1
I
ain’t doing my duty by that boy, and that’s the Lord’s truth, goodness
knows. Spare the rod and spile the child, as the Good Book says.
I’m a-laying up sin and suffering for us both, I know. He’s full
of the Old Scratch, but laws-a-me! he’s my own dead sister’s boy,
poor thing, and I ain’t got the heart to lash him, somehow. Every
time I let him off, my conscience does hurt me so, and every time
I hit him my old heart most breaks.
This quotation is from Chapter 1,
when Tom has just escaped Aunt Polly’s grasp once again. Aunt Polly’s
mixture of amusement and frustration at Tom’s antics is characteristic
of her good humor. She attempts to discipline Tom out of a sense
of duty more than out of any real indignation. In fact, she often
seems to admire Tom’s cleverness and his vivacity. Her inner conflict
about her treatment of Tom is summed up in the final sentence of
this passage.
The faithful re-creation of regional dialects is a characteristic
element of Twain’s style. Aunt Polly uses a colloquial vocabulary
and pronunciation that may be difficult for a reader unfamiliar
with these speech patterns. Twain’s minute attention to language
is an important aspect of his realism—–his project of capturing the uniqueness
of American frontier life. Twain carefully studied the speech of
his local Missouri community and experimented with different ways
of rendering it in writing. Furthermore, he attended closely to
the internal variations in speech even within such a small town
as Hannibal (rendered in his fiction as St. Petersburg). The differences
between the language of rich people and poor people, and between
the language of blacks and whites, often find expression in Twain’s
dialogue. In addition to its distinctive idiom and accent, Aunt
Polly’s speech is peppered with clichés and folk wisdom, mixing
Scripture and local sayings in a way that gives structure and meaning
to her experience.
