Studies in American Fiction, September 22nd, 1995
A white-skinned man dons blackface and women's clothing to rob (and murder); he subsequently discovers, through the new science of fingerprinting, that he is really a descendent of Africans and a slave who was exchanged in infancy with his young master. Valet de Chambre (or Chambers), alias Tom Driscoll, seems almost tailor-made for a 1990s audience. Hence the recently increased interest in Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson, a text that turns race and gender misapprehension in a mid-nineteenth-century Southern town into a complicated spoof of the "fiction of law and custom" in the United States...
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