Caroline Kirkland Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Kelli A. Larson

Critical Essay by Kelli A. Larson

SOURCE: “Kirkland's Myth of the American Eve: Re-Visioning the Frontier Experience,” Midwestern Miscellany, Vol. 20, 1992, pp. 9-14.

In the following essay, Larson discusses Kirkland's subversion of the romantic myth of western settlement and her exploration of the significant role women played in establishing homes in the wilderness.

Though Caroline Kirkland's early Western sketches charted the course for American literary realism, she has only recently begun to attract the close critical scrutiny she deserves as an artistic innovator in her own right rather than as merely the background from which major figures of the movement emerged. Familiar with contemporary accounts of frontier life such as Hoffman's A Winter in the West (1835) and Cooper's Leather-Stocking Tales, Kirkland soon discovered upon her own emigration to the Michigan wilderness in 1835 that these early representations, incarnations of the British and American Romantic tradition, bore little resemblance to the actual conditions awaiting the...
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