Planting Civilization in the Wilderness: The Intersections of Manifest Destiny and the Cult of Domesticity in Elizabeth Madox Roberts' The Great Meadow

Abstract

This essay explores the collusion of the domestic discourse and the imperialistic thrust of America abetted by the doctrines of Manifest Destiny in Roberts’s The Great Meadow. Roberts assigns a crucial role to domesticity in the project of civilizing the wilderness: despite her attraction to the frontier, the female protagonist, who controls those spaces traditionally assigned to women, makes the home and the hearth into essential tools for the cultivation of a new civilization. Roberts’s heroine is seen at the time when the house of America was beginning its imperialistic expansion. Domesticity, the sphere in which women exert moral influence, is here endowed with mobility, thus contributing significantly to the expansion of the nation. Diony is a female protagonist in the traditionally male plot of the outward journey, and her story of establishing a home in the wilderness combines the contracted space of the woman’s sphere with the hugely expansive one of the burgeoning American empire. Her journey into the wilderness is to plant the values of an exclusively white Anglo-Saxon American domesticity. Although we tend to conceive of the home as a stable center, domesticity becomes in Roberts’s novel spatially and conceptually mobile, capable of traveling to the new frontiers of the nation.