Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson is rooted in the relationship within dichotomies, as we pointed out in class today. I found there to be further relationships between the dichotomies that sometimes resulted in a conflict of ideas. Such an example is the punishment of of 'Tom' given to him when he was a white man, and then the punishment after we became an enslaved man. This conflict is thus related to the dichotomy of white and black.
The reader knows that there are both blacks and whites and Twain also knows then when Tom asks the question of why there "were niggers and whites made?" (117). The dichotomy is presented and fortified within the novel. Now, when 'Tom' is punished for the murder of his uncle, he is at first given the sentence of life imprisonment (225). However, when the creditors claimed that since he was not really 'Tom' but a black slave given to Judge Driscoll, he was then property of the estate. The shift in punishment confuses the notion of justice under law. For a murder crime, the just (as in lawful) punishment would be the life sentence. Any murdering man would then have to be punished according to this law for committing the crime. However, 'Tom' loses the justness of this punishment, this written law of punishment, because he is a slave, a black man. This implies that slaves were not even considered men, for even if they committed the crime, their punishment was not within the realms of law. Where is the justice in that? In other words, slaves were purely property and completely void of justice of the constitution. Twain even admits that if Tom "were white and free" then he would have to be punished. But, he was a black slave and had to be dealt with by other means because he was outside of the requirements for just law (226).
'Tom's' actual punishment then is to be sold down the river. But, I am hesitant to call it a punishment because he is only sold as a means to equal out the debt of an estate. It is more of a business transaction. This transaction is a dangerous one, because Tom faces a fate worse than the punishment within man's law. No, he has to be sold down the river like an inanimate object merely bought to better the white man's situation. That is the scariest punishment a once free man could ever receive: to become not even human. The dichotomy of white and black is more like the dichotomy of human and object.
Agreed; I thought that the loss of even being able to claim that you are human was the scariest punishment of all. Granted, he did kill the man who loved him unconditionally and who only wanted him to become a better person...
ReplyDeleteI like how at the end you turned the dichotomy of white and black into human and object. I think this is really important because that is how it was seen back in the 1830s.
ReplyDeleteJust for a little historical context, slaves were considered property primarily, but according to the Constitution (before the 13th amendment ended slavery) a slave constituted 3/5 of a person when figuring out the state's population for the purposes of figuring out how many congressional representatives a state would have. It was part of a compromise where perhaps ironically the north wanted slaves to not count as people while the south wanted them to count as people.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with the dichotomy of white and black really being human and object. The time when Pudd'nhead Wilson was set, african americans weren't seen as human but merely as possessions of their white owners.
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