{"id":252,"date":"2014-02-12T13:59:34","date_gmt":"2014-02-12T18:59:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/mixlit\/?p=252"},"modified":"2014-03-17T14:46:05","modified_gmt":"2014-03-17T18:46:05","slug":"puddnhead-wilson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/mixlit\/puddnhead-wilson\/","title":{"rendered":"Tom Driscoll (Valet de Chambre)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"PuddnheadWilsonCover\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Character: <\/span><\/strong>Tom Driscoll (Valet de Chambre)<\/span><\/p>\n

Source Text: <\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>Mark Twain, The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson <\/em>(1894)<\/p>\n

Entry Author:<\/span> \u00a0<\/strong><\/span>Adam Kelley<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The character known throughout the text of Puddn\u2019head Wilson<\/em> as Tom Driscoll, a white southern aristocrat, was actually born Valet de Chambre, a mixed race child born a slave, but was switched at birth by his slave mother Roxana, \u201cRoxy\u201d.\u00a0 Chambers, hereafter referred to as Tom, \u2018passes\u2019 as the son of Judge Driscoll, descended from the \u201cFirst Families\u201d of aristocratic \u201cOld Virginia\u201d lineage.\u00a0 Tom\u2019s real identity is later revealed using forensic evidence that proves his birth, but his appearance and success as an imposter challenge 19th<\/sup> century notions of racial identity.\u00a0 Tom, is born a \u2018black\u2019 slave by the \u2018one drop\u2019 rule, lives half his life as free white man of a locally respected family, and is ultimately revealed and sold back into slavery.\u00a0 The irony of his fate draws out the arbitrary nature of socially and legally constructed racial identity.<\/p>\n

The imposter Tom\u2019s race is known through his mixed race mother Roxy. The narrator describes her as \u201cwhite as anybody, but the one sixteenth of her which was black out voted the other fifteen parts and made her a negro\u201d (Twain 9).\u00a0 Twain\u2019s matter-of-fact tone parodies the absurd nature of 19th century legal definitions of race.\u00a0 He presses this point farther when he describes of Roxy\u2019s son that \u201che was thirty-one parts white, and he, too, was a slave, and by a fiction of law and custom a negro\u201d (9).\u00a0 Both Roxy\u2019s and her child\u2019s racial status is defined legally in terms of the \u201cone drop rule\u201d that defines them as slaves by descent.<\/p>\n

Physically, Roxy\u2019s son \u2018Chambers\u2019 and the child Tom Driscoll appear identical.\u00a0 Twain describes of Chambers that \u201che had blue eyes and flaxen curls, like his white comrade\u201d (9).\u00a0 The only discernable marker between the two infants is their clothing: the Driscoll child dressed in the finest garb and ornament, and Chambers stuffed into a \u201ccourse\u201d shirt that \u201cbarely reached his knees\u201d (9).\u00a0 This further links the racial identity of the children to social cues imbedded in status symbols, and not in anything inherent in the children themselves.<\/p>\n

Later in life the imposter Tom is informed by his mother that he was switched at birth and this has a devastating effect on his sense of self.\u00a0 After the revelation he wakes in the morning to exclaim the infamous lines \u201c\u2018A nigger!\u2014I am a nigger!\u2014oh, I wish I was dead!\u2019\u201d (48).\u00a0 Profoundly disturbed by the news of his origin, Tom\u2019s personality is shattered and he immediately begins to internalize the racial stereotypes he once cast on others.\u00a0 He feels \u201cthe curse of Ham upon him\u201d (49) and \u201cthe \u2018nigger\u2019 in him was ashamed to sit at the white folks table\u201d (49).\u00a0 He becomes deeply aware of his vulnerability under the law, and lives his life in constant fear of being found out.<\/p>\n

All of Tom\u2019s social relationships become inverted: his mother, once his slave, now lords her secret knowledge of his identity over him, and his perception of his relationship to his Uncle and his community alters drastically from entitlement to suspicion.\u00a0 His drastic shift in mood draws out the effects of racial prejudice on the marginalized of society.\u00a0 Tom is unwittingly forced into the position of \u2018passing\u2019 as white, and grows up oblivious of his origin.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But, once he learns his true origin, he immediately begins to question his own identity and alters his personality and behavior.\u00a0 Nevertheless, Tom is consistently a despicable character: callous, cruel, and manipulative, but his punishment of being \u201csold down the river\u201d feels unjust even for such an unlikable person.\u00a0 Tom, although being guilty of multiple counts of theft and even a murder, is ultimately punished merely for being a fraction \u2018negro\u2019.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Character: Tom Driscoll (Valet de Chambre) Source Text: \u00a0Mark Twain, The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) Entry Author: \u00a0Adam Kelley The character known throughout the text of Puddn\u2019head Wilson as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":365,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20642],"tags":[20644,20619,20577,20592,20635],"class_list":{"0":"post-252","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-puddnhead-wilson","7":"tag-african-american","8":"tag-bi-racial","9":"tag-black","10":"tag-male","11":"tag-mark-twain","12":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/mixlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/mixlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/mixlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/mixlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/365"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/mixlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=252"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/mixlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/mixlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/mixlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/mixlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}