Chapter 7
Twain, Tourgée, and the Logic of "Separate but Equal"

I

On June 7, 1892, Homer Plessy was arrested for violating Section 2 of Act 111 passed by the Louisiana legislature in 1890. The law called for "equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races" on all passenger railways within the state. Plessy's arrest was part of a planned challenge to the law by New Orleans blacks. In September 1891 they contacted the white lawyer Albion Winegar Tourgée. Living in New York state, Tourgée was perhaps the most famous living white spokesman for blacks. After serving in the Union army, he became a carpetbagger judge in North Carolina. Returning to New York, he chronicled his experiences in A Fool's Errand by One of the Fools (1879), which was a novelistic success. Exposing the Ku Klux Klan, he used literary and legal means to improve conditions for freedmen. He agreed to work for the New Orleans committee at a distance for no fee.

Homer Plessy had been born free in 1862. His family was French-speaking. Only one-eighth of his blood was African and, according to his counsel, "the mixture [was] not discernible."^[1] Most likely he could have passed and ridden in the white car without trouble, but Tourgée's strategy was to have someone of mixed blood violate the law. By prearrangement the railroad conductor detained Plessy when he sat in the forbidden coach.

A month after his arrest Plessy came before the court of John Howard Ferguson. A native of Massachusetts, Ferguson was a carpetbagger who

stayed in the South, marrying the daughter of a prominent New Orleans attorney. Between Plessy's arrest and his trial, Ferguson had ruled that the law was unconstitutional on interstate trains because of the federal government's power to regulate interstate commerce. Plessy, however, was traveling on an intrastate train, and at his trial Ferguson upheld the law, arguing that a state had the power to regulate railroad companies operating solely within its borders. The constitutional challenge was under way, as (apparently with some help from Ferguson in the process) the decision was appealed to the State Supreme Court and eventually the United States Supreme Court.

The Louisiana Jim Crow law threatened to undermine much of the work of Reconstruction, whose legal foundation was the three Civil War amendments, which granted freedmen economic and political rights. Also important were the three civil rights bills of 1866, 1870, and 1875. The Act of 1875 was especially important, because the controversial election of 1876 led to the compromise that ended Reconstruction in March 1877. With federal troops returned to their posts and no longer governing the South, rights of the freedmen were now in the hands of Southerners. Thus it was a major defeat when in 1883 the Supreme Court declared much of the Act of 1875 unconstitutional. The next year the first Democrat since before the Civil War was elected president.

Some of the mugwumps whose defection from the Republican Party helped elect Cleveland warned him to guarantee the rights of Southern blacks.^[2] At stake was the determination of which rights should be protected. Because the Supreme Court had undermined the effort to extend the civil rights of freedmen, George Washington Cable, a novelist and friend of Mark Twain, as well as someone who shared mugwump concerns, was forced to appeal to a standard of equity rather than positive law. The question, he declares, "is no longer whether constitutional amendments, but whether the eternal principles of justice, are violated."^[3] In response Henry W. Grady, a spokesperson for the New South, agrees, but differs on what equity demands. Assuring his readers that no one in the New South wants a return to the economic system of slavery, he also claims that the South will, reluctantly, abide by protections of political rights. But it will not tolerate efforts to guarantee civil rights that violate natural social differences between blacks and whites.^[4] The issue in the Plessy case was whether or not states had the right to pass laws maintaining the color line socially.

At the beginning Tourgée was confident that Plessy's challenge would succeed. But between 1892 and 1896 the climate for victory got

worse rather than better. Even an event considered a triumph for blacks tended to work against Plessy. Invited to address the 1895 Atlanta Exposition, Booker T. Washington argued for the mutual dependence of blacks and whites in the South by employing the metaphor of a hand. "In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress."^[5] Washington's metaphor helped to confirm arguments, such as Grady's, for segregation.

May 18, 1896, the Plessy court handed down its decision that laws requiring the social separation of the races on intrastate railroads were constitutional, so long as facilities were equal. Seven of the eight judges who sat on the case denied Tourgée's claim that the Louisiana law violated both the 13th and 14th Amendments. Writing for the majority, Justice Henry Billings Brown quickly disposed of the 13th Amendment claim. He cites Justice Bradley in the Civil Rights Cases to rule that "it would be running the slavery argument into the ground"^[6] to claim that a law that implies a legal distinction between races based on color reestablishes a state of involuntary servitude. The 14th Amendment claim, he admitted, was more complicated.

The intention of the 14th Amendment, he writes, "was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law" (P 544). But he adds a qualification that relies on logic very similar to Grady's. "In the nature of things," he asserts, the amendment "could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either" (P 544). To demonstrate that states have a right to use their police powers to enforce social separation of the races, he cites the antebellum Massachusetts case of Roberts v. City of Boston (1849). Speaking for the court, Lemuel Shaw, Herman Melville's famous father-in-law, declared that segregated schools did not violate the Massachusetts constitution's guarantee of equality before the law.^[7] The crucial issue in the Plessy case according to Brown is whether the Louisiana law provides for the reasonable use of police powers.^[8] Granting the state legislature "large discretion," Brown rules that "in determining the question of reasonableness it is at liberty to act with reference to the established usages, customs and traditions of the people, and with a view to the promotion of their comfort, and the preservation of the public peace and good order" (P 550). According to this standard the Louisiana law is not unreasonable. Indeed, Brown declares that the "underlying fallacy" in Plessy's argument is to

assume that the "enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it" (P 551).

From a strictly logical point of view Brown is correct to point out a fallacy in Plessy's argument. The Louisiana law demanded separate butequal facilities. Thus, as written, it did apply equally to whites and blacks.^[9] A white person, for instance, was as subject to arrest for sitting in a car designated for blacks as a black for sitting in a car designated for whites. But Brown's logic falls prey to the abstracting tendency of the period's contractual thought, which neglected the concrete social and historical conditions in which people lived. Both Tourgée and Justice Harlan, the lone dissenter, recognized that the effect of the law could not be measured by logic alone.^[10]

Harlan's dissent relied on many points made by Tourgée. For instance, he argued that the 13th Amendment did apply since the Louisiana law could be explained by the history of slavery. Thus enforced separation of the races marked blacks with "badges of slavery or servitude" (P 555). Furthermore, the 14th Amendment issue for Harlan was whether the law was constitutional, not whether it was reasonable. For Harlan the intention of the Civil War amendments was not to defer to the established usages, customs, and traditions of the people on issues of race but to alter them by creating a "color-blind" (P 559) Constitution. Jim Crow laws were not color-blind. In fact, if the Court relied on the abstracting logic of the period's contractual thought to justify the Louisiana law, the law failed to measure up to the promise of contract, which is not only about exchanges but also about exchangeability.

By their very nature Jim Crow laws denied whites and blacks the right to change places. The reason why was clear to both Tourgée and Harlan: such laws maintained a system of status based on race. Relying on boundary ideology, the Court claimed that, although the Louisiana law recognized "natural" social differences between the races, it did not affect the political and civil rights of blacks. Harlan knew better. Intended to degrade blacks, the law, he argued, affected both the political and civil standing of blacks by perpetuating a caste system at odds with constitutional principles.

Harlan, of course, was a dissenter, and for the most part the country ignored his argument. Nonetheless, a year later W. E. B. Du Bois published an essay that, while not explicitly citing the Plessy case, explained

why the majority's appeal to logic was inadequate to describe the effect of "separate but equal" laws. Defining the condition of "double-consciousness," Du Bois argued that when it is assumed that to be American is to be white, a black becomes an African-American rather than simply an American. For the Negro the American world is a "world which yields him no self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."^[11]

The Plessy court reasoned that the "separate but equal" law did not itself stamp the black race with a badge of inferiority. Du Bois's account of double-consciousness explains why blacks almost inevitably interpreted it as doing so. Condemned to see themselves through the eyes of whites, blacks interiorized a standard that marked them as inherently inferior, a standard established by attitudes of both contempt and pity. Given the history of racial relations in the country and the political and economic realities of late nineteenth-century America, when the white race passed a law demanding the social segregation of races, blacks could not help but see it as an attempt to avoid contact with people judged inferior.

Significantly, Du Bois first experiences double-consciousness during an exchange of visiting cards with a white schoolmate. Indeed, exchanges involving race are an excellent way to test the Court's claim that the Jim Crow law applied equally to blacks and whites. For instance, novels of passing explore whether someone can live the same life as a black and a white. They also challenge the logic of separate but equal by focusing on characters with mixed blood. As Tourgée argued, the assortment of races into two self-contained categories assumed an absolute division between races. The actuality of widespread mixture of blood prompted him to test the Louisiana law with someone of mixed blood, since a mulatto demonstrated the folly of dividing people between black and white. To be sure, most Southern states had laws specifying how much African blood was necessary to make one black. But because they varied from state to state Tourgée used them to point out the arbitrariness of racial divisions. Furthermore, since only the

heritage of slavery could explain why a small amount of African blood could "brand" someone as black, these laws violated the 13th Amendment by marking blacks with a badge of servitude.

The Court refused to accept Tourgée's arguments. For instance, even though it admitted that race was defined differently from state to state, it ruled that in the federal system definitions of race remained a matter for the states. But Tourgée's failure to convince the Court does not negate the challenge that novels of passing posed to the Plessy logic. The rest of this chapter will examine two more novels of passing: Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) and Tourgée's own Pactolus Prime (1890).^[12] Both were written before the Plessy decision. Nonetheless, to place them in conjunction with it should not only help us better understand the logic legitimating segregation, it will also help to distinguish between the aesthetic practices and politics of one of the most important practitioners of realism and an important literary lawyer who attacked a realist aesthetic.

II

Pudd'nhead grew out of an abandoned comic story about Siamese twins called Those Extraordinary Twins . Faced with what he called the "most embarrassing circumstance" that the story he was writing "changed itself from a farce to a tragedy while [he] was going along with it" (PW 119), Twain "pulled out the farce and left the tragedy" (PW 122). Twain's experience of having the genre of a story change without his control is shared by his mulatto heroine Roxy. As Roxy contemplates a cradle exchange of her son for her master's, she justifies her act by recalling a tale about a similar exchange—servant for heir—in England. " 'Tain't no sin," she reasons with herself, "white folks has done it" (PW 15). Roxy, however, entangles herself in a tragic, not comic, plot.

For both Twain and Roxy, tragedy replaces comedy/farce because of cultural circumstances beyond their control. The traditional plot of European comedy in which confusion over identity disrupts a hierarchical order that is restored when true identity is revealed does not seem to work in democratic America—at least not when the confusion of identity involves race. For instance, if Ben Jonson's Volpone is a comedy even though its trial scene punishes Mosca's impostures by condemning

him to life as a galley slave, Pudd'nhead, which also concludes by selling an impostor into slavery, is tragic, as it confirms the impotency of Roxy's "rage against the fates" (PW 22). The effort of a mother to have her son defy the fate allotted a slave in America ends in futility.

Tourgée also presents a tragic story. The publisher's introduction goes so far as to call Pactolus Prime, the title character, "the Edipus of American fiction." Observing the three unities, the book takes place on Christmas day in Washington, D.C. Prime is a bootblack at the "Best Hotel." So black that he appears of pure African blood, he has a light-skinned mulatto assistant named Benny, who is reading law with a white lawyer named Phelps. Using Phelps as an agent, Prime has amassed a fortune in real estate under the assumed name of P. P. Smith. Living modestly, he supports a beautiful, young white woman named Eva Collins, who does not know the identity of her benefactor, although she does love her "Uncle Pac," who raised her as a child, claiming to be fulfilling a promise to his lost master, her father. Through Phelps, Prime tries to give a huge Christmas gift to Eva, who refuses until she knows more about the identity of the donor. Struck down in an accident, Prime is taken to Eva's where he is nursed by her and her white maid, Mrs. Macey, only to die. A doctor seems to solve the mystery of Prime's relation to Eva when he confides to Phelps that from medical literature he recognizes Prime as a rare victim of argyria in which his white skin was permanently discolored by treatments with a silver preparation. Phelps, however, knows better, and the reader is presented with a four-chapter memoir Prime left with him.

Born a slave, a son of his master, with so much white blood that he was sometimes mistaken for his master's white son, Prime was sent to school and then university with his half brother, to help him in his studies. His half brother, a Collins, inherits him when their father dies. As the Civil War begins, Prime falls in love with Mazy, a mulatto slave, whom he later discovers in his master's arms. Betrayed, he strikes Collins and flees, eventually joining the Union army as a color-bearer (!), under the name of P. P. Smith. Advised by the regiment's colonel, a lawyer, Prime passes as a white man. After the war he reunites with Mazy and marries her. Both passing as white, they buy a plantation in South Carolina and raise their daughter, Eva. Collins, however, surprises Prime, shoots him, leaves him for dead, and moves in with Mazy. Nursed back to life by a black conjure woman in the swamp, Prime receives his silver treatment, turns completely black, steals his daughter, and heads north. Prime and Eva settle in Washington, D.C., where he

starts his double life, later meeting and employing Benny, his wife's son by Collins. Hiring him to keep track of Mazy, whom he fears will betray him, Prime admires Benny's skill and plans to leave him the business. In the meantime, Mazy, passing again as white, ends up as the maid for her blue-eyed, fair-haired daughter. Shown this memoir after Prime's death, Eva joins the Sisters of Mercy, vowing to work for the colored race as Sister Pactola.

Critics have not been convinced by this bizarre story. For instance, the noted African-American critic Sterling Brown complains that it "is not completely convincing" because it has "more argument than characters in action,"^[13] and Theodore L. Gross dismisses it as "the product of an author whose literary voice has lost its range and flexibility and power and has become a screeching monotone."^[14] But despite such harsh criticism, Pactolus deserves closer attention. Even if it subordinates dramatic action to argument, the argument is worth remembering since, as Brown notes, it is "too easily forgotten today."^[15] Tourgée's novel also plays an important role in the history of the novel of passing.

If Chesnutt's House Behind the Cedars self-consciously responds to Howells's An Imperative Duty, it is likely that both respond in part to Pactolus Prime . Chesnutt's reading of Tourgée's novel is clearly documented. In a June 5, 1890, letter to Cable about The Century 's response to "Rena Walden," the early version of House, Chesnutt notes that an English writer need not "immerse" characters having mixed blood "in convents, as Tourgée does his latest heroine, to save them from a fate worse than death, i.e., the confession of inferiority by reason of color."^[16] Evidence of Howells's response is circumstantial, but convincing.

In December 1888 Tourgée published an essay entitled "The South as a Field for Fiction." In it he proclaims that "American fiction of to-day, whatever may be its origin, is predominantly Southern in type and character." "Hardly a novelist of prominence," he adds, "except Mr. Howells and Mr. James, but has found it necessary to yield to the prevailing demand and identify himself with Southern types." One of the types they fail to portray is the freedman. To be sure, existing portrayals are themselves flawed. "The traditions of the freedman's fireside are richer and far more tragic than the folk-lore which genius has recently put into his quaint vernacular." The realists, Tourgée claims, although technically capable of portraying such richness, will probable not do so because the type evokes the pathos that their fiction tries to avoid. "Pathos lies at the bottom of all enduring fiction. Agony is the key of immortality. The ills of fate, irreparable misfortune, untoward but

unavoidable destiny: these are the things that make for enduring fame. The 'realists' profess to be truth-tellers, but are in fact the worst of falsifiers, since they tell only the weakest and meanest part of the grand truth which makes up the continued story of every life."^[17]

As if to show the realists what he means, Tourgée produces Pactolus, conceived as a Christmas story and then expanded as it was serialized in the Advance from December 13, 1888, to March 14, 1889. Tourgée's wife recorded receiving the first bound copies of the book March 27, 1890. On August 27, 1890, Howells wrote Hamlin Garland that he was at work on An Imperative Duty .^[18] "The Letters of Olney" had been in Howells's mind since 1886, but very likely Tourgée's attack on him and Tourgée's novel played a role in his return to this project, which, in contrast to Tourgée's aesthetic, shows how belief in unavoidable destiny perpetuates unnecessary racial tragedy.

On the issue of racial destiny Twain seems closer to Tourgée and his sense of tragedy than Howells and his limited optimism. If Howells self-consciously offers an ending that combats the standard fate of the "tragic mulatto," Twain refuses to imagine a way out for his characters of mixed blood. One reason for this difference is that Howells creates a plot in which his heroine can choose between being black or white. Her liminal status allows her free exchange. In contrast, the cradle exchange that Twain imagines invites readers to compare the fates of a white boy raised as black and a "black" boy raised as white. That comparison has comic possibilities, but the outcome is tragic.

The differences and similarities among the endings of Twain's, Tourgée's, and Howells's novels indicate that a realist aesthetic cannot be distinguished simply at the level of plot. A closer look at Tourgée's and Twain's works in conjunction with the Plessy decision can move us toward such a distinction. Before turning to that distinction, however, I first want to use similarities between the novels to shed light on debates among Twain's critics about his racial politics. I then want to explore how, despite many similarities, the two novels imply different senses of individuals' duties and obligations, with Twain's closer, if not identical, to those associated with the promise of contract.

III

Liberal and radical critics have both praised and condemned Twain's portrayal of race in Pudd'nhead . A debated passage is

one in which Roxy mocks her son's cowardice for refusing to accept the challenge of a duel. "It's de nigger in you," she cries, "dat's what it is. Thirty-one parts o' you is white, en on'y one part nigger, en dat po' little one part is yo' soul " (PW 70). For some this passage proves Twain's belief in the shaping power of blood. But the passage can also dramatize Twain's awareness of Roxy's double-consciousness. Not only has she internalized the whites' false code of honor that values duels over rule of law; she also has internalized a sense of black inferiority. If so, the passage illustrates the linguistic construction of race in Twain's world. For instance, Roxy later calls attention to the extent to which "nigger" is linguistically determined. "I is a nigger, en nobody ain't gwyne te doubt it dat hears me talk" (PW 80).

Those critical of Twain can grant such readings and still argue that his trading-places plot leads to problems. The thrust of Twain's brief against racism, so the argument runs, depends on his belief that, as one of Pudd'nhead's calendar entries puts it, "training is everything" (PW 23). By having Roxy switch Chambers and Tom in the cradle, he demonstrates the power of nurture over nature in constituting identity. But when the plot unravels to reveal the false Tom as the murderer, Twain nonetheless gives his villain black blood. Lee Clark Mitchell summarizes this point of view: "Pudd'nhead Wilson derides the belief in innate racial capacities, and exposes the absurdity of assumptions that arbitrarily separate black from white. Yet the novel resorts to a logic of inheritance that seems at the same time to legitimate belief in racial distinctions. What makes it difficult to sort out the claims of nature from those of nurture is that the latter inevitably alters whatever understanding we have in the former."^[19]

What then are we to think of the racial politics of Twain's work? Comparison with Pactolus can help us to answer that question. Let's turn first to the argument that Twain reveals the cultural and linguistic construction of race. There is much evidence to support this claim. For instance, when the narrator reminds us that Roxy and her son are black only by a "fiction of law and custom" (PW 9), he clearly challenges the essentialist thinking that helped to legitimate segregation. Nonetheless, when Evan Carton claims that Twain's occasional use of quotation marks around "nigger" calls attention to the term's status as sign (PW 89), we should not forget that Tourgée also places quotation marks around "nigger" and calls the term "expressive of the concentrated contempt of centuries" (PP 44).^[20] In fact, Tourgée's attention to linguistic indicators of race begins with his first novel, when a mulatto

woman passing as white during the war comes upon her wounded master and lover in a prison camp. She nurses him to health, only to have him betray her, when in front of others he adopts the voice of master, which she answers "instantly, with the inimitable and indescribable intonation of the slave: 'Sir?' That was all she said. It was enough. It revealed all. The brand showed" (RG 78). In Pactolus Prime Phelps rebukes Prime for adopting the voice of a slave. "You ought not to perpetuate even the language of slavery—much less its spirit" (PP 156).

Tourgée may have even seen a legal possibility in exposing the language of slavery as a sign of subserviency. If a black's language constituted a "badge of servitude," he could argue that there was a constitutional obligation to provide blacks with an education that could remove that badge. Prime, for instance, having attended college, is bilingual, able to switch from dialect to standard English at will. Knowing how to play "nigger" to provoke the consciences of his prestigious customers, he can also argue with the best lawyer in the lawyer's own language.

Seven years before Du Bois identified double-consciousness and four before Twain wrote Pudd'nhead, Tourgée uses Prime's two voices to mark his split identity and express ambivalence toward his black blood. Mixing pride and self-loathing, Pactolus counsels Benny, as he had been counseled by the colonel, to pass as white. Doubleness of this sort structures the book. Tourgée a white lawyer, speaks out on race by adopting the voice of a black man, who in the novel needs a white lawyer to act as his agent. Trained in the law by this same white lawyer, Benny is told by Prime that, because the world is ruled by whites, he can do more for his race as a white lawyer than as a black. Such advice implies that the only way for a black to succeed in a white man's world is to lie and be a divided self, a possibility that motivates Eva's final act of committed withdrawal, "for she saw no other way to avoid either deception or the confession of inferiority" (PP 358).

Pac's advice to Benny is important for another reason. Much work in law and literature explores how literary texts respond to legal decisions. But for Tourgée fiction served as a testing ground where he could rehearse legal arguments that sometimes made their way into court. The Louisiana law, Tourgée claimed in Plessy, conferred upon the conductor of a train "the power to deprive one of the reputation of being a white man, or at least to impair that reputation." In turn, reputation is a form of property because it can affect earning power. "How much," Tourgée goes on, "would it be worth to a young man entering upon the practice

of law, to be regarded as a white man rather than a colored one? Six-sevenths of the population are white. Nineteen-twentieths of the property of the country is owned by white people."^[21] Tourgée first worked out this imaginative argument in his portrayal of Benny. Of course, Twain also knew that reputation was a form of property, as evidenced not only by Pudd'nhead's failure to attract clients once he is branded a fool, but also by the status accorded to the two Toms.

The similarities between Pactolus and Pudd'nhead suggest that, although Twain's exposure of linguistic elements in the construction of race challenges the logic of the Plessy decision, it is not necessarily aesthetically innovative. At the same time, other similarities between Tourgée and Twain suggest that the problems that Twain's novel encounters with the nature/nurture opposition might reveal more about the assumptions of contemporary critics than reactionary racial politics on Twain's part. Concerned that he take the correct stand on race, we insist that he demonstrate the power of training. But within Twain's world the phrase "training is everything" has repressive, not liberating, connotations. In A Connecticut Yankee Hank Morgan asserts, "Training—training is everything: training is all there is to a person. We speak of nature; it is folly; there is no such thing as nature; what we call by that misleading name is merely heredity and training. We have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own; they are transmitted to us, trained into us" (CY 208).

Morgan's fear would seem to be confirmed in Pudd'nhead Wilson, which dramatizes what Earl F. Briden calls the "enslaving effects of communal opinion upon the individual."^[22] Not immune to these enslaving effects, some contemporary critics have been so trained to evoke the powers of training on issues of race that they ignore the way in which Pudd'nhead is a tragedy because of the powers of training. No one in the novel seems free from the enslaving effect of existing cultural narratives, including Roxy with her double-consciousness. Thus, in our demand that Twain remain consistent on the issue of training, we reveal our own inconsistencies. The consequences of that inconsistency are made more poignant when we remember that the Plessy court allowed state legislatures to defer to communal opinion on race to pass laws for the public good. To abandon judgment of Twain long enough to try to understand his position might put critics in a better position to understand the circumstances in which inconsistencies in contemporary opinions arose.

Prospero's judgment in The Tempest that Caliban is "a born devil, oil whose nature / Nurture can never stick" (iv. i. 188–89) could tempt us

to assume that our present formulation of the nature/nurture opposition was always already there. But both "nature" and "nurture" have complicated histories in themselves. Furthermore, nineteenth-century theories of evolution altered their relation. For evidence that Twain was not operating within the opposition as we see it at present, we can look more closely at Morgan's passage on training. For us nature versus nurture means heredity versus environment, but this is not the case for Morgan. "There is no such thing as nature," he says; "what we call by that name is merely heredity and training." What is nature for us is not nature for Morgan. For him, heredity is not opposed to training but lumped with it in joint opposition to what he calls nature. Seemingly inconsistent from our present perspective, Morgan's statement would have made perfect sense within late nineteenth-century thought that linked, rather than opposed, environmental training and hereditary transmission.

Although Darwin's nonteleological theory of natural selection was common knowledge, the experimental work necessary to confirm it was not available until the 1890s or later. For instance, Gregor Mendel's work on genetics in the 1860s was not disseminated until 1900. As a result, most scientists in America clung to a neo-Lamarckian view of evolution in which acquired characteristics could be inherited. Neo-Lamarckianism suited nineteenth-century notions of teleological progress because it allowed people to believe that the adaptive learning of one generation was passed on to the next. Morgan's comment that "training is everything," followed by the grouping of heredity and training, makes perfect neo-Lamarckian sense.

To identify Morgan's comment as neo-Lamarckian does not resolve the debate over Twain's racial politics, since neo-Lamarckianism underlay nineteenth-century scientific racism by implying that different races had different behaviors, temperaments, and levels of intelligence. In conjunction with a Eurocentric view of teleological progress, it enabled the common belief that Africans were "outcasts from evolution."^[23] For instance, in the 1895 presidential address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Daniel G. Brinton correlated the mental and physical structures of races and argued that some, especially among the "black, brown, and red races," manifested "a peculiar mental temperament which has become hereditary and general, of a nature to disqualify them for the atmosphere of modern enlightenment." Also, in 1896, Frederick Hoffman published a book with the assistance of the American Economic Association editorial staff, which

used the racial situation in the United States to prove the inferiority of the African race. Influenced by the widespread link between race and country, as well as by the fact that blacks had been free for a generation (and thus able to transmit adaptive characteristics), Hoffman noted that the "natural bond of sympathy [typically] existing between people of the same country, no matter how widely separated by language and nationality, cannot be proved to exist between the white and colored races of the United States." Good citizens, these experts used their science to advise the country on racial laws. Brinton, for instance, concluded that the "only sure foundation for legislation" was scientific evidence about racial difference, "not a priori notions of the rights of man."^[24]

Twain's neo-Lamarckianism would, therefore, seem to confirm a latent racism. But the situation is complicated. One of the targets of scientific racists was Tourgée. Hoffman, for instance, questioned the shaky foundation for "the many foolish utterances" on race made by people like Tourgée.^[25] Yet Tourgée, whose credentials as a defender of blacks are hard to question, seems himself to have been a neo-Lamarckian. The prefaces to both Pactolus and Murvale Eastman: Christian Socialist, also published in 1890, declare that inheritance and environment shape character. Often Tourgée calls attention to the influence of blood. Benny, Pac insists, will be a smarter man for having Collins blood in his veins. "The fact that you've got that blood in your veins makes it certain that you'll succeed, if you don't let the stubbornness you inherit with it, spoil your chances" (PP 138). As Prime puts it, "no human law can prevent the transmission of qualities" (PP 140.)

Tourgée shows how racial injustice could be challenged even within a neo-Lamarckian framework, which is not to say that Tourgée was free of nineteenth-century racial prejudices any more than we are from twentieth-century ones. But refusing to believe that Africans were outcasts from evolution, he turned neo-Lamarckianism into an argument to improve conditions for blacks. "One who has been a slave can never be made wholly free," Pac writes. "Liberty is a growth—an evolution—not an instantaneous fact" (PP 311–12). Raised in the environment of slavery, blacks will transmit slavelike characteristics. Provided with a proper environment, however, they would acquire different characteristics to pass on to future generations. Within a neo-Lamarckian framework, what today we call the cultural construction of identity was merely part of the combined force of nature and nurture. Thus, Tourgée was devoted to providing blacks with equal conditions, especially education.

An Appeal to Caesar (1884) spelled out his argument for federal support to wipe out illiteracy, especially in the South. Pactolus returns to the issues that he raises in that work.^[26]

Tourgée's neo-Lamarckian argument suggests that Twain too combats racism from within a neo-Lamarckian framework. Pudd'nhead, we can conclude, is a tragedy of both heredity and training. Roxy's attempt to defy the socially constructed fate of her son as a slave ends up producing two "niggers." "Tom" is born a "nigger" because he has black blood, while the real Tom is condemned to remain one because of acculturation. As Tourgée writes, "There ain't ever any good comes of tryin' to make white folks out of niggers. White folks may git to be niggers, but niggers can't ever git to be white folks" (PP 223).

If neither Twain's nor Tourgée's works oppose heredity and training, they do, however, as the last quotation indicates, distinguish between the two. A white person can be made a "nigger" only through training, whereas heredity makes it impossible for training to make a "nigger" white. This distinction is linguistically available in Morgan's 1889 passage on training. If, as the passage begins, "training is everything," then training must also include hereditary transmission. But not quite, for why else would Twain need to write both "heredity" and "training," both "transmitted" and "trained"? Clearly, for Morgan there is a distinction, if not necessarily an opposition, between heredity and training. What links the two is not identity, but a common opposition to a "nature" that is not what we mean by nature today.

Morgan does not define what he means by nature, but he offers a suggestion when he concludes his passage vowing to "save that one microscopic atom in me that is truly me " (CY 208). The way in which that microscopic atom qualifies the power of training is important for understanding Pudd'nhead .

As we have seen, critics concerned with the issue of race read the phrase "training is everything" positively, whereas those concerned with the tyranny of communal opinion read it negatively. But since part of the tyranny of communal opinion in Twain's fictional Dawson's Landing concerns race, neither of these readings is satisfactory. Indeed, the immediate context in Pudd'nhead Wilson invites an ironic reading. In the very chapter to which the entry is appended, Judge Driscoll offers some of Pudd'nhead's "quips and fancies" to a few of the town's "chief citizens." "Irony," however, "was not for these people; their mental vision was not focused for it. They read those playful trifles in solid earnest ..." (PW 25). Earnestly concerned, on the one hand, to

demonstrate the bleak consequences of the fact that Pudd'nhead's "dictum" on training, unlike Hank Morgan's, "no longer admits qualifications or exceptions,"^[27] and, on the other, to argue that it should not admit qualifications or exceptions, contemporary critics resemble the community of readers in Dawson's Landing whose mental vision rules out a playful reading of his calendar entries.

That "training is everything" should not be read purely negatively is suggested by the sentence that follows it: "The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education" (PW 23). Not only is the tone here far removed from Morgan's despair, the promise of a college education suggests that the effects of training are not all bad. Twain demonstrated his belief in education by supporting a black student through Yale law school. But Pudd'nhead's quip also points to education's limits. As Sherwood Cummings has pointed out, the remark about the peach echoes a sentence in Darwin.^[28] After all, few would argue that education could transform a cabbage into a cauliflower. Indeed, if the student Twain supported eventually helped Thurgood Marshall in his early legal career, "Tom" has his manners changed by two years at Yale, but not his character.^[29]

Many critics assume that Tom resists training because of black blood. In fact, for Twain resistance comes from that microscopic atom of a self that is determined by neither training nor heredity. For him that atom is not linked to color. Tom may be a rascal, but he was a rascal in early drafts when he was all white. Because there are black, white, and mulatto rascals, on the issue of rascality Twain is neutral.

Neutrality, however, may not be as neutral as it seems. After all, the Plessy majority also claimed to maintain a stance of neutrality on issues of race. But Twain's neutrality is not the Court's. If the Court felt that under the "separate but equal" law the position of blacks and whites was equal, Twain's novel, with its portrayal of double-consciousness, challenges the Court's logic. In fact, Twain does not confine his portrayal of double-consciousness to Roxy. When "Tom" first discovers that he has black blood, Twain dramatizes how someone defined as black interiorizes a sense of inferiority. After Tom's revelation, Twain writes, "the 'nigger' in him was surprised when the white friend put out his hand for a shake with him. He found the 'nigger' in him involuntarily giving the road, on the sidewalk, to the white rowdy and loafer" (PW 45). The list goes on for two paragraphs.

In other words, Twain's neutrality is not the neutrality claimed by the Plessy majority. Nonetheless, it still makes sense to evoke the criterion of

neutrality for him. Not neutral in the sense that he has no position on racial issues, but neutral in the sense that "black" and "white" characters in his work are, if not absolutely exchangeable, more exchangeable than in many other novels of passing. There are, for example, those unchanged passages in the final text that were written before "Tom" acquired black blood in Twain's imagination. Herschel Parker points to them and calls criticism on the theme of slavery in Pudd'nhead Wilson an "exercise in futility."^[30] Trained as a textual critic, Parker demands some material indication that for Twain the meaning of the passages changed from the time that Tom was white to the time that he is black. But Parker fails to consider the possibility that Twain would have enjoyed the irony that passages written while Tom was all white continue to work once Tom has acquired black blood. It is certainly consistent with Twain's views of race that, like Tom, the passages retain the same surface appearance but their identity has been dramatically transformed. In refusing to acknowledge this possibility Parker is like the townspeople who miss the irony of Pudd'nhead's joke about the dog because they demand a visible sign of his intention.

Twain's neutrality in terms of race is closer to the color-blind standard evoked by Justice Harlan in his Plessy dissent. Because Harlan borrows his metaphor from Tourgée it might seem that Tourgée shares Twain's sense of neutrality.^[31] But Tourgée is also aware that color blindness can be a defect that keeps people from seeing the actual conditions of freedmen. In Bricks without Straw (1880) Tourgée's narrator describes how the freedman had been granted rights, and he complains: "Right he had, in the abstract; in the concrete, none. Justice would not hear his voice. The law was still color-blinded by the past."^[32] Appearing in a chapter entitled "Nunc Pro Tunc," a legal phrase meaning "now for then" that describes acts with a retroactive effect allowed to be done after the time when they should have been done, Tourgée's literary use of the metaphor indicates that he recognized how color blindness could become myopia, keeping the law from acting affirmatively to help improve the concrete conditions of freedmen. That recognition helps to distinguish the duties and obligations that Tourgée imagines for his characters from those imagined by Twain.

Like most novels of passing, Twain's contrasts the interests of self with those of family. To save his inheritance Tom murders the uncle who has adopted him. Even worse, to save his skin he sells his mother down the river. But Twain does not link familial loyalty with racial loyalty, while Tourgée does, even if, as we shall see, he complicates that

standard linkage.^[33] This difference results in some conventional beliefs of Twain's, especially on gender, and some innovative beliefs of Tourgée's, especially on the condition of black Americans. Nonetheless, if Twain's blindness to the historical need for racial loyalty points to limits of his realism, Tourgée's awareness of it does not redeem his outmoded aesthetic. Whereas Tourgée claims to untangle the complications of late nineteenth-century society so as to free readers to think properly on racial issues, Twain uses them to entangle his readers, past and present, in the community that he constructs, a community, according to Carton, of "disingenuousness and guilt."^[34]

IV

Twain's sense of responsibility grows out of his belief in human sympathy. As we have seen, universal human sympathy is closely related to the promise of contract and helps to explain the popularity of Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments in the period. Belief in racial affinities presents a problem for that promise. Indeed, by the end of the century people began to argue that sympathy could draw groups apart as much as draw individuals together.^[35] By not stressing racial loyalty, Twain, like Howells, retains remnants of the ideal of universal human sympathy. In contrast, Tourgée, while deploring racial prejudice, encourages blacks to maintain a sense of racial loyalty. If the two realists' sense of universal sympathy challenges the logic of segregation, it also leads to some fairly conventional portrayals.

Twain's realism would seem to oppose the sentimentality of a writer such as Harriet Beecher Stowe.^[36] But both attack slavery by dramatizing how it violates bonds of sentiment by reducing human beings to pieces of property.^[37] In Twain the icon of such violations is a contractually agreed upon bill of sale for a human being. If it seems inconsistent for Twain, who supported liberal economics, to expose damaging effects of contractual exchanges, he, like Stowe, did not attack the market itself, only its disruption of the ties that bind.^[38] Indeed, a comparison of the roles played by bills of sale in Huckleberry Finn and Pudd'nhead reveals distinctions even within exchanges of sentiment themselves.

In both works the bills are counterfeit. Allowing Huck to prove ownership of Jim, the one in Huckleberry Finn raises perplexing questions about the possible counterfeit nature of the documents that form

the foundation of market exchanges. In fact, when it is later used to sell Jim back into slavery, it illustrates how commerce can disrupt the fraternal bond established between Huck and Jim. Nonetheless, for Twain their bond is constructed. The bond that Tom violates by selling his mother down the river is not. For Twain this bond is natural, more natural than the one between a father and his children.

Fathers are everywhere absent in Pudd'nhead . The father of Roxy's child never acknowledges his son and dies when the son is still a boy. The father of the true "heir" also dies early, leaving a worthless inheritance as the result of unwise speculation in real estate. The "father" murdered by Tom is a father by adoption.^[39] In contrast, Tom's mother is very much in evidence. Her attempt to save her son generates the plot of the novel, and his lack of gratitude makes him seem a naturally depraved villain.

A mother's natural relation to her child also helps drive the plot in Huckleberry Finn, even if through its absence. Huck, of course, starts the book without a mother and with an irresponsible father, who soon dies, leaving Huck an orphan. What needs to be emphasized, however, is that the book's attack on domesticity almost demands that Huck be motherless. The reader and Twain have no problem when Huck rebels against the civilizing efforts of the widow and Aunt Sally. But the sympathies of both would have been complicated if Huck's rebellion had been directed against his mother. Twain may not recognize natural bonds of race, but he does recognize one between mother and child.^[40]

Tom's betrayal of his mother allows Twain to show that under slavery, when the work of motherhood was often done by slaves, the bond between mother and child was threatened. The death of the real heir's mother does not alter the fact that Roxy would have been the surrogate mother of a white child anyway. What Roxy's exchange of infants does is turn her surrogate motherhood into a seemingly real motherhood. Nonetheless, she retains secret affections for her son by birth, a son who has no knowledge of his relationship to his mother even though she mothers him, just as she would have had to mother any white child in his position. In one sense, then, Tom's lack of gratitude is Twain's comment on the lack of gratitude that so many masters displayed to the black women who raised them. Tom, however, is in fact Roxy's real son, and his lack of gratitude seems even worse. Thus, as much as Twain recognizes the importance of acknowledging the work of surrogate mothers, he continues to privilege the ties of blood through the mother, whether that blood be black or white. The world of commerce threatens

those ties because its bonds are not natural, but constructed. And in Twain's world no invisible hand or higher moral order presides over their construction.

The ties that bind and their relationship to the world of commerce is quite different in Tourgée. Like John Hay, Tourgée retains classical republicanism's patriarchal principle of moral order. Indeed, of the works of passing that I have examined, only Hay's "The Foster Brothers" and Pactolus focus on a father/daughter rather than a mother/daughter or a mother/son relation. Like Hay, Tourgée also adheres to an American version of republicanism in which commerce can lead to virtue rather than threaten it, so long as the commercial world is governed by the same patriarchal moral order that governs the family.

Even so, Tourgée's republicanism was much less influenced by liberalism than Hay's was. One result is different views on race and labor. For instance, Tourgée disliked The Bread-Winners and sympathized with wage earners. "Wage-earning is not slavery," Tourgée writes in the preface to Murvale Eastman, "but when it becomes a fixed condition it is one of sheer dependence" (ME iv). That dependency creates new social conditions. In the "new feudalism" (ME iii) of the present, "the 'wealth of nations' has proved a delusion" (ME v). Previously, the battle for freedom had been one of rights, as both serfs and slaves struggled for the rights of citizenship. But the subjection of the wage earner "does not trench upon the domain of personal right. No individual laborer has a right to demand work and wages of an individual employer" (ME iv). Restoring workers' independence is not a question of personal rights. "It is a question between society and the employer as to the control of opportunity" (ME iv). Recognizing that relations between employers and workers are not providing promised opportunities, Tourgée evokes a societal obligation. In doing so he separates himself from the mainstream of the Republican Party, which continued to conceive of duties and obligations in terms of contracting individuals. In 1890, in Murvale Eastman, he works out the consequences of his position for the "Labor Question"; in Pactolus Prime, for the "Negro Question."

If the question facing society is one of opportunity, merely granting former slaves rights is not enough. They also need commercial opportunity. If for Twain and Stowe slavery illustrates the potentially damaging effects of commercial logic intruding into the domestic circle, Tourgée, like Chesnutt, shows how racism can undermine the potentially positive effects of commerce. In Pactolus commercial enterprise more often than not serves the interests of family. The propensity to

accumulate wealth that Pac and Benny inherit from their Collins blood allows Pac to provide unselfishly for his daughter. She, unlike the greedy Tom, does not pursue her inheritance at the expense of family members. She even refuses the gift offered her until she clears up the mystery of her relation to its donor. But a racist society makes it necessary for her father to conceal his role as patriarchal protector.

By linking Pac's commercial prowess with the fulfillment of his role as a patriarchal protector of his daughter, Tourgée creates an impossible dilemma. The lawyer Phelps wants Pac to get rid of his disguise and become a public model to combat the prejudice that blacks lack business sense. But publicly acknowledging himself as the person who has amassed the fortune to pass onto his daughter is precisely what Pac cannot do, since to do so would be to reveal himself as Eva's father and thus to brand her black and taint her life forever. The same sense of duty that motivates Pac to accumulate wealth makes it impossible for him to reveal to the world how much he has embodied the commercial virtue recognized by American society. Unable to acknowledge himself to his daughter, he must play the role of a servant, while a white lawyer acts as the agent for a fictional father named P. P. Smith.

In trying to elicit public sympathy for an argument based on opportunity as well as rights, Tourgée needed to revise the standard account about the horrors of slavery. In "The South as a Field for Fiction," he writes: "About the Negro as a man, with hopes, fears and aspirations like other men, our literature is very nearly silent. Much has been written of the slave and something of the freedman, but thus far no one has been found able to weld the new life to the old. This indeed is the great difficulty to be overcome. As soon as the American Negro seeks to rise above the level of the former time, he finds himself confronted with the past of his race and the woes of his kindred."^[41] In making the reduction of human beings to pieces of property the major evil of slavery, Twain, like Stowe, could tap into the widespread belief that all humans had a right to freedom. He could also elicit a powerful emotional reaction by showing how such a system allowed family relations to be violated by the logic of the market. But his focus severely limited his ability to face the "great difficulty" of welding the life of the freedman to that of the slave. After all, once the freedman is no longer a piece of property, the emotional force of Twain's plot disappears.

This limitation may help to account for why Twain sets his two most important works dealing with race, in the era of slavery. It may also explain Steven Mailloux's remarkable discovery that, despite the

publication of part of Huckleberry Finn in the issue of The Century containing "The Freedman's Case in Equity," there is no contemporary commentary linking Twain's novel to debates over the "Negro Question."^[42] Indeed, insofar as Grady makes clear that those in the New South do not want a return to slavery, it could even be argued that Twain's portrayal of the inhumanity of slavery does not explicitly take sides in the post-Reconstruction debate. The same could not be said of Tourgée's works.

The worst evil of slavery in Pactolus Prime is not the reduction of human beings to property. It is the production of a racism that continues to brand even freedmen with a badge of inferiority. According to Pac, "Slavery was never half so great a curse as that brand of infamy which stamps the soul at its birth with ineradicable inferiority" (PP 45). The end of slavery does not mean an end to this infamy. Persisting in the postbellum period, it undermines the moral order that should govern both the domestic and commercial worlds. The lack of such order forces Pac to face a conflict between his personal interests and the duty to serve as a model for his race.

Standard as that conflict is in the novel of passing, Tourgée complicates it in a number of fascinating ways. First, Pac's personal interest is not for himself but a duty that he feels for his daughter. Second, Pac serves that interest as a "white" man while still remaining black. Third, and perhaps most important, Pac recognizes that the circumscribed role allotted blacks in the public sphere creates conditions in which someone who can pass is able to accomplish more for his race by choosing to be white. At the book's end Eva recognizes this irony, and earlier Pac responds to Benny's question, "But can't I do something for the race?" with: "As a white man you can do more than a thousand colored men" (PP 140).

Pac's insistence that Benny will be able to help his race more as a white lawyer than a black one calls attention to how much Tourgée remains focused on the public sphere. As a black lawyer Benny could certainly help members of the black community in their private affairs, but he would have little power in the public sphere of politics. Without that power he could do little to guarantee just treatment for the entire black race. For Tourgée the central issue remains achieving justice for the freedmen. If justice remains a question of what is right, it can no longer be satisfied only in terms of rights.

Through a discussion that Benny has with a customer, Tourgée, like so many others, makes a case for the freedman in terms of equity, which

a judge listening to the exchange defines as " 'what the common reason of mankind approves as just and true' " (PP 87).^[43] Nonetheless, the judge calls attention to difficulties that occur "when one tries to apply the rules of equity to the practice of peoples and nations" (PP 87). For instance, how could a distinction be made between former slaveholders or their descendants and those who opposed slavery? Benny's response is: "It is the duty of all the people to see that the law wrongs no man, is it not" (PP 88)? The slave's labor, after all, "has gone into the national wealth—that immense aggregate that we have recently seen paraded before the world's eyes with so much boastfulness" (PP 87). Admitting the power of Benny's argument, the judge ends by referring to "Heavenly Chancery" (PP 92), which operates with a steadier hand than equity presided over by human beings. "God," he declares, "has a strange way of keeping his accounts—the debit and credit of right and wrong between races and peoples—and settling them according to His own notions" (PP 91).

Tourgée's appeal to equity distinguishes his moral economy from Twain's. First, there is his faith in the "common reason of mankind," a faith that Twain calls into question with his portrayal of communal opinion in Dawson's Landing. Indeed, given the Plessy court's deference to communal opinion to define reasonableness, Tourgée's faith seems misplaced. Of course, when he evokes the common reason of mankind he is not referring simply to public opinion. He has in mind a higher notion of right reason. But his belief in right reason serves to distinguish him further from Twain, for faith in a higher source of justice is not embodied in the structure of Twain's novel.

Another difference is Tourgée's desire to balance accounts between races and peoples. Pac, for instance, demonstrates to a businessman that for whites to have their financial "account squared" with blacks so as to "start afresh" (PP 73), they would have to pay at least ten billion 1890 dollars for uncompensated labor. To be sure, Twain also believed that whites owed blacks a debt. But in the dramatic working out of his novel Twain focuses on debts owed on an individual level. One of the aesthetic problems with Tourgée's novel is that it can find no way to dramatize his fascinating idea that equity needs to be applied to nations and peoples, not just individuals.

But, as important as equity is for Tourgée, it is not his final word on the issue of race. Despite his calculations to balance accounts, Pac declares, "It is not recompense that we seek, but right. Justice to-day, pays all the debts of yesterday, and nothing else will" (PP 94). In fact,

Pac does not even insist on strict justice, if it means "to make compensation for the past." All he really asks for is an end to injustice, which "pertains only to the future and is always possible" (PP 117). The entire discussion of credit and debit, he asserts, was in response to someone "who believes that political society is merely a business association for business purposes" (PP 117). Not opposed to commerce but lodged within the republican tradition, Tourgée has a different sense of political society. His means of avoiding further injustice within it is education.

As Pac shines the shoes of a senator, he argues for Tourgée's plan to eliminate illiteracy. When the senator expresses doubt about such a "great National charity" (PP 129), Pac admits that the charity of the North has been "as boundless as its faith" (PP 128), but insists that his plan is a matter of justice not charity. Furthermore, wiping out illiteracy is in the national welfare, since the "ignorant voter is a source of actual peril" (PP 120). His plan, therefore, is a "great defensive policy on which the peace and welfare of the United States are certain some time to depend" (PP 130).^[44]

Like sentimentalists, Tourgée believes in a controlling higher moral order, but his order is one governed by right reason, not sentiment. Pac, for instance, claims that his policies are a "matter of right rather than one of sentiment" (PP 126). Devoted to the enlightenment project of educating the public on the dictates of right reason, especially on issues of race, Tourgée saw prejudice and custom as barriers in his way. Yet he was not naive about how to deal with prejudice. For instance, he has Prime echo Lemuel Shaw in Roberts v. City of Boston . "Prejudice," Prime admits, "whether right or wrong, can rarely be legislated out of existence, and the schools of the South would be valueless to the colored people if they were opened by compulsion to them" (PP 118). Tourgée also knew that the Supreme Court was not free from prejudice. The Court, he wrote, "has always been the foe of liberty until forced to move on by public opinion."^[45]

As part of what Prime calls "this coming warfare of opinion" (PP 141), Tourgée wrote newspaper columns and founded his own journal. He also expressed a belief shared by a number of recent critics that fiction could accomplish important cultural work by fixing public opinion.^[46] A necessary supplement to his legal activities, Tourgée's literary activities were devoted to a campaign "to reach and awaken public sentiment."^[47]

Tourgée's use of literature to advocate his views on race led to attacks by those believing that to subordinate literature to politics is to ruin it.

For instance, the editor of The Century who refused an essay of Chesnutt's because of its politics, wrote to George Washington Cable that his manuscript of John March, Southerner had "gleams of the delightful old art." But, he complained, it was "a tract, not a story.... Instead of a return to literature; an attempt to fetch everything into literature save & except literature itself.... Shades of Tourgée!"^[48]

The contempt addressed toward Tourgée for defending the novel of purpose has led Kenneth Warren to take seriously his attack on realism. For Warren American realism in general "must be read against a backdrop of the North's retreat from a commitment to securing freedom and equal rights for black Americans—a retreat that moved the body of Northern opinion to an acceptance of policies and decisions mandating the social, political, and economic subordination of the nation's freedmen."^[49] There is, without a doubt, truth to the argument that Howells and James tried to avoid the partisan politics between North and South in their fiction.^[50] It is important to remember, however, that attempts to avoid partisan politics are not necessarily apolitical. If political rhetoric is, as Aristotle defines it, linked to questions of the social good, there are times when not taking part in partisan squabbles can be an important political move. Not abandoning belief in universal human sympathy, the realists remained more focused on imagining possibilities for the entire population than advocating the position of one party or group. To be sure, insofar as the defense of black rights came to be seen as a sign of partisanship, Warren's complaint about realism is an important one, although, as we have seen, the realists were not all alike on racial issues. Part of the function of this chapter is to distinguish Twain's portrayal of race from James's and Howells's. It is also to distinguish his literary practice from Tourgée's. What Warren does not consider in his analysis of the realists is Tourgée's alternative aesthetic.

V

Tourgée grants that Howells and James are masters in fiction. For instance, calling the courtroom scene in A Modern Instance one of "immense vigor and dramatic effect," he declares that "no more scathing words on certain divorce laws have ever been spoken."^[51] Nonetheless, he expresses concern over both the content and method of realism. The preface to Pactolus has the realists in mind when it states

that Tourgée's method "is not only original, but almost unique. He does not develope [sic ] his characters by self-analytic monologue or the unnatural expedient of making them constant seekers for advice." Elsewhere Tourgée complains that realists exalt "accuracy of detail ... almost to the exclusion of other artistic qualities. It mattered little what was the subject, save that it must have no historical or emotional significance." Tourgée was especially upset with how, according to him, realists sneered at attempts to show how lives were influenced by "the rise and fall of empires, the movements of races and peoples, the conflict of jarring civilizations." Sneering himself, he claims that instead realists focused on "the littlest and meanest characteristics of the lives [they seek] to portray."^[52]

Tourgée's complaint that the realists focused on the accuracy of details at the expense of their historical significance is similar to Lukàcs's years later about the naturalists.^[53] Like Lukàcs, he insists on a higher significance for the details of life, and he disputes the notion that life, even if common, can be commonplace. "Life, whether of low or high degree, is never commonplace if we reach its core. The depiction of the mere commonplace, therefore, however accurate, is not a true portraiture of life. The commonplaces of emotion, sentiment, and aspiration, are only incidents which sometimes reveal and sometimes hide the real life. One might as well recall Washington's account of his expenses a history of the Revolution. It is part of that history, but only the meanest part."^[54] If for Lukàcs Marxist history makes life significant, for Tourgée spirituality does. In Murvale Eastman he faults realism for assuming that human character is a result of natural law. "So it is; but those laws are not all physical, nor purely mental. The soul must be taken into account if we would comprehend humanity or truly portray character" (ME 113). "Till some gleam of spirituality is added" to James's work, Tourgée warns, "he must remain artist, but can never become creator."^[55]

For Tourgée, who supported a campaign to remove books from the Boston Public Library that were "objectionable from any rational standpoint" and "unfit for decent people to read,"^[56] the realists lacked moral purpose and unfairly mocked traditional values. To his insistence that "love, and honor, and self-sacrifice remain, despite the flood of unhealthy caricature that comes from the press of to-day," he adds: "In his desire to avoid unreal sentimentality, the modern American novelist has gone to the other extreme of a more unreal and unnatural cynicism."^[57] That cynicism is especially apparent in the treatment of love.

Writing shortly after the publication of The Rise of Silas Lapham and The Bostonians, and very likely alluding to them, Tourgée complains that, in satirizing sentimental love and presenting a "stage on which a pair of self-conscious actors perform a miserable comedy of self-deception," the realist novel has eliminated the idea of love itself and "substituted a poor, petulant, selfish desire for possession." "Surprised glances, analytic agony, and morbid self-anatomy have taken the place of honest love-making. No man woos in true manly fashion, no woman yields with tender truthfulness, in the modern realistic novel. Courtship has come to be a war of wits. The wooer is transformed into a pursuer.... He frets, and worries, and persecutes, until the overwrought sensibility of the poor creature gives way, and she spitefully or tearfully capitulates, apparently for the mere sake of peace."^[58]

In contrast, Tourgée praises Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona because it recognizes that love is not dead. Although he knows that Ramona will be attacked for advocating the cause of Indians, Tourgée calls it "unquestionably the best novel yet produced by an American woman."^[59] He also publishes Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and celebrates E. P. Roe, the sentimental author of the religious novel Barriers Burned Away . "Few men have extended a healthier influence upon the life of today than Mr. Roe. In these times when the novel of purpose is made a matter of artistic ridicule by our over-refined dilettanti, and the novel without a purpose is corrupting the heart and brain of the rising generation ... the very large scales which his works have had disclose to us the pleasing fact that our American reading public is not yet entirely given over to the worship of realism which insists that fiction shall be given up to the painting of life as it is, dirt and all.^[60]

Tourgée, whose favorite author was the literary lawyer Walter Scott deplored by Twain, belonged more to the tradition of legal men of letters who dominated the political and literary scene in the first years of the republic than to the tradition of sentimental fiction. But his attack on the realists and his praise of sentimentalists indicate that for many contemporaries republicanism and sentimentalism had more in common with one another than either had in common with the practice of realism.

One area of the country where the traditions of both republicanism and sentimentalism were more successful in resisting the rise of realism was the South. In singling out the South as the most promising field for American fiction, Tourgée adhered to the widespread belief that it retained a sense of honor and virtue undermined in the North by forces

of modernity. In fact, Tourgée's aesthetic practice had more in common with Southern writers of the plantation school, such as the lawyer-novelist Thomas Nelson Page, who openly fought against the political, social, and civil rights of blacks, than with the realists who at their worst may have been complicit with the Northern retreat from rights for freedmen, but who, nonetheless, advocated an aesthetic that undercut the increasingly sentimentalized view of the slaveholding South. As Howells's Basil March puts it in Their Wedding Journey, "I suppose that almost any evil commends itself by its ruin; the wrecks of slavery are fast growing a fungus crop of sentiment, and they may yet outflourish the remains of the feudal system in the kind of poetry they produce" (WJ 95).^[61] To base an aesthetic practice on right reason, as Tourgée did, did not guarantee agreement on what was right. Tourgée and Page might have shared one another's beliefs in honor, self-sacrifice, and love, but they had very different notions as to what right reason dictated on race.

The problem with Tourgée's attempt to use fiction to fix the public's opinion on racial matters was that the public adhered more to Page's views than his own. As a result, Tourgée's cultural work stopped working. If Benny and Prime win every argument in a work of fiction, the public was no more swayed by Pactolus Prime than the Court would be by his argument in Plessy . In contrast, Page's fiction along with work by revisionist historians helped to establish in the public's mind a view of the antebellum South in which race relations were not tense and blacks were often better off than in their freed condition.

The failure of Tourgée's fiction points to the limits of his literary project. A child of the enlightenment, Tourgée believed that by embodying right reason in his fiction he could educate public opinion and eliminate prejudice. The problem with that goal is similar to the one he himself noted in the Court's interpretation of the "equal but separate" law. The works that he hoped would alter racial prejudice could not be interpreted free from the history of prejudice that he would alter. Whereas Tourgée thought that he had expressed right reason in Pactolus Prime, even his "moderate" critics declared the book fanatical.^[62]

To recognize the limits of Tourgée's literary project is not to claim that realism has none, but it can help us better understand the realists' options within their historical context. Not directly related to racial politics, part of that context was the rise of a professional middle class. Twain's and Tourgée's responses to it affect their aesthetics.

VI

Tourgée never mentions Twain in his criticism. Of course, he could not fault Twain for neglecting the South in his fiction. He might even have seen Twain as an ally in demystifying false images of Southern society.^[63] Nonetheless, as we have seen, Twain did not take up the difficult task of explicitly linking the condition of the freedman to slavery. Twain was also a mugwump. Tourgée had more against mugwumps than their disloyalty to the Republican Party. He opposed their proposals for civil service reform.

His opposition was linked to racial politics. For Richard Watson Gilder and E. L. Godkin, a terrible example of corruption was Reconstruction and carpetbaggers' use of spoils to buy the votes of uneducated freedmen.^[64] They feared that dependent wage laborers in Northern cities would be as vulnerable to corruption as former slaves. But Tourgée's opposition was also related to his classical republicanism. Recognizing the need to do something about the spoils system, he nonetheless warned that a system of state examinations and life tenure would undermine citizens' active participation in governance by creating a permanent class of professional bureaucrats. The United States, he noted, liked to think of itself as superior to China, yet as China opened its borders, the United States took over two distinctive features of Chinese life. "We have built a wall to prevent foreigners from entering our territories and have adopted the principle of scholastic examination and life-tenure in office." Local acts of individual corruption should not prompt the adoption of "reforms" that would corrupt the virtue of the republican system.^[65]

If Tourgée clung to the traditional notion of republican virtue, the mugwumps attempted to update it through reform. For them, the spoils system was a perfect example of the corruption that followed from people's refusal to sacrifice self-interest and partisan politics to the public good. Civil service reformers assumed that the professionalization feared by Tourgée was the best answer to self-interested partisanship. Even so, the mugwumps' sense of self did not allow them to be perfectly comfortable with the implications of professionalism.

Antebellum America tended to grant authority for knowledge to either intuitive individuals in touch with higher laws or a moral standard of right reason associated with republicanism. But the rise of

professionalism in postbellum society meant that it was increasingly granted to communities of trained specialists. As Thomas Haskell has observed, the ascendancy of professionalism received philosophical legitimation from the rise of pragmatism, especially C. S. Peirce's notion of scientifically trained communities of the competent.^[66] In contrast, as the mugwump origins of the right to privacy indicate, the mugwumps remained individualists. To be sure, the philosophical school of pragmatism and the political alliance of mugwumps were not mutually exclusive. Nonetheless, the pragmatic redefinition of truth and selfhood helped to transform the reformist tendencies of the mugwumps into the early twentieth-century movement of progressivism. If the individualism of many mugwumps was not quite compatible with professionalism, progressivism depended on it.

In law pragmatism had an important influence on Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. In the 1870s Holmes, Peirce, and William James were members of an informal Metaphysical Club whose meetings led to pragmatism's formulation. In turn, Holmes's pragmatically inspired aphorism that the life of the law has been experience, not logic, contributed to the rise of legal realism, which is associated with progressive reform.^[67] Against laissez-faire theories of legal neutrality, legal realists argued that law was an active force in shaping public policy. If their emphasis on law's affirmative role helped to revitalize aspects of the republican tradition, they transformed republicanism as they revitalized it, making it incompatible with both Tourgée's classical version and mugwump gentility. Following Holmes, legal realists anchored law in felt necessities of the time, not right reason. For them law served the public interest by balancing the demands of competing interest groups.^[68] Unable to find the principles needed to achieve their goal of efficient management in either a virtuous, if nonexistent, right reason or a neutral, if impossible to achieve, legal science, they increasingly turned elsewhere, especially to the newly established professional social sciences, which pragmatism had helped to legitimate philosophically.

The authority that Peirce gave to professionally trained communities of the competent seems to give progressives a solution to a problem that our comparison of Twain and Tourgée has raised. Tourgée places great faith in the power of education to make people see right reason. Skeptical about the transcendental governance of right reason, Twain calls attention to the power of training to reinforce prejudiced communal opinion and places his hope for resistance in an undefined "natural" self. From a Peircean perspective Tourgée's error is to believe in right

reason, whereas Twain's is to rely on the "microscopic atom" of a resisting self. Rather than work to keep that microscopic atom visible, Peirce denied its existence altogether. For him no ideas or beliefs originate with one person. Instead, "every cognition, every awareness, conscious sensation or reasoning, was determined by previous cognitions. There were no 'simple' ideas determined by their object alone that could be built by the gentle force of association into a static web of knowledge. Instead, every act of knowing was a moment in a continuous stream of experience, a moment irrevocably conditioned by previous moments."^[69]

If, as Peirce writes, "belief is of the nature of habit," the Emersonian hope of seeing with new eyes is impossible, and Peirce's account of the self would seem to confirm the Connecticut Yankee's fear that training is everything. But Peirce does not despair, because to say that belief is of the nature of habit is not to say that belief cannot change, only that individuals cannot be the generating force in changing their beliefs. Thus for Peirce the question becomes, "how to fix belief, not in the individual merely, but in the community."^[70] Reviewing various methods of fixing belief, Peirce concludes that the superior one is science with its ideal model of a community in which the individual is subordinated to a group's shared quest for truth.

Peirce's faith in scientifically trained communities of the competent allows him to retain Tourgée's enlightenment faith in education without positing the existence of right reason. The absence of right reason is not a problem because professional communities of the competent can provide reliable knowledge for the entire society. Thus, even though the community as a whole might seem enslaved to prejudiced and false beliefs, those properly trained could provide training that would fix proper belief. This belief was taken over by progressivism and also influenced the New Deal and its "brain trust" of professionally trained experts that could engineer the good society. The Plessy decision suggests a limitation to this solution.

For the most part the Plessy decision conforms to the premises of boundary theory, not pragmatism. Nonetheless, as we saw in chapter 2, whereas legal scholars praise Holmes's Lochner dissent and condemn the Plessy majority, both depend on the test of reasonableness. Furthermore, when Justice Brown defers to the "established usages, customs, and traditions of the people," he allows the prejudices of Southern whites to define reason and thus confirms Holmes's realistic argument that law is determined by the "felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral

and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow men."^[71] To be sure, Peirce's communities of the competent should correct the prejudices of custom. In the Plessy case, however, they proved no safeguard. The scientific community might have believed in the quest for truth, but the truth that it produced in the late nineteenth century was a "scientific racism" that supported the reasonableness of Jim Crow laws.^[72]

In such a situation Twain and Tourgée imagine very different narratives. Tourgée recognizes new problems posed by the late nineteenth century, but clings to old-fashioned republican ideas, especially the republican notion of selfhood, to solve them. Twain makes no explicit effort to solve problems. Instead, his narrative exposes limitations to liberal, republican, and progressive solutions.

VII

Tourgée continues to imagine a world in which right reason exists and is guarded by the moral intelligence of gentlemen lawyers and judges devoted to proper government and justice. Thus, when a judge takes the bootblack's chair in Pactolus Prime, silence overcomes the assembled group, a silence "not so much due to the exalted position which he held, as to that innate respect for his moral and intellectual qualities which has been the bulwark of the American judiciary" (PP 92). The authority of the legal profession in Tourgée's world is further illustrated by the disagreement between the lawyer Phelps and his medical friend over Prime's racial identity. The two represent different versions of professionalism. Phelps's professional standard is a moral one traditionally associated with the bar. The doctor's is scientific. For Tourgée, it is the gentleman lawyer, not the scientific expert, who knows the truth about racial identity, the representative of morally right reason who has the knowledge to combat community standards of reason regarding race. In contrast, Pudd'nhead's role in Twain's tragedy registers the displacement of right reason by the authority of scientific professionalism.

Pudd'nhead's role has often been debated. For some, his final success exempts him from the tragic conclusion. For others, he remains a heroic outsider who offers an alternative to the community's prejudiced beliefs.

Still others see his final success as part of Twain's tragedy, since it causes him to lose his status as outsider and succumb to communal opinion.

Whereas this pessimistic view seems closest to the mark, it is not quite accurate to say that Pudd'nhead succumbs to communal opinion. On the contrary, by the end of the novel he has assumed the role of leadership previously occupied by Judge Driscoll, the only other member of the Freethinker's Society. He does not simply conform to communal opinion, he at least in part alters it. That he does so through the use of science distinguishes him from fellow lawyer Driscoll and the lawyer in Tourgée's work.

In Pudd'nhead Twain combines the scientist and the lawyer that Tourgée presents as two characters. Discussing Prime's identity in a chapter entitled "The Feat of Science," Tourgée's doctor does a "bit of detective analysis" (PP 241) that draws on scientific evidence to construct a "chain of evidence" (PP 246) that for him solves the mystery. Although impressed by the display, Phelps skeptically responds, "You see, doctor, my profession has learned by sad experience not to put entire reliance upon flesh-marks and—experts!" (PP 244). But if in Tourgée's novel the lawyer overrules science, in Twain's the lawyer's authority depends on it. Destroying the "indestructible chain of evidence" (PW 107) incorrectly used to identify the murderer, Pudd'nhead accomplishes his own bit of detective work by producing another chain based on the scientific evidence of flesh marks.^[73] Science, as Peirce argued, does have the power to alter communal opinion, but in this case it confirms rather than challenges prejudices about race, just as the majority of the scientific community would have supported the reasonableness of Plessy v. Ferguson .

Unlike Tourgée, Twain avoids making explicit comment on the condition of the freedman by setting his work in the era of slavery. Nonetheless, Pudd'nhead's role in the tragedy suggests that Twain's story does make an indirect comment on its moment of production as well as its moment of representation.^[74] First of all, "college bred" and a recent graduate of a "post-college course in an eastern law school" (PW 5), Pudd'nhead represents the new brand of professionalism. Second, entering the South from New York, he might well have evoked fears and memories of meddlesome carpetbaggers, like Tourgée, who also lived in New York. His nickname even recalls A Fool's Errand, which is about a Northern lawyer in the South. By the novel's end, however, Pudd'nhead loses his status as a fool and becomes a leader accepted by the Southern community. Marking the ascendancy of a new class of

scientific professionals, Pudd'nhead's triumph also signals the formation of a larger community of fools, Northern and Southern, who united after the war by collectively selling down the river blacks' efforts to integrate into the national community.^[75] Try as Northerners might to blame Jim Crow legislation on Southern prejudice, the Supreme Court decision upholding such laws was authored by a judge born in Massachusetts, who prominently cited another Massachusetts judge, whereas the lone dissenter was an ex-slaveholder from the South.

Mocking community standards of reasonableness regarding race, Tourgée's and Twain's works are cultural tragedies because racial inequality continues to prevail. Tourgée, however, counters faulty standards of reason with an explicit argument based on right reason, whereas Twain offers no explicit alternative. The supposedly naturally good self of someone like Huck has no force, and the class of gentleman lawyers, who supposedly embody moral right reason, has produced the decaying code of the First Families of Virginia and been replaced by a representative of new communities of the competent, a transformation that has the potential to alter communal opinion but does little to alter the inequitable social order. Thus, Pudd'nhead, Twain's vehicle for criticizing prejudice, becomes himself open to criticism when, after his use of science gains him acceptance into the community, we learn that "his long fight against hard luck and prejudice was ended" (PW 114).

Potentially meaning both that Pudd'nhead's scientific attitude has prevailed over prejudice and that Pudd'nhead himself has succumbed to prejudice, this phrase suggests Twain's divided attitude toward science. On the one hand, he, like Pudd'nhead, believes in the superiority of science over prejudice. On the other, if science, our most effective weapon against prejudice, is no more than a prejudice, the fight against one prejudice has ended with the victory of another.

This dilemma is suggested by Pudd'nhead's combined interests in fingerprinting and palmistry. Distinctions between the two might seem to establish the authority of science. Fingerprinting works; palmistry doesn't; and Twain uses the difference to set up dramatic irony when Tom mocks the fingerprinting that eventually convicts him. " 'But look here, Dave,' said Tom, 'you used to tell people's fortunes too, when you took their finger-marks. Dave's just an all-around genius. A genius of the first water, gentlemen, a great scientist running to seed here in this village, a prophet with the kind of honor that prophets generally get at home—for here they don't give shucks for his scientifics, and they call his skull a notion-factory' " (PW 49). If, however, we laugh at "Tom"

as he laughs at Pudd'nhead, we share his skepticism when he responds to the claims made for palmistry with: "That jugglery a science? But really, you ain't serious are you?" (PW 50). Our split response to "Tom's" mockery raises the question of what makes one way of reading a hand a science and another "rank sorcery" (PW 50), a question even more poignant for Twain's contemporary audience, for whom fingerprinting was a new discovery, and even more so for the fictional audience in Dawson's Landing, for whom fingerprinting would have been virtually indistinguishable from palmistry. The question becomes even more complicated when we remember that one reason that Twain used fingerprinting was to have a gimmick whose novelty would increase sales.

Pudd'nhead's legal authority to challenge prevailing community beliefs might depend on the authority of science, but the criteria constituting a science seem to depend on prevailing community beliefs. In a way that Tourgée never does, Twain questions the very notion of reasonableness that not only justifies the decision in Plessy v. Ferguson but also the final action of Pudd'nhead Wilson, for when Judge Driscoll's murder is blamed on the erroneous inventory that overlooked "Tom's" existence as a slave, "everyone saw that there was reason in this" (PW 115).

Even if it is too simple to say that reason and science are products of prejudice rather than correctives to it, rationality never seems quite able to break from the prejudice to which it claims superiority. As John Carlos Rowe has reasonably argued, citing a passage from A Connecticut Yankee in which one of Hank Morgan's rational plans is brought low by a "near-sighted, cross-eyed, pudd'nheaded clown" (CY 315), "every apparently rational intention has something 'pudd'nheaded' about it."^[76] That pudd'nheadedness affects Twain's aesthetic. If the natural self no longer exists to resist repressive communal standards, the only disruptive force left may be unpredictable pudd'nheadedness.

Tourgée's aesthetic is based on the enlightenment ideal of public debate fostered by republicanism. According to that ideal, so long as all parties have an equal hearing, the proper argument will prevail, as it does in Prime's public debate with prominent citizens. In a racist society, however, all parties do not have an equal hearing, and, as Prime remarks to a senator, "You have the Record and the press to give circulation to your ideas. I have only the men who sit in my chairs or who are waiting for places in them to talk to" (PP 114). To combat this inequitable constraint on the free circulation of ideas in the marketplace, Tourgée

proposed national ownership of the communications system, a proposal that indicates how similar Tourgée's ideal of public debate is to Jürgen Habermas's ideal of unconstrained communication, which, not surprisingly, owes a debt to Peirce's notion of the scientific community's quest after truth—which in turn is a pragmatic variation on the ideal of republican right reason. Since the conditions for Tourgée's ideal have never been established, it is impossible to test whether it would work. It is certainly a reasonable goal to work for.

But even as we work for it, its limitations are suggested by the notion of a rationality inhabited by pudd'nheadedness. Tourgée's ideal of right reason assumes that given a level playing field, an argument based on proper assumptions and logic will prevail. But arguments are won by rhetoric as well as logic. Inhabited by pudd'nheaded rhetoric, rational logic does not hold sovereign sway, and the unreasonableness of prevailing community standards of reason cannot be exposed merely by presenting an argument that adheres to right reason, since there is no purely rational argument devoid of rhetoric. The only way to proceed seems to be to deflate existing codes of reasonableness by inhabiting them in such a way as to expose their rhetorical component, a way of proceeding that admits its complicity with that which it would deflate by calling attention to its own rhetoricity.

VIII

Twain's and Tourgée's differences on rhetoric can be highlighted by looking at how they use law to help structure their novels. Tourgée's work is often simply an arena in which to voice legal arguments. In fact, Pactolus Prime is structured as a legal brief for blacks. Chapter titles include "An Assessment of Damages," "Some Expert Testimony," "Counterclaim and Set-Off," "An Unsatisfactory Client," "A Puzzled Counsellor," "The Boundary of Right," and "Penalties." The legal structure especially dominates the first half, when Benny and Prime interrogate prominent citizens occupying the shoeshine chair as if it were the witness chair in court. Faced with questions, these expert witnesses inevitably testify, if often unwillingly, to past injustice to blacks and the need to prevent further injustice in the present and future. In contrast, Twain is more intent on exploiting dramatic possibilities in the law. As the final courtroom scene reveals,

the law for him is both spectacle and theater. If Tourgée subordinates the form of his novel to its legal argument, Twain uses law to advance his aesthetic purposes.

This neat contrast demands qualification, however, because Twain's aesthetic purposes are not completely separate from an argument he at least implies about the desirability of having the legal system serve the ends of justice. For Twain this implied argument depends on a realistic presentation of experience. To be sure, in his prefatory "Whisper to the Reader" he mocks the attempt to achieve an authentic recreation of a trial scene in fiction. Nonetheless, the theatricality that he exploits in rendering his final scene is not opposed to his realism but a vital part of it.

No writer in the American tradition has better captured voices and dialects than Twain. For instance, Hay praised Twain's "1601" as "a serious effort to bring back our literature and philosophy to the sober and chaste Elizabethan standard." Twain, however, denied any such moral intention. The piece was written, he claims, while "saturating myself with archaic English to a degree which would enable me to do plausible imitations of it in a fairly easy and unlabored way." It was inspired by a passage "which commended itself to me as being absolutely real, and as being the kind of talk which ladies and gentlemen did actually indulge." Testing himself, he tried to "contrive one of those stirring passages out of my own head."^[77]

Twain knew that his ability to create dialogue was like an actor's ability to "get into" a character. Indeed, Twain was a success on the lecture circuit in part because of his acting abilities. Upstaging Charles Dickens and his popular reading tours, Twain did not simply read from his books, he performed them. Similarly, his best books were created by his ability to let his characters speak in their own voices. His first story published in a widely respected journal was, appropriately, "A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It."

Twain's obsession with letting characters speak for themselves rather than subordinate them to a preexisting design or argument grows out of an obligation that he felt toward them as unique individuals. That obligation contributed to his abandonment of Those Extraordinary Twins . As he was writing that story, "other people got to intruding themselves and taking up more room with their talk and their affairs. Among them came a stranger named Pudd'nhead Wilson, and a woman named Roxana; and presently the doings of these two pushed up into prominence a young fellow named Tom Driscoll, whose proper place

was away in the obscure background. Before the book was half finished those three were taking things almost entirely into their own hands and working the whole tale as a private venture of their own—a tale which they had nothing at all to do with, by rights" (PW 120). By listening to the voices of these characters who continued to assert themselves, Twain altered the order of the world he was creating.

In allowing himself to be the medium through whom his characters speak, Twain would seem to have affinities with spiritualists. Indeed, although he mocked mediumship, he was also fascinated with its possibilities.^[78] Nonetheless, Twain differs from writers like Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and E. P. Roe. The latter two claimed to be mediums through whom God spoke. Twain serves as a medium for individual characters. The evangelical Christians presented a vertically ordered world governed by God. Twain presents a horizontally ordered one constructed by the "private venture" (PW 120) of characters interacting on their own. That interaction allows characters to escape the "proper place" (PW 120) assigned them in a fictional hierarchy.

Even so, the origin of his characters' diverse voices remains in question. Carton has argued that in exposing racial categories as fictions of law and custom, Twain calls attention to our role as the authors of social forms. But Twain's account of the authorship of his story seems to confirm the structuralist notion about the death of the author. Transforming itself beyond Twain's control, the story seems to be produced by an autonomous writing machine. Indeed, although characters take "things almost entirely into their own hands" (PW 120), eventually their lives seem controlled by the cultural narratives into which they are born. Since the book's realism seems to depend on conforming to the logic of those narratives, Twain too would seem to be controlled by them. Thus his role is close to Pudd'nhead's, which he describes as merely "a button or a crank or a lever, with a useful function to perform in a machine" (LL 291). Just as Twain claims not to have created the tragedy that he wrote, but merely to have made it visible as it grew out of his attempt to write a farce, so Pudd'nhead merely makes visible the evidence provided by his fingerprinting. Not free agents controlling the terms of the action, Twain and Pudd'nhead seem to serve as agents through which a mechanistic fate accomplishes its dirty work of perpetuating a cultural tragedy.

As similar as the roles of character and author are, however, they are not identical. If Pudd'nhead makes fingerprints legible, Twain makes visible the cultural narrative in which Pudd'nhead's scientific profes-

sionalism helps to restore order temporarily disrupted by a black woman's attempt to advance her son. Twain's role as an author may seem to be no more than that of a crank in a machine, but this particular crank makes a difference. First, even though Twain seems to let characters speak through him, they in fact are his creations. The process by which they come into existence is similar to the one by which Twain produced "1601." He so saturates himself in the voices that he hears around him that he acquires the ability to create them out of his own head. Second, Twain does not simply record the interaction of his characters. Their actions generate a plot by being filtered through his imagination. Twain offers, to use Wolfgang Iser's distinction, an active presentation of reality not a passive representation of it, an act of Darstellung not mimesis.^[79]

Not a closed society, the world that Twain presents continues to perform itself by involving readers, past and present, within it. By not dictating a particular set of beliefs, it nonetheless tested past readers' relations to the communal and scientific beliefs that two years later supported the Plessy decision. Even though most present-day readers are confident that such beliefs are a thing of the past, Pudd'nhead poses a test or two to us as well by inviting us to scrutinize standards of reasonableness constructed by our communities of scientifically trained professionals.

For example, we can examine the common assumption that Plessy was overruled by Brown v. Board of Education (1954) or, if not by Brown, by Gayle v. Browder (1956), which, appealing to Brown, forbids segregated transportation facilities. Nonetheless, Brown never explicitly claims to overrule Plessy on a question of law. Instead, it focuses on the evidence that was available to the Plessy court about the effect of segregated facilities. Citing recent evidence from the social sciences in footnote 11, Chief Justice Earl Warren concludes that segregation has a detrimental effect on black children because it imparts a sense of inferiority that affects their motivation to learn. "Whatever may have been the extent of psychological knowledge at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson ," he declares, "this finding is amply supported by modern authority."^[80] Rather than make Harlan's "color-blind" Constitution the law of the land, Brown more explicitly than Plessy rests on the authority of our communities of the competent. In fact, if it had declared the Constitution color-blind, it would have ruled out affirmative action programs that try to guarantee professional training for minorities, as evidenced by the Bakke case (1978).

What supporters of Brown too rarely ask is, what will happen if in the future the "modern authority" of social science evidence shows that separate but equal schools do not necessarily have a detrimental effect? Should Brown then be overruled? The answer to that question is not an easy one because Brown does not rest solely on social science evidence. Certainly, the answer will not be found by reading Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson . Nonetheless, Twain's book continues to force us to raise such difficult questions.

Describing his composition process, Twain distinguishes himself from a "born-and-trained novelist" and refers to the pulling out of his tragedy from his farce as the operation of a "jack-leg" (PW 119). But for the author of a work about the tragedies of birth and training, the epithet "jack-leg" may not be completely pejorative. Indeed, in a culture of professionalism, in which racism persists, the tragedy that this incompetent pudd'nhead pulled out continues to have the capacity to produce "most embarrassing circumstance [s]" (PW 119) for those who read it, despite, or at times because of, their cultural and professional training and birth.