The land before themthree women's perspectives of the frontier experience in north América

Resumen

This dissertation is informed by feminist, historicist and ecocritical considerations and highlights three women writers' attempt to reveal the contradictions in the grand forces operating in the nineteenth century, the forces which shaped momentous changes in agricultural practice, urbanization, industrialization, migration, demographic transition, and the westward movement. Caroline Kirkland, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, and Susanna Moodie responded in their work to the social agitation circumscribing the development of the political and national entities in North America. It analyses the processes that govern canon formation and its link to the politics of the publishing marketplace and to the ideological currents underlying national imperialism and expansionism. It examines therefore the market conditions under these authors laboured, and their use of traditionally feminine tools and discourses, such as domesticity and sentimentality to put their literary messages across. From an ecocritical perspective, the work of women writers can be considered as a contribution to a major quest crucial for our world and lives: how to look after our natural heritage, and to discover whether some alternative way to relate to the land could be found which establishes a distance from our destructive capacities. The foremost connection of the work of these three writers is a proto-ecological sensitivity which springs from their use of first person narratives. Through their narratives they ceased to perceive nature in terms of domination and used instead a conceptual framework of cooperation switching from an arrogant perception to a loving one of the environment, both social and natural. Their narratives were their own personal attempts at formulating the meaning of landscape and place, the main forces shaping the American imagination, and implicit in them is a critique of the corrupting forces of a man-made world, which ultimately poses a great threat to the familial communities. Like many other women writers in the nineteenth century, one of the impulses of their literary output, apart from their artistic ambitions, was the real need to provide economic support for their families. The three texts deal with the experiences of women who follow a husband or a father to the new lands to try to improve their economic prospects, and there organise a familial community as an alternative to the ethics of male mercantilism, placing the narrators in the private domestic sphere from which to exercise their critical dissection of the public world. Their work presents the figure of the woman as the organising centre of familiar life, translating their domestic rituals to the frontier locations, but at the same time as bearers of a great moral power over public affairs. This dissertation deals with the work of three writers for whom the national projects in North America did not mean the fulfilment of fantasies of grandeur, but involved them directly in the economical, political, historical and social conflicts of expanding nations in the nineteenth century.