192 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865(1845); she became an active editor, and her home in New York City, to which she
returned from life on the frontier, became the center for a network of women writers.
But it is for A New Home that she deserves a place in American literary history.
Similarly, Alice Cary led an active life in several fields. She wrote novels; her poetry
was admired by both Poe and Whittier and enjoyed popular success; and, after she
moved from her birthplace in Ohio to New York City in 1850, she became a celebrated
literary hostess. But, like Kirkland, she deserves recognition for her work in one field
in particular: in her case, the short fiction collected in Clovernook; or, Recollections of
Our Neighborhood in the West (1852), Clovernook, Second Series (1853), and Pictures
of Country Life (1859). What is notable about these sketches and tales is their elusive,
carefully selective structure and a rich texture that combines realism of surface detail
with intimations of fairy tale. In “My Grandfather” (1851), for example, the narrator
recalls the time when, as she puts it, “I first made room in my bosom for the
consciousness of death.” In a story that is, characteristically, a recollection of
childhood in the West, the “I,” the center of consciousness, moves in a dreamlike
state, from the narrative present to the past, adulthood to childhood. She sees her
mother, father, and brother as they once were: her father, for instance, not the
“scornful old man” he has become, with hair “thinned and whitened almost to
the limit of three score years and ten,” but “fresh and vigorous” and youthful as he
once was. She also sees herself as a child, and then becomes that child. And, through
the eyes of a child, she witnesses the news being brought about the sickness of her
grandfather. She accompanies her mother to her grandfather’s house two miles
away. Around the closing door of the sick room, she catches a glimpse of his “pale,
livid, and ghostly” face. Timidly creeping into the room, she dares to touch her
grandfather’s “damp and cold” hand, only to be told by him, “Child, you trouble
me”; “those were the last words he ever spoke to me,” the narrator recalls. Finally, she
catches another glimpse of her grandfather: this time, of his “unsmiling corpse” at
the funeral. The tale captures the fragmented nature of reality and memory, the
shifting, shadowy boundaries between present and past, and the curious way
experience can come, especially to children, as a series of hints and guesses, half-
suppressed secrets, significant glances and whispered conversations. The grimness
of reality is never ignored: the grandfather, for example, is remembered not as
a beloved, kindly person but as “a stern man,” whose behavior was invariably
“uncompromising and unbending.” But the magic, the mystery of things, even the
everyday, is not minimized either. “My Grandfather” works, as all Cary’s best short
stories do, precisely because it evokes the strangeness of the supposedly ordinary, the
familiar – a wonder that is subject only to partial disclosure, and which finds its ideal
medium of expression in fragments, gemlike narratives like this one.
Elizabeth Stoddard, born Elizabeth Drew Barstow in a small Massachusetts sea coast
town, was a more unconventional person than either Cary or Kirkland. In letters written
in 1850, she described herself as being different from other women: intellectual and
passionate and self-possessed, someone who saw marriage as a struggle for power and
motherhood as a distraction from the destiny she planned for herself. She did get
married, however, to a minor poet called Richard Stoddard. And she began to write asGGray_c02.indd 192ray_c 02 .indd 192 8 8/1/2011 7:54:43 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 43 AM