Work and Play in Tom Sawyer and Little Women

Introduction: Work, Play, and Children's Literature

"All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." This adage takes on various meanings according to context — in the early twenty-first century, it will most likely be used to imply too much seriousness about schoolwork. But in the consideration of children's literature in the nineteenth century, we face the prospect of a society where child labor was actually a fact of life. We are familiar with the stereotypes that still linger in the collective imagination: young boys forced to work as chimney-sweeps, or girls compelled to labor in textile factories. The simple fact is that between the present day and the emergence of children's literature as a category of its own — largely during the nineteenth century — there has been a widespread reform in labor practices and social mores that has altered what "work" might mean for young Jack, or indeed Jill. An examination of how the concept of "work" is constructed within Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Louisa May Alcott's Little Women can give us some sense of how work and play were complicated by issues of economics, including gender and slavery.

Tom Sawyer and the Whitewashing Episode

One of the most famous episodes in Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer is, in itself, about the concepts of work and play — this is the scene in which Tom is compelled by his Aunt Polly to whitewash a fence. Before examining the episode in closer detail, however, some general observations about Twain's novel are necessary. We should first note the title. It would be difficult to imagine a child before the emergence of bourgeois society in the nineteenth century being in a position to have "adventures," or to find those adventures described in fiction. The title describes Twain's novel perfectly, with its episodic and picaresque construction. There were, of course, adventure stories in print — Chapter VIII of Tom Sawyer indicates that Tom himself reads tales about Robin Hood and his Merry Men, and is willing to act out these adventures as part of his own. But Robin Hood is an adult; Tom Sawyer is only a child. To some extent, childhood is here defined as a form of freedom from adult responsibilities, and it is worth noting that Robin Hood himself is someone who overturns standard ideas about social organization and what people ought to do.

The episode of Tom whitewashing the fence illustrates something one is compelled to do. Twain is careful to describe the episode in terms of the overall pleasantness of the day, so that the physical labor entailed in whitewashing a fence is bound to seem tedious and unpleasant by contrast. The area outside the town is described as seeming like "a Delectable Land, dreamy, reposeful, and inviting" (Twain 15). In other words, the story begins with Tom already imagining a space beyond the imposed responsibilities of civilization — the sort of place where children can play at being Robin Hood. Twain describes Tom's reluctance to work in comically exaggerated terms: surveying the fence, Tom reflects that it is "Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden" (15). Even Tom's reluctance to do household chores is exaggerated to the level of emotions more suitable to melodramatic romance than a small-town Missouri street.

This ironized exaggeration comes into sharper focus, however, when we consider the larger capitalist dimension of the episode. Tom counts his "worldly wealth," which consists of "bits of toys, marbles, and trash; enough to buy an exchange of work" (16). Within this parody of a capitalist mindset, Tom recognizes that he lacks sufficient parody-capital and "gave up the idea of trying to buy the boys." Instead, he turns to the entrepreneurial spirit in another way. Twain recognizes it as a deliberate stratagem — a "great, magnificent inspiration" — which consists of turning the chore into play (16). Tom's inspiration appears to come from observing Ben Rogers, who pretends to be a steamboat captain. For Tom, who has to paint a fence, Ben's play counts as leisure, yet for an adult reader, Ben's form of play consists of "personating" something that, in adulthood, would be a form of work (16–17). Tom therefore transforms fence-painting into an activity like steamboat-piloting — something that can be reimagined as play rather than work.

This is evident in Tom's strategy of dramatizing his own activity for Ben's benefit, greeting him with "Why, it's you, Ben! I warn't noticing" — as though the fence-painting were so captivating that it provides its own distraction — and responding to Ben's charge that this is "work" with "What do you call work?" (17). All Tom needs to do is redefine the activity and pretend that it affects him powerfully in order to provoke Ben's jealousy. His response to the claim that it constitutes work is: "Well, maybe it is, and maybe it ain't. All I know, is, it suits Tom Sawyer" (18).

Slavery, Child Labor, and Capitalist Economics in Tom Sawyer

The episode essentially represents the invention of a capitalist sales pitch or advertising technique. Tom glamorizes the activity for Ben by making it seem enjoyable only to those of superior discernment, and also difficult and unattainable: "Yes, she's awful particular about this fence; it's got to be done very careful; I reckon there ain't one boy in a thousand, maybe two thousand, that can do it the way it's got to be done" (18). Tom has made the activity appear to require special talent and insight, and the larger joke is that his initial capitalist scheme — possibly paying other boys to do the work for him — is reversed: he now gets Ben and the other children to pay him for the opportunity to work. The profits are parody profits within a parody economy, but Twain nonetheless maintains the metaphor of commerce, claiming that "Tom was literally rolling in wealth" — although that wealth is defined in the same terms as before: "toys, marbles and trash" (19). We are also told that "If he hadn't run out of whitewash he would have bankrupted every boy in the village" (19).

What we witness here seems like a parable about the birth of capitalism, or the birth of advertising. Twain offers his own moralistic gloss on the story:

"Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it — namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign." (19–20)

This question of obligation, however, is set into sharp relief when we consider the inclusion of Jim and the water-bucket at the beginning of the episode. If the concept of child labor in the nineteenth century is remote to a present-day reader, the concept of slave labor is even more remote, and it is worth noting that Twain subtly likens one to the other. In thinking about how he can procrastinate from his assigned chores, Tom notes that "Jim never got back with a bucket of water under an hour — and even then somebody generally had to go after him" (15). But when Tom volunteers to take on Jim's task, Jim notes that he has been specifically instructed to work and not play: "Ole missis, she tole me I got to go an' git dis water an' not stop foolin' roun' wid anybody" (15).

To some extent, the paternalism of the slavery system is likened here to the obviously paternalistic system in which children exist: neither Tom nor Jim is paid to perform their tasks. Yet it is interesting that Tom finds the task assigned to the slave preferable to his own — not only because it seems to offer greater opportunity for leisure and distraction, but also for the simple fact that it is not the task assigned to him. The suggested similarity between slaves and children becomes more apparent when Jim receives corporal punishment from Aunt Polly: after the moment of distraction for both Tom and Jim, we learn that "Jim was flying down the street with his pail and a tingling rear, Tom was whitewashing with vigor, and Aunt Polly was retiring from the field with a slipper in her hand and triumph in her eye" (16). The slave and the child alike are excluded from a system of work as something one is paid for, though Tom does exist within a world where such payment is not forbidden to him. Slavery, as Twain presents it, is a state in which one's existence as a worker is entirely obligatory and compulsory — a state that illuminates Twain's maxim about work and play even more vividly than his examples of the hobbies of the wealthy or privileged.

Conclusion: Commerce, Slavery, and the Meaning of Childhood

The moral here is about finding a balance between extremes, and is therefore intended to render the girls self-sufficient. But self-sufficiency is constructed differently by Twain: if the March girls learn, to a certain degree, how to manage their own household economics, Tom Sawyer by contrast is learning how to manipulate the larger social economy through the power of advertising. In both cases, childhood work and play are defined in terms of the larger adult world of commerce — and both novels require the contrasting image of slavery to contextualize the unfreedom, and the remoteness from economic reality, of children who will grow up to take part in that economic world.

Works Cited

Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women. Edited with an introduction by Elaine Showalter. New York: Penguin Books, 1989. Print.

Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Edited with an introduction by John Seelye. New York: Penguin Books, 1986. Print.