Pudd'nhead Wilson
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
27th April 2001 at Sam's House
Synopsis
At the beginning of Pudd'nhead Wilson a young slave
woman, fearing for her infant's son's life, exchanges her
light-skinned child with her master's. From this rather simple
premise Mark Twain fashioned one of his most entertaining,
funny, yet biting novels. On its surface, Pudd'nhead Wilson
possesses all the elements of an engrossing nineteenth-century
mystery: reversed identities, a horrible crime, an eccentric
detective, a suspenseful courtroom drama, and a surprising,
unusual solution. Yet it is not a mystery novel. Seething
with the undercurrents of antebellum southern culture, the
book is a savage indictment in which the real criminal is
society, and racial prejudice and slavery are the crimes.
The flashes of farce and general comic exuberance which
enlivened Huckleberry Finn are sustained in this later
work; but the mood is altogether more restless and critical.
Twain uses certain stock characters and devices, such as the
sardonic cracker-barrel philosopher, the scoundrel unmasked,
and the substitution of babies, to build up a complex ironical
and morally disturbing account of human nature under slavery.
Some of the peculiar circumstances in which it was written
originally a slight comedy of identity based on Siamese twins,
it developed into something much more ambitious, and finally
Twain discarded most of the original plot: "I pulled one of
the stories out by the roots - a kind of literary Caesarean
operation."
First lines
The scene of this chronicle is the town of Dawson's
Landing, on the Missouri side of the Mississippi, half a day's
journey, per steamboat, below St Louis.
Our comments
Once more we ended up choosing a lesser known Twain as most
of us had already read Huckleberry Finn and Tom
Sawyer. For those of us that had, this was a slightly
disappointing read, lacking the all out quality of those books.
But there is a lot to like in this ironic if not cynical look
at slavery and the perverse results from such a system.
Related resources
Biography
on Pegasos site
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