinguish the Tom Sawyer of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the Tom Sawyer of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In Tom Sawyer, Tom's cruelty is essentially a by-product of his failure to consider the consequences of his actions; when he does consider, he feels remorse. In Huckleberry Finn, cruelty is a primary motive in all Tom's plans. Tom's interest in rules in Tom Sawyer is a minor aspect of his character and in fact supports his larger role of exposing the rigidities and hypocrisies of the rule- ridden society of St. Petersburg; in Huckleberry Finn, Tom's interest in rules is an obsession which makes him the butt rather than the agent of exposure and intensifies his cruelty. Tom is the natural leader of the world of Tom Sawyer because each of his schemes provides pleasure for those concerned. In Huckleberry Finn, Tom has nothing of value to offer; he maintains his control instead through a series of tyrannies. The ending of Huckleberry Finn is a major exposure of Tom's cruelty and of the connection between cruelty and pleasure in his mind.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 87 , Issue 1 , January 1972 , pp. 69 - 74
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1972

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References

1 Mark Twain-Howells Letters, ed. William M. Gibson and Henry Nash Smith (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard Univ. Press, 1960), i, 91–92.

2 Twain-Howells Letters, i, 112–13.

3 Samuel L. Clemens, The Writings of Mark Twain, definitive ed. (New York: Gabriel Wells, 1922–25), viii, 291. Subsequent references are to this edition and appear in the text.

4 Mark Twain & “Huck Finn” (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1960), p. 100.

5 Similarly, when Aunt Polly rebukes Tom for having given Peter, the cat, a spoonful of Painkiller, Twain shifts the focus away from Tom's cruelty onto Aunt Polly's cruelty in having inflicted the medicine on Tom in the first place. Thus the final result of this joke, as of the one on Aunt Polly, is to place Tom in a good light.

6 Blair, p. 106.

7 Unpromising Heroes: Mark Twain and His Characters (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1966), p. 133.

8 James M. Cox, Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor (Princeton, N. J. : Princeton Univ. Press, 1966), p. 175.

9 “The Unity and Coherence of Huckleberry Finn,” Tulane Studies in English, 6 (1956), 99.

10 New York, 1961; paperback rpt., New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965, pp. 328–29.

11 Hoffman, pp. 327–28.