Mark Twain\'s Pudd\'nhead Wilson Mark Twain Began

Mark Twain's "Pudd'nhead Wilson"

Mark Twain began The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson and The Comedy of Those Extraordinary Twins as an examination of Siamese caught in a farce, but as it developed, it morphed into the tragic story of with the introduction of a stranger and detective by the moniker of "Pudd'nhead Wilson." The story centers around the slave woman passing as a Free white named Roxy, who, with her "son" Tom, becomes involved in a murder trial in which her "true" identity as a "negro" is discovered by the novel use of finger printing. (Chapter Two.) In doing so, while they are freed of any incrimination in the trial of Judge Driscoll, they are restored to the ante-bellum society into which they were born with legislated discrimination. Pudd'nhead Wilson is another of Twain's classic social commentaries, with an ambiguous questioning of the status-quo that leads to a varied cadre of interpretations; under the lens of New Historicism, the story reveals the inner-workings of the Old South and how it interacted with those someplace between slave and free.

Galvanized by the social historian Steven Greenblatt, New Historicism is a critical approach to the standard methods of understanding history.

Born of the 1960s political culture that looked with suspicion upon the forms previously understood as mechanisms for social thought and reform, its thinkers brought not only new light to historical reasoning, but also new diversity to their fields; most were literary professors whose unique backgrounds, Italian-, African-, Asian-, and Latin-American as well as women, were new to academia as well.

Like their roles in the workplace, their ideas centered around non-conformity. They envisioned an approach to literary texts throughout time as a mechanism for understanding the contemporary world of the authors; they found images and narratives as literary agents performing a cultural function. Through this light, they tried to relate interpretive problems to cultural-historical problems in hopes of understanding more about societal history.

Mark Twain, whose 1890's literary prowess was not always recognized but his peers, capitalized on the quirks of his post-bellum world, ripe with racism, discrimination and crime to paint a careful picture of the fledgling New South. At this point historically, the South was ruled by the Jim Crow Laws recently enacted, modeled with solidified reminiscence of the South before the Civil War; racism was not only a personal characteristic, it was the whole world. This truth is evident in Pudd'nhead Wilson, in which race and slavery play a critical role.

Wilson views even a "drop of black blood" as a negative source of superstition, and although she passed as white, Roxy herself was a "negro,' whose one drop of black blood was enough to incriminate her to a life of segregated submission. When Tom discovers that he too is actually a slave, he is so wrought with dismay over this discovery that he even questions his own sense of self.

"In his broodings in the solitudes, he searched himself for the reasons of certain things, & in toil & pain he worked out the answers: Why was he a coward? It was the "nigger" in him. The nigger blood? Yes, the nigger blood degraded from original courage to cowardice by decades & generations of insult & outrage inflicted in circumstances which forbade reprisals, & made mute & meek endurance the only refuge & defence. Whence came that in him which was high, & whence that which was base? That which was high came from either blood, & was the monopoly of neither color; but that which was base was the white blood in him debased by the brutalizing effects of a long-drawn heredity of slave-owning, with the habit of abuse which the possession of irresponsible power always creates & perpetuates, by a law of human nature. So he argued."

To Tom, the presence of black blood in his body was a curse, a fact as good as empirical evidence that he was a lesser man.

At this point in American history, doctors, politicians, and even social anthropologists agreed with this scientific separation of the human man; to them, biology cemented the hierarchical roles provided by social racism. In the medical community, doctor Paul Barringer plainly laid this distinction in physical terms:

"Let us apply this biological axiom to the human race, taking as our example of that race, the Southern Negro ... I will show from the study of his racial history (phylogeny) that his late tendency to return to barbarism is as natural as the return of the sow that is washed to her willing in the mire ... The young negro of the South, except where descended from parents of exceptional character and worth, is reverting [after "civilization" by the whites through slavery] through hereditary forces to savagery ... It his nature that makes him criminal and imperils a civilization ... "

Whether or not Twain agreed with this was left conspicuously absent from a decisive comment or position in his literature. In Pudd'nhead Wilson, the argument could be made that he actually did not believe there was any great biological difference between Wilson and Tom; while Wilson could have argued that the immorality Tom exhibited was the result of race, he instead chose to say it was the product of his upbringing. Additionally, Twain omitted the Chapter Ten worry of Tom, tardily deleting the passage in later publications. The original manuscript reveals this concern on behalf of Tom's character, and the omission of it is significant to the argument that Twain did not agree. By keeping the original passage, Twain could have been associated with the support of a moral and interpersonal difference between the races; by deleting it, he prevents that automatic corollary.

At the time of its publication, a review of the book from the North credited Twain with addressing the "race problem" south of the Mason-Dixon. A review in the American Monthly wrote,

"Curiously enough, the plot, if one may presume to prophesy from the first chapters, is going to center around the mixing up of two babies, one of whom is a white child and the other a mulatto with a slight strain of negro blood, the two being under the charge of the fond mulatto mother; so that we may expect to find Mark Twain drawing some healthy moral concerning the race problem before we are through with 'Pudd'n Head Wilson.'"

At the same time, reviewers in the South failed to appreciate the ambiguous dualism of the Twain pen.

"A better title, perhaps, would be 'The Decline and Fall of Mark Twain;' for, looking at it solely as a piece of literature, there is no denying, that his much-advertised serial is tremendously stupid ... 'Pudd'nhead Wilson' is more than stupid. So far it has appeared -- to the end of the second installment, that is -- it is at once malicious and misleading ... I cannot comfort myself with the belief that he has sinned ignorantly against half his countrymen."