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

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 Cæsarean 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 primary figure of authority in the text, David Wilson functions as the "extraordinary twin" of Twain's revised tale and works as the philopena of power in Dawson's Landing. ¹

Many critics of Pudd'nhead Wilson have acknowledged the centrality of the twinning theme in the novel in terms of individual and societal identity in general. Arnold Weinstein, for instance, looking at society and identity within the novel argues that "the twinning principle is a way of making elastic what would be rigid, of spoofing what would be solemn, of annexing more space and having more fun in quarters that are pretty cramped and dull" (73). ² And of those critics who have acknowledged the centrality of David Wilson in the novel, there is disagreement as to how he should be read. Most view Wilson in terms of either his intelligence or else the degree to which he lives up to the name pudd'nhead. ³ However insightful these studies may be, the ambiguous nature of Wilson's power in Dawson's Landing has been by and large neglected. Yet whether as Columbo or as Barney Fife, Wilson unquestionably possesses some form of power, and it is this authority that best reveals Twain's textual double-mindedness.

Some of the criticism concerning David Wilson suggests an innocent or benevolent character who functions as a figure of enlightenment and emancipation. Other readings of Wilson, however, suggest a more sinister or self-serving figure. ⁴ But if doubleness or twinning lies at the heart of Pudd'nhead Wilson's structure, then one would expect its title character to embody this in some way. However, some critics deny David Wilson the central focus...