Race in Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson
Mark Twain's novel Pudd'nhead Wilson is a controversial commentary on race, identity and social determination. The action of the novel takes place in a small town in Missouri, called Dawson's Landing, in a society in which the relationship between the white people and the black was still a master-slave relationship. The text tells the story of two boys who are exchanged soon after their birth by Roxana, a slave of Percy Driscoll. The changelings exchange thus more than their names, which are Thomas a Beckett and Valet de Chambers, respectively. They exchange their race, their identity, their social position and even their lives. In an almost Shakespearian vein, Mark Twain joggles with the notion of mistaken or stolen identity. There is a particular emphasis in the text on clothes, veiling and face painting, all of which serve as masks and disguises. The two central characters in this maze of plots are Roxana and the lawyer Wilson, who plays the role of a detective and who eventually unravels the mystery of the two twins. Roxana is a slave with only one sixteenth black blood and the rest white. The central figure of the novel, Roxy stands out as a very interesting and contradictory character. Attempting so save her son from being s
Roxy herself has a conflicting identity: she is only sixteenth percent black and physically, she does not look black. Roxy is actually the most versatile of all the characters, as she is the one who eventually embodies the most roles. Roxy believes her own-created fiction as well: "With all her splendid common sense and practical everyday ability, Roxy was a doting fool of a mother. She was this toward her child -- and she was also more than this: by the fiction created by herself, he was become her master. The two boys were born on the very same day, and looked like identical twins, but despite this fact, they were fated to have entirely different rights and privileges on the basis of their racial identity: "What has my po' baby done, dat he couldn't have yo' luck? He hain't done nuth'n. It is obvious thus that Roxy is used in the novel to point to the gradation of identity. At a crucial point in the novel, when Roxy tells 'Tom' all her story and her sufferance as a slave, she appears to embody all the possibilities of existence: she is at once male (through her costume) and female, white and black (because of her painted face). Twain obviously hints here at the stereotype according to which the black people had a fascination for colors, and could be bought or bribed by their colonizers with colored beads made of glass. Roxy acts, speaks and thinks as a black woman according to the stereotypes that existed during the age about the black race, but she it would be illogical to assume that her character is entirely determined by that small part of her which is of Afro-American descending. As Linda Morris observes, Roxy's and Tom's cross-dressing is the background that Twain uses to suggest the "category crisis" that structures the novel, or the impossibility to define race: "Tom's cross-dressing in order to commit burglaries sets the scene for even more complex gendered and racial crossing that follows. The core problem of the novel is thus the attempt to give a definition of identity, in the context of racial difference. For example, just before Roxy switches the babies, she puts on a gaudy apparel that denounces the appreciation she has for the lively combinations of colors. Roxy and everyone else, the father and the villagers and the two boys themselves take the switched roles for granted. It is here that the extent to which society determines identity can be measured. Only one sixteenth of her was black, and that sixteenth did not show.
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