The Disobedient Child

The current chapter explores the censorship imposed on the Spanish translations of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, due to the censors’ perceived need to suppress the subversive and disobedient child image cultivated in Twain’s works. Specifically, this chapter answers these two questions: what were the particular episodes that attracted the censors’ criticisms, due to their disapproval of the child characters’ behaviour that appeared to them as subversive and inappropriate? In what ways were their objections supported by the patronage power and the dominant poetics of children’s literature in the target culture? Through the analysis, this chapter discovers that, far from mere passive adherence to the regime’s censorship principles, during their “readings”, the censors were in fact actively defending a model Francoist child image, which was nonetheless characterised by its overall passiveness.