Nothing in these games can take on actual power, or legitimacy, unless the language is right; Tom is the insistent monitor of legitimacy, the novel’s gate-keeper of language. Speech casts a spell over everything (the children’s superstitions, expressed by verbal incantations at several points, are merely one aspect of that spell), and, like Ariel’s song in the The Tempest, Tom’s language charms the world he inhabits. In a broader sense, Tom lives by language, as can be seen in his various verbal encounters with the adult world. For example, his deft wordplay with Aunt Polly in extricating himself from numerous scrapes shows his brilliance at this game, the game of language. The juxtaposition implied in “wordplay” is one of the most important elements in the novel.

In all these ways, Tom’s gift for language—the way he spins a world into being and sustains it according to his “rules”—helps to hold this otherwise unruly narrative together. But it also holds Tom together. Without this distinctive aspect of his character, we would be left with an exceedingly unfocused view of him. His undeterminable age is but one aspect of the indefiniteness of his rendering by Twain. For example, Tom’s identity as an orphan is a fact begging for explanation, yet none is ever offered. And, as numerous commentators have observed, we never learn what Tom looks like; our visualization of him depends altogether on the work of generations of illustrators, who have fancied him variously in his overalls and straw hat.

If we as readers depend on Tom’s verbal gifts for our sense of his identity, he himself needs them to negotiate the social structure of St. Petersburg, because the actual power in this book is overwhelmingly on the side of the adults. Aunt Polly, in fact, is among the more benign figures in the adult world of St. Petersburg, and one needs only to glance at that world to see what a disappointing gathering of humanity it is. From the respectable Judge Thatcher, at the top of the social scale, to the town drunkard, there is little here for a child to embrace. Top to bottom, this world is characterized by hypocrisy, social pretension, false piety, and self-interest. No one is spared, except perhaps some marginal figures like “the Welshman” whose benevolent presence and actions (rescuing the widow Douglas from Injun Joe) are necessary to furthering the plot.

For Tom and his friends, the most onerous adults in St. Petersburg are those, like the schoolmaster, with institutional authority, because their power over children has been officially sanctioned by society. And characteristically they use their power against the children, as the schoolmaster’s whipping of Tom in chapter 20 illustrates. Indeed, this is a novel structured by oppositions, and the opposition of children and adults, as Twain represents it, points to a larger one, that of civilization versus nature. Spatially, the boys retreat from St. Petersburg (from home and school and church) to Jackson’s Island and Cardiff Hill, and temporally they retreat from their school year into the freedom of summer.

The very word that titles the novel, “adventures,” suggests these twinned flights into time and space, which in turn suggest Freud’s classic formulation of civilization and its discontents. Here, work is the enemy; it is, in the narrator’s words, “whatever a body is obliged to do,” and the self finds fulfillment and pleasure in the opposite of work, which is to say, “play”: “Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do” (p. 18). These phrases come from the chapter in which Tom, through deception, turns his own (onerous) work of whitewashing the fence into the pleasure of others (as well as his own profit), showing how deeply, if instinctively, he himself understands the formulation.

To accommodate a vision of retreat from the adult world of work and the confinement of institutional forms like school and church, Twain renders the world of his novel as one long summer idyll. This quality works to give Tom Sawyer a firm unity of time and place, another aspect of its scenic presentation. Unlike Huck Finn, which transports its hero relentlessly away from St. Petersburg into unknown and threatening worlds downriver, Tom Sawyer holds its characters within a tightly circumscribed field of action, never allowing that action to venture farther than a few miles from the community, which forms the moral center of the novel.

And while the community has many objectionable qualities for Tom and his friends, he is always drawn back to it. His opposition to the community, in fact, forms his relation to that community and, ironically, binds him to it. When Tom, Huck, and Joe camp on Jackson’s Island, Joe soon becomes homesick, and even Huck begins to long for the familiar “doorsteps and empty hogsheads” (p. 90) that serve as his home in St.