cat
The cat is a minor but recurring creature in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, appearing in several episodes that highlight Tom's mischievous nature, the town's superstitions, and the comic texture of daily life in St. Petersburg. It is never given a proper name except for Aunt Polly's yellow cat, Peter, who becomes the unwitting victim of Tom's experiment with Pain-killer. The cat's appearances range from the mundane to the grotesque, and it functions both as a prop in Tom's schemes and as a barometer of the community's folk beliefs.
Encounters with Tom and Aunt Polly
The cat first appears in the opening chapter when Aunt Polly, searching for Tom, punches under the bed with a broom and "resurrected nothing but the cat." This moment establishes the cat as a familiar household presence, one that shares the domestic space with the family. Later, when Tom is trying to avoid punishment for playing hookey, he offers to show Jim his sore toe as a bribe, but the cat is not directly involved in that scene. The most memorable cat episode occurs when Tom, bored with Aunt Polly's water treatments and quack medicines, decides to dose the sitting-room floor crack with Pain-killer. Aunt Polly's yellow cat, Peter, appears, purring and eying the teaspoon avariciously. Tom warns him, "Don't ask for it unless you want it, Peter," but Peter insists. Tom pries open the cat's mouth and pours down the Pain-killer. The cat springs into the air, delivers a war-whoop, tears around the room banging into furniture and upsetting flower-pots, then prances on his hind legs, throws double summersets, and sails through the open window carrying the rest of the flower-pots with him. Aunt Polly, entering in time to see the climax, stands petrified. When she discovers the telltale teaspoon under the bed-valance, she cracks Tom's head with her thimble. Tom defends himself by saying he did it out of pity because the cat "hadn't any aunt" who would "roast his bowels out of him" with such treatments. This remark causes Aunt Polly a pang of remorse, and she softens, allowing Tom to stop taking the medicine.
Role in Superstition and Folk Belief
The cat is also central to the boys' superstitious world. Huckleberry Finn carries a dead cat, which he bought from a boy for a blue ticket and a bladder from the slaughter-house. He explains to Tom that dead cats are good for curing warts. The ritual involves taking the cat to a graveyard at midnight, when a wicked person has been buried, and heaving the cat after the devils who come to take the corpse away, saying, "Devil follow corpse, cat follow devil, warts follow cat, I'm done with ye!" Tom and Huck plan to use this method on the night they witness the graveyard murder. The cat thus becomes a tool in the boys' attempt to control their world through folk magic, a practice that the narrator notes was prevalent among children and slaves in the West at the period of the story.
The Cat as a Symbol of Tom's Rebellion and the Town's Norms
The cat's appearances also underscore Tom's rebellion against adult authority and the constraints of civilization. When Tom doses Peter with Pain-killer, he is not merely being cruel; he is subverting Aunt Polly's medical regime, turning her own remedy into a weapon of chaos. The cat's wild behavior mirrors Tom's own untamed energy. Later, when Huck is living with the Widow Douglas, he complains that he cannot "ketch a fly in there" or "chaw" during church, and he longs for the freedom of his old life, which included sleeping in empty hogsheads and playing with dead cats. The cat, in its dead form, represents the wild, unsupervised world of boyhood that Huck and Tom cherish. In the graveyard, the dead cat is the pretext for the boys' presence at the murder, and it becomes part of the oath of secrecy they swear afterward. The cat thus weaves through the novel as a thread connecting Tom's domestic mischief, the boys' superstitious adventures, and the darker events that test their courage and loyalty.
