Caroline Kirkland was born at the
beginning of the nineteenth century, when America
was barely two decades old, and she died during
the Civil War. Thus she witnessed her country's
coming of age, starting with its fledgling attempts
to decide what kind of culture it would produce,
and she became a valuable contributor to, as well
as chronicler of, a uniquely American world of arts
and letters. She joined the first generation of
writers born in the new nation. The city of New
York, where she made her career, came to dominate
the American literary scene during the years of
her residence, marking a shift from Boston and its
ties to an older Puritan ethic. Kirkland's style
and vision fit the rising metropolis. New York was
sharp, practical, and energetic, home to a diverse,
inquisitive reading public eager for the short fiction
that was shaped by the nature of the magazines that
began to flourish in the 1840s and 1850s. "The Schoolmaster's
Progress" demonstrates Kirkland's concern with national
identity, especially in the story's discussions
of education and words. Americans' dreams and goals
were embodied in their diction, in how they chose
both to write and to talk.
The frontier setting of "The Schoolmaster's
Progress" is designed to reflect, as a transitional,
border-world space, the choices that Americans would
make, in particular how they would choose between
civilization
and wilderness, between the values of home and the
values of the free outdoors, between the fine arts
and the survival arts, between the old European
traditions of the past and the new opportunities
of a land that had only a future. This was to be
the great theme of early-nineteenth-century American
literature, from Irving and Cooper to Thoreau and
Melville. Kirkland, with the title of her first
book, asked questions about "home" that were questions
about choices-who would choose to take the wilderness
and make it into the "new home;" what would be the
problems of this task?
"The Schoolmaster's Progress" tackles
the subject of the young nation's changing economic
priorities in a way that emphasizes similarities
with one of Kirkland's predecessors in the genre
of the short sketch, Washington Irving. In his famous
ghost story, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," Ichabod
Crane, too, is a schoolteacher full of Old World
ideas who comes to an agrarian community. Ichabod
and Master Horner both represent the past, in foppish
European traditions that have no place in a wide-open,
democratic society. Yet they are also harbingers
of progress, foretelling the taming of the primitive
world. While Ichabod is driven out of the peaceful
Hudson Valley Dutch farming community by one of
the local swains, Horner is absorbed into a similar
pastoral community. Yet both stories show how the
early national idyll of the farm, where rugged individuals
could indulge their anti-intellectualism and live
off the fat of the land, was a transitional myth.
The hero pioneers, as James Fenimore Cooper's novels
traced them, would be forced into ever more westward
venturing in search of freedom from civilizing forces.
Horner and the condescending Harriet, however they
might be dismissed or retrained in this story, still
represent the wave of the future and the end of
America's agrarian dream.
In many of her works, Kirkland dealt
with domestic themes, treating home and hearth with
a realism usually touched with irony and with a
direct, unsentimental style unusual for the ante-bellum
brand of popular women's fiction. She endorsed the
rights of women and wrote a defense of women writers,
"Literary Women," in 1850. But in many ways she
was somewhat conservative, following the lead of
her male friends in the publishing world of New
York. She disliked giving offense, and after the
good folks in Michigan attacked her for her frank
depictions of their society in New Home,
she toned down her satires. "The Schoolmaster's
Progress," one of the stories collected for her
volume A Western Clearing, reflects her gentler
eye. The two young ladies show no interest in anything
beyond the schoolmaster himself as a potential "catch,"
and Harriet's trying out of her feminine wiles has
close to disastrous results, but sweetness and light
are rather easily restored.
What was daring and innovative in
Kirkland's writing after her first book was not
so much her subject matter, but her voice itself,
which had a robust vitality that was decidedly unfeminine.
In addition, as a leading magazine editor, she wielded
unusual power for a woman in the literary circles
of her time. While she has been called "a pioneer
in American realism," her highest achievement might
well turn out to be the satires she infrequently
allowed full sway, hints of which we see skillfully
applied in "The Schoolmaster's Progress."
That she well understood how little
the world was willing to grant to a woman who took
an unconventional path is illustrated in one of
Kirkland's satires, an essay titled "The American
Ideal Woman." Assuming the voice of a man to press
her point, Kirkland wrote that the male's ideal
representative of her sex "was born to be the humble
contributor to man; . . . be wholly lost and swallowed
up in him while he lived, and, if she survived him,
be content with a pittance of his estate, or a condition
of dependence, if it proved to have been his sovereign
will and pleasure to leave the fortune she had helped
to accumulate to posterity of the public." These
are sharp words containing a truth that turned out
to be not at all an exaggeration of the story of
many nineteenth-century American women for whom
Kirkland provided one of the first and most powerful
voices. -Lucinda H. MacKethan
Photograph courtesy of the Detroit Public Library
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