Featuring the brilliantly drawn Roxanna, a mulatto slave who
suffers dire consequences after switching her infant son with her
master''s baby, and the clever Pudd''nhead Wilson, an ostracized
small-town lawyer, Twain''s darkly comic masterpiece is a
provocative exploration of slavery and miscegenation. Leslie A.
Fiedler described the novel as "half melodramatic detective story,
half bleak tragedy," noting that "morally, it is one of the most
honest books in our literature." "Those Extraordinary Twins," the
slapstick story that evolved into Pudd''nhead Wilson, provides a
fascinating view of the author''s process. The text for this Modern
Library Paperback Classic was set from the 1894 first American
edition.
關於作者：
Ron Powers, a Pulitzer Prize–winning author
and native of Hannibal, Missouri, has written twelve books,
including Dangerous Water: A Biography of the Boy Who Became
Mark Twain. He lives in Middlebury, Vermont. --This text
refers to the Paperback
edition.
目錄：
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
INTRODUCTION: OUT OF SLAPSTICK, GENIUS:
MARK TWAIN, MEET DR. HA.CKENBUSH by Ron Powers
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
PUDD''NHEAD WILSON
THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS
COMMENTARY
READING GROUP GUIDE
內容試閱：
From Darryl Pinckney’s Introduction to Pudd’nhead Wilson and
Those Extraordinary Twins
Pudd’nhead Wilson is mercilessly ironic in tone, so that Twain’s
exasperation at received attitudes about race isn’t obvious right
away. His burlesque is disarming, a sort of screen under the cover
of which are stark assertions about the miseries of slavery and the
unfairness of power based on race. Yet Pudd’nhead Wilson also feels
like a sketch, as if to have filled in more, to have told his tale
as anything more than a romp, would have been impossible for the
kind of writer Twain was by temperament. Prefaces of sly humor were
his custom, and Pudd’nhead Wilson begins with “A Whisper to the
Reader,” in which his dislike of Italy percolates again. A mild
discontent, something of that Florentine weariness, enters into the
narrative voice at this early point and never really goes away.
Twain has no real interest in characterization or extended
description of place in Pudd’nhead Wilson. His omniscient narrator
scatters clues and barrels through his yarn at a great clip, but
this modern fable differs considerably from his historical
romances. The twins of Pudd’nhead Wilson do not relate to the Tudor
look-alikes of The Prince and the Pauper, and Pudd’nhead Wilson is
not a reprise of King Arthur’s Yankee problem solver.
Then, too, it is a conflation of story ideas: one about a white
baby and black baby switched in the cradle; and another about
Italian twins with musical gifts of the higher freak show order. At
times Twain’s novel reads as though the two stories, one
melodramatic, the other farcical, had met up, unexpectedly,
uneasily, in the same town. Most of Pudd’nhead Wilson’s twenty-two
chapters are headed by two aphorisms, selections from an almanac,
Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar. “There is no character, howsoever
good and fine, but it can be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor
and witless,” begins the first saying attributed to Pudd’nhead
Wilson. “Tell the truth or trump—but get the trick,” goes the
second. The two sayings not only foreshadow the story of the man,
Pudd’nhead Wilson, they also suggest the rueful spirit that rules
the novel.
In 1830 Dawson’s Landing, Missouri, is a sleepy, pretty town. St.
Louis is to the north, half a day’s journey by steamboat. Dawson’s
Landing is “a slaveholding town, with a rich, slave-worked grain
and pork country back of it.” York Leicester Driscoll is the county
judge and Dawson’s Landing’s “chief citizen.” He and his wife are
childless. It is a hierarchical town, full of names that echo the
England of Twain’s historical romances. Judge Driscoll, like his
brother, Percy Northumberland Driscoll, or Colonel Cecil Burleigh
Essex, or Pembroke Howard, takes his descent from the First
Families of Virginia, or “F.F.V.s,” very seriously.
The children of Percy Northumberland Driscoll have died in
infancy. When the novel opens, Percy’s wife dies a week after
giving birth to a boy, and one of his slave girls, Roxana, who gave
birth to a son the same day the Driscoll baby was born, is put in
charge of both babies. Around the same time, Dawson’s Landing gains
another new citizen, Mr. David Wilson, a “college-bred”
twenty-five-year-old of “Scotch parentage” who is seeking his
fortune. Homely, but with intelligent blue eyes, he would have been
successful at once in Dawson’s Landing, “but he made his fatal
remark the first day he spent in the village, and it ‘gaged’ him.”
While Wilson is talking to a group of townspeople, a dog somewhere
begins to howl. “I wish I owned half of that dog,” Wilson says.
When someone asks why, he replies, “Because I would kill my
half.”
The townspeople talk among themselves: “’Pears to be a fool.”
“What did he reckon would become of the other half if he killed his
half?” “He would be responsible for that half just the same as if
he had killed that half instead of his own. Don’t it look that way
to you, gents?” “Yes, it does . . . , because if you kill one half
of a general dog there ain’t any man that can tell whose half it
was.” They decide that Wilson is not in his right mind, that he
“hain’t got any mind,” that he is a “pudd’nhead.” Though he will
become well liked and his nickname will lose any unfriendly feeling
it ever had, nevertheless it will take more than twenty years for
him to overturn the town’s verdict about him. Wilson buys a small
house next to Judge Driscoll’s property, but his reputation has
left him no chance at practicing law. However, he does get work as
a land surveyor and accountant. In his free time Wilson devotes
himself to his hobbies of “palmistry” and “one which dealt with
people’s finger-marks.” In his coat pocket Wilson carries shallow
boxes containing strips of glass that he uses to record people’s
thumbprints. He calls this fascination “an amusement,” because he
finds that his “fads” only add to his image as a “pudd’nhead.”
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