Western American Literature

After the 1995 bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma, Jane Smiley decided to write a novel about the intersection of American ideology and violence. She turned to 1850s Kansas and radical abolitionist John Brown, publishing The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton in 1998. Not coincidentally, Russell Banks notes that his 1998 John Brown novel Cloudsplitter was inspired by Waco and Ruby Ridge: "I realized how significantly he figures in the old American weave of violence, politics, religion, race" ("Art of Fiction" 79). Banks dubbed Brown "the last Puritan and the first modern terrorist" (82). John Brown and 1850s Kansas emerged at the turn of the millennium as the fullest expression of American ideological passions for American novelists.

1850s Kansas was dubbed "Bleeding Kansas" for the frequent skirmishes that occurred between Free State and pro-slave factions in the Kansas Territory from 1855 to 1859. With the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, Congress did not explicitly designate these territories as free or enslaved, leaving it to the vote of residents. The subsequent rush of opposing settlers led to guerilla warfare and other violent outbreaks, with the bloodiest attacks attributed to John Brown and his followers. Many point to John Brown's actions in Kansas and later in Harpers Ferry as contributing to the Civil War.

When Bruce Olds published his 1995 novel Raising Holy Hell (a Pulitzer Prize finalist), he noted that few novels had chosen John Brown as a subject (163). However, following Lidie Newton and Cloudsplitter, Marilynne Robinson wrote Gilead (2004), in which [End Page 325] the pre–Civil War events in both Kansas and Iowa are foundational and include a dramatic cameo by John Brown. And in 2013 James McBride published the National Book Award winner The Good Lord Bird,¹ as choreographer Dean Moss was developing his performance piece johnbrown. All of these texts portray a complicated relationship between 1850s Kansas and the country that followed—with the glowering presence of a disappointed John Brown.

What separates the Bleeding Kansas novels of McBride and Smiley from these other works is their deliberate focus on the role of gender in grounding these ideologies as well as fueling their violent eruptions. The gender-fluid performance of McBride's narrator Henry as the girl Onion is central to The Good Lord Bird's complicating of rigid ideological positions. Smiley similarly highlights the fusion of ideology and gender with Lidie's initial dependence on the writing of Catharine Beecher to perform her role as an abolitionist wife, before choosing to travel as the pro-slavery (male) reporter Lyman Arquette. The unfixed gender of their narrators is the first quality that separates McBride's and Smiley's work from that of Olds, Banks, and Robinson. Their fluidity points to how performance of traditional gender roles was foundational to America's ideological battles.

Another key commonality is the move by Smiley and McBride from the purely picaresque to the posthistorical and metafictional, which is key to their disruption of historical and literary readings of the period (connecting to contemporary debates on race and gender). Their fictional protagonists not only interact with historical figures and events but they likewise reference nineteenth-century texts—most directly, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Linda Hutcheon argues that the term "postmodern" should be reserved for literature that is "at once metafictional and historical in its echoes of the texts and contexts of the past" (3), presenting the term "historiographic metafiction," historical fiction that is likewise postmodern. And it is impossible to read either The Good Lord Bird or The All-True Travels and Adventure of Lidie Newton without recognizing the echoes and reversals of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a novel with a particular status in the American literary canon.

Through the memoirs of their fictional shape-shifters, Smiley [End Page 326] and McBride ask readers to witness the incredible sacrifices as well as unfulfilled dreams of 1850s Kansas—indirectly conceding that 150-plus years of complacency and privilege have failed to produce full equality. Like Twain, Smiley and McBride force contemporary...