The patchwork of life: sentimental discourse in Tracy Chevalier’s The Last Runaway

The Last Runaway (2013) narrates the story of Honor Bright, a Quaker girl from England arriving to the US in the 1840s. This is a story of displacement and border crossing: not only does she move from Dorset to Ohio, from an extended family circle to a group of foreigners, she also experiences a different sense of religious commitment in her new home. The different sense of English and American Quaker beliefs culminates in their approach to the issue of helping runaway slaves, a debate that leads to Honor leaving home and husband for a while.

   Indeed it would be easy to criticize the novel from the perspective of historical fiction. Jan Stuart actually performs this saying The Last Runaway “succumbs to potboiler temptations of historical fiction as familiar characters muscle their way towards a badly formulaic denouement.” (Stuart 26) As part of this approach, reviewers tend to criticize the novel as yet another of Chevalier’s reimaginations of history, now complete with poor characterization, and one that focuses on an English heroine with the stiff upper lip. (Birch)  However, I think the novel tackles issues challenging for today’s critical tastes because it tells the story of transatlantic travel, portrays cultural displacement, and focuses on a heroine who is forced to adapt to her new cultural environment by rearticulating her social position on the margins of her community. The question is how one can possibly discuss the novel as not a historical novel but as historical representation and the heroine’s story in terms of border crossing and marginalized existence.     

My idea for investigating the historical representation of a marginal existence in the novel is to explore how the representation of border crossings is structured discursively in the text. I argue that the novel relies heavily on 19th-c US literary discourse of the domestic novel. This seems similar to the way Poe’s stories relied on the discourse of slave narratives (Goddu 95), and to the way Toni Morrison’s reimaginations of history rely on the discourse of the slave narrative. Actually, Morrison’s marking a place of historical significance for African Americans was an inspiration that made Chevalier think of the novel first (McCrum).  In particular, as the issue of slavery is centrally involved in the story, the connection to Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is vital. Also, the ideal Quaker home represented there is criticised in Chevalier’s version. Moreover, references to  English travellers to the US play a role in the way life and manners in the settlements are represented, in particular Frances Trollope’s perspective on matters American in her Domestic Manners of Americans (1832), which adds a critical attitude to what is shown.  At the same time, Chevalier’s text employs basic tropes of African-American Feminism about feminine creativity that make the process and direction of the heroine’s identity formation more understandable. If you look at the text in this way, then you can ask how the interaction of these discursive modes represents the heroine’s cultural dislocation, and study what notion of “home” is reconstructed here. 

Dream Fox

Today's poem is by Jack Roberts. Jack Roberts’s poems appeared in Sites, Boulevard, Tar River Poetry Review, and the Occupation Wall Street Poetry Anthology, among other reviews and collections. His poem "The New Reforms" was selected by then Poet Laureate Mark Strand for Best American Poetry 1991. Another poem "Dream Fox" was featured as poem of the day in Verse Daily (verse.org). Then he was working exclusively on fiction. "The Watchman" won a prize for short story from Mendocino Coast Writers Conference. "Re: Bright Goddess, At Your Rising," another story, was selected for the Florida International University/Books & Books Conference Anthology (online). He died in April, 2012.


Dream Fox


Not the five tiny black birds that flew
out from behind the mirror  
over the washstand,

nor the raccoon that crept  
out of the hamper,

nor even the opossum that hung
from the ceiling fan

troubled me half so much as
the fox in the bathtub.

There's a wildness in our lives.
We need not look for it.

That's wrong too.
It finds us.

It finds us,
naked and alone,

in unfamiliar bathrooms,
wiping the grit from our eyes,

waiting for the first signs
that we're back among the living.

I catch him beneath his forelegs and lift.
"Don't bite me," I say. Says he, "I'll bite you."

Miklós Radnóti "Mint a halál" -- translated by Jon Roberts

Like Death

Quiet settles on my heart, envelops sullen darkness,
the frost softly rattles, snaps the woodland road
along the river whose nuzzling banks and surface
achingly stand still.

How long this winter lasts: the earth beneath
the bones of beautiful old loves freezes, splits.
Deep within a cavern, the shaggy bear groans,
a tiny roe-deer cries.

The small deer softly weeps, the winter sky's tin-sheathed,
clouds' fringe hangs down, cold dark breathes hard,
the moon flash-flickers, the snow-white ghost flitters
and quivers the trees.

The frost slowly struts, and, on the windowpane,
a delicate ice-flower cracks like solemn death -
you'd think it's only lace - and like sweat,
flows down heavily.

Now this verse of mine ambles along before you,
silently the word appears, rises, and swiftly falls
just like death. And then, whirring, unperturbed,
says nothing more.

Henry James and the US South in The American Scene

James’s criticism of the South and the American scene culminates in his description of Southern hotels and of the general American hotel-spirit they embody. He stays at hotels in Richmond and Charleston and finds the institution similar everywhere: the American hotel is great, shiny, and empty, as if the individual specimens were signposts of universal values from the North scattered about the South. In Florida the hotel life takes on a sudden intensity, as hotels dominate the holiday resorts, and in the clean Florida air the effect of hotels is quite spectacular. James compares this impression to the one he had had of the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City not long before. The effect consist in the impression of the “perfect, the exquisite adjustability of the “national” life to the sublime hotel-spirit.” (439) Analyzing the relation of national life and the hotel spirit, James is content to make the hotel-spirit the stronger in the sense that it is full-blown and expert, and thus the national life can rely on it to assist its own undeveloped and passive social organization. The problem with the hotel-sprit for James is not only that it is unifying but also that while it predends to meet the need of American ideals, it in fact creates new American ideals. It is not only educative but also prescriptive. The great national ignorance is taken advantage of artfully by the hotel-spirit that will define relations. This is the revelation James encounters instead of a fulfilling meal at his Florida hotel.
He finds this revelation troubling from the perspective of “the individual” or “the informed few” looking at “the crowd” or the “uninformed” (441) masses:

I seemed to see again … the whole housed populace move as in mild and consenting suspicion of its captured and governed state, its having to consent to inordinate fusion as the price of what it seemed pleased to regard as inordinate luxury. Beguiled and caged, positively thankful, in its vast vacancy, for the sense and the definite horizon of a cage, were there yet not moments,,, in which it still dimly made out that its condition was the result of a compromise into the detail of which there might some day be an alarm in entering? (441)

It is James’s notion of individuality existing in differentiations, taste, manners that is captured by the hotel-spirit in America. The cumulative sum, the golden-mean as the universal ideal of the hotel-spirit oppresses him as the quality that has no need for his kind of individual sensibility at all.

"The Cigarette" from The Letters of Virginia Joyce. 6 vols, ed. Nigel Nicholson and Joanne Trautmann, London: Chatto, 1975 - 80.

It was a splendid sunshine. For if the sun is like an eye that changes day into night with each of its flickers, or like a mother who caters her child through the day with the rhythm of breakfast, lunch, and dinner, then the morning has been started successfully in the refectory and was well on its way to the Chapterhouse Restaurant. She has had orange juice, cereal, and coffee. She has appropriated two apples and a tub of marmalade. She has reached saturation. Many people never reach saturation. Here she glanced vaguely towards the polished drops of moisture on the grass and as the glitter of her watch rose to meet it, in the distance she made out the figures of the other members of the group, discretely leaning on their elbows or dozing off in the silent heat of the somehow Mediterranean greenery of the park, like ancient gods and goddesses listening to Hermes on the affairs of a world far below. They needed entertainment, clap your hands and sing if you live where motley is worn.
But after breakfast, what comes next? If breakfast, then a cigarette. And also a number of meals to be had. But at least she's had breakfast. Breakfast she was sure of. Then... A cigarette? One cigarette? The figures were moving slowly in the halo of light, their limbs ejecting soft moaning sounds as they streched. They needed guidance, they needed to be provoked into action. One cigarette... Is it smell, is it taste? When will she have it? A cigarette... She asked herself what is a man sitting in the grass in the sunshine, fingering an unlit cigarette, a symbol of. If she were a composer, she would compose a fugue on that attitude. The movement away from the mouth and back to it would be repeated in different tones and the explanatory circles of the brown end would spiral into the white wilderness of the soul. It was a splendid sunshine, after breakfast. After breakfast, there comes lunch. Lunch --

The Rhetoric of Unreality: Travel writing and ethnography in Edith Wharton’s In Morocco

Edith Wharton called herself a drawing room naturalist when she referred to her novels. Her novels are ethnographically oriented studies into the behavior patterns of an elite NYC social class. But she is not just a novelist of manners as she also wrote several books on her travels, mostly about Italy and France, studying European culture. As part of this interest, she came out with a book on Morocco in 1919. Wharton’s travelogue is the first guidebook to Morocco in English written well before the country became independent of colonial rule in 1953. Wharton’s aim in this volume is to measure up Moroccan ways of life mainly untouched by European influence. This isolated position is the reason for Wharton’s main interest: the presence of the past in Morocco, the presence of a Medieval past that she suspects is soon to be lost through modernization. At the same time, her account is to draw the very tourists who embody Europeanization into the country through her alluring book.
I wish to look into the problem of how Wharton tries to preserve the work of the past and also to produce an attractive report about a Morocco of Oriental mysteries. My main question is how she manages both to describe and sensationalize matters Moroccan. My idea is that she uses two discourses in her travelogue to achieve her aim. On the one hand, the discourse of history is concerned with the loss of the past. On the other hand, the discourse of tales from Arabian Nights is concerned with the dreamlike quality apparent in most instances of Moroccan life. I claim that in her book the discourse of history and the discourse of tales interact and construct a knowledge of Morocco that is both ethnographically oriented but at the same time relies on a strong premise of the Orient as a dreamlike, ambiguous space embedded in the past (Said 27), a cultural position to be improved by French colonial influence. So I think that while she claims to write in order to preserve bits of Moroccan culture from effects of Europeanization in the first place, she in fact supports colonization and produces a Europeanized body of knowledge about Morocco as a place of mystic and Medieval life to be enlightened and improved. The main challenge lies in showing the way she produces this account. I think that although she constructs a conscious interplay of discourses, she does not manage to criticize her premises of the Orient through this deceptively self-conscious rhetoric.

Transnationalism and Cosmopolis -- discussion group by Heinz Ickstadt

Salzburg Seminar American Studies Alumni Association symposium
To Honor Emory Elliott: American Literary History in a New Key
Sep. 24-28, 2010


Discussion group: Transnationalism and Cosmopolis
Coordinator: Heinz Ickstadt


Readings: Andreas Huyssen, “Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World” New German Critique 34(2007):1, 189-207; Andreas Huyssen, “World Cultures, World Cities” In Andreas Huyssen, ed. Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age. Durham: Duke, 2009. pp; Sherry Simon, “Bridge to Babel: The Cosmopolitan City” In Translating Montreal: Episodes in the Life of a Divided City. Montreal: McGill-Queens UP, 2006. pp.

We began with a brief dilemma concerning transnational American Studies from a European perspective delineated by Heinz Ickstadt. Heinz used his own personal story to illustrate what America meant for him and his generation in post WW2 Germany: it was a way of life, the only source of democratic institutions, of tolerance, of equality transmitted through literature. The young Heinz duly transferred from German literature to American literature and became personally engaged with and loyal to his idea of America and American values. He felt literature entered his consciousness and changed his life. So his idea of America was a primarily aesthetic experience. Now, the turn to the transnational kills the nationalist from AS, and doing so it deletes exactly that idea of America Heinz has been involved in through his life and does not feel like following. The question, then, from a European perspective is how to incorporate this aestheticized European experience of America into a transnational idea of American literature. In more academic formulation, the question is if we have to reawaken the issue of aesthetics in the age of transnational studies.

More specifically, we were seeking possible new methodologies of reading literature that come from European sources, possibly from outside the discipline of American Studies. We relied on two texts by Andreas Huyssen, a professor of German literature and of comparative literature in which he draws up a new kind of aesthetics for reading Modernist spaces. We asked if we can use Huyssen’s idea as a model to follow in American studies. Huyssen reintroduces the discarded terms high and low into reading urban palimpsests and into tracing the politics of memory. He asserts that Modernism has not ended, but rather is a contemporary development that happens with different speeds at different locations. When you study these developments, you have to compare them but for this you also have to translate them. This is where you can use the aesthetic in an unconventional way if you reintroduce the concepts high and low. You can use high and low not vertically for value judgement but horizontally for comparison. If you use high and lw horizontally, you can use them for cultural translation. For example, when cultures meet, hierarchies might change, and using the terms high and low becomes and instrument for differentiation from one culture to the other, and “low art” in (q marks) can be looked at aesthetically, too.

In the discussion we referred to the volume Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age edited by Emory Elliott in which Elliott argues that multiculturalism and the aesthetic are not enemies, they have to go together otherwise we lose the essence of literature. Non-Americans have to be inclusive in terms of texts/objects used but not forget aesthetics, a bridge between cultural studies and literary studies. This sense of aesthetics is not linked to New Criticism but something different.

Heinz warned that what seems to be the broadening sense of the object often comes with a methodological narrowing, for instance philological means of comparison between transnational texts.

The city has come up repeatedly in the discussion as the site where these issues are represented. America defined the Modern primarily in architectural terms and associated the two. Yet the American city is double, all the major cities are divided, both the city of possibility and of corruption is in them. Modern American architecture, in turn, is present in the Metropolises of the world, so the modern city is also a global phenomenon, so is its double quality possibility/corruption. Also, the city represents the global and the local at the same time.

Eventually, we agreed that that American studies, whilst broadening its subject, need retain its methodological refinement. Using Huyssen’s frame, we might even make the trans-national frame as object for inquiry for American Studies.