Throughout Mark Twain’s novel, Pudd’nhead Wilson, there are multiple ways race was defined by. As a class we referenced many identifiers of race: class, speech, skin tone, ancestry, clothing, mannerism, etc. The one that interested me the most was blood, we kept referring to the One Drop Rule, which after a little research, I found out wasn't an actually law until the early 20th Century. Meaning that it was only an idea enforced that if part of ones ancestry was black then that was enough to force that one person into slavery. Although realistically the One Drop Rule, was enforced to stop interracial marriages.Now, this is the first instance where I see Twain bringing light to how stupid the one drop rule was to stop racial mixing.
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With those two questions, it it possible to say that being a born "identity" is a fiction made by society? Twain uses Tom to express this, "'Why were niggers and whites made?' What crime did the uncreated first nigger commit the curse of birth was decreed for him? And why is this awful difference between white and black?"(Twain 117). This passage asking questions far beyond the averages readers daily thinking. Even now, in the 'progressive' 21st Century these questions make any person feel awkward. Still why? What caused the inherit birth differences between the white and the black? Quite frankly its the institutional practices of the time that carried into the ideas of social darwinism. I think entirely that Pudd'nhead Wilson is Twain bringing the issue that race and the positive and negative connotations that come with them are all based on social beliefs.
Works Cited
Twain, Mark. Pudd’nhead Wilson. New York: Penguin Group Ltd., 2004. Print.
I definitely agree that Twain is taking this sort of a stance on race. I like how he makes us think about it for ourselves though instead of just straight out saying what he thinks. I really liked how you pointed out that even though we say that racism is not a big issue anymore, it does still exist and we might not be as 'progressive' as we think we are. This goes back to the video that we watched last Thursday about changing the word 'nigger' to 'slave'. I think that if we still have trouble saying, reading, or discussing the 'n-word' then it must still have some negative connotations attached to it. If we had moved past such ideas completely, then the word should be much less harmful now. As far as the one drop rule, I just think that the whole idea is so questionable as to how they traced peoples' ancestry. In Roxy's case, where she looks like she could be completely white, no one would ever know that she was part black except by rumors of who her great-great-great-(etc.)-grandparents would have been. I feel that your title of this post 'fiction of race', really exemplifies the ideas presented by Twain through much of his work.
ReplyDeleteI think that Twain represents the idea that through the exaggeration of how bad slavery was then and how interchangeable descriptions are between a white and black individual to show racism was taken to a new level through those who lived in that time period. Today racism isn't dead, but what was true racism then and what is true racism now. Each individual will have there own perception of how racism took place and what exactly makes up a black individual versus a white individual. Ancestry took a huge part in racism, in the way the to define a person, one would lead back to the ancestry and history of the individual and if there was even an ounce of black blood in someone they would be considered black. Exaggeration brings the reality of how racism survived the civil war time period and still survives today in different parts of the world.
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