Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn: Journey of Initiation

I. Initiation Stories and Mark Twain’s Two Adventures

1.1 Initiation Stories

The word “initiation” originated from anthropology. It refers to, after a series of hardships and ordeals, the adolescent obtaining the knowledge, ability and confidence to face the society and the life independently, and therefore entering a new stage of life—adulthood. These hardships and ordeals are often some kinds of ceremonies. Especially in primitive tribes, when boys come to certain age, they must experience some ordeals on their bodies in order to be accepted as adults by their society, such as cutting some part of their bodies, catching and killing animals, and completing a task which usually only an adult can.

In the history of English literature, so far the name of “initiation story” has not been established. That is not because its amount is so small that it cannot become an independent subgenre of fiction, but, quite contrarily because there are large amounts of initiation stories, with different perspectives, then it is hard to express its broad literary vision and aesthetic scope with just a concise word. In addition, English critics have not made a profound study on it so that there are many names for it. Among them, the more commonly used ones are “initiation story” or “novel of initiation”, “growing-up novel”, “coming-of-age novel”, “novel of youth” or “novel of adolescence”, “novel of life”, etc.

For so many names for English initiation stories, there is no unanimous view in academic circles. Mordecai Marcus, in his article “What is an Initiation Story?”, offers a provisional working definition which contains the main elements in initiation story:

 

   An initiation story may be said to show its young protagonist experiencing a significant change of knowledge about the world or himself, or a change of character, or of both, and this change must point or lead him towards an adult world. It may or may not contain some form of ritual, but it should give some evidence that the change is at least likely to have permanent effects. (Marcus, 1969:29)

 

The famous theoretician of literature and art, Bakhtin, has ever made a specialized study on initiation stories. In his Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the Realist History he expounded the features, classifications and characters of initiation stories systematically. He pointed out that,

 

   Most novels only master the fixed characters, and they are in a large amount and dominant status. Besides that, there is another type of novel which is rarely known. Novels of this type create characters in static unities but dynamic ones. The characteristic of a hero in the formula of this kind of novel becomes a variable, and then the changes of the hero contain a sense of story. So the plot of the novel gets recognized anew and reconstructed essentially, and time goes into the hero and the image itself. So this type of novel can generally be called initiation stories. (芮渝平,2004:6)#p#分页标题#e#

 

In short, an initiation story has a theme of narrating the course of one’s growing-up; it tells the experiences of the character; through the narrative about one or more characters’ experience of growing-up, it reflects the course of changing form immaturity to maturity in mind and psychology of the characters. Initiation stories cannot be identified by the age of their heroes or be standardized. As a literary theme which can be discussed by people of different times over and over again, “initiation problems” are not merely the problem of maturity in physiology. Some heroes in initiation stories are even older than thirty years old, for instance, the hero in Song of Solomon.

Since till now there has always been lacking of systematic study on initiation stories in China, and no enough attention, either, paid to the study or introduction of American initiation stories, then Professor Rui Yuping from Ningbo University published her book, A Study of American Initiation Stories at the proper time in May, 2004. It systematically introduces the development of initiation stories in Europe and in American, and makes more analyses on the features of American Initiation stories. And it gives the thesis much revelation.

 

1.2 Mark Twain’s Two Adventures

Among Mark Twain’s major works, the Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn most strikingly stand out. In the Encyclopedia American, we read “He(Mark Twain)is best known for two novel of boyhood life on the Mississippi River in the mid-19th century ─Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer”(Grolier, 1981:291). Also in the New Encyclopedia, we read, Mark Twain “won a worldwide audience for his stories of the Adventures of Tom Sawyer andthe Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” (Turner, 1980:806). Although more than ninety years has passed since his death, his two Adventures written a century ago still remain one of the first choices in literary reading.

1.2.1 Social Background of the Two Adventures

After four years of fighting in the Civil War, the industrialized North defeated the agrarian South, which not only protected the integrity of the United States as an indivisible nation, but also made American head toward capitalism. Increasing industrialization and mechanization propelled an economic boom that made America step into a prosperous age. However, industrialization brought in problems, like a significant increase in evil and crime. Meanwhile, the old customs and conventions still remained in America, such as the abolition of slavery and equal chance for everyone was not perfectly achieved since some states in the south continued to deprive of the former slaves’ rights to vote through certain laws. Both the rising step and the dark side of America are reflected in Mark Twain’s two Adventures composed from 1870 to 1884. In the two Adventures, under the help of the two children protagonists, Mark Twain on the one hand, showed great concern for the good nature of human beings and symbolized American’s rise with Tom’s and Huck’s moral growth, on the other hand, threw strong criticism on the society he lived in.   #p#分页标题#e#

1.2.2 Literary Background of the Two Adventures

Mark Twain drew a vivid picture of his hometown and the Mississippi region of which he knew best in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. After the Civil a number of American writers accentuated “fidelity to a particular geographical section and a faithful representation of its habits, speech, manners, history, folklore, or beliefs” (吴定柏，2004:72) in their works, whose mode of writing is regionalism. Being a subordinate order of realism, regionalism indicates that an author writes about what is unique in his or her living section. The local color writing is the form of regionalism, which came to prominence in the United States in the late 19th century.

The main features of local fiction are summarized by Wu Dingbo in the following ways. ① Local color fiction describes the exotic and the picturesque, namely, things that are not common to other region. ② Local color fiction glorifies the past. The writers are nostalgic about the past as they are really trying to describe things would be lost. But local color is not merely as nostalgia but also as realism in the service of social criticism. ③ Local color fiction also attempts to show things as they are (吴定柏，2004:74). All these characteristics of local fiction are fully exhibited in Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.     

 

II. Tom’s and Huck’s Initiation 

2.1Tom’s Initiation

Although at the end of Tom Sawyer Tom is still very much a boy and capable of thinking like the old Tom the readers know so well in the early chapters of that novel, Tom grows up psychologically in the course of the story. When the novel opens, Tom is a crafty, intelligent, and imaginative boy with an intuitive understanding of human nature. He expends his immense personal resources mainly on tricks and games. Tom is engaged in and often the organizer of childhood pranks and make-believe games, who rarely takes anything seriously and seems to worry about nothing. As the novel progresses, these initially consequence-free childish games take on more and more gravity. Tom leads himself, Joe Harper, Huck, and, in the cave, Becky Thatcher into increasingly dangerous situations. He also finds himself in predicaments where he must put his concern for others above that for himself, such as when he testifies at Injun Joe’s trial and when he saves Becky in the cave.

The murder of Dr. Robinson is the first serious conflict to present itself in the story, and Tom begins to change after he witnesses it. In this incident, he must decide whether he will break his blood oath and endanger his life by testifying that Muff Potter did not kill the doctor, of whether he will let Muff Potter die for a crime he did not commit. Tom’s anxiety and guilt about Muff Potter’s fate are plain in the scenes in which he tries to get Huck to reconsider their vow to secrecy. After his attempts at making his conscience feel better by visiting Muff Potter in the jailhouse provide no relief from his torment, Tom decides to follow his conscience despite the ties that have bound him ─his devotion to loyalty and his personal safety. He goes and tells the truth bravely.#p#分页标题#e#