Travel literature is always written in relation to home. This presented a challenge for Americans traveling abroad early in the nineteenth century since the nation was young, its borders contested, and federalism left American caught between national and regional loyalties. Consequently, travel accounts by American men going to Europe at this time were often strongly patriotic and presented a unified America distinct from its European forebears. American women had an even more complicated relationship to their country, since they were barred from participating directly in the political arena where the country's identity was being forged. Caroline Kirkland, who came onto the American literary scene with her novel A New Home--Who'll Follow? (1839) and the travelogue Holidays Abroad: or Europe from the West (1849), writes these complexities into her accounts of westward expansion and travel in Europe. While A New Home portrays a fragmented country still in the process of defining itself, Holidays Abroad presents a unified America in the face of English approbation, suggesting that Kirkland has to negotiate conflicting sets of loyalties in order to write her relationship to America as a woman. By focusing on Kirkland's two narratives, this paper explores the tension between the ways nation is gendered at home and abroad and how the differences between these two faces of America show the inherent difficulties American women faced in writing their relationship to the nation.
Most travel literature is profoundly recuperative of national identity and gender roles, and Kirkland's Holidays Abroad is no exception. Kirkland substitutes a masculine voice for her own, referring to "the American" as "he" and speaks of England as America's grandmother, an older woman put off by her offspring's youthful exuberance and promise. This gendering of English and American national identities sets up the U.S. as the stronger of the two by playing upon nationalism's traditional gendering of the public domain as masculine and the domestic, cultured domain as feminine. America's masculine identity validates the country's political superiority, whereas England's femininity confines her to the domestic space within her boundaries and leaves her unable to engage in the historically masculine field of international politics. Since America is still a fledgling nation proving itself to the world, Kirkland is, as an American abroad, invested in upholding American nationalism, despite the fact that the gendered tropes she uses to do so support her own oppression.
In A New Home Kirkland continues to work within this frame of reference, though here she shifts the balance of power to the domestic domain by placing it at the center of her novel about westward expansion. She writes for and about women, calling upon them to be a generation of Eves who will domesticate the wilderness--yet women must enter the wilderness as disillusioned Eves, eyes open to the challenges facing them. The role of Eve is both recuperative and subversive: it implies a maturity and awareness that contradict the blind limits imposed by domesticity. It doesn't threaten the gendered underpinnings of national identity yet still allows women access, albeit mediated access, to the shaping of the nation.
These ambiguities run throughout Kirkland's travel narratives, putting to rest feminist claims that women's oppression at home causes them to write against prevailing nationalist or chauvinist discourses while abroad. As Kirkland's writing shows, women travelers' relationships too home are much more complicated and contradictory, and it is these contradictions that are well worth exploring.
The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator and
employer.
© Regents of the University of Minnesota, 1997.