Petersburg. Tom alone appears to hold out for a pirate’s life, yet, under the cover of darkness and unknown to Huck and Joe, he makes a return to Aunt Polly’s house, where (we learn only later) he plans to leave her a signal that he is safe. This nighttime journey can serve to symbolize Tom’s attachment to community and home, and this attachment has its climactic dramatization in the boys’ surprise appearance at their own funeral. The members of the community, so glad and relieved at the boys’ return that they don’t mind being duped, give Tom exactly the kind of tumultuous approbation he most desires. This was, the narrator tells us, “the proudest moment of [Tom‘s] life” (p. 107). As many commentators have observed, Tom’s “rebirth” in this scene is figured specifically as a rebirth into society.

Tom’s need for the community’s approbation qualifies his status as a rebel. His subversive acts must always be seen within the context of his larger identification with the established order, an identification that Judge Thatcher acknowledges when he predicts for Tom enrollment in the National Military Academy and later in “the best law school in the country” (p. 200). There is nothing in Tom’s actions that ever approaches the authentic subversiveness of Huck’s decision, in Huckleberry Finn, to go to hell for trying to steal a black man, Jim, out of slavery. Unlike Huck, Tom is fundamentally a “good” boy, which is to say a boy acculturated to society’s norms, though he acts out his goodness in “bad” ways.

There is a literary context for this kind of boy. In writing Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain was participating in a recently formed genre of American fiction that sought to unsettle the old “good boy-bad boy” dichotomy of earlier moralistic literature. Twain himself had worked in this genre in sketches he had written earlier, and in 1869 Thomas Bailey Aldrich published The Story of a Bad Boy, which demonstrated the suitability of the theme for longer narratives.

Such works, which turned the “bad boy” into a kind of American hero by showing his inner goodness, laid out several paradigms of youthful behavior, and all of them make their appearance in Tom Sawyer. Along with the “bad boy,” represented by Tom, Twain gives us the “good boy” in the person of Tom’s half-brother, Sid, who relentlessly reports Tom’s misdeeds to Aunt Polly. Even more objectionable than “good boy” Sid is the “Model Boy of the village” (p. 10), Willie Mufferson, who took “as heedful care of his mother as if she were cut glass”: “The boys all hated him, he was so good” (p. 35). A variation on the Model Boy is Alfred Temple, “that St. Louis smarty that thinks he dresses so fine and is aristocracy” (p. 114), whose presence in the novel serves to sharpen Twain’s exploration of class issues, and of tensions between urban and rural life. Country boy Tom vying with the “St. Louis smarty” for Becky’s affections will bring to mind for some readers the novels of Jane Austen and other English novels of manners.

On one level, the narrative proceeds by gradually revealing Tom’s inner goodness. The early chapters are organized by a series of his capers, which illustrate just how “bad” he can be. But later in the novel we learn about his “harassed conscience” (p. 139), which leads him courageously to testify at Muff Potter’s trial. And near the book’s conclusion we witness the sensitivity he shows toward Becky’s feelings when the two of them are lost in the cave. This episode illustrates not only Tom’s compassion and courage, but also his respectability; he and Becky in these scenes have about them the aspect of a middle-class couple.

While Twain did not invent American fiction of the good-bad boy (it has its still deeper background in European picaresque fiction, and in the novels of Dickens), he used it for his own distinctive purposes of social criticism. For these purposes, in the context of this novel, he needed a figure who systematically challenges the established order even as he firmly belongs to it. This role places Tom in a somewhat unusual position among Twain’s heroes. He is not an outsider figure in the radical way that Huck most certainly is in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or the way that Hank Morgan is in A Connecticut Yankee. Nor does he really resemble Twain’s classic outsider, the man that corrupted Hadleyburg, in Twain’s story of that title (1899).