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Chapter 2
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Pudd’nhead Wilson, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Science, Race, and Identity
Slavery
Motherhood
Foreignness and Xenophobia
Disguise, Deception, and Masculinity
Summary
Analysis
Roxy begins to fear for her child, whom Percy Driscoll could sell down the river at any moment without repercussion. She determines to kill her baby to save him from this fate, which she considers worse than death. But she can’t bear to abandon the child, so she decides to kill herself as well. To prepare for this solemn event, she puts on her best Sunday dress. This, however, makes her boy’s outfit look even shabbier than it already is, so she takes the master’s son’s ruffled gown and puts it on her own boy. She steps back to admire the effect, declaring that her baby is just as beautiful as the master’s baby is.
Roxy’s desperation mounts, and she realizes she must take drastic measures to protect her son. She initially considers killing her baby—an act that Toni Morrison would examine nearly a century later in her classic novel Beloved. Then she decides she must kill herself as well. Her preparations for these terrible acts are ceremonial. She dresses in the finest gown she owns and dresses her baby in one of her master’s son’s outfits. This is one of the most crucial scenes for establishing the horrifying realities enslaved mothers faced.
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Roxy recalls that just the day before, Percy Driscoll walked by when she was bathing the two babies together and couldn’t tell which boy was his. Acting on impulse, she takes her son’s discarded clothes and puts them on the other baby. Then she puts her boy, whom she hereafter calls Tom, into the ornate crib and puts Tom, hereafter called Chambers, into the crude wooden cradle. She practices calling her child “Tom” until she feels confident in her performance.
After dressing her boy in her master’s son’s clothing, Roxy realizes she doesn’t need to kill him. Instead, she can simply switch the two boys and thereby rescue her son from a life of enslavement. The fact that the boys are nearly identical suggests that the lines between the categories of White and Black are not as impenetrable as the White citizens of Dawson’s Landing might think. Nor are they scientifically provable.
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Roxy doubts anyone will suspect that she changed the babies, and she is right. Percy Driscoll, who leaves on a business trip a few days later, doesn’t notice anything, and the new enslaved people that he buys aren’t familiar with the children. The only person Roxy worries about is Wilson. Everyone in town calls him a “pudd’nhead,” but Roxy knows he’s far sharper than people give him credit for. But when she encounters him on the street, Wilson doesn’t notice anything. He simply takes the babies’ fingerprints for a third time. Roxy, triumphant, returns home, certain no one will ever discover her secret.
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