SOURCE: "Tom Sawyer and Mark Twain: Fictional Women and Real in the Play of Conscience with the Imagination," in Literature and Psychology, Vol. XXIII, No., 1973, pp. 5-12.

In the following essay, Karpowitz demonstrates how Twain's attitudes toward women are revealed in Tom Sawyer.

A year after Mark Twain finished Tom Sawyer (1875) he wrote to his boyhood friend, Will Bowen, criticizing him for counting too heavily on future profits and sentimentalizing his past.

Your reckless imaginations are always eating feasts that are never to be cooked …

Do you know that this is simply mental and moral masturbation? It belongs to the period usually devoted to physical masturbation, and should be left there & outgrown.

One of the recurring problems for a student of Mark Twain is to distinguish the author's own reckless fantasies from his more fruitful ones.

Women played a large part in Samuel Clemens' daydreams. In his letters...