Dress traditionally has been a ubiquitous symbol of sexual differences, emphasizing social conceptions of masculinity and femininity. Also, it was a symbolic indicator of racial differences in antebellum American South. Cross-dressing, therefore, represents a symbolic incursion into territory that crosses gender and race boundaries, offering challenges to easy notions of binarity and puts into question the categories of "female" and "male" or "black" and "white" whether they are considered essential or constructed, biological or cultural.<BR> Twain experiments with cross-dressing figures forced under various forms of duress, to act as if they were the opposite sex or race in his novel, Pudd"nhead Wilson and two short transvestite tales. Roxy and Tom"s cross-dressing to disguise themselves in Pudd"nhead Wilson sets the scenes for even more complex gendered and racial crossing, which is a symptom and a cause of the category crisis that is at the heart of the novel.<BR> In "1002nd Arabian night," an evil witch switches the genders of two babies at birth, so that a child who is born a girl is reared as a boy attired in male clothes and vice versa. Both behavior and gender role confuse people by their unexpectedness. Rachel in "Hellfire Hotchkiss" finds conventional gender roles hopelessly confining and confuses her dormant villagers by her unexpectedness. Both tales deal with cross-dressing or with otherwise reversing or inverting gender differences, to the extent that readers doubt sexual differences are at its origin unstable and unprovable.<BR> Twain"s metaphoric use of clothing and cross-dressed performances complicates and complements the gender and racial issues at the core of his works, which demonstrate part of Twain assumes the possibilities that stretched conventional gender expectation to their limits.
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