Loading...
Domestic Interiors: Boyhood Nostalgia and Affective Labor in the Gilded Age
Lowry, Richard S.
Lowry, Richard S.
Abstract
At the end of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer ( 1875 ), Mark Twain appends a terse note: "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." The ending is as abrupt as it could be: until its final chapters the text celebrates what Twain calls "the pure unalloyed pleasure" of boyhood, inviting adult readers to immerse themselves once again in the "pattern- restless, noisy. and troublesome" of childhood energy. By the end, however, as Tom's summer adventures draw to a close and he must once again face the socializing injunctions of home, school, and church; as Huckleberry Finn is adopted by the widow Douglas; the boyhood world of St. Petersburg grows increasingly constricted, haunted by the specter of an adult manhood that, as Twain acknowledges in his conclusion, threatens the novel's idyllicism.
Description
Date
1997-02-01
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Yale University Press
Collections
Download Dataset
Files
Loading...
Lowrydoc.pdf
Adobe PDF, 3.83 MB
Rights Holder
Usage License
Embargo
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Journal Issue
Keywords
Citation
Advisor
Department
English