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"Shadow Economies: Realism, Race, and the Distribution of Wealth in Pudd'nhead Wilson."
Mary Esteve, Associate Professor of English, Concordia University
Nov. 15, 2007

The central plot of Mark Twain's novel derives its shape as much from Roxy's loss of financial security as from her act of baby-switching. The novel can be seen as staging the crisis of the pensionless in an era when only Civil War veterans and their widows were deemed worthy of state aid in the form of a pension. This crisis becomes visible as such in light of the era's neo-Kantian reformist efforts (particularly those exerted by members of the Ethical Culture Society and the American Economic Association) to make wealth redistribution look like a matter of rights and justice, rather than charity and pity. Further, I suggest that Pudd'nhead Wilson exemplifies a literary practice I call "noumenal realism," one keyed to William Dean Howells's importantly vague sense of aesthetic "truth."