Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson: Manuscript and Revised Versions with “Those Extraordinary Twins,” edited by Benjamin Griffin

This article examines the persistence of race, slavery, and disability issues in nineteenth-century American literature. It employs both critical race and disability analysis to argue for a mutually constitutive relationship between these categories of representation in nineteenth-century American literature. The article comments on Mark Twain's novel Puddn'head Wilson and his short story “Those Extraordinary Twins,” which are structured around the mutually supportive tropes of conjoined twins and racial ambiguity.

And thus in the land of the Color-line I saw, as it fell across my baby, the shadow of the Veil. --W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk Now who would b'lieve clo'es could do de like o' dat? --Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson The idyllic opening of Pudd'nhead Wilson, with its description of Dawson's Landing's modest dwellings with whitewashed exteriors and a cat asleep in a flower box, concludes with the description of the village bounded on the front by the Mississippi River and on the back by a row of high hills that, Mark Twain writes, were clothed with forests from foot to summit.(1) Thus, unobtrusively and in the context of a tranquil landscape, he introduces what is to become one of the major subtexts of the novel: namely, clothes as markers of identity, race, and gender. The text is rich with masquerading, with layering of clothing, with cross-dressing and misleading gender markers, with foppery, veiling and unveiling, and with clothing as cues (and mis-cues) to sexual and racial identity. Yet across the novel's critical history, Twain's preoccupation with clothing in the text has been all but invisible.(2) For the first generation of critics and reviewers of Pudd'nhead Wilson, even the multiple acts of cross-dressing performed by both the slave heroine, Roxana, and her son escaped public notice. The reviewer for Cosmopolitan, for instance, called attention to a host of melodramatic elements in the novel, but made no mention of cross-dressing: exchanges of infants in the cradle, a hero with negro taint in his blood substituted for the legitimate white heir, midnight encounters in a haunted house between the false heir and his colored mother, murder by the villain of his supposed uncle and benefactor, accusation of an innocent foreigner, and final sensational acquittal and general unraveling of the tangled skein ....(3) This reviewer goes on in familiar nineteenth-century terms to extol the virtue of the text's black language: How deliciously rich, racy, and copious is, for instance, his negro talk. The very gurgling laugh and cooing cadence seems, somehow, implied in the text.(4) The reviewer for the Spectator, responding to the wry humor of the novel, wondered if Twain had found Missouri audiences or readers slow to appreciate his jokes,(5) while the Bookman focused on the novelty of fingerprint records that ultimately reveal the true identity of the false heir who murders his purported uncle.(6) These reviewers, as others across the work's critical history, responded to Pudd'nhead Wilson's deeply disturbing critique of racial categories, but none of them perceived how metaphors of clothing and cross-dressed performances complicate and complement the racial issues at the core of the novel. More recently, Pudd'nhead Wilson criticism has taken two distinct directions. Scholars such as Hershel Parker have taken pains to understand how Twain composed Pudd'nhead Wilson, not being content to accept the author's flippant description of how he simply removed the Siamese twins from his original manuscript by Cesarean surgery once the slave Roxana and her son took over the text.(7) By delicate surgical procedures of their own, these scholars have reconstructed Twain's composing and revising processes that led to the ultimate creation of two texts, Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins. They note, for example, that in the original manuscript, now known as the Morgan Manuscript, there were no changelings; Tom Driscoll was white, not black; and the Italian twins were Siamese twins who were ultimately hanged by the good citizens of Dawson's Landing. (More accurately, only one of the twins was hanged; but as the citizenry deduced about Wilson's dog at the beginning of the story, killing one halt of the animal would for all practical purposes also kill the other.) A second strand of modern scholarship, as represented in Susan Gilman and Forrest Robinson's collection of essays, Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson: Race, Conflict, and Culture, reads the text historically and interprets late nineteenth-century culture through the text. …

Book Review

Pudd‘nhead Wilson (1894) was Mark Twain‘s last serious work of fiction, and perhaps the only real novel that he ever produced. Written in a more sombre vein than his other Mississippi writings, the novel reveals the sinister forces that Mark Twain felt to be threatening the American dream. In spite of a plot which includes child swapping, palmistry, and a pair of Italian twins, this astringent work also raises the serious issue of racial differences. This volume also includes two other late works ‘Those Extraordinary Twins’ and ‘The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg’.

When P. T. Barnum needed to move dawdling spectators out of his museum, he posted signs over the exits that read, “This Way to the Egress.” Standing suddenly on the street, Barnum's gullible patrons were left with two choices: pay for reentry or choose to see the world as the grand spectacle, the ultimate humbug. Barnum's sly redirection of his audience is re-created in Mark Twain's writing. Like Barnum, Twain challenges the boundaries of the joke, the fiction, the text. What begins as a romantic spectacle of fiction bleeds into the more inscrutable (and participatory) spectacle of its context: reality. This article examines this literary tactic in three texts: Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins, The Mysterious Stranger, and Mark Twain's Autobiography. Here, the humbugs of society, self, and celebrity stand under close scrutiny. The exhibition of the Barnumesque real-or-manufactured marvels forces us to the exit without ever admitting that the show is over.

there lingers some doubt about his attitude toward Negro. has been criticized for using such disparaging designations as nigger. His works, both fictional and autobiographical, have been carefully combed to find traces of racial prejudice expected of Southerner. That one can abhor slavery and still retain a prejudice against Negro is, of course, a commonplace,' one that has been recently popularized by late Malcolm X in his efforts to unveil true Abraham Lincoln. Whether this charge can be applied to Mark Twain is, however, questionable. His hatred of slavery seems, at times, to have been intimately connected to a personal sense of responsibility for injustices inflicted upon black William Dean Howells has written of Mark Twain that he was the most desouthernized Southerner he had ever known. He held himself responsible for wrong which white race had done black race in slavery, and he explained, in paying way of a negro student through Yale, that he was doing it as his part of reparation due from every white to every black man. 2 Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson seems to be another such act of reparation, an exposure of white man's moral decay resulting from Negro slavery, as well as an expression of Mark Twain's sympathetic understanding for those who, he believed, suffered most from that decay, products of miscegenation, those who are white in color, yet Negro by that American fiction of law and custom that labels a man, and thereby condemns him, for merest drop of Negroid blood. The Italian twins that figure in Pudd'nhead Wilson were originally Siamese, a 'freak'-or 'freaks' . . . a combination consisting of two heads and four arms joined to a single body and a single pair of legs. As Mark

374 Western American Literature with Paul Horgan (from whom the epigraph istaken),that in the Southwestand in comparative cultural studies there is, indeed, “no such thing as a short journey.” ROBERT FRANKLIN GISH CatPoly, San Luis Obispo WritingHuckFinn: Mark Twain’s CreativeProcess. ByVictor A. Doyno. (Philadel­ phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. 273 pages, $29.95.) The debate over the merits and sins of Mark Twain’s Adventures ofHuckle­ berryFinn has been so strong and so comprehensive that we only nod when, in his preface to WritingHuckFinn, Victor Doyno asks, “Isit possible to sayor think anything new about Huck?” Doyno’s answer, of course, is yes. His yes is informed by long and meticulous study of four sources. Two of these—the manuscript version and Clemens’s correspondence—have been part of earlier studies (Doyno completed this projectjust before the discovery of the first half of the manuscript early in 1991. The issues surrounding the ownership of that manuscript have notyetbeen resolved.) Doyno, however, shines a new interpre­ tive light upon two other sources: Clemens’s record of his children’s sayings and, in Doyno’s words, “full, sympathetic explorations of then-current laws, of Twain’s lawsuits, and of his opinions about international copyright.” It is a bright light. It is fueled by a detailed look at the accumulated records of Clemens’s personal and our social history with textual evidence of Clemens’s constant search for the right word and expression. Doyno’s genetic criticism helps us understand the intricate and interde­ pendent patterns that tie the book together on both the micro/stylistic level and the macro/thematic level. He leads us through a myriad of revisions and stylistic and thematic echoes and helps us see and hear Clemens’s careful tuning ofHuck’svoice. Bytracing Clemens’srevisions, Doyno introduces us to a writer of immense and focused creative energy. By accumulating textual, per­ sonal, and social evidence, Doyno resurrects Clemens’s concern with the na­ tional questions of literacy that are part of the debate over copyright. He also introduces the intensely personal battles waged by the illiterate and semi­ literate who are forced to exist on the margins. Huck’s choice to enter the literate world becomes an act of rebellion and self determination. He is, after all, taking a step into foreign territory—territory that has been Tom Sawyer’s exclusively. The power of reading and writing is at the heart of HuckleberryFinn. Books or the information gotten from books or the myth and half-truths that grow out of an obsession with literature are everywhere in Huck. And the power of the literate culture—of the laws that allow the hunting of men and the literature Reviews 375 that encourages notions of excess for the sake of the effect—is the cement that binds the Phelps farm section to the rest of the text. Doyno’s argument for the inherent connections within the novel is fascinating and convincing. It is also extremely disturbing because it demonstrates how easily our culture has ig­ nored its own violent and abusive history. We have become too sanguine about Clemens’s indictments of the “damned human race.” Times have dulled our appreciation of the outrage that lurks within Huck’syarn. Doyno has managed to resurrect the times and the disgust and the pain inherent in the struggle to tell a terrible and sad story. MICHAELJ. KISKIS SUNY-EmpireState College Mark Twain and theFeminineAesthetic. By Peter Stoneley. (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. 205 pages, $44.95.) Mark Twain and theFeminine Aesthetic examines Twain’s literary and nonliterary writings for his responses to the ideology of gender. Envisioning “the feminine aesthetic” as “an ideological process that involved men and women, both in its creation and its effects,”Stoneley traces the bifurcation between the adventurous, picaresque, or “male” world of Roughing It, Adventures ofHuckle­ berryFinn, and HuckFinn and TomSawyeramongtheIndiansversusworks corrobo­ rating “feminine”values. Readers interested in Twain’swestern experience will enjoy Chapter One’streatment ofthe Nevada-California literary apprenticeship and two early gender parodies: “Lucretia Smith’s Soldiers” (1864) and “Aurelia’s Unfortunate Young Man” (1864). Chapter Two examines Twain’s evolving masculine aesthetic in Life on the...

Mark Twain's tale of those conglomerate Luigi and Angelo Capello, double-headed human creature with four arms, one body, and a single pair of legs, is an appropriate figure for much of American religion since the Enlightenment. These extraordinary twins, Twain tells us, were terribly divided religiously. Luigi's tastes ran to Tom Paine's Age of Reason, pipe tobacco, rum shops, and the Freethinkers' Society; Angelo's to devotional classics, temperance, Methodist meetings, and eventually Baptist full immersion (a miserably wet day for Luigi). Being inseparably joined to his irreligious brother was a grievous trial to Angelo, who, in moments of deep despair, wished that and his brother might become segregated from each other and be separate individuals, like other men. But then he would shudder at these dark imaginings: To sleep by himself, eat by himself, walk by himself-how lonely, how unspeakably lonely. A shivering at the monstrosity of manly isolation, Angelo's quavering was also a recognition that evangelicalism and the Enlightenment, modern religion and natural philosophy, were so bound together that their separation could hardly be conceived. Angelo was stuck with Luigi, and vice versa. Such intense intertwining is especially foregrounded in James Gilbert's Redeeming Culture, but the question of Christianization and secularization is also the one issue that echoes

(4L T E R N A T E S E L V E S fascinate Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. Dickens tends to explore the implications of doubleness: characters complement one another, though their connection may not be genetically or physiognomically apparent, nor need they even share the same gender. Twain, by contrast, centers on gender and genetic twins: look-alikes (The Prince and the Pauper), half brothers (Pudd'nhead Wilson), Siamese twins (Those Extraordinary Twins), and characters such as Tom Driscoll who through imposture become twin selves of both genders. Both authors also double themselves through autobiographical projections within the fictions and by pseudonyms. The difference between their writerly doubles, which, as we shall show, is consonant with the difference between their treatment of doubles/twins, is that Dickens' self-projections (David Copperfield, Pip) enact alternate lives, pursue tracks that only a part of Charles Dickens ever partly followed; whereas Samuel Clemens invents a persona that not only becomes a second self but after a time enslaves the first, so that the twin Twain eclipses Clemens. In short, Dickens explores the ramifications of doubleness from a base that seems confident about individual identity: David Copperfield is not Charles Dickens, nor is Pip Orlick, though they share certain traits, activities, and options. Twain presses his investigations of twin-ness to the point where radical individual identity collapses: it ceases to be possible to separate one brother from the other, or

The South, it seems, is the obvious home to the freak and freakish enterprises, so much so that Flannery O’Connor famously said, “Whenever I’m asked why Southern Writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one” (44). And freaks do populate much of the regional literature—either explicitly, such as in Eudora Welty’s short story “Petrified Man” (1941), Mark Twain’s novel Those Extraordinary Twins (later, Pudd’nhead Wilson 1894), and Frank Stanford’s epic The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You (1977), or implicitly through the deformation of characters and landscapes, such as in Carson McCullers’s Ballad of the Sad Café (1951) or Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road (1932). Because of the freakish resonances across so much literature of the American South, freak studies offers a valuable lens in untangling the rhetoric and function of performing and consuming monstrosity in the nation’s most enfreaked region.

Abolishing White Masculinity from Mark Twain to Hiphop examines white American male literature for its social commentary on the construction of whiteness in the United States. Whiteness has always been a contested racial identity in the U.S., one in a state of construction and reconstruction throughout critical cultural and historical moments. This text examines how white American male writers have grappled with understanding themselves and their audiences as white beings. Abolishing White Masculinity from Mark Twain to Hiphop specifically brings a critical whiteness approach to American literary criticism and strengthens the growing interdisciplinary field of critical whiteness studies in the humanities. Critical whiteness studies shifts the attention from solely examining people and perspectives of color in race discourse to addressing whiteness as an essential component of race ideology. The primary contribution of this perspective is in how whites construct and see whiteness, for the larger purpose of exploring the possibilities of how they may come to no longer construct and see themselves through whiteness. Understanding this is at the heart of contemporary discussions of post-raciality. Abolishing White Masculinity from Mark Twain to Hiphop uses the following texts as canonical case studies: Puddn’head Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins by Mark Twain, The Great Gatsby and The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Angry Black White Boy and The End of the Jews by Adam Mansbach. Each underscores the dialectic of formation, deformation, and reformation of whiteness at specific socio-historical moments based upon anxieties about race possessed by whites and highlighted by white fictionists. The selected writers ultimately serve dually as co-constructors of whiteness and social critics of their times through their literature.

Perhaps no other work better reveals the double-minded impulse in Mark Twain than does Pudd’nhead Wilson. Not only do twins make up the structural core of the tale, but the composition history of the novel is a case study in Twain’s narrative double-play. Beginning as Those Extraordinary Twins, a short piece centered around Italian-born Siamese twins, the project quickly developed into something more than Twain thought he could handle. What had originally started as a farce soon turned into a tragedy—“a most embarrassing circumstance,” according to its author (Pudd’nhead, 229). It was not one separate story, but two intertwined tales that “obstructed and interrupted each other at every turn and created no end of confusion and annoyance,” leaving Twain with a literary task of surgical proportions: “I pulled one of the stories out by the roots, and left the other one—a kind of literary Caesarean operation” (229–30). Twain concludes his history of “jack-leg” composition by stating that the twins’ “story was one story, the new people’s story was another story, and there was no connection between them, no interdependence, no kinship” (303). This last remark appears too emphatically dismissive to be dismissed, and if we were to take the author at his word, our reading of Pudd’nhead Wilson would be tragically abortive. If the tales of the twins— the Capellos in the farce as well as Tom Driscoll and Valet de Chambers in the tragedy—suggest anything, it is the impossibility of an autonomous identity. The two individual stories may have progressed along separate trajectories, but they nonetheless share a favorite Twain theme: twinning. The literal twins in Those Extraordinary Twins evolved into a series of thematic twins in Pudd’nhead Wilson, including Luigi and Angelo, Tom and Chambers, Tom and Roxy, Roxy and Wilson, Wilson and Judge Driscoll, and Wilson and Tom. But one of the most significant acts of twinning in the novel occurs within the single character of David Wilson. He embodies the two conflicting impulses of power that seem to permeate Twain’s later writings: the will to emancipate and the will to manipulate. As the

The general critical consensus is that, with the completion of Puddn′head Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins, Twain′s best work was done. But that is not to say that the vast amount he wrote after 1894 (and particularly in the next twelve years2) is without interest. Indeed, the range and variety of his writing in this period is extraordinary. Twain published a good part of this material in his lifetime. However, much remained unfinished, or self-censored, and unpublished (or published only in bowdlerised or ‘laundered’ form3) until comparatively recently. Which Was the Dream? and Other Symbolic Writings and Mark Twain′s Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts came out in 1967 and 1969 respectively.4

Mark Twain was caught between different stories and literary modes as he wrote Puddn’head Wilson (1894). His artistic difficulties with his material are suggested in the late change of title from Those Extraordinary Twins.3 They are clear in his account of the ‘literary Caesarean operation’ he performed, when he ‘dug out’ farcical material about Siamese twins to leave the ‘tragic aspect’ of his tale of Roxy and the two changelings intact.4 Twain’s story of this severance is in the first American edition of the text, published as

Thomas W. Howard, “‘Two Stories Tangled Together’: The Double Brain, Pudd’nhead Wilson, and Those Extraordinary Twins” (pp. 81–110) In this article, I examine Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins (1894) alongside nineteenth-century psychological theories, especially ideas about the double brain. While scholars have long acknowledged Twain’s fascination with twinship, I argue that the twinned and conjoined characters of these texts reflect deeper concerns about mental duality and the divided self. I begin by demonstrating Twain’s longstanding interest in psychological and psychical research, including his own investigation into “mental telegraphy,” his membership in the Society for Psychical Research, and his acquaintance with famed psychologists including William James. Next, I show how the conjoined characters Angelo and Luigi demonstrate characteristics that commonly appear in theories of the dual-hemispheric structure of the brain. I then turn to the two tales themselves as evidence of a further conjoinment, where Twain performs hypnotic whispers and subconscious suggestion through his careful revision of the texts. Instead of a straightforward narrative, Twain creates a twinned narrative that disrupts linear storytelling, requiring readers to navigate layered and shifting interpretations. Ultimately, Twain’s entangled stories serve as a literary experiment that engages multiple forms of attention, paralleling contemporary conceptions of the double brain and challenging readers to experience the reading of fictional narrative as a more psychological, nuanced process.