Literary Forensics: Fingerprinting the Literary Dialects of Three Works of Plantation Fiction

Introduction

In a scene widely and convincingly read as a courtroom farce with a tragic understanding of late-nineteenth-century racial politics, Mark Twain's title character in Pudd'nhead Wilson uses his fingerprint records of the people of Dawson's Landing as forensic evidence that "Tom" is not only Judge Driscoll's murderer, but, more damningly, his salable property.¹ In doing so, Twain represents what Eric Sundquist calls "the perversions of justice and the nearly hallucinatory structures of pseudoscientific theory that coursed throughout nineteenth-century intellectual, political and legal debate about race in the United States" (226).² That "Tom" is, in fact, the killer is beside the point; for Sundquist, in a legal system that demands "natural" barriers to be drawn between races where they are neither justified nor feasible, there is no such thing as a correct interpretation of fact. Facts themselves border on hallucinations in this context. In the case of Pudd'nhead Wilson, the correct identification of the killer is not a Sherlock Holmesian case of the truth shining through after rigorous and disinterested examination of evidence, but rather a cautionary tale about how the kinds of questions we ask and the contexts in which our answers are presented can render interpretation of any evidence dubious at best and dangerous at worst.

I begin this essay with Pudd'nhead Wilson because it provides a number of useful parallels for my work on literary dialects, which uses computational tools to "fingerprint" representations of nonstandard dialects in works of plantation fiction from the late nineteenth century. That fiction's own history is fraught with uses of pseudo-linguistic theory for drawing artificial social boundaries between speakers. Michele Birnbaum has pointed out the logical fallacies behind late-nineteenth-century dialect authors' obsessions with the authenticity of their dialect representations and the "objective" divisions they entrenched between standard (white) and nonstandard (black) speakers. And Gavin Jones has convincingly identified the deep-seated ambivalence about language variation's potential for vibrant expressiveness on the one hand, and for cultural corrosiveness on the other, that informed these obsessions. My research, however, is more concerned with the nearly hallucinatory structures of questionable linguistic theory that have coursed through some critical attempts to counteract the dangers of racist pseudoscience from the period with modern antiracist pseudoscience. Certainly Wilson's pseudoscientific interests in fingerprinting help to correct the town's xenophobic forensics behind Luigi's arrest for murder, yet they do so at the expense of propping up a racist parody of justice for "Tom," whose identity and guilt, once exposed, do not provide him his own impartial trial but a one-way ticket down the river.

Representations of language variation in literature matter immensely to literary criticism and its relevance to social justice, particularly given sociolinguist Alexandra Jaffe's insight that "orthography selects, displays and naturalizes linguistic difference which in turn is used to legitimize and naturalize cultural and political boundaries" (502-3). But the immensity of that importance has bedeviled our ability to think first and clearly about what we can know about literary dialects, how we can know it, and what conclusions we can reach with that knowledge. Consider the case of Henry Louis Gates's and Hazel Carby's respective interpretations of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's representations of black speech in Iola Leroy. While Gates argues that "Iola Leroy contains the richest and fullest representation of black dialect to be found in the nineteenth century novel" (xiv), Carby asserts that "the language Harper invented for [folk speakers] was based on an authorial sense of error and deviation from an assumed norm; it was not an attempt to describe the inherent qualities, cadence, and tone of the freedman's speech" (78). The fact that two of our most prominent literary critics can interpret the same aspect of the same text in such fundamentally different ways should give us pause. Is one right and the other wrong? How can we adjudicate between them? This essay offers an alternative to objectively stated and dubiously supported pronouncements on the authenticity of literary dialects by using...