A character in Tom Sawyer

Aunt Polly

Name: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Author: Mark Twain

Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

Aunt Polly is the aunt who raises Tom Sawyer, her dead sister's son: a kind, devout old lady who means to be strict with him and is usually disarmed.

Also known as: Polly

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Inside the story

Meet Aunt Polly

Aunt Polly's voice opens the novel, calling for a boy who will not answer. Tom is her dead sister's son, and he lives in her house in St. Petersburg with his half-brother Sid and his cousin Mary. Her best spectacles are built for style, so she looks over them or under them rather than through them. She quotes the Bible readily and worries that if she spares the rod she will spoil the child.

Twain calls her simple-hearted and gives her one harmless vanity: she believes she has a talent for cunning questions. Her traps rarely hold Tom for long. Her deeper difficulty is tenderness. Punishing him hurts her, and when she strikes him by mistake over a sugar bowl that Sid broke, her sense of discipline will not let her apologize, so she goes about her work with a troubled heart.

Character analysis

Why Aunt Polly matters

Aunt Polly is the adult Tom tests most often, and the one whose love for him is never in question. Much of the book's comedy comes from her, from the switch that never lands to the patent medicines she tries on him. Some of its most tender scenes come from her as well, because Tom's adventures so often end in her worry and grief.

Through her, Tom begins to see what his adventures cost other people. The island escapade that makes him a schoolyard hero has left her mourning a drowned boy, and her complaint afterward is that he never once thought of her. When he sees how his clever story about a dream has hurt her, the joke that pleased him that morning looks mean and shabby.

In the novel

Key moments

Read the final moment only if you already know how the cave chapters end.

Chapter 1
The switch in the air
Aunt Polly catches Tom with jam on his mouth and raises a switch. He tells her to look behind her, and while she turns he is over the fence. She laughs at herself for being fooled again and admits she has not the heart to whip her dead sister's boy, though she resolves to make him work on Saturday.
Every time I let him off, my conscience does hurt me so, and every time I hit him my old heart most breaks.
Tom Sawyer, Chapter 1
Chapter 12
Pain-killer
When Tom turns pale and listless while Becky is ill, Aunt Polly tries every cure in her health journals on him, from cold-water baths to a fiery patent medicine. Tom feeds a dose to the cat and explains that he did it out of pity, because the cat had no aunt. She sees her own treatment of him in a new light and tells him he needn't take any more medicine.
She dropped the water treatment and everything else, and pinned her faith to Pain-killer.
Tom Sawyer, Chapter 12
Chapter 15
Under the bed
While the village believes Tom drowned, he slips home at night and hides under the bed as Aunt Polly talks with Sid, Mary, and Mrs. Harper. He hears her silence Sid for a word against him, and later hears her pray for him so lovingly that he is in tears before she finishes.
He was such a comfort to me, although he tormented my old heart out of me, ’most.
Tom Sawyer, Chapter 15
Chapter 19
The bark in the jacket
Aunt Polly learns from Mrs. Harper that Tom's marvelous dream was a trick, and she is hurt that he let her make a fool of herself. Tom insists he came home that night to leave her a message on a piece of bark. Afraid to find out that this is another lie, she twice reaches for his old jacket and draws back before she searches the pocket.
“I could forgive the boy, now, if he’d committed a million sins!”
Tom Sawyer, Chapter 19
Chapter 32
The long search
Tom and Becky have been lost in the cave for days. Aunt Polly, who at first assumed Tom had simply stayed the night with a friend, is worn down by the waiting. When the bells ring out in the night with news that the children are found, her happiness is complete.
Aunt Polly had drooped into a settled melancholy, and her gray hair had grown almost white.
Tom Sawyer, Chapter 32