“Outré-mer adventures”: Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home, Who’ll Follow? and the Maritime World

Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home, Who’ll Follow? or, Glimpses of Western Life (1839), a genre-defying collection of sketches that combines qualities of the travelogue, traditions of orality and gossip, and biting social satire, is set in the wilds of Michigan. Kirkland herself had moved from upstate New York to Michigan with her husband and children in 1835. Writing amusing letters about the trials of frontier life to her friends in the East presumably gave her the idea for A New Home, which was published in New York four years later (Zagarell xiv–xv). In the book, Kirkland counters and parodies contemporary booster literature intended to lure settlers to new territories with the promise of productive land and quick money. In A New Home houses are raised and populations multiply, but speculation fails, banks collapse, and interpersonal relationships within new communities are distressed. Whatever romantic notions you have about life in the West, Kirkland repeatedly reminds her readers, they are not aligned with the experience of constructing a new home.

Kirkland’s critiques of the expectations surrounding settlement are heightened through A New Home’s literary borrowing. In keeping with what Meredith McGill has termed the “culture of reprinting,” Kirkland “culls from many sources, including stories by or about settlers other than herself, references to literary sources (both cited and uncited, prose and poetry), and her own personal experience,” Rachel Azima has recently noted (413). Kirkland draws on writings about the West as well as her readers’ familiarity with a range of poetic and narrative traditions in the course of emphasizing that the West which settlers imagine—one of opportunity and advancement, productive land and certain wealth—is just that: imagined. Yet despite critical attention to Kirkland’s literary borrowing and A New Home’s wide-ranging generic engagements, the role of a rather unexpected set of references within the text has gone unexamined. Tales of maritime adventure appear throughout A New Home. For example, A New Home’s narrator, Mrs. Mary Clavers, quips, “Robinson Crusoe would have been the most rational purchase” for a young couple’s frontier reading material, suggesting that a tale of settlement and economic development set within maritime contexts would best suit their needs (160).¹ At other moments, entire oceanic plots appear within Kirkland’s text, as with the story of Mr. and Mrs. Beckworth, whose inevitable marriage is delayed by Mr. Beckworth’s years at sea. These maritime references and plots seem incongruous in a narrative about the Michigan frontier. But in what follows, I show how stories about the sea are an integral part of Kirkland’s story about the Michigan “peninsula” (112). We might expect these oceanic narratives to reinforce the notion of home as a clearly defined space or concept that stands in opposition to maritime spaces and tales, but in fact Kirkland’s sea stories do not do so. Rather, they serve to reinforce the question mark in Kirkland’s title, one that asks “Who’ll Follow?” while also unsettling the very concept of “home.” Homes, whether in the form of planned but still unrealized towns or rustic frontier houses, remain persistently speculative in A New Home. The romance and speculation of the sea voyage, I argue, becomes another way to reinforce the romance and speculative nature of the West as a fiction. Stories of global adventure serve to question the status of the domestic.

Of course, while sea stories might initially seem out of place in a narrative set in Michigan, scholars have long recognized links between western and oceanic frontiers in nineteenth-century American texts. In his 1961 study of James Fenimore Cooper’s sea fiction, for example, Thomas Philbrick notes that Cooper “habitually uses marine metaphors and analogies in drawing his pictures of the woods and the woodsman’s life” (66). References to oceanic images, travel, and spaces appear frequently in writings about the American frontier in the first half of the nineteenth century. In Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail (1849), the prairie is “like a turbulent ocean, suddenly congealed when its...