Mabel Dodge Luhan Research Articles

From Greenwich Village to Taos: Primitivism and Place at Mabel Dodge Luhan's

From Greenwich Village to Taos: Primitivism and Place at Mabel Dodge Luhan's

From Greenwich Village to Taos: primitivism and place at Mabel Dodge Luhan's

From Greenwich Village to Taos: primitivism and place at Mabel Dodge Luhan's

JEROLD S. AUERBACH. Explorers in Eden: Pueblo Indians and the Promised Land. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 2006. Pp. 205. $34.95

At the end of this book, Jerold S. Auerbach reveals that on his first morning in Santa Fe, New Mexico, he felt transported to another place: Jerusalem, “a strangely familiar foreign land, with deep historical and personal resonance” (p. 168). That information explained this book's genesis and interesting, but somewhat misguided, argument. Auerbach, whose previous work includes Are We One? Jewish Identity in the United States and Israel (2001), maintains that Anglo-American “explorers” and other visitors to the Southwest repeatedly used biblical imagery to describe the Pueblos. This, in turn, connected to a long-standing American tradition of looking for the Promised Land, or Eden, in America. The Hebrew Bible framed the way Americans explained their supposedly unique historical experience. The Southwest, by the late nineteenth century, became “the last best hope of return to the wellspring of American distinctiveness as a chosen people” (p. 1). From the Puritans' city upon a hill, revolutionary references to George Washington as an American Moses, and the Mormons' belief that they descended from the Israelites, American cultural history is replete with biblical metaphors and Holy Land references. Starting with Frank Hamilton Cushing, who first came to Zuni Pueblo in 1879 as part of a U.S. Bureau of Ethnology team, Anglo-Americans renewed this impulse through the 1920s. They imposed upon Pueblos, with their supposed organic unity, spiritual and moral integrity, and pastoral existence, a belief that these communities offered America's final chance for regeneration. Of course, this represented the Anglos' hopes and yearnings. It had nothing to do with the complicated reality of Pueblo life. Others who engaged in this process included ethnographer Matilda Coxe Stevenson, journalist Charles Fletcher Lummis, photographer Edward Curtis, tourism entrepreneur Fred Harvey, and the influential cluster of women who came to New Mexico following World War I such as salon hostess and writer Mabel Dodge Luhan, anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons, and some of anthropologist Franz Boas's women students. The Pueblos also proved “useful” to Anglo men and women wrestling with the nation's growing unease regarding changing gender roles. For some men the Pueblos' example offered encouraging reminders that separate spheres were appropriate. Feminists believed Indian models challenged patriarchy.

The Secret Properties of Southern Regionalism: Gender and Agrarianism in Glasgow's Barren Ground

The subject of regionalism has once again become a central preoccupation of cultural criticism. What is noteworthy about this resurgence of critical interest in regionalism is its feminist turn. In late 1980s, feminist theorists began to recover importance of a regionalist framework to U.S. women's writing. Collections of literary and historical essays, such as Breaking Boundaries: New Perspectives on Women's Regional Writing (1997), The Female Tradition in Southern Literature 0993), and Writing Range: Race, Class and Culture in Women's West (1991) began to appear in earnest in 1990s. In this essay, I build on this work, but I am also interested in a specific analysis of how regionalism, specifically Agrarianism, formulates relation between private and public as gendered, and how Ellen Glasgow reveals in Barren Ground (1925) that marginalization of female labor and reproduction is constitutive of this regional paradigm. The study of South as a cultural region has had a long institutional history in United States, but feminist literary critics working in field of culture have challenged traditional methods of reading Southern Renaissance of interwar years. At same time, cultural critics have rediscovered interdisciplinary and cross-regional contexts of that renaissance. Yet it becomes exasperatingly clear that these two critical gestures--the one an opening up of literary to a broader cultural context, and, second, a reconsideration of, as Anne Goodwyn Jones terms it, the work of in a regionalist framework--do not often overlap. The work of women writers, and importance of gender, to any formulation of cultural claims of regionalism is often suppressed, excluded, or marginalized when critics approach subject using interdisciplinary methodologies of modernist, U.S., or cultural studies. Robert Dorman's recent contribution to American studies is a good example. In Revolt of Provinces, Dorman considers writing of regional sociologists, writers, historians, and documentarians as part of general regionalist movement of 20s and 30s. Dorman's study is replete with details on ideological and aesthetic commitments of regionalism. But, while Dorman discusses western writing of Mary Austin, Willa Cather, and Mari Sandoz, as well as activities of Mabel Dodge Luhan and early female historians, he does not discuss how early twentieth-century feminism may have influenced regionalist aesthetics or ideologies nor role that gender politics may have played in some of underlying assumptions of movement and its outcome. Another example of marginalization of women writers and work of gender in studies of interwar regionalism can be found in Richard King's A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of American South 1930-1955. Traditionally, work of Fugitives and Agrarians, along with Faulkner's writing, has dominated discussions of Southern Renaissance. However, King makes significant point that renaissance was a movement that stretched across disciplines, and thus, he includes in his study historians, sociologists, and journalists, as well as well-known literary figures. King's framework for understanding is what he calls southern family romance, a rebellion against generation of fathers preceding authors (thus interest in grandfather in many novels); from this rebellion emerges a historical consciousness fraught with ambivalence and ambiguity about relation between past and present (7). In defending his selection of texts, King states, Black writers are not taken up because for them Southern family was hardly problematic.... Their great theme was attempt (literally) to escape white South which had historically oppressed their people. …

Individuality Incorporated: Indians and the Multicultural Modern by Joel Pfister

3 6 2 W e s t e r n A m e r i c a n L i t e r a t u r e F a l l 2 0 0 6 Luck Tomorrow, and comic strips, such as “Secret Asian Man,” allow Asian Americans to transcend stereotypes and create a more realistic space for themselves in popular depiction. East Main Street creates its own relevance by touching on an abundance of cultural mediums and themes. Scholars of film, literature, the Internet, music, and history can all find essays in which to sink their teeth. More important, this book is a must-read for scholars of Asian American popular culture because it imagines the field in so many creative and complex ways. Individuality Incorporated: Indians and the Multicultural Modern. By Joel Pfister. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004- 340 pages, $84.95/$23.95. Reviewed by Linda Lizut H elstern North Dakota State University, Fargo In Individuality Incorporated: Indians and the Multicultural Modem, Joel Pfister claims as his subject the making of the individual self. It would be more accu­ rate to say that he is investigating the historical change in the popular ideology of individuality and how this change, the result both of Freud’s radically new insight into depth psychology and the shift from producer-oriented to consumer -oriented capitalism, was reflected in federal Indian policy. The Indians of Pfisters title are ideological constructs of the white imaginary, though his text seeks to resist such constructions at every turn. Divided into two discrete parts with no attempt to forge causal or chronological connection, Individuality Incorporated offers a new slant on two familiar stories: the story of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and its founder Col. Richard Henry Pratt and the story of high modernism in New Mexico, focusing on Mabel Dodge Luhan and John Collier. From Carlisle’s founding in 1879 until Pratt’s ouster as superintendent in 1904, the ideology of the self-made man dominated the school’s educational program. Racial uplift had no place here. Every barrier to advancement, whether institutional, racial, social, or economic, was re-encoded as an individ­ ual challenge. Pfister introduces Pratt’s rhetorical strategies and the ideological tools Pratt deployed in his effort to “workerize” Indians, including “before” and “after” photos taken of each student— ostensible testimony to the program’s success— and a succession of school newspapers that published student work alongside articles by the Carlisle staff and Washington bureaucrats. Always reading against the grain, Pfister suggests that Carlisle’s students often manipulated official ideology to their own ends, though not all of his examples are equally persuasive and many are drawn from the less rigidly assimilationist period after Pratt’s departure. Pfister expands this discussion to show how several Native intellectuals, including Charles Alexander Eastman and Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, strategically deployed in their critique of individu­ BOOK REVIEWS 3 6 3 ality the very techniques Pratt used to create it. It must be noted, however, that among them only Luther Standing Bear was educated at Carlisle. Importantly, Pfister tackles one of the most difficult questions associated with Pratt and his educational project: the loyalty he engendered in his Native students and associates. He suggests that the bond may have grown from a common enmity with the Indian Bureau. Mabel Dodge Luhan, already a convert to Freudian analysis when she moved to Taos in 1917, promoted Pueblo life as the ultimate antidote to the neurosis of contemporary life. The notables Luhan lured to New Mexico to share her discovery included D. H. Lawrence, who published two books on psychoanalysis in the early 1920s, and Collier, an immigrant activist who had promoted cultural pluralism as the fastest route to assimilation. Pfister glosses over the import of Collier’s subsequent successes in reshaping federal Indian policy, offering instead, through Lawrence, a critique of Luhan’s and Collier’s saviorist motives, as well as Collier’s paternalistic management style. For Pfister, Laughing Boy (1986) and The Surrounded (1978) stand as the ultimate modemist refutation of the Indian as ideological therapy for the white psyche. The Pastures of Beyond: An Old Cotvboy Looks Back at the Old West. By...

Indian country: travels in the American Southwest, 1840-1935

This book analyses the works of Anglo writers and artists who encountered American Indians in the course of their travels in the Southwest during the one-hundred-year period beginning in 1840. Martin Padget looks first at the accounts produced by government-sponsored explorers, most notably John Wesley Powell's writings about the Colorado Plateau. He goes on to survey the writers who popularised the region in fiction and travelogue, including Helen Hunt Jackson and Charles F. Lummis. He also introduces us to Eldridge Ayer Burbank, an often-overlooked artist who between 1897 and 1917 made thousands of paintings and drawings of Indians from over 140 western tribes. Padget addresses two topics: how the Southwest emerged as a distinctive region in the minds of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Americans, and what impact these conceptions, and the growing presence of Anglos, had on Indians in the region. Popular writers like Jackson and Lummis presented the American Indians as a primitive culture waiting to be discovered and experienced firsthand. Later, as Padget shows, Anglo activists for Indian rights, such as Mabel Dodge Luhan and Mary Austin, worked for the acceptance of other views of Native Americans and their cultures.

Women and Gender in the American West by Mary Ann Irwin, James F. Brooks

Women and Gender in the American West Edited byMary Ann Irwin and JamesR Brooks University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 2004. Notes. 437 pages. $22.95 paper. Reviewed by Lillian Schlissel Brooklyn College, The City University of New York In 1980, the Pacific Historical Review pub lished "The Gentle Tamers Revisited: New Approaches to theHistory ofWomen in the American West," the landmark essay by Joan Jensenand Darlis Miller. A decade later,in 1990, theCoalition for Western Women sHistory es tablished the Jensen-MillerPrize tobe awarded annually to an essay on the history ofwomen in theNorth American West, Mexico, Canada, Alaska and Hawaii. The original Jensen-Miller essay and the thirteenprize essays chosen be tween 1990 and 2002 are gathered in Women and Gender in the American West, edited byMary Ann Irwin and JamesBrooks. Each essay is a stunningachievement. Each one, chosen byprize committees, is scholarship at the highest level. Anyone remotely interested in the field needs thisbook for itsreach into what has proliferated into "a mountain of scholarship" and for the annotations, which are excellent (p. 4). Scholars entering what was, in 1980, a new field of research quickly expanded the history ofwestern women to includeChicanas, African Americans, Asian Americans, Mormons, dilet tantes, and tourists. Peggy Pascoe and Carol Madsen broke new groundwith studiesof the le gal codes governing interracialand polygamous marriages. Jean Barman and LynnHudson wrote on issues of sexualityamong Native andAfrican American women. Irene Ledesma wrote about the long effortsofMexican women in Texas to establish fair labor practices for themselves. James Brooks wrote about captive women ? In dian and non-Indian?who were accomplished linguist-interpreters and go-betweens. Catherine Cavanaugh considered theways in which racial identities and stereotypical images determined theproperty rightsofM?tis and Anglo women in western Canada. Concepts of race and gender both defined and confined the rights of all women in the West. Susan Lee JohnsonandAntonia Casteneda described thepersistence of assumptions about a woman's "sphere." In "Gender, Race, Raza," Amy Kaminsky studied how those attitudes retained theirforceacross time,from thefifteenthto the twentiethcenturies. Laura Jane Moore wrote of Navajo arts and the tourist industry. Margaret Jacobsoffered insights into the interracialmar riages of Elaine Eastman and Mabel Dodge Luhan. I searched foran unifyingview bywhich to bring together so largea display of scholarship. In everyway, it seemed that language itself was the constant agency of cultural hierarchy.Ever since thedays ofdiscovery and settlement, when the landwas described as "virgin,"the West has been a place where conquest and possession have played extraordinarily significantroles in justi fying land settlement and cultural dominance. English as itwas encoded into law carried the images and attitudes bywhich western women found theirlivesbounded. Englishwas the impe rial language thatestablishedwhat JamesBrooks called the "structural constraints" (p. 168). Irene Ledesma wrote about the efforts ofMexican women to protect themselves as workers. Texas newspapers called those women shiftlessand childlike. Ledesma countered with excerpts from Spanish language newspapers thatdefended thewomen ? ?Cnuestras mujeres est?n dando un ejemplo de character, energ?a,y solidaridad racial? The words are simple ? the women were umuy dignamente representada en 682 OHQ vol. 106, no. 4 las sociedades"? but placing thosewords in a scholarly essaywas a political act (p. 141). Delphine Red Shirt inher recentbook, Bead on anAnthill:A Lakota Childhood (1998),wrote in Sioux dialect "Mi cate el ciyu ha? ? inmy heart I have put you. Spanish or Sioux, the ex cerpts by Ledesma and Red Shirt aremeant to affirmthatEnglish isonly one of the languages available to the historian. I read in a recent newspaper thatthepop singerGruffRhys (Griff Reese) has cut a cd in Welsh. The reviewer ex plains thatupwdinwy" [literally, "eggpudding"] isa termof affection,but it isalso Rhys's small resistance to English, the refusalof an artist to letothers definewho he or shemay be. Amy Kaminsky quotes Antonia de Nebrija ina 1492dedication of a Spanish grammar book toQueen Isabella: "Language has always been the companion of empire." Ifwe intend to discover thehistories ofwomen of the West, we many need some fluencywith textsas they were written. It isnot only gender and racewe many want to rethink,but the languages inwhich we do our thinking. Bering: The Russian Discovery ofAmerica ByOrcutt Frost Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 2004. Illustrations, maps...

Individuality incorporated: Indians and the multicultural modern

Spanning the 1870s to the present, Individuality Incorporated demonstrates how crucial a knowledge of Native American-White history is to rethinking key issues in American studies, cultural studies, and the history of subjectivity. Joel Pfister proposes an ingenious critical and historical reinterpretation of constructions of “Indians” and “individuals.” Native Americans have long contemplated the irony that the government used its schools to coerce children from diverse tribes to view themselves first as “Indians”—encoded as the evolutionary problem—and then as “individuals”—defined as the civilized industrial solution. As Luther Standing Bear, Charles Eastman, and Black Elk attest, tribal cultures had their own complex ways of imagining, enhancing, motivating, and performing the self that did not conform to federal blueprints labeled “individuality.” Enlarging the scope of this history of “individuality,” Pfister elaborates the implications of state, corporate, and aesthetic experiments that moved beyond the tactics of an older melting pot hegemony to impose a modern protomulticultural rule on Natives. The argument focuses on the famous Carlisle Indian School; assimilationist novels; Native literature and cultural critique from Zitkala-Sa to Leslie Marmon Silko; Taos and Santa Fe bohemians (Mabel Dodge Luhan, D. H. Lawrence, Mary Austin); multicultural modernisms (Fred Kabotie, Oliver La Farge, John Sloan, D’Arcy McNickle); the Southwestern tourism industry’s development of corporate multiculturalism; the diversity management schemes that John Collier implemented as head of the Indian New Deal; and early formulations of ethnic studies. Pfister’s unique analysis moves from Gilded Age incorporations of individuality to postmodern incorporations of multicultural reworkings of individuality to unpack what is at stake in producing subjectivity in World America.

An Intersection of Interests: Gurdjieff’s Rope Group as a Site of Literary Production

As Shari Benstock and others have pointed out, Paris between the two world wars was home to a number of prominent American women writers, including Gertrude Stein, Janet Flanner, and Djuna Barnes. But within this context, one subgroup of American women writers has largely escaped critical attention. Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, Solita Solano, and Kathryn Hulme were all students of expatriate Armenian and self-proclaimed spiritual teacher George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff. Anderson's French lover, Georgette LeBlanc, and her subsequent partner, American Dorothy Caruso, also published books and studied with Gurdjieff. These women (together with Louise Davidson, a New Englander, and Elizabeth Gordon, a British follower) constituted the study group known as the Rope. Likening his program to a high mountain climb, told participants they would need to be roped together for safety--hence the group's name (Hulme, Undiscovered 92). Among them, the group's writers published 17 books after beginning to grapple seriously with Gurdjieff's teachings. While a number of these works deserve the obscurity that has claimed them, several others received substantial contemporaneous praise and continue to merit critical attention. To my knowledge, no one has yet examined this body of work as a discrete literary phenomenon, much less tried to determine the conditions of its emergence from the larger expatriate literary community. (1) Holly A. Baggett notes that In addition to an artistic avant-garde in Paris during the interwar period, there was a spiritual one as well, and unfortunately the connection between the two has not been adequately scrutinized (15). After a partial roll call of those mesmerized by Gurdjieff, including Heap, Anderson, Katherine Mansfield, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Jean Toomer, Waldo Frank, Gorham Munson, Herbert Croly, Muriel Draper, and architect Frank Lloyd Wright, Baggett writes: With few exceptions ... the biographers and critics of those listed above fail to deal with this aspect of their subject's experience. (2) Rob Baker, a former editor of Parabola magazine, did begin a book that might have partially addressed this scholarly void. Tentatively titling the project Gurdjieff and the Women of the Rope, Baker wrote that he hoped to bridge the gap that has always existed between literary chroniclers of the Stein circle and historians of the movement (42). Unfortunately, Baker was unable to complete the book before his death in 1996. follower William Patrick Patterson recently adopted a similar project, but his Ladies of the Rope focuses on the group as a spiritual phenomenon, emphasizing Gurdjieff's decision to work with lesbian women. To date, those who consider Gurdjieff's community have either addressed it as a spiritual phenomenon or addressed the works of its writers as if their association with were not a factor. Neither approach alone can begin to present a complete picture of the writers involved. This, then, is a preliminary survey of the Rope group as a site of literary production. Very much a product of its specific time and place, the group distinctly marked the works of its members. The behavioral model provided, the literary aesthetic he articulated, the various practices he encouraged, and the attitudes he espoused all helped to shape the texts produced by his students. While Gurdjieff's impact on the work of two of his male pupils, Jean Toomer and Rene Daumal, was in several respects less than positive, his influence on the women in the Rope group appears to have been largely beneficial. These writers were able to use what they learned from to increase their productivity, release themselves from dependency on the male-dominated avant-garde, and create their own text-producing apparatus with features very different from the traditional model. The Rope group and Before I consider the Rope group as a site of literary production, let me sketch a brief history of the people who belonged to it. …

Translating Southwestern Landscapes: The Making of an Anglo Literary Region by Audrey Goodman

3 0 4 WAL 3 8 . 3 F a l l 2 0 0 3 “an absent signifier” (56). While agreeing with Donald Worster that Stein­ beck looks favorably on the myth of the yeoman, he argues that this nostalgia “does not detract from the book’s success in subverting the hydroindustrial paradigm” (57). Cassuto continues his look at the power inherent in the excesses of fed­ eral hydrologic projects by examining Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang through “faux potlatch," based on Georges Bataille’s theories. For Cassuto the monkey wrenchers’ plan to blow up Glen Canyon Dam represents “the ultimate potlatch” and a replacement of the faux potlatch of federal control (81). In examining Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams, Cassuto turns to sys­ tems theory to discuss “the difficulties inherent in the construction of a postReclamation era” (97). His analysis underscores the importance of differing definitions used by the characters on both sides of the dam dispute. As with Austin’s novel, Cassuto reads the novel’s positive ending as forced, suggesting the success of Kingsolver’s characters is a limited victory, one that offers little hope in terms of changing water policy. Throughout the book Cassuto, who now practices environmental law, gives a clear overview of a century of water politics, contributing to western American literature by showing the ways in which dominant cultural myths not only influence novelists, but also creators of water policy. Translating Southwestern Landscapes: The Making of an Anglo Literary Region. By Audrey Goodman. Tucson: U n iversity o f A rizona Press, 2002. 224 pages, $40.00. Reviewed by Maureen Salzer U niversity of W isconsin, Superior In this interdisciplinary study of the cultural forces that have constructed the American Southwest as a distinct region, Audrey Goodman draws upon cultural geography, borderland studies, postmodern ethnography, ethnocriticism , economic analysis, and theories of tourism to construct an analysis of the Southwest as a series of imagined translations. Goodman focuses on East Coast bourgeois writers and photographers who represented the Southwest to Englishspeaking , dominant-culture readers: Charles Lummis, Zane Grey, Mark Strand, Ansel Adams, Mary Austin, and Willa Cather. Goodman argues that defini­ tions of region are necessarily partial and contingent, that constructions of region are culturally and aesthetically specific, and that closure usefully eludes us in an imagined southwestern landscape. The book begins with popular writers Charles Lummis and Zane Grey. Goodman finds value in Lummis’s use of multiple written genres and his doc­ umentary photography, briefly discussing his 1892 A Tramp across the Continent and comparing his translations of Pueblo stories (1894’s The Man Who Married the Moon and Other Pueblo Indian Folk-Stories) to those of Frank Hamilton B o o k r e v i e w s 3 0 5 Cushing. Goodman rightly emphasizes the difficulties of intercultural transla­ tion. Next Goodman considers how Zane Grey’s early novels—The Heritage of the Desert (1910), The Riders of the Purple Sage (1912), Desert Gold (1913), and The Rainbow Trail (1915)— establish utopian visions of the Southwest within a network of social, political, and economic forces, including religion, eco­ nomic opportunity, gender roles, borderlands issues, and personal property rights. A sublime or enchanted landscape, free of history, coexists with cultural difference and lack of economic parity. Next, art photographers Mark Strand and Ansel Adams, both protégés of Alfred Stieglitz, are shown to have developed their work in relation to earlier documentary photographers Carleton Watkins and William Henry Jackson, who primarily produced landscapes, and to Ben Wittick, Lummis, and Edward Curtis, whose subjects included Native people and their communities. Their work is contrasted with the innovative work of contemporary photographer Alex Harris. Goodman’s chapter on Mary Austin and the modernist Southwest dis­ cusses the then current popularity of things Native, Mabel Dodge Luhan and her problematic participation in Native cultures, D. H. Lawrence’s visions of the American Southwest, and Boasian anthropology. Austin’s early regionalist work in Land of Little Rain (1903) is found to have clearly modernist narra­ tive structures that differentiate it from earlier local color writings. Austin’s later subjective and intuitive translations of Native verbal art are rightly seen as partial and...

Imaginary Indians in Modern Times

As in her earlier, important work The View from Officers' Row: Army Perceptions of Western Indians (1990), Sherry L. Smith again looks at how a class of people, this time popular writers, conceptualized and described American Indians in the West. Organized chronologically, the book provides mini-biographies of ten men and women focusing on their actual experiences with American Indians, the images they created about Indians through their writing, and the personal satisfactions they derived from promoting their vision of Indianness to a broader public. The first generation Smith deals with were mostly menCharles Erskine Scott Wood, George Bird Grinnell, and Walter McClintock, with a brief discussion of Mary Roberts Rinehart-who sought out the West, Indians, and nature in the late nineteenth century, the era of the United States' final military subjugation of Indians and formative years for western Indian reservations. For the turn of the twentieth century, Smith chose Frank Bird Linderman, Charles Fletcher Lummis, and George Wharton James, and for the early twentieth century through the 1930s, three women: Mary Austin, Anna Ickes, and Mabel Dodge Luhan. Despite differing viewpoints and widely varying connections, or lack of connections, to living Indian communities, these ten people had much in common. Most significant, they did not claim to be scholars, and so their composite works make an interesting counterpoint to the booming interest in Indians occurring contemporaneously in American ethnography, a phenomenon scholars today have devoted much more attention to.1 From this selection of popular writers, we can see that they shared with early ethnographers a pathos for the inevitable extinction of Indians, so they thought, and like many anthropologists saw in Indian cultures the opportunity to admire cultural diversity in ceremony, dance, traditional crafts, and community life. Although less well-known to academics working in Indian studies today than anthropologists such as Franz Boas or James Mooney, these popularizers of pseudo-Indian lore probably had more influence on the popular mind and

Re-representing the American "Ethnographic Imagination"

Inventing the American Primitive: Politics, Gender and the Representation of Native American Literary Traditions, 1789-1936. By Helen Carr. New York: New York University Press, 1996. 320 pages. $50.00 (cloth). $20.00 (paper). In this ambitious and capacious book, Helen Carr plots the United States' sociopolitical-literary history of the construction of Native North Americans (Indian bodies and cultures) as "primitive," from the First U.S. Congress to the mid 1930s. Derived early from Scottish Enlightenment thinkers and later from German philosophers and European Romantics, the "idea of the primitive" in the U.S. shaped both the acknowledgment and understanding (or lack thereof) of Native American literary traditions. Carr brings an eclectic collection of academic discourses and theories to her examination of four centuries of historical, anthropological, and literary texts. Carr presents well-researched, richly-detailed historical discussions about the production of "primitivism" and the "ethnographic imagination" that enables it. She locates these discussions in a wide variety of sources: in the reports and correspondence of Henry Knox (the first U.S. secretary of war); an epic poem of American origins, entitled "Ouabi: or the Virtues of Nature, an American Tale. In Four Cantos" (1790), by Sarah Wentworth Morton (who published under the pseudonym Philenia); and "The Song of Hiawatha" (1855), the (in)famous [End Page 189] epic poem by Henry Longfellow that borrowed liberally from the Finnish epic song Kalevala, as well as from the poetry of Scandinavian Bishop Tegnér and the ethnographic observations recorded in the work of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, George Catlin, John Heckewelder, John Tanner, George Copway and others. Tracing the development of anthropology, Carr examines various ethnographic studies: from The League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee or Iroquois (1851) by Lewis Henry Morgan to Autobiography of a Papago Woman (1936), Boas-trained anthropologist Ruth Underhill's creative ethnography of Maria Chona. In the process, she analyzes the work of Bureau of American Ethnology cultural workers Alice Fletcher and Frances Densmore as well as the independent studies of Natalie Curtin Burlin whose work, according to Carr, "marks the beginning of a Western aesthetic reading of Native American poetry" (215). Burlin's insistence on the poetic value of Native song cycles paved the way for later artists and preservers of primitivist/modernist art, such as Mary Austin and Mabel Dodge Luhan who, in addition to preserving Native arts, promoted Indian song as imagist poetry. Carr illustrates how in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Indian "otherness" was cultural, but by the nineteenth century, with the rise of "scientific" racialism, Indian "otherness" had become racial. At the time of the American Revolution, Americans identified against Europeans and with Native Americans who they presented as images of man in a "free" or "natural" state, but soon battle lines were redrawn and European Americans again defined themselves in opposition to Native Americans, manifesting their presumed differences in a variety of ways, all of them linked to notions of Indian "primitiveness." The attempt to use Indians as a symbol of the new America, Carr claims, ends with the publication of Hiawatha (1855). This narrative poem exemplifies the primitivist notion of the tragic but inevitable disappearance of indigenous North American peoples and cultures in the march of progress and thus provides an "enabling myth" for nineteenth-century British colonialism as well as American dispossession of Indian lands. Much of this terrain has been covered before (by Henry Nash Smith, Roy Harvey Pearce, Richard Slotkin, Annette Kolodny, Robert Berkhofer, and others) and, though Carr is more self-conscious of her own participation in the dubious practice of representation, she offers little new to earlier emplotments of "savagism" or "primitivism" in its American mode. [End Page 190] Nonetheless, there are at least two unique contributions of her book: her ability to link the details of the stages of American primitivism to European intellectual and literary movements and her astute discussion of gender, a subject which has been too often ignored or conflated with considerations of primitivism. In...

Intimate memories: the autobiography of Mabel Dodge Luhan

Mabel Dodge Luhan's Intimate Memories offers brilliantly edited memoirs of one woman's rebellion against the whole ghastly social structure under which United States had been buried since Victorian era. Luhan fled Gilded Age prison of upper classes to lead a life of notoriety among Europe and America's leading artists, writers, and social visionaries - among them D. H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, and John Reed. Intimate Memories details Luhan's assemblage of a series of utopian domains aimed at curing malaise of modern age and shows Luhan not just as a visionary hostess but as a talented and important writer.

Utopian Vistas: The Mabel Dodge Luhan House and the American Counterculture

Utopian Vistas: The Mabel Dodge Luhan House and the American Counterculture

Utopian Vistas: The Mabel Dodge Luhan House and the American Counterculture

Mabel Dodge Luhan, hostess and visionary, made Taos, New Mexico, a center for artists and utopians when she moved there in 1917 and began inviting friends to visit her. Utopian Vistas is a chronicle of the house Mabel Dodge Luhan built in Taos and the poets, painters, photographers, filmmakers, writers, educators, and visionaries whose lives and works were affected by the house and its environs. Skillfully combining scholarship and a gift for storytelling, author Lois Rudnick weaves a complex tapestry depicting American counter-cultures in New Mexico from the 1920s to the 1990s. Against a backdrop of Southwest scenery, Indian and Hispanic cultures, and expatriate Anglos, the story of the Mabel Dodge Luhan house unfolds from its inception in 1918 to its modern-day incarnation as a center for alternate education. Meticulous architectural descriptions are juxtaposed with insightful comments on the personalities - from D. H. Lawrence and Georgia O'Keeffe to Dennis Hopper and George McGovern - who have owned or visited the Luhan property. Inter-ethnic strife and ongoing poverty, hippies and Chicano radicals, gifted artisans and doped-up geniuses, mystics and ghosts mingle together in this compelling story of the house that Mabel built.

Pueblo Indian painting: tradition and modernism in New Mexico, 1900-1930

A new tradition of Pueblo fine art painting arose in the first three decades of the twentieth century, born out of a dynamic encounter between the Pueblo and Euro-American communities in and around Santa Fe, New Mexico. Traditional Pueblo art supported community values and was integral to the ritual and daily life of the people, but the painting style that developed after 1900 was novel in every way, involving new subject matter, new media, and a new audience of Euro-American artists, intellectuals, and art patrons. The young Pueblo artists who created the new genre merged their Pueblo traditions with the aesthetic principles of Euro-American modernism to create an entirely new art form emblematic of the changing relationship between the two cultures. In Pueblo Indian Painting, art historian J. J. Brody presents the first complete history of this vibrant art. Based on the extensive Pueblo painting collections of the School of American Research and richly illustrated in color and black and white, the book examines the achievements of seven artists who were key to the evolution of Pueblo painting: Fred Kabotie and Otis Polelonema of Hopi, Velino Shije Herrera of Zia, and Crescencio Martinez (Ta'E), Tonita PeOa (Quah Ah), Alfonso Roybal (Awa Tsireh), and Abel Sanchez (Oqwa Pi) of San Ildefonso. Brody also explores the role played by the patrons who supported and promoted the Pueblo artists' work, individuals such as Mary Austin, Alice Corbin Henderson, Edgar Lee Hewett, Oliver La Farge, Mabel Dodge Luhan, John Sloan, and Amelia Elizabeth White. Pueblo Indian Painting places this important but under-appreciated fine art tradition squarely within the contexts of Pueblo culture and Euro-American modernism, bringing long-overdue recognition to the tradition and its preeminent practitioners as a vital part of American art history.

Escape to Reality: The Ecocritical Symbiosis of D. H. Lawrence and Mabel Dodge Luhan

Escape to Reality: The Ecocritical Symbiosis of D. H. Lawrence and Mabel Dodge Luhan

Love, Literature, and Politics in the Machine Age

Love, Literature, and Politics in the Machine Age Lynn Dumenil (bio) Douglas Clayton. Floyd Dell: The Life and Times of an American Rebel. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1994. xv 335 pp. Photographs, notes, and index. $30.00. In the years shortly before World War I, New York’s Greenwich Village was a vibrant community of mostly young intellectuals enthralled with what one of them, Max Eastman, called a “universal revolt or regeneration, of the just-before-dawn of a new day in American art and literature and living-of-life as well as in politics.” 1 A tenuous sense of coherence united a wide spectrum of people, including such luminaries as John Reed, Emma Goldman, Randolph Bourne, Walter Lippmann, and Margaret Sanger, who congregated at the offices of exciting little magazines like Seven Lively Arts and The Masses or met at the famous salon of Mabel Dodge Luhan to debate socialism, birth control, feminism, free love, Freud, modern art and literature. The village was not only the scene of experimental theater and art, but also of experiments in living — as the young radicals pursued an unconventional life style that flew in the face of bourgeois respectability. With Floyd Dell: The Life and Times of an American Rebel, Douglas Clayton provides a useful addition to our understanding of the men and women who shaped this exciting cultural moment. Although Clayton surprisingly makes no reference to any other scholar’s account of Dell, his eagerness to prove Dell’s seriousness of purpose and intellect seems to have been designed to correct negative views of his subject, such as Leslie Fishbein’s 2 largely critical assessment of Dell as inconsistent and narcissistic. Clayton presents his subject as a literary and social critic of unusual merit and originality, a major contributor to the shape and quality of The Masses, and a novelist of critical and popular acclaim. He further argues that even after Dell ceased to be at the center of American intellectual life (by the mid 1920s), he nonetheless continued to be a serious intellectual who continually grappled with the questions that had concerned him for decades: the contradictions between a life dedicated to art and one dedicated to radical politics; between a life in search of a stable home life and one committed to literature and individual self expression. [End Page 699] Clayton’s account is particularly engaging as he traces Dell’s early life in the Midwest, where he was born in Barry, Illinois in 1887. The recurring depressions of the late nineteenth century had a devastating impact on his family, which laid the groundwork for Dell’s socialism. He was also deeply moved by literature, and thus early on the intertwining of art and radical politics shaped his ideas and character. These interests found fuller expression when he moved to Chicago in 1908 and quickly made a name for himself as a literary critic for The Friday Literary Review, a supplement to The Evening Post. It was also in Chicago that Dell adopted his bohemian life style, constructing an unconventional, “feminist” marriage with Margery Currey. Dell’s “credo of self-expression” eventually led to numerous openly conducted affairs that put a strain on his marriage, which failed shortly before his move to New York and to Greenwich Village. When he arrived in 1913, the rebellion was already in full swing, but Dell seems to have made his mark quickly. As associate editor of The Masses, he expanded the literature review and reinforced the exciting directions Eastman was taking the magazine as “an attention-grabbing hodgepodge of radical politics and culture, with criticism, fiction, and artwork, much of it shot through with irreverence and an irascible, satiric spirit” (p. 110). Dell was active in the founding of the Provincetown Players, the theater group that was to transform significantly American theater. At the same time, he embarked on a long-term live-in relationship with photographer Marjorie Jones. After that affair broke up, he conducted a number of romances, among the most passionate, with Edna St. Vincent Millay. His sexual exploits, coupled with his eager embrace of Freudianism that Dell and others interpreted primarily as a struggle against repression, made him a...

Native American art and the New York avant-garde: a history of cultural primitivism

Avant-garde art between 1910 and 1950 is well known for its use of primitive imagery, often borrowed from traditional cultures in Africa and Oceania. Less recognized, however, is the use United States artists made of Native American art, myth, and ritual to craft a specifically American Modernist art. In this groundbreaking study, W. Jackson Rushing comprehensively explores the process by which Native American iconography was appropriated, transformed, and embodied in American avant-garde art of the Modernist period. Writing from the dual perspectives of cultural and art history, Rushing shows how national exhibitions of Native American art influenced such artists, critics, and patrons as Marsden Hartley, John Sloan, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Robert Henri, John Marin, Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, and especially Jackson Pollock, whose legendary drip paintings he convincingly links with the curative sand paintings of the Navajo. He traces the avant-garde adoption of Native American cultural forms to anxiety over industrialism and urbanism, post-World War I return to roots nationalism, the New Deal search for American strengths and values, and the notion of the dark Jungian unconscious current in the 1940s. Through its interdisciplinary approach, this book underscores the fact that even abstract art springs from specific cultural and political motivations and sources. Its message is especially timely, for Euro-American society is once again turning to Native American cultures for lessons on how to integrate our lives with the land, with tradition, and with the sacred.

Tony Hillerman by Fred Erisma, and: David Wagone by Ron McFarland, and: Joseph Wood Krutch by Paul N. Pavich, and: David Henry Hwang by Douglas Street, and: John Graves by Dorys Grow Grove

82 Western American Literature so obviously a regional poet, though Nordstrom argues that his “North Ameri­ can Sequence” was “the first cohesive synthesis of the ecological metaphor in the Northwest.” However, the sequence was publishd as a whole only in 1964, and Snyder had already published Myths & Texts (1960), which surely has a slightly prior claim as ecologically-centered poetry. I do not find Nordstrom’s argument for Roethke as a Northwest regionalist convincing. But his readings of Stafford are very sound, especially on the subject of the “Indian poems.” Nordstrom often uses poems from Stafford’s uncollected chapbooks and quotes them in full, which is preferable to yet another discussion of, say, “Travelling in the Dark,” excellent as that poem is. The Snyder discussion is also based on perceptive readings of poems. The commentaries on these major poets are supplemented by a survey of other Pacific Northwest poets, like Duane Niatum, James Welch and David Wagoner. The book shows an easy familiarity with major theoretical statements on western poetry by William Everson and Thomas J. Lyon, and the scholarship is thorough. Readers concerned with western poetry will find the lengthy bibliographies indispensable: in addition to full listings on the three principal poets, categories include comments on contemporary western poetry and prose, and on early western writing, bibliographies on Native American writing and environmental and ecological issues, and a list of Pacific Northwest poetry anthologies. In short, Nordstrom’s book is both readable and informative, a starting point for further work in the field as well as a stimulating guide to a delightful body of poetry. BERT ALMON University of Alberta Tony Hillerman. By Fred Erisman. (Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Western Writers Series Number 87, 1989. 52 pages, $2.95.) David Wagoner. By Ron McFarland. (Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Western Writers Series Number 88, 1989. 56 pages, $2.95.) Joseph Wood Krutch. ByPaul N. Pavich. (Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Western Writers Series Number 89, 1989. 52 pages, $2.95.) David Henry Hwang. ByDouglas Street. (Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Western Writers Series Number 90, 1989. 52 pages, $2.95.) John Graves. By Dorys Grow Grover. (Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Western Writers Series Number 91, 1989. 52 pages, $2.95.) Over the years, students of western American literature have come to expect quality monographs from the Western Writers Series, published at Boise State University. Though the paperbacks are thin in size, they are always fat in scholarship, the bibliographies alone worth the small amount of change it takes to purchase them. Although each work disavows any attempt at complete­ ness, there is no question that the series has become an important part of Reviews 83 western studies, with our finest critics and historians having written them and scores of students having read them. Whether the subject is a major historical figure like Owen Wister or Bret Harte, or a person whose impact is less dramatic like Mabel Dodge Luhan, the books are always worthy; they seem always to have been handled by good editors and appear to help fill in the immense mosaic that is the American West. Writers represent the epicenter of the West; I do not think it would be stretching it to suggest that the Western Writers Series may some­ day be thought of as a series that helped shake and shape the western landscape. The latest five books (Numbers 87-91) will take their places as valuable works and the group represents the range of interests found in the series. Tony Hillerman, by Fred Erisman, examines the life and work of a New Mexican fiction writer whose publications now appear on the New York Times Best Sellers lists. Erisman shows that here is a writer who is going to be around for a long, long time, that Hillerman’ssouthwestern detective stories have that magic quality that attracts both the popular audience and the academic audience. Ron McFarland’s David Wagoner considers publications of a poet and fiction writer who makes his home in the Northwest. Wagoner, never as popular as Hillerman has become, is a man who has been extremely productive in a variety of genres. And even within his poetry, McFarland writes, there...