Mixed Race Studies

Mark Twain and Homer Plessy

Representations
Number 24, Special Issue: America Reconstructed, 1840-1940 (Autumn, 1988)
pages 102-128

Eric J. Sundquist, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities
Johns Hopkins University

The carnivalesque drama of doubling, twinship, and masquerade that constitutes Pudd’nhead Wilson and its freakishly extracted yet intimately conjoined story, “Those Extraordinary Twins,” is likely to remain misread and controversial in estimations of Mark Twain’s literary achievement as long as the work’s virtual mimicry of America’s late-nineteenth-century race crisis is left out of account. Readers have, of course, often found a key to the novel’s interpretation in the notorious “fiction of law and custom” that makes the “white” slave Roxy legally “black” by allowing one-sixteenth of her blood to “outvote” the rest (8-9). Like so many parodic moments in the book, however. Twain’s joke about voting speaks not simply to general anxieties about miscegenation but more particularly to the deliberate campaign to disfranchise blacks and strip them of legal protections that was underway by the early 1890s. Built of the brutal artifice of racial distinctions, both American law and American custom conspired to punish black men and women in the post-Reconstruction years, and Twain’s bitter failed fiction, verging on allegory but trapped in unfinished burlesque, has been thought to participate in the black nadir without artistically transcending it or, conversely, without reaching its broader historical implications.

As Hershel Parker and others have demonstrated in detail, Twain’s chaotic process of composition and his unconcerned interchange of various manuscript versions make it impossible to place much weight on authorial intention narrowly defined. Yet this hardly leads to the conclusion that Twain’s vision had no coherent meaning or that his own comic rationale, contained in the opening of “Those Extraordinary Twins,” reveals nothing of significance about the texts critique of contemporary race theory or Twain’s authorial involvement in that critique. Indeed, one might rather argue that the confusion and seeming flaws in the manuscript and the published text, while largely attributable to his haste to produce a book that would ameliorate his financial problems, are also a measure of the social and psychic turmoil that Twain, not least as a liberal Southerner living and working in the North, felt in the post-Reconstruction years. The key phenomena in late-nineteenth-century race relations have just as much place in determining the text’s range of implication, its meaning, as do such mechanical factors as compositional sequence and manuscript emendations. Preoccupied with relevant but improperly construed issues of aesthetic unity and verisimilitude, critics have typically missed the primary ways in which Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) and its attached tale of the Italian Siamese twins involves itself in the…

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