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Mister M, Mister I, Mister SSI

Bill Lazenbatt

“The Mississippi,” says Mark Twain in the opening sentence of his Life on the Mississippi, “is well worth reading about. It is not a commonplace river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable” (13). Certainly, in relation to the South, the central importance of the river topographically, historically, commercially and culturally cannot be over-stated. As the main artery flowing through the region, it is also the most significant site of the journeys made by southerners at various points in time, and it enjoys a permanent significance in the literature of the South.

It is a commonplace of criticism that the literary river journey may frequently be interpreted as a journey of self-definition, an excursion not simply into the less explored reaches of the actual river, but into the psychology of the characters involved; the best example of which is probably Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. This essay will explore the minds of several male voyagers on the mighty Mississippi, to enquire into the extent to which their river experiences help to clarify or consolidate their gender definition and sense of masculinity. It will refer to representative texts by the giants of southern literature, Twain and Faulkner, as well as more recent work by Richard Ford and – to provide a woman’s perspective – Lee Smith. Firstly, it is pertinent to ask if there is any correlation between the sense of maleness referred to and the designated gender of the river itself. Why are some rivers considered male and others female?

There appears to be no obvious pattern to the way in which we attribute gender to particular rivers: some are designated as feminine; others are resolutely masculine. Topographical or geographic similarities fail to provide a satisfactory explanation, though one internet commentator, considering linguistic gender in German, posits the “rule of thumb that really big rivers are masculine (der Nil, der Amazonas, der Mississippi, der Rio Grande, der Rhein) but smaller rivers and streams are feminine (die Elbe, die Bille, die Weser)” (Newton). English, lacking linguistic gender, does not reflect even this degree of consistency. For instance, within literature, an important river like the Thames is given masculinity with the phrase “Old Father Thames” while conversely, in the greatest experimental novel in the English language, Dublin’s equally important Liffey is personified as feminine: Anna Livia Plurabella. If the broader symbolism of the river’s flow likens it to the flow of life, we might find a feminine creative and reproductive principle in the “female” rivers like Anna Livia, or remember that “la Seine est une amante,” or find “male” examples like the Rhine complemented by reference to the Götterdämmerung’s Rhine Daughters. This, however, is not the case for the Mississippi, which is invariably and without qualification given a masculine status as “Old Man River” throughout its appearance in southern literature and culture. Originally named by the Algonquin Indians as the “Father of Waters,” an epithet which Faulkner recycles in The Wild Palms (Brown 79), it retains a sense of masculinity and is most frequently associated with the displays of stereotypically masculine behaviour of those who journey upon it. Indeed, it might be argued that the river is a site of masculine preservation from the opposite and potentially weakening influence of the feminine and that the “River God,” identified by T. S. Eliot in “The Dry Salvages” and invoked by Lionel Trilling in an early essay on Huckleberry Finn, represents a mystical maleness for which the river offers no feminine counterpart (Trilling 115).

The impression of the river as a male domain is reinforced if we consider some of its legendary characters and their exploits. The masculine prowess of Jim Bludso, skipper of the Prairie Belle, provides one example. Commemorated in John Hay’s 1871 ballad, Jim’s character is a blend of rough and ready manliness and instinctive goodness: “He weren’t no saint, them engineers / Is all pretty much alike, / One wife in Natchez-under-the-Hill / And another one here, in Pike; / A keerless man in his talk was Jim, / And an awkward hand in a row, / But he never flunked, and he never lied, / I reckon he never knew how.... / And if ever the Prairie Belle took fire, / A thousand times he swore, / He’d hold her nozzle agin the bank / Till the last soul got ashore” (Hay, “Jim Bludso”). When the old steamboat’s boilers finally do blow, Jim proves courageously to be as good as his word, and gives his own life in order to save the others: “they all got off / Afore the smokestacks fell— / And Bludso’s ghost went up alone / In the smoke of the Prairie Belle.” The final stanza applauds Jim’s courage and manliness: “He weren’t no saint, but at jedgement / I’d run my chance with Jim, / ‘Longside of some pious gentlemen / That wouldn’t shook hands with him. / He seen his duty, a dead-sure thing, / And went for it thar and then; / And Christ ain’t a-going to be too hard / On a man that died for men” (Hay, “Jim Bludso”).

Moreover, as the Christian parallel here suggests, truly admirable masculinity is a composite of physical action and moral integrity. The braggadocio of boastful action is not in itself enough to commend the masculine. That other legendary figure of the Mississippi River, Mike Fink, is perhaps more guilty of such boastfulness. While he appears in many incarnations throughout southern writing, nowhere for this forum is more appropriate to find him in all his conceit and self-praise than in Eudora Welty’s The Robber Bridegroom. Observing the conventions of ebullience and exaggeration which characterise the tall tale, Welty heads straight for hyperbole:

“You doubt that I am Mike Fink? Nevertheless it is true!” yelled the flatboatman. “Only look!” And he doubled up his fists and rippled the muscles on his arms up and down, as slow as molasses, and on his chest was the finest mermaid it was possible to have tattooed at any port. “I can pick up a grown man by the neck in each hand and hold him out at arm’s length, and often do, too,” yelled the flatboatman. “I eat a whole cow at one time, and follow her up with a live sheep if it’s Sunday.... I can carry a dozen oxen on my back at one time, and as for pigs, I tie them in a bunch and hang them to my belt!” (Welty 9)

In addition to this, if addition were needed, Fink boasts further of his male animal attributes and his muscularity:

“I’m an alligator!” yelled the flatboatman, and began to flail his mighty arms through the air. “I’m a he-bull and a he-rattlesnake and a he-alligator all in one! I’ve beat up so many flatboatmen and thrown them in the river I haven’t kept a count since the flood, and I’m a lover of the women like you’ll never see again.” And he chanted Mike Fink’s song: “I can outrun, outhop, outjump, throw down, drag out, and lick any man in the country!” (Welty 10)

Little doubt, then, of the extreme nature of masculinity in so simple and so traditional a rendition of gender. But, leaving aside its comic purpose, such a two-dimensional definition appears unlikely and very limited; surely there is more to manliness than violent boastfulness, even within the river’s arena of desperadoes, tough flatboatmen, gamblers, adventurers and ladies who are no better than they ought to be? A more holistic definition of masculinity might include a sense of responsibility towards others, or a code of behaviour, such as Hemingway’s characters develop, which extends the range of genderdefinition beyond the physical, to encompass moral and philosophical dimensions too. To discover the additional attributes, where better to turn than to the greatest odyssey of all on the Mississippi, namely The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In a novel obsessed with notions of self-definition and identity, the eponymous hero’s development into moral manhood is charted as he progresses from one assumed identity to another. Identified in parenthesis on the 1884 title page as “Tom Sawyer’s comrade,” in other words, something of an afterthought in a story for boys, Huck will eventually outgrow so reductive a beginning to step from the final page of the volume into mythology, as moral exemplar and legendary conscience of his nation. Along the way, he will demonstrate in repeated key moments that there is an alternative to Colonel Sherburn’s brutally misanthropic definition of what constitutes a man. Huck’s need to repeat and reaffirm his moral decisions as part of a learning process is in keeping with the theory put forward by Judith Butler that there is a performative and repetitive quality to gender definition, a theory that in fact holds good for all the texts considered in this paper.

According to Butler, gender “operates as an interior essence ... an expectation that ends up producing the very phenomenon that it anticipates.” It achieves this by means of “performativity”: by performing the features of a particular gender, we become that gender. “Performativity,” says Butler, “is not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual” (xv). Moreover,

gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts. The effect of gender is produced through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self. (Butler 191)

The “exterior space” of the Mississippi is a perfect location for such rituals of self-discovery, and, as Huck demonstrates initially, for the repetition of acts that will finally confirm his identity and mature masculinity. Of the number of provisional identities which he tries on then discards again, interestingly the first in line requires him to change gender altogether. In the guise of Mary – and then Sarah – Williams, Huck convinces no-one of his femininity; rightly so, as all the gestures and styles of being of his girl-persona contradict that essential maleness that he will develop in the company of Jim while on the river. Leslie Fiedler’s reading of a chaste inter-racial love relationship between Huck and Jim, in “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!” establishes the racial harmony of the river idyll, but overlooks the central characterization of Jim in a paternal role. Both protagonists are denied adult status when ashore: one by reason of his race, the other by age and class. However, both discover in a symbiotic interaction on the mythic raft, suspended in an idealism insulated from the disappointing realities of shore life, aspects of their own being that create a fuller sense of mature masculinity. Jim’s paternal concern, though largely removed from him by the reductive infantilisation process of slavery, is nevertheless evident in the story he tells of his deaf daughter, and is transferred across race and family lines by the repeated acts of fatherly care he shows for Huck. In turn, the latter learns by repetition how to become a man of independent thought and judgement, rather than the sort of conformist whom Sherburn derides as mere members of the mob. On several occasions Huck defies the prevailing view of how to treat black people, as when he apologizes to Jim for tricking him:

It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger – but I done it, and I warn’t ever sorry for it afterwards, neither. I didn’t do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn’t done that one if I’d a knowed it would make him feel that way. (Twain, Huckleberry Finn 143)

Subsequently, Huck discovers further points of empathy:

[Jim] was thinking about his wife and his children, away up yonder, and he was low and homesick ... I do believe he cared just as much for his people as white folks does for their’n. It don’t seem natural, but I reckon it’s so. (Twain, Huckleberry Finn 218)

The boy’s developing moral conscience reaches its highpoint in his decision to “go to hell” rather than betray Jim, and his arrival at this mature position is a fitting climax to the idyllic days spent on the raft. Now manhood has been reached and the various false disguises of boyhood, those aliases of “George Peters,” “George Jackson,” “Adolphus” and – tellingly – “Tom Sawyer” are left behind as Huck finds his own identity. The transformation is possible not only because Huck has repeated the performance of manly empathy, but also because the river gods have sanctioned it, have created a transcendent effect in those moments when the two protagonists respond to the easy flow of the river’s spirit and relax into a blissful harmony. Not only will Jim be freed, but Huck too will be freed from the limited mindset of a shore-based boyishness, which will hold Tom Sawyer captive for the rest of his life. The identification of the river as the main highway into more intransigent slave territory is reversed, as Huck leaves his early social subservience behind and shoulders in its place a sense of morally brave masculinity.

William Faulkner discovers his own river gods in The Wild Palms, or rather in the “Old Man” narrative that constitutes half of this hybrid novel and provides counterpoint to the story of Harry and Charlotte in the title narrative. Noel Polk informs us that Faulkner objected to the title change from its original If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (Polk 7), but the publisher’s ostensibly divisive decision to use two titles for the interlaced narratives, and to imply greater significance for the Charlotte/Harry story by awarding it the composite volume title, at least has the advantage of casting “Old Man” in clearer contrapuntal relief, as its “complete antithesis” to use Faulkner’s own description (Gwynn & Blotner, 7), which allows us to recognize its many thematic features stronger than those which bedevil the ill-fated tale of Charlotte and Harry. Again, ambiguities of gender definition and the interrogation of masculinity in “Wild Palms” are counterbalanced by a display of active, and assertive, maleness by the convict protagonist of “Old Man”.

“Wild Palms” opens with a display of the potential ambiguity of gender: the doctor wears a nightshirt rather than pyjamas which are “for dudes and women,” nevertheless he has “thick soft women’s hands” and though he has shared his marital bed for twenty-three years now, he remains childless; his wife’s nightgown is “shaped like a shroud,” symbolizing presumably the death of any sexual activity, and it is with some trepidation that he discovers that Charlotte wears “pants ... not these ladies’ slacks but pants, man’s pants” of which his wife will surely disapprove (Faulkner, Wild Palms 5). Although in “Old Man” the convict protagonist first appears sweeping and dusting in the deputy wardens’ barracks “in a long apron like a woman,” there the similarity ends (Faulkner, Wild Palms 22). Detailed to assist in flood rescue, the convict reasserts his masculinity once on the river, in a way that the shore-bound Harry cannot match. Where the latter is frequently surprised at Charlotte’s more stereotypical masculine qualities – her capable strong hands, her role as wage-earner, her willingness to initiate sexual encounters – all of which earn her the accolade that “she’s a better man than I am” (Faulkner, Wild Palms 96), the Convict by contrast is openly misogynous and utterly shuns the feminine: “This, out of all the female meat that walks, is what I have to be caught in a runaway boat with,” he complains of his pregnant passenger (Faulkner, Wild Palms 107). The counterpoint is intentionally ironic; Harry idealistically abandons convention, eschewing the rat race in which Charlotte’s aptly-nicknamed husband belongs, only to be left paradoxically in thrall to Charlotte’s love, a compromised freedom which is juxtaposed with the comically conceived reverse tale of the convict who willingly returns to prison in order to avoid women altogether. Unfortunately, romantic idealism is difficult to sustain amid the realities of economic need and gynaecological difficulty; while the conceit of an exclusive world of love may appear transcendent, Faulkner insists that a grim realism is never too far away, perhaps to reflect an autobiographical disillusion over the ending of his affair with Meta Carpenter. Instead, the possibility of transcendence and renewal is reserved for the river narrative of “Old Man.”

In Faulkner’s view, “the river dominates not only the economy of that country but it dominates its spiritual life” (Gwynn & Blotner 178). However, the river gods in this time of flood are less than benevolent; rather, what they offer is a test of manhood; the Convict must learn “to accept anything the gods [throw] at him without even knowing that he [is] being tried” (Gwynn & Blotner 177). The testing takes the form of three violent dousings in the river, each a type of baptism into a life of ever stronger male resolve. The first immersion occurs early in the tall convict’s river experience, when the skiff capsizes, throwing him and his short companion into the water. The tall convict surfaces, still defiantly grasping the paddle which is held “perpendicular above them like a jackstaff, vanishing from the view of the short convict” (Faulkner, Wild Palms 103). In contrast to his lesser companion, the tall convict is flying the colours of his masculinity here, with the perpendicular paddle a suitable phallic symbol of male strength as it emerges Excalibur-like from the surface of the water. Shortly after this incident, he takes the pregnant woman on board, her swelling belly a suitably visible female reproach to his masculine paddle, no matter how he tries to ignore it. As the journey downriver continues, he feels that he has been “doomed from the very start never to get rid of her” (Faulkner, Wild Palms 120). The approaching second mammoth wave finds him in such fatalistic frame of mind:

So he hung there ... shaking the paddle and howling, when suddenly he remembered that other wave, the second wall of water full of houses and dead mules building up behind him back in the swamp. So he quit yelling then and went back to paddling. He was not trying to outrun it. He just knew from experience that when it overtook him, he would have to travel in the same direction it was moving in anyway, whether he wanted it or not, and when it did overtake him, he would begin to move too fast to stop, no matter what place he might come to where he could leave the woman, land her in time. (Faulkner, Wild Palms 121)

As in Huckleberry Finn, here too the river is fate, determining the flow and direction of the convict’s life. His second immersion combines a simultaneous physical birth and a spiritual rebirth, while the spirit of the great river manifests itself in the form of a swimming deer which leads the convict and the woman to safety before disappearing mystically. There are clear similarities here between “Old Man” and “The Bear”: indeed, the account of the convict’s encounter with the spirit of the river might be viewed as a trial run for Ike McCaslin’s later encounter with the spirit of the wilderness in “The Bear.” He hears the flood roar behind him as “the wave actually began to rear above his head into its thunderous climax” (Faulkner, Wild Palms 125), then sees the swimming deer and follows it even as both are swamped by the breaking wave:

he and the deer shot forward side by side at arm’s length, he watching the deer now, watching the deer begin to rise out of the water bodily until it was actually running along upon the surface, rising still, soaring clear of the water altogether, vanishing upwards in a dying crescendo of splashings and snapping branches, its damp scut flashing upwards, the entire animal vanishing upwards as smoke vanishes. (Faulkner, Wild Palms 126)

This climactic scene contains several important details. The river’s spirit – or the river gods, perhaps – saves him from drowning, but ironically so, since it also preserves and prolongs his fate of remaining with the woman – or, more accurately now, the mother, who gives birth just as she is thrown clear of the waters. The convict stumbles over a snake as he struggles to find his footing on dry land, a land now obviously and rather heavy-handedly cursed by the same old sins of men and women that will lead Ike, in imitation of his mentor Sam Fathers, to salute this embodiment of the evil principle, “Chief, Grandfather!” (Faulkner, Go Down, Moses 330).

The convict reveals in retrospect that the earlier part of his adventures took place on the Atchafalaya, a Louisiana river parallel to the Mississippi, but not the authentic river itself. However, once he reaches the “Old Man” his third and final test rewards the masculine determination he has shown throughout his travails. Even a humorous dialogue with his fellow prisoners, over the meaning of “haemophilic,” emphasises this point. They obviously mistake the word for “hermaphrodite” – “that’s a calf that’s a bull and a cow at the same time,” one observes sagely (Faulkner, Wild Palms 170) – which meets with the uncomplicated response, “Hell fire. He’s got to be one or the other to keep from drounding” (Faulkner, Wild Palms 170). So where is Judith Butler now, with her gradations of gender theory, in a context where such simply polarized differences apply?

Certainly, her notion of repetition holds good, with the convict acknowledging grimly that “there was a peculiar quality of repetitiveness about his present fate” (Wild Palms 190). However, he evades immersion this third time, finding himself saved by a company of men, in that Faulknerian camaraderie so often found when even the most masculine of men must join together in fear of women. The river, Old Man, enables him to preserve his separate, womanless identity, symbolised by the jail clothing which he dons again. But he has not simply come full circle; he has responded to “a power, a force ... [a] cosmic violence” (Faulkner, Wild Palms 185) with which the river has tested his manhood:

When he saw the river again he knew it at once. He should have; it was now ineradicably a part of his past, his life; it would be a part of what he would bequeath, if that were in store for him. (Faulkner, Wild Palms 194)

Harry loses everything he wants, whereas the convict wins all he desires – thanks to a repeated assertion of his masculinity which not only uses muscle and nerve to survive the floods, but also involves the determination to keep his side of the bargain with the warders and deliver the woman to safety – safely away from him in his male world.

Faulkner employs a resurrection metaphor – “This man is dead,” is the official bureaucratic view of the obviously very much alive protagonist (Faulkner, Wild Palms 230) – and clarifies any ambiguity about the authenticity of the Atchafalaya and the Mississippi, the better to emphasise and preserve the mythic and mystical power of the “Old Man.” Richard Ford strives for a similar effect in A Piece of My Heart, where the island on which the climactic action occurs doesn’t exist on maps of the region at all. Although Ford may be taken to represent “postsouthern” writers, his first novel is decidedly more southern than post; in fact, it shares a number of similarities with the novels already mentioned: the various avenues of plot converge onto an island in the Mississippi where one of the protagonists hopes to renew his identity, much as Huck Finn does when he “lights out” for Jackson’s Island, another mystical, otherworldly place insofar as it shelters black and white runaways alike from a society which forbids them to exist together in any relationship beyond childhood.

There are further similarities with the structure of The Wild Palms, since Ford alternates sections which focus on each of his two protagonists separately, though he does not maintain a strict separation, as Faulkner does in his master-class in counterpoint, but finally weaves the stories of Robard Hewes and Sam Newel together. Newel is the character who travels south to the Mississippi in a voyage of self-renewal, as his name suggests. Traumatised by the gruesome accidental death of his father by decapitation, Newel is suffering a crisis about his own mortality which manifests itself in flashback memories of boyhood experiences with his father – italicised in the best Faulknerian manner – and also in the affectation of a limp, which is more psychological that physical in origin. Its function appears similar to Milkman’s affected lameness in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977), which disappears as he grows into a mature and manly appreciation of his family and race heritage. Newel will discover a similar improvement after he is tested by the power of the Mississippi.

A final similarity concerns the appearance of a doe – rather, two on this occasion – which function not as guides from the spirit world, as in “Old Man,” but instead as a sacrifice which buys subsequent immunity for Lamb and his island hideaway. Butchered by army officers the does’ carcasses enable Lamb to blackmail the Corps of Engineers cartographers into leaving a blank on the map where his home is, thus lifting it for the receptive reader from the mundane and actual, and endowing it with a mythical atmosphere instead; a suitable location, then, for Newel to discover himself anew.

His rebaptism into confident manhood again takes the form of a repeated immersion in the river. Newel leaves the train south at Memphis and approaches the Mississippi. At the water’s edge he is drawn to the power of the river, realizing his need to form a connection with it: “he had never felt the river, never had it in his hand and let the water comb through his fingers to find out just what it was. It seemed now like a vast and imponderable disadvantage, and made him feel like he needed to know” (Ford 87). Moments later he has dived into the water, not, I would suggest, in a “half-hearted attempt to drown himself” as Martyn Bone argues, but in an attempt to re-vitalize himself, make a new man of himself (Bone 677). Ford offers the detail that Sam’s shorts have come off and “he was floating with his privates adangle in the cold current, prey to any browsing fish” (Ford 88). Though potentially comical, Sam’s skinny-dipping is more akin to a Lawrentian communion with nature. Despite his indecorous entry to the water, “he felt relatively little fear ... and none of the gulping hysteria he feared he might.” The current buoys him as it moves him steadily and “he felt unusually relaxed, though cold and still strange that his parts had become potential forage for the fish” (Ford 88). The prose emphasises the connection between the river and its creatures and Sam’s masculine being. His is a confident masculinity as he “enters” the river for the first time, with all the Freudian undertones that that verb implies. When he is finally hauled ashore by bargemen, he discovers that “some of the numbness was departing his feet, and he was beginning to feel more of a piece” (Ford 91). Like Morrison’s Milkman, Newel is beginning to lose his hypochondria and with it his lameness.

The river test of his masculine health is repeated later on the island, when he stumbles in darkness into the river again. Now there is no-one to haul him out, but he is able to do so with his own efforts. As with Faulkner’s convict, he is accompanied by an animal of some symbolic significance:

He bellied out of the water, and somewhere up the bank he heard the water whacked loudly, and the commotion of something frothing in the water, then the sound of limbs popping and sediment rolling onto the surface, and the lesser noise of some beast wheezing and snorting and trotting into the break. He wondered ... whether some animal had swum the river, and if so, which didn’t seem likely, what could have driven it. He ... thought about Beeb’s theory that animals remained faithful to their own wretched unpromising territory ... “It’s the strongest urge they have,” she said ... “And the stupidest.” (Ford 185)

However, territoriality, or quite simply knowing your home place, is part of the masculine re-definition which Sam Newel seeks, possibly as psychological counterbalance for the boyhood memories of his father’s rootlessness while he pursued his job as travelling salesman. Sam explains to Robard why he has come to this place: “‘It feels like I remember the South being,’ he said. ‘It seemed like a good place’” (Ford 229), and although his renewed appreciation may not last, it is certainly the case that he has taken something positive from his journeys on and in the Mississippi, in contrast to Robard who is fated to die at journey’s end, shot dead by an apparently unmotivated and uncaring country boy, whose rifle casually takes Robard’s life because he “didn’t have no business being here. I’ll tell you that” (Ford 2).

The pattern of river journey, and usually immersion too, as revalidation of masculinity should be fairly clear by now, I hope. So what of the women? Is this a thematic no-go area for them? Lee Smith’s The Last Girls (2002) dares to trespass on male territory, but with rather unconvincing results. The novel logs the reunion of a group of now middle-aged women, who arrange to repeat an adventure of their student days, when they travelled down the Mississippi by raft, in imitation of and homage to Huck Finn’s fantastic voyage. However, their latter-day journey aboard the tourist-oriented riverboat, the Belle of Natchez, lacks any real sense of the river as a significant presence, as it is in the male fiction discussed. Here, it is reduced to a backdrop to those issues of women’s writing that make one wonder at times about the wisdom of écriture feminine: sisterhood within the group of friends; rivalry within the group of friends; husband problems; children problems, lover problems; gynae problems, and so on. The major problem, however, is that the river exerts no worthwhile influence on the women’s lives, but serves only as a reminder of their earlier trip, thus enabling them to review and take stock of their lives in the intervening years. The river gods have departed and those males who remain in the cast of characters are sadly reduced. Harriet, the most sympathetic of the “raft of girls” at least recalls Huck’s description of the Mississippi as a “monstrous big river,” and at least attempts some sort of understanding of the river: “she imagines herself floating farther and farther from shore, borne out into the current on a rising tide of unopposed estrogen.” And therein lies the problem: the women are afloat in a masculine domain and try to feminize it by allowing their womanly issues to dominate. Catherine confesses:

On the original raft trip....She was much more interested in her romance with Howie than she was in the river, or the trip itself. She didn’t give a damn about Mark Twain who reminded her of her uncle Walt anyway.... She was working on her tan. (Smith 188-9)

What Smith does, she does extremely well, so it is perhaps unfair to criticize her portrait of the river overmuch, as it may well reflect accurately the commercialism and consumerism of the contemporary and synthetic Mississippi experience. The “Riverlorian” offers his tourist passengers facts and figures, but fails to conjure any of the mythical force of the river. The Captain of the Belle of Natchez serenades the passengers with “Shrimpboats Are a’Comin’” and “Ol’ Man River” but seems a poor substitute for a Jim Blindso, still less a Mike Fink (Smith 111). The redoubtable Russell, consort to one of the “girls,” retains enough of his masculinity to complain:

This is not real.... Why, a Northern person on this boat ... could travel down the entire Mississippi River and go back home without ever having seen anything of the real South where people live and die and play out their personal dramas just as they do everywhere. (Smith 237)

O tempora, o mores! However, if the contemporary mindset fails to connect with the mystical and defining power of the river, the female mindset – in this novel anyway – lacks sufficient interest to connect with such force, because, I would argue, the river remains the last masculine domain. It is, after all, the “Old Man” and we should jump to accept his rhythms: “Mister M, Mister I, Mister SS I.”

Works Cited

Bone, Martyn. “Review of Richard Ford by Elinor Ann Walker.” Mississippi Quarterly 56 (2003): 675-679.

Brown, Calvin S. A Glossary of Faulkner’s South. New Haven: Yale UP, 1977.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. London: Routledge, 2008.

Faulkner, William. Go Down, Moses. New York: Modern Library, 1970.

——. The Wild Palms. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.

Ford, Richard. A Piece of My Heart. London: Harvill Press, 1996.

Gwynn, Frederick L., and Joseph L. Blotner, eds. Faulkner in the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia, 1957-1958. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1977.

Hay, John. “Jim Bludso and the Prairie Belle.” Wondering minstrels blogspot. Posted June 24, 2003. Webpage http://wonderingminstrels.blogspot.com.es/2003/06/jim-bludso-of-prairie-belle-john-hay.html. Accessed 13 August 2011.

Newton, Philip. “Gender of rivers – and other waters.” October 2008. Webpage http://archives.conlang.info/thau/bhoersae/qenwiagal.html. Accessed 13 August 2011.

Polk, Noel. Children of the Dark House. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 1996.

Smith, Lee. The Last Girls. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2002.

Trilling, Lionel. “Huckleberry Finn.” In The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. Harmondsworth: Peregrine Books, 1970.

Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.

——. Life on the Mississippi. New York: Signet Classics, 1961.

Welty, Eudora. The Robber Bridegroom. New York: Athenium Books, 1963.