by Mark Twain
INTRODUCTION
Mark Twain’s Pudd‘nhead Wilson, first published in 1894, is a comic novel about race with much bitterness at its heart. When Twain wrote the book, he was living cheaply in Italy, picking up the pieces of his life after bankruptcy. Like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twain did not like Italy. In The Innocents Abroad (1869), he is sarcastic about Florence’s “weary miles of paintings” and pleased that Dante was not buried in the city that had exiled the Italian poet. But in the early 1890s Twain’s investments in a typesetting machine company and a publishing company went bust. Suddenly, his expansive Hartford, Connecticut, years were behind him, and so, too, were the successes of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), as well as his historical romances. The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson and the Comedy of Those Extraordinary Twins, as it was first titled in the United States, is therefore a work of recovery. It goes back to the Missouri of Twain’s youth, but in this tale about mistaken identity and race relations, patient cunning and brutal expedience, his beloved Mississippi River is part of a mean landscape.
No one strikes out for the territory in Pudd‘nhead Wilson. Twain’s birthplace ceases to be the frontier and becomes a part of the South. Though set in slavery times, some of the bitterness in Pudd’nhead Wilson is perhaps aimed at a later American Republic, the Gilded Age’s failures of freedom and capitalism. After 1877, when Union troops were withdrawn from the southern states of the United States and Reconstruction governments were replaced by white supremacist administrations, black people in the South were disenfranchised by legislative acts, segregated by judicial review, condemned to unpaid labor by the debt peonage system, and made the victims of mob violence. In 1894 black journalist Ida B. Wells documented 134 lynchings of blacks in the South on charges ranging from murder, rape, arson, and horse stealing to asking for a white woman’s hand in marriage and writing letters to a white woman. The New York Times attacked Wells for what it regarded as her sensationalism. 1 She was a dangerous “mulatress” more interested in “income” than “outcome.”
After the defeat of Reconstruction, the antebellum era was presented in fiction as an idyllic time—followed by the Civil War, viewed by white southern writers (as well as by some white northern writers) as a noble, doomed cause, the War of Secession. In the South, the proposed political equality of blacks was portrayed as a degradation of white people, a punishment that the victorious North sought to impose on a proud region. Those in the Gilded Age who did not recognize the social destiny of blacks for what it was preferred the romantic South as depicted in the plantation stories of Thomas Nelson Page or in Uncle Remus’s folktales as written by Joel Chandler Harris.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn had its detractors, because Twain has Huck knowingly break the law to help his friend Jim, a fugitive slave, to escape. It’s hard not to think that Twain chose to set the action of Pudd‘nhead Wilson in the time of the Fugitive Slave Law for a reason. While Pudd’nhead Wilson is far from the earnest realism of George Washington Cable, Albion Tourgee, or William Dean Howells—novelists after the Civil War who portrayed blacks sympathetically and championed the cause of social justice—because it is not an argument, Twain’s novel is free of the sentimentalities about race often found in the realism of that era. Twain, Ralph Ellison once said, was the great storyteller who made sharp distinctions between what Americans said they were and how they acted. Twain’s point in this novel would seem to rest on what few of his characters notice.
In American Humor: A Study in the National Character (see “For Further Reading”), Constance Rourke reminds us that it is a mistake to look for the social critic—“even manque”—in Twain, and that the comic tradition is social criticism anyway. Since the Revolutionary era, humorists had provided Americans with a sense of themselves, and in the 1890s, a time in the United States of expansion, immigration, and empire building, they were important to the dissemination of racial attitudes. Compared to other humorists of his day, Twain is radical simply in his restraint. In Marietta Holley’s Samantha Among the Colored Folks (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1898), the first-person narrator declares, “The Government whipped the South and freed the niggers. And there it is, finished and done with.” Samantha thinks the South will remain quiet, if left alone. But after she and her husband move South and hear stories about black women who poisoned their own children, she comes to believe that the race problem can be solved only by the mass emigration of black people to Africa. In her faux folk voice, Samantha particularly relishes the calamities that befall mulattoes, beset on one side by white enemies and on the other by the low element of blacks who, she claims, bitterly mistrust them. Holley’s real purpose is to argue that the races must remain distinct.
Pudd‘nhead Wilson is mercilessly ironic in tone, so that Twain’s exasperation at received attitudes about race isn’t obvious right away. His burlesque is disarming, a sort of screen under the cover of which are stark assertions about the miseries of slavery and the unfairness of power based on race. Yet Pudd’nhead Wilson also feels like a sketch, as if to have filled in more, to have told his tale as anything more than a romp, would have been impossible for the kind of writer Twain was by temperament. Prefaces of sly humor were his custom, and Pudd‘nhead Wilson begins with “A Whisper to the Reader,” in which his dislike of Italy percolates again. A mild discontent, something of that Florentine weariness, enters into the narrative voice at this early point and never really goes away. Twain has no real interest in characterization or extended description of place in Pudd’nhead Wilson. His omniscient narrator scatters clues and barrels through his yarn at a great clip, but this modern fable differs considerably from his historical romances. The twins of Pudd‘nhead Wilson do not relate to the Tudor look-alikes of The Prince and the Pauper, and Pudd’nhead Wilson is not a reprise of King Arthur’s Yankee problem solver.
Then, too, it is a conflation of story ideas: one about a white baby and black baby switched in the cradle; and another about Italian twins with musical gifts of the higher freak show order. At times Twain’s novel reads as though the two stories, one melodramatic, the other farcical, had met up, unexpectedly, uneasily, in the same town. Most of Pudd‘nhead Wilson’s twenty-two chapters are headed by two aphorisms, selections from an almanac, Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar. “There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless,” begins the first saying attributed to Pudd‘nhead Wilson. “Tell the truth or trump—but get the trick,” goes the second (p. 5). The two sayings not only foreshadow the story of the man, Pudd’nhead Wilson, they also suggest the rueful spirit that rules the novel.
In 1830 Dawson’s Landing, Missouri, is a sleepy, pretty town. St. Louis is to the north, half a day’s journey by steamboat. Dawson’s Landing is “a slaveholding town, with a rich, slave-worked grain and pork country back of it” (p. 6). York Leicester Driscoll is the county judge and Dawson’s Landing’s “chief citizen.” He and his wife are childless. It is a hierarchical town, full of names that echo the England of Twain’s historical romances. Judge Driscoll, like his brother, Percy Northumberland Driscoll, or Colonel Cecil Burleigh Essex, or Pembroke Howard, takes his descent from the First Families of Virginia, or “F.F.V.s,” very seriously.
The children of Percy Northumberland Driscoll have died in infancy. When the novel opens, Percy’s wife dies a week after giving birth to a boy, and one of his slave girls, Roxana, who gave birth to a son the same day the Driscoll baby was born, is put in charge of both babies. Around the same time, Dawson’s Landing gains another new citizen, Mr. David Wilson, a “college-bred” twenty-five-year-old of “Scotch parentage” who is seeking his fortune. Homely, but with intelligent blue eyes, he would have been successful at once in Dawson’s Landing, “but he made his fatal remark the first day he spent in the village, and it ‘gaged’ him” (p. 8). While Wilson is talking to a group of townspeople, a dog somewhere begins to howl. “
I wish I owned half of that dog,” Wilson says. When someone asks why, he replies, “Because I would kill my half.”
The townspeople talk among themselves: “ ’Pears to be a fool.” “What did he reckon would become of the other half if he killed his half?” “He would be responsible for that half just the same as if he had killed that half instead of his own. Don’t it look that way to you, gents?” (p. 8). “Yes, it does ... , because if you kill one half of a general dog there ain’t any man that can tell whose half it was.” They decide that Wilson is not in his right mind, that he “hain’t got any mind,” that he is a “pudd’nhead”(p. 9). Though he will become well liked and his nickname will lose any unfriendly feeling it ever had, nevertheless it will take more than twenty years for him to overturn the town’s verdict about him. Wilson buys a small house next to Judge Driscoll’s property, but his reputation has left him no chance at practicing law. However, he does get work as a land surveyor and accountant. In his free time Wilson devotes himself to his hobbies of “palmistry” and “one which dealt with people’s finger-marks.” In his coat pocket Wilson carries shallow boxes containing strips of glass that he uses to record people’s thumbprints. He calls this fascination “an amusement,” because he finds that his “fads” only add to his image as a “pudd’nhead.”
While studying his fingerprint “records,” Wilson hears the flirtatious banter of a black man and a black woman: “ ’Clah to goodness if dat conceit o’ yo’n strikes in, Jasper, it gwine to kill you sho’. If you b‘longed to me I’d sell you down de river ’fo’ you git too fur gone” (p. 12). Wilson sees Roxana (“Roxy”) with her baby and the Driscoll baby. “From Roxy’s manner of speech a stranger would have expected her to be black, but she was not. Only one sixteenth of her was black, and that sixteenth did not show” (p. 12). Beautiful, graceful, intelligent, with an easy carriage and a sassy way when no white people are around, Roxy is delighted when Wilson, wanting to fingerprint both children for his collection, praises her baby—named Valet de Chambre, simply because Roxy liked the phrase—as well as her white master’s son, Thomas à Becket Driscoll. Wilson takes Roxy’s fingerprints, too.
To all intents and purposes Roxy was as white as anybody, but the one sixteenth of her which was black outvoted the other fifteen parts and made her a negro. She was a slave, and saleable as such. Her child was thirty-one parts white, and he, too, was a slave and, by a fiction of law and custom, a negro. He had blue eyes and flaxen curls like his white comrade; but even the father of the white child was able to tell the children apart—little as he had commerce with them—by their clothes: for the white babe wore ruffled soft muslin and a coral necklace, while the other wore merely a coarse tow-linen shirt which barely reached to its knees, and no jewellery (pp. 12-13).
Twain follows his point about the arbitrariness of racial classification with a point about slave theft. Two months after Wilson fingerprints Roxy and the children, Mr. Driscoll realizes that he has been robbed—yet again—of a small sum of money and that the thief must be one of his four house slaves, Roxy among them. Driscoll questions them, threatening to sell the thief down river, to the large cotton plantations where slavery is much harsher. They admit to taking sugar, honey, but not money. “The truth was, all were guilty but Roxana” (p. 14). She could have been guilty, had she not a fortnight before “got religion” at a revival meeting at the colored Methodist Church. The day after the revival, “vain of her purified condition,” she came across “a couple of dollars” unprotected on her master’s desk. “Religious etiquette” made it necessary for her to resist temptation at that moment, but it would by no means become “a precedent”; her piety “would limber up” in a week or two, and if then she came across dollars in need of comfort, she could name the comforter.
“Was she bad? Was she worse than the general run of her race? No. They had an unfair show in the battle of life, and they held it no sin to take military advantage of the enemy—in a small way” (pp. 14-15). They “smouched” provisions from the pantry whenever they got a chance, Twain explains, or stole a brass thimble, an emery-bag, a silver spoon, small articles of clothing, “or any other property of light value,” and did not consider such thefts sinful. “A farm smoke-house had to be heavily padlocked, for even the coloured deacon himself could not resist a ham when Providence showed him in a dream, or otherwise, where such a thing hung lonesome and longed for someone to love” (p. 15). He would be sure that in taking a trifle from a master, “the man who daily robbed him of an inestimable treasure—his liberty—he was not committing any sin that God would remember against him in the Last Great Day” (p. 15).
Not only does Twain say that slaves stole, he doesn’t condemn them or the entire black race as thieves, suggesting that it was necessary, a kind of retribution, a help to survival, and that it could be seen as resistance from the slave’s point of view. In the literature of the nineteenth century, blacks were accused of every character failing, including dishonesty. Twain’s realism about slavery and theft amounts to a defense of the black character, which was altogether unusual in fiction at that time. Most turn-of the-century novels by whites concerned with black people or the South were part of the intense propaganda that held that black people had been better off in slavery, and that they were not prepared for the responsibilities of full citizenship. In such novels, blacks were either murderous, lustful brutes or they were comic, childlike buffoons. Twain chooses the comic tone, but his burlesque allows him to subvert the messages in the comic images he deals with.
When Driscoll threatens to sell all four of his house slaves down river if the thief does not confess, the three culprits fling themselves at his feet. He relents, deciding to sell them off in Dawson’s Landing, for which they are sincerely grateful.
He knew, himself, that he had done a noble and gracious thing, and was privately well pleased with his magnanimity; and that night he set the incident down in his diary, so that his son might read it in after years, and be thereby moved to deeds of gentleness and humanity himself (p. 16).
Roxy, however, can’t sleep, crazed with horror at the thought that “her child could grow up and be sold down the river!” (p. 17). She hates Driscoll at that moment, and wonders what her child has done to deserve this punishment, and why Driscoll’s child deserves to escape such a fate.
Roxy tearfully resolves to kill herself and her child so that he can never be sold down river. Her Sunday gown, “a conflagration of gaudy colours and fantastic figures,” is more suitable than “dis mis ’able ole linsey-woolsey” (p. 18) for the watery tomb. But her splendid dress contrasts too tellingly with the “pauper shabbiness” of her own son. Roxy doesn’t want the angels to say to the prophets, “Dat chile is dress’ too indelicate fo’ dis place” (p. 18). She clothes her child in one of the master’s son’s snowy long gowns of ruffles and bows. “Now a strange light dawned in her eyes, and. in a moment she was lost in thought.” In a trancelike state, she puts the slave’s humble tow-linen shirt on Thomas à Becket Driscoll and his coral necklace around her own child’s neck. She puts her child in the elegant cradle and the heir of the house in her child’s unpainted, pine cradle, elated that she has saved her son from slavery.
Roxy is sorry for the real “Marse Tom,” but his father would sell her son at some point, “en I couldn‘t, couldn’t couldn’t stan’ it” (p. 19). The switch “ ’tain’t no sin—white folks has done it!” (p. 19). Roxy recalls a black preacher telling them about a prince who had been stolen from the palace and a usurper left in his place. She practices talking sweetly to her son as her master’s son and curtly to her master’s son as her own. “Lay still Chambers!—does you want me to take somep‘n’ to you?” (p. 20). New house slaves won’t know the children, and Driscoll has never been able to tell them apart. But she fears Pudd’nhead Wilson, knowing that he is not the fool the town thinks he is. She visits Wilson, who again takes the children’s fingerprints. He notices nothing unusual about the boys, and Roxy is satisfied.
/> Tom Driscoll proves a bad baby, spoiled and “fractious.” He has been pampered and is sickly. Chambers, however, has had only mush and milk, and it is he, the slave, meek and docile, who grows strong. He is good at games, an expert swimmer and fighter, and local boys respect him more than they do his young master. Tom in his jealousy is cruel to Chambers, but Driscoll has taught Chambers that he is never allowed to defend himself against his young master or to raise a hand against him. Roxy also learns her place. “With all her splendid common sense and practical everyday ability,” Roxy is nevertheless “a doting fool of a mother” (p. 23). By her own plan, her son has become her master. Her mock reverence as a black slave for her white master turns into real reverence, real obsequiousness. Roxy, “the dupe of her own deceptions” (p. 24), forgets who she is in her worship of her young master. However, in time her affection disgusts him. “The abyss of separation between her and her boy was complete. She was merely his chattel, now, his convenience, his dog, his cringing and helpless slave, the humble and unresisting victim of his capricious temper and vicious nature” (pp. 26-27). Nights of impotent rage that she cannot expose her son are forgotten the moment he happens to be good to her. Then she is proud that “her nigger son” is “lording it among the whites and securely avenging their crimes against her race” (p. 27).
When Tom and Chambers are fifteen years old, Colonel Cecil Burleigh Essex and Percy Driscoll die, providing Dawson’s Landings with two grand funerals. On his deathbed Driscoll has set Roxy free and she decides to see the world, “go chambermaiding on a steamboat, the darling ambition of her race and sex” (p. 28). Judge Driscoll had purchased Chambers before his brother’s death, so that Tom would not cause a scandal by selling a family servant down river for no reason other than his dislike of him. Percy Driscoll was broke when he died. He commended his son to his brother, who promised to make him his heir. Tom is sent to study at Yale, but he gives up the struggle after two years. Having acquired the habits of drinking and gambling, Tom is bored by his country town and refreshes himself for long periods in St. Louis. There he can conceal his gambling from his uncle. By 1853 Tom is in hot water.
