preview

Superstitions In Mark Twain's The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer

Decent Essays
Open Document

“My, but we’re rich, Tom!” Huckleberry Finn says after taking a glimpse of the treasure-box (Twain 240-241). When looked from afar, the small town in Missouri seems slow, boring, and awfully religious, but Tom Sawyer, the protagonist, finding treasure is one of the many instances where even a small town is full of adventure. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain is a fictional novel that highlights some of the experiences that the author had as a boy. It is a novel about boyhood during an era before American industrialization, emphasized when Twain concludes the story with, “It being strictly a history of a boy, [the chronicle] must stop here,” (Twain 253). In the novel, Mark Twain uses folklore and superstition, mischief and humor, and …show more content…

For example, in a main plot point in the story, Huckleberry Finn has bought a dead cat that will supposedly cure warts by taking it to the graveyard at midnight and chanting, “Devil follow corpse, cat follow devil, warts follow cat, I’m done with ye!” (Twain 54-55) Tom objects by arguing that he has a real solution by sticking your hand in a tree stump full of rain water and reciting a chant, then doing a series of steps and movements that will shrink the wounds. Twain emphasizes the silliness and the length of performing these superstitious rituals. It all goes back to the fact that, unlike adults, only boys and girls believe these charms. The reason warts are a problem in the first place is because they are associated with witches and the devil. The chant Huck plans to use with the dead cat shows this connection. Witches are portrayed negatively throughout the book, known to cast curses and interfere with superstitious charms. Huck’s “old Mother Hopkins” that told him about the dead cat superstition was revealed as a witch, known to mumble the Lord’s prayer backwards and cause Huck’s drunken dad to break his arm the night she “witched” him (Twain 55). There is an episode where Tom Sawyer blames witches because his marble-seeking charm failed. …show more content…

The book features this mischief exclusive to boyhood. Tom’s mischief includes what any other boy would have done, but there are also instances where he takes advantage of human tendency. For example, when Tom is set by Aunt Polly to whitewash, he comes up with an interesting way to manipulate others into doing it for him by making the work not seem like work at all. Soon he is getting paid to sit back and watch people do it for him, all because he discovers that, “…to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.” (Twain 21) Here, the author makes humor of human psychology. Another example Twain exposes humans’ follies and mischiefs is in chapter four, when Tom gathers enough tickets for a Dore Bible, an achievement that only the finest spiritual scholars receive (Twain 29-40). Getting a Dore Bible might cause people to assume that Tom is faithful to his church, but the chapter shows how disengaged and resentful Tom – and the other boys and girls - was to church service, thus shows its weekly routine in a more sarcastic light. Tom and the other children can’t help but include their child-like mischief into the sermon, which shows that even as organized as religion is, it just cannot tame the children (Twain 35). The book portrays church service as a boring, routine event that everyone merely shows up to, as stated, “It is not

Get Access