You Should Be Judas Character Analysis

You Should Be Judas Did you know in 1884 Olivia Langdon Clemens told her husband; “I will give you a motto, and it will be useful to you if you will adopt it; consider every man colored til he is proved white?” Furthermore, Samuel Langhorne Clemens approved, noting “It is dern good, I think.” Also Clemens is better known outside his family as Mark Twain subsequently constructed a character unique in American literature: a black slave reborn as a “white” master, who later chooses to live as a black slave-owner before being forced to become a black slave again. However, this purposeful colorful figure, Tom Driscoll is at the center of Twain’s 1894 novel, Pudd’nhead Wilson. This novel begins in antebellum Dawson’s Landing, Missouri; which itch

Most of the novel then Tom to echo Olivia’s words is colored but trying to prove himself white. Tom accomplishes this by strategically mimicking those whites with the ultimate power white slave-owners . Since then Pudd’nhead Wilson’s publication, critics have diverged on what to make of the novel . Therefore, it has been wildly characterized as a structural mess and a tight plot; an attack on Southern slavery, miscegenation, and gentility; a critique of the Antebellum period, Reconstruction, and the Gilded Age and a novel ultimately about race, gender, and class. Tom is most often paradoxically assessed as both a flat character and an agent of revolution. Twain’s fictional setting of Dawson’s Landing to the actual Antebellum South can inform a new understanding of Pudd’nhead Wilson. There were black slave-owners existed in the thousands in any given year of the nineteenth-century Antebellum South, including in Twain’s home state of Missouri an reports of their astonishing lives were published regionally and nationally. A little- studied phenomenon within historical circles and have been untouched by literary