The “Fine Understanding” of Mary Austin: Recent Criticism and Republished Works

Abstract

E s s a y R e v i e w T h e “ F in e U n d e r s t a n d in g ” o f M a r y A u s t in R e c e n t C r it ic is m a n d R e p u b l is h e d W o r k s J e a n C h e n e y Mary Austin’s work has always resisted categorization. Writing nat­ ural history essays that were also cultural sketches, autobiography in third person, narrative poems, novels with cross-gendered characters, plays from Indian stories, story collections that became “divided narra­ tives,” she worked in genres as borderless and undefinable as the land she described. Among her admirers, Sherwood Anderson praised her early works about the California desert, The Land of Little Rain (1903) and Lost Borders (1909), telling her, “They have been such a relief to me after all the other books of the western country I have read. What Louise Everett Nimmo. THE GIANT CENTURY. Ca. 1935. Oil on canvas. 39" x 21". Courtesy Perlmutter Fine Arts, San Francisco. Like Austin, Louise Nimmo used a modernist approach to represent the organic life of the desert Southwest, encountered in solitary ramblings “observing the various types of plant and animal life, absorbing... the mystery, the vastness, the silence— those elements out ofwhich such strange forms of life are evolved and nurtured” (quoted in Patricia Trenton, Independent Spirits: Women Painters of theAmerican West, 1890-1945). WAL 37.1 Spring 2002 Twain and Harte missed you have found and set down with such fine understanding” (in Pearce 177). But that fine understanding was often elusive or too controversial for many readers. By the time of her death in 1934, most of Austin’s books were out of print. In the 1980s, Austin was rediscovered by feminists and ecocritics who saw her as a passionate advocate of women’s freedom and a nature writer with an ecological understanding decades ahead of her time. This renewed interest stimulated the republication of her major work. Now, twenty years later, five recently published books by the University of Nevada Press— three critical works and two new editions of work long out of print— establish Austin’s stature as a major American thinker and writer on many social issues, one who will be increasingly impor­ tant to students of American literature and thought. As Melody Graulich notes in her introduction to a fine new collection of critical essays on Mary Austin, Exploring Lost Borders, coedited with Elizabeth Klimasmith , Austin was recognized by some of her contemporaries, including Ansel Adams, as a “ ‘future’ person.” For most readers, however, “her work would become visible only when the proper critical vocabulary and context had been put in place” (xii). That vocabulary and context now seem available. The Mary Austin examined in this new criticism is a far more com­ plex, intriguing, and revolutionary figure than she has ever been con­ sidered before. In addition to the excellent scholarship available in Exploring Lost Borders, Barney Nelson, a rural rancher and scholar who takes the measure of a writer as adeptly as she guides a horse over slickrock , explores Austin’s animal representations in The Wild and the Domestic. Nelson is an ardent fan of Austin, admiring her nature writing and challenge of cultural paradigms, predicting that she will become “the American Shakespeare for ecocritical research” (137). Her study shows that in questioning wild/domestic dichotomies, Austin also chal­ lenged hierarchies of gender, class, and ethnicity. The third critical work from the University of Nevada Press, Mark Hoyer’s Dancing Ghosts, a study of Native American and Christian syn­ cretism, offers an extensive, detailed look at the influence of Native American and Christian religion on Austin and her unique synthesis of these traditions. Finally, I will consider two recently reissued books by Austin: The Flock, based on her firsthand experience with shepherds and sheep herding; and The Basket Woman: A Book of Indian Tales, a collection of stories ostensibly written for children but vital to an adult understanding of Austin’s view of the...