Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins

From Darryl Pinckney's Introduction toPudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins Pudd'nhead Wilsonis mercilessly ironic in tone, so that Twain's exasperation at received attitudes about race isn't obvious right away. His burlesque is disarming, a sort of screen under the cover of which are stark assertions about the miseries of slavery and the unfairness of power based on race. Yet Pudd'nhead Wilson also feels like a sketch, as if to have filled in more, to have told his tale as anything more than a romp, would have been impossible for the kind of writer Twain was by temperament. Prefaces of sly humor were his custom, andPudd'nhead Wilsonbegins with "A Whisper to the Reader," in which his dislike of Italy percolates again. A mild discontent, something of that Florentine weariness, enters into the narrative voice at this early point and never really goes away. Twain has no real interest in characterization or extended description of place inPudd'nhead Wilson. His omniscient narrator scatters clues and barrels through his yarn at a great clip, but this modern fable differs considerably from his historical romances. The twins ofPudd'nhead Wilsondo not relate to the Tudor look-alikes ofThe Prince and the Pauper, and Pudd'nhead Wilson is not a reprise of King Arthur's Yankee problem solver. Then, too, it is a conflation of story ideas: one about a white baby and black baby switched in the cradle; and another about Italian twins with musical gifts of the higher freak show order. At times Twain's novel reads as though the two stories, one melodramatic, the other farcical, had met up, unexpectedly, uneasily, in the same town. Most ofPudd'nhead Wilson's twenty-two chapters are headed by two aphorisms, selections from an almanac,Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar. "There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless," begins the first saying attributed to Pudd'nhead Wilson. "Tell the truth or trump--but get the trick," goes the second. The two sayings not only foreshadow the story of the man, Pudd'nhead Wilson, they also suggest the rueful spirit that rules the novel. In 1830 Dawson's Landing, Missouri, is a sleepy, pretty town. St. Louis is to the north, half a day's journey by steamboat. Dawson's Landing is "a slaveholding town, with a rich, slave-worked grain and pork country back of it." York Leicester Driscoll is the county judge and Dawson's Landing's "chief citizen." He and his wife are childless. It is a hierarchical town, full of names that echo the England of Twain's historical romances. Judge Driscoll, like his brother, Percy Northumberland Driscoll, or Colonel Cecil Burleigh Essex, or Pembroke Howard, takes his descent from the First Families of Virginia, or "F.F.V.s," very seriously. The children of Percy Northumberland Driscoll have died in infancy. When the novel opens, Percy's wife dies a week after giving birth to a boy, and one of his slave girls, Roxana, who gave birth to a son the same day the Driscoll baby was born, is put in charge of both babies. Around the same time, Dawson's Landing gains another new citizen, Mr. David Wilson, a "college-bred" twenty-five-year-old of "Scotch parentage" who is seeking his fortune. Homely, but with intelligent blue eyes, he would have been successful at once in Dawson's Landing, "but he made his fatal remark the first day he spent in the village, and it 'gaged&Twain, Mark is the author of 'Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins ', published 2005 under ISBN 9781593082550 and ISBN 159308255X.