earticle

영어

Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) is considered to be the first novel to use fingerprints for forensic evidence in the courtroom. Even though fingerprints function as meaningful mechanisms in this novel, not much attention has been given to both fingerprints themselves and the connection between race and fingerprints. This paper aims to explore the specific way how lawyer/scientist Wilson is reading fingerprints in the final courtroom scene. Fingerprints are biological markers which show only individual identities and do not signify any ethnic or racial groups. But when Wilson announces Tom as ‘a negro and a slave’ in the courtroom, race-neutral fingerprints are being appropriated to reinforce socially constructed racial identities. Wilson uses fingerprints to prop up the fiction of law and custom which was prevalent under the Jim Crow regime. We can find the profound influence of dominant racial ideology on fingerprint identification. Twain makes use of fingerprints anachronistically to criticize the absurdity of the false social constructs such as racial categories of white and black.