2024 Trouble Begins Lecture Series: Genealogies of Mothering and Mammying in Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson

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Presented by Briditte Fielder, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Roxy, the mixed-race Black mother of Pudd’nhead Wilson, changes her child’s place with the child of her enslaver. She achieves this swap by performing the roles of mother and mammy, respectively, projecting race onto each child by virtue of their racialized relationships to her. Representations of the mother (overwhelmingly imagined as white in white-authored literature) and the racist minstrel trope of the mammy (overwhelmingly overshadowing Black motherhood in white-authored literature) converge in Twain’s novel. This reveals their co-construction: the mammy’s surrogacy is dependent upon her own mother-relation, even as this relation is impeded by the legal mechanisms of slavery. Twain’s novel hereby illustrates how race is not simply constructed within individual bodies or identities but via racialized relationships.

Brigitte Fielder is an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America (2020) and co-author (with Jonathan Senchyne) of Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print (2019). Her essays have appeared in journals including African American Review, American Literary History, American Quarterly, Civil War History, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, The Lion and Unicorn, Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, TSWL: Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, and various edited collections.

The 2024 Trouble Begins Lecture Series and Park Church Summer Lecture Series are made possible by the generous support of The Mark Twain Foundation.