Sawyer, Tom

Tom Sawyer and his best friend, Huckleberry Finn, are featured in four novels by Mark Twain: Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894), and Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896). Although Huck Finn is the older boy and the narrator of the last three novels, Tom Sawyer is the undisputed leader and inventor of their adventures. Huck may be a rough boy of nature, but Tom Sawyer is the ultimate “bad” good boy, a trickster who also serves as an emblem of American boyhood.

Mark Twain's intention with Adventures of Tom Sawyer was less to create a classic boy's book than to write a gentle parody of the moralistic children's literature written by authors such as Horatio Alger, Jr., and Louisa May Alcott. Written for adults, this novel is a more honest and complex portrait of childhood than contemporary novels, which featured ideal (good) boys and girls.

The Tom Sawyer novels, which include slave playmates and storytellers, were influenced by Twain's integrated childhood, which explains Tom and Huck's appeal across racial boundaries. The literary figure that Tom most resembles is his contemporary Brer Rabbit, of Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus stories. The way Tom Sawyer cons his friends into paying for the privilege of doing his chores by proclaiming the joys of whitewashing a fence is similar to Brer Rabbit's famous ploy of begging “whatever you do, don't throw me into the briar patch” when that is exactly where he wants to go. Tom only appears in the last section of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, yet he completely drives the narrative after his arrival. For instance, Tom insists on orchestrating a fittingly dramatic escape for the slave Jim, rather than reveal to Huck that Jim was legally freed months earlier.

Although Huck longs to “light out for the territories”—in keeping with nineteenth-century models of manhood requiring an escape from a stifling urban life—Tom's mischief requires a community setting. Tom, more like the urban street urchin than the frontier loner, rebels against nothing except adult control. He uses games, pranks, and superstitions to balance the feminine-controlled middle-class community. Tom understands the rules of society, and he beats society at its own game. As an orphan raised by his Aunt Polly, Tom has all the comforts of a small-town, middle-class home life—but without the expectations of parents. His male identity is thus grounded equally in domesticity and a “natural” boyishness. While Alger's urban good boys demonstrated the value of paternalistic nurture, Tom actively resists any attempts at paternal or maternal control, possibly to the point of usurping paternal authority himself and exercising it over Huck and his other friends. Fishing appears as a common scene in the novels, serving as a refuge from adult influence. While family may be tangential to Tom, friendship with other boys is Tom's highest priority—at least when it does not interfere with his self-centered need for adventure.

Tom Sawyer has remained a major figure in popular American images of boyhood through the continued popularity of Twain's novels and their adaptations into plays, film, and television. He serves as the exemplar for twentieth-century boy tricksters like Dennis the Menace, Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes, Bart Simpson, and many other young male characters who rebel against the expectations of adult society and the ideals of middle-class domesticity by demanding more adventure from life.

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