Social  Criticism in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn  

Table of Contents

I.  Introduction  1

I.1.  From didacticism to romanticism in 19 th century American  

children  ’s literature  1

I.2.  Rewarded misconduct in Mark Twain’s two children’s classics  2

II.  Social criticism in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn  3

II.1.  The country school and the quality of former popular literature  4

II.2.  The institution of church and Presbyterian double standards  6

II.3.  The controversial depiction of racism  8

II.3.1.  Huck Finn’s “sound heart set against white brutality  9

II.3.2.  Maltreatment of slaves and Injun Joe in Tom Sawyer  10

II.4.  The “fickle unreasoning world  12

II.4.1.  The mob  12

II.4.2.  The individual versus society  13

III.  Evaluation  14

III.1.  Twain’s criticism of the Old South and post-Civil War society  14

III.2.  Twain’s social criticism - still relevant today?  15

Bibliography   16

I. Introduction

Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, first published in 1876, and its sequel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn of 1885 are widely known and praised as boyhood adventure stories. Both young and old are fascinated by the nostalgic portraits of American childhood, which are also blended with a good portion of social criticism. This essay will concentrate on the novels’ depiction of South American society and on critical observations and comments made by the author. His attitude towards societal concepts of education, religion and slavery will be examined, as will the conflict between individual and social morality, which is highlighted in the two novels. The subsequent evaluation will consider the question whether Twain’s criticism of his generation continues to be relevant today. Before I can embark, though, on the study of social criticism in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, it is useful to have some background information about the period of writing and the author’s notion of childhood, which will make it easier to analyse the novels in the context of 19 ^th century American children’s literature. Therefore, I am going to begin with a brief outline of the entirely opposing trends in juvenile fiction in the first and the second half of the 19 ^th century.

I.1. From didacticism to romanticism in 19 th century American

children’s literature

Adventure and celebration of childhood was the last thing on the mind of American authors when they started writing juvenile fiction in the 1820s. At a time of rapid development and progress, the young American republic was highly concerned with the right moral upbringing of their children - who would soon become the country’s active citizens - to secure the future of their new nation: “The nature of American institutions was settled, they believed; what remained was to make them work, to insure that the republic survived” (MacLeod 1994: 89). This is why the first American books were intended to teach morality, to shape characters by defining and encouraging model behaviour. The stories thereby reflected the expectations held by adults “of and for the next generation” (MacLeod 1994: 89). For the sake of unmistakable instruction in obedience, virtue, discipline and social responsibility, the pattern of each children’s tale was purposefully simple: As Anne S. MacLeod (1994: 91) points out the always “staid, domestic, and

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predictable” narratives focused on a child with some moral flaw and the way he or she overcame that weakness. Topics like the American past or everyday life were more or less completely ignored, as were industrialisation and slavery, both important issues in the period.

Only in the 1850s did the growing urban poverty bring about a change in the level of homogeneity of juvenile fiction. Authors began to portray the misery of the poor children living on the streets to rouse sympathy and a feeling of responsibility on the part of the American society. Furthermore, the increasing partiality for romanticism and sentimentality in adult fiction eventually led to a re-orientation in children’s literature. By the end of the 19 ^th century, the notion of childhood as a crucial period for moral training was replaced by a concept in which childhood was valuable in itself. Innocence, beauty and moral purity were now presented as innate qualities of children. The sober didacticism conveyed in earlier fiction was superseded by the romantic view that the joyous and carefree nature of childhood was a desirable state of being.

I.2. Rewarded misconduct in Mark Twain’s two children’s classics

Mark Twain rejected the concept of moral lessons as being the sole motive of juvenile literature. He became one of the first American authors to write about misbehaving children who were not corrected but even rewarded. There are numerous examples in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Tom runs away from home and has the pleasure of attending his own funeral; he does not learn his verses for Sunday school, but he is rewarded with a Bible; or Tom has to whitewash a fence as a punishment, but he avoids it by cunningly convincing his friends to do the work, who even pay him for the “privilege”. Although Tom steals, lies, sneaks out of the house at night, shows interest in neither school nor church and does not obey his aunt, the novel ends with him and Huck being rich and the heroes of the village: “Wherever Tom and Huck appeared they were courted, admired, stared at” (216).

Even Huck, who is in no way inferior to Tom with regard to social misconduct, is rewarded. Being the pariah boy of the community, Huck attends neither school nor church, steals, smokes, swears and idles away his time. His aversion to the conventional way of life urges him to run away from St Petersburg in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and at the end of the long journey his reluctance to adapt himself to society is still the same: “I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going

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to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it” (281). The conclusion does not provide a character reform favourable to society, which would have been demanded in earlier literature instead. Mark Twain confronts the readership with a completely different understanding of a good child as he “accepted, and even glorified, antisocial behavior in boys while insisting that their inherent goodness balanced the ledger” (MacLeod 1994: 75). He invites the readers to take pleasure in boys who are full of mischief in small matters and justifies it by revealing their kind-heartedness in serious matters. It is difficult to doubt the boys’ moral integrity when Tom risks his life by telling the truth about the murder or when Huck accepts eternal damnation in order to help Jim escape. Mark Twain’s “good boy” is ingenious, brave, brisk and adventurous and Twain repudiates that mischievous behaviour in children is necessarily a sign of wickedness.

II. Social criticism in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn

So far, the focus has been purely on anti-social behaviour in Twain’s novels as a reaction to moral didacticism in earlier writings for children. The question arises as to whether the two adventure stories have any moral message at all. As the title suggests, this work is not going to take seriously the notice given at the beginning of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons

attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot

in it will be shot. (5).

Despite the undeniable danger of overanalysing, this notice is taken rather as a hint at the underlying criticism of social morality. Moral intentions behind Huck’s inner conflicts, Sherburn’s speech about “the average man” or in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer comments on the “fickle unreasoning world” (151) can hardly be ignored. The following chapters are going to demonstrate that both texts abound with moral reflections and judgements - not in the old sense of giving children instruction as to how to behave, but by attacking social traditions and behaviour.

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II.1. The country school and the quality of former popular literature

Schooling is one of the central objects of criticism in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Mark Twain writes fully about the daily school routine and the power struggle existing between the teacher and his group of pupils. He claims to give a realistic picture of a typical country school, when he confronts the prevailing ideal of an obedient pupil, who likes to go to school and is anxious to learn, with a rebellious class of pupils, whose main interest is to play a trick on the hated, excessively strict master. The master’s function is presented as being almost purely to make sure that law and order prevail, which he achieves with the help of corporal punishment. This one-sided function is symbolised by the reduction of the teacher to his exercising body parts or his disciplinary action: “The master’s arm performed until it was tired” (51) or Tom felt “a slow fateful grip closing on his ear” (53) and another time a “tremendous whack came down on [his] shoulders” (55). The superiority of the teacher is demonstrated by multiple references to the master sitting “in his throne” (50, 53, 133, 136) and his “majestic” (136) way of retribution. The one-sided depiction of the teacher as a punitive tyrant and the stressed severity of the punishments - particularly in the preparation scene for the examination day - indicate Twain’s disapproval of the harshness with which knowledge was drummed into the children:

[A]ll the tyranny that was in him [Mr Dobbins] came to the surface; he seemed to

take a vindictive pleasure in punishing the least shortcomings. The consequence

was that the smallest boys spent their days in terror and suffering and their nights

in plotting revenge. (136)

But the criticism of Mr Dobbins does not stop here. Twain questions the teacher’s whole authority by representing him as a figure of fun. Behind the ironically kingly façade there is no more than a common village master, who did not have enough money to become a doctor, his preferred career. Correspondingly unmotivated and frustrated, he is unsparingly strict with his pupils, reads an anatomy book during the lessons and is often sleepy. On examination day, his last scene in the story, he is made the object of ridicule. His “unmajestic” exit with his bald head painted golden makes it hardly possible to take Mr Dobbins in his role as a teacher seriously.

Apart from the teacher, the didactic child gets a setback. In addition to rascals like Tom being rewarded, society’s “good children” completely lack admirable characteristics. Tom’s stepbrother Sid likes to learn, but he is by no means presented as a positive character. He is sneaky, it gives him great pleasure to tell on Tom, but he is too much of a coward to fight with Tom and runs away instead. As a further example, the model boy

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