Haunting Black Feminist Geographies in Pudd’nhead Wilson

Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson depicts a passing plot centered on Roxy, a white passing enslaved woman who switches her master’s son with her own. Through the passing plot, the Gothic seeps in to unsettle the slaveholding town of Dawson’s Landing. In this essay, I focus on the novel’s racialized geographies through the haunted house which paradoxically represents Roxy’s oppression as well as facilitates her survival and motherhood by allowing her to remap dominant, white supremacist geographies. While the novel initially centers on domestic houses and the courtroom, the reader becomes drawn to the haunted house. I draw from Black feminist scholarship to argue that the haunted house emerges as the Middle Passage, enabling Roxy and Tom to subvert the logics of the white domestic and insist upon their own desires. To that end the haunted house elucidates the racial and gendered cartography of the novel and Roxy’s agential possibilities.