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The Frontier Origins of North American Realism: Metarealism and the Travel Writings of Susanna Moodie and Caroline Kirkland

2008; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 42; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wal.2008.0065

1948-7142

Noreen Lape,

American History and Culture

T h e F r o n t i e r O r i g i n s o f N o r t h A m e r i c a n R e a l i s m : M e t a r e a l i s m a n d t h e T r a v e l W r i t i n g s o f S u s a n n a M o o d i e a n d C a r o l i n e K i r k l a n d N o r e e n G r o o v e r L a p e As editor of the Atlantic Monthly in 1871, William Dean Howells sought to promote “western” writers such as Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Hamlin Garland, and Stephen Crane, believing that the West was “a likely source for the new realism in American letters” (Fender 5). Howells himself drew on the “idea of the West”— particularly its association with “nature”— and found the West to be a useful source of “conceptual raw material” as he crafted his realist fiction (Witschi 80, 79, 81). Nicolas S. Witschi goes so far as to assert, “The American West may in fact be said to be a key late-nineteenth-century production of American realism” (4). While the West may be a product of American realism, might not American realism also be a product of the West? For at least two decades, scholars have been arguing that once the contributions of women writers are factored into literary history, it becomes evident that literary realism existed early in the nineteenth century, prior to Howells and the “Age of Realism.”1Most of these schol­ ars cite the frontier writer Caroline Kirkland, author of A New Home, Who’ll Follow? (1839), as a main foremother of literary realism. At the same moment when Kirkland traveled to and wrote about the Michigan frontier— roughly the 1830s through the 1850s— Susanna Moodie, a British emigrant to Canada, wrote Roughing It in the Bush (1852). There is no evidence that Moodie and Kirkland knew each other, yet Moodie’s reviewers in the United States noted Roughing It in the Bush’s “similarity to Caroline Kirkland’s” work (Ballstadt, Hopkins, and Peterman 110). The works of Moodie and Kirkland reveal how realism is “enmeshed in and produced by its social context”— in this case, the frontiers (Ammons 96). As Nancy Glazener remarks, “The Atlantic group was not the only site where American realism was constructed in the nine­ teenth century” (12).2 Moodie and Kirkland encountered the North American frontiers and constructed fitting narratives in a discourse that resembles and anticipates Howellsian realism by several decades. We s te r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e 4 2 .4 (Win te r 2 0 0 8 ): 3 6 3 -9 4 . 3 6 4 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n l it e r a t u r e W i n t e r 2 0 0 8 An important impetus to the creation of realism for Moodie and Kirkland is booster literature— those pamphlets, guidebooks, advertisements , and articles describing a frontier destination, often in grandiose terms, in order to attract settlers. Both women produce realism, set in the context of nineteenth-century moral didacticism, as an act of “good faith” toward other genteel potential immigrants who may be led West by unreliable booster tracts. Further, both women intertwine realism with romanticism as well as popular romance and sentimental fiction— a hybrid discourse that Sharon Harris terms “metarealism.” Moodie waxes realistic and abandons the language of English romanticism when fron­ tier encounters threaten her emotional, psychological, or social borders. Kirkland creates metarealism by transforming romance and sentimental­ ism through satire even as she constructs a story about her own trans­ formation on the frontier. Hence, in theorizing realism Moodie shores up her borders and claims to represent the Truth. Kirkland, writing the permeability of the American frontier, teases out truth, calling...