The Second Mark Twain Lecture at The Park Church -
Wednesday, July 9 in Beecher Hall (7:00 PM)
“Detecting Twain in Puddn’head Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins” Aliza Theis, University of California, Berkeley
After the first day of trial in Pudd’nhead Wilson, Tom Driscoll—who thinks he is a white enslaver but was actually born to an enslaved mother—boasts that his crime will “take its place with the permanent mysteries” (329). In a revision, Twain added, “and people won’t get done trying to guess out the secret of it for fifty years” (329). He was right, in the sense that scholars continue to inspect Pudd’nhead Wilson for deeper truths about Mark Twain and his post-Reconstruction mindset. Initially a slapstick story of conjoined twins from Italy traveling in the antebellum South, Pudd’nhead Wilson grew into a detective plot complete with fingerprinting, the doubled crimes of familicide and baby-swapping, and the question of how one reads physical evidence of racial identity. After drastically cutting down the manuscript, Twain decided to publish alongside Pudd’nhead Wilson much of its excised material, which he strung together under the title Those Extraordinary Twins. He justified this double publication with a series of remarks which purport to display his own writing process. However, as he added this self-reflexive content, making his authorship the subject of detection, he also took out his more polemical comments on the construction of whiteness. This lecture examines the relationship between racial and authorial identity making in the combined works.
Aliza Theis is a PhD student in the English Department at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on 19th-century print culture, landscape, and coloniality. Aliza received a Master’s in Education from Harvard GSE and taught high school English for seven years in Brooklyn and San Francisco. She has presented papers at the National Council of Teachers of English, the Western Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and she currently serves as a researcher for Samuel Otter.
