[In the following essay, Bray presents a detailed analysis of the structure of A New Home, arguing that if the work is to be worthy of the importance “occasionally attributed to it, then the reasons for this importance ought to be specified as carefully as possible.”]

In the myriad game of literary status, at least as it is played with American literature, there is a certain ploy of categorization which results in a few books' being designated “minor classics.” Now the one thing that can surely be said about this small and peculiar family is that its members' privacy is rarely violated: such books are talked about more often than they are read. One of the best examples from ante-bellum American literature is Caroline M. Kirkland's A New Home (1839). That this curious volume of “lucubrations,” as the author called them, is indeed regarded as a minor classic may be seen from the de rigeur bows in its direction in the literary histories. This has been going on now for over a century—from the Duyckincks to Van Wyck Brooks to Alexander Cowie. And that A New Home is discussed rather than read might be inferred from the scarcity of detailed analyses of its form—those few who have commented having largely chosen to dwell on the aspects of the book which show the distinctive, if incipient, beginnings of frontier realism. Of course, one knows that the call for re-evaluation has been sounded many times for many books and is a regular feature of American literary studies. Yet in the case of A New Home I think another interpretive look is easily justified: if the book has anything like the importance to American literature occasionally attributed to it, then the reasons for this importance ought to be specified as carefully as possible.

Of the many qualities of Kirkland's work, the formal are the least well understood. A New Home, like other “hard” books in American fiction—I am thinking of things like Melville's Confidence Man—might possibly have been undervalued because it is not readily assimilated into the class of work we call the novel. The book, while clearly some sort of prose fiction, lacks the characteristics of what Ralph Rader terms “the action model.”¹ And since this is the class of prose fictions with astronomically the greatest number of members, we are more likely to find fault with it as an ill-formed novel than to ask ourselves if perhaps this work—which I believe we react to as solid, complete and moving—belongs legitimately to another class of prose fiction. In this brief essay I shall attempt to suggest (and suggest only) some non-actional formal criteria for A New Home, and then mention briefly the native American materials which Kirkland developed to help her realize the form of her book. But first, by way of prelude, I would like to place A New Home in a general context of American literature in 1839, the year of the book's appearance.

In 1839 the serious student of literature would surely have been reading Irving, the early work of the Boston Brahmins and Emerson, the English romantics, perhaps some poetry from the South, scarcely any novels, English or American. But the rapidly expanding reading public, the demotic audience if you will, would have been devouring novels with the hearty appetite that would characterize the entire century. The novel readers would have been reading Cooper and Dickens—whose Pickwick Papers had appeared just the year before under an American imprint—and, to be sure, Scott. The historical romance was, to say the least, established; its practitioners on both sides of the Atlantic were flourishing. In America, besides Cooper, who turned them out with machine-like regularity, there was the violent frontier sensationalism of R. M. Bird's Nick of the Woods (1837), and the popularized Chateaubriand mentality of Timothy Flint's George Mason, A Young Backwoodsman (1829). Beyond the historical romance, and to some high brows entirely sub-literary, was the development of native American humor, first in New England, then in the Old Southwest, which was given a focus and an audience by the founding of The Spirit of the Times (1821-61) by W. T. Porter in New York. The point of this rough sketch is simply that, even in its young republican days, the literature of America was manifold in its branches, though the mainstream into which these tributaries flowed was not yet apparent. American literature's “father of waters” would, of course, be realism. Caroline Kirkland must have been aware of these goings-on in American literature. She was a cosmopolitan New Yorker both before and after the sojourn in the Michigan backwoods. She was impressively well-read, as can be gathered from her irrepressible allusiveness, knew the English romantic tradition, knew Chateaubriand and a great deal of travel literature, including the despised English tradition represented by Captain Basil Hall.² In short, she was immersed in belles lettres, saw writing as a vocation, and was aware of that from which she departed when she wrote A New Home—Who'll Follow? Or, Glimpses of Western Life and invented, in a single book, household realism and the ironic acculturation story.

This brings us, at least in my mind, not quite to the book itself, but to Poe. For it is one of those pungent little ironies of our literary history that Kirkland is remembered today mainly because Poe chose to praise her. And is it not odd that this formidable critic touted work as different from his own as that of Cabell's from Sinclair Lewis' in our own century? What did he find to admire in A New Home? I am convinced that he liked the book because of its seeming lack of artifice:

With a fidelity and vigor that prove her pictures to be taken from the very life, she has represented “scenes” that could have occurred only as and where she has described them. She has placed before us the veritable settlers of the forest, with all their pecularities. …³

Certainly Poe, like so many other easterners, was curious about the West and its folk. Yet Poe's remarks seem to me to indicate that he saw in A New Home a significant departure from the highly wrought romantic tradition of believable fantasy in fiction—a departure, that is, from the acceptable norms of the historical romance, the Victorian “development story,” and indeed Poe's own structural notions as set forth in “The Philosophy of Composition:” “Nothing is more clear than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its dénouement before anything be attempted with the men. It is only with the dénouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention.”⁴ Poe clearly did not perceive A New Home as a member of the “action model” class of fictions, for had he so perceived it he could not have done otherwise than dismiss the book as an egregious piece of art. In fact Poe discusses its structure not at all. The American critic with the most highly developed theory of literary cause and effect in his day somehow missed much of the point of A New Home. Is it then much of a wonder that there has been little advance over his view in the succeeding century?

What kind of prose fiction is A New Home? I think it can best be described as a kind of imitative autobiography. This is a type of fiction that has only recently been adequately specified. The paradigm example of the class is Defoe's Moll Flanders. Ralph Rader, who has done the best work with the form, observes that “the primary formal fact about Moll Flanders is that its form does not within itself convey the information that Moll is not the real agent of the story. To the contrary, it may be said to be an obviously positive feature of the form to make Moll seem the real author of the story but not of the events of the story—to make the work seem, in a word, literally true. This formal argument is entirely confirmed by the external historical fact that many sophisticated readers have mistaken Defoe's unidentified fictions for fact, as Donald Stauffer in 1941 mistook Robert Drury's Journal, whereas not even an unsophisticated reader could so mistake Richardson's (Pamela).”⁵ This statement of form in Moll is almost applicable to A New Home (the difference should become clear below). Mrs. Clavers is taken to be the author of the story, and the story seems literally true. Again, Rader comments, “If we take seriously the idea that an intention to make Moll seem like a real story is the whole principle of the book, then it follows directly that, as a matter of positive artistic principle, it would display neither of those features called plot and judgment, the desert/fate curve of the action model.”⁶ I think a strong case can be made that something very close to this was Kirkland's intention in A New Home.

There are striking similarities as well as substantial differences in the introductory materials of both books. Moll emphatically attests a stranger-than-fiction truth for itself, or, as Rader puts it, a “man-bites-dog” sensationalism. But A New Home, while similarly wanting to certify its unimpeachable truth, warrants that truth not in sensationalism but in the commonplace. “I have never seen a cougar—not been bitten by a rattlesnake. The reader who has patience to go with me to the close of my desultory sketches, must expect nothing beyond a meandering recital of commonplace occurrences—mere gossip about every-day people. …”⁷ Moll's is a hair-raising story naively related; Mrs. Clavers' is as she puts it “desultory,” but she is naive only with respect to the frontier environment she has adopted and in her claim to artlessness: the narrative will not be “enhanced in value by any fancy or ingenuity of the writer,” whatever merit accruing to it being due to its plain “truth” (p. 33). Moll appears to learn nothing from her experiences. This often happens in life; never in action-model novels. Mrs. Clavers, however, does change, though she is not vouchsafed much awareness of this process. We, the readers, know about it, but, again, it is the condition of dramatic self-awareness that distinguishes action-model characterization.

Here then is the germ of the ironic acculturation story, as I have called it. “Acculturation,” as coined and defined by John Wesley Powell,⁸ involves the effects upon a so-called primitive society when it is assimilated into a superior culture, also so-called. But for the purposes of narrative, the usual process of acculturation is given a neatly ironic twist: the rugged, democratic, embryonic frontier society becomes the superior culture, while the migrating easterner, genteel, tender-footed and often full of “social notions,” must gain entrance to a human community previously disdained from the same vantage of the urban and urbane East. This is precisely the scenario as described by Frederick Jackson Turner in his “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,”⁹ but here it is being used for literary purposes more than half a century before he formulated it as the dominant force in American history. The ironic, or if you prefer, democratic acculturation story was to serve as the basis for an important strain of American literature that lasted well into the twentieth century—may in fact be with us yet. Edward Eggleston used it freely in his Ohio Valley novels, as did Kirkland's son Joseph in his Zury. Mark Twain could not have done without it in Roughing It, and where would the greenhorn-turning-into-seasoned timber plot of the western be, from the dime novel to Wister to Zane Grey to Hollywood and television, without this admirable conception of the democratic, socially fluid West's stipulating the social rites of passage for wide-eyed, physically and morally flabby easterners and demanding that they work through their trials or else. It was a literary mother load, certainly, no matter what its final status as historical process.

All this works delightfully in A New Home. Much of the book synthesizes around the one salient fact of the narrator's future in Montacute, Michigan: if she is to live with felicity in that region, she will need to come to an accommodation with its ambience. Just as the physical wilderness at first confounds her, so will the micro-insular society of the village force fundamental changes in her behavior, and all those changes will be in the direction of moderating her eastern cultural chauvinism, no matter how patently superior she believes the East to be at the outset. Michigan at first gives her fits, and her response is a barrage of quotations and allusions from her eastern heritage—just to hold the chaos of the frontier back: Shelley on wildflowers, Miss Mitford's travel narratives and those of Captain Hall on America, Lamb and Bulwer on nothing in particular. As a woman who regards migration to the frontier as a sentimental journey in the mode of Sterne, Mrs. Clavers has quite a bit to learn. But learn she does, early on wondering at her travelling companion's sarcasm when she asked when they would get to the hotel, only to be disabused of her expectations on arriving at a whiskey-drenched log hut at the edge of one of the countless oak-openings. If here, as elsewhere, Mrs. Clavers is set up a bit unfairly, the humor at least emphasizes the chasm between her and her adopted culture. And this is just what A New Home is to be about.

She soon finds herself caught up in the new democratic rhythms of Montacute. Pioneering daughters will “hire out” only long enough to save money for a new dress. Servants are unheard of. The lesson is that Mrs. Clavers must fend for herself, and she learns to get along pretty well, despite her neighbors' head shaking over the “gimcracks” brought hundreds of miles from New York, and their observation that her precious japanned tables were “better for kindlin's than anythin' else (p. 76).” Though never entirely at ease with the Montacute women's smoking and chewing, her level of tolerance steadily rises, and soon she is able to patronize a woman more recently arrived than herself. She advises Mrs. Rivers, a genteel expatriate suspiciously like Mrs. Clavers a season earlier, that “her true happiness lay in making friends of her neighbors.” But the task, as she well knew, could be exasperating:

“Mother wants your sifter,” said Miss Ianthe Howard, a young lady of six years' standing, attired in a tattered calico, thickened with dirt; her unkempt locks straggling from under that hideous substitute for a bonnet, so universal in the western country, a dirty cotton hankerchief …

Mother wants your sifter, and she says she guesses you can let her have some sugar and tea, ’cause you've got plenty.” (p. 102)

It was not a question of borrowing, you see. The sifter, like all such luxuries, was wanted—according to the local outlook that goods of the affluent were at the service of the community. There was little of the invidiousness usually attached to private property. The have things, “and not be willing to share them in some sort with the whole community, [was] an unpardonable crime.” (p. 102) Here was no cringing back-door petition, but rather a strident demand for material and social equality. And, inexorably, the Clavers household was being converted to the system.

When the narrative is well underway, there are even some didactic interpolations to show the reader what happens when proud ones refuse to habituate themselves to the social environment. One such is the sad plight of the “B_____'s:” the husband, desiring to be a country squire in the virgin Michigan forests, had frittered away a fortune through the sporting life, disdaining a true American yeoman's toil, and had thus left his family destitute. But since in their salad days they had spurned the society of the low-lived Montacutians, and were still too proud to ask assistance, they were now thrown into direst poverty (pp. 112ff). Another object of satire—but this time without the moralizing—is an affected young poetaster from the East. Of course, Mrs. Clavers has forgotten her own poetic propensities of not so long ago, and is now ready to agree with the community that poor Eloise Fidler is “kind o' crazy” for spending her hours under the oak trees writing verse in her “gold and satin album,” all the while lamenting the misfortune of not having a romantic-sounding name (pp. 142ff). We sense that the democratization of Mrs. Clavers is just about an accomplished fact. Near the end of the story are two chapters entitled “Democratic Vistas” and “La Fraternité ou La Mort!” As she prepares to leave Michigan after several years of the great experiment, she can speak unaffectedly of frontier democracy and invoke the motto of the French Revolution with only the gentlest of ironies. In a kind of final address to the reader Mrs. Clavers sets forth the democratic lesson she has learned in Montacute:

I should be disposed to recommend a course of Michigan to the Sybarites, the puny exquisites, the world-worn and sated Epicureans of our cities. … It would require volumes to enumerate all the cases in which the fastidiousness, the taste, the pride, the self-esteem of the refined child of civilization, must be wounded by a familiar intercourse with the persons among whom he will find himself thrown, in the ordinary course of rural life. He is continually reminded in how great a variety of particulars his necessities, his materials for comfort, and his sources of pain, are precisely those of the humblest of his neighbors. The humblest did I say? He will find that he has no humbler neighbors. He will very soon discover, that in his new sphere, no act of kindness … will be considered as anything, short of insult, if the least suspicion of condescension peep out. Equality, perfect and practical, is the sine qua non. … (p. 220)

By way of concluding, I would like to offer some examples of another vital contribution which A New Home makes to the tradition of midwestern fiction. Here are some of the comic and folk stereotypes, genre scenes and democratic motifs mentioned and often developed in the book. There is the Yankee Peddlar, the rural schoolmaster, the politician canvassing for a vote; there are county-seat wars, outdoor political rallies, and wildcat towns; pipe-smoking, toothless women and white trash families, spinster poetasters and malicious gossips; know-it-all storekeepers, lynching mobs, confidence men and always “demon rum.” It is simply a matter of fact that the flowering of midwestern fiction after the Civil War depended a good deal upon this catalogue of democratic types. Add to this the humorous use of dialect and other comic techniques and the artistic total is imposing: literary form (the imitative autobiography, generally; the ironic acculturation in particular); literary matter (the catalogue just mentioned); and literary manner (comic techniques). No one would want to argue seriously that Kirkland alone realized the value of this vital body of folk-based American humor—the material was inchoate in the oral tradition for many years before A New Home, and the profession of American humor and humorist was just getting going in 1839, especially in the Old Southwest and in New England. Nor, as we have seen, did she create ex nihilo a new literary form. But the ironic acculturation story, at least in her version minus the romantic trappings of Cooper, is a genuine contribution that needs to be recognized. And the artistic synthesis of form, matter and manner in A New Home offers historians and critics a solidly grounded reference point from which to mark the outgoing milestones of midwestern realism. Eggleston, Twain, E. W. Howe, Garland, Booth Tarkington, David Ross Locke and William Allen White, to name some of the obvious examples; could not have fashioned the tradition they did without drawing, consciously or not, upon the “desultory sketches” of a remarkable woman who was an American pioneer in the two places where it really counted: in life and art. One thinks inevitably of Joseph Kirkland's fulfilling in Zury, nearly half a century later, the realistic promise of his mother's work. And we must conclude, with a smile, that he would not have been possible without her.

Notes

1. Ralph Rader, “Defoe, Richardson, Joyce, and the Concept of Form in the Novel,” in Autobiography, Biography and the Novel, Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1973, p. 34.

2. See Basil Hall's Travels in North America (1829), a book that also mightily displeases Melville, who reflected his feelings in The Confidence Man (1857).

3. Edgar Allan Poe, “Caroline Kirkland,” in The New York Literati, Works of Edgar Allan Poe, New York: Harpers, 1903, V. p. 124.

4. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” Works, V. p. 1.

5. Rader, pp. 39-40.

6. Rader, p. 40.

7. Caroline M. Kirkland, A New Home, ed. John Nerber, New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1953, p. 18. (Further references cited in the body of the paper).

8. The Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary cites Powell as the first source of the word in print in his Study of Indian Languages (1880).

9. Turner writes: “The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European (for our purposes read ‘easterner’) in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization, and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and the Iroquois, and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish. …”