226 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900books” by others, “tho’ credit given”), this became Life on the Mississippi eight years
later. What is remarkable about the essays and the book is how Twain turns autobi-
ography into history. In his account of his own personal development, the author
distinguishes between the romantic dreamer he once was, before training as a pilot,
who saw the Mississippi merely in terms of its “grace,” “beauty,” and “poetry,” and
the sternly empirical realist he became after his training, when he could see the
Mississippi in more pragmatic terms – as a tool, to be used and maneuvered. That
same model, contrasting the romance of the past with the realism of afterwards, is
then deployed to explain larger social change: with the South of the author’s child-
hood identified with romance and the South of his adult years, after the Civil War,
associated with realism – enjoying a sense of “progress, energy, and prosperity”
along with the rest of the nation. The key feature of this contrast, personal and
social, between times before the war and times after, is its slippery, equivocal nature.
The glamour of the past is dismissed at one moment and then recalled with elegiac
regret the next, the pragmatism and progress of the present is welcomed sometimes
and at others coolly regretted. No attempt is made to resolve this contradiction. And
similar, if not precisely the same, confusions are at work in The Adventures of Tom
Sawyer (1876), a book clearly based on the author’s childhood years in Hannibal,
renamed St. Petersburg. At the time of writing Tom Sawyer, Twain’s uncertainty
about his purposes was signaled by the fact that he changed his mind over who the
book was intended for, adults or children. “It is not a boy’s book at all,” he wrote to
his friend William Dean Howells, “It will only be read by adults.” But then he
announced, in his preface, “my book is intended mainly for the entertainment of
boys and girls. I hope that it will not be shunned by men and women on that
account.” That uncertainty is then registered in the narrative. There is immediacy in
some of the language, but there is distance in much of it, an attempt to sound sophis-
ticated, mature, refined: characters do not spit, for example, they “expectorate,”
clothes are “accoutrements,” breezes are “zephyrs,” buildings are “edifices.” There is
the stuff of childhood fantasies (the delicious thrill of overhearing regretful adults
mourn your untimely death, bogeymen, the discovery of treasure) and the staple of
adult discourse (the tale of Tom and Becky, for instance, is a parody of adult court-
ship). There is the tendency, on the part of the anonymous narrator, to be ironic and
patronizing about the “simple-hearted” community of St. Petersburg and its “small
plain” buildings. And there is also an impulse toward elegy, toward seeing that very
same place as “a Delectable Land, dreamy, reposeful, and inviting.” The only attempt
to resolve these contradictions is also the one Twain resorts to in Life on the
Mississippi: to impose on his material the notions of personal development and
social betterment – in other words, the myth of progress. Tom turns out to be, in
the words of his Aunt Polly, not “bad, so to say – only mischeevous.” By the end of the
story, he has shown his true mettle by assuming the conventional male protective
role with Becky and acting as the upholder of social justice. The integrity and sanctity
of the community is confirmed, with Tom’s revelation of the villainy of Injun Joe
and the killing of the villain. And Tom is even ready, it seems to offer brief lectures
on the advantages of respectability: “we can’t let you into the gang if you ain’tGGray_c03.indd 226ray_c 03 .indd 226 8 8/1/2011 7:54:18 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 18 AM