Disenchantment: Tom Sawyer in Huckleberry Finn
Author(s): Judith Fetterley
Reviewed work(s):
Source: PMLA, Vol. 87, No. 1 (Jan., 1972), pp. 69-74
Published by: Modern Language Association
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JUDITH FETTERLEY
Finn
Disenchantment:Tom Sawyer in Huckleberry
HAT MARK TWAIN'S attitude toward
Tom Sawyer had changed by the end of The
Adventuresof Tom Sawyer, that he had become disenchantedwith his boy hero, is evidenced
in a letter he wrote to Howells upon completing the
novel:
T
I havefinishedthe story & didn'ttake the chap beyond
boyhood. I believe it would be fatal to do it in any
shape but autobiographically-like Gil Blas. ... If
I went on, now, & took him into manhood,he would
just be like all the one-horsemen in literature& the
readerwouldconceivea heartycontemptfor him....
By & by I shall take a boy of twelve & run him on
throughlife (in the firstperson) but not Tom Sawyer
-he would not be a good characterfor it.'
That he, however, curtailed his impulse to express
this disillusionment in Tom Sawyer is indicated by
another letter he wrote to Howells a few months
later:
As to that last chapter,I think of just leaving it off
& addingnothingin its place. Somethingtold me that
the book was done whenI got to that point-& so the
strong temptationto put Huck's life at the widow's
into detail instead of generalizingit in a paragraph,
was resisted.2
Thus, while the ending of The Adventuresof Tom
Sawyer is somewhat uneasy, it is still Tom
Sawyer's and Huck accepts Tom's pressure and
values, swearing to "stick to the widder till I rot"
in order to be accepted into Tom Sawyer's gang.3
Tom is still cast in the role of having pleasures to
offer which justify the compromises Huck has to
make and Mark Twain's disenchantment with
Tom waits for its real expression until Adventures
of HuckleberryFinn, which he began writing in the
summer of 1876, a year after concluding Tom
Sawyer, and whose first three chapters are, according to Walter Blair, the result of "rewriting and
probably elaborating discarded material from
Tom Sawyer."4In these chapters the character of
Tom Sawyer is quite different from what it was in
the earlier book.
The first major difference is defined in Tom's
69
initial action which reveals him as an almost
compulsive practicaljoker. It is impossible for him
to pass up the opportunity of playing a trick on
Jim even though it might mean getting caught and
having to give up the evening's fun. Such a subordination of larger areas of pleasure to the need
to play a joke is new to Tom. New also is the fact
that cruelty is the sole motivation behind Tom's
joke. Thus he initially wants to tie Jim to the tree
"for fun," and when Huck dissuades him from
this he concludes by devising a joke which will play
on Jim's ignorance and expose him as a fool.
Indicative of this change in the implications of
Tom's actions is the fact that it never occurs to
Huck, who is a willing partner to all Tom's
schemes in Tom Sawyer, to take part in this
prank.
Tom's joke on Aunt Polly the day after his
glorious appearanceat his own funeral is similar in
certain ways to his joke on Jim, but a close comparison of the two situations reveals crucial differences. While cruelty is an element in the joke on
Aunt Polly, it does not provide the motivation for
it. The emphasis is not on Tom's imagination of
Aunt Polly's reaction but on his satisfaction with
his own intelligence, his own cleverness in making
entertainment capital of his stealthy trip home.
Thus, when Aunt Polly confronts him with the
results of his cleverness, he can honestly respond,
"I didn't think" (vni, 166), and when he does think
he can honestly feel remorse.5Such a response is
impossible for the Tom Sawyer of Huckleberry
Finn whose interest in a joke lies precisely in his
imagination of its consequences. There is nothing
clever in tying Jim to a tree. The motivation behind such a plan lies in the pleasure Tom expects
from imagining Jim's feelings and predicament
when he wakes up. Tom's pleasure in Huckleberry
Finn is deeply entwined with cruelty.
After Tom has played his joke on Jim, he and
Huck take off to meet the rest of the boys who are
to form "Tom Sawyer's Gang." When they reach
the cave Tom begins: "Now, we'll start this band
of robbers and call it Tom Sawyer's Gang. Every-
70
Disenchantment: Tom Sawyer in Huckleberry Finn
body that wants to join has got to take an oath,
and write his name in blood" (XIII, 9-10). The
oath which follows has only one element in it:
the appropriate mode of murder for each itemized
crime against the gang. It is simply a blueprint for
killing and it suggests that Tom's major interest in
the gang is the aggressions he can imagine it committing. Certainly aggression is an element of
Tom's character in Tom Sawyer and colors his
imagination, resulting in the fantasies of the
Black Avenger of the Spanish Main. But again in
that book it is but one element among many, a
single fiber in a complex fabric. Further, Tom's investment in aggression is by no means so extreme
in the earlier book. A simple comparison of the
oath in Huckleberry Finn with the oaths in Tom
Sawyer-the one by which Tom and Huck swear
each other to secrecyover the murderof Dr. Robinson, and the one which Tom presents to Huck at
the end of the book as his gang's-makes this point.
In Huckleberry Finn, however, aggression is
Tom's character. When pushed to give a meaning
for the word "ransom," the only thing he can
think of is that it must mean "to kill"; when asked
at the end of the book why he took so much
trouble to set a free slave free, he replies indignantly, "I wanted the adventureof it; and I'd 'a'
waded neck-deep in blood to [get it]" (xIII,400).
It is this kind of change in Tom that Walter Blair
responds to when he remarks that in Huckleberry
Finn Tom "has become a simpler character."6
The process of forming Tom Sawyer's gang reveals a further transformation of Tom's character.
In Tom Sawyer, Tom is acquainted with books and
insistent on playing according to the patterns he
finds there, but once again this is a relativelyminor
part of his character, secondary to his largerrole of
exposing the rigidities and hypocrisies of the
various sets of rules held by the adults of St.
Petersburg.Indeed, in accordance with Tom's role
as a principle of reality in his world, the rules he insists on following frequently turn out to be justified. This is most notably the case in the episodes
surrounding his search for buried treasure. Tom's
superstitions about the kind of day Friday is
turn out to be true. Friday is indeed a bad day; if
he and Huck had gone into the haunted house that
day as planned they would have walked in on Injun
Joe who would have happily dispatched them.
Further, all Tom's presuppositions, derived from
the romances he has read, on the matter of where
treasure is buried turn out to be correct. Haunted
houses do contain treasure which robbers have
been unable to come back for or have forgotten.
Thus the treasure Tom finds is a testament to the
reality he represents and his interest in rules is
subsumed in that role.
Not so in HuckleberryFinn, where Tom's obsession with rules becomes the index to his unreality and makes him the butt rather than the
agent of exposure. Further, Tom's obsession
changes him from a character whose genius lies
in his capacity to create brilliant situations in
response to the immediate circumstances-the
whitewashing triumph, the flight to Jackson's
Island, the staging of his own funeral-to a
character who is both rigid (he constantly iterates,
"you'd have to") and derivative: "Everybody said
it was a real beautiful oath, and asked Tom if he
got it out of his own head. He said some of it,
but the rest was out of pirate-books and robberbooks" (XIII, 10).
There are, however, more ominous implications
to Tom's obsession with books in Huckleberry
Finn. These implications are developed in Chapter iii, "We Ambuscade the A-rabs." In Tom
Sawyer, the boys' world of play is self-contained.
When Tom goes off on a Saturday afternoon to
play general and wage a war, the other general is
Joe Harper and the opposing army is another
group of boys. In Huckleberry Finn, however,
Tom's play world is not self-contained; his makebelieve no longer sustains itself as make-believe
but constantly attempts to become real by impinging on worlds outside itself which have nothing to
do with it. It is one thing for a group of boys to
pretend that they are a caravan of "Spanish
merchants and rich A-rabs" bearing "ingots," and
"di'monds" and "julery" and to have another
group of boys rob them (xiii, 17). That is play, a
self-contained structurewhich imitates reality and
to whose rules and conventions all parties agree.
Such is the texture of Tom's activities in Tom
Sawyer. In Huckleberry Finn, however, we have
the spectacle of Tom trying to convince his gang
that turnips are jewelry and hogs are bars of gold
and that a Sunday school picnic is a caravan of
wealthy traders. As Robert Regan has noted, this
is akin to madness: "Here Tom appears only a
little less than insane; the boy who has so wildly
misread Cervantes verges upon becoming identified with Cervantes'hero."7The characterwho was
the reality principle in Tom Sawyer has become a
creature of delusion. What is more significant,
71
Judith Fetterley
however, is the nature of Tom's delusion. It does
not matter so much whether Tom actually believes
the claims he makes to his gang. Most likely he
does not. What does matter is that he has lost that
which made him the true hero of his own book: the
perception of the nature of play as a symbiotic
relationship between willing and aware parties.
With this loss of perception comes a concomitant loss of control. "We played robber now and
then about a month, and then I resigned. All the
boys did. We hadn't robbed nobody, hadn't killed
any people, but only just pretended" (xiI, 17). It
is impossible to imagine Tom's losing his gang in
Tom Sawyer because he "only just pretended."
The boys in Tom Sawyer delight in and thrive on
Tom's pretending. It is for this that they turn to
Tom as leader-he always has the most exciting
game for them to play and the most exciting roles
for them to be. Thus Joe Harper's plan to run off
and be a hermit naturally gives way to Tom's more
gaudy and satisfactory scheme of being pirates
and hiding out on Jackson's Island. But in Huckleberry Finn, Tom cannot deliver because he has
changed the groundwork of his promises.
Tom's image as a leader has changed in accordance with his change of tactics. In Huckleberry
Finn, he appears as a kind of petty tyrant, a hard
taskmaster who makes the boys labor at stupid
and uninterestingjobs. "He never could go after
even a turnip-cart but he must have the swords
and guns all scoured up for it, though they was
only lath and broomsticks, and you might scour
at them till you rotted, and then they warn't
worth a mouthful of ashes more than what they
was before" (xiII, 18). Quite different is the scene in
Tom Sawyer which describes the battle between
Tom's army and Joe's: "These two great commanders did not condescend to fight in personthat being better suited to the still smaller fry-but
sat together on an eminence and conducted the
field operations by orders delivered through aidesde-camp" (viii, 22). Other boys still do all the work
in Tom Sawyer, but they do it because they enjoy
it, because Tom has made it fun, and so, of course,
it isn't really work. One of Tom's defining characteristicsin Tom Sawyer, succinctly dramatizedin
the whitewashing episode, is his capacity to convert all work into play. In Huckleberry Finn the
process is reversed: what should be play becomes
work.
In Tom Sawyer, Tom easily controls the boys
because he has something to offer. Huck and Joe
are in mid-flight from Jackson's Island on their
way back home when Tom springs his plan of appearing at their own funeral and "then they set up
a war whoop of applause and said it was 'splendid!' and said if he had told them at first, they
wouldn't have started away" (viii, 140). Since, in
HuckleberryFinn, Tom no longer has anything of
value to offer, he has to devise all sorts of devious
tactics to keep control. "Little Tommy Barnes was
asleep now, and when they waked him up he was
scared, and cried, and said he wanted to go home
to his ma, and didn't want to be a robber any
more" (XIII, 13). Tom first tries to manipulate
him by ridicule, calling him a crybaby and
laughing at him. When that doesn't work he gives
him a nickel to keep him quiet. This anticipates
the conclusion of the book where Huck records
that Tom gave Jim forty dollars "for being
prisoner for us so patient" (xIII, 403). Money
has replaced pleasure as the currency of Tom's
control, and his relationship with the world is no
longer the symbiotic one of entertainer and entertained but is rather the tyrannical, aristocratic
one of the haves and the have-nots.
II
The ending of Huckleberry Finn is a more
elaborate statement of the changes in Tom's
character which the first three chapters have revealed. Certainly the ending is a tour de force of
the cruelty which derives pleasure from other
people's suffering.Tom forces Jim to work as hard
as any slave in order to carry out his elaborate
plans, which include turning spoons into pens and
then carving a series of mottoes with these pens
into a grindstone which Jim has had to roll to the
cabin. Tom insists on filling Jim's room with
snakes and spiders and rats, which Jim must not
only endure but play music to and tame, in spite of
Jim's protestation that he doesn't need or like
these creatures, in spite of his cry, "but what kine
er time is Jim having" (xiii, 364). But worse than
the physical pain which Tom inflicts on Jim is the
psychological pain of what can only seem to Jim a
toying with his freedom. For while Tom's plan is
elegant and has gobs of style, it effectively destroys Jim's chances for freedom. Thus Tom's indignation when told that Jim has not gotten away
but is chained in the cabin is one of the bleakest
moments of the book.
The entire final sequence of the novel, however,
is studded with instances of the pleasureTom takes
72
Disenchantment: Tom Sawyer in Huckleberry Finn
in other people's discomfort, beginning with his
arrival at the Phelps's farm in the guise of William
Thompson of Hicksville, Ohio. This disguise is
adopted simply for the opportunity it provides to
place Aunt Sally in the uncomfortable position of
being insulted by a guest whom she has warmly
welcomed. Typical, too, is the conclusion of the
joke whereby she has to beg Tom, who has revealed himself as Sid, to kiss her again. Tom continues this kind of activity throughout the course
of the "evasion," constantly reducing Aunt Sally
to a state of near hysteria over the loss of sheets
and candlesticks and shirts, and over spoons
which mysteriously appear and disappear until,
to preserve her sanity, she has to give up worrying
about them. But the height of this pattern is
reached through Tom's "nonnamus" letters which
terrorize not simply Aunt Sally and Uncle Silas
but the entire neighborhood. But this is just
"nuts" for Tom Sawyer. It is the source of his
pleasure, the index of his control over the world,
and the assured sign that his exploit will be talked
about and his achievement recognized.
The thirst for glory is certainly a major motivation behind Tom's plan, and in Tom's eyes glory,
like pleasure, is a product of difficulties overcome.
Thus Huck's proposal is rejectedbecause, "What's
the good of a plan that ain't no more trouble than
that?" (xIII, 323). Such a plan wouldn't create any
talk and talk is what Tom is after. The desire for
glory, the desire to be recognized as inordinately
clever, is nothing new to Tom. It is certainly basic
to his activities in The Adventuresof Tom Sawyer.
But in Tom Sawyer there is some reason for according Tom the recognition he seeks. His activities are strokes of genius and the egotism that
motivates them is justified because it results in
pleasure for everyone. While Tom's appearance at
his own funeral gains considerable attention for
him, his flight to Jackson's Island and apparent
death provide the opportunity for both the adults
and the other children to get attention. The Saturday before the funeral, the children of St. Petersburg all vie for the honor of having been the last
one to see the boys or talk to them or touch them
and "when it was ultimately decided who did see
the departed last, and exchanged the last words
with them, the lucky parties took upon themselves
a sort of sacred importance, and were gaped at
and envied by all the rest" (VIII, 150). But the
adults get their chance, too. Aunt Polly, Sid, and
Mary, as they enter the church, are the subject of
everyone's solicitude and gaze. While they do not
revel in this attention, it is implied that they do
enjoy it. The minister is far more open in his
pleasure at the opportunity to demonstrate his
powers of oratory which Tom has provided. In
HuckleberryFinn, however, this symbiotic context
is lacking and Tom's passion for recognition appears as unredeemed egotism.
There is, however, one motivation to Tom's
actions at the end of Huckleberry Finn which is
new to him in this book: his obsession with doing
things the right way. The words "right" and
"wrong" and "principle"and "duty" and "honor"
stud both Tom's speech and Huck's remarks on
him in this final section, and Tom is constantly
revealed as acting out of adherenceto a strict code
of right and wrong. Thus he constantly insists that
the evasion takes the shape it does because that is
right. He acts constantly upon the compulsions
of his code rather than upon the promptings of
his genius.
But it is clear that Tom's compulsions affect him
in deeper ways. His absolute conviction about his
rights and wrongs prevents him from having any
perspective on himself. One of the factors which
makes Tom a sympathetic character in Tom
Sawyer is his conscience. Rather than being always
convinced he is right, he often suffers the pangs of
conscience and experiencesboth guilt and remorse.
Equally, he has a very definite sense of self. He
knows the limits of his actions; he understandsthe
trajectoryhe is to define. After pushing against the
limits of what his community will stand by appearing at his own funeral and threateningto make the
congregation look ridiculous in front of each
other, his next act is the ultimately approvable one
of saving Becky from the public humiliation of a
whipping. In Tom Sawyer, Tom senses always
what is expected of him, and he acts accordingly.
In HuckleberryFinn, both the conscience and the
self-perspectiveare lacking. What appears instead
is the self-righteousnessof a characterwho knows
exactly what is right and what is wrong, and who
knows that he is right, and who is thus uncontrollable. As Huck ruefullyremarks,"he never paid no
attention to me; went right on. It was his way
when he'd got his plans set" (xiii, 344).
There is a far more significant dimension to
Tom's moralism, however, than any of those yet
discussed. If Tom's pleasure is connected with
cruelty, his cruelty, in turn, is connected with his
moralism. Thus, every aggression of Tom's
Judith Fetterley
against Jim is done under the aegis of right. The
hypocrisy of such a pattern is blatant, and hypocrisy is a final characteristic which Tom has
picked up in his transition from The Adventuresof
Tom Sawyer to Adventuresof Huckleberry Finn.
Again, in Tom Sawyer, Tom's role is to expose the
hypocrisy of his community and to offer them
something real in its stead. On Examination Day, a
locus classicus of the hypocrisies of St. Petersburg,
when the firstprize is awarded to the speech whose
content bears least relation to its form, Tom's action is to participate in lowering a cat over the
schoolmaster'shead until it succeeds in clawing off
his wig, to expose the bald reality underneath.
In HuckleberryFinn the action of the novel works
to expose the hypocrisy of Tom Sawyerwho, under
the aegis of right, enacts cruelty after cruelty; who
claims to be freeing Jim and in effect enslaves him;
who presents himself as bold, daring, and adventurous and is, in fact, doing the safest thing that
can be imagined-"setting a free slave free."8
III
The indictment of the character of Tom Sawyer
is carried on equally in the numerous analogues to
him that are found throughout the novel. The
similarity between Tom and Miss Watson is suggested in Chapter iii, which begins with Huck's
testing Miss Watson's code and ends with his
testing Tom's. The characters are linked both
through their possession of codes and through the
fact that their codes, under the pressure of Huck's
tests, are exposed as a useless bunch of lies. The
most crucial connection, however, is made through
Jim, who reveals to Huck that it is the very Miss
Watson who told him that he "must help other
people, and do everything I could for other
people, and look out for them all the time, and
never think about myself," who has been unable to
resist an $800 price on Jim (xiii, 16). We remember
that Tom, too, thinks of Jim in terms of money
and covers up the reality of his actions toward Jim
with the language of right and wrong. The two
characters are thus connected through their
mutual possession of the syndrome of moralism,
aggression, and hypocrisy.
As Richard Adams has noted, Miss Watson's
plan to sell Jim also links her to two other characters in the novel, the King and the Duke.9 The
scene in which the Wilks's Negroes are sold,
mother away from children, acts out the horror
which Jim has fled. But clearly there are many
73
connections between Tom Sawyer and the Duke
and King as well. Daniel Hoffman, in Form and
Fable in American Fiction, has noted many of
these:
It is curioushow closely the King and Duke's stockin-tradeof shifty disguisesparallelsTom's dreamsof
glorymemorizedfromold romances.Tom was always
concerninghimself about captive or outcast nobles;
they turn up as the dispossessedDuke of Bilgewater
and the lamentedDauphin of France.Tom was forever acting parts, and, as Mr. Eliot reminds us, he
always needed an audience; they are professional
thespians-The great David Garrick of Drury Lane
and EdmundKean. Tom's favoritesop to self-pityin
TomSawyerwas to imaginehimselfa pirate;but the
only pirate we see is the King at the camp meeting,
acting again. We remember,too, that Tom had tried
to ambuscadethe A-rabs;now, when the Duke wants
to keep Jim from being recognizedby slave-hunters,
"He dressed Jim up in King Lear's outfit . . . and
painted Jim's face and hands and ears and neck all
over a dead, dull, solid blue, like a man that's been
drownedninedays.Blamedif he warn'tthe horriblestlooking outrageI ever see. Then the Duke took and
wroteout a signon a shingleso: Sick Arab-but harmless whennot out of his head."10
These parallels clearly suggest the pains which
Mark Twain was at to associate Tom Sawyer with
these characters and thus to denigrate him. The
most important connection between Tom and the
King and Duke, however, is, as Hoffman goes on
to suggest, their attitude toward Jim. The King
and Duke, like Tom, see Jim as an object, a possession which can be bought and sold for money.
Thus when Huck, whose posture as Jim's owner
is, ironically, a disguise he adopts to keep Jim
free, asks the Duke what he has done with his
"nigger," "the only nigger I had in the world and
the only property," the Duke replies, "Fact is, I
reckon we'd come to consider him our nigger; yes,
we did consider him so-goodness knows we had
trouble enough for him" (XIII, 299). Compare this
to the language of Tom's exuberance at the height
of the evasion:
Tom was in high spirits.He said it was the best fun he
ever had in his life, and the most intellectual;and
said if he only could see his way to it we wouldkeep it
up all the rest of our lives and leave Jim to our childrento get out; for he believedJimwouldcometo like
it betterand betterthe morehe got usedto it. (XIII, 345)
There is, however, a basic differencebetween the
Duke and King and Tom. The Duke and King at
74
Disenchantment: Tom Siawyerin HuckleberryFinn
least are honest with themselves. They know very
well what they are and what they are doing; they
have no delusions. The roles they adopt are
strategies to gull others, not postures which they
themselves believe in. Further, they do not have
the language of morality. They never claim that
what they are doing is right. The only legitimization they even faintly suggest-and it is in some
ways a fair one-is that it is people's stupidity and
hypocrisy, their insatiable demand for sensation,
which supports them. Thus, in a certain respect,
they come off better than Tom, who believes in his
postures as right, and we can share Huck's pity
for them as they are ridden out of town on a rail.
These same reservationsdo not apply, however,
when we compare Tom to another set of characters
in the book, the Grangerfords. Again, Hoffman
has made an important comparison:
Whenwe, with Huck, fall in amongthe Grangerfords,
we cannot help but think how they and Tom would
have liked one another.(They do have a son named
Tom!) TheseGrangerfordsbow to eachotherat breakfast and drinkto the healthof theirparents;they apologize to little Huck for the indignityof searchinghis
pockets, and they have more culturethan Huck believed could exist under one roof. The Grangerfords
make a morality of manners, but their chivalric
rituals,we come to learn,are a thin veneer over their
essential barbarism.Their sense of honor is worthy
but limited;they do not understandwhatit is to which
they give their loyalty."
There is, however, a major similarity which Hoffman has not articulated. The focus of Twain's
attention to the Grangerford-Shepherdsonfeud is
not so much on the viciousness of the action as it is
on the hypocrisy of calling that viciousness
"honor." Contrary to Hoffman, the Grangerfords' sense of honor is not worthy; it is the very
thing which makes them worse than the Duke and
the King. The code of the Grangerfords and the
Shepherdsons is that of Southern chivalry and
honor and what Mark Twain is exposing through
them is the hypocrisy of the Southern way of life in
which murder is legitimized as justice and in which
black men are castrated and lynched in the name
of the honor of white women by the very men who
are themselves destroying that honor.
In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Southern
chivalry is exposed as sneaking up behind a couple
of kids and shooting them in the back. But the
exposure of that cruelty is not so important as the
exposure of the connection between that cruelty
and the language of honor. What Mark Twain is
recording in Huckleberry Finn, through the
Grangerfords, through Miss Watson, and through
Tom Sawyer, is his sense of the inevitable connection between moralism, the language of right and
wrong with its inevitable concomitant of selfrighteousness, and the fact, the act, of aggression.
Thus one of the central, defining scenes of the
book is the death of Boggs. "He made about a
dozen long gasps, his breast lifting the Bible up
when he drawed in his breath, and letting it down
again when he breathed it out-and after that he
laid still; he was dead" (xni, 199). The Bible, proclaimed as the giver of life, is in reality used to
crush life out.
Universityof Pennsylvania
Philadelphia
Notes
1 Mark Twain-HowellsLetters, ed. William M. Gibson
and Henry Nash Smith(Cambridge,Mass.: HarvardUniv.
Press, 1960),I, 91-92.
2 Twain-Howells Letters, I, 112-13.
3 Samuel L. Clemens, The Writings Mark Twain,
of
definitiveed. (New York: Gabriel Wells, 1922-25), viii,
291. Subsequentreferencesare to this edition and appearin
the text.
4Mark Twain& "Huck Finn" (Berkeley:Univ. of CaliforniaPress,1960),p. 100.
6 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
crueltyin having inflictedthe medicineon Tom in the first
place. Thus the final result of this joke, as of the one on
Aunt Polly, is to placeTom in a good light.
6 Blair, p. 106.
7 UnpromisingHeroes: Mark Twainand His Characters
(Berkeley:Univ. of CaliforniaPress, 1966),p. 133.
8 James M. Cox, Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor
(Princeton,N. J.: PrincetonUniv. Press, 1966), p. 175.
9 "The Unity and Coherence of Huckleberry Finn,"
TulaneStudiesin English,6 (1956),99.
10New York, 1961; paperback rpt., New York:
OxfordUniv. Press,1965,pp. 328-29.
n Hoffman,pp. 327-28.