On Tom Sawyer Abroad and the Accidental Imperialists

Everyone knows about that time Tom Sawyer tricked the neighborhood kids into painting his aunt’s fence for him. Everyone knows about his time hiding out on Jackson Island with his friend Huck Finn and when he made his way out of McDougal’s Cave with his sweetheart Becky. Heck, those who have read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn could even tell you that Tom Sawyer was there when Huck Finn freed the slave Jim after he is recaptured. Tom Sawyer’s story has been a part of not only the literary canon, but a part of the American tale we tell ourselves. But few know about that one time Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Jim hopped on a flying machine with a deranged inventor and made their way over to Northern Africa.

It turns out that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is not the end of the Tom and Huck saga. Mark Twain completed two other novels focused on his two most famous characters, Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer Detective. Twain even attempted to write other adventure tales featuring Tom and Huck, including Huck and Tom Among the Indians, Schoolhouse Hill, and Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy, but none of these were published or even completed in Twain’s lifetime.

There’s a reason why Tom Sawyer Abroad failed to lodge in America’s consciousness: it’s not great. I suppose you could see it as the Solo: A Star Wars Story of the Tom Sawyer series, or Twain’s Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure, if you’re being unkind. While the previous Tom and Huck stories weren’t exactly concerned with narrative realism, it does seem odd to see Twain inject some Jules Verne steampunk into the bucolic world of St. Petersburg, Missouri.

Like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Abroad is narrated by Huck, and though published about a decade after Huck Finn, it begins almost immediately after the events of the previous novel. The first chapter, “Tom Seeks New Adventures,” which begins with Tom Sawyer deciding that the events of Huck Finn wouldn’t be enough to satiate his curiosity and wanderlust, seems to perfectly describe what was likely Twain’s brainstorming process. As M. Thomas Inge notes in my edition’s afterward, Twain, who got himself into financial trouble towards the end of the nineteenth century, wrote Abroad for “crass commercial purposes.” In other words Twain writing a third novel featuring these characters is kind of like when a movie studio decides that they have some IP that they can squeeze a few bucks from. So I guess this makes Tom Sawyer Abroad the Live Free or Die Hard or the Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps or Godfather III of Twain’s oeuvre.

And just like many movie studios of late, Twain had been bitten by the franchise bug. He apparently had plans to ship Huck, Tom, and Jim to other parts of the world in a series of sequels, which never came to be. Judging by the quality of Abroad, this is probably for the better. The main problem is that although Abroad promises lots of hijinks by Tom, Huck, and Jim in Northern Africa, the trio doesn’t really spend much time actually on the ground. Instead, they spend much of the early chapters terrorized by the manic mad inventor of the airship who both seems to have absolute faith in his invention and a streak of misanthropy, and when he plunges to his grizzly death, the three of them are left to figure out what to do now that they’ve somehow wandered across the Atlantic Ocean. But once they reach Africa, they mostly just hang out in the stupid air balloon. There’s no awkward mix up with local customs or getting caught up in the tension between the Berbers and colonizing European powers. No, it’s mostly just Tom, Huck, and Jim observing things from a far and shooting the shit.

On the bright side, the conversation and arguments that the three get into are without a doubt the highlights of the novel. As the most learned of the three, Tom repeatedly tries to represent himself and worldly and authoritative, but he’s almost always rhetorically outmaneuvered by Jim. At one point they consider the implication that fleas are proportionally much stronger than humans, leading them to the horrifying conclusion that if a flea were human-size, then that “flea would be President of the United States, and you couldn’t any more prevent it than you can prevent lightning.”  In these moments, you can feel Twain’s warmth towards his creations, and the book starts to take the shape of an anti-adventure novel, where the characters go halfway around the world just to get into philosophical arguments with one another. Maybe Richard Linklater can do the film adaptation.

It’s worth highlighting the boisterous illustrations, which are admittedly a lot of fun, and interestingly enough they were created by Dan Beard, an early founder of the Boy Scouts of America. 

Tom Sawyer Abroad is uneven at best, but that doesn’t mean that there’s not some interesting work going on here. The novel showcases Twain’s burgeoning anti-imperialist attitudes. Early on, Tom tries to convince his companions to embark on a crusade, but Jim is unsure about the ethics behind this new idea, arguing that if he had a farm and someone wanted it, it wouldn’t be right for them to just take it like the so called crusaders. Apoplectic, Tom rejects Jim’s metaphor outright:

“It ain’t a farm, it’s entirely different. You see, it’s like this. They own the land, just the mere land, and that’s all they do own; but it was our folks, our Jews and Christians, that made it holy, and so they haven’t any business to be there defiling it.”

Tom’s response surely strikes the reader as an inefficient defense of crusades, but it also inaugurates themes of epistemological uncertainty and imperialism. He rejects Jim’s metaphor as a means of knowing how Middle Easterners must have felt about invading Europeans. Throughout the novel the notion of metaphors as a means of knowing comes into play, which in turn affects how the trio see themselves as an invasive force.

Later, after the three have been riding the balloon across America, Huck uses his knowledge of of maps to try and pinpoint exactly where they are. Although they have been riding the balloon for quite some time, Huck’s surprised that they haven’t passed into Indiana yet. When asked why he thinks they haven’t passed Indiana yet, Huck logically observes that while the state of Illinois is green, Indiana is clearly pink. After all, that’s how it’s portrayed on maps he’s seen. Like the metaphor of the farm, Huck is relying on the map as a form of metaphor. It synecdochically stands in for the nation as a whole, but where Jim’s farm metaphor attempts the bridge the distance between Christians and Muslims, the map demonstrates ways in which metaphor can distance us from the reality of the object itself. Color coded states are a helpful shorthand, but they are clearly a fiction.

There’s a running theme of how distance, both figurative and literal, between us and the other becomes difficult to bridge through traditional modes of knowledge production. While reading Tom Sawyer Abroad, I eventually became frustrated by the fact that Tom, Huck, and Jim rarely leave the damn balloon. One of the joys of these globetrotting nineteenth century adventure stories is how our western heroes get to visit new places and cultures. Of course, these cultures are always interpreted through the understanding of the white authors, often in wildly inaccurate and racist ways. But if we’re to look at Abroad as an anti-adventure novel, perhaps this is the point. There’s no uncovering of ancient artifacts from lost civilizations or opportunities to use superior wit to escape capture by the natives. Instead, the three of them much prefer to sit around and jaw with one another just as if the front porches of St. Petersburg, Missouri were transported to the Sahara Desert.

Because Tom, Huck, and Jim rarely leave the balloon, they have a skewed perspective understanding of Africa and its people. It’s telling that Twain borrows the word “aeronaut” from Jules Verne, who he is clearly satirizing, but here he spells it “errornaut” (italics mine).

 To me, this seems to suggest ways in which this new technology allows individuals to more quickly and easily cast about the world while also maintaining a distance from the actual people who live in these “far flung” regions, keeping us just as ignorant as before we left our provincial town. I can’t help but compare the balloon in Abroad with drones sent by the military to places like Northern Africa and the Middle East.

We see both of these issues, the use of metaphor as knowledge-creation and the errornautical view of the world, collide in the chapter, “The Sand-Storm,” where the trio witnesses the destruction of a caravan of nomads violently tossed by a sandstorm. Tom and company were devastated by these deaths and felt like they had lost friends although they never actually met any members of the caravan.

For some time, the trio had followed the caravan with their air balloon, and as Tom says, “The longer we traveled with them, and the more we got used to their ways, the better and better we liked them.” Of course, they didn’t actually know any of the Africans below, so they granted them names, like “Mr. Elexander Robinson and Miss Adaline Robinson” or “Miss Harryet McDougal.” Over time, the group became so familiar with these nomads that they decided it was okay to drop the misters and misses and other titles. Once again, Abroad is trapped between the remote and the nearby. Tom and the rest are capable of extending empathy towards outsiders from a culture and place foreign to them, but in order to do so, they must Anglicize these people. The Africans become Robinsons and McDougals.

Over the course of the novel, Tom, Huck, and Jim become accidental imperialists. At one point, Tom looks at all the sand that’s been gathering in their balloon and decides that it must be worth tens of thousands of dollars. Quickly, he sets upon a money-making scheme:

“[W]e can keep on coming back and fetching sand, and coming back and fetching more sand, and just keep it a-going till we’ve carted this whole desert over there and sold it out; and there ain’t ever going to be any opposition, either because we’ll take out a patent.”

The only thing that preventing Tom from embarking on literally stealing the desert sands of North Africa are tariffs, which he reasons would completely eat away at their profits.

But just as it’s easy to not only forgive Tom’s fence-painting scheme, but actually laud him for his ingenuity, Tom, Huck, and Jim are so genial, it’s easy to forgive or miss altogether the fact that they seem to be inadvertently colonizing countries they likely didn’t even know existed at the beginning of the novel. Needless to say, Tom Sawyer Abroad is a strange novel. I don’t think anyone expected Mark Twain to pump out a steampunk sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and after reading the novel, I’m not surprised that it’s fallen into obscurity. Despite the fact that the novel spans oceans and deserts, it seems strangely stagnant and claustrophobic. The novel is filled with contradictions like this, but in many ways Tom Sawyer Abroad is the kind of novel you enjoy the more you think and write about it. 

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I do think that there’s a lot of potential to adapt Tom Sawyer Abroad as a film. Hear me out. There’s no definitive film version of either Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn, perhaps the closest being the 1938 technicolor adaptation. For whatever reason, both novels seem to resist adaptation, perhaps because of their episodic structure. But what’s the use in letting these instantly recognizable IPs lying around? People have heard of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, and they’re in the public domain. Do I have to draw you a map?

But in all seriousness, I would be down for a steampunk, globe-trotting Tom Sawyer movie. And since the novel isn’t as precious as the first two, a screenwriter doesn’t really have any obligation to follow the book to the letter. It’s an invitation to let your imagination go wild. If Hollywood wanted to play it safe, they could just let Guy Ritchie do to Tom Sawyer what he already did to Sherlock Holmes. But I also think both Kings of Summer and Kong make Jordan Vogt-Roberts uniquely qualified for steampunk Tom Sawyer. This one’s for free, Hollywood.

On Pap Finn and White Trash

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn might be the most laid-back of any “Great American Novel.” It goes down as easy as iced tea on a summer day or a dry stout after a long day of work. Let’s just take a moment to appreciate the cover of Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition (the copy I own) by Lilli Carre. Just look at how delightful that image is. Doesn’t it just invite you to take an adventure on the mighty Mississippi? And doesn’t it promise that the adventure will be fun, even exciting, but that in the end, no one will get hurt?

That’s not exactly true of the story itself. A few people die, including Huck’s drunken and abusive dad (who we’ll get to in a bit), but the story is so wrapped up in irony that when Huck once again teams up with Tom Sawyer in the final act in order to rescue the escaped slave Jim, Tom purposefully creates obstacles for the rescue so that it better resembles the adventure novels he’s read.

I mean, take a look at the inscription that opens the novel:

NOTICE.

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.

BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR

Per G. G. Chief of Ordinance

 

It almost makes it possible to not read anything into the novel, to refuse to peak under the veil, to plumb the subtext, and to just come along for the adventure.

But we can’t. No, it’s just not in our constitution. So when rereading Huck Finn after about a decade, I couldn’t help but draw connections between the world Twain crafted and our own. (By the by, G. G. in the above inscription likely refers to General Grant who Twain befriended. Twain even published Grant’s memoir.) Huck Finn draws a picture of a fragmented, inchoate nation. Its very geography speaks to differing, contested, and overlapping peoples, governments, customs, borders, and languages. The narrative spans the length of the Mississippi, a commercial byway that seems to be the only link to disparate, isolated communities. In other words, the world of Huck Finn is startling familiar to the United States of today.

Before we even get started on Huck’s trip down the Mississippi, Twain highlights the divided nature of America as embodied in speech:

In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect; the ordinary “Pike-County” Dialect; and the modified varieties of this last…I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.

Through multiple dialects, Twain illustrates ways in which we barely speak the same language, and in fact language serves as much a means of division as a means of communication. Language attaches itself to geography, race, and class.

It’s the last of these that I want to focus on, specifically on Huck’s drunken, abusive father. It’s easy to see Twain as a champion of the lower class. He not only uses dialect, but he allows Huck to the be narrator of his own story, elevating him and his unique speaking style to that of the novel’s typically bourgeois subject who for so long nearly monopolized literary attention. It’s this populism that has lead to his canonization as a particularly American author.

But when we look at Huck’s father, Pap Finn, it’s clear that he’s burdened with many of the same stereotypes associated with the poor in America. He’s lazy, he’s a drunk, and he’s an unrepentant racist. In White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, Nancy Isenberg traces common stereotypes of poor whites from early colonization to the 21st century. She finds not only that America has always had some form of class system, but also it was commonly believed that that a permanent underclass was natural and right. Pap seems to reflect America’s belief that poverty is the result of individual failings.

There’s one striking passage where Pap expresses class and racial resentment against a well-educated black man who had the audacity to live in Missouri as a free man. What’s worse, the useless government didn’t even bother to enslave him:

“There was a free nigger there, from Ohio; a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain’t a man in that town that’s got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane–the awfulest old gray-headed nabob in the State. And what do you think they said he was a p’fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain’t the wust. They said he could vote, when he was at home…I says to the people, why ain’t this nigger put up at auction and sold?…Why they said he couldn’t be sold till he’d been in the State six months…They call that a govment that can’t sell a free nigger till he’s been in the State six months.” (36-7)

So many of the negative perceptions of poor whites that we associate with Trump voters are found in Pap. He’s resentful and embittered, and these feelings are directed towards blacks who he sees as his natural inferiors. This passage reminded me of a remark made by J.D. Vance in Hillbilly Elegy claiming that many poor whites look at Barack Obama, see a successful black man with an established family, and feel angry and ashamed.

As mentioned in White Trash, there’s a long history of elevating African-Americans by comparing them favorably to poor whites. Isenberg point to the famous photograph of Elizabeth Eckford, one of nine girls who were selected to attend the newly desegregated Little Rock Central High School in 1957. In the photograph, we can see Eckford calmly walking to school while a white classmate, Hazel Bryan, shouts at her from behind. The image is powerful. As Isenberg puts it, attempting to maintain her tenuous social and economic position above blacks Bryan became the face of white trash for most of America. There’s certainly truth in this reading, and it’s long underpinned our understanding of why poor whites would fight so aggressively for slavery during the Civil War when they could never hope to own slaves themselves. (Of course, there were exceptions, even back then).

Of course, focusing too intently on animosity between poor whites and blacks serves to distance middle and upper class whites from their own more genteel bigotry. We see racism as something that only the ill bred engage in.

At the same time, poor white racial animosity has long been used by the left as an explanation for why we lack the kind of class consciousness that’s found in Great Britain. Look at What’s the Matter with Kansas or the debate over whether Trump’s ability to flip the Midwest was a result of economics or racism. (Recent research has suggested that white voters were concerned about losing their status as whites, but I don’t think you can discount ways in which economic anxiety can reinforce racism).

In some ways, Pap demonstrates the tricky relationship progressives have with poor whites in the Trump era. We believe we should be sticking up for the economically marginalized while also acknowledging that racism drove many of these people (although certainly not all) to vote for an obvious huckster who represents the exact opposite of what we believe to be the best qualities of the nation.

So what do we do with Pap? It helps that he’s not the sole or even the most prominent representation of poor whites in the novel. That position, of course, belongs to Huck himself who purposefully flees bourgeois respectability. Perhaps it’s easier to handle the stereotypes embodied by Pap because he does not fully stand for poor whites, and Twain valorizes the dusty street urchin that headlines the novel.

There’s also an opening to read Pap as more than a simple stereotype. In one exchange with Huck, he tries to steer his son away from education. First, he asks his son to read in order to see if his son even knows how, and when he sees that Huck can read, he accuses him of putting on airs:

“It’s so. You can do it. I had my doubts when you told me. Now looky here’ you stop that putting on frills. I won’t have it. I’ll lay for you, my smarty; and if I catch you about that school I’ll tan you good. First you know you’ll get religion, too. I never see such a son.” (29)

There are different ways to interpret his fear of education. Certainly, he’s afraid of his social standing in relation to his son. For his son to be educated would mean an inversion of father/son norms as he understands them. There’s also a suggestion that Pap sees education as unmanly and unsuitable for a son of his. (At one point he calls Huck a “dandy.”). But I wonder if we can’t also read some genuine attachment.

Pap could be afraid of how education might transform Huck’s speech, driving a wedge between him and his son. Twain foregrounds language’s ability to divide, so it makes sense that this form of logophobia is on the mind of Finn the elder. As Huck’s language changes, he becomes a part of the bourgeois, and it’s interesting to note that Pap links education with religion here. In English departments we so often find common allies with characters who reject bourgeois norms, but Pap seems to test these limits. Still, we might see his tirade not simply born out of personal grievances or fear of losing what little socio-economic privileges he has, but rather developed out of a fear of losing his only son. We might consider whether such a monstrous character might also have room for affection within.

In 2007, Jon Clinch published a book, Finn, that follows Pap Finn prior to the events of Huckleberry Finn. Instead of humanizing and rounding out the character, though, he makes him even more gruesome and beyond our sympathy. I haven’t read Clinch’s book, but it is interesting to note that when so many retellings try to humanize the villain (see: Wicked and Maleficent), Pap is denied a similarly new perspective.

Pap Finn reminds us that liberals and the left have always struggled when it comes to poor whites. Often they are seen as enemies while also being the kind of marginalized group we should be working to help. But people can be complicated. A racist can also be economically disenfranchised; a poor white can also benefit from white privilege. As Huckleberry Finn still teaches us, race and class wrestle with each other in troubling ways.

On Tom Sawyer, Cats, and Water Nymphs

When I was ten, Tom Sawyer tricked me. Not only did he convince me to paint his aunt’s fence, a chore he was supposed to complete on his own, but he somehow got me to give him a big glass stopper and a tin soldier for the honor. I never forgave him.

Or at least that’s the only explanation I can think of for why I never actually sat down to read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer until now. In fifth grade I was in a school production of the novel where I got to be one of the dummies who paint the fence, and I suppose I never got the love for a character who’s kind of a jerk. But just like Bart Simpson, America’s other irascible schoolboy, Sawyer has a heart of gold, never as bad as his parents or teachers might think in their moments of anger.

By now most people are nominally familiar with the basic outline of Tom Sawyer’s plot: his innocent courtship of new girl Becky Thatcher, his friendship with Huck Finn (and Joe Harper), his running away to an island in the Mississippi River with Huck (and Joe), his witnessing of Injun Joe committing murder, and his time lost in McDougal’s cave with Becky. But reading the actual book, it’s clear that Mark Twain isn’t interested in a tight plot so much as in creating a series of vignettes you might find in one of his public speeches.

In his “Preface” to the novel, Twain makes his goals plain. He plans is “to try pleasantly try to 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” (vii). Tom Sawyer’s ability to capture boyhood even for men living over a hundred and fifty years after the events are supposed to take place, makes it the ur-text of male nostalgia. Without Tom Sawyer would we have the works of Stephen King, Our Gang, The Goonies, The Sandlot, Peanuts, and any other text where (mostly) boys construct an entire society outside the purview of adults.

But what I found most striking about first about Tom Sawyer in my first read through are the “queer enterprises.” Plenty are familiar with Leslie Fiedler’s essay, “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!,” where he posits an interracial sexual relation between Huck and Jim (arguably a bit of a stretch) as well as Ishmael and Queequeg (much less of a stretch). Fiedler’s essay was first published in 1948(!) and then later repackaged in the early sixties in his book Love and Death in the American Novel. But I had never previously read a queer take on Tom Sawyer, even though it’s ripe for such a reading.

It’s when Tom, Joe, and Huck flee to a small island in the Mississippi that most clearly presents a sexualized relationship between boys. Twain writes:

After breakfast they went whooping and prancing out on the bar, and chased each other round and round, shedding clothes as they went, until they were naked, and then continued the frolic far away up the shoal water of the bar, against the stiff current, which latter tripped their legs from under them from time to time, and greatly increased the fun. And now and then they stood in a group and splashed water in each other’s faces with their palms, gradually approaching each other with averted faces, to avoid the straggling sprays, and finally gripping and struggling till the best man ducked his neighbour, and then they all went under in a tangle of white legs and arms, and came up blowing, sputtering, laughing and grasping for breath at one and the same time. (150-1)

I can imagine that queer theorists took a look at that passage and said to themselves, “Naw, this is too easy.” The scene seems strangely reminiscent of the water nymphs John William Waterhouse would paint a couple of decades later.

The ages of Sawyer and his friends are never revealed, but it’s clear that they are at the age to notice girls. Sawyer, of course, pursues Becky Thatcher, even persuading her to get “engaged” by kissing him. Thatcher’s a bit incensed when she learns that Sawyer was previously engaged to another girl. This budding romance puts Sawyer and his friends at a crossroads where they must choose between each other and compulsory heterosexuality.

Perhaps the most common metaphor for the boys of St. Petersburg is that of a cat. A quick search shows that the word “cat(s)” appears in the slim volume of Tom Sawyer eighteen times. It’s a wonderfully layered metaphor. On the one hand, Sawyer, Finn, and Harper are like strays, resourceful and versed in the ways of getting what they want. But cats are also androgynous. Feline are often associated with women where dogs are associated with men. In this sense, Sawyer and his friends’ close association with cats speak to the fact that they are not yet, by the dictates of the 19th century, “men” in multiple senses of the word.

Much of Tom Sawyer’s plot revolves around McDougal’s Cave, which serves as a convenient psychoanalytical metaphor for the subconscious. The characters enter and exit the cave at several point, and within the context of Tom and his buddy’s island adventure, these journeys into the dark stand for exploration of unearthed desires. Tellingly, the climax of the novel occurs when Tom and Becky get lost within the cave and must navigate their way to the surface. This joint male/female journey becomes Tom’s means of establishing a heteronormative relationship, leaving behind his time on the island in the Mississippi and the queer relationships he developed there.

But Tom Sawyer refuses to fall into place as a tidy heteronormative journey. By the end of the narrative, after Becky and Tom are rescued, Injun Joe is dead, and Huck Finn is adopted by The Widow Douglas, Tom and Huck have one last encounter. Stifled by his structured life in his new home, Huck flees. Tom chases him down and promises Huck that all of this civilizing (read: interpellating into the heteronormative adult world) won’t be so bad, and that they will never give up their time together. In fact, when the time is right, they will form their gang in secret once again.

What’s so fascinating about Tom Sawyer when reading it for the first time as an adult is how obvious these queer themes are. In order to complete a queer reading, you barely have to break a sweat. How much of this, though, is a result of a modern reader who had to read queer theory in graduate school and how much of it would have been recognized by the Twain’s 19th century audience? Returning to Twain’s preface now, Twain’s words take on a new meaning: “part of my plan has been to try pleasantly to remind adults of what they once were” (vii). How many adults were reminded of queer lives lived outside the gaze of the heteronormative world? Perhaps this sort of scholarly work is nearly impossible. Even looking at the reception of Tom Sawyer at the time would yield little since book reviews would have been subject to the rules of discourse that at the time would have made such discussion verboten. So we’re left with a mystery. But even without a definitive answer, we can assume that the queer themes would have likely moved certain audience members with a sense of recognition and an understanding that their experiences are not singular, that they are not alone.

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This is the first of several reviews of Mark Twain’s series of books that feature Tom Sawyer and his friends. In total, he wrote four books that include Tom Sawyer and his best friend Huck Finn. I’ll tackle each one, examining whatever themes happen to catch my eye at the time.