Pudd'nhead Wilson
The setting of this novel is again the world that
Sam Clemens grew up in, although now MT calls the village
Dawson's Landing, and has moved it several hundred miles
down the Mississippi River. The book was originally
published in America, on 28 November 1894, as The
Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson and the Comedy of Those
Extraordinary Twins. It began as a farce about Siamese
twins -- two different temperaments inseparably linked in
one body -- and wound up becoming an irony about two babies
-- one slave, one free -- switched in their cradles. It was
never very popular with MT's contemporaries, but as his
most direct, sustained treatment of slavery it has
attracted considerable attention in our time; there is as
yet, however, no agreement about what it's saying. In Roxy
the novel offers MT's most complex woman character. Despite
the title, most commentary on the book assumes that her
son, Tom/Valet de Chambers, is the central character. My
own reading of it begins with the title. It is curious that
MT should call it a tragedy when its ending is
classically comic: true identities and an apparent social
order are restored. And curiouser that he calls it
Pudd'nhead Wilson's tragedy, when Wilson enacts the
rise from obscurity to popularity and prestige that is
usually thought of as the archetypal American success
story.
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