Bob Wilson
Knallkopf Wilson (Original title: Pudd'nhead Wilson. Those Extraordinary Twins. ) Is a novel by Mark Twain . It was published in 1894 and also appeared in German under the titles Querkopf Wilson and Wilson, the Spinner .
action
The setting of the story is the homely, somewhat sleepy little town of Dawson's Landing on the Mississippi , which like Deer Lick (in A Bloody Deed, a Fraud and a Covenant ) and also like St. Petersburg (in Tom Sawyer ) in Mark Twain's hometown Hannibal in Missouri remind. Dawson's Landing is a slave-holding town where people live off grain and pig farming and where blacks are socially disadvantaged. The twenty-year-old, self-confident Roxy, a slave in Percy Driscoll's house, also finds out. When a thief is sought there, Driscoll threatens to sell all blacks “to the south” - to where even more brutal methods of oppression are used. Roxy worries about the future of her son Valet de Chambre, known as Chambers, and decides to swap children without further ado: She puts the clothes of Thomas Becket Driscoll, known as Tom, on her son, who is just a few months old, and she is her master’s son Mother's place looked after. Nobody notices the swap because like Roxy, Chambers is a black with white skin.
The quirky residents of Dawson's Landing include David Wilson, an East Coast born lawyer with Scottish ancestry and British humor . Wilson is an outsider and the ancestral residents suspect. He not only practices palmistry and thinks up wisdom for a calendar, but also collects fingerprints of all residents, which he neatly catalogs. His first impressions include those of the two boys Tom and Chambers.
Depending on their skin color and social position, they develop in completely different directions: Tom (actually Chambers) becomes a pampered, spoiled tyrant, Chambers (actually Tom) a robust, capable worker who is his "foster brother" in all situations Help has to come. The boys are 16 when "Tom's" father Percy Driscoll dies. This gives Roxy her freedom and makes a lifelong dream come true: She hires on a Mississippi steamer. "Tom" comes into the care of his uncle and aunt, is pampered by them and sent to law school at Yale, where he is more noticeable for gambling and drinking than for performance.
Eight years later, Roxy suffers from rheumatism , can no longer work and is penniless because the bank to which she entrusted her wages is bankrupt. She forces “Tom”, who has meanwhile returned home without a degree, to get her money, otherwise, she threatens, she will reveal the secret of his origins. Tom falls from the clouds - after all, neither he nor Chambers knew about the child swap - and decides to raise money by breaking into the citizens of Dawson's Landing. Disguised as a woman, he succeeds in numerous coups, until, of all things, he is caught breaking into his uncle's house and murdered him.
The twins Luigi and Angelo Capello, well-traveled entertainers from ancient Florentine aristocracy, who have been living in Dawson's Landing for some time, quickly come under suspicion, as the murder weapon, a dagger previously stolen by "Tom", comes from their possession. Then comes the process in which David Wilson can prove his skills as a lawyer for the first time: With the help of his fingerprint card index, he can not only prove that the fingerprints on the murder weapon come from "Tom", but also that Tom and Chambers were swapped in infancy.
background
David Wilson's "investigative methods" were completely new at the time the book was written. It was not until 1892 that the British naturalist Francis Galton had "invented" the identification of people through fingerprints with his book Finger Prints . However, Mark Twain contradicts Galton's original thesis that race and class origin must lead to specific differences in the print.
Interpretative approaches
In Pudd'nhead Wilson , as is often the case in his work, Mark Twain's interest in personality splits and duplications (Tom / Chambers, Luigi / Angelo). Just like the choice of genre, the detective novel , the duplication motif is not an end in itself, but is closely related to Knallkopf Wilson's central theme , ethnic identity, the difference between black and white. Just as society makes the two boys Tom and Chambers what they are, Tom does not commit the murder because he is black, but because he is spoiled and therefore neglected in character. Twain uses a popular literary motif in his novel, the so-called Delphi motif: The negro slave Roxy does everything to save her son from slavery and sale in the brutal slave-owner south, but this ultimately leads to him being a slave in the Is sold south.
The novel remained a failure during Mark Twain's lifetime and was not reflected in the reception of his work for a long time. Today Pudd'nhead Wilson is considered to be "the last important work in the transition from American realism to modernity".
Edition history
The story of Pudd'nhead Wilson appeared three times in 1894: first as a sequel in New York's Century Magazine (December 1893 – June 1894), then in book form with the London publisher Chatto & Windus , and most recently with the American Publishing Company late in the same year in Hartford, but here under the title The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson and the Comedy of Those Extraordinary Twins . The latter edition actually contained two texts, the story of Knallkopf Wilson and the somewhat older story ( Those Extraordinary Twins ) of an Italian pair of twins, drafted as early as 1892 , from which the figure pair Luigi and Angelo Capello in Knallkopf became through a revision .
literature
- Susan Gillman (ed.): Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson . Duke University Press, Durham 1990, ISBN 0-8223-1001-5 .
- Robert Rowlette: Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson . Bowling Green University Popular Press, Bowling Green 1971.
German editions
- Mark Twain: Fuck Wilson . From the American by Reinhild Böhnke. With an afterword by Manfred Pfister. Manesse-Verlag, Zurich 2010.