A. The thesis of the study is that Mark Twain in Pudd'nhead Wilson depicts a tragedy most exemplified in slavery.
1. Argues that Twain has victims pressured by both internal and external forces.
2. One theme is man's fall; the other is the fall of America.
a. Slavery is a sin akin to the sin in the Garden of Eden
1. Miscegenation is not a crime; the crime is whites' attitude toward miscegenation.
A. Both whites and blacks suffered from slavery.
B. Slavery tears individual souls and families apart.
C. The tragedy of slavery is a man-made tragedy based on racism, fear, and greed.
D. To Twain, one of the worst effects of slavery was the "whitewashing" of the black person's soul, so that he or she participated in the hatred of blacks.
A. Slavery is, finally, a human tragedy, and not merely a black tragedy.
This study will argue that Mark Twain presents his work Pudd'nhead Wilson as a tragedy most apparent in the slavery depicted.
The basic technique by which Mark Twain achieves artistic and philosophic unity in this novel is to make the leading characters become victims of forces both outside and within themselves. One is concerned with man's sin and fall, and the other with the fall of America (334).
Brodwin approaches the story as a tale symbolic of the Eden story, and slavery is in this sense seen as the serpent, "the metaphorical serpent in this apparent Eden" (334).
. . . The slavery is not only an evil in itself--the National Sin--but is the condition that leads to a variety of crimes: miscegenation, betrayal, murder, and tampering with the lives of innocent infants. A whole range of man's sinful impulses is dramatically realized. From this fact springs the essential, mythic tragedy of the book (334-335).
Arthur Pettit focuses on one of these "crimes" (miscegenation) in his critique of the book. Pettit notes Twain's appreciation of black culture and concludes:
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