642
PARTISAN REVIEW
to Massachusetts. Mrs. Bush, persisting in the struggle for mere survival on
the rude frontier, stuffing cartridges during the Wakarusa War, still feels
uncomfortable when a cup and saucer don't match. Thomas's friend,
Charles Bisket, marries the vigorous, feminist Louisa who compares the
condition of women to that of the black slaves, and says that women's
corsets resemble horses' saddles: "They stifle our breath and cut us in two
and shape us to the liking of our masters." And poor Mrs.James's baby dies
in the punishing cold in her little house on the prairie. The stream of new
encounters and small incidents, humor and pathos haphazardly mixed, cre–
ate an illusion of life as lived. Only, after a while, the reader feels drowned.
The idea of plot contends vainly with Smiley's plenitude.
As time wears on, the incidents become more violent in character, and
we remember our history books and know that we are being carried for–
ward to a terrible climax. John Dow, a Free State man from Ohio, is
murdered by a pro-slavery man bu t the pro-slavery sheriff arres ts not the
murderer but a friend of Dow's who organized a protest. A posse of Free
Staters rescues the prisoner and, in Lidie's account of these true events, the
rescue party includes Thomas's friend, Charles. Not long afterwards, the
sheriff is himself wounded by an unknown assassin. Filling in history's gap,
Banks's Owen claims that
he
was that assassin, but Lidie wonders if it could
not have been her cousin Frank. In any case, what history knows is that the
shooting of the sheriff was the provocation the pro-slavery governor and
his supporters were waiting for, and Lawrence is sacked and vandalized by
pro-slavery militia. Then, one day, Smiley's Lidie relates, Thomas is shot
on a country road by proslavery men. She reflects, "Now I was a new per–
son, one I had never desired or expected to be."
I wish the book had stopped there. But from this point, leaving his–
tory and even likelihood behind, Smiley tacks on a melodramatic
fulfillment of Lidie's declaration. Resolved to avenge her husband's mur–
der she crosses into Missouri to find his murderers, puts on a man's clothes
and gets a job as a newspaper reporter while pursuing clues. Here, in slave
country, she encounters, for the first time, a black child who directly asks
her for help in gaining his freedom. But she does not find her husband's
murderers and cannot help the slave. Struggling uncomfortably in her
men's boots, which don't fit, and discovering herself pregnant under her
male clothing, she collapses along a rural road. Yet her romantic destiny
bubbles on like an irrepressible brook. She is promptly rescued by black
Lorna, who takes her to her owner's house where she is healed and cos–
seted by him and his daughter. Of course, he is a widower and a perfect
gentleman who reads Jane Austen, and he soon proposes marriage to
Lidie-though he and his friends are slavers who may have been involved
in Thomas's death. Lidie decides to help Lorna escape. They are caught,
