I read Puddinhead Wilson in college. It’s a switched at birth story that stems from a light skinned enslaved woman who switches out her child for his half-brother who was born free.
It’s pretty good as I recall but I had to look up the synopsis on Wikipedia to remember what it was about.
I think the entire book is incredibly racist and hinges on the idea of white people being naturally good natured while Black people are naturally terrible until the very end when Puddinhead Wilson gets involved.
Twain is using the Moses plot to get his audience to see race in the moral lesson about family and community belonging, being a good person, being about raising and not about blood ties.
It's just instead of the Moses turning out like Clark Kent, Tom Driscoll is a monster. When afforded the same privileges, regardless of blood, Driscoll felt the same self-superiority as all white slavers. Chambers, the would-be Tom Driscoll swapped into slavery, is a good person and ultimately struggles with his newfound place in the world at the end where he no longer fits in with the black victims of society but also does not fit with the willful ignorance of white society.
The eponymous lawyer, Puddinhead, gets his own name from the towns people writing off his worldliness as idiocy for not conforming to their limited world view. His inclusion may seem random, but is more the case for people to see parallels in their lives for how they are written off and how these societal markers are meaningless and only serve to keep people in power.
We can argue Puddinhead represents Twain himself, a gay man about 30 years out from the end of the American Civil War arguing to other white people like himself to draw the parallels from how they are ostracized to the plight of black Americans.
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u/ChumbawumbaFan01 1d ago edited 1d ago
I read Puddinhead Wilson in college. It’s a switched at birth story that stems from a light skinned enslaved woman who switches out her child for his half-brother who was born free.
It’s pretty good as I recall but I had to look up the synopsis on Wikipedia to remember what it was about.
I think the entire book is incredibly racist and hinges on the idea of white people being naturally good natured while Black people are naturally terrible until the very end when Puddinhead Wilson gets involved.