Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 191life in a new country,” Kirkland begins by admitting that she has “never seen a
cougar – nor been bitten by a rattlesnake.” The reader must expect no more, she says,
than “a meandering recital of common-place occurrences – mere gossip about
everyday people.” What follows is more calculated than that, however, and subtler: a
portrait of “home on the outskirts of civilisation” that focuses on the experience of
women as they struggle to make do, and make something out of their daily lives.
Kirkland makes wry fun of those with romantic expectations of the West, including
a character called Miss Eloise Fisher, a visitor from the East, who writes poetry about
the beauty of the woods – although “she could not walk out much on account of her
shoes.” Several of Miss Fisher’s sentimental poems are included in the text. Delicious
parodies of a nature poetry that identifies the frontier with the pastoral life, they are
subverted by their context. For what the narrative concentrates on elsewhere is
physical and material hardship: the difficulty of housekeeping in the wilderness, the
harshness of work in “remote and lonely regions,” the sheer trouble of traveling
anywhere when at any moment one might encounter “a Michigan mud-hole.” “We
must have a poet of our own,” the narrator, Mrs. Clavers, insists; and that poet, it is
clear, would be someone quite the opposite of Eloise Fisher. It would be someone, in
fact, like the storyteller here, who is not afraid of writing what she calls “a veracious
history of actual occurrences, an unvarnished transcript of real characters, and an
impartial record of everyday forms of speech” – but in a manner that carries with it
dramatic wit and bite.
Part of that bite comes from the contrast Kirkland draws between men and
women on the frontier. The men have their own upwardly and westwardly mobile
agenda. They are driven by ambitious dreams and plans – like Mr. Clavers, who buys
two hundred acres of land and then draws “the plan of a village” he wants to build
“with a piece of chalk on the bar-room table.” They lead, and the women have to
follow: making homes and communities, or at least trying to, before being moved on
again. Several women characters in A New Home suffer from male physical brutality:
the drunkenness of men, for instance, and the consequent fear and despair of their
women is a recurrent theme. Other women characters find the rough manners of
Western life congenial – like a local schoolteacher who visits Mrs. Clavers and, as
soon as she arrives, begins to smoke a pipe “with the greatest gusto, turning ever and
anon to spit at the hearth.” But the majority of women in the book, like Mrs. Clavers
herself, have to negotiate neither brutal treatment nor rough manners but something
far more fundamental: the enormity of the gap between how they and their husbands
see land and life in the West. For them, the land is a place to settle, life there should
be communal; for their men, however, the land is a source of status and power and
life in the West is competition – if the game dictates it, then the men, seeing the land
as negotiable currency, will readily sell out, pull up stakes. For Kirkland, there is a
touch of what she calls “madness” in this male attitude, but there is nothing the
females can do about it. All they can do is try, as best they can, to put up with the
hidden emotional costs.
Kirkland published a sequel to A New Home, called Forest Life, in 1842. She wrote
many other sketches and essays, published other volumes such as Western ClearingsGGray_c02.indd 191ray_c 02 .indd 191 8 8/1/2011 7:54:43 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 43 AM