190 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865John Marr and Other Sailors (1888) and Timoleon (1891). In his shorter poems,
published here and in Battlepieces and Aspects of the War (1866), Melville is
concerned, just as he is in his novels, with the tragic discords of experience; and he
expresses those concerns here in a style that is itself often discordant, abrupt. In
“The Portent” (1886), for instance, he presents the militant abolitionist John
Brown, the subject of the poem, as an alien and “weird” Christ figure, whose
thwarted aspirations and misdirected zeal become an emblem of the failure visited
on all those who try to realize their dreams in the world. The poem, for all its ironic
use of the Christ comparison, is not cynical; it does not deny Brown greatness of
ambition and courage. As in Moby-Dick, though, admiration for, even envy of,
such courage is set in tension with the imperative of survival: in its own small way,
this poem rehearses again the issue that haunted its creator – the necessity and the
absurdity of heroic faith.Women writers and storytellers
The death of Melville went largely unnoticed by a wider public. Even those who did
take note were hardly complimentary. “He won considerable fame as an author by
the publication of a book in 1847 entitled ‘Typee,’ ” an obituary in the New York Daily
Tribune observed. “This was his best work, although he has since written a number
of other stories, which were published more for private than public circulation.” It
was not until the 1920s that his work began to be appreciated, and his stature as a
major American writer was finally confirmed. Conversely, as Melville’s star began to
wax, the stars of other writers waned. This was notably true of those many women
novelists and storytellers of the period whose work had enjoyed a wide contempo-
rary readership. In their case, it is only in the last thirty years that reputations have
been rehabilitated. Their writing has now been recognized for the pivotal cultural
work it performed: the way it enabled Americans, and in particular American
women, to assess their position in society and engage in debates about its prevailing
character and possible development. Apart from Stowe, Fern, and Harper, those
women writers whose reputations suffered for a while in this way include Caroline
Kirkland (1801–1864), Alice Cary (1820–1871), Elizabeth Stoddard (1823–1902),
and Rebecca Harding Davis (1831–1902). Spanning the century in their lives, their
work measures the range, diversity, and quality of those whom Hawthorne famously,
and quite unjustly, dismissed as a “damned mob of scribbling women.”
Caroline Kirkland was one of the first settlers of Pinckney, Michigan, accompany-
ing her husband there after he had acquired some land. Her ideas of the West, formed
by such romantic works as Atala (1801) by Vicomte François-René de Chateaubriand,
were radically altered by the experience. And in 1839 she published a novel, a series
of scenes from provincial life on the frontier, A New Home – Who Will Follow? or,
Glimpses of Western Life under the pseudonym of “Mrs. Mary Clavers, An Actual
Settler.” The book offers a version of the West that eschews romanticism, sensation-
alism, or even the kind of realism that emphasizes the masculine adventure and
challenge of the frontier. Aiming at what she called “an honest portraiture of ruralGGray_c02.indd 190ray_c 02 .indd 190 8 8/1/2011 7:54:43 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 43 AM