The Arc of Mark Twain's Satire, or Tom Sawyer the Moral Snag

"Humor must not professedly teach, and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever."

—Autobiography of Mark Twain

"The humorous writer professes to awaken and direct your love, your pity, your kindness—your scorn for untruth, pretension, imposture. . . . He takes upon himself to be the week-day preacher."

—William Makepeace Thackeray

This essay originated in the classroom. The last two semesters that I offered a course on Mark Twain as a single author an interesting thing happened. As one would expect, the schedule had the students reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn immediately after The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and both times after finishing Huck Finn they turned on Tom, quite viciously, though they had loved him after only reading Tom Sawyer.

That experience led to some meditation about how Tom Sawyer functioned in a wide-angle view of the corpus of Mark Twain writings. Thinking of Tom as a type of ambiguous moral agent, a trickster figure, links him to Hank Morgan, but recalling the historical context of antebellum Missouri suggests a stronger tie: Tom Sawyer and Tom Driscoll are satiric versions of a symbolic Southern gentleman, though obviously in different phases. As their first name suggests, Tom Sawyer and Tom Driscoll are twins. The key to the duplication, however, is Tom Sawyer's last name, which deliberately evokes a specific phenomenon: a fallen tree stuck on the bottom of a river, where it constitutes a danger to shipping. In 1824, Congress passed an "Act to Improve the Navigation of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers," which included efforts "to remove sand bars on the Ohio and planers, sawyers, and snags on the Mississippi." For my purposes, "sawyer" and "snag" name the same thing; they illustrate the concept of a hidden danger, an obstacle to safe progress. Especially in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom functions like a sawyer in the river, ready to rip the bottom out of the narrative's moral progress. Sensing the danger of Tom Sawyer as a moral snag, my students came to dislike him intensely.

I will argue that the change from Tom Sawyer in his own story to Tom Sawyer in Huck's story foreshadows Tom Driscoll in The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson, who can be understood as another instance of a sawyer. Both Toms together thus suggest how Tom Sawyer's last name can be read as a satiric archetype in three important fictions of Mark Twain; both Toms are sawyers, moral snags representing disruptions of social order. Place this symbolic figure into its equally symbolic setting, the country village, and one can begin to conceptualize what I call Mark Twain's satiric ur-narrative, a template tale the key iterations of which include these three narratives concerned with antebellum slave culture. This River Trilogy intersects with Henry Nash Smith's "matter of Hannibal," though iterations of the satiric ur-narrative begin earlier and arc across later fictions targeting the damned human race.

The ur-narrative that creates the arc of Mark Twain's satire can be distinguished by its symbolic setting, a country village, and a symbolic figure, the Moral Snag. Clemens utilized the country village setting for the central portion of his satiric arc, found in four of his extended narrative fictions: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), and The Mysterious Stranger.¹ The arc begins with prototypes for the figure: James from "The Story of the Bad Little Boy Who Bore a Charmed Life" (1865) and Jacob Blivens from "The Story of the Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper" (1870).² Mark Twain's country village quartet progressively distills its satiric attack by disregarding the form of the realistic novel (but not necessarily realistic details) in favor of the parable form acting as a substrate. The grouping tells one story, reiterated with an essential dictum: civilization is built with violence, moral viciousness, and self-delusion.

Clemens returned compulsively to the country village as a stage to display human behavior at its...