清潔志向という名の暴力 : Mark TwainのThe Adventures of Tom Sawyerにおける浮浪者対策

The community of St. Petersburg is divided into two worlds: the tyrannical legal world and the benevolent and caring world of mothers. People's attitudes towards vagrants are also split in two. The judges, a typical example of the legal world, severely impose a penalty on Huck's pap and Injun Joe for vagrancy; on the other hand, widow Douglass, a representative of the world of mothers, adopts Huck and provides him with education in hygiene. In this regard, there is a complete antithesis between "the legal world of judges" and "the world of mothers." But, in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huck happens to realize that there is another kind of violence in women's world. The widow's cleanliness-conscious correctional education is a good example. As soon as he moves to her house, the widow starts to drum cleanliness into his head. Huck, who has not got used to wearing clean tight-fitting clothes and washing his body, and so on, cannot keep up with her "respectable" way of living. Huck is not arrested as a vagrant like his father and Injun Joe, and moves to the widow's house in this story, because he has the role of disclosing the negative side of women's excessive concern with childbearing.