Has anybody read Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain?

Question:

Has anybody read Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain?

What did you think of it?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: I loved it, and I think Twain's wit in telling the story is wonderful, but it's not at all a cheerful book.

Along with Huckleberry Finn, this is a book in which Twain looked hard at the institution of slavery and the white racism that was associated with slavery, and it seems to me he's essentially saying that slavery and racism have a tragically distorting effect - both on the character of the slaves and the character of their masters.

I think Twain's essentially gloomy view is encapsulated in one of the jokes from "Puddenhead Wilson's Calendar" that he uses to head one of his chapters.

It goes something like:

"October 12, Columbus Day. It was a great thing for Columbus to have discovered America. However, it might have been an even greater thing to have missed it."

"It might have been an even greater thing to have missed it" -- that's a really positive thing to say about American history and American civilization, isn't it?

If I remember rightly -- I'm pretty old by now, and high school was a long time ago for me -- all of the major characters except for Puddn'head Wilson are ruined by the outcome of the plot, although the Judge's real son Tom comes out a little better than his lookalike.

This is a witty, half-comic tragedy about race in America, and the wit is put in there to make it possible for us to endure the tragedy, which is pretty awful.

It's interesting, too, that Twain has chosen to create his race tragedy about two babies - boys - young men, one "white" and one "Negro," who are almost impossible to tell apart physically.

At the time that Twain wrote the book, racial fears among white Americans were so intense that a person with mostly European ancestry, but with a very small fraction of African genes, was considered "nonwhite" and subjected to grossly discriminatory treatment.

"A drop of black blood" was thought to be enough to taint a person's character and change the person's life. Whereas a "drop of white blood" was not enough to matter -- not enough to save you from discrimination, not enough to save you from slavery.

In addition to showing the negative things that slavery and racism do to his characters, then, Twain is also suggesting how absurd and arbitrary the racism is.

BTW - In my parent's copy of "Puddn'head Wilson" that I read as a kid, Twain added an appendix explaining how he didn't orginally intend to write the story he did.

He explained how he started out to write a story about the two Italian twins, but he soon found that a couple of his minor characters kept butting into his plot and taking up far more space than he wanted them to.

Eventually the minor characters took over the story, and the twins became relatively unimportant. It's an interesting story of how an author's subconscious concerns can come to influence and in fact overwhelm his conscious aims. And if your copy of the book doesn't have the appendix, try to find one that does, because it's worth reading.