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The nineteenth-century science of optics may seem incongruous in a discussion of Michigan novelist Caroline M. Kirkland, who is best known for work in three closely connected, mutually reinforcing traditions: regionalism, local color writing, and realism. Kirkland's Michigan-based frontier novel A New Home, Who'll Follow?: Or, Glimpses of Western Life (1839) fits into these categories and has led scholars to appreciate this "rough picture" of "life and manners in the remoter parts of Michigan" (A New Home 1).(1) Kirkland's self-proclaimed "Emigrant's Guide" to personal, familial, and social survival is described by the author herself as a "daguerreotype" (Forest Life 27), a photographic rendition of one woman's extended, intimate contact with a particular social and environmental community.
This very term "daguerreotype" however, points toward an investment in theories of vision, not simply from a literary standpoint, but also within the context of scientific processes debated during the nation's antebellum years. A New Home and its sequel Forest Life (1842) offer a discourse on frontier settlement by way of an optical rhetoric arguably more relevant to science than to nineteenth-century literary realism, or, for that matter, feminism.
Though Kirkland's texts are pervaded by references to log huts, mud holes, and the vernacular speech of rustic Michigan, they also register an experiential knowledge of and a fascination with antebellum machines and optical devices. This is not a hobbyist's preoccupation, but rather a rhetorical method for engaging in a national debate about western patterns of settlement and environmental development, about the aggressive growth and ethics of market capitalism, about power relations between the East and the West, and about the ultimate fate/stability of regional and (by extension) national character.
Kirkland's fascination with visual experimentation and optical discourse derives in large part from personal experience; throughout her married life, Kirkland's ability to function as a reliable optical instrument, as it were, played a crucial role in her family's economic and environmental survival. Her husband, William Kirkland, suffered not only from poor eyesight (a condition that required thick spectacles) but also from partial deafness. William's physical impairments prevented him from pursuing his career as a distinguished teacher in the East and played a direct role in his decision to relocate to Michigan.
Significantly, William's move (both in real life and as...