University of Virginia Library

6

Languages of Power and
Submission in Pudd'nhead Wilson

The decade between Huckleberry Finn (1884) and Pudd'nhead
Wilson (1894) measures the difference between fundamental
optimism and pessimism, between redemptive humor and
tragedy. Mark Twain's turn toward gloom has been traced in
many domains: increasing repugnance for human nature, despair
of historical and technological progress, growing discontent
with American civilization, fascination with deterministic
philosophies. Only infrequently have analyses of this
movement focused on language. The major exception is Henry
Nash Smith's Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer, which
documents a gradual loss of faith in the possibilities of vernacular
values and the language that expresses them; after
Huckleberry Finn Twain never regains Huck's voice because he
has lost Huck's vision. To my mind, however, Huckleberry Finn
celebrates linguistic variety more than anything else, and the
"enemy" in the novel is whatever would repress that variety,
whether straitlaced Miss Watson or unlaced Pap Finn, both of
whom seek to cut off Huck's dialogue with important voices in
his culture and his being. This celebration does not mean
broad tolerance, of course; there are debased, misused, and
immoral varieties of language. But Twain seems confident
that language is a homeostatic system, that the free play of
many voices will suffice to expose the inadequate ones, and
that a character like Huck can listen to and record that multiplicity
without losing his own integrity. This faith is principally
what Twain loses in the years following Huckleberry Finn.
In Pudd'nhead Wilson there is no central narrative consciousness,
no Huck, to integrate the voices, because integration (in

more than one sense) is impossible in Dawson's Landing. Dialogue
has become a Manichaean struggle that must destroy
one party or the other.

The tenuous moral boundary dividing "good" Standard English
and vernacular from their "bad" counterparts in Huckleberry
Finn was based on the assumption that some varieties of
language can remain innocent of the corruption that affects
others. Speakers of the authentic standard refrain from using
their linguistic authority to suppress or exploit; the vernacular
of folk speech is used in the interest of solidarity and companionship.
In reality, as Twain knew, both the standard and the
colloquial speech of the South were inescapably tainted by
class and racial oppression. Compassionate though they are
toward individual slaves, neither Huck nor Mary Jane Wilks
questions the abstract institution of slaveholding. Jim retains
the innocence of folk speech only by suppressing violent resentment
against the slave-owning class and internalizing the
categories that it uses to describe him. ("I's rich now, come to
look at it. I owns mysef, en I's wuth eight hund'd dollars" [HF,
57].) While reading Huckleberry Finn we accept the hopeful
premise that a sound heart can generate the sound dialect
that, in T. S. Eliot's phrase, can purify the language of the
tribe. Only when we back off from the world of the novel to
judge it against historical and sociological criteria do we realize
that a real Huck and Jim would have spoken languages
more heavily influenced by the values and speechways of
their society.

Pudd'nhead Wilson is Huckleberry Finn de-romanticized, a
"dark mirror image" of Huck and Jim's world, as Leslie Fiedler
says, without any "sentimental relenting."[1] Its Dawson's Landing
is a town where idealized authoritative or innocent speech
is so tentative and vulnerable as to be effectively nonexistent.
The major oppositions between varieties of speech in Huckleberry
Finn no longer obtain. Conflict between standard and
vernacular has all but disappeared, at least so far as the white
speech community is concerned, to be replaced by an infinitely
less bridgeable split between white speech and black.
Moreover, in the absence of significant moral distinctions

among them, the major varieties of speech in Pudd'nhead
Wilson struggle desperately for social power, with language a
tool for preserving authority, mastery, or domination. As
George Steiner has put it, "Where there is no true kinship of
interests, where power relations determine the conditions of
meeting, linguistic exchange becomes a duel."[2] Vestiges of authentic
Standard English and folk speech survive in Pudd'nhead
Wilson and Roxanna, but without enough force to create
more than a potential alliance between the two characters; by
the end of the novel they have opted for opposing forms of
power, and they finish as adversaries. White speech is powerful
by virtue of social sanction and becomes impotent only
when an individual member of the white community is subjected
to another's authority. Submission is the prescribed
norm for black speech, which becomes powerful only when
an individual black, through unusual circumstances, acquires
temporary domination over an individual white.

In Huckleberry Finn Standard English was the prestige form
of language whose authority was accepted as given by all who
aspired to use it. In Pudd'nhead Wilson, on the other hand, the
formal linguistic correlate of social authority is variable and
open to negotiation. The "standard" language is that spoken
by whichever social group or individual is uppermost for the
time being. As the roles of master and slave, established citizen
and "pudd'nhead" devolve on different characters, the
expressive force of varieties of speech alters as well. Eberhard
Alsen suggests that the mayoral election that raises David
Wilson from marginality to power symbolizes "change from a
society in which the power depended on property to one in
which the power is based on popularity."[3] In Dawson's Landing,
Standard English is a "property" without inherent value;
its authority can be ratified only by the mass of citizens. The
entire action of the novel is bracketed by two "elections," one
that removes authority from David Wilson's speech, another
that restores it. The power of authoritative language here derives
not from outward form but from its acquired capacity to
"elect," to choose, to define. Hence characters in Pudd'nhead
Wilson do not, like the Duke or Tom Sawyer in Huckleberry

Finn, aspire to modify their own language but rather to have
their language recognized as normative by others.

This major opposition in Pudd'nhead Wilson between languages
of dominance and of submission, rather than between
vernacular and genteel, has been prepared for in works as
early as The Prince and the Pauper (1882) and as recent as A
Connecticut Yankee (1889). In The Prince and the Pauper a beggar
must learn to command like a king, and a king finds his royal
peremptoriness useless. To achieve a semblance of authentic
sixteenth-century English speech, Twain had read diligently
in Elizabethan prose and practiced "finger exercises" in the
form of phrase lists of archaic diction.[4] But he makes relatively
little attempt at linguistic distinction between courtly speech
and lower-class vernacular. (The major exception is his use of
genuine rogue's cant for the speech of the band of thieves
Edward meets with.) True, Tom Canty is able to pass for a
prince from the start because he has, Quixote-like, become so
infatuated with tales of noble life that even in Offal Court his
"speech and manners became curiously ceremonious and
courtly" (PP, 54). His major lesson, however, is in learning to
give orders. At first the necessity of delivering commands is a
nightmare to Tom, but as his usurped role becomes more and
more attractive to him, he falls into a king's language naturally,
as the fulfillment of the old daydreams in which he "did
imagine [his] own self a prince, giving law and command
to all, saying 'do this, do that,' whilst none durst offer let or
hindrance to [his] will" (PP, 172). In contrast, Edward is incapable
of abandoning his native kingly speech despite constant
reminders that the rest of the world takes him for a beggar,
and his inflexibility provides comic relief. Twain returns
to this motif when in chapter 28 of A Connecticut Yankee Hank
Morgan tries to teach the king the manners and speech that
will allow him to pose as a serf. How would Arthur, clothed in
peasant's garb, request hospitality of the master of a thatched
hut? "Varlet, bring a seat; and serve to me what cheer ye have"
(CY, 321).[5] One's habitual speech results from "training," but
the ability to alter it depends, for Twain's characters, on temperament;
ultimately we respect King Arthur for his rigid nobility

more than we do Tom Driscoll, who learns obsequiousness
so readily.

The language of command characterizes the "power figure"
in Twain's work, a recurrent figure whose career James L.
Johnson has traced.[6] Power figures can be as courtly as King
Arthur or as bluff and vernacular as Captain Ned Wakeman in
his various incarnations. They have in common no regional or
class variety of speech but rather the assumption that language
is an extension of the self that compels others to act.
For better or for worse, the language of command transforms
others into manipulable objects—even into prey, as evident in
the phrase that both a ship's captain and a former slave apply
to men who have fallen into their power: "You are my meat!"[7]
Yet as Pudd'nhead Wilson shows, once an entire group has become
identified with mastery or servility, its manners and language
tend to become ipso facto markers of social standing,
independent of the speakers who employ them. From its association
with slavery, black vernacular is taken to be inherently
inferior. Thus to Valet de Chambre, revealed as Judge
Driscoll's true heir, the white man's parlor holds nothing but
terror because he speaks "the basest dialect of the negro
quarter." Pudd'nhead Wilson marks Twain's increasing awareness
that the "empowered Self" is not self-created, relying as
it must on the authority of the social group to which it belongs.

David Wilson, the "college-bred" lawyer who emigrates from
New York to small-town Missouri, is the only character in the
novel who speaks consistently in Standard English. Yet on the
day of his arrival the town's citizens deny him the authority
his discourse ought to confer on him, because of his "fatal remark"
about a yelping dog:

(PW, 5)

The villagers puzzle over Wilson's "folly": if he killed half a
dog, the other half would die, too, and he would be responsible
for the entire dog. The "jury" submits its findings: Wilson
is a lummox, a "labrick," a "dam fool," a "perfect jackass":

(PW, 6)

Critics discussing this episode have focused on the curious
misinterpretation by Dawson's Landing citizens of a witticism
that was commonplace on the Southwest frontier.[8] Their literal-mindedness
is no less exaggerated than Huck's, but it
serves a different purpose. While Huck is merely an observer,
the citizens are judges. Confronted by a form of language that
is opaque to them, they determine to rule its creator out of
social existence. Rejecting Wilson's ironic speech act, they
assert that the normative and authoritative speech act in
Dawson's Landing is the performative utterance. The first reaction
to Wilson is tentative: "Pears to be a fool." A constative
utterance, one asserting a truth-value, it allows for the
possibility of error; the folly predicated of Wilson exists independent
of the observers, who may have erred in judging
him. But the next response is ambiguous: "Is, I reckon you
better say." On the surface it strongly affirms the existential
truth of the proposition "Wilson is a fool," but it may also be
taken as a declaration, "I pronounce [and thereby establish]
that Wilson is a fool." By the end of the episode, the latter interpretation
is dominant. Wilson is a "pudd'nhead" as a result
of the performative acts of naming and "electing." As
"judges" of the appropriateness of names, the citizens assume
the power to constitute reality according to their own
conventions. The verdict of folly here is the first in a series of
constitutive judgments in which "is" really means "is declared
to be": Tom is guilty, Tom is a slave, Valet de Chambre is
"white and free," and so on.

The speech act most closely allied to power is the command,
which the citizens of Dawson's Landing value far more
highly than any prestige dialect or variety of speech. It is the
first language that Tom Driscoll learns to use: "When he got
to be old enough to begin to toddle about, and say broken
words... [h]e would call for anything and everything he saw,
simply saying, 'Awnt it!' (want it), which was a command. When
it was brought, he said, in a frenzy... 'Don't awnt it! don't
awnt it!' and the moment it was gone he set up frantic yells of
'Awnt it! awnt it! awnt it!' " (PW, 18; emphasis mine). Baby
Tom, lacking perhaps the formal English imperative mood
("Give it") invents his own by making the optative mood
serve—"I want it" means "do it!" (Popular speech recognizes
the connection between the two forms in the formula "Your
wish is my command," which can be used nonironically only
by a servant.) Tom's first recorded speech as a boy is a command
to his servant Chambers: "Knock their heads off!" (PW,
21). More genteel but no less peremptory is the melodramatic
language of command that forms the natural idiom of the
Southern gentleman. "Answer me!" Judge Driscoll demands
of his nephew Tom, who has responded to an insult by taking
the perpetrator to court, in violation of the code of honor:

(PW, 60)

"You will": the modal verb of this formal imperative reminds
us that commands function by overlaying one person's will
with another's. The objective correlative of the judge's power
is the literal will, or testament, that he revises to disinherit
Tom every time his nephew is disobedient. The command is
an object of desire because it seems to be a magical speech
form: one utters a few words, a ritual formula, and one's wish
is performed. The magical view assumes that the addressee is
like the ever-willing helper of a fairy tale, like the genies Tom
Sawyer describes, who "belong to whoever rubs the lamp or
the ring, and they've got to do whatever he says" (HF, 16).
Huck is the one who objects that the recipients of commands
may have wills of their own:

(HF, 16)

Huck and Tom's brief exchange, which may easily be read as
an allegory of the antebellum Southern racial situation, expresses
precisely the conflicts in Pudd'nhead Wilson. What
happens when the magical servant rebels? refuses to serve?
worse, insists that the master become the servant? Murdered,
Judge Driscoll can no longer command Tom; blackmailed,
Tom follows Roxy's orders. Pudd'nhead Wilson is about Aladdin
caught by a servant and thrust into his own lamp.

Because the only requirement for speaking the language of
power is that the listener acknowledge the authority of its imperatives,
it is indifferent whether the speaker is "vernacular"
or "genteel." For Judge Driscoll, command naturally shapes
itself into the pompous diction of the melodramatic hero:
"Once more you have forced me to disinherit you, you base
son of a most noble father! Leave my sight!" (PW, 60). Tom,
on the other hand, tends to employ a cross between Missouri
colloquial and breezy college slang when he is feeling self-assured:
"Dave's just an all-around genius, a genius of the first
water, gentlemen, a great scientist running to seed here in this
village... for here they don't give shucks for his scientifics,
and they call his skull a notion-factory—hey, Dave, ain't it
so?" (PW, 49). An elegant formal register comes to him more
readily when he is in an inferior position, begging favors or

justifying himself with his uncle or his mother Roxy. Roxy
herself shows no desire to modify her own vernacular once
she has gained power over Tom; making a former Yale student
obey orders framed in the slave's dialect is part of her revenge.

A language of command entails a language of submission.
The differential power relations among white speakers in
Dawson's Landing become irrelevant when white speakers
and black speakers converse, for theirs is by definition a dialogue
of master and slave. Conversation between black and
white is a zero-sum game: interlocutors cannot share power;
one must gain what the other loses. Thus the only alternative
the slave can imagine is a complete reversal of poles, the
slave's dream becoming the master's nightmare. As the master-slave
relation between Tom Driscoll and Roxy is inverted, Tom
learns to speak the language of submission while Roxy learns
to command. In the eighth and ninth chapters of Pudd'nhead
Wilson Tom's discovery of his true identity reverses his and
Roxy's respective positions. Tom, who has used the language
of command unconsciously all his life, realizes the full humility
of submission; Roxy, who knows quite well that her native
dialect is servile vis-à-vis white speech, exposes the theological
pretensions of the latter: "Fine nice young white gen'lman
kneelin' down to a nigger wench! I's wanted to see dat jes'
once befo' I's called. Now, Gabrel, blow de hawn, I's ready"
(PW, 39). Earlier, Roxy has "approached her son with all the
wheedling and supplicating servilities that fear and interest
can impart to the words and attitudes of the born slave" (PW,
37), declaring that having seen her "Marse Tom" once again
she "kin lay down and die in peace." Her speech, with its
echoes of the prayer of Simeon, accurately reflects the ideology
of slaveholding that maps the biblical dialogue between
God and His servant man on the dialogue between master
and slave. (The relevant passage is Luke 2:20-30: "Lord, now
lettest thou thy servant depart in peace... for mine eyes
have seen thy salvation" [Luke 2:29-30].) Now the triumphant
Roxy mocks the rhetoric of the slave's religiosity as
she requires an act of worship from her former oppressor.

That her unchanged black vernacular becomes the vehicle
of command makes Tom Driscoll's humiliation all the more
striking; the harder he tries to placate his mother, the more
pronounced his genteel language becomes. The racial antagonism
of the scene is qualified only by Tom's not being really
"white" but legally a slave. Several years after Pudd'nhead
Wilson, Twain would rework the Tom-Roxy inversion in an
even starker and less ambiguous form as the climax of the unfinished
novel Which Was It? (1899-1902), in which the former
slave Jasper acquires absolute power over the respected citizen
George Harrison by revealing that he alone knows Harrison
to be a murderer. "Dey's a long bill agin de low-down
ornery white race," Jasper tells Harrison, "en you's a-gwyneter
settle it" (WWD, 415). Like Babo in Melville's "Benito Cereno,"
Jasper dictates a charade: Harrison is to play master when
others are present, obedient slave when the two are alone.
Melville and Twain show that such assumptions of power by
slaves are invariably tragic. Both Pudd'nhead Wilson and "Benito
Cereno" close with legal proceedings that restore dominance
to the white community; presumably Which Was It?
would have ended with a murder trial and the resulting exposure
and ruin of both servant and master. Destitute of social
sanction, black speech can retain its authority only by
force of individual threat. Ultimately the usurper gains nothing,
because his or her individual rebellion simply changes
white for black while preserving a linguistic and social system
based on inequity. The irony, as Evan Carton notes, is that
"the subversive act that Roxy commits against white society
is . . . a confirmatory one."[9]

In both Pudd'nhead Wilson and Which Was It?, the reversal of
roles involves linguistic shifts, whose mechanism is virtually
identical.[10] Initially the slave's discourse is self-effacing, characterizing
its speaker as an object whose only possible act of
will is supplication. The master's discourse is domineering,
and its content is wholesale refusal of the slave's requests. Reversal
of power becomes effective when the slave first uses the
imperative mood and is complete when the former master is

given a lesson in the discourse of servitude. Roxy, as I have
noted, first approaches Tom in chapter 8 with a consciously
assumed submissiveness, what might be called "yas-massa"
speech:

(PW, 37)

(PW, 37)

Self-reference in the third person typifies servile speech. The
I, or ego, of independent adult speech is replaced by a form
that suggests at once the slave's status as property and the
myth of familial relationships that Southern slavery fostered.
(Slaves are "mammies" or "uncles" to their owners, but at the
same time "children" of their benevolent and paternal masters;
third-person self-reference is common to both partners
in a dialogue between young children and their parents.)
Meantime Tom is unleashing a string of commands that had
begun when he ordered Valet de Chambre to admit Roxy:
"Face the door—March!" "Send her in!" "Cut it short, damn
it, cut it short!" "Clear out, and be quick about it!" Once
Roxy's resentment has provoked her to open defiance, she
abandons her use of the third person for good, and moves toward
the imperative through an intermediary series of periphrastic
commands. (Instead of directly ordering Tom to get
on his knees and beg, she reminds him what will happen if he
does not.) Only after Tom has performed the symbolic action
of kneeling does she use the naked imperative: "Git up. . . .
Come to de ha'nted house. . . . Gimme de dollah bill!" (PW,
39-40). Tom, in turn, assimilates some of the self-abnegating
qualities of subservient speech into his otherwise genteel dialect,
as when he balks at begging on his knees: "Oh, Roxy,
you wouldn't require your young master to do such a horrible
thing" (PW, 39). The reversal is complete when Roxy asserts
the power of naming Tom, altering his identity. He is really
Valet de Chambre, she tells him, and he "ain't got no fambly
name, becaze niggers don't have 'em!" (PW, 41). Moreover,
Tom must not call her Roxy, as if they were equals, because
"chillen don't speak to dey mammies like dat" (PW, 42). Alone
of all the characters in Pudd'nhead Wilson, Roxy is painfully
aware that both the language of power and the language of
slavery are learned forms of speech. Immediately after switching
her child with Percy Driscoll's she reminds herself that she
must thenceforth remember to call her son Marse Tom lest she
make a mistake that will betray her. She spends most of the
night "practicing," and is "surprised to see how steadily and
surely the awe which had kept her tongue reverent and her
manner humble toward her young master was transferring itself
to her speech and manner toward the usurper, and how
similarly handy she was becoming in transferring her motherly
curtness of speech and peremptoriness of manner to the
unlucky heir of the ancient house of Driscoll" (PW, 16). And
this practice, continued throughout the boyhood of both children,
in turn creates the forms of speech they employ: the
false Tom, addressed with submission, learns to be peremptory,
while the new Valet de Chambre is broken and harnessed
to the language of reverence.

Roxy and David Wilson are the two major characters in Pudd'nhead
Wilson who escape, momentarily, the game of power that
defines language for the other inhabitants of Dawson's Landing.
Before they are caught up in the events connected with
the murder of Judge Driscoll, they share the ability to use language
playfully, particularly in ironic humor. Moreover, Roxy
is capable of innocent language, by which I mean language
whose aim is to represent experience faithfully, free from the
rhetorical constraints that govern language in its conative
function.

David Wilson is labeled by Twain as the ironist who descends
on Dawson's Landing to be met with incomprehension,
but to my knowledge it has not been noted that the village has a
native ironist in Roxy. She enters the novel in chapter 3, engaged
in a shouted colloquy with the slave Jasper (not to be
confused with the Jasper of Which Was It?), who is planning to

come courting her. Twain describes the conversation as "idle
and aimless jabber," a "friendly duel" that leaves each party
"well satisfied with his own share of the wit exchanged":

(PW, 8)

Arlin Turner has complained about the "slapstick" tone of
this conversation and what he perceives to be Jasper's representation
of "the Negro as a simple comic figure."[11] He misses
the point of the scene, which is to show two black characters
conversing unconstrainedly in the absence of tension and—
more important—with no whites around. Twain reinforces
this interpretation in the ensuing description of Roxy: "She
had an easy, independent carriage—when she was among
her own caste—and a high and 'sassy' way, withal; but of
course she was meek and humble enough where white people
were" (PW, 8). A verbal duel at once "aimless" and "friendly"
is impossible between slave and white, because the slave must
always calculate the effect of his or her language on the master.
The duel between Jasper and Roxy is actually neither slapstick
nor "aimless." Its flirtatious repartee is set in the black
speech genre of "signifying," at which Roxy obviously excels.[12]
Jasper's jest about jealousy is uninspired, but Roxy, like
David Wilson, can produce an ironic jibe about a hypothetical
case of owning something undesirable. Roxy is no more serious
about banishing Jasper than Wilson was about killing his
half of a dog. But one element of Roxy's irony is not under her
control: slave discourse can never be truly free, for the master's
definition of the black condition lurks in its terms, thoroughly
implicating it in the dialectics of the master-slave relation.
When she mocks Jasper's blackness and his status as a
possession, she falls into complicity with the categories that
enslave her.

For the slave, the only exit from the prison house of the
master's language is physical escape from slavery. Roxy's voice
rises to its greatest power and autonomy in the evasion narrative
she tells in chapter 18. It is an interlude, a brief respite
from the constant necessity to order or obey orders. (Roxy indicates
as much to Tom: "I's gwyne to tell you de tale, en cut it
jes' as short as I kin, en den I'll tell you what you's got to do"
[PW, 85].) The escape narrative allows the slave to exhibit all
the qualities of strength, initiative, self-reliance, and judgment
that must normally be concealed by docile submission.
Forms of the verb know are predicated of Roxy five times in
the three central paragraphs of her narrative, and the proportion
of verbs of action is especially high. Similar observations
apply to Jim's escape narrative in chapter 8 of Huckleberry Finn,
for the craft and competence Jim discloses turn him into a
character entirely different from the superstitious object of
boys' pranks in the first few chapters. Neither Jim nor Roxy
manages to escape permanently from slaveholding society, so
both must return to more calculated forms of speech, Jim to
humble submission, Roxy to control.[13] Reentering the life of
Dawson's Landing, Roxy irrevocably commits herself to the
antinomy of power and submission. Her next-to-last speech
in the novel is a command to Tom: "Shet de light out en move
along" (PW, 91). Her last speech, made in the courtroom following
the collapse of all her designs, is a desperate prayer
she utters on her knees: "De Lord have mercy upon me, po'
misable sinner that I is!" (PW, 113). Her personal rebellion defeated,
Roxy has no alternative to supplication.

The irony that initially sets David Wilson at odds with
Dawson's Landing stands above and apart from the dialectic
of power and submission. Hence the iconic function of the
aphorisms from "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar" that preface
each chapter: from outside the narrative, they mock its "tragedy"
with their sarcasm, performing this function long after
their "creator" has become integrated into the plot in a major

nonironic role.[14] The villagers of Dawson's Landing misconstrue
Wilson's "playful trifles" by reading them "in the solidest
earnest" (PW, 25), unaware that the "is" of an ironic or fictive
speech does not adhere to the same criteria of existential
truth as the "is" of a referential statement. Unappreciated as
an ironist, Wilson turns to the opposite extreme of absolute
literalism when he adopts fingerprinting as a hobby. Unlike
linguistic signs, fingerprints are indices: they signify an individual
by virtue of a natural, biological, connection. By themselves
fingerprints cannot lie or be ironic; they are powerless
to do anything but refer to the person who produced them.
Incorruptible, they are immune to the vicissitudes of human
languages, as Wilson implies in his courtroom speech: "Every
human being carries with him from his cradle to his grave certain
physical marks which do not change their character, and
by which he can always be identified—and that without shade
of doubt or question. These marks are his signature, his physiological
autograph, so to speak, and this autograph cannot
be counterfeited, nor can he disguise it or hide it away, nor
can it become illegible by the wear and the mutations of time"
(PW, 108). Fingerprints would seem to be the novel's one innocent
language. Their "is" makes no claim to power: "These
prints are Tom's" is an objectively verifiable statement, not an
evaluative judgment like "this man is a fool." David Wilson is
transformed from ironist to victim of irony precisely when he
fails to see that in moving from "these prints are Tom's" to
"Tom is guilty," he deprives the prints of their innocence and
makes them one more judgmental tool by which Dawson's
Landing maintains control over its citizens.

Wilson errs in transferring the semiotic of natural signs to
the semiotic of language, overlooking the conventionality of
the meanings of words.[15] He claims for his fingerprint collection
far more than its ability to determine physical identity:
his prints will, he maintains, distinguish between the guilty
and the innocent, the free and the slave. Pudd'nhead Wilson's
final speech, the novel's most dramatic imperative, adroitly
confuses semantic categories: "The murderer of your friend
and mine . . . sits among you. Valet de Chambre, negro and

slave—falsely called Thomas à Becket Driscoll—make upon
the window the finger-prints that will hang you!" (PW, 112).
Although the fingerprints establish Tom's biological identity
as the child born to Roxy and the wielder of the knife used to
kill Judge Driscoll, they do not establish that he is a "murderer,"
a "slave," or even a "negro." The first two labels are
verdictives, constituted by a human evaluation of certain facts.
And the third label cannot be applied without a similar evaluation,
since biologically Tom is only one thirty-second part
black. Wilson's brilliant rhetorical trope that has the false Tom's
own fingerprints "hang" him evades responsibility altogether
with a synecdochic substitution that eliminates the role of
judge and jury in relating evidence to guilt and punishment.
By coalescing descriptive reference with constitutive reference
("These are Tom's prints" versus "[We declare that] Tom
is a murderer/slave/negro"), Wilson affirms the legitimacy of
the social conventions governing Dawson's Landing, using a
language of power that operates by disguising imperatives as
referential statements.[16] My reading of Wilson's language in
the courtroom scene, then, allies itself with critical interpretations
that locate the "tragedy" of Pudd'nhead Wilson in David
Wilson's assimilation into the dominant culture rather than
Tom Driscoll's unfortunate fall.[17] Wilson's motive for moving
into the axis of power and submission is more obscure than
Roxy's, largely because Wilson was conceived of less as a character
than as a "piece of machinery . . . with a useful function
to perform."[18] His failure to supply a morally authoritative variety
of standard language in Pudd'nhead Wilson, however, is
consistent with the disappearance of authentic moral norms
that distinguishes Dawson's Landing from the Hannibal of
Twain's earlier novels.