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Published in 1894, The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson occupies a central position in the dark period of Mark Twain’s literary career. In this book, Twain criticizes the race slavery and American racial politics. The main topic is the highly artificial category of race. Both the servant Roxy and his son look white, but they are black according to “a fiction of law and custom,” and it is this fiction the novel sets out to expose. The fact that white and black can be changed simply by a single act of switching children testifies that the racial identity in Dawson’s Landing is nothing but a fiction supported by laws and customs.
Twain introduces a stranger as a means of exposing and criticizing the evils and injustices of the slavery. Wilson, “pudd’nhead” stranger, tries to restore justice with scientific knowledge of fingerprints, but shows his limitations by joining the injustices of the slave-holding town. He scores a success in the court by restoring the switched identities of Tom and Chambers, but his success is anything but a real success. In the process of correcting the racial identity, he in effect justifies racial discrimination and re-establishes the distorted social order based on it.