Transcending to Jackson Island

In “The Art of Fiction,” Henry James wrote, “the motive [of reading fiction] is simply experience.  As people feel life, so they will feel the art that is most closely related to it.  The closeness of relation is what we should never forget in talking of the effect of the novel” (599).  So true is this statement that it can be applied to countless examples of popular literature.  James’ own “Daisy Miller,” William Dean Howells’ “Editha,” and Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” are a only a few examples of fiction that readers relate themselves to.  Other authors have taken their own experiences and transformed them into memorable literature.  Among the most popular of these is Mark Twain.  Twain used boyhood companions and experiences, as well as his knowledge of other literary works, to create his two most famous novels, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.  The books are much the same in style and format, but not in content.  The difference between Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, as well as its difference from the other works previously mentioned, is that Tom Sawyer does not have any deep, philosophical meaning to it.  Edgar Lee Masters called it “a history of an Old America, of boyhood in the free West, of the ramshackle village on the river” (158).  Even Twain referred to it as a “hymn” to boyhood (Baldanza 103).  If this is a book written about boys, for boys, with no moral or ethical message attached to it, then why is it so popular among adults?  The answer lies in what James referred to as the closeness between life and the novel.  In Tom Sawyer’s case, the relationship is between childhood in the novel and the reminiscence of the adult reader.  Though the experiences are not the readers’ own, the novel allows them to escape the grown-up world and plunge into the adventures of Sam Clemens.

Most adults can vividly remember aspects from their childhoods.  The towns they lived in and what they were like, the people they knew and their ways and attitudes, and the things that happened and how their effects shaped the people around them all linger within the memories of adults.  Twain used his own recollections to help shape Tom Sawyer.  For example, the town setting of the novel is St. Petersburg, which is based on Twain’s home of Hannibal, Missouri.  Though the names were changed, many of Hannibal’s most familiar places were included in the novel. The church that Tom attended is an actual place; Cardiff Hill is actually Holliday’s Hill; the cemetery is the Baptist cemetery; Jackson’s Island was actually Glassock’s Island (since vanished); and  McDougal’s cave is really McDowell’s cave.

            Several of the characters in Tom Sawyer were based on real people that Twain knew as a boy in Hannibal. Tom Sawyer was the combination of three boys: Mark Twain, Will Bowen, and John Briggs.  Aunt Polly was modeled after Jane Clemens, Twain’s mother, and Sid was his brother Henry.  Huck Finn was modeled after Tom Blankenship, and Becky Thatcher was Laura Hawkins, Twain’s across-the-street neighbor.  Some of these characters, as well as others in the novel, were modified.  As Nordloh writes, “His mother [Twain’s], for example, was not so sentimental and ineffective as Aunt Polly. . . the real Injun Joe was not a villain but simply a village good-for-nothing whose worst habit was getting drunk” (70).  Muff Potter was not a real person, but embodied “the qualities of several Hannibal ne’er do wells” (55).

            Just as places and characters were familiar to Twain, so were some of the events that happened in the story.  Blair notes that Albert Paine decided “the personal details of this story were essentially nothing more than the various aspects of his own [Twain’s] boyhood” (53).  In fact, in the preface to the novel, Twain wrote, “Most of the adventures recorded in this book really occurred; one or two were experiences of my own, the rest of boys who were schoolmates of mine” (7). In looking at Twain’s Autobiography, we can see that several of his notes later became scenes in Tom Sawyer.  For instance, “Tom’s brief membership in the Cadets of Temperance and his measles are adaptations of experiences described in the Autobiography” (Baldanza 109).  While on the sea, “he made notes for the cat-and-painkiller episode that was to become Chapter 12,” as well as “listed some of the superstitions that would play a part in his Hannibal novels; how you remove freckles by washing your face in rainwater; how you could transfer warts to another boy” (Kaplan 64).  The firing of a cannon over the river to raise drowned bodies comes from Twain’s experience of watching this take place in the search for Christ Levering and himself after he “escaped from a ferryboat,” and was thought to be drowned (Blair 52).

            Though Tom Sawyer rings with Twain’s personal experience, it is important to note that not everything that occurred in the novel came from his life.  Many of the events that took place were drawn from other literary works that Twain was familiar with.  Twain admitted to this “unconscious plagiarism” in 1876 when “he indicated that he often knowingly transplanted ideas from stories by others into his own” (Blair 59).  For instance, the grave-robbing scene is thought to be derived from the body-snatcher scene of Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities.  Neither Clemens nor Hannibal history records any incidences of grave robbing (68).  The manner in which Tom and Huck dig for treasure under the shadow of a tree limb may have been taken from Poe’s “The Gold Bug” (61).  Blair also writes that “dime novels, melodramas, and similar trash are echoed in the sensational courtroom scene” (58).  

            An interesting comparison to make is the relationship between The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Don Quixote.  In his book, “Magic” realism in Cervantes, Arturo Serrano-Plaja writes, “Twain was the first to see how much of the world of children there is in Don Quixote” (23).  “Don Quixote, an adult whom the author terms mad, is simply playing like a child” (28).  Twain used the idea of Don Quixote and restructured it to have a child as the main character, engaging in the same type of romantic activities, because,  “A child doing childish things is much more consistent than an adult who acts like a child” (23).  There is also an inverse in the family life of Quixote and Sawyer.  Whereas Don Quixote is an outrageous uncle who lives with his niece, Tom Sawyer is a rambunctious nephew living with his aunt. Nordloh believes that “the relation between Tom and Huck, for example, owes as much to Cervantes’ Don Quixote as it does to Sam Clemens’s friendship with Tom Blankenship” (70).  Plaja agrees.  He writes that Sancho Panza, Quixote’s squire, is agreeable to anything that the Don desires.  Though he is the more realistic of the two, he refuses to dispute Quixote’s words.  Huck Finn is the same, in that he does whatever Tom wishes.  In fact, he is willing to change his life in order to be a member of Tom’s gang of robbers.  

            Twain’s depiction of his own boyhood and his inclusion of previously written material give Tom Sawyer that closeness to real childhood life that adults need to escape the grown-up world.  As adult readers, we become Don Quixote’s.  Without physically leaving our home, we transcend to Jackson’s Island and become pirates along with Tom, Huck, and Joe.  We, too, search for buried treasure and get lost in McDougal’s cave.  In the preface to the novel, Twain wrote,

Although my book is intended mainly for the entertainment of boys and girls, I hope it will not be shunned by men and women on that account, for part of my plan has been to try to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked, and what queer enterprises they sometimes engaged in.

For Twain, Tom Sawyer was his release from the responsibilities and confinements of adulthood, into the past, unrestricted, freedom of childhood.  His wish was that it would be the same for other adults as well.

Works Cited

Baldanza, Frank. Mark Twain: An Intoduction and Interpretation.

New York: Barnes and Noble Inc.,1961.

Blair, Walter. Mark Twain and Huck Finn. Los Angeles:

University of California Press. 1960

James, Henry. "The Art of Fiction." The American Tradition

in Literature Vol. II. Eds. George and Barbara

Perkins. Boston: McGraw Hill College, 1999.

591-60.

Kaplan, Justin. Mark Twain and His World. New York:

Simon and Schuster, 1974.

Master, Edgar Lee. "Mark Twain." The Adventures of

Tom Sawyer. Philadelphia: Running Press, 1991.

Nordloh, David J., eds. Mark Twain. Boston: Twayne Publishers,

1988.

Serrano-Plaja, Arturo. "Magic" Realism in Cervantes.

Los Angeles: University of California Press,1970.

Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Philadelphia:

Running Press, 1991.