The Adventures of Tom Sawyer | The Lack of Male Role Models in Tom Sawyer

In the following excerpt, the author asserts that Tom Sawyer is a protest against the female-dominated moral code of Twain's day and the lack of suitable masculine role models for boys.

Initially Twain had intended [The Adventures of Tom Sawyer] to be a kind of bildungsroman: as Justin Kaplan reports, it was to have had four parts—"1. Boyhood & youth; 2. Y[outh] & early manh[ood]; 3. The Battle of Life in many lands; 4. (age 37 to [40?])..."

Yet the finished novel shows no sign of this early intention. In fact, Twain writes his "conclusion" with a kind of defensive bravado: "So endeth this chronicle. It being strictly a history of a boy, it must stop here; the story could not go much further without becoming the history of a man." At least one...

[The entire page is 3744 words long]

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