Willie Mufferson

Willie Mufferson, known throughout St. Petersburg as the Model Boy, embodies the ideal of childhood conduct that the town's adults admire and its children resent. He appears in the narrative primarily as a living standard against which Tom Sawyer's own behavior is measured and found wanting. His most notable public act is his weekly attendance at church, where he takes "as heedful care of his mother as if she were cut glass," a display of filial piety that makes him "the pride of all the matrons." This very perfection, however, earns him the hatred of every other boy in the village, who resent the way he is constantly "thrown up to them" as an example. Tom Sawyer, who knows the Model Boy "very well" and "loathed him," regards Willie's Sunday habit of letting a white handkerchief hang from his back pocket as a mark of snobbery, especially since Tom himself owns no handkerchief. Willie Mufferson's function in the story is to define by contrast the kind of boy Tom is not: obedient, clean, pious, and a source of pride to adults, yet utterly devoid of the adventurous spirit and genuine vitality that the narrative celebrates. He is a flat character, a type rather than an individual, whose sole purpose is to illuminate the social expectations that Tom consistently defies.