The Land Before Her

Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860

Annette Kolodny

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780807841112
  9780807815717
• eBook ISBN:
  9781469619552
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

To discover how women constructed their own mythology of the West, Kolodny examines the evidence of three generations of women’s writing about the frontier. She finds that, although the American frontiersman imagined the wilderness as virgin land, an unspoiled Eve to be taken, the pioneer woman at his side dreamed more modestly of a garden to be cultivated. Both intellectual and cultural history, this volume continues Kolodny’s study of frontier mythology begun in The Lay of the Land.

Index

Adams, Elisabeth, 11, 173, 174, 177, 265 (n. 54)

Adams, John Quincy, 118

Alcott, Louisa May: Little Women, 267 (n. 29)

Allegheny Mountains, xiii, xiv, 28, 31, 37, 39, 40, 95, 230

American Adam: as hunter adventurer, xiii, 5, 56–57, 63, 65–67, 80, 86–88, 101, 104, 202, 203, 221, 224, 225, 226, 240; as reinvented by domestic fictionists, 8, 9, 101–2, 141, 145, 154, 191–92, 203, 204, 210, 212, 214, 220–21, 223–26; as domesticator-cultivator, 63–65, 66–67, 221, 224, 240. See also Boone, Daniel; Fantasy

American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 230

American Fur Company, 231

American literary realism, 155–56, 157. See also Kirkland, Caroline

Anti-urbanism, 161–62

Appalachian Mountains, 112

Arkansas, 232

Austin, Stephen F., 99, 101, 108–9, 258 (nn. 28, 30), 259 (nn. 35, 36)

Babylon: New England as type of, 20–21; identified with Roman or Papist conquest, 23

Bay Colony. See Massachusetts

Baym, Nina, 111, 165, 167, 223, 266 (n. 22)

Beecher, Catharine, 166, 168, 218, 264 (n. 34); Letters to the People on Health and Happiness, 165, 167; “How to Redeem Women’s Profession from Dishonor,” 165–66

Bemis, James D., 72, 80

Bickerstaff’s almanack, for the year … 1788, 57

Black women: on the frontier, xiv–xv

Bleecker, Ann Eliza, 27; The History of Maria Kittle, 27–28, 31, 62, 74

Boone, Daniel, 10, 37, 40, 42, 47, 61, 203, 210, 221, 224; myth or legend of, xiii, 11, 28, 63, 65, 67, 70, 80, 101, 127, 225; in Filson, 28–29, 56–58, 69, 82–83, 240, 253 (n. 13); and change in structure of captivity narrative, 29–30; in John Trumbull, 29–31, 83; in Flint, 82–89 passim, 101; in Henry Trumbull, 83

Boone, Mary, 88

Boone, Rebecca Bryan, xiii, 5, 57, 82–89, 224, 255 (n. 24); and “fire hunt” legend, 84, 86–88; as ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Prologue. Dispossessed of Paradise
• Book One. From Captivity to Accommodation, 1630–1833
• Book Two. From Promotion to Literature, 1833–1850
• Book Three. Repossessing Eden, 1850–1860
• Epilogue. A New Frontier Beckons: A Transitional Meditation
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index