TITLE:

CAROLINE KIRKLAND´S GUIDE TO WEST LIVING: A NEW HOME--.WHO’LL FOLLOW? OR, GLIMPSES OF WESTERN LIFE

Author:

Olga Gonzalez Calvo

Institution:

Universidad de Alcalá de Henares

E-mail:

olga.gonzalez@uah.es - olga.gonzalez@telefonica.net      

When studying nineteenth century women writers, scholars such as Ammons, Baym, Davidson, Fetterly, Harris, Lauter, Romines and Warren have pointed out that the traditional attitude of the critical establishment has been to group them together under categories that imply a belittling of their art, classifying them as minor writers, regionalists, local colourists, or as sentimental or domestic writers. However, not all writings by women in the nineteenth century can be strictly categorised as sentimental or domestic fiction even if they use these elements in their writings. Some writers, such as Caroline Kirkland have dealt with the topic of masculine attitudes to land and the process of expansion of the U.S. in a realistic fashion, portraying in her work the conditions of life in the frontier.

In A New Home--.Who’ll Follow? Or, Glimpses of Western Life she made a partially overt critique of the rapacity and lack of wisdom men bring to their stewardship of the land. Kirkland felt a keen appreciation of the wild grasses and flowers in the Michigan prairies, and deplored the disappearance of the natural beauty to make space for human habitations. Her view of the process of territorial expansion contrasts with the dominant male view, whose literary output emphasized the romantic quest of an individual, sometimes in confrontation with the forces of the natural world. She denounced the land ethics of her male peers, who only saw in the wild a chance for personal economic gain. She was a witness to the expansion of America into the Western Frontier in the 1830s and tried to make this alien experience her own by employing a didactic bent in her work and trying to superimpose on a Western untamed location the paradigms and discourses of Eastern “civilization”. She is one of those women authors whose work had undeservedly disappeared from the anthologies of American literature, as did also most of the women writers belonging to the group active before the Civil War, notwithstanding that she, like so many others before and after, gained not only highly critical acclaim in her time, but also commercial success.