SOURCE: "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: A Nightmare Vision of American Boyhood," in The Massachusetts Review, Vol. XXI, No. 4, Winter, 1980, pp. 637-52.

Wolff is an American educator and critic. In the following essay, she 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.

Twain's second book of boyhood has more or less cornered one segment of the American Dream. Read with admiration (read during the long years when Moby Dick was relegated to obscurity), it captured both our lofty goals and our tragic weaknesses; and if it is not "the" American epic, it has epic dimensions. By comparison, its predecessor seems unworthy of serious attention (a "comic idyll of boyhood," says Leo Marx dismissively, on his way to a lengthy analysis of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn)—no more than idealized reminiscences...