Roxy's response to "Tom"'s behavior -- that she blamed it on his true race -- was perplexing and troubling for many reasons. For one thing, I wondered why she didn't blame his behavior on the way he was raised. To me, it seemed like a clear relationship between being raised as a pampered "young master" and being disciplined throughout your life as "Chambers" was. Regardless of race, it seemed obvious that a child raised the way "Tom" was would turn out, if not evil, at the very least unpleasant and spoiled. Chapter 4 contrasts the two boy's upbringings: "Tom got all the petting, Chambers got none. Tom got all the delicacies, Chambers got mush and milk and clabber without sugar. In consequence, Tom was a sickly child and Chambers wasn't. Tom was "fractious," as Roxy called it, and overbearing. Chambers was meek and docile." (20)
The differences made me at first think Pudd'nhead Wilson would be a "nature versus nurture" type story. That phrase came into use after Darwin's Origin of the Species was published, which was in 1859, more than thirty years before Twain wrote Puddn'head Wilson.
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