Pudd'nhead Wilson I. Introduction A. The thesis of the s

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

. . .
ed into the deeper patterns of hatred and racism that mark that time and place: Tom had long ago taught Roxy 'her place.' It had been many a day, now, since she had ventured a caress or a fondling epithet in his quarter. Such things, from a 'nigger,' were repulsive to him, and she had been warned to keep her distance and remember who she was. She saw her darling gradually cease from being her son, she saw that detail perish utterly; all that was left was master--master, pure and simple, and it was not a gentle mastership, either. She saw herself sink from the sublime height of motherhood to the sombre deeps of unmodified slavery. The abyss of separation between her and her boy was complete (Twain 21). What makes the story a tragedy, of course, is not simply that so many sad things happen to so many people. Sad events and sad people do not make a tragedy, in the literary sense. What makes a tragedy is the fact that the things that happened to these people did not have to happen. The tragedy of slavery as depicted in this book is a manmade tragedy, a tragedy not visited upon man by nature as in an earthquake or a hurricane. Every tragedy that flows from slavery in Twain's book is a tragedy which has its root in the fi
. . .

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1362
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)