The ordinary world in which Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson is set was once familiar to everyone who lived in Missouri along the Mississippi River in 1830.
For them, it was an ordinary world where most people accepted slavery, adopting the prevailing societal views as their own.
To ban a book such as Pudd’nhead Wilson because it depicts the way things used to be because its values aren’t our values (though Twain opposed slavery, he doesn’t shy away from depicting it)—to ban a book that shows us a world that isn’t here anymore because we’re bothered by the way the world once was, is to exclude from awareness the ways in which our world might not be acceptable to the future.
Twain’s world was also a world where a gentleman who had been verbally offended had to risk his life in a duel or be outcast as a coward.
These societal roles and rules, so alien to us today, make the reading of Pudd’nhead Wilson oddly like the reading of a science fiction story, about a place that seems just barely on the edge of possibility.
And yet, that world of slavery and gentlemen and duels was once the ordinary world, in Missouri along the Mississippi in 1830.
* Orlando Bartro is the author of Toward Two Words, a comical & surreal novel about a man who finds yet another woman he never knew, usually available on Amazon for $4.91.