Mark Twain & Pudd’nhead’s Satire: The One Drop Rule
Welcome back Everyone!! It’s me again with the deep thoughts. For this week of the blog, we are discussing Pudd’nhead Wilson. Not just the novel, but the underlying tones of issues within the book. Hopefully I won’t get side tracked this week with a philosophical “What does it all mean” posting again. Either way, thank you for reading!
Mark Twain published his book Pudd’nhead Wilson in 1893. Twain had already written other works and had them published before then. He also had already earned his title of a worker of satire by this point. Pudd’nhead WIlson follows three plot lines within the same town: A northerner named David moved to a Missouri town to be a lawyer who gets shunned from the small town and nicknamed Pudd’nhead, A slave woman named Roxy makes a hard decision in the beginning of the story to save her child by switching him with the master’s newborn who looks equal skin tone as her master’s child and born around the same time, and by the end of the novel- An untimely murder mystery that blames innocent men. Twain laces satire throughout the story to master his invested meanings.
There are two things to remember when reading Pudd’nhead WIlson. The first thing is to remember that this is a society that focused on ‘The One Drop Rule’. Outlandish ideas and uneducated Psuedoscience held people of this time in a choke hold about the concept that if a white person even had ‘one drop’ of African American blood in them, that they were considered themselves as a black person (which in this time ties them to a life of enslavement and oppression). While the readers are to sympathize with Roxy as a mother, she makes an unbelievable choice in the name of protecting her child. She switches her child for the master’s child who is just a couple days different in age and have the same skin complexion. The fact that both children are the same color of skin complected with different family lineage shows just how diverse genetics can be. The master’s child was born from two white people while Roxy gives birth to a child 1/16 of Black Ancestry. (A modern day example is looking at pictures of Tamara Mowery’s son who is ‘a quarter of Black Ancestry’ has the same amount as White Passing Actress Troian Bellisario). Genetics work in multiple different complex ways, and children can look the same or different from the counterparts. It were the adults of this time that bothered doing the work to investigate the lineage of each person to strike them out as they do others with Black Ancestry.
Another thing to take into consideration is the conversation of Nature vs. Nurture. This topic feels like it holds reservation in every conversation these days. However, the way that Twain describes the lives that the switched individuals puts a spotlight on the subject as he dissects it for satire. The Nature vs. Nurture concept was coined in the Enlightenment Period by Francis Galton. The subject covers the debate or whether it is either your physical environment (Nurture) or your genetic ancestry (Nature) that describes who you become.
Twain opens this conversation of Nature vs. Nurture with satire with talking about how the swapped children grow out. Roxy’s child (now named Tom) grew up to be a criminal and a murderer after being saved from the life of a black, enslaved person. The master’s child (now named Chambers) was raised as a slave with torture and oppression just to grow up to be a civilized man. Once the truth was exposed, Chambers was recognized as an heir to his estate and legally in charge of the entire plantation.
Mark Twain places Satire in each aspect of this novel showing the immoral practices ‘Blood Searching’, Racial Speculation, and the Enslavement of Black People. While Twain gives his audience and readers something to sit and think of, they enjoy the laughs that come with solving a murder by accident.
I do not feel like this kind of approach would work in modern day society. How we could find plenty of stories with symbolism and skewed meanings that underly bigger issues. Showing someone with 1/16 of Black Ancestry as “naturally violent and a town hassle” would only add to the list of many harmful stereotypes that white people have created against the black community.
