Roxana, Racial Identity, and the Plot of Pudd’nhead Wilson
Pudd’nhead Wilson was written by Mark Twain and published in 1894, based on the story of a slave, Roxana, and her son, whom she exchanged with the son of her master. This novel was greatly enjoyed during that time and became very popular. In this fiction, the author explains a life arising from an embryonic idea that was divided to give rise to the novel; thus, the novel shares the time and environment of the 19th century. This paper focuses on the main character of the novel, Roxana, while she is trying to save her son from a life of slavery by switching the two children, but she unintentionally ends up enslaving both. In Pudd’nhead Wilson, the brothers are identical twins, and the entire novel repeats the double theme. It is an obsession of the writer in the years when he wrote this novel.
During the years of Wilson’s life, there were many events at Dawson Dock. White Negro Roxana gave birth to a white child and exchanged him with another identical child of an aristocrat to save her son from slavery, but her son ultimately became a slave. She nurses the son of the same aristocratic family, born on the same day. Wanting to wrest her son from slavery, Roxana changes the clothes of the children, so the Negro is considered the son and heir of the rich white man and aristocrat. Roxana’s son, Tom, is a spoiled child; he is a coward, a thief, and a heartless man. Twain emphasizes that Tom is not a rascal by nature; it is the position of the master that makes him a moral monster.
Accidentally, Italian twins come to the town (in a new version of the story, they ceased to be Siamese twins). The plot of the story becomes increasingly complicated. There is a murder. The twins are accused of it, but the true criminal is Tom. The mystery of the origin of the white Negro is also revealed. Wilson secretly collects the fingerprints of the inhabitants of the town for many years. This allows him to determine who held the knife with which the murder was committed. Fingerprints also reveal the substitution that Roxana performed.
Slavery, Domestic Intimacy, and the Hypocrisy of the Old South
The book tells the story of the slave owners of the South who take care of children with their Negro slaves and then treat them like slaves. Slavery is shown with hatred. Twain is hostile to the completely musty spiritual world of the inhabitants of the southern town. In this realm of stupidity, selfishness, and racism, not only Wilson but Roxana also lives badly (YVONNE A. AMAR). [Roxy] had an easy, independent carriage—when she was among her caste—and a high and ‘sassy’ way, withal; but of course, she was meek and humble enough where white people were. (2.13) Roxana was changing her identification around white Americans, which seems a bit awful. As the reader understands, the town represented by Twain is not an exception in America. There is something characteristic of the whole country in the claims of its rich people to superiority over ordinary workers, their indifference to the destinies of the people, the hypocrisy of these immoral people, the miserliness of the opinions of ordinary people, and the hostility of the Philistines to everything pure and good. Wilson’s aphorisms, placed as epigraphs to different book chapters, resonate with the dreary judgments scattered in Twain’s notebooks. He who has lived long enough in the world and knows life understands how deeply we owe Adam—the first great benefactor of the human race (Cade 230-239).
Mark Twain reveals in this novel American secular anxiety about the uncertainty of reality and fiction and what constitutes identity. The themes of doubles, duplicity, and disguise are part of Mark Twain’s fabulous obsessions and come together in this account to underline the ambiguity inherent in the very concept of identity: a fiction of law and society. David Wilson—the character who names the play, a frustrated lawyer and detective for more than twenty-three years—lives obsessed with a science that at the end of the nineteenth century was novel and aimed at creating a fingerprint file to identify individuals without possible error and to place them within the racial categories determined by the law. We can see that [Roxy] had an easy, independent carriage—when she was among her caste—and a high and ‘sassy’ way, withal; but of course she was meek and humble enough where white people were. (2.13) The white slave Roxana, terrified at the possibility that her baby—also white in appearance—can be sold by the master, exchanges her son with the master’s offspring in order to save him from the social death represented by the slave system.
Proposed for the first time to the Italian reader in its original form as published in 1894, this volume encloses two ‘twin’ texts. In his introduction and other notes to the volume, Twain tells of a first sketch in which he experiences the incarnation of two events in one: a farce and a tragedy. Then, he realizes he cannot keep them together and divides them. What is the farcical part of the initial conception of this surgical operation? Wilson is a young lawyer with good hopes but little fortune who, having just come to town, is considered foolish because of an unhappy joke. He will solve the strange case of children swapped in the cradle by Rowena, the white-skinned slave. Second, two Italian twins are protagonists instead of the original text. However, in the latter case, they are twin siblings, and the effect, though it may seem less respectful nowadays, is one of boundless comedy: a paradoxical, two-headed man, one gentle and the other alcoholic (Cade 230-239). Mark Twain, at his best in fierce humour, investigates the dual nature of the human soul.
Exchanged Children and the Social Construction of Race
Two children are born on the same day in the same house in a small town of the old South: Chambers, son of the slave Roxana, and Tom, son of the master Driscoll. The two are apparently white and almost identical. Terrified by the prospect of seeing Chambers sold ‘down the river,’ Roxana exchanges the children, turning slave into master and master into slave. From this misconception of identities, Mark Twain paints in Pudd’nhead Wilson a comic portrait of the fluvial community of his childhood, betraying with keen irony the obstacles and miseries of his picturesque characters. To the surprise of all, it will be through the insight of Wilson, his collection of fingerprints, and deductive logic that the secret of Roxana is finally discovered, providing easily understandable and acute testimony to the cruel and inhospitable condition of human slavery (Jehlen 105-120).
Mark Twain has titles that resist the passage of time, which are valid, and this is one of them. It brings together all the characteristics we look for in this collection. It is a quality text by an indisputable author, who also has the appeal of an exciting and intense life. It is a fundamental title among the short works of the author. The text summarizes the ironic and humorous characteristics of the literature of the creator of characters. For this historian of American literature, the magical and dangerous aspects of wealth and fame gave Mark Twain the armour of his principles. The book has the appeal of focusing on two human qualities: talent and virtue. It comes to say that an honest and talented man triumphs in the end, and this is a hopeful message not negligible in the times that run.
Roxana, the slave, a Negro woman who looks white, is a mother capable of doing everything to help her son get ahead, even exchanging him when he was a baby with the son of the lord so that her son may have the possibility of a better life (Jehlen 105-120). However, she realizes that her son has become a bad person, and she becomes a threat to him by telling him the truth. This woman knows that being a mother is the same in all races or religions and that mothers are all the same inside. A profound terror had taken possession of [Roxy]. Her child could grow up and be sold down the river! The thought crazed her with horror. (3.1) Some studies say that Roxana is a renegade of the Twainian canon because she violates the passivity of women to become an active woman, but unlike her male counterparts, she ends her history defeated by society. This shows that Twain hardly shows scenes of romantic love in his narratives and none of sensual love. In this sense, we have already seen how Twain tried to conform to the canons of his married life with the daughter of a respectable, decent, and religious Connecticut family. This Puritanism was common in nineteenth-century America, in which men and women maintained a hygienic attitude inside and out, which excluded any sexual appetite and even some sexual curiosity. Letters that he sent to his fiancée exemplify this behaviour: You are the purest woman I ever knew and your purity is the most uncommon and precious ornament (Jehlen 105-120).
Humour, Criticism, and the Sadness Beneath Twain’s Satire
As we say, the humour of the author is not empty of criticism (although Twain also cultivated humour), and, in addition, in the case of Twain there is a foundation of sadness and incomprehension about the future of the human race, which can be called the tragic feeling of humour. This is what Twain acknowledges in his Pudd’nhead Wilson: everything human is pathetic. In this work, black humour imbued with bitterness towards the world is evident, starting with the calendar notes of the protagonist, lawyer Wilson, in which he speaks of Adam as the one who brought death to the world.
Twain cultivates absurd humour in Pudd’nhead Wilson, which blames the inventory for Tom Driscoll’s crime. Being a slave, Tom was not included along with the rest of the estate that would have been inherited when its owner died. If he had been delivered to them in the first place, they would have had Driscoll; therefore, it was not that he had committed the murder, but that the guilt lay with the erroneous inventory. However, in this type of comedy, the American author pours into works like the Diaries of Adam and Eve, based on the destruction of the rules of logical thought. Twain made jokes about everything, including religion, especially about what is related to the book of Genesis and the figure of providence, as we saw above. He leaves the subject of religion reserved for more serious spaces of his artistic creation. The natural medium of laughter is indifference, which makes it very difficult to make jokes about something that gives us a deep feeling, and it should be difficult for an author to turn the drama of human finitude into comedy.
In the novel Pudd’nhead Wilson, Wilson expresses this idea in a subtle way in his correspondence. He talks about things that he will never do with his typical irony and tells him about the will. It happened to Tom Driscoll, the Black man whom his mother passes off as a white man in Pudd’nhead Wilson, who could not change. In short, Mark Twain recognizes that there is a will, but it has nothing to do with conceptions of the just and unjust and is not subject to them (Jehlen 105-120).
Pudd’nhead Wilson and the Mockery of Local Society
The story of The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson is a mockery of locals, starting with the protagonist himself (who in the end turns out to be, paradoxically, the most lucid) and reaching most of the characters. First, of course, is Tom Driscoll, the bad person of the story, for which Twain could be accused of racism since the character, although he seems white, is of Black blood and repeatedly humiliates Chambers, a supposed Black man who is white, and who says the following when he discovers his true origin (Watson N.p.).
[Roxy] paused awhile, thinking; then she burst into wild sobbings again, and turned away, saying, “Oh, I got to kill my chile, dy ain’t no yuther way—killin’ him wouldn’t save de chile fum goin’ down de river. Oh, I got to do it, yo’ po’ mammy’s got to kill you to save you, honey.” (3.3)
We should not stay with these descriptions of the racist attitude but with Twain’s satire and the evolution of its personages, such as, for example, the history of Wilson and one of the slaves, Roxana, the mother of Tom Driscoll, who in principle attributes the dishonourable behaviour to her son. We should not stay with these descriptions of the racist attitude but with Twain’s satire and the evolution of its personages, in which the final analysis states, despite her status as a slave, that there is no difference between a white and a Black mother when it comes to saving the life of a child (Porter 121-136).
Motherhood, Mastery, and Roxana’s Loss of Her Son
[Roxy] saw her darling gradually cease from being her son, she saw that detail perish utterly; all that was left was the master—pure and simple, and it was not a gentle mastership, either. She saw herself sink from the sublime height of motherhood to the sombre depths of unmodified slavery. (4.21)
The novel not only criticizes racism towards slaves but also racism towards immigrants in the cities of the Pacific coast, which is where they arrived in greater numbers. Twain speaks in laudatory terms of the Asian population, whose discrimination was well known to him in his time as a reporter in San Francisco: he has a hard life and is always busy. Irony embodies these hypocritical behaviours in the figure of the sisters of Judge Driscoll in Pudd’nhead Wilson, Presbyterian devotees who receive the approval of the community for their fervour: their reward is clear consciences and the community’s approbation. The obligation of respect to the beautiful virgins only applies, like so many other things, to others (Yvonne 13–19).
False and selfish is Tom Driscoll, who, after leading a lifetime of comforts by supplanting the legitimate heir, while actually being the slave, learns, thanks to Wilson’s inquiries with fingerprints, that he is not who he believes himself to be. Then, instead of feeling empathy for the boy who for so long has lived as a slave and has always been treated contemptuously, he personifies the idea of seeing the straw in the other eye. A paradigm of falsehood is his uncle, Judge Driscoll, in charge of social appearances, who, knowing that Tom tried to convince his supposed father, York Leicester, to sell the alleged slave Chambers, who is his son, buys him himself to prevent the scandal. The usual image of women in the works of Mark Twain corresponds to the social roles of the time. The novel’s male and female characters correspond to a strict stereotype of the different spheres of social activity: while men are defined in terms of business, women are defined in terms of their domestic or family activity. Looking at Pudd’nhead Wilson ratifies this idea: Judge Driscoll, lawyer Wilson’s wife, and the judge’s sister. Diversification of roles involves the characters’ traits: the man (or boy) is independent, astute, and practical, while the woman is dreamy and weak.
References
Cade, Roshaunda. “Mulatta Mamma Performing and Mimicking Minstrelsy in Mark Twain’s Puddn’head Wilson” Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering, Volume 9, 2007, pp. 230-239
Jehlen, Myra. “The Ties That Bond: Race and Sex in Puddn’head Wilson.” 1990. Mark Twain’s Puddn’head Wilson Race, Conflict, and Culture, edited by Susan Gillman and Forrest G. Robinson, Duke University Press, 1990, pp. 105-120
Porter, Carolyn. “Roxana’s Plot.”Mark Twain’s Puddn’head Wilson Race, Conflict, and Culture, edited by Susan Gillman and Forrest G. Robinson, Duke University press, 1990, pp. 121-136
Watson, Steven. “Exploring Prejudice, Miscegenation, and Slavery’s Consequences in Mark Twains Puddn’head Wilson. The Kennesaw Journal of Undergraduate Research, Vol. 1, 2011
Yvonne A. Amar. Mark Twain’s andquot; Joan of Arcandquot; An andquot; Asbestosandquot; Character Rising from the Ashes. Twain Journal 19.3 (1979): 13–19. Web. 17 Apr. 2017.
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