Literary articles - Mark Twain 2024

Off the Raft: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Jane Smiley's The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton

Jim O'Loughlin

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In the long history of Harper's magazine, the most letters ever received about an article was in response to a 1996 essay by Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Jane Smiley entitled “Say It Ain't So, Huck”(Bérubé 693). In this now-notorious piece, Smiley took on the exalted critical status of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, questioning its preeminent role in American literary history and positing Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin as a superior model for American literature. For Smiley, the most notable problem with Huckleberry Finn was that Twain took the public question of race and removed it to the private sphere. It was only on the raft floating down the Mississippi away from societal constraints that Huck was able to overcome the racist attitudes of his culture and understand Jim as a man. But far from being a solution, Huck's change of heart simply illustrates the problem for Smiley.

If Huck feels positive toward Jim, and loves him, and thinks of him as a man, then that's enough. He doesn't actually have to act in accordance with his feelings. White Americans always think racism is a feeling, and they reject it or they embrace it. To most Americans, it seems more honorable and nicer to reject it, so they do, but they almost invariably fail to understand that how they feel means very little to black Americans, who understand racism as a way of structuring American culture, American politics, and the American economy. To invest The [sic] Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with “greatness” is to underwrite a very simplistic and evasive theory of what racism is and to promulgate it, philosophically, in schools and the media as well as in academic journals (“Say” 63).

This extended quotation captures the force of Smiley's argument as well as much of what proved controversial following the article's publication. In attacking Huck's personal transformation, Smiley doesn't simply say the novel fails (by now a familiar debate); she argues instead that the problem of the novel is where it succeeds. By placing Huck's feelings at the center of the book, Twain derails any kind of structural understanding of racism. Racism becomes a personal matter rather than a political one, allowing readers to substitute feeling for action.

It is precisely the opposite quality that stands out in Uncle Tom's Cabin for Smiley. She claims that the broader scope of Stowe's novel allows Stowe to present a range of voices—whites who are pro- as well as anti-slavery, blacks who emerge as heroic as well as psychologically wounded by their enslavement—so that the issue never boils down to a question of individual attitude. Even more crucially, in Uncle Tom's Cabin personal relationships are never removed from politics. The racist structure of slaveholding society supplants, in many cases, bonds of friendship, of loyalty, and, most importantly, of family.

Stowe never forgets the logical end of any relationship in which one person is the subject and the other is the object. No matter how the two people feel, or what their intentions are, the logic of the relationship is inherently tragic and traps both parties until the false subject/object relationship is ended. Stowe's most oft-repeated and potent representation of this inexorable logic is the forcible separation of family members, especially of mothers from children (65).

Essentially, what Smiley admires is that Stowe's novel takes place “off the raft.” In Uncle Tom's Cabin, there is no space where relations of power can be transcended, no space where the personal is not also always political. For Stowe, all personal interactions, even of the most intimate nature, are implicated in power relationships and reflective of the unequal distribution of power under the regime of slavery. For Smiley, this makes Stowe's novel a more thoughtful and more meaningful meditation on the place of slavery in nineteenth-century American culture.

Smiley's article proved controversial, though it is worth noting that she was not alone in her views. Her article foreshadows many of the claims made by Jonathan Arac in his book length study, Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target. That said, Smiley was castigated in Harper's subsequent “Letters” section where she was called a Philistine and a “dunce” for presuming “to criticize Mark Twain's masterpiece, Huckleberry Finn, on such lame topical and political grounds” (Fiore 83, Theroux 7). Her championing of Uncle Tom's Cabin was termed an insult, and Stowe's novel was castigated as “treacle” (Boyce 7, Friedman 84). Another writer complained that the version of Huckleberry Finn Smiley would write would consist of “three hundred bore-me-slack-jawed sermons from the high pulpit of a hundred years' hindsight” (Cameron 83). In one sense, these letters prove Smiley's point. Viewing Huckleberry Finn as the quintessential American novel, a process Jonathan Arac refers to as “hypercanonization,” functions as a way to disarm critics without having to take their arguments seriously (137). The rage with which Smiley's article was answered, however, also speaks to the enduring appreciation for Twain's novel.

An unexpected epilogue to this controversy occurred two years later when Smiley published a novel that took on many of the same issues raised in her Harper's essay. In 1998, she released The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton, a historical novel set largely in Kansas Territory during the 1850s, a time when battles over whether the territory would be admitted into the Union as a free or slave state earned it the nickname “Bleeding Kansas.” From the tenor of Smiley's Harper's article, one might have expected her to use Uncle Tom's Cabin as a touchstone for her writing on the 1850s, taking Stowe's novel as the kind of model she felt it should have been for American literature. But the surprise of Lidie Newton, a revelation even to Smiley her self, is the extent to which Huckleberry Finn became her stylistic model. This is not to say that Smiley wholly reversed her earlier stance—her use of Huckleberry Finn is clearly revisionist, and she clearly aimed to correct what she saw as Twain's missteps. In this regard, her use of Huckleberry Finn is not unlike the feminist revision of King Lear in Smiley's A Thousand Acres. What is unexpected, however, is that though there are occasional influences of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe's novel is clearly a lesser inspiration for Lidie Newton than is Huckleberry Finn.

The point in emphasizing this disjunction is not to accuse Smiley of hypocrisy but instead to suggest that the influence of Mark Twain on her writing is more complex than her earlier condemnation would indicate. It also should come as no surprise that Smiley would find herself taxed when attempting to sort out the questions of race and character that challenged Twain. It is the very type of situation that often results in what Toni Morrison describes as “a subtext that either sabotages the surface text's expressed intentions or escapes them through a language that mystifies what it cannot bring itself to articulate but still attempts to register” (66). In fact, as an examination of the ending of Lidie Newton will show, Smiley replays a dilemma—how to square historically determined ideologies with exceptional and even heroic actions—that vexed Twain and has animated generations of literary critics since. In the subtexts and mystifications of that ending, it becomes clear that what is at stake in both celebrations and condemnations of Huckleberry Finn is the extent to which American history and American literary history can provide a useable touchstone for the issues with which we currently struggle.

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The end of Lidie Newton is the section of the novel that is both most indebted to Twain and most implicitly critical of him, though it is not the only place where references to Twain can be found. Lidie discusses seeing slaves in Twain's hometown of Hannibal,

Missouri. Echoes of Twain can be heard in the description of the adventures of her cousin Frank in Kansas Territory. And, when disguised as a man, Lidie learns the trade of typesetting, a job that had a great influence on Twain, at a Missouri newspaper. To appreciate the dilemma of Smiley's ending, however, it is helpful to have a basic sense of that which preceded it.

The novel begins in the 1850s in a Mississippi river town in Illinois with Lidie's older sisters lamenting what to do with her now that their parents have died. Lidie is the youngest daughter by twenty years and, as a stubborn tomboy, she has long been a source of concern and exasperation to her sisters. Lidie becomes intrigued by Thomas Newton, an abolitionist making his way to Kansas Territory (K. T.) in hopes of establishing an anti-slavery beachhead. Thomas is drawn to Lidie's physical and emotional strength. Though her family disapproves, Lidie marries Thomas and they move to K. T. In K. T., Lidie finds herself caught up in hardscrabble efforts to establish a homestead while living in constant fear of anti-abolitionist violence. Though not politically motivated up to this point, Lidie's animosity toward the anti-abolitionists and her growing friendships with abolitionists in Lawrence begin to shape her experience and beliefs. When her husband is killed in the violence that marked “Bleeding Kansas” during this period of history, Lidie dedicates herself to avenging his death. She disguises herself as a man and heads into pro-slavery Missouri to pursue his killers.

It is in the final section of Lidie Newton that Smiley most explicitly attempts to rewrite Huckleberry Finn, taking on that novel's controversial final twelve chapters, the section of the novel after Tom Sawyer reappears and hatches an elaborately deceptive plan to free the imprisoned Jim according to the standards of his favorite romantic adventures. As Tom knows, though Jim and Huck do not, Jim has already been freed according the will of his former owner, so the escape plan is a ruse, though it nevertheless entails actual danger.

Twain's ending is perhaps the most controversial in all of classic American literature. Tom's term for the escape plan, the “evasion,” has been used by critics since Leo Marx to describe the sense that, in the novel's final section, Twain evaded the moral implications of Huck's decision to go against the established order and throw his lot in with Jim. As Marx writes, “the flimsy devices of plot, the discordant farcical tone, and the disintegration of the major characters all betray the failure of the ending” (296). Building upon Marx's argument, Smiley castigates what she calls “the deeper racism of the novel—the way Twain and Huck use Jim because they really don't care enough about his desire for freedom to let that desire change their plans” (“Say” 64).

Smiley's own ending, what can be thought of as her attempt to “evade the evasion,” begins with Lidie as a character without a plan. Her efforts to avenge Thomas's death have proven fruitless, and she begins to question the principles guiding her actions. But where Huck found himself struggling to understand where he stood in relation to Jim rather than challenging dominant beliefs about slavery, Lidie begins to question her own beliefs and motivations.

Were I honest with myself, I would have to wonder why I had taken up the abolitionist cause. Thomas, of course, had made it attractive, so perhaps I had taken it up as a way of being courted. [. . .] And then, in K. T., we abolitionists had been so hated, so stupidly, venally, cruelly, and ridiculously hated, that there was honor in being an abolitionist. For all their foibles, my friends there had been kindly, hard working folks. I hated those who hated them, even hated the enemy more for my friends than they hated the enemy for themselves. But I couldn't, in all honesty, look upon that as a virtue. (All-True Travels 343)

In contrast to Huck, separation from “sivilation” does not necessarily inspire righteous actions or beliefs in Lidie. If Huck can be thought of in the tradition of the “noble savage,” a character with instinctively generous impulses, Lidie is a character who gains nobility from societal contact and influence. In the above passage, she comes to question her dedication to abolitionism, recognizing herself as more of an anti-anti-abolitionist. That is not a very strong basis for commitment, she realizes, as she later states, “It wasn't just having to hide among my enemies that made it hard to be an abolitionist in Missouri; it was also having no friends” (343-44). Her principles arise in defense of her friends, and without a social context for her actions, Lidie's beliefs become fragile and tentative. Not only do the best of her politics arise from personal connections, but none of her personal relationships take place outside of the context of politics. In “Bleeding Kansas,” Lidie developed personally and politically in an atmosphere of sharp ideological divides where the question “which side are you on?” trumped individual uncertainties.

Lidie's beliefs are challenged when she herself is stranded on a Missouri plantation, dependent upon the hospitality of a slave owner while she recuperates from a miscarriage. Having resolved to sacrifice her own life to find the Missourians who killed her husband, Lidie realizes not only that the trail has run cold, but that without vengeance as a guide she has little to motivate her. In fact, she finds herself beginning to enjoy the pampered life of the plantation after the physical difficulties of life in K. T. During her convalescence, however, one of the slaves on the plantation, Lorna, recognizes Lidie. Lorna had formerly been a fugitive slave who had received assistance from Lidie's late husband during her unsuccessful escape attempt. Lorna now enlists Lidie in helping her escape again.

Lidie is at first shocked at Lorna's recognition of her, but Lidie soon finds herself grateful for the opportunity that Lorna provides. Helping a slave escape from bondage seems a more fitting monument to the memory of her abolitionist husband, as she states, “Aiding in [Lorna's] escape was the thing I had to do for Thomas that would somehow restore him to me” (404). But this decision also resolves Lidie's crisis of principle, or at least absolves her of the need to ruminate upon it. “[E]ven though I hadn't the first notion of where we would go and how we would get there, I was not afraid. Lorna, after all, had a plan, and I had a purpose. That was enough for me” (404). That “was enough for” Lidie because her actions on behalf of Lorna supersede her own ambivalent commitment to the cause of abolition and give her the purpose she alone lacked.

This turn in the novel offers an implicit critique of Huckleberry Finn. In Huck's case, it is the reappearance of Tom in the novel that gives him a purpose, someone with a plan to follow. The implication here is that once Huck's allegiance switches from Jim to Tom, he has betrayed what Smiley called “the true subject of the work: Huck's affection for and responsibility to Jim” (“Say” 62). Lidie, though, like Huck, beset by uncertainties, nevertheless puts herself on the line for Lorna. It is worth noting that Lidie does so despite the fact that she does not have warm feelings for Lorna. Lorna is portrayed as a gruff and unfriendly individual, though as an intelligent and clear-headed character.

Lorna and Lidie proceed from the plantation to Kansas City where they hope to find passage on a riverboat. Along the way, Lidie peppers Lorna with questions about her experiences and her desire to escape, working through her own personal ambivalence even while she is in the midst of helping a slave escape, as in the following exchange:

“Why shouldn't you be a slave, Lorna? What if all those preachers are right, and the Lord says that Negroes are best in slavery?”

“'Cause I don' want to be, an' I know my own mine bettah dan dose preachahs know de Lawd's mine, I think.” (420)

Lidie comes to realize that despite all the talk she has heard in Kansas Territory about slavery, she knows very little about how the institution appears to African Americans. Lorna tells of her own mistreatment, beatings for escape attempts, and her separation from her husband, as well as the much greater mistreatment of others such as that of her fellow slave, Delia, whose child was sold away from her.

In a passage that echoes Harriet Jacobs's 1861 slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Lorna acknowledges that her conditions were better than those of many others under slavery, but that realization in no way mitigates her desire to be free. “We don' know all dat happen in slavery, an' I always thought we don' want to know. Ifn my days is good enough, an' I hate 'em, den I can' think about de days of de others, dat is terrible bad, down Louisiana way an' dem other places” (421). Lorna's personal experience of slavery serves to enlighten Lidie, to turn Lidie into a forthright abolitionist in a way that no amount of intellectual engagement or inner conflict could. Personal experience transforms Lidie's political beliefs.

That transformation is in sharp contrast to Huck Finn. When Huck decides to rescue Jim after the King and Duke exposed him as a fugitive slave, he famously declares, “All right, then, I'll go to hell” (Twain 271). Huck separates his personal feelings for Jim from his views about the institution of slavery. He does not believe that slavery is improper (in fact, he believes he is doomed for going against it). His personal connection to Jim may outweigh his beliefs, but his experience does not fundamentally change his thinking.

As Lidie and Lorna make their way to Kansas City, Missouri, in hopes of booking passage on a northbound steamboat, they find themselves crowded among many people attempting to flee the area as nearby K. T. seems on the verge of open warfare. The story takes a tragic turn as Lidie is recognized by a former acquaintance with pro-slavery views. Both Lidie and Lorna are captured, and while Lidie is briefly imprisoned before being deported, Lorna is sold down river to the kind of fate she had previously tried not to imagine. During Lidie's imprisonment, Lorna's former owner lectures Lidie as to how he now saw his error in not having beaten Lorna more at an early age, as Lorna's escape proved her resistance needed to be physically broken. Lidie's reply testifies to the absence of ambiguity in her newly-solidified thinking about slavery: “‘Please,' I exclaimed, ‘I can't bear this! You are wrong in every way! Down to the roots you are wrong!'”(All-True Travels 441). There remains no uncertainty left in Lidie. Though her attempt to help Lorna escape was unsuccessful, the novel shows Lidie as transformed by her experiences.

But was Lidie a hero? Lidie herself does not think so. Looking back, she terms the escape attempt a “fool's errand,” and she feels she gave Lorna false hope (443). Yet, she is treated like a hero when she goes to visit the family of her deceased husband in Massachusetts and is persuaded to give a public lecture about her experience. Though Lidie feels herself to be a poor speaker, her audience responds enthusiastically to her story, causing her to comment, “Giving testimony was more important than the testimony given” (451). At the end of the novel, Lidie comes to realize what the novel has illustrated: actions matter more than beliefs, and decisive action supersedes personal misgivings.

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In positing actions as more important than beliefs, Smiley offers a corrective to the inadequacies she found in Twain's representation of Huck. But it is precisely this corrective that has incurred critical wrath for Smiley. For example, novelist Thomas Mallon, in his New York Times review of Lidie Newton, was positive about much of the book, but he found that once Lidie left Lawrence for Missouri, the novel lost believability, “[lurching] into some broad derring-do and then [galloping] away on a moral high horse, leaving the reader baffled and unsatisfied.” Mallon was extremely critical of Smiley's conception of Lorna, whom he found noble to the point of caricature and wrought “of the purest P.C.” The ending of Lidie Newton was such a disappointment for Mallon because what he found most admirable about the earlier sections of the novel was that Lidie was someone whose ideology was never quite in line with her actions, “less crusading than conflicted.” This sense of internal conflict is lost, or at least becomes irrelevant, once Lidie casts her lot with Lorna. Mallon laments this shift, asking rhetorically, “What, if not tension and guilt and inner conflict, gave us the great American writing of Dickinson and Melville and Hawthorne? What, on however less grand a scale, gave Lidie her own most believable moments?”

On one level, Mallon's criticisms hold true. Once the escape begins, the ambiguities of character and politics found earlier in the novel disappear. However, the implication of Mallon's critique is that “inner conflict” should remain the driving force behind Lidie's understanding of slavery. But if that were so, she would be a character who learned little from her experience. This flaw was exactly what Smiley found in Huck. Despite Huck's personal transformation in the famous “All right then, I'll go to hell” speech, Huck remains an inner-conflicted character, and during the “evasion” Huck proves incapable of superceding Tom Sawyer's scheming on behalf of Jim. How could a character remain both heroic and conflicted when confronted with the realities of slavery? Smiley felt Lidie Newton could not.

In finding heroism incompatible with ambiguity, Smiley followed the lead of Stowe. Smiley found Stowe's lack of inner conflict over slavery appealing; because Stowe found nothing attractive about slavery, “her lack of conflict is apparent in the clarity of both the style and substance of the novel” (Smiley, “Say” 66). But if that is the case, why then is Lidie characterized by uncertainty and doubt for much of the novel? Why does Stowe provide no model for Lidie's earlier characterization?

To answer these questions, one must consider Stowe and Twain as more complex influences than one would expect from Smiley's Harper's essay. In her published interviews about Lidie Newton, Smiley herself seems to be uncertain as to how these authors affected her thinking. In a 1998 interview for Atlantic Unbound she stated that the connections reviewers made between her Harper's essay and her novel “has shown me something about Lidie: Twain is her dad and Harriet Beecher Stowe is her mom” (Smiley, “Adventures”; emphasis added). Note that in this statement Smiley is talking about a realization she had following the publication the novel, not something she was consciously aware of during its writing. Even more intriguing, a year later in an interview for The Writer, Smiley stated, “I like to see Huck as the dad and Harriet Beecher Stowe as the mom of my novel” (Smiley, “Conversation”; emphasis added).

I would argue that the slip Smiley has made here, identifying first Twain and then Huck as Lidie Newton's “father,” is not just an accident. Rather, it is an illustration of Smiley's own conflation of Twain and Huck and her sense that the strengths and weaknesses of one are also those of the other. Huck's inadequacies are not seen as specific to him as a character but as a reflection on Twain and his limitations as a writer. But Smiley also acknowledges her specific debt to Twain. It is the psychologically complex Huck rather than one of Stowe's typological characters who serves as the model for Lidie.

This homage to Twain came about not just because contemporary readers expect psychologically complex characters, but because an unambiguous character wouldn't be able to address questions of racism making use of contemporary thinking on the subject. As Smiley noted in her Atlantic Unbound interview, Anytime—and this is straight out of Toni Morrison's lectures at Harvard in 1990—anytime an American ponders his whiteness, he has to necessarily ponder blackness also. To avoid or to think that you don't have to do that is an evasion of your responsibility as a white person. . . . Those essays by Toni Morrison were really central to my thinking about racism, so she's a big influence on Lidie.

Morrison's lectures, which became the basis of Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, stand among a series of works in the 1990s that interrogated the related social constructions of whiteness and blackness. Central to Morrison's argument is the idea that a racial unconscious in American literature can be found in efforts both to justify and question implicit white supremacy. Lidie, when confronted by the presence of Lorna as an active agent, must reconsider the nature of abolitionism, a distinct African American perspective on slavery, and her own position in a system of racial hierarchies that made slavery possible. The result is not just a personal transformation but a political conversion as well.

This is perhaps the crucial distinction between Huck and Lidie. Lidie grows and matures as a result of her personal experiences. Though Huck has crucial scenes that show a moral maturity, the controversial end of the novel finds Huck deferring to Tom Sawyer and retreating from his previous stances. Huck's personal experiences never transform his political beliefs. So, on one hand, with this ending, Smiley has resolved her problems with Huckleberry Finn. Lidie is a character whose personal experience compels her to political action. She is changed by her experience, and any ideological uncertainty she might feel is rendered meaningless by her behavior. Lidie becomes the hero Huck did not.

And, yet, the problems of the ending of Lidie Newton remain. For Mallon, Lidie's transformation destroys what made her significant and plausible as a character. Additionally, the resolution of the escape attempt is so dismal (Lorna is sold down river, and Lidie is left feeling like her efforts were wholly in vain) as to put a cloud over the entire novel. How is it that in correcting such seemingly obvious “flaws” in the ending of Huckleberry Finn Smiley could have wound up with an ending that is arguably worse?

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The answer to this question takes us back into Smiley's criticism of Huckleberry Finn, specifically her argument that the ending of Twain's novel failed because it betrayed “the true subject of the work: Huck's affection for and responsibility to Jim” (“Say” 62). Smiley's sense of the ending's failure arises from her expectation that Huck's growing emotional maturation should inform his behavior, and the final twelve chapters of Huckleberry Finn would seem to be designed to frustrate such a belief. As Victor Doyno has written, prior to Smiley's article but in a statement that remains applicable to her, “Some critics have a conscious or unconscious expectation that a novel about a youth, even a picaresque novel, will bear some resemblance to a bildungsroman or kunstlerroman. Accordingly, they assume that Huck will mature noticeably and are disappointed” (226; emphasis original).

One school of critical thought concerning the ending of Huckleberry Finn, however, sees it as anything but a bildungsro-man set in antebellum America. In fact, as critics including Doyno, Christine MacLeod, and Stacey Margolis have argued, it makes much more sense to view the ending of Huckleberry Finn as a political allegory of post-Reconstruction America, the period during which Twain wrote the novel. The problem this alternate interpretation solves is to explain why so much of Huckleberry Finn would be devoted to the imprisonment of a man who is already free. This was in fact the historical position of many African Americans after the collapse of Reconstruction. As MacLeod writes, “Mere legal emancipation, in short had done nothing to create or sustain the necessary conditions of a genuine liberty for black people” (7). Doyno draws a much more precise historical analogy, linking the end of Huckleberry Finn to the convict–lease system, a post-Civil War legal statute under which freedmen deemed “vagrant” could be arrested and hired out to plantation owners for almost indefinite periods of time (229-33).

If these last twelve chapters are viewed as a political allegory of the post-Reconstruction South, then Huck appears less as a hero who is able to transcend the racist views of his culture than as simply one well-intentioned figure struggling against forces more powerful than himself. For Jim to have escaped the fate of so many former slaves would have been, in fact, an evasion of the history that was unfolding before Twain as he wrote his book. In this interpretation, Huck's acquiescence to Tom's scheme mirrors a collective lack of interest in the fate of African Americans during the 1880s. Huck's heroic impulses are temporary, but they are no less temporary than the political will that brought about Emancipation without actual freedom. It is no coincidence that Twain concludes the novel by having Tom give Jim “forty dollars for being prisoner for us so patient, and for doing it up so good” (264; emphasis added). That echo of the failed promise of “forty acres and a mule” is, according to Margolis, “Twain's way of rewriting history or, more accurately, of fantasizing a new racial history of postwar America” in which some sort of compensation was in fact made to African American freedmen (339). While this historicist understanding brings with it its own set of problems (not the least of which is the record of Twain's own conflicted statements on race), there is no denying that, as Margolis notes, “this tendency to read the novel in the light of post-Reconstruction politics has only gained steam in recent years” (343). The implication of this interpretation is that the strength of the novel's ending lies in Twain's refusal to allow Huck to be the kind of hero his society did not deserve.

Ironically, that very description could apply equally as well to the ending of Lidie Newton, as a more careful investigation of a climactic scene of Smiley's novel will now show. To set the context for this scene once again, Lidie and Lorna's escape attempt has brought them to Kansas City where they are attempting to pass for slave owner and slave. They have been going from steamboat to steamboat attempting to arrange passage out of Missouri with the limited funds at their disposal when Lidie is spotted by David B. Graves, a previous acquaintance who knows Lidie as an abolitionist and who is himself pro-slavery. Though Lidie thinks she and Lorna might be able to avoid detection by separating, the following scene squelches that hope.

I saw at once that right there, at the top of the plank, the captain was having an altercation with three men. One of them was David B. Graves, and he saw me before I could step back into the saloon. Lorna was holding me up, and he and she exchanged a glance, too. He said, in a hard voice, “There they are. Harmon, you grab the niggah!”

“This is my boat!” thundered the captain.

“You an't gonna be party to nigger-stealin', are ya?” shouted one of the men, and Lorna and I stepped back into the saloon and slammed the door.

“I ain' nevah seen dose men!” exclaimed Lorna. “How dey know?”

“It's me! It's me, Lorna!”

And she gave me one anguished look, only one. In the next moment, I saw her inure herself, draw away, begin to take this in. I grabbed her hand and ran across the room to the largest window. As the men entered the door, I kicked at the window and pounded at it until, as they rushed over to us, it broke. I stepped through and tried to pull Lorna with me, but the pieces of glass still in the frame slowed us, and the men grabbed us. (434-35)

Throughout the escape attempt both women have feared that someone would recognize Lorna as a fugitive slave and foil their attempt. Even after knowing about David B. Graves, Lorna is sure that she is the one who has been spotted. Lorna says “‘I ain' nevah seen dose men! [. . .] How dey know?'” because she is sure that it must be the sight of her face that has given them away, since it is her status of slave that is at issue. But it is Lidie's face, and the improbability of her being in Lorna's presence, that betrays them.

In the end, the escape is foiled by Lidie's whiteness—not the pigment of her skin, but rather the privilege that allowed Lidie to assume that the risks they faced were posed by Lorna. The fact of Lidie's skin pigment may have given their escape a veneer of plausibility, but when Lidie screams “‘It's me! It's me, Lorna!'” the veneer that drops is that of white privilege, for Lidie can no longer presume that her whiteness will be the means to affect Lorna's freedom. Tellingly, as the slave catchers descend on them, Lidie finds that though she can step through the broken window, she is unable to pull Lorna through with her. They both are slowed by the jagged edges of glass that remain in the frame. The image is apt, as glass is seen as transparent but becomes jagged and dangerous when broken. Similarly, Lidie's whiteness, the supposed absence of race that allowed Lidie to think she posed no danger, is devastating when revealed.

As the two women are dragged away to their separate fates, Lorna remains silent, aware of what must follow next. It is Li-die who screams and physically resists. “All I remember is how frenzied it made me to know that it was through me that Lorna had been betrayed” (435). But even here, Lidie has the privilege of rage. As a white woman, she may act out in a frenzy, even in such an extreme situation, with less risk of physical harm than Lorna faces. Lidie acknowledges as much after the fact. In jail she says she has little fear of being hung, even though hers was a capital crime (442). And, in fact, Lidie is deported back to her home state of Illinois while Lorna is sold down river to a far worse fate.

What Mallon's criticism of the ending misses is that Lidie does remain an ambivalent character at the end of the novel, but her conflict is not over the nature of slavery. Instead, Lidie's ambivalence is directed toward the impact of her own actions. Events outstrip her ability to process the ethics of what she's doing. In the end, she questions whether her actions did any good. The final question then is why does this novel have such an unhappy ending? Lidie is apparently punished for her actions, and her commitment to Lorna's freedom would seem to have been in vain. Lidie is unable to come away from her experiences with any insights beyond noting, in the last sentence of the novel, that she was surprised by nothing she saw after the time of the narrative, “not Bull Run nor Gettysburg, certainly not the raid at Harpers Ferry that some thought started it all, not the Emancipation nor the burning of Atlanta, not the killing of the President” (452). The answer is to be found in the historical gesture of that concluding sentence. Lidie finds that the meaning of her experience lies in its ability to help her make sense of subsequent events, and so too does Smiley offer a narrative in which her protagonist's failures presage other crises in American history.

If Lidie's and Lorna's escape had been successful, it would then have provided readers with a measure of satisfaction, an ability to know that in the midst of this nadir of American history, one individual's actions were able to make a difference. Such a happy ending would, of course, replicate the racial fantasy Smiley feared had been the result of Huckleberry Finn, allowing readers to celebrate individual feeling and to ignore structural inequities. But Smiley's refusal to allow Lidie to be the kind of hero her society did not deserve is, rather ironically, fully in line with the current historicist reading of Twain's ending. In attempting to “evade the evasion,” Smiley has stumbled into the very conflicts that rightfully beset Twain. The dissatisfying nature of her ending must be understood as a willful act of sabotage, not merely a refusal to value feelings over action, but also a stubborn insistence that literature not be used to redeem history.

WORKS CITED

Arac, Jonathan. Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target: The Functions of Criticism in Our Time. Madison: U of Wisconsin Press, 1997.

Bérubé, Michael. “Come Back to the Text Ag'in, Huck Honey.” American Quarterly 53.1 (1999): 693-701.

Boyce, Allison. Letter to the Editor. Harper's Apr. 1996: 7.

Cameron, Anson J. Letter to the Editor. Harper's Apr. 1996: 7+. Doyno, Victor A. Writing Huckleberry Finn: Mark Twain's Creative Process.

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Fiore, Robert. Letter to the Editor. Harper's Apr. 1996: 83.

Friedman, George S. Letter to the Editor. Harper's Apr. 1996: 84.

Mallon, Thomas. "Bleeding Kansas." New York Times 5 Apr. 1998, late ed., sec. 7: 10.

Margolis, Stacy. “Huckleberry Finn; Or, Consequences.” Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Case Study in Critical Controversy. Ed. Gerald Graff and James Phelan. Boston: Bedford, 1995. 310-29.

Marx, Leo. “Mr. Eliot, Mr. Trilling, and Huckleberry Finn.” Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Case Study in Critical Controversy. Ed. Gerald Graff and James Phelan. Boston: Bedford, 1995. 290-305.

MacLeod, Christine. “Telling the Truth in a Tight Place: Huckleberry Finn and the Reconstruction Era.” The Southern Quarterly 34.1 (1995): 5-16.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.

Smiley, Jane. “The Adventures of Jane Smiley.” Interview with Katie Bacon. Atlantic Unbound 28 May 1998 <www.theatlantic.com/inbound/book-auth/ba980528.htm>.

——.The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.

——.“A Conversation with . . . Jane Smiley.” Interview with Lewis Burke Frumkes. The Writer May 1999: 20-21. Academic Search Elite. EBSCOhost. U of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA. 5 Mar. 2007 <web.ebscohost. com>.

——.“Say It Ain't So, Huck.” Harper's 292.1748 (Jan. 1996): 61-67.

Theroux, Alexander. Letter to the Editor. Harper's Apr. 1996: 7

Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 1885. Berkeley: U of California P, 1985.

JIM O'LOUGHLIN is Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Northern Iowa. His is the co-author (with Julie Husband) of Daily Life in the Industrial United States, 1870-1900 (Greenwood Press) and the publisher of Final Thursday Press.