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.