Chapters+5-7

**Summary and Analysis of Chapters 5-7**
Tom goes away to Yale for two years, and when he comes home, he has a few new traits. His manners have improved with his time away, but he's also developed the habit of gambling. He begins to make trips to St. Louis, worsening his gambling addiction every time. Over the next two years, he starts visiting the city more often, and eventually it gets him into trouble. Meanwhile, the widow Cooper, who everyone calls Aunt Patsy, is looking for a tenant to rent her spare room. After waiting for a year, she finally gets a letter from a pair of Italian twins in St. Louis. When the town finds out that Angelo and Luigi will be staying with the Coopers, everyone is excited. They are the "handsomest, the best dressed, the most distinguished-looking" people that Dawson's Landing has ever seen. After the twins’ arrival, it is revealed that Angelo and Luigi had endured poverty and hardship early in their lives, forced to exhibit themselves as child prodigies after their parents’ death. The whole town has come to the Coopers’ house to see and speak to the legendary foreign twins. The young Rowena Cooper is “in the clouds” from the excitement at her house, and it is topped off when the twins display their unequaled talents at the piano.
 * Chapters 5 and 6 - The Twins Thrill Dawson's Landing / Swimming in Glory**

Mark Twain is slyly crafting his story here for the 1894 audience. Forty years after the civil war and the failing Reconstruction movement, the prestigious Italian twins provide a much more attractive and interesting light read than Twain's bold, classification-lifting slave mix-up story. The white reader more readily identified with these characters and could admire them as self-made men. Yet the twins and their tale of moving through social classes, rising up from a sort of slavery, also adds to the clamor of confusioning ideas that Twain is supplying -how simply a slave's and white's identities could be changed at birth, and a sharp lawyer's reputation formed at a whim- and are in effect an interesting contrast to Tom, Chambers, and Wilson, such that just might make the reader notice and take a second thought. Twain is subtly breaking the rules from the chapter's onset when Tom, 1/32 black, born a slave to a slave mother, is nineteen years later going to Yale, the Ivy League school for rich white men. Even knowing the tinkering of nature and nurture in between that time, in 1894 it's a new thought to be wrapped around, everything about the simple switch has broken society's underlying invisible threads. When Tom comes back from Yale with a new haughty attitude, he becomes something of a misfit, perhaps almost equated to Puddin'head Wilson, who, twenty-three years after his dog remark, is still regarded as a person of no consequence (and still hasn't had a case). In this chapter, we yet again learn, based on the town's reaction to his calendar quotes, that Wilson's pessimistic irony is above the townspeople, and their judgemwntal reaction is a display of ignorance. The Italian twins' successes and the way they draw the townspeople is completely the opposite of the college-bred New Yorker Wilson's luck. Another interesting point though is that the twins fuel their reputation by exhibiting themselves just as they had been forced to do in their economic slavery. The slight way such a mention of slavery is even woven into the greater fabric could also serve an interesting purpose, even if just as a meandering reminder. Social class and identity were not stagnant for the Angelo and Luigi. Social class, identity, and even race become ridiculed when we look at the contrasting case of the parallel "twins" Tom and Chambers, who perhaps look even more alike (and more white) than the Italian birth brothers (one of whom, the text tells us, is dark). The ignorance we use in making judgements is completely ridiculed through the town's reactions to Wilson and only highlighted in the contrast of the twins. In this way, Angelo and Luigi are part of Twain's mechanism for spoon-feeding to readers of the early 1900s through today these bold ideas that call into question social class, race, reputation, and identity.

After the party at Aunt Patsy’s house to welcome the twins, Angelo and Luigi agree to go on a tour of the town with Judge Driscoll. As he shows them around, he tells them all about Pudd’nhead Wilson and invites them to their Free-Thinkers meeting later that night. By the end of the meeting, the twins are good friends with Wilson. The next morning, Wilson is waiting for Angelo and Luigi to arrive when he notices something strange in the window next door. There’s a girl in Tom Driscoll’s room, but there shouldn’t be. Tom watches her for twenty minutes, and then she disappears. Still, he waits to see if she’ll come back, but after a while he’s forced to give up and remain curious as he waits for the twins.
 * Chapter 7 - The Unknown Nymph**

Chapter seven is used primarily to set up for future events in the story. Judge Dirscoll shows the twins around the town and tells them about Wilson so they end up becoming friends with him. That friendship is important later on in the plot when it becomes Wilson's responsibility to prove that Angelo and Luigi are not guilty of murder. The chapter also shows Tom dressed as a woman, which Wilson sees. This will also be important during the murder trial. Mark Twain wrote this chapter not to add to the story, but to establish the basis for future events. If he'd gone right from chapter six to chapter eight, the reader would be confused later on when these factors come back into play. By placing these events here, in the middle of the story, he plants ideas in the reader's mind early on, so the information is there when the climax of the book comes up, but it doesn't make it too easy to figure out the end of the story. Also, it allows the reader to know things that the characters don't know, thus creating dramatic irony and adding to the tension.