Pudd'nhead Wilson

 The Introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Pudd'nhead Wilson gives voice to the widespread perception that the novel is in some ways a stunted classic—a book that fails to carry through its own profound and intriguing themes to their logical conclusion; preferring instead to accept the cheap victory of becoming a merely mechanical—if satisfying and gripping—detective story. 

But if true, this is precisely part of the genius and power of the novel: because one of its great themes is precisely the stunting of personality under the force of social convention—something Twain himself knew intimately. 

It is a commonplace of Twain biography that in his earlier, more comedic work—particularly, the humorous travelogues—he is in many ways playing a role. 

The man behind the mask, Samuel Clemens, may have always possessed the satirical pessimism and fierce moral indignation that becomes ever more prominent in Twain's later works, and which is visible in glimpses throughout his career. But Clemens must appear behind the persona of the lovable yet irascible Mark Twain, who flatters the prejudices of the world's first great mass reading public. 

And these readers knew exactly what they wanted him to be: he was a "humorist" and licensed jester who offered light entertainment. He could make jokes at his own expense as much as he pleased—but not at theirs. 

Observe the development between a work like, say, A Tramp Abroad, and the later Following the Equator. The former is almost wholly made up of anodyne comic digressions and at times almost inane anecdotes. The satire—to the extent it is present—is directed almost entirely against such "safe" targets as the pretensions of American opera lovers, the importunings of hotel staff seeking tips, or the inordinate boastfulness of the well-traveled. 

The latter book, meanwhile (which was published in England as More Tramps Abroad) has a sort of carapace of the same "comedic" anecdotal armor, but is shot through with glimpses of the darkest satire on the evils of European colonialism. More of the true Clemens is poking through, then, the further into Twain's later work we read. 

Twain, then, was plainly someone who "wore the mask that grins and lies," to quote Paul Laurence Dunbar. He was no stranger to what D.H. Lawrence called "image-making love": Always / at the core of me / burns the small flame of anger, gnawing [...] Always / in the eyes of those who loved me / I have seen at last the image of him they loved / and took for me / mistook for me. 

The comedic persona of Mark Twain was "a simulacrum" to the real Clemens, as D.H. Lawrence would put it: "something / like me, and like a gibe at me."

And if I'm right that this was Twain's experience as an author and public figure—then it perhaps should not surprise us that imposture is a recurring theme in his work—Pudd'nhead Wilson being a fine example. 

The book's action proceeds from the decision of an enslaved woman Roxana to swap the clothes of her own child, Chambers, with that of the newborn white heir of the house, Tom Driscoll, in order to protect her child from the fate of being one day "sold down the river." 

The false "Tom" then grows up to be a bully, villain, and poltroon who is finally unmasked and reduced once more to the wretched slavery from which his mother tried to save him. 

The Penguin introduction floats the possibility that Twain's thematic intention in this was to reinforce the widespread late nineteenth century belief in the inescapability of heredity. Perhaps the usurping "Tom" grows up to be a villain and monster precisely because his "blood" was tainted from the beginning; whereas the true heir would never have been guilty of these crimes. 

"[T]he confusion," the editor writes, "though it has advantages for the novel clearly raises the possibility that Twain regards the two races as morally distinct." 

This seems to me, however, to be a profound misreading. It seems more correct that the novel in fact leads to the opposite moral: namely, Roxana's imposture is meant to show the utter artificiality of social divisions and inequalities. 

The two infants at the start of the story, after all, are separated from one another by a seemingly unbridgeable social chasm. One is born free, endowed with legal rights, and the heir to a great patrimony. The other is born into slavery, denied even a surname, and destined to labor under the omnipresent threat of being "sold down the river" to a fate worse than death on the cotton plantations—which Twain aptly describes as hell on earth. 

One is "born to sweet delight"; the other is "born to endless night," as William Blake would put it. 

Yet, Roxana is able to reverse their fortunes entirely by the simple expedient of changing their clothes. Her own "Black" child is able to assume the role of the "white" heir without arousing suspicion, precisely because race, as it is constructed in this society, is a legal fiction. 

Twain is well aware of its purely artificial and conventional nature. Roxana herself appears "as white as anybody," Twain writes, "but the one sixteenth of her which was black outvoted the other fifteen parts of her which was white and made her a negro. She was a slave and salable 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." 

If Twain's thematic purpose was to suggest that indeed, even that one-thirty-second part will tell in the end, and thus to imply some sort of racial essentialism—then surely the true "white" heir would show signs early on of inherent superiority and mastery. But instead—while he shows a humility and moral superiority over the false usurper—he grows up to be illiterate and submissive, and in every other way to conform to the social role in which he is cast. 

Twain's point, then, is obviously the Pygmalion one that social inequalities are an artificial construct, and that people will take on the traits society expects them to possess—not because of their inherent hereditary qualities, but because of that force of "law and custom" Twain mentions. ("Training is everything" as one of the aphorisms of Pudd'nhead Wilson's "Calendar" puts it.) 

But if my reading is correct, then why indeed does the false "Tom" grow up to be a villain? 

That seems equally simple to resolve: Twain's point is that the purely conventional and fictive elevation of any human being to legal mastery and rule over others distorts their character. 

This all should not surprise us, since it's precisely Twain's point in The Prince and the Pauper as well—his earlier, more famous treatment of the "impostor" and "doubling" theme from a decade prior. 

There, the usurping prince (also named "Tom") begins the novel as a good-hearted boy, who at first makes a better lord of all England because of his humble origins; but he is gradually corrupted by the mere fact of meeting no external check on his will to power. By the end of the novel, he is even disavowing his own mother (before eventually repenting in order to reach the book's happy ending). 

Meanwhile, the true prince is made into a better person—learns mercy and compassion—through having to share the life for a time of his meanest and most despised subjects. 

Twain's treatment of the hierarchy of caste in antebellum America, then, is ultimately not different from his treatment of the same phenomenon in early modern Britain. His point in both cases is that human nature should never be entrusted with the absolute power to dispose of the life and limb of others; that even the best character will be corrupted if handed the reins of absolute authority. 

Twain's King Leopold's Soliloquy, as well as his other writings on imperialism, teach the same moral, by means of even more gruesome real-world examples of the excesses of despotic power. 

Twain's point, then, is quite manifestly not that heredity will win out over environment every time—but quite to the contrary: that the force of artificial social constructs will stifle the "inherent" qualities of independent personality and individual virtue. 

His conclusion is indeed pessimistic, then—but in a very different sense than the pessimism of the 19th century theorists of heredity and racial essentialism. 

Twain, as I said above, knows exactly whereof he speaks when it comes to the stifling of individual personality under the weight of social conformity. His entire authorial life was a struggle to see how much of his indignation at humanity and the state of the world he could allow to show publicly. And some of his best writings, such as his essay on lynching, he suppressed for this reason until after his death, concluding that the public in his time was not yet ready for its message. 

One of the aspects of Twain's personality that he obviously wrestled with in this regard in his later years—unsure whether or how much to display it publicly—was his religious skepticism; and this too forms one of the subterranean themes of Pudd'nhead Wilson. The novel's hero and authorial stand-in, the underestimated and misunderstood intellectual lawyer Wilson, is a member of the local Freethinkers society. And one of Twain's satirical targets in passing is the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. 

In one scene, Roxana briefly struggles with herself over whether she is inflicting an injustice on the "white" child she is now condemning to a lifetime of servitude, merely by switching his cradle with that of her own offspring. But she reassures herself with the observation that God Himself commits the same arbitrary injustice all the time, according to the teachings of Protestant religion. "He do jis' as He's a minter," as Roxana observes in dialect; "He s'lect out anybody dat suit him, en put another one in his place, en make de fust one happy for ever en leave t'other one to burn wid Satan." 

Some are born to sweet delight, others to endless night, to quote Blake again. Twain's novel is concerned, among others things, then, also with the problem of evil: "God was good to you; why warn't he good to him?" as Roxana asks, with regard to the chasm separating the fates of the two infant boys—one born to freedom and power and ease, the other to drudgery and bondage and humiliation. 

How was the existence of slavery as an institution supposed to be reconciled to God's purported goodness and omnipotence? "[W]his is this awful distance made between white and black?" as even the false "Tom" is moved to wonder, after he learns of his true identity. 

In his later piece "Is Shakespeare Dead?", Twain was even more overt in his criticism of religious orthodoxy. As he wrote there: 

It took several thousand years to convince our fine race—including every splendid intellect in it—that there is no such thing as a witch; it has taken several thousand years to convince that same fine race—including every splendid intellect in it—that there is no such person as Satan; it has taken several centuries to remove perdition from the Protestant Church’s program of postmortem entertainments; it has taken a weary long time to persuade American Presbyterians to give up infant damnation and try to bear it the best they can; and it looks as if their Scotch brethren will still be burning babies in the everlasting fires when Shakespeare comes down from his perch.

One of Twain's points in that great essay is that social convention, custom, familiarity, and conformity are such mighty forces that they can convince people to "believe"—or at least, act as if they believed—even the patently false and absurd. Twain opens the piece with a description of how he first started to propound and defend the contrarian Baconian theory of Shakespearean authorship merely for the sake of argument—but gradually, the habit of doing so grew into something approaching actual conviction. 

This is the same process Roxana undergoes in the novel, as she gradually comes to live into the fiction she has created: namely, that her son is actually her white "master." The "necessity of recognising this relation outwardly," Twain writes, "and of perfecting herself in the forms required to express the recognition, had moved her to such diligence and faithfulness in practising these forms that this exercise soon concreted itself into habit; it became automatic and unconscious; then a natural result followed: deceptions intended solely for others gradually grew into self-deceptions as well, the mock reverence became real reverence, the mock obsequiousness real obsequiousness, the mock homage real homage." 

Roxana undergoes a sort of Pascalian procedure, then, of inculcating faith through acting as if she had it; just as Twain became a believer in the Baconian hypothesis, by his own telling: "Study, practice, experience in handling my end of the matter presently enabled me to take my new position almost seriously; a little bit later, utterly seriously; a little later still, lovingly, gratefully, devotedly; finally: fiercely, rabidly, uncompromisingly.  After that, I was welded to my faith[.]"

"Training is everything," again.

One of Twain's great themes in Pudd'nhead Wilson, then, is not so much the thesis that "blood will tell" in the end or that heredity is inescapable—but rather the opposite: people really can spend their whole existence on Earth living a lie; and a lie that becomes habitual enough (such as the lie of social and racial inequality) can harden and congeal into a kind of truth, through the sheer force of conformity and convention. This is the true horror of the novel. 

A "fiction of law and custom" such as race or caste, practiced long enough, takes on a reality and force of its own. Just as a role or persona adopted long enough can hijack and eclipse the true personality beneath. "The mask eats the face," as John Updike once put it (as quoted by Martin Amis). 

But Twain also shows that this victory of mask over substance is never perfect—just as it was never perfect in his own case either. The role of Twain the licensed jester and light humorist, as we've seen, never fully disguised the silhouette of Clemens the pessimist and dark satirist. Glimpses of the latter keep showing through even in those merriest and seemingly insubstantial earlier works—and the mask slipped off entirely toward the end of Twain's career. 

So too, one of the strengths of Twain's portrayal of slavery in Pudd'nhhead Wilson is that he reveals that the pose of humility, submissiveness, and obsequiousness—no matter how habituated—never actually eclipsed the real enmity and rancor at the heart of the relationship. Within the heart of the enslaved—as in the heart of the real Clemens, trapped within the celebrity persona of Twain the jester—was always that "small flame of anger, gnawing" of which D.H. Lawrence wrote. 

When describing the petty pilferings that would happen around the domestic establishment in antebellum Missouri, Twain describes what the sociologists would now call "everyday resistance"—the "weapons of the weak." The enslaved person "held it no sin to take military advantage of the enemy—in a small way," Twain writes; he was "perfectly sure that in taking this trifle from the man who daily robbed him of an inestimable treasure—his liberty" he was justified before God. 

Later, when the false "Tom" abuses his mother—in the belief that he is a free man and rich heir, whereas she is just a lowly bond-servant—she responds, in Twain's telling, "in voice and manner which made Tom almost realise that even a former slave can remember for ten minutes insults and injuries returned for compliments and flatteries received, and can enjoy taking revenge for them when the opportunity offers. [...] The heritage of two centuries of unatoned insult and outrage looked down on him" in that moment. 

One of Twain's themes in his later anti-imperialist writings, too, was that white Europeans—those self-declared masters of the human race—should not assume so easily that just because their victims did not immediately return blow for blow—and even made a show of a performative "obsequiousness" (Dunbar's "mask that grins and lies" again)—that did not mean they were not storing up an inner reservoir of justified hate and fury against this wrong that would one day overflow. (Twain knew from his own case that the outward show of submission to the prejudices and social expectations of one's time can only make the inner "flame of anger" wax hotter over time.)

In his 1897 travelogue Following the Equator, he describes an incident in which a European tourist strikes an Indian servant in the face for supposedly not cleaning a window fast enough. "It seemed such a shame to do that before us all," Twain writes. "The native took it with meekness, saying nothing, and not showing in his face or manner any resentment. I had not seen the like of this for fifty years. It carried me back to my boyhood, and flashed upon me the forgotten fact that this was the usual way of explaining one’s desires to a slave."

He proceeds from this to describe an incident from his boyhood in which he saw a man murder his own "slave" in broad daylight: "When I was ten years old I saw a man fling a lump of iron-ore at a slaveman in anger, for merely doing something awkwardly—as if that were a crime. It bounded from the man’s skull, and the man fell and never spoke again. He was dead in an hour."

Twain adds, with that chilling succinct mordancy that characterizes some of his most profound satirical writing: "I knew the man had a right to kill his slave if he wanted to, and yet it seemed a pitiful thing and somehow wrong, though why wrong I was not deep enough to explain if I had been asked to do it. Nobody in the village approved of that murder, but of course no one said much about it."

But then, as soon as he has come out with this profound horror—this abysmal glimpse into the heart of humankind—Twain stops short. He pulls himself out of the reflection before drawing any conclusions. He remembers that he is here in the role of the comic traveler—the light "humorist" on a journey to India—and that his only role is to flatter and amuse, not challenge, his readers. He dons the mask once more. He too grins obsequiously. 

"It is curious—the space-annihilating power of thought," he writes. "For just one second, all that goes to make the me in me was in a Missourian village, on the other side of the globe, vividly seeing again these forgotten pictures of fifty years ago, [...] Back to boyhood—fifty years; back to age again, another fifty; and a flight equal to the circumference of the globe-all in two seconds by the watch!"

And that's it. The moment is done. Twain the licensed jester is back in command, eclipsing Clemens the pessimist and philosopher once more (like the twin-headed Luigi and Antonio in the story "Those Extraordinary Twins" that was extracted from Pudd'nhead Wilson, who take turns every week in the pilot seat of their shared body). And we are treated to some more humorous anecdotes about the inconveniences of foreign travel.