Hands and Fingers

Think a person's Facebook page tells a lot about them? Well, it's nothing compared to what hands and fingers reveal in this novel. In Pudd'nhead Wilson, hands and fingers represent identity.

Pudd'nhead Wilson is really into both hands and fingers. Describing Puddn'head's favorite pastimes, the narrator notes, "One of [Pudd'nhead's] pet fads was palmistry" (2.3) and "The fad without a name was one which dealt with people's finger-marks" (2.3). The narrator goes on to explain Pudd'nhead's process of collecting the fingerprints of people in town on his glass strips. This sure is a lot more interesting than stamp collecting.

Later we see Pudd'nhead in action, as he reads Luigi's palm:

Wilson began to study Luigi's palm, tracing life lines, heart lines, head lines, and so on, and noting carefully their relations with the cobweb of finer and more delicate marks and lines that enmeshed them on all side [. . .] (11.37)

Okay, that's kind of cool, but what can it tell us?

Pretty much everything, it turns out. The narrator continues:

[Pudd'nhead] mapped out Luigi's character and disposition, his tastes, aversions, proclivities, ambitions, and eccentricities in a way which sometimes made Luigi wince and the other laugh, but both twins declared that the chart was artistically drawn and was correct. (11. 38)

Luigi's entire identity, it seems, is represented in his hand.

Even Tom picks up on this:

Why a man's own hand is his deadliest enemy! Just think of that—a man's own hand keeps a record of the deepest and fatalist secrets of his life, and is treacherously ready to expose him to any black-magic stranger that comes along. (11.54)

Hm…did someone say foreshadowing?

As we see most clearly in the trial scene at the end of the book, fingers turn out to be Tom's deadliest enemy when his fingerprints turn up on the murder weapon, revealing his identity. Referring to fingerprints, Pudd'nhead explains:

Every human being carries with him from his cradle to his grave certain physical marks which do not change their character, and by which he can always be identified—and that without shade of doubt or question. (21.14)

Gotcha, Tom!

Okay, so it's pretty clear that hands and fingers represent identity in this novel. That may not seem like a big deal to us twenty-first-century readers who've pretty much grown up with the knowledge that no two people have the same fingerprints so, duh, fingerprints reveal identity.

But this was hardly common knowledge in Twain's time. Besides making Twain something of a visionary, his emphasis on fingers and hands as sources of identity, as other readers have noted, signals a shift away from the practice of identifying people based on the color of their skin. Given the anti-racist tone of much of the novel, it sure does make sense that the story suggests there might be a better way of making distinctions among people than skin color.

Twain deserves a hand for that one (har, har).