Pudd'nhead Wilson

"Pudd’nhead Wilson is a prince-and-the-pauper tale. It’s about a boy called Chambers, who is 1/32 Black—which basically means that he’s white in everything but the law—and a boy called Tom, the white master’s son. Roxy, Chambers’ mother, swaps them in the crib. So Chambers is raised as a white master and Tom is raised as a slave. Twain follows this conceit through, and in a way that’s very much in keeping with the confusion of the South. It’s not a neat little parable or morality tale. The real Chambers grows up to be a nasty piece of work, and Tom becomes the noble slave. So it’s sometimes misread as a reductive story, a book about nature as opposed to nurture, as though Twain was saying that if you take a savage and put him in the master’s seat, he will behave like a savage. It was seen as actively unhelpful to the progressive cause, whereas I would argue that it really is a book about nurture. It’s about the impact of structural racism and what it does to people: it makes you a monster or a martyr, depending on how the world treats you and expects you to behave. Even that reading is to slightly misrepresent it. There’s also the possibility that Chambers is just an arsehole who would have been an arsehole as a slave or an arsehole as a master. So it’s a thorny, knotty book. Obviously if you’re thinking of the American South , the initial impulse is to choose Huckleberry Finn . Which I love! But this one is more complicated and gives you more to grapple with. In Huckleberry Finn , the river is an engine of liberation. It’s an adventure story; they use the river to escape. In Pudd’nhead Wilson the river means only oppression. It means you’re being sold downriver to the Tidewater Plantations, the place you don’t want to go. The river means hardship and woe. The book ends in a spectacularly pessimistic way. Chambers is sold down the river, his mother is rumbled and punished, and the white rule of the South is reestablished. I defy anyone to see that as a happy ending. It’s a messy book about a messy situation. Initially, Twain intended to write a story about Italian twins—‘The Extraordinary Twins’—and the ghost of that unrealised book is still there, although the twins are very much supporting characters here. Twain came around to the idea of doubling being used to tell a story that was closer to home, which creatively I think was the right decision – but he didn’t quite work it through enough. It feels he rushed down this new avenue, leaving all the widows of the earlier book rattling around in the story still. Then you have the character Pudd’nhead Wilson himself. Wilson is a lawyer, an outsider who sets up in the small town and is widely ridiculed because he is smarter than the townsfolk and they don’t get his jokes. He’s set up in the opening chapter as if he’s going to be the hero of the book. He gives his name to the title. Then he kind of goes away, and comes back as a sort of deus ex machina at the end, to identify the guilty party. So it’s a knock-kneed book that doesn’t have the easy assurance and swing of Huckleberry Finn . Yet I think, in terms of understanding the confusions of the South, it takes a better, more honest approach."