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Children and Identity in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Identity is both a complex concept whose meanings range from “Who am I?” and “How do I develop my identity?” to “Who needs an identity at all?” and a contemporary phenomenon that has perhaps become even more fascinating than the concept of identity itself. There are many different contemporary theories of identity, the most important of which are essentialist and anti- essentialist. The advocates of the essentialist approach believe in the existence of an inner essential content or core of self, perceive identity as a stable and unchangeable essence, and thus establish the identity as a “natural, ” innate or self-fulfilling category. The essentialist approach looks at the fixed or invariable identity categories, such as “woman, ” “Roma people” or “old people, ” and interprets every activity of the subject through those labels. Contrary to the essentialist, the anti-essentialist approach sees the category of identity as flexible, changeable, and unstable and claims that any kind of stable identity is just a temporary occurrence. The meaning of identity categories varies depending on place, time, socio-political, economic or cultural circumstances (Peternai Andrić, 2012: 9-48). In this paper, the emphasis will be put on how a child’s, and by extension an adult’s, identity is formed in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Beginning with the assumption that the concept of identity is an inseparable part of the (con)text of Twain’s novel, the first part of the paper will briefly examine the main tenets of essentialist and anti-essentialist readings of identity. The main part of the paper will explore the children, and by extension adult, characters in Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by utilizing the essentialist and anti-essentialist approach to identity. The identity categories taken into consideration in their analysis will be the mythical West, race, religion, and popular stereotypes.

identity, the essentialist approach, the anti-essentialist approach, children’s literature, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain

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