This essay argues against the historical and persistent willingness to read Mark Twain9s Pudd9nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins (1893) as fully or successfully separated texts, insisting
 instead that the apparent division of the text reiterates and mirrors the thematic concern with division, doubleness, and duplicity that runs through both parts of the composite novel. The paper examines
 the textual elements that frequently lead critics to read the texts as separate and argues that narrative assertions of separability are extremely unreliable. In addition, it demonstrates that the novel9s
 treatment of race slavery and segregation is more effective if Pudd9nhead and Twins are read as parts of an essential whole. It further asserts that the perception of textual flaws in Pudd9nhead
 stems largely from critics reading it apart from Twins, and that many of the problems with the text disappear when the two parts of the novel are reconnected.

Resecting Those Extraordinary Twins: Pudd'nhead Wilson and the Costs of "Killing Half"

In the Second Part of C. B. Brown's Arthur Mervyn (1799-1800), the eponymous hero journeys into the country from Philadelphia to bring the dismal news to the Hadwins, his Quaker benefactors, that Wallace, the fiancé of Susan Hadwin, has probably succumbed to the yellow fever. Earlier Mervyn had secretly ventured into fever-stricken Philadelphia in search of Wallace, and because he had cloaked his intentions from the Hadwins, Mr. Hadwin undertook a similar mission and needlessly exposed himself to the fever. Now returning to this family who, prior to meeting him, had been living in repose, Mervyn finds that his intervention has affected a complete upheaval. Hadwin, Mervyn learns, has died as a result of his unnecessary visit to Philadelphia. The languishing Susan, overjoyed by the news that a young man has just arrived, rushes downstairs to find that it is only Mervyn, and immediately perishes. Mervyn comments on her amazing demise: \"This fatal disappointment of hopes that had nearly been extinct, and which were now so powerfully revived, could not be endured by a frame verging to dissolution.\"1 Stepping outside to the site of Hadwin's grave, Mervyn reflects on the havoc wrought by the passage of time: \"A few months had passed since I had last visited this spot. What revolutions had since occurred, and how gloomily contrasted was my present purpose with what had formerly led me hither!\" (p. 281). Arthur Mervyn comprises a series of such \"revolutions,\" turns of the wheel that are unforeseen, disorienting, and never-ending. Susan's death represents the numbing toll exacted by an unstable world that eventually wears down its revolving individuals. To be sure, this world is a post-revolutionary one but not the progressive and democratic society supposedly fostered by the American Revolution and not even its nightmare antithesis as dramatized in such later works as Cooper's Lionel Lincoln and Hawthorne's \"My Kinsman, Major Molineux.\" Arthur Mervyn is about a particular post-revolutionary moment in which revolution is a blow to the imagination, an unexpected disorienting shock, an unforeseen upheaval that makes a mockery of stabilizing controls and simple cause-effect schematizations: it is about, and even partly shaped by, the post-French Revolutionary world and its attendant literary images, tropes, and structures.2

Arthur Mervyn's Revolutions

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 Clinician as Enslaver: Pudd'nhead Wilson and the Rationalization of Identity

Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson is generally considered an unsuccessful novel because of its alleged lack of coherence and con­ sistency in the development of its several thematic concerns. In 1970, however, George M. Spangler presented a thematic analysis which convincingly argues that “the book, far being incoherent or inconsistent, is remarkable among Twain’s works for its unity, a unity which derives from its pervasive concern with the theme of property, particularly the perils of an obsession with property to the exclusion of all other human values and needs.”2

Pudd'nhead Wilson's Fight for Popularity and Power

Although Mark Twain’s Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson and his Extraordinary Twins began as a single work, Twain separated them, in a decision that has a bearing on the reception of the better-known Pudd’nhead Wilson. After briefly summarizing the differences between Twins and Pudd’nhead Wilson, this article discusses the reception history of the latter book, including the reviews, which gave the novel a mixed reception until the 1950s, when it achieved the status of a classic comparable to Huckleberry Finn: the diverse and contrary analyses of the academic criticism and the highly divided feelings of recent online responses. This article will show, moreover, that changing cultural institutions explain the differences and divisions of the reviews, which are public and general, the academic criticism, which is specialized and autonomous, and the online responses, which derive from the novel’s educational contexts.

Reading Pudd'nhead Wilson: Criticism and Commentary from the Gilded Age to the Modern, Online Era

THE STRIKING LACK OF AGREEMENT about the merits of Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson is unquestionably related to the equally striking disagreements over interpretaton of the novel, related in the crucial sense that all the thematic analyses so far presented leave important aspects of the novel unaccounted for. The result is that those who are inclined to praise the novel dismiss certain parts as finally inconsequential evidence of Twain's predictably careless technique, while those who have serious reservations about its merits stress its lack of coherence, its lack of an action adequate to embody what appear to be the author's chief concerns. Although interpretations vary widely, ranging from the view that its theme is the conflict between appearance and reality to the assertion that it has "no clear meaning,"' two interpretative emphases are most common. First, there are those critics who stress racial themes, especially slavery and miscegenation, and second, those who argue for the centrality of the theme of environmental determinism and see slavery as simply a metaphor for Twain's more general concern with the influence of "training" on the individual.2 Although both these approaches yield valuable insights, both are finally unsatisfactory because they leave too many important questions unanswered-except by alluding to Twain's uncertain artistry.

Pudd'nhead Wilson: A Parable of Property

THOUGH SIMPLE in conception, Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn (I799; Part II, i8oo) is wonderfully complicated in execution. Brown adopted the straightforward, familiar tale of a young man's initiation and made of it a text extraordinary in its elaborateness, even in comparison to the intricacies of his other long fictions. There is nothing like it in serious American fiction until Faulkner's novels, excepting perhaps Melville's Pierre, the nineteenth-century American work it most resembles. R. W. B. Lewis no doubt spoke for most readers when he said that the plot is "often unintelligible" and that the indirect narrative method "confuses us intolerably."' At a lower level of generality than that provided by terms like initiation fable and Bildungsroman, the contrast between theoretical simplicity and actual complication is evident in the difference between the clarity of the story material and the frequent obscurity of Brown's plotting, between the ease with which the story can be summarized and the reader's sense of confusion as he experiences the text itself. When his widowed father's marriage to a conniving servant seems sure to disinherit him, young Arthur leaves the family farm to try his luck in Philadelphia where he becomes secretary to the villainous Welbeck. Within a few days he learns that his employer is a seducer, a thief, and a killer, and then an apparent suicide. Having had enough of wicked city ways, Arthur returns to the country where he works on the Hadwins' farm and falls in love with Eliza Hadwin. Soon a yellow fever epidemic strikes Philadelphia, and Arthur returns to the city to look for the fiance of another of the Hadwins' daughters. Becoming ill, he is himself rescued by Dr. Stevens, who defends him against suspicion stem-

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/2925452

George M. Spangler

Papers

Pudd'nhead Wilson: A Parable of Property

C. B. Brown's Arthur Mervyn: A Portrait of the Young American Artist