The following review appeared 23 Feburary 2023 on the Mark Twain Forum.
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The first of Kent Rasmussen's two forewords to Critical Insights: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer suggests that the reputation of the novel as "a literary work worthy of serious study has always been shaky" (vii). Since his idea is based on the huge scholarship accorded Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in comparison to scholarly attention to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, it is hard to refute, but I am reminded of a statement on Moby Dick that scholarship on it had replaced whaling as the greatest industry of Massachusetts, or words to that effect. Yes, the study of Tom Sawyer has been eclipsed by the massive Huck Finn juggernaut, but it is also true that Huck Finn takes on, face front, America's gravest and most disastrous social calamity, racism. Still, as Rasmussen points out, Tom Sawyer's publication history is also massive and world-wide. Good reasons exist to think it is more widely read throughout the world than Huck Finn. Huck's first-person speech is tough on translators. The third-person omniscient voice which narrates Tom Sawyer is a lot less of a problem, but there are other features of the first book which have appealed to vast numbers of readers, such as the fence white-washing episode which provides Tom's story its own icons and themes. When I asked two Korean English teachers if they knew Huck Finn, some years ago, both smiled and said, "Oh, Yes! I loved the chapter where he whitewashed the fence!" Either way you read this anecdote, it emphasizes that Tom Sawyer is worthy of our attention and that white-washed fence as a major icon is tied centrally into American culture as international readers perceive us. Incidentally, like all of Twain's major works, it contains comments and moments touching on racism in America.
Readers of this collection of original new essays would expect to come out
of the experience with a heightened perception of Tom Sawyer well worth
discussing. They will be satisfied not only with important points established
but also with some of the more nuanced observations. Also the broad spectrum
of essays, and their placing the novel in relation to popular media up to
the present time is a dimension that might appeal to teachers and to media-oriented
analysts. The topics of the essays place the novel not only in different critical
perspectives, but also put the book in cultural contexts coming forward to
the present. I found a number of points in essays that caused me to reflect
on the novel somewhat differently than I had before. I think my appreciation
of the novel's achievement was expanded in relation to Twain's nature writing,
in the detailing its purposefully nostalgic statement, and in the positioning
of Injun' Joe.
Kent Rasmussen's introductory essay on Twain in relation to Tom Sawyer, as
persona and as a set of adventures is, like most of the essays offered, unpretentiously
engaging. Rasmussen highlights Twain's 1907 letter which offers the flat-out
confession that he is himself Tom Sawyer. As students of Twain as humorist
and realist all know, of course, anything he says is part truth and part fiction:
nothing can be taken for granted. Every critic of his time who had an insufficiently
well-developed sense of humor choked on the ambiguity involved in other works
like The Innocents Abroad, which crippled their ability to get the
joke. Almost every critic agreed in Tom Sawyer reviews, however, that
the portraits of nature, of a boy's mind, and of a culture were very special
and the melodramatic plot was engaging, although awfully grim for a children's
book. One of my problems as a reviewer of this collection is that the introductory
survey by Rasmussen is so clear and compact that summarizing it without simply
replicating it is not really possible--so I won't try. However, hoping that
Artificial Intelligence ChatGPT would write the review for me (this is a joke,
in case you take everything I wrote as serious), I did resort to the internet
with the question "Why is Adventures of Tom Sawyer still popular?"
The digital response was amazingly close to this introduction. Wondering at
this miracle, I put the question in again--I'm not sure if I changed a word--and
got the same answer only with some of the points shuffled around in a way
that made for disorganized reading. On the third try, it flopped a little
more. In other words, I suspect that the several points made in the essays
offered in this volume establish the lasting key points for our generation,
as well as Artificial Intelligence, and the fact that the essays here are
well-detailed and nuanced--as we would expect from the respected scholars
who wrote them--is comforting in reassuring us as readers that the skeleton
is very strong, and the details raise these particular essays well above the
common.
The first three essays by Peter Messent, Alan Gribben, and Joe B. Fulton build
on Rasmussen's framing and provide meticulous detailing. Messent proposes
that while Tom Sawyer is entangled with the reality of the period,
it is anti-historical in its elevation as fiction above its immediate period,
climaxing in the melodramatic ending. Particularly substantive was the interpretation
in terms of "profound dislocation" occurring in the 1870s. I was
impressed because I had just read a superb set of essays on the novels and
life of Albion W. Tourgee (Reimaging the Republic; Fordham UP, 2023)
and his efforts to arouse the nation through A Fool's Errand and Bricks
Without Straw, of the same period. Messent pinpoints the same idea, but
in a novel that, unlike Tourgee's, has escaped the milieu of the 1870s to
be readable in a later time. Messent demonstrates the curve of Twain's novel
through history--antebellum and post-bellum--into the symbols and archetypes
of the Gothic and the interplay of Messent's observations with the plot of
the novel was noteworthy. Alan Gribben immerses us in alternate sources while
musing that many critics seem to forget that Tom Sawyer is a comic
novel, one point that really needs to be continually reemphasized about Mark
Twain's canon generally. His list of issues in Tom Sawyer also sets
the novel in a valuable perspective when he notes that no other specimen of
the boy book genre is remembered at all--and yet here Tom remains, an icon
of youth and a progenitor of scenic moments that find places in advertisements,
revisions of popular plays, and elsewhere. Taken together those two essays
pretty much carry the argument for taking the book seriously. Gribben's perceptions
on Jackson's Island and Twain's observation of nature, by themselves, changed
my own somewhat ambivalent feelings about Tom Sawyer. Joe B. Fulton's
essay on Jackson's Island and the "environment" goes more deeply
into the matter of the perception and use of nature, minute nature, in a way
that finished my conversion to an admirer of what Twain had achieved as a
minute "Realist" writer, not of city ways like Howells, so much
as in the personal observations of Tom, as in the case of the inchworm. Jackson's
Island is a sort of poetic rendering of the ecological environment which reflects
more deeply on Twain's nostalgia about an era of simplicity that was fast
vanishing in the 1870s--and even more so in our era of climate catastrophe.
I note the fourth essay in this first grouping of essays, by Philip Bader,
takes on the task of showing parallels between Twain's novel and J. K. Rowling's
Harry Potter series. Given my druthers, I wished I had first read John Bird's
following essay on the Tom Sawyer "franchise"--after all, as Bird
points out, there are four finished novels/novellas and a couple of unfinished
manuscripts featuring Tom--all of them showing a devolution which makes Tom
less and less appealing. Bird argues that we miss something in the earliest
book when our reading is colored more darkly by the later Tom of Huck's adventures,
an interesting point for thoughtful consideration. Then Bader's presentation
of the Potter books could have brought me up to speed on current literature.
Having listened on occasion to grandfathers chatting with their grandchildren
about Harry Potter--Oh, yes, I have--I recognize an inter-generational appeal
of substance. Since I do not have even a "passing" knowledge of
the Potter books, though, I will back away from trying to be smart in comments
about something I am ignorant about. The parallels noted are worth considering
for those who might want to bring the comparison into the classroom. Rasmussen's
later essay on Hollywood's take on Tom Sawyer, also can be grouped
with these preceding essays. The subtitle of Rasmussen's essay that Hollywood
"almost" got the book right is quite appropriate to his documentation.
Note: Hollywood got "A Connecticut Yankee" all wrong, and
I will quibble with the description of Bing Crosby's antics and the misuse
of Rhonda Fleming as entertaining in the one paragraph which treats it as
a side-comment, although that might describe some responses in 1949-1950--I
was glad that in the same paragraph Rasmussen stated how viciously unethical
the perpetrators of this particular artifact really were, subverting everything
substantial in Hank Morgan's experience.
John Bird's essay overlaps with two other essays. Kevin MacDonnell traces
Tom from "boy-book" hero to "coming-of-age-hellion," but
MacDonnell's essay seems to end at a different conclusion from John Bird's
essay. One of the pleasing aspects of the whole "Critical Insights"
collection is that a few Twain direct statements appear in more than one essay,
but each of the essays seem to follow its own logic. Conclusions offer variations.
A set of four essays take on the challenge of readjusting commonplace assumptions
about the novel. Patrick Ober finds plenty of reasons for Tom to project fears
in his life, which mostly attach to the person of Injun' Joe, but notes that
illness and juvenile death were facts in the period where the story is set.
As he reminds us, finally Tom Sawyer ends with innocence winning, which
may suggest that over time, processes change, as do our readings. Linda Morris
finds in Aunt Polly a deeper and more powerful character and a more nuanced
set of feelings than superficial readings provide, and her case modifies how
we should be sensitized to brief statements like Aunt Polly's that she "was
meaning for the best," as her explanation of her treatment of the two
young boys she is charged with raising on her own. Hannah Wells defines "republican
motherhood," as the common prevailing expectations of a small town for
the families residing therein. The concept as described allows space for Tom's
growth and allows Aunt Polly and Mary to assert their own kindness. Identifying
a collective town spirit may give more Marxist dignity than is deserved to
the small town's hypocrisy and egoism, but Wells makes the point that Tom
remains outside the enervating education of this world. Kerry Driscoll reminds
us that Twain's novel comes out about six months after The Battle of Little
Bighorn and even such a respected historian as Francis Parkman, prior to that,
wrote of the type of the half-breed as half-Indian, half-white, and half-devil.
Maybe the prejudice is laid out by Twain's portrayal in such a way that we
can apply more understanding to what he reflects about the culture which created
such a case-study. The Davises, Jr. and Sr., who make up a very good team,
finding Tom and Huck as two independent icons of boyhood. In his own book
Tom plays the role of "everyboy" in a childhood Eden, but one who
is compelled to set his own rules in a white-washed milieu. As an adult, perhaps
he becomes Col. Sellers, Hank Morgan, or Philip Traum, three characters who
might be described as Tom Sawyer on steroids. Bringing their survey of later
iconographic renderings of Tom, they do well in reminding us of Kipling's
assertion to Twain that Tom Sawyer is no longer his property: he belongs to
us, his readers. I am not sure I particularly noticed that part of the Kipling-Twain
interview, and it seems to me that Kipling was making a bold statement, but
apt when considering the various points made about the book by the critical
insights essays.
The closing essays in the book have the value of summarizing our culture's
employment of Tom Sawyer as a way of reimagining ourselves. For Cindy Lovell,
the present-day Hannibal's reluctance to include slaves and slavery in the
narrative is a part of the complicated raveling of history and fiction together.
I will note her citation of Bernard De Voto's flat-footed statement that Hannibal
is the most important single fact in the life of Sam Clemens (without endorsing
it). My early reading of Mark Twain was probably as deeply influenced by De
Voto's pontifications as anybody's, but it is flatly wrong when dissected.
Hannibal is nothing like a single fact in anything Twain lived or wrote. One
thing that all the essays in this book support is that the multiplicity of
experiences and of interpretations is one of the novel's most important qualities.
To that observation might be added Twain's autobiographical notes on Hannibal
as reprinted in Walter Blair's Mark Twain's Hannibal: Huck & Tom,
where he notes that the stupefied humanity of a slave-holding town in his
childhood really left him unaware as a child of the situation of slaves whose
freedom had been usurped. Lovell identifies the African-American viewpoint
as displayed in the less-visited "Huck Finn Freedom Center" as a
small corrective to the present-day Hannibal's idyllic version of itself.
Barbara Schmidt takes up the illustrations of Tom Sawyer and offers
other cultural gems--the first Dell comic book didn't include the whitewashing
scene--what were they thinking!--and the Classics Illustrated comic
presented a cover with Tom beating up Alfred--the cover changed quickly when
Congress started investigating comics as a bad influence, are two pointed
examples.
Two more pieces finish out the book with engaging personal insights that are
highly relevant to how we might think about presenting The Adventures of
Tom Sawyer. John Pascal's fun questions to warm up a high school prep
class are welcome, of course, as are all of his insights into the real responses
of real students. I especially admired--once I got past laughing at the whitewashed
fence in the Seton Hall Preparatory School parking lot--the observation on
the asides on history among the stalagmites, which actually don't appear as
imposing geological formations in the real cave. The emphasis on the book
as a hymn to childhood makes good use of Twain's ideas in relation to his
style, following up on the scholarly essays with insights into how first-time
or "younger" readers interpreted the story was quite appropriate,
as was the description of the real cave offered by local observer Danny Norman
with the descriptions by which we know it, and good thematic points emerge.
Finally, technical aids appear at the end of the book--a useful chronology,
lists of editions and of movies, notable editions and plays. The list of illustrators
of Tom Sawyer supplements Barbara Schmidt's "Illustrating Tom
Sawyer" which had previously found that one or two major illustrators
had a very large influence on following interpreters, and perhaps readers
as well. My own appreciation of Twain's intentions and artistry in Tom
Sawyer has expanded and that sounds a sufficient closing note for this
review.