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Pudd'nhead Wilson: Mark Twain and the Limits of Detection

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

John S. Whitley
John S. Whitley
Affiliation:
John S. Whitley is Reader in American Studies in the School of English and American Studies, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QN.
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Extract

My starting point is two related critical judgments. In a recent essay on the detective fiction of Ross Macdonald, Eric Mottram suggests that an important point in the history of such fiction is reached in Mark Twain's play The Amateur Detective (1877) and his short story “A Double-Barrelled Detective Story” (1902), parodies of the literary process of detection where “Twain demolishes the man-hunt plot and the Sherlock Holmes plot of aristocratic ratiocinative powers derived from Poe's Chevalier Auguste Dupin”. A quarter of a century before this, Leslie A. Fiedler came to the conclusion that Twain's most extensive treatment of detective work, Pudd'nhead Wilson, was “an anti-detective story, more like The Brothers Karamazov than The Innocence of Father Brown, its function to expose communal guilt.” The purpose of this essay will be to show how the process of detection was cited in Twain's writings throughout his career, usually but by no means inevitably in a parodic manner, and that Pudd'nhead Wilson needs to be understood as a serious, indeed, tragic parody of the detective story, one which turned most of Twain's models on their heads in order to demonstrate that a supposedly successful detective dénouement (what Fiedler elsewhere describes as “Pudd'nhead's book – a success story”) is deliberately allowed to work against its normal function in a detective novel.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , April 1987 , pp. 55 - 70
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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References

An earlier draft of this article was read at the British Association for American Studies Conference, University of Manchester, April 1985. He wishes to express his indebtedness to two articles which raise one or more of the points raised here, though in different contexts: Barry Wood, “Narrative Action and Structural Symmetry in Pudd'nhead Wilson,” in Sidney E. Berger, ed., Pudd'nhead Wilson (New York: Norton, 1980), pp. 370–85 and Allan Gardner Smith, “Puddn'head Wilson: Neurotic Text,” Dutch Quarterly Review, II, 1981, 22–33.

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43 “The Guilty Vicarage”, p. 151. The two quotations are from p. 155.

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