Race in Mark Twains Puddnhead Wilson essays

Race in Mark Twains Puddnhead Wilson essays Mark Twains novel Puddnhead Wilson is a controversial commentary on race, identity and social determination. The action of the novel takes place in a small town in Missouri, called Dawsons Landing, in a society in which the relationship between the white people and the black was still a master-slave relationship. The text tells the story of two boys who are exchanged soon after their birth by Roxana, a slave of Percy Driscoll. The changelings exchange thus more than their names, which are Thomas a Beckett and Valet de Chambers, respectively. They exchange their race, their identity, their social position and even their lives. In an almost Shakespearian vein, Mark Twain joggles with the notion of mistaken or stolen identity. There is a particular emphasis in the text on clothes, veiling and face painting, all of which serve as masks and disguises. The two central characters in this maze of plots are Roxana and the lawyer Wilson, who plays the role of a detective and who eventually unr avels the mystery of the two twins. Roxana is a slave with only one sixteenth black blood and the rest white. The central figure of the novel, Roxy stands out as a very interesting and contradictory character. Attempting so save her son from being sold down the river, she switches the two babies that were born the same day, soon after their birth. Roxana is thus more than an overzealous mother, who is trying to protect her child at all costs. Her desperate act makes of her a modern character: by switching the two children, Roxana frees identity from its racial and social determination. Thus, her main role in the novel is to prove that identity is not dictated by the racial origin, but by the social environment in which a certain person lives. The core problem of the novel is thus the attempt to give a definition of identity, in the context of racial difference. From the beginning, identity is introduced in the novel as someth...