SOURCE: “Two Genteel Women Look at Men: Sarah Hale and Caroline Kirkland” in Manhood and the American Renaissance, Cornell University Press, 1989, pp. 135-70.

In the following excerpt, Leverenz explores the manner in which Kirkland utilized class conflict to generate humor in A New Home. Leverenz argues that “Kirkland's voice and wit depend on a clash between traditional pastoral and antipastoral.”

… Dress constitutes no small part of the social comedy in A New Home—Who'll Follow? (1839), Caroline Kirkland's witty, often acerbic account of life on the Michigan frontier in the 1830s. Her opening chapter, which she intends as a parable for all “ladies from the eastward world” who may venture into a similar situation, chronicles the disillusionments of her first journey, from the inappropriateness of paper-soled shoes in fording a ditch to her final hapless plunge into a boghole, just as she was inquiring of her husband when she...