Critical Insights: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Kent Rasmussen’s contributions to Mark Twain Studies are considerable. With more than a dozen collected editions, reference guides, and edited works, he has been a go-to scholar in the field since the appearance of his epic and indispensable Mark Twain A to Z in 1995. With Critical Insights: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Rasmussen brings forward the work of Gary Scharnhorst’s pioneering Critical Essays on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1993) by placing today’s scholars on the record regarding the book Alan Gribben aptly describes as “a classic overshadowed by its successor” (20). The premise here and presumably driving Rasmussen’s volume, of course, is that—for all kinds of reasons, including the rarefied place Adventures of Huckleberry Finn occupies in the American literary imagination—Tom Sawyer has not received the scholarly attention it deserves. Critical Insights: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer begins to rectify that reality with its unique combination of insightful commentaries, analytical essays, and practical resource materials.Critical Insights: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer features twenty-three original contributions by seventeen different scholars and is organized into three sections. The first grouping, “Critical Contexts,” consists of four essays that provide a range of historical and cultural perspectives for thinking about Twain’s novel in new and interesting ways. Peter Messent opens the collection with a reflection on the two timelines of Tom Sawyer (its setting in the 1840s and its composition in the 1870s) and how they impact Twain’s presentation of history in “Tom Sawyer’s Evasion of History.” It’s a powerhouse analysis that attempts to dislodge the novel’s reputation for nostalgia and makes a compelling case for Twain’s novel as “a profoundly anti-historical text” (3). Alan Gribben’s “Tom Sawyer: A Classic Overshadowed by Its Successor,” Joe B. Fulton’s “Thinking Like Jackson’s Island; Or, Why Tom Sawyer Is Good for the Environment,” and Philip Bader’s “Tom Sawyer and Harry Potter: The Boys Who Live” offer similarly innovative readings of the novel’s critical reputation, its use of imagery, and its influence on present-day writing, respectively.The book’s second section, “Critical Readings,” contains eleven essays that look more closely at Tom Sawyer’s characters, themes, and reception. John Bird’s “The Tom Sawyer Franchise: The Evolution (and Devolution) of Character” launches this part of the collection with a comprehensive and illuminating survey of Twain’s use of Tom over the course of his career. Bird’s conclusion that Tom devolves gradually but steadily into a cruel megalomaniac over the twenty years following his first appearance in 1876 is certain to shift critical understanding of Twain’s use of this and other characters in his body of work. The next two essays, Kevin MacDonnell’s “Tom Sawyer: From Boy-Book Hellion to Coming-of-Age Hellion” and K. Patrick Ober’s “Is Tom Sawyer an Idyllic Dream or a Boy’s Nightmare?” also challenge the long-standing consensus of Tom as idyllic hero in particularly useful ways.Shifting focus to the novel’s female characters, “Becky Thatcher and Aunt Polly in Three Dimensions” by Linda Morris reminds us that Twain “created a range of strong girls and powerful women who clearly push beyond any cultural or gender stereotypes” (131) throughout his career. Even though scholars typically point to such late examples as Rachel (“Hellfire”) Hotchkiss, Joan of Arc, and Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Roxy, Twain’s presentation of well-developed female characters actually began much earlier with Tom Sawyer. Hannah J. D. Wells’s “Republican Motherhood and Tom Sawyer’s Political Education” extends the conversation regarding Aunt Polly’s underestimated role in the novel as it (rather ingeniously) speculates on precisely how Aunt Polly, Tom, Sid, and Mary might be related to each other. Another standout essay in this section of is Kerry Driscoll’s “Injun Joe and Mark Twain’s Attitudes toward Native Americans.” Here Driscoll argues that the generational contradiction in St. Petersburg’s perceptions of Injun Joe—namely those of the younger characters versus those of the adults—“mirrors Mark Twain’s own deep ambivalence about native peoples” (163).The final five pieces in “Critical Readings” explore a range of responses to Twain’s novel. “Tom Sawyer as Enduring Icon of Boyhood” by father-and-son team John H. Davis and Hugh H. Davis traces Tom Sawyer’s influence on popular culture through its numerous adaptations in print and electronic media. According to the Davises, Tom has emerged in the popular consciousness over the last century as an “Everyboy” (166), “a paragon of boyish acts and innocence” (174). Cindy Lovell leans heavily on her standing as a daughter of Hannibal, Missouri, in “Tom Sawyer’s Complicated Relationship with Twain’s Hometown” and provides an insider’s perspective on how Twain’s affiliation with the model for St. Petersburg and other of his fictional settings has presented itself both positively and negatively. Barbara Schmidt presents a fascinating look at the way illustrators have seemingly interpreted Tom Sawyer throughout the years in “Illustrating Tom Sawyer.” R. Kent Rasmussen does a deep dive into arguably the best film adaptation of the book, David O. Selznick’s 1938 production, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. “The Tom Sawyer Movie that Hollywood Got (Almost) Right” offers easily the most detailed discussion of all aspects Selznick’s film to date. The final essay of this section of the collection is John Pascal’s superb “Adventuring with Tom Sawyer in a Twenty-First-Century Classroom.” Mainly a pedagogical reflection, Pascal provides both a teacher’s and students’ perspectives on how the novel is being received in high schools nearly 150 years after its publication.The third grouping in the collection is titled “Resources.” It contains eight enormously handy research aids, including Danny Norman’s essay, “Tom Sawyer’s Cave: Fact vs. Fiction,” a listing of significant editions of the novel, and an exhaustive filmography, to name just a few. Of particular note in this section of Critical Insights: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is “Illustrators of American Editions of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” which catalogs standard novels as well as comic book and illustrated abridged and adapted editions. The other four resources include a chronology of Twain’s life, separate bibliographies of primary and secondary works, and a list of published plays based on the novel.Critical Insights: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer represents a valuable and much-needed contribution to Mark Twain Studies. Tom Sawyer has indeed suffered over time because of its close relationship with the more-acclaimed Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. However, with the kind of attention that Twain’s first foray into the matter of Hannibal is sure to receive these next few years as we approach the novel’s sesquicentennial in 2026, R. Kent Rasmussen has done a valuable service in providing a guide ready to greet general readers and academics alike as they return to this most deserving work of American fiction.