I am coming to the end of my Mark Twain reading for the year. I was going to read the new volume 1 of The Mark Twain's Project's effort, but I think not. I don't see it as pleasureable reading. I'll probably settle for reading excerpts.
Pudd'nhead is pleasureable Twain reading. You have to hang in there with the plot, for tight plotting is not one of Twain's strengths.
I see a story about miscegenation in the antebellum South, a book noted for its grim humor and its reflections on racism and responsibility. Roxana, a light-skinned mixed-race slave, switches her baby with her white owner's baby. Her natural son, Tom Driscoll, grows up in a privileged household to become a criminal who finances his gambling debts by selling her to a slave trader and who later murders his putative uncle. Meanwhile, Roxy raises Valet de Chambre as a slave. David ("Pudd'nhead") Wilson, an eccentric lawyer, determines the true identities of Tom and Valet. As a result Roxy is exposed, Wilson is elected mayor, Tom is sold into slavery, and Valet, unfitted for his newly won freedom, becomes an illiterate, uncouth landholder. Grim stuff, indeed, but true to life in the 19th century.
The book is dated. Miscegenation is not a big deal today. In Twain's time this must have been explosive stuff. Racism is not dated. The novel stands the test of time despite the vehicle of miscegenation.
We want to see Twain as a racial liberal. Perhaps he was; perhaps he wasn't. I don't know. This book puts him on the right side of history. I suspect his autobiography also puts him on the right side of history.
1 comment:
This is a marvelous book.
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