Frontier Migration, Nature, and Early Ecofeminism in Caroline Kirkland’S a New Home, Who’Ll Follow? (1839)

From “Wall-Flower” to “Queen of the Forest”: Frontier Migration, Nature, and Early Ecofeminism in Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home, Who’ll Follow? (1839) Alexandra Ganser ABSTRACT In The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, Annette Kolod- ny asserts that women’s literature claimed the West “as a potential sanctuary for an idealized domesticity” (xii) rather than imagining the “[m]assive exploitation and alteration of the continent” (xiii). Kolodny cites Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home, Who’ll Follow? (1839) as a key example of how women’s narratives imagined the triumph of domesticity in the ‘wilderness.’ This essay argues that Kirkland articulates mobility—understood as “socially produced motion” (Cresswell 3) according to the “new mobilities” (Urry) paradigm proposed by recent work in cultural geography—as a basis for transformed notions of both home and the natural environment. Analyzing its environmental imagination, I explore how A New Home, on the one hand, casts migration as fun- damental for a sensitized perception of the environment that challenges patriarchal notions of sub- duing the land as much as traditional ideas of domesticity. Kirkland undermines the conceptual binary between movement and domesticity in ways that question the environmental implications of both. At the same time, her western “removal” obscures the simultaneous removal of Native Americans in the 1830s and 1840s, erasing the ‘Indian’ not only from ‘civilization,’ but also from ‘natural’ American landscapes. The article discusses the environmental implications of a pioneer woman’s account of the frontier as fundamentally tied to effects of migration and relocation. Introduction Until the mid-nineteenth century, women were largely absent from literary discourses about the American West. In traditional literary renditions of the frontier, as Annette Kolodny argues in her ecofeminist study The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (1975), the land itself became feminized in metaphors of virginal fertility, maternal nurture, passivity, possession and even rape, and it took the position of actual women. Kolodny critiques the imagination of the land as awaiting the (white male) pioneer to ‘penetrate’ it, as Henry Nash Smith’s classic Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950), for instance, insinuates. What happened, then, when women entered public discourse about the West and wrote about the frontier and its natural environment? In her second book, The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860 (1984), Kolodny suggests that women, like men, shared in economic motives behind emigration; and like the men, women also dreamed of transforming the wilderness. But the emphases were different. […] Avoiding for a time 470 Alexandra Ganser male assertions of a rediscovered Eden, women claimed the frontiers as a potential sanctuary for an idealized domesticity. Massive exploitation and alteration of the continent do not seem to have been a part of women’s fantasies. They dreamed, more modestly, of locating a home and a familial human community within a cultivated garden. (xii-xiii) According to Kolodny and other feminist literary critics who began to re-evaluate women’s narratives about the West in the 1970s, books like Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home, Who’ll Follow?, Eliza Farnham’s Life in the Prairie Land (1846), and Catherine Stewart’s New Homes in the West (1843) focused on the triumph of an unchanging ideal of domesticity in the ‘wilderness.’ Kirkland’s A New Home, Who’ll Follow? Or, Glimpses of Western Life, published in 1839, has been treated as one of the earliest examples in this context. In the following, I argue that, from an environmentally oriented perspective, there is more to Kirkland’s book than its emphasis on domesticity, as the text is also a travelogue. Henry Nash Smith, who otherwise dismissed the book for its “extremely simple” structure (226), was perhaps the first to notice that Kirkland “conceived of herself as a traveler who happened to have made an unusually long sojourn in the wilderness” (225). Likewise, in a lucid discussion of Kirkland and her peers, Brigitte Georgi-Findlay has looked at the text as a “travel and settlement [narrative]” (19) that can be read “within an expansionist context […] of the contact zone” (26). Dawn Keetley has further emphasized Kirkland’s con- struction of her alter ego as mobile. This is reflected in Kirkland’s literary style, which the narrator herself claims to be “wandering” (77). In my own argument, I am starting from Susan Imbarrato’s general observation that “[t]he travel narrative is also a record of natural phenomena, as travelers note indigenous plants and document resources” and that “[t]he traveler’s relationship to nature, in turn, distinguishes the type of journey and subsequent narrative style” (35). Travel and migration narratives are of course different genres, voicing dissimilar discourses of mobility: the travel account is bound by its final return to the point of departure and emphasizes routes of adventure and exploration, while the migration story is geared towards the re-establishment of home elsewhere and usually highlights uprooting and re-rooting. Progressing from exploratory travel discourses towards a migratory poetics of resettlement, A New Home, like most frontier narratives, mixes these genres. In Kirkland’s text, as I will argue, the migration experience leads the narrator to question contemporaneous attitudes towards nature, both in the sense of the non-human environment and of human—particularly women’s— ‘nature.’ The narrative thereby crosses the divide between inside and outside, human and Other. This transgressive imagination has been seen as one of the hall- marks of ecofeminism (cf. Gaard and Murphy 5), for which Kirkland’s book is, in my view, an early example. It also places Kirkland (and similar migrant women on the frontier) in a state of liminality: [S]he literally moves “about” or circles the object of her discourse. Her movement, which provides the subject […] of her writing, also constitutes her own subjectivity, shifting and resistant to confinement within any space, including the domestic one. Provisionally inhabiting and at the same time moving between existing identity positions, which were culturally promulgated as natural and encompassing, Kirkland is able to question their status as “natural.” (Keetley 25) From “Wall-Flower” to “Queen of the Forest” 471 Yet, Keetley continues, Kirkland is noticeably wary of figures that transgress the ideological boundary separating white and Native American, wary of movement between ‘natural’ racial categories. These categories were so fixed that breaching them was more unthinkable and threatening than crossing the thresholds of dominant gender categories […] [O]nly during movement away from that fixed social world […] does the text even admit the Native American. (26, 30) In this context, feminist revisionist commentators like Georgi-Findlay have been somewhat lenient on Kirkland’s text, claiming also that A New Home “runs coun- ter to male notions of empire building” (27) and that it “criticiz[es] the celebration of the West as ‘Nature’” (29). Most recently, Karen Kilcup’s study of women’s environmental writing from the late eighteenth century to the 1920s praises Kirk- land, who, in her view, “deserves prominence in a tradition of American women’s environmental literature” (105) as her texts “explore—and deplore—resource depletion” (88). Kilcup fails, however, to question the text’s underlying ethics of American exceptionalism. My argument hence follows Nathaniel Lewis, who notes that “critics have at times projected onto A New Home a revisionary agenda that may itself stand in need of some revision” since feminist praise for Kirkland often falls short of taking into account her work’s implication in Anglo westward expansion (66). In sum, it is significant how much has been written about the rep- resentation of domesticity in A New Home and how little about the text’s repre- sentation of mobility and the environment. Hence this article tries to fill a gap in studies of Kirkland and to turn scholarly attention towards A New Home’s environmental imagination as well as its colonial entanglement on the frontier in the first half of the nineteenth century.1 While the book expresses what I think can be called an early instance of ecofeminist thought, this first-wave ecofeminism’s limited scope of critique regarding the national project of ‘civilizing’ the frontier needs to be troubled. As a field of inquiry, mobility studies, following Stephen Greenblatt, is inter- ested in movement not only in its literal sense (the movement of objects, bod- ies, images, texts, and ideas in space) but also in the structural and institutional conditions of mobility. According to what John Urry calls the “new mobilities paradigm” in cultural geography, mobility is similarly understood as “socially produced motion” (Cresswell 3). Mobility studies thus focuses on movement in its relationship to hegemonic social, political, and cultural structures as well as to cultural representations deeply informed by constructions of difference via race, class, and gender.2 Such an approach highlights that mobility always exists in the plural and in close connection with its opposite, immobility.3 In this essay, I am arguing that Kirkland’s book articulates the experience of westward migration and women’s frontier mobility (including both migration to the frontier and their 1 On a biographical note, see Zagarell for Kirkland’s assertion that it was her experience of the wilderness that prompted her, among other factors, to become an author (xv). 2 See Carlsen for a summary of the relationship between feminism, gender roles, and mobility studies. 3 For an overview of the field from an American Studies perspective, see Paul, Ganser, and Gerund. 472 Alexandra Ganser movements in everyday life after settlement) as a basis for a transformed notion of home and the natural environment as interpenetrating spaces, focusing on the latter.

Load more