A(t) Home on the Frontier: Place, Narrative, and Material Culture in Caroline Kirkland and Eliza Farnham
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Nicole Maruo-Schröder
Abstract
Particularly during the westward expansion, the frontier was not just a concrete site of conquest, exploration, and settlement but also a space of projection and imagination of (future) possibilities. People not only imagined the frontier in a variety of sometimes incompatible ways. They also used such imaginations to process and order their experience of the concrete, ‘real-life’ space so that the frontier becomes a space in which both, the lived and the imagined space, overlap and merge. This essay looks at how two popular antebellum writers used material objects and related cultural practices in their narrative construction of frontier space, arguing that, from this perspective, narrative space ceases to be only a property of the text and extends into the object world. Drawing on their own experience of life in the east, Caroline Kirkland and Eliza Farnham use gender- and class-based ideologies of taste and refinement to make the unknown space of the frontier meaningful and familiar, thus turning it from a mere place to live into something like a home. Such a use of material culture in the narrative construction of this space allows both writers to comment on and shape the ideological underpinnings of the frontier and, by extension, take part in the (narrative) construction of future America.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Laura Bieger for sharing her thoughts on space, place, and narrative as well as her astute comments on their intersection with material culture.
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©2016 by De Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- “Space, Place, and Narrative”: A Short Introduction
- Articles
- Some Thoughts on the Spatial Forms and Practices of Storytelling
- Narrating the Contested Space of Detroit’s River Rouge, 1600–2015
- A(t) Home on the Frontier: Place, Narrative, and Material Culture in Caroline Kirkland and Eliza Farnham
- The Cathedral of Nature: Sullivan’s and Adler’s Auditorium Building and the Narrative Function of Architecture
- “The Americans are Rumored to be Eccentrics”: On Los Angeles through the Romanian Cultural Lens
- Space, Place, Narrative: Critical Regionalism and the Idea of Home in a Global Age
- Book Reviews
- Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics, and Left-Wing Literature in the 1930s
- Identitas Oriens: Diskursive Konstruktionen von Identität und Alterität in britischer Orient-Reiseliteratur
- The American Novel of War: A Critical Analysis and Classification System
- Books Received
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- “Space, Place, and Narrative”: A Short Introduction
- Articles
- Some Thoughts on the Spatial Forms and Practices of Storytelling
- Narrating the Contested Space of Detroit’s River Rouge, 1600–2015
- A(t) Home on the Frontier: Place, Narrative, and Material Culture in Caroline Kirkland and Eliza Farnham
- The Cathedral of Nature: Sullivan’s and Adler’s Auditorium Building and the Narrative Function of Architecture
- “The Americans are Rumored to be Eccentrics”: On Los Angeles through the Romanian Cultural Lens
- Space, Place, Narrative: Critical Regionalism and the Idea of Home in a Global Age
- Book Reviews
- Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics, and Left-Wing Literature in the 1930s
- Identitas Oriens: Diskursive Konstruktionen von Identität und Alterität in britischer Orient-Reiseliteratur
- The American Novel of War: A Critical Analysis and Classification System
- Books Received
