Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy

Tom Sawyer: Hero of Middle America 213
here when Tom reveals the source of his convictions in regard to the super
natural. Tom, we should remember, always settles disputes by
an appeal
to authority, never to experience. Usually it is the books he has read, about
Robin Hood, hermits, pirates, or robbers, that supply
the truth about
these things. In Huckleberry Finn Tom undergoes a radical extension of
his literary authoritarianism. Tom Sawyer's Gang is there conducted upon
methods borrowed from Don Quixote. The attack upon the Sunday
school picnic is closely modeled upon episodes from Cervantes. The
emancipation of Jim, at the end of the latter novel, is based upon bor
rowed bits and pieces from "Baron Trenck .
Henry IV"
and other of "them heroes,"
. . Benvenuto
. . .
Chelleeny
the Count of Monte Cristo chief
among them. Tom's Law is derived from the Book, the original being
transformed by infusions from such other sources as we have suggested.
Accordingly, it is remarkable when, in considering a question in regard to
the supernatural with Huck questioning the authenticity or reliability of
the superstition that a stray dog howling in the night is a certain prophecy
of death Tom settles the matter by saying, "That's what the niggers say,
and they know all about these kind of things, Huck."
Negroes as a
source of authority stand outside conventional Christianity
in Tom
Sawyer's America, much as earlier Protestants were outside the precincts of
authority in the Europe from which Tom's ancestors had fled.
Tom is led by his superstitions to a rendezvous with Huck Finn, to test
the virtues of a dead cat for the removal of warts. The cure requires going
to the graveyard "
has been buried,"
'long about midnight when somebody that was wicked
on the assurance that "a devU wiU come, or maybe two
or three"
to carry off the deceased. "When they're taking that feller away,
you heave your cat after 'em and say 'Devil follow corpse, cat foUow
devil, warts follow ye!'"
cat, I'm done with We suspect that Huck himself
is as much an attraction for Tom at this point the beginning of their
relationship
in the novel as the ritual of the cat. Huck's position outside
conventional society, hke that of the slaves, promises communion with an
esoteric and more genuine reahty. But Huck's belief in a devU or devils
coming for the corpse has a certain foundation in reality. It is notable
the soul of the deceased to be
that Huck expects the body and not merely
carried off. From the events that follow in the graveyard, culminating in
the murder of young Doctor Robinson, we infer that body snatching was
practiced by many young medical scholars,
who needed cadavers for
dissection and who could not get them any other way. The main obstacle to
dissection was the traditional religious belief in the bodily resurrection, a
belief to which Tom also addresses himself, as we have seen. The doctor,
hke Huck, Tom, and the Negroes, represented a ground of conviction
outside traditional religious views. Huck's superstition was then not
random, but arose from the frequency of grave robbing in the early days of
modern medicine. Dobbins the schoolmaster is also a secret votary of
medicine, and the book he keeps locked in his desk and which must be
kept from the view of children, as Becky discovers, because of its pictures