A DELEUZIAN READING OF THE WHIPPING BOY IN THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER

Abstract

The role of the whipping boy in Mark Twain’s 1881 novel The Prince and the Pauper can be explained via an application of Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia. A reading of the plot reveals that neither Edward Tudor (the crown prince of England) nor Tom Canty (a street urchin) would normally be inclined to enact the type of social disruption that Deleuze/Guattari identify as a “deterritorialization.” However, they both manage to do so only because of their unlikely exchange of roles, which is further enabled by the crown prince’s official whipping boy and by a disenfranchised member of the peerage who performs a similar function. Thus, the whipping boy acts as a catalyst who enables the deterritorialization to take place.