Character Analysis
Mother of the (Nineteenth) Century
If Roxy were around today, she'd be the type of mom who would happily forgo buying a new pair of shoes for herself so she'd have the money to send her kid to astronaut camp. Roxy's love for her child is probably the single most defining feature of her character. After all, her decision to swap the places of Tom and Chambers to ensure that her son doesn't grow up in slavery is what sets this entire wild story into motion.
Before Roxy even makes the big switcheroo, we're given a taste of just how deeply her motherly devotion runs. Our narrator relates the agony Roxy experiences at the mere thought that her baby might be separated from her and end up in more brutal conditions:
A profound terror had taken possession of [Roxy]. Her child could grow up and be sold down the river! The thought crazed her with horror. (3.1)
Yikes. Roxy's desperation here is palpable.
Eager to spare her child a life of pain and suffering, Roxy is driven to some pretty extreme measures. Once she realizes the threat to her child, Roxy wastes no time springing into action. The bad news, she tells her baby, is that she's got to kill him (boo). But the good news is that he won't be alone (yay):
Mammy's got to kill you—how kin I do it! But yo' mammy ain't gwine to desert you—no, no; dah, don't cry—she gwine wid you, she gwine to kill herself too. (3.3)
Roxy is totally prepared to sacrifice her very existence for the sake of her baby. And even though she doesn't go through with her fatal plan, she still ends up putting herself in huge danger by trading the places of the kids.
Okay, so Roxy's no slouch as a mother. But, we might ask, what's the big deal about that? What's so out of the ordinary about a devoted, loving mama? Surely we see them in books and on tv shows all the time jumping in front of trains to save their kids (or, um, at least baking cookies for them). What's so special about Roxy?
What really sets Roxy apart is that she's a loving mother who also happens to be a black female slave. And in the context of nineteenth-century America, that's actually a pretty huge deal. Wanna know why? Well, read on.
More than a Mammy
By showing Roxy's unwavering devotion to her son as well as depicting her emotions of agony and desperation, Twain presents a black slave character with whom nineteenth-century readers might sympathize and relate.
It looks like Twain may have even borrowed a page from abolitionist, or anti-slavery, literature like Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. These texts helped to turn their (mostly female Northern) readers off from slavery by appealing to their sympathy for slave mother characters forced to watch their children suffer the evils of slavery.
But, hey, wait a second. Why, you might be wondering, is Twain so concerned with presenting a sympathetic, relatable slave character? After all, slavery ended about thirty some years before the publication of Pudd'nhead Wilson (we also point this out in Tom's Character Analysis if you'd like to check that out). Didn't our buddy Twain get the memo?
Well, even though the institution of slavery itself may have been long gone by the time Twain was writing, his late nineteenth-century readers would've been used to seeing stereotypical, disparaging depictions of blacks in advertisements and popular media. Notably, many of these images were pretty ridiculous representations of slaves.
The comical and slightly creepy image of the mammy, for instance, debuted in 1875 and was used to sell everything from baking powder to ashtrays (the image was later immortalized at the end of the 19th century in the figure of pancake syrup queen Aunt Jemima).
Such images didn't seem much like real people at all, yet in the era of segregation and Jim Crow laws, they might be some white people's main exposure to black people. Pretty scary. Some experts have further suggested that having these ridiculous caricatures plastered all over the place made it hard for blacks to be taken seriously during their crucial struggle for equality and for greater social, economic, and political rights in the late nineteenth century.
But never fear, as our gal Roxy comes to the rescue. In Roxy, we meet a black character who experiences love and pain, someone who does extreme and crazy things for the sake of her kid. Twain gives us a black female character who boldly defies the mammy stereotype.
In other words, we get a character who is relatable and human (okay, okay, we know characters aren't really human, but let's not get all hung up on that right now). And that's way different than the ridiculous, dehumanizing images of blacks that many nineteenth-century readers were accustomed to seeing.
Thank God for literature, right?
Roxy's Timeline