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The All-true Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton
Background Information
In her career as a novelist, Jane Smiley has earned the reputation of
a prolific writer who tackles disparate subjects and themes. She has written
about Greenland, academe, thoroughbred racing, the modern family farm,
and the world of real estate. With The All-True Travels
and Adventures of Lidie Newton (1998), Smiley, again, demonstrates
her extraordinary range. As Smiley makes clear by thanking two history
professors for their assistance in her "Acknowledgments," this
book is a historical novel, presenting to the late-twentieth-century reader
as authentically as possible the look, feel and sensibilities of a time
and place in American history—the Kansas-Missouri border in the 1850s—that
Smiley considers significant. In interviews, Smiley mentioned the numerous
diaries and journals that she read by various correspondents that gave
her the form for her first-person fictional account. Lidie
Newton is also a novel of ideas. While she was working on this
novel, Smiley published an essay in Harper's
that suggests that Lidie Newton was the fruition
of the argument Smiley was making in that essay—that Harriet Beecher
Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin is a superior
work to Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
because of Stowe's dedication to confronting in all of its moral
complexity the foremost issue of the time: race.
By setting her novel in the years before the Civil War and, at least
at the beginning, along the Mississippi River, Smiley appears to be inviting
comparisons between Lidie Newton and Huckleberry
Finn. Her protagonist resembles Twain's title character in many
ways. An orphan and an outsider like Huck, Lidie grew up on the Mississippi
River in the antebellum period and eventually lit out for the territory.
As significant as any of the circumstantial similarities between Lidie
and Huck are their similarly unique voices. Their stories will be told
by them, in their own inimitable way. There are important differences
in the two, however. Whereas Twain focuses on life on the river and concludes
his narrative with Huck on the verge of setting out for the West, Smiley
chooses to devote the majority of her novel to Lidie's experiences on
the Kansas frontier. Two events in the fall of 1855 propel Lidie away
from her home of Quincy, Illinois. First, her father dies, leaving her
without a home and at the mercy of her older half-sisters, who do not
wish to take her in. Swiftly following the death of her father, she meets
and marries Thomas Newton, an abolitionist, whom she accompanies to Kansas
Territory as part of the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company.
Traditionally viewed as a stage for manly action and rugged independence,
the frontier Smiley depicts is populated by strong and assertive women
such as Louisa Bisket and powerful couples such as Charles and Sara Robinson.
There are hardship, hatred, and violence, as well as joy, friendship,
and cooperation on this frontier. Furthermore, Kansas is a battlefield
where ideologues on either side of the slavery issue wage war. In her
Harper's essay, Smiley credits Stowe with
uniting "the power of brilliant analysis" with "a great
wisdom of feeling" in Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Smiley emulates that formula in Lidie Newton,
particularly through the sensibility of her title character, who is neither
an abolitionist from New England like her husband and the other settlers
of Free State Lawrence nor an advocate for or beneficiary of the institution
of slavery like Papa and Helen Day. An inquiring and objective—if
not neutral—character surrounded by a cast of radicals, Lidie serves
Smiley as a means by which the author may study different perspectives
and positions on the issue of slavery.
Questions for Reflection
Lidie lives with both abolitionists (Thomas Newton and Louisa Bisket)
and slaveholders (Papa Day), and through her interaction with each the
reader hears their respective arguments for their cause. Are these opponents
similar in any way? How does each side justify its beliefs and actions
toward slavery? Smiley appears to give primacy to immediate experience
and personal involvement over debate or rhetoric. For instance, in an
argument with her husband, Lidie admits to resenting the hostile and threatening
behavior of Missourians toward her more than their practice of slaveholding.
Her husband calls her ignorant, but she answers that she has never seen
the effects of slavery. Think of the instances when Lidie does observe
the consequences of slavery—along the Mississippi River with Frank,
fleeing Master Philip and thus abandoning the boy, and finally her attempted
escape with Lorna. How does her attitude toward slavery evolve?
Smiley has said that in Kansas in the 1850s ideology and violence intersected,
and the text contains several ideological and violent characters. Is Lidie
one of them? Does she become either ideological or violent at any time?
Kansas Territory is also a paradoxical place, where "you could possibly
act one way one minute and another way the next minute." How does
Lidie respond to this environment where mutually exclusive ideas hold
simultaneously? What do you make of David B. Graves, a significant character
who acts paradoxically? What other examples does Smiley offer us from
Lidie's stay in Kansas that might qualify as mutually exclusive ideas
that hold simultaneously?
As critics have pointed out, Lidie Newton contains elements of the picaresque novel and the bildungsroman. The picaresque novel usually features a clever protagonist, from a lower class, often a scoundrel or a rogue, who meets representative figures from a particular level of society. How, in your opinion, does Lidie Newton conform to this description? A bildungsroman charts a young character's development and education, concluding with his or her acceptance into a particular society. Does this describe Lidie Newton? Given the circular nature of the narrative--Lidie leaves Kansas and returns to her family in Quincy, where she was at the beginning of the novel--what do you think Smiley is trying to suggest about the settlement of Kansas in the 1850s? Will Lidie be accepted into Quincy society? Will she want that? What do you think Lidie will do with the rest of her life? How is she different after her sojourn in Kansas? In the last lines of the novel, she refers to the major events of the Civil War and how they did not surprise her after her experiences in Kansas Territory. What did she learn from her travels and adventures? How does the conclusion of Lidie Newton compare to the ending of Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin?