Mabel Dodge Luhan Research Articles

Cather Among the Moderns by Janis P. Stout

Reviewed by: Cather Among the Moderns by Janis P. Stout Richard Millington Janis P. Stout, Cather Among the Moderns. U of Alabama P, 2019. ix + 265 pp. In Cather Among the Moderns, Janis Stout sets out to answer a question that has exercised scholars for decades: how should we see Cather in relation to the group of writers, all her contemporaries, whom we call modernists? Briefly put, Stout answers this question by expanding the kind of attentiveness that we bring to it. She does so by focusing not simply on the expressive strategies that may or may not have affiliated Cather with her innovation-seeking contemporaries but also on the contexts—the communities, the friendships, the antipathies, the affinities—through which Cather encountered the cultural transformations of the earlier twentieth century. In a sense, then, the most important word in Stout's title is among, and the book's prevailing spirit is exploratory, as Stout interrogates the relation between the early twentieth-century worlds in which Cather found herself and the writing that she produced. In taking this contextual approach, Stout joins a scholarly tradition, memorably codified by Daniel Joseph Singal, that she calls "cultural modernism" (xii)—one that thinks of modernism not as a set of artistic practices (though such practices may well be revealing and significant) but as a distinctive historical culture, the successor to the American Victorian culture that preceded it. In doing so, she is less interested in rendering a verdict on Cather as modernist—though she will supply one—than in setting in motion an inquiry that gives us a newly vivid, intellectually compelling sense of Cather's life and work and delivers a welcome jolt of energy and expansiveness to biographical thinking within Cather studies. Once she has established this intellectual orientation, Stout launches her biographical narrative by identifying and unpacking a moment of inception: the 1896 train journey that brought Cather [End Page 386] from Red Cloud, Nebraska to Pittsburgh, where she took up a post at the Home Monthly. Stout begins, this is to say, not with the writing but with the context—with the ingredients, both cultural and personal, that affiliated Cather to the transition from a Victorian America to a modernist one: mobility, urbanization, and the unmooring of the coordinates of identity, especially for young white middle-class women who had access to careers within an expanding consumer economy. Cather's story starts with a young person becoming modern by navigating modernity. In the chapters that follow, a pattern emerges. As in the opening chapter, they start with context, and the organization of Stout's account, though inflected by chronology, is fundamentally locational. In each chapter, Stout places Cather in American modernity's definitive terroirs: Cather is shown inhabiting the Greenwich Village of the 1910s, encountering the gender-role-redefining world of early twentieth-century female friendships, and absorbing the dismantling of hierarchical conceptions of race in the wake of Franz Boas's new anthropology, to take a few examples. In each of these chapters, the contextual work leads to a consideration of the complex relationship between particular contexts and the shaping of Cather's fiction. Thus, chapter 2's evocation of the talkative, experimental culture of Greenwich Village generates a discussion of the emphatic urbanity of "Coming, Aphrodite" and other early stories. Chapter 3's recovery of the world of female friendships that Cather and Edith Lewis together inhabited informs a survey of the strong women who populate Cather's fiction. In chapter 4, an account of the Great War's emergence as a topos of modernist sensibility yields a rich discussion of the reputation-shaping dissonances between One of Ours and the prevailing, mostly male treatments of the war and its attendant disillusionment. Chapter 5, discussed more fully below, hears the echoes of the Taos-based counterculture presided over by Mabel Dodge Luhan in Cather's Southwestern fiction. In "Democratic Vistas," chapter 6, Stout explores the interplay between democratic and elitist elements in Cather's relation to her readers and her conception of artistic authenticity, as Cather advocates for her own novelistic innovation against the dismissals of a critical establishment oblivious to her originality. Perhaps the book's...

Mabel Dodge Luhan's “Whirling around Mexico”: A Selection

Mabel Dodge Luhan's “Whirling around Mexico”: A Selection

Carlos Chávez in Mabel Dodge Luhan’s “Whirling around Mexico”

For a brief time during the early 1930s, art patroness Mabel Dodge Luhan and composer-conductor Carlos Chávez formed a transnational alliance. They sought to foreground Native American music in modernist artistic expression, and each found in the other useful talents and resources. Chávez showed Luhan a musical equivalent to the Rivera murals she so admired and proffered a potential pathway to elevate her husband, the Pueblo musician Tony Luhan, and his practices. Luhan, meanwhile, allowed Chávez access to the network of New York modernists who congregated at her salon in Taos, New Mexico, including Paul Strand and Leopold Stokowski, as well as familiarity with the Native music in the Taos area. Using a postcolonial lens, this article embarks on a close reading of Luhan’s unpublished memoir, “Whirling around Mexico,” and Chávez’s articles in El Excélsior. Through such an examination we can track the shared characteristics and divergences in their worldviews.

Bohemians West: Free Love, Family, and Radicals in Twentieth-Century America by Sherry L. Smith

203 Reviews could continue to make money through touring , especially when traveling to towns located geographically close to one another. Theater owners also fought financial decline by offering gimmicks to get people in the door — raffles, door prizes, and other enticements sought to keep audiences returning to the theater. From San Francisco Eastward illustrates the many ways theater responded to and created society in that city and the region as a whole. Eichin’s study of gender, space, economics, and Irish immigration and ethnic identity are especially engaging and will provide readers with additional ways to understand and challenge extant narratives. Native peoples and performance are discussed briefly, as are Chinese and Japanese immigrant experiences, but African American performers are analyzed with more complexity. This study would make a useful addition to research or courses in theater history, urbanization, Irish immigration, social and geographic mobility, and women in the American West. Laurie Arnold Gonzaga University BOHEMIANS WEST: FREE LOVE, FAMILY, AND RADICALS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA by Sherry L. Smith Heydey, Berkeley, California, 2020. Photographs, notes, bibliography, index. 408 pages. $28.00 cloth. Sherry L. Smith’s beautifully written and thoroughly captivating new study, Bohemians West, focuses on the long-term romantic and free-love affair between soldier, lawyer, supporter-ofprogressive -causes, and poet Charles Erskine Scott Wood (1852–1944) and women’s rights activist and writer Sara Bard Field (1882–1974). Wood is well-known in the history of the Pacific Northwest and Portland. Bard is less so; however , her national fame at the time of their lives eclipsed that of Wood’s. The other “bohemians” in the volume are those whose lives intersect with theirs. They include the famous attorney Clarence Darrow, who introduced Wood and Field in Portland in the autumn of 1910, and Sara’s sister and journalist Mary Field, who was Darrow’s lover for many years while he was married to another. Many other period radicals, both nationally and regionally known, play roles here, too. They include Emma Goldman, Alice Paul, Lincoln Steffens, Jack Reed, Louise Bryant , Margaret Sanger, Marie Equi, Max Eastman, and Mabel Dodge Luhan. Other personages from the era also make appearances, indicating here the remarkable lives that Field and Wood lived and that Smith tells. These include Chief Joseph, Oliver O. Howard, Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, Abigail Scott Duniway, Woodrow Wilson, and members of the Roosevelt family. Smith expertly weaves all these characters into the larger events that they were a part of — westward expansion, labor conflicts, World War I, reform, politics, and social oppression. Given some of those involved, including the main figures, Smith also necessarily deals with the more personal and sensitive topics of free love and romance, birth control and abortion, and marriage and divorce. The focus of the volume is of course on the intimate relationship between Wood and Field from their meeting in 1910 until the former’s death in 1944. Smith arranges that story into twenty chapters and follows a chronological trajectory. She provides two background chapters on the early lives of the protagonists before their meeting, including information on their first marriages and parenthood. Wood was thirty years Field’s senior and was already a practitioner of free-love and an advocate of anarchism by the time they met. Younger and less experienced, Field was more conventional and socially limited. Her husband was Albert Erghott, a Baptist minister. After a brief mission in Burma, the two moved to Portland from the Midwest in 1910 when Erghott earned a ministerial position in a local church. Field, a woman of considerable imagination and ambition, longed for more than what being a minister’s wife and a mother afforded. Only months after their first encounter, Field and Woods embarked on 204 OHQ vol. 122, no. 2 their tumultuous relationship — one that would forever change their lives, and their families’ futures, and would impact national events as it intersected with them. Much of the story Smith tells occupies the next sixteen or so years of Wood’s and Field’s lives. They were principally apart during that time and pursued their own interests as much as each other. Only after the realities of their individual lives and obligations...

They Met at Wounded Knee: The Eastmans’ Story by Gretchen Cassel Eick

Reviewed by: They Met at Wounded Knee: The Eastmans’ Story by Gretchen Cassel Eick Janet Dean They Met at Wounded Knee: The Eastmans’ Story. By Gretchen Cassel Eick. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2020. xiii + 353 pp. $45.00 cloth. When Charles Ohiyesa Eastman and Elaine Goodale married in 1891, they formed a power couple in the fight for Indigenous people in the United States. He was a Santee Dakota (Sioux) doctor, serving his community as government physician at the Pine Ridge Agency. She was a white teacher and writer from Massachusetts whose work with Indigenous students at Hampton Institute led to a government position as supervisor of education in the Dakotas. Despite [End Page 177] their Indian Bureau appointments, both had reputations as critics of federal Indian policy and advocates for western tribes. Joining forces in life and work, the Eastmans would go on to dedicate their lives to the advancement of Indigenous rights. But the inauspicious timing of their engagement, days before the massacre at Wounded Knee, suggests the magnitude of what they, and their marriage, were up against: no less than a national campaign to eliminate Native American peoples and cultures. Less discernibly, the couple faced tensions within the movement they helped lead, as well as changes in their individual views about what was in the best interests of Indigenous people. Gretchen Cassel Eick’s They Met at Wounded Knee: The Eastmans’ Story uses the record of this fascinating shared life as a framework for exploring the conflicts and contradictions of the Progressive Era. Interweaving descriptions of the Eastmans’ nearly thirty-year partnership with overviews of major historical events, shifts in government policy, and developments in reform movements, Eick offers not so much an intimate portrait of a marriage as a case study in the convergence of the personal and the political. Eick draws on scholarly biographies and the Eastmans’ memoirs, but rather than just presenting side-by-side life stories, she illuminates the major events that positioned her subjects between white and Indigenous worlds. The opening chapters focus on the Dakota War of 1862, which made Charles Eastman a refugee when he was four years old. Charles was raised by his grandmother in a traditional Dakota community in Canada; at fifteen, he was reunited with his father and brothers, who had been imprisoned by the United States and had emerged Christianized and assimilated. Charles learned English, converted to Christianity, and earned degrees from Dartmouth College and Boston University School of Medicine, but as Eick notes, he retained a belief that practicing traditional culture was an important form of resistance. Eick devotes less attention to Elaine’s early years but outlines a childhood in a New England family dedicated to social reform and an early writing career (as a teenager, she published a book of poetry with her sister). By the time of her marriage, Elaine was writing articles criticizing the commissioner of Indian Affairs and exposing the corruption of land speculators, railroad companies, and political appointees who exploited tribes. She learned Dakota and spent a year traveling to reservations to document conditions. In the years that followed their marriage, Charles held a variety of positions as Elaine supported his career and raised their six children, writing when she could. Eick details Charles’s work as a representative for the YMCA (he started forty-three chapters of the organization on reservations around the country), a lobbyist, an educator, a Bureau of Indian Affairs official, and a founder and president of the Society of American Indians. She chronicles Charles’s growing [End Page 178] celebrity as an author and speaker and the couples’ creation of a summer camp devoted to teaching Indigenous practices. Alternating with these descriptions are analyses of historical events, from the Battle of Little Big Horn to World War I, and introductions to a cast of prominent figures, including Chief Red Cloud, Theodore Roosevelt, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Emma Goldman, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin/Zitkala-Ŝa, and Mabel Dodge Luhan. While most of these figures did not directly interact with the Eastmans, their stories offer rich context for understanding the transformations in politics, society, and culture that the couple was experiencing at...

Thornton Wilder: At Home in the Southwest

Abstract Thornton Wilder is regarded by most as a New Englander, with a house in Hamden, Connecticut, built with early proceeds from The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and a second home purchased in 1966 in Edgartown on Martha's Vineyard. Throughout his adult life, however, Wilder had a recurring urgency to leave home when he was working on novels or plays. For over a third of his life, he found a temporary refuge in the American Southwest. He established deep friendships there with fellow writers Mabel Dodge Luhan and Witter Bynner and found desert retreats in which to start one novel (The Eighth Day), finish another (Heaven's My Destination), and write most of his play The Merchant of Yonkers. This article theorizes that Wilder, like characters in Heaven's My Destination and Theophilus North, might have been in Wilder biographer Penelope Niven's words, a lifelong traveler “searching for home” (672). For Wilder, the Southwest may have been as close to a creative and spiritual home as any he would ever find.

Turquoise Door: Finding Mabel Dodge Luhan in New Mexico by Lauren Camp

Turquoise Door: Finding Mabel Dodge Luhan in New Mexico by Lauren Camp

On Harmony

On Harmony Lauren Camp (bio) Train stops and labneh and the grim little sun and our clappingall morning and later we slicked down to righteousdance moves, pink greasy boxes of dough. Some would say we were not divine between us but we hummed our shared holyfamily in a quarry of folding chairs. One hour skimmedto another and they were not forbidden, or clarified with reason, but the ache of the olives and responsesrendered in timbal, qanun, tarub, the oud, and the sounds againof distress and truth. Darwish said "Nothing is harder…than the smell of dreams, while they're evaporating." On those days we dressedin our blacks and thick tongues, and the narrativewe offered was not an acceptance, a raging. We wanted to forget to kneel. We spent the days linked to our divisionsof oppression and we fixed to the matterof beginning. Every thought claimed five wounds. Dresses loose with their fine threads, red and lime,wheat gold. Outside, a stone bridge watched the great riverweeping, a mother sang to her baby. My taste in the mouth of this crowd. Habibi, our losses, and most of us rustlingour arrows beneath them. Five times a day we ate all the oilysweetness with our vigorous fingers, our tongues moving to cumin and cream, and we passed from news to a chapelof pita, to portions of dusk, our ghosts and marginal angers.I took 48 photos of shadows in quick succession, thinking one better than another, and saw in each photoa lapse to spot evidence. I deleted themfrom my memory which wanted not to hunger [End Page 7] for these compulsions, statistics. We were taughtso many instances to doubt, but the light came alongsinging and we joined it, taking its melody as apology. [End Page 8] Lauren Camp Lauren Camp's newest book is Turquoise Door: Finding Mabel Dodge Luhan in New Mexico (3: A Taos Press, 2018). Her third book, One Hundred Hungers (Tupelo Press, 2016), won the Dorset Prize and was named a finalist for the Arab American Book Award. She is a Senior Fellow at the Black Earth Institute. Copyright © 2019 Pleiades and Pleiades Press

A Study of Americanness in D. H. Lawrence’s “The Woman Who Rode Away"

로렌스가 아메리카 대륙에 가보기 이전에 아메리카와 그 대지가 왜 그의 관심을 끌게 되었는지를 아는 것은 흥미롭다. 그는 나다니엘 호손, 허만 멜빌, 월트 휘트먼 등 미국 작가들의 작품을 읽었다. 그가 미국 문학의 특성을 그 장소와 대지, 특히 뉴멕시코와 멕시코와 같은 미남서부 지역과 관련짓고 있다는 것은 분명하다. 그 이유는 그 지역이 뉴욕, 보스톤, 워싱턴과 그 이외의 도시들과 같은 미동부 지역의 도시와 멀리 위치해 있을 뿐 아니라 아메리카 원주민 고유의 원시적 문화를 잘 보존해왔기 때문이다. 로렌스에게 있어서 아메리카는 자유와 해방의 상징이다. 반면 영국과 유럽은 이미 로렌스가 더 이상 견딜 수 없는 엄격하고 고집스런 그들의 오랜 전통, 문화와 종교에 의해 타락해버렸다고 믿고 있기 때문이다. 그러므로 그는 1922년 마벨 더쥐 루한에 의해 초청을 받았을 때 기꺼이 미국으로 이주를 하게 되었다. 그가 타오스에 2년 이상 머물게 되면서 그는 “말을 타고 떠난 여인”을 집필했다. 이 이야기는 미국고전문학연구 에 잘 나타나 있듯이 그의 마음에 오랫동안 지니고 있었던 “그것”을 실현해보려는 로렌스의 시도라 할 수 있다. “그것”은 그가 미국성이라 간주하고 있는 것으로 유럽과 영국적인 것과는 다른 고유성을 지니고 있다. 한 백인 여인이 인디언 원주민 부족의 원시적 대지를 탐색하는 내용을 소개하면서 로렌스는 “그것”이 무엇인지, “그것”이 어떻게 작동하는지, 그리고 “그것”이 왜 중요한지를 보여주고 있다.It is curious to know why America and its land had interested D. H. Lawrence even before he landed on it. He read American writers’ books; those of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, etc,. It is certain that he related qualities of American literature to its place and landscape, in particular, the Southwest of America like New and Old Mexico not only because the area was located away from the Eastern American cities like New York, Boston, Washington D.C. and others, but also because it had preserved its unique and primitive culture of the indigenous people and Mexican people. For Lawrence, American was a symbol of liberty and freedom while he believed that England and Europe were already corrupted by their old tradition, culture, and religion, all of which had strict and stubborn doctrines that Lawrence could not stand any more. Therefore, he was willing to move to the United States in 1922 as he was invited by Mabel Dodge Luhan. And while staying at Taos for more than two years, he wrote “The Woman Who Rode Away.” This story is Lawrence’s attempt to test whether he realizes what he had longed to hold in his heart and mind “IT” in his Studies in Classic American Literature . IT may be what he has thought of as Americanness, which is unique and different from something European and English. Introducing a white woman’s exploring into a primitive land of a Native tribe, Lawrence’s story subtly shows what IT is, how IT works, and why IT is important.

Book Review: Corresponding Lives: Mabel Dodge Luhan, A. A. Brill, and the Psychoanalytic Adventure in America

Book Review: Corresponding Lives: Mabel Dodge Luhan, A. A. Brill, and the Psychoanalytic Adventure in America

Sasha T. Scott. A Strange Mixture: The Art and Politics of Painting Pueblo Indians. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015. xii+266 pp.; 58 color and 30 black-and-white illustrations, note, bibliography, index. $45.00.

Scott is less convincing in her interpretation of the simplified and abstracted artwork of Marsden Hartley, Awa Tsireh, and Georgia O’Keeffe. In her endeavor to find a dialogue between their art and federal Indian politics, Scott stretches her interpretations beyond archival sources specifically associated with the artists to include unsubstantiated claims. She writes: Hartley “could have” learned about Pueblo beliefs and dances from Mabel Dodge Luhan and Edgar Hewett (56); O’Keeffe was “likely aware” of D. H. Lawrence’s “uneasy reaction to the region’s intercultural environment” (189). Addressing the intentional silences of Awa Tsireh’s paintings, Scott first describes his tactic of eliding “esoteric meaning” and then encourages the reader to “surmise that Awa Tsireh was often singing ceremonial songs related to his subject matter” (161–63).

The 'secret' source of 'female hysteria': the role that syphilis played in the construction of female sexuality and psychoanalysis in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the unspoken fear of syphilis played a significant role in the development of beliefs about female sexuality. Many women were afraid of sexual relationships with men because they feared contracting syphilis, which was, at that time, untreatable. Women also feared passing this disease on to their children. Women's sexual aversion, or repression, became a focus for Freud and his colleagues, whose theory of psychosexual development was based on their treatment of women. This article examines the case of Dora, the memoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan and other sources to argue that the fear of syphilis was a significant factor in upper- and middle-class women's avoidance of heterosexual relationships. The fear of syphilis, in turn, became a significant factor in the psychoanalytic construction of female sexuality. The social suppression of the fear of syphilis has had a profound impact on theories of women's development. The implication for psychiatry is that our models of psychological development occur within a sociocultural milieu and cannot escape suppressed aspects of our culture.

Education at the Edge of Empire: Negotiating Pueblo Identity in New Mexico’s Indian Boarding Schools by John R. Gram, and: Community Self-Determination: American Indian Education in Chicago, 1952–2006 by John L. Laukaitis

Reviewed by: Education at the Edge of Empire: Negotiating Pueblo Identity in New Mexico’s Indian Boarding Schools by John R. Gram, and: Community Self-Determination: American Indian Education in Chicago, 1952–2006 by John L. Laukaitis Kevin Whalen Education at the Edge of Empire: Negotiating Pueblo Identity in New Mexico’s Indian Boarding Schools. By John R. Gram. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015. xviii + 241 pp. Cloth $45, paper $30. Community Self-Determination: American Indian Education in Chicago, 1952–2006. By John L. Laukaitis. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015. xviii + 264 pp. Cloth $85, paper $25. After an almost decade-long slowdown, the literature on Indian education is gaining momentum again. During the 1990s, scholars began telling the stories of Indian boarding schools that aimed to erase Indigenous languages and cultures and assimilate Native people into the broader body politic of the United States. Robert Trennert and David Wallace Adams elucidated the design of the schools, while K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Brenda Child, and others highlighted how Native students and communities endured boarding school experiences and protected the Native languages and cultures that the schools aimed to erase. Almost as quickly as the literature began to flourish, it went quiet again. A new group of scholars is pushing the study of Indian education in novel directions. Where the first wave of scholarship on boarding schools often focused on specific schools, scholars such as Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert began looking at the lasting connections between schools and Native communities; others such as Julie Davis reminded us that Indigenous education in the United States went beyond boarding schools as she chronicled the rise of community-based Indigenous education in Minneapolis. Now, John R. Gram and John J. Laukaitis provide a pair of studies that have added even more depth and nuance to Gilbert’s attention to community approaches to boarding schools and Davis’s examination of Indigenous schooling during the era of educational self-determination. While Gram and Laukaitis tackle topics separated by vast time and space, they engage in a common push to enrich the broader literature on [End Page 127] Indian education with close attention to how local contexts can both reinforce and reorder what we know about Indigenous education. While Gram is not the first scholar to explore the complicated ties between Indigenous communities and federal Indian boarding schools, he adds new layers of complexity to this approach as he teases out connections between Pueblo communities of northern New Mexico and the federal Indian boarding schools at Albuquerque and Santa Fe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This nuance is especially apparent in the first two chapters, where Gram sketches out a political economy in which the schools desperately needed Pueblo students to keep their doors open, and where Pueblos held the ability to send their children to Catholic boarding schools or federal schools in Arizona and Southern California. Using this leverage, Pueblo communities often forced the schools to change policies and practices they deemed harmful or unsatisfactory. Foremost for Pueblo people was the ability for their children to come home during the summer months. Where other large, off-reservation boarding schools often managed to hold students over the summer, Pueblo parents and political leaders made clear that they would not send their children to Albuquerque or Santa Fe if they could not come home for the summer. In his third chapter, Gram aptly places the schools at Santa Fe and Albuquerque within broader social and political contexts. Artists and writers such as Mabel Dodge Luhan and Charles F. Lummis—people the author calls “romantics”—held Pueblo culture as an antidote to the alleged moral and political decay brought by industrial capitalism, and they pushed the Bureau of Indian Affairs to protect rather than erase Pueblo lifeways. Alongside the visions of local crusaders, a nationwide disdain for boarding schools placed additional pressure on the schools at Albuquerque and Santa Fe. Here, Gram aptly demonstrates how the nexus of national and local politics provided Pueblo people with opportunities to exact change from school officials. Gram’s development of a political economy of Indian education stands among the most important contributions of his book. To close...

Mabel Dodge Luhan & company: American moderns and the West

Mabel Dodge Luhan & company: American moderns and the West

The Suppressed Memoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan: Sex, Syphilis, and Psychoanalysis in the Making of Modern American Culture by Lois Palken Rudnick (review)

The Suppressed Memoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan: Sex, Syphilis, and Psychoanalysis in the Making of Modern American Culture by Lois Palken Rudnick (review)

The suppressed memoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan: sex, syphilis, and psychoanalysis in the making of modern American culture

The suppressed memoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan: sex, syphilis, and psychoanalysis in the making of modern American culture

María Cristina Mena, Transnationalism, and Mass Media: Untold Stories in the Archive

María Cristina Mena, Transnationalism, and Mass Media:Untold Stories in the Archive Margaret A. Toth Although today María Cristina Mena (1893-1965) is a relatively unknown author even among scholars of US women's literary history, at the peak of her career she distinguished herself as an authority on Mexican culture and a pioneer in Mexican American writing. Household Magazine, which published her story "A Son of the Tropics," billed her as "the foremost interpreter of Mexican life," and a biographical sketch published in a volume devoted to Catholic authors proclaimed her to be, albeit inaccurately, "the first woman of Mexican birth to write fiction in English" (qtd. in Doherty xii; "Maria Cristina Chambers" 118). While Mena fell into obscurity toward the end of her lifetime, she was an important voice in the early-twentieth-century Latina literary scene. Her reputation was recuperated four decades later by scholars like Amy Doherty Mohr and Elizabeth Ammons. Mena was born in Mexico City and immigrated to New York City by herself at the age of fourteen. Critics, myself included, have speculated that her father, an ardent supporter of Mexican president Porfirio Díaz, sent her to the United States because of brewing domestic turmoil that culminated in the Mexican Revolution and concomitant retribution against Díaz's followers three years after Mena left. Little is known about Mena's early experiences in the States, but a photographic portrait taken at a studio on Washington Avenue in New York City captures the author the year she arrived (see fig. 1). The teenager, whose life just has been radically disrupted and restructured, looks directly into the camera. She smiles confidently and almost coyly, but her eyes reveal, perhaps, strain or wariness. After this point, Mena disappeared from both private and public records until roughly six years later, when the renowned Century [End Page 331] Magazine hired her in 1913 to write short fiction about life in Mexico. In the next three years, Mena wrote eight stories and one essay (on the Mexican composer and musician Julian Carrillo) for Century, along with two stories for other periodicals. In 1916 she married the playwright and editor Henry Kellett Chambers and moved to her new home on Long Island. During her marriage, she and her husband struck up friendships with other literary figures, including D. H. Lawrence, with whom Mena shared sustained correspondence, and Aldous Huxley. After Chambers's death in 1935, Mena relocated to an apartment in Brooklyn Heights, where she reinvented herself as an author of children's literature, publishing five books between 1942 and 1953. She lived there until her death in 1965. Aside from the photograph, which until now has not seen publication, these are the basic details of Mena's personal and professional life to which scholars have had access and that appear repeatedly in the criticism. However, a newly available archive, the María Cristina Mena Chambers Papers, significantly expands our understanding of Mena's biography and authorship. The physical archive is housed at the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Project (also known simply as the Recovery Project) at the University of Houston. It consists of two boxes of published and unpublished works by Mena, correspondence from such figures as D. H. Lawrence and Mabel Dodge Luhan, photographs of the author, and ephemera.1 Ebsco Publishing released the materials electronically in the spring of 2013 as part of The Latino-Hispanic American Experience: Leaders, Writers, and Thinkers (Series II), a digital archive devoted to "thematic content focusing on the evolution of Hispanic civil rights, religious thought, and the growing presence of women writers from the late 19th and 20th centuries" ("Digital Archives"). The archive overturns several well-established views on Mena. For one, her writing career was much more consistent and productive than previously understood. Scholars believed that after her marriage to Chambers, Mena's literary enterprise halted dramatically.2 In fact, the archive reveals that Mena not only continued writing after her marriage but also actively submitted to and published in a variety of venues from 1916 until her death in 1965. This story emerges not just through archived typescripts and published pieces but through photographs as...

Mary Austin and the American West (review)

Reviewed by: Mary Austin and the American West Karen S. Langlois Mary Austin and the American West. By Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. 344 pages, $29.95. This biography is a wonderful addition to scholarship on the writer Mary Hunter Austin (1868–1934). The biographical details add to the information that is available in Austin's autobiography, Earth Horizon (1932), and in two previous biographies. Beautifully written and wonderfully researched, it will prove indispensable to those who are familiar with Austin's work while also appealing to a wider audience. Austin is best remembered for writing the California classic The Land of Little Rain (1903). She has a vast oeuvre—thirty books in a wide variety of genres, including nature writing and long and short fiction, as well as articles, plays, and poetry. Her subjects range from her beloved desert landscapes and the people who inhabited them to the important issues of her day. Many readers are familiar with the general contours of her early life—her birth and youth in Carlinville, Illinois; her graduation from Blackburn College; her trip west at age twenty; her marriage to Stafford Wallace Austin. These are detailed in the biography's first chapter titled "Desert Places." Her years in California, which were the inspiration for many of her finest works, were also the period of two of her greatest heartbreaks: the realization that her only child was mentally disabled and the understanding that her married life would fail. The biography covers Austin's life in the high desert towns of Lone Pine, Independence, and Bishop; her move to the literary colony of Carmel, California, after her separation from her husband; and her travels to England and Italy. Later chapters consider her life in New York City and her eventual relocation to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she lived until her death at age sixty-four. Goodman and Dawson examine her literary work and her association with important figures of her day, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Lincoln Steffens, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and Lou and Herbert Hoover. They also explore her activism in many of the important issues of her time, including the diversion of Owens Valley water to Los Angeles, women's rights, Native American rights, and the preservation of Native American and Spanish Colonial arts. In the last chapter, "The Accounting," they offer a summary of Austin's legacy. For all its merits, the biography does not displace Austin's engaging autobiography, which, though unwieldy, is poetic and insightful. It also does not negate the straightforward, no-nonsense insights of Austin's [End Page 104] first biographer, Augusta Fink, in I-Mary (1983). Furthermore, it does not attempt to ground Austin in American studies and feminist theory, the approach of Esther F. Lanigan in her critical biography, Mary Austin: Song of a Maverick (1989). Goodman and Dawson do offer more detailed information on Austin's life and times. Eventually, the book brings to mind a significant question. What genuine new insights are offered by this third biographical narrative of Austin's life? In that, the biography somewhat disappoints. In addition to her achievements, Austin is also distinctive for her theatrical, unconventional personality. For example, in Carmel, the thirty-eight-year-old Austin was noted for wearing flowing robes and writing in a tree house she called her "wickiup." In 1922, at a dinner in her honor at the New York City National Arts Club, she was escorted by a young Chickasaw artist, who was dressed in quill embroidered buckskin and wore a flamingo feather headdress and a necklace made out of alligator teeth. In addition to her eccentricities, Austin was known for being insufferably egotistical. She also had a well-earned reputation for exaggerating or disregarding facts. The challenge to biographers is to capture her complex persona. Scholars who are familiar with her correspondence know all too well that Austin could fly into a rage and hurl insults at her family, friends, and professional associates. Austin was, on various occasions, referred to as "the Priestess at Delphi" because of her know-it-all approach, "God's Mother-in-Law" because of her imperious attitude, and "Sitting Bull...

ReviewFrom Greenwich Village to Taos: Primitivism and Place at Mabel Dodge Luhan’s. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008. xi + 248 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95.) Flannery Burke

Review<b><i>From Greenwich Village to Taos: Primitivism and Place at Mabel Dodge Luhan’s</i></b>. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008. xi + 248 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95.) Flannery Burke

Review: From Greenwich Village to Taos: Primitivism and Place at Mabel Dodge Luhan's, by Flannery Burke

Book Review| November 01 2009 Review: From Greenwich Village to Taos: Primitivism and Place at Mabel Dodge Luhan's, by Flannery Burke From Greenwich Village to Taos: Primitivism and Place at Mabel Dodge Luhan's. By Flannery Burke. (Lawrence, University Press of Kansas, 2008. xii + 248 pp. $34.95) Victoria Grieve Victoria Grieve Utah State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Pacific Historical Review (2009) 78 (4): 660–661. https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2009.78.4.660 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Victoria Grieve; Review: From Greenwich Village to Taos: Primitivism and Place at Mabel Dodge Luhan's, by Flannery Burke. Pacific Historical Review 1 November 2009; 78 (4): 660–661. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2009.78.4.660 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentPacific Historical Review Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2009 by the Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.