Becky Thatcher’s Literary Half-life: Appropriating Mark Twain’s Good Girl

Abstract

AbstractMark Twain’s Becky Thatcher features very little in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. She mostly vanishes after Tom Sawyer, and even in that novel she speaks fewer than a thousand words of dialogue. She disappears from Twain’s work almost completely after Huckleberry Finn, where she receives a single mention. An insignificant character to academics, Becky appears in the scholarly record little more than she had in Twain’s fiction. This essay explores Becky Thatcher’s outsized role in cinematic, literary, and other adaptations across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Becky Thatcher’s literary half-life extends to clothing racks and gift shops, as well as in cinematic and literary adaptations and appropriations. These transformations map racial and sexual anxieties of several American generations. Minor though she may seem, Becky looms large in films, fiction, restaurants, tourist attractions, and all the ephemera produced from the marketing of successful fictional characters in a capitalist media landscape.