Model Children

The very delight with which Mark Twain imagined his characters’ mischievous idiosyncrasies has the effect of dislodging any clear distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behavior—a distinction illustrated, on the one hand, through Tom’s brother Sid and ‘the Model Boy, Will Mufferson,’ and, on the other, through Tom Sawyer, Joe Harper, and Huck Finn, the ‘juvenile pariah of the village, [and] son of the town drunkard.’ As ever for Twain, abstractions were inadequate to the roiling turmoil of life he envisioned. And not until eight years later, in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, would he be able to define the contorted implications of ‘bad’ behavior—behavior that paradoxically appears most ethical in its capacity to subvert the morally ‘civilized’ premises of a slave-holding South.