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

This article examines the character Becky Thatcher from Mark Twain’s novels, focusing on her minimal role in the original texts and her extensive reimagining in twentieth- and twenty-first-century adaptations across literature, film, and commercial culture. While Becky is a minor figure in Twain’s *The Adventures of Tom Sawyer* and *Adventures of Huckleberry Finn*, later adaptations recast her in diverse and often contradictory ways, engaging with themes of gender, sexuality, race, and authorship. Notably, recent novels and films explore Becky’s agency through gender performance and narrative control but frequently perpetuate problematic portrayals, including sexual violence and racial stereotypes, while often erasing or sanitizing the historical realities of slavery and racism present in Twain’s works. These adaptations reflect ongoing cultural tensions around preserving literary canon, confronting historical trauma, and negotiating gender and racial politics in American literature and media.