Mary Austin Research Articles

“Left All Alone in This World’s Wilderness”: Queer Ecology, Desert Spaces, and Unmaking the Nation in Frank Norris’s McTeague

“Left All Alone in This World’s Wilderness”Queer Ecology, Desert Spaces, and Unmaking the Nation in Frank Norris’s McTeague Jada Ach (bio) Nearly everywhere on earth, sand is principally made up of one element—in some places silica, in others limestone. Ninety percent of a grain is almost always just one of those two elements. But the other 10 percent is the percentage with a difference—the percentage that, in its difference, matters—the percentage that can tell us something about the history of a place. —Vanessa Agard-Jones Can you describe that vast and holy desert, a desert that is so old that it once was the sea? No, you can’t. But does that stop you? Never. —Michael Cobb But you have not known what force resides in the mindless things until you have known a desert wind. —Mary Austin “There was no change in the character of the desert,” observes the narrator near the end of Frank Norris’s McTeague. “Always the same measureless leagues of white-hot alkali stretched away toward the horizon on every hand” (236). Just a few sentences later, the narrator describes the “horrible desolation” of Death Valley, where “not a rock, not a stone” interrupts “the monotony of the ground” (236). In almost every paragraph in McTeague’s final chapters, the narrator notes the desert’s refusal to cultivate life and deliver topographical diversity, and at times Norris seems to go out of his way to emphasize the stasis of this region: “on the face of the desert not a grain of sand was in motion” (232). Not a one. However, Norris’s [End Page 175] desert may be more complicated—and more erotic—than what appears “on the face.” Despite its harshness, its relentless invariability, Norris also depicts the desert as uneven, “dazzling,” and shimmering with the “glitter of sand and sky” (236). How is it that the desert can simultaneously contain all these contradictory characteristics? In one passage, we are told that the landscape is both “flat” and marked by “low mounds”; in yet another passage, the “dazzling surface” of the desert instantaneously fades into oblivion (236). An indeterminate landscape that occupies both eastern California and southwestern Nevada, Norris’s Death Valley is a generative “something—something or other,” to use McTeague’s recurrent utterance, that cannot be reduced to binary systems of classification (226). It is this mesmerizing “something” of the American West that simultaneously propels and frustrates McTeague, just as it did countless individuals who “looked westward for the fulfillment of American promises” in the second half of the nineteenth century (Packard 1). But unlike cowboys, outlaws, miners, prospectors, artists, writers, and others who wandered these regions before him, McTeague looks eastward from the western edge of the nation in hopes of finding his sandy wilderness. However, McTeague’s unpredictable Death Valley is a different kind of wilderness than what John P. O’Grady playfully refers to as the “holiday side of the wild” depicted by other nineteenth-century writers such as Henry David Thoreau and John Muir. In Pilgrims to the Wild, O’Grady uses words including “recreational,” “privileged,” and even “dilettantish” to describe environmental writing born from the nineteenth century’s burgeoning conservation movement, a movement that aimed to preserve the nation’s wilderness areas for future use (125). In such writing, “wilderness” is synonymous not with desert lands, but with the “forested, well-watered landscapes” of New England, coastal California, and the American Northwest (125). Rooted in anxieties “leveled at cities…, urbanization, industrialization, and environmental contamination (not to mention immigration),” Theodore Roosevelt’s wilderness ethos defined the wild spaces of the American West as “elite and remote” corrective zones where Anglo-Saxon men could seek refuge from modern urban influences (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson 13, 14). Urban anxieties, when combined with the perceived threat of an increasingly feminine [End Page 176] national identity, culminated in what Denise Cruz has called “the hypermasculine discourse of westward-moving imperialism” (488). This growing interest in the (gendered) West contributed to the federal management of wilderness spaces under the designation of national parks, beginning with Yellowstone in 1872. According to Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, editors...

“A Reading Problem”: Margaret Lynn, Jean Stafford, and Literary Criticism of the American West

“A Reading Problem”:Margaret Lynn, Jean Stafford, and Literary Criticism of the American West Cathryn Halverson I have borrowed the main title of this essay from one of Jean Stafford’s many autobiographical short stories, “A Reading Problem.” Recasting details of Stafford’s Boulder, Colorado girlhood, the story tracks the quest of its protagonist, Emily Vanderpool, to read in peace. Emily owns many books, including Tom Sawyer Abroad, Hans Brinker, and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, but she has no place to read them free from the scrutiny of prying adults. A hotel lobby and the town jail prove to be only temporary solutions, and her dilemma leads to a fraught encounter with a con man and his daughter. The story ends with Emily’s revelation that the cemetery meets her needs. However, the rather portentous final image of her reading while seated “beside the grave of an infant kinswoman of the sheriff, a late-nineteenth-century baby called Primrose Starbird,” undermines any complacent resolution (344). Emily’s proximity to another bygone Colorado girl points at once toward familial connections between generations of western women and the inaccessibility of past stories. The evocative name on the stone is the only text the “infant kinswoman” offers her. This essay uncovers connections between western women writers by discussing Jean Stafford in concert with her literal kinswoman, Margaret Lynn. Author of the once widely known A Stepdaughter of the Prairie, Lynn was a native Missourian who preceded Stafford as an important spokeswoman of the West; she was also, not incidentally, Stafford’s first cousin once removed. The brunt of my argument is that Stafford and Lynn thematize, in their autobiographical texts, the difficulty of identifying a literary tradition shaped by western women. As critics, I posit, we experience this same difficulty—the same “reading problem” in respect to women writers and the West. Stafford’s three novels and many short stories established her as a leading [End Page 127] literary voice of the American West and “a figure of genuine consequence” in American letters more generally (Yardley). For over twenty years Stafford published short fiction in the New Yorker, a magazine with which she remains closely associated, and she won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Collected Stories. Her oeuvre includes numerous expressions of the plight of the female intellectual coming of age in the American West—some comic, like “A Reading Problem,” and others tragic, like her best-known book, The Mountain Lion (1947). Stafford was deeply interested in the ramifications of being a western woman. She did not, however, openly explore relationships between women in the West. Women’s succor and bonds are present in her fiction only at a sedimentary level, as almost literally configured in the image of Emily Vanderpool reading beside Primrose Starbird’s grave. Stafford’s inclination to feature “woman” over “women”—to focus, that is, on individual female characters without making larger claims about women’s experience—is mirrored in dominant trends in western literary criticism. Key figures like Willa Cather, Mary Austin, Mourning Dove, and Laura Ingalls Wilder, to take some earlier twentieth-century examples, are typically treated in single-author studies. Correlatively, we have only a scant handful of monographs on “western women’s literature” as such. It is telling that Annette Kolodny’s The Land Before Her, published over three decades ago, remains the standard reference. In her review essay, “Big Books Wanted: Women and Western American Literature in the Twenty-First Century,” Victoria Lamont investigates the sources of this dearth. Her title references Christine Bold’s observation about the lack of major studies featuring “the explanatory patterns and causal narratives that would produce an alternative history of the literary West” (qtd. in Lamont 322). Lamont shows that the limited number of monographs is due partly to the long stretch of recovery work that had to come first, in a discipline that “emerged from the margins of a marginal field” (311). Yet the scarcity is now perpetuated by its achieved sophistication, with scholars favoring—over broad claims—the more focused arguments that case studies yield. “The increasing complexity of feminist work may have had the unintended consequence of allowing traditional master narratives to...

Laughing HorseMagazine and Regional Modernism in New Mexico

New Mexico was central to the development of American modernism in the 1920s and 1930s, and Laughing Horse magazine documented the distinctive form that modernism took there. Crucial to the arts and literary communities in Santa Fe and Taos, Laughing Horse provided a venue for established writers like Mary Austin and D. H. Lawrence, as well as younger writers like Lynn Riggs and Frank Waters, and the magazine also featured iconic visual images that reinforced the magazine’s regionalist, yet also modernist, aesthetic. This essay argues that Laughing Horse and its network of little magazines are central, rather than peripheral, to modernism.

The Road to the Spring: Collected Poems of Mary Austin

The Road to the Spring: Collected Poems of Mary Austin

Laughing Horse Magazine and Regional Modernism in New Mexico

ABSTRACT New Mexico was central to the development of American modernism in the 1920s and 1930s, and Laughing Horse magazine documented the distinctive form that modernism took there. Crucial to the arts and literary communities in Santa Fe and Taos, Laughing Horse provided a venue for established writers like Mary Austin and D. H. Lawrence, as well as younger writers like Lynn Riggs and Frank Waters, and the magazine also featured iconic visual images that reinforced the magazine's regionalist, yet also modernist, aesthetic. This essay argues that Laughing Horse and its network of little magazines are central, rather than peripheral, to modernism.

WOMEN WRITERS OF THE AMERICAN WEST, 1833–1927

WOMEN WRITERS OF THE AMERICAN WEST, 1833-1927. By Nina Baym. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2011. 371 pp. $32, paperback; $40, cloth.Nina Baym's Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1927 expands some common notions of literature created by women about the American western experience by including not only recognized canonical writers such as Willa Cather and Mary Austin but also obscure writers and writers who enjoyed limited regional appeal. Baym engages in the conversation about what sorts of writing should be treated as literature about the West by including not just the writings of women who were from western states and territories but also writers who wrote about the West without having been there. In scholarship treating literature of the American West, there exist a number of questions, including inquiries about authorship, perspective, marginalization, appropriation, and literary value of texts and writers. Baym's book reflects the wide range of women's writing across western states during a time of Manifest Destiny, westward expansion, settlement, and, ultimately, urbanization; it is polyvalent insofar as it includes not only the expected settlers' diaries, captivity narratives, and dime store cowboy novels but also poetry, romance novels, memoirs, state and regional histories, and children's literature.Baym begins in 1833 with Mary Austin Holley's Notes on Texas and ends in 1927 with Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop. Chapters, most organized by region, include Texas and Oklahoma, the Pacific Northwest, Upper California and Nevada, Utah, Colorado, the Great Plains, the High Plains, Southern California and Nevada, the Southwest, and one about movement called "On the Trail, On the Road." By both examining an array of texts by diverse authors and organizing the texts by region, Baym creates a fuller picture of women's literary engagement with the West. In so doing, she investigates what literature is worthy of consideration and which writers create this literature, thereby contributing significantly to the conversation involving what we consider to be literature about the WestBaym anticipates two major potential criticisms of her work. She acknowledges that she "sacrifice[s] depth for breadth, describing rather than analyzing" (2), and likewise acknowledges the Anglo-centrism of her work: "[One] might have hoped for a significant counternarrative in books by women associated with minority status. Regrettably, I found only nineteen such women, less than 6 percent of the total. These nineteen women, too, accepted Anglo dominance as a historical reality" (4). Forewarned of the "reality" of the types of writing and authors included, the reader can set about the business of exploring region by region the surprising diversity of literature produced by such writers as Alice S. and Emma Wolf, who wrote novels about San Francisco's Jewish community and society; Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, author of The Squatter and the Don (1885), the first known novel published by a Mexican American woman; Augusta Crocheron, a Mormon poet; and Emma Ray, a Seattle missionary and memoirist. Some authors are well-respected fixtures of the American literary landscape- Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kathleen Norris, and Willa Cather-while others, such as Narcissa Owen, Aileen Nusbaum, and M. E. M. Davis, have achieved regional prominence. Throughout, Baym's survey challenges notions of what it is to be a "Writer of the American West."By presenting the works and authors in a region-by-region survey, Baym unearths an astonishing amount of writing by women writers about the region west of the Mississippi that has been heretofore neglected, filling a tremendous gap in American literary studies. This organization allows her to be both meticulous and catholic in her selection. Some writers have been recovered while others have been elevated from mere regional importance. For students and researchers investigating the types of literature produced, such an overview has been lacking. …

Democracy of Difference: Mary Austin, Joseph Conrad, and Global Feminism

Mary Hunter Austin (1868–1934) was one of the earliest, most longstanding, and trenchant of Conrad's American readers in the first part of the twentieth century. In a series of prominent essays that played a powerful role in Conrad's American cultural promotion during the 1910s and 1920s, Austin galvanized Conrad for women and feminist readers by arguing that his works presented a conception of masculinity not reducible to conventional gender formulas. Working from feminist premises, Austin offered a vision of Conrad emphasizing the importance of recognizing and respecting difference. This vision comes to carry large gendered, ethnic, international, economic, environmental, and, above all, deliberative democratic implications. In recovering this lost reception history, this essay argues that Austin's feminist and transnational (American) lens offers an enhanced sense of the meaning of Conrad's work, just as the latter, in turn, offers a means of reevaluating the vast conceptual scope and political vision that animated Austin's own diverse corpus of writing.

Hell of a Vision: Regionalism and the Modern American West by Robert L. Dorman

 Reviews mary sources is the repeated mantra of“hostile Indians”and recurrent use of the generic term “Indians” with limited reference to the larger historical context or Native perspectives, cultures , and historical geographies. Given the lack of engagement with current historiographical trends in the literature on the fur trade, Native Americans, western history , and women’s history, this volume will be of limited value for scholars and graduate students. Perhaps most interestingly, The Perilous West raises intriguing questions that call for further investigation: What was the nature of the various“French villages”that the fur traders stumbled across in their journeys up the Missouri? What is the story of gender relations and domestic violence, which seems to pervade the primary sources on the French Canadian and French-Indian fur traders, but not the Euro-Americans? How did liaisons and marriages between fur traders and Native women structure intercultural relations and commerce along the upper Missouri? How did this region compare with well-documented areas in Canada? How have the well-known primary sources on the Far West colored the scholarship on western fur trade? How might we recover the multiple voices that seldom appear in the fragmentary record? And for general readers and scholars alike: What is perhaps the more engaging story of intercultural relations during the early 1800s — before the Euro-American juggernaut pushed its way westward during the mid 1800s? Melinda Marie Jetté Franklin Pierce University Hell of a Vision: Regionalism and the Modern American West by Robert L. Dorman The University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 2012. Maps, notes, bibliography, index. 272 pages. $50.00 cloth. The word regionalism has had many meanings , and in Hell of a Vision Robert L. Dorman explores the term as it has been applied to the American West since the late nineteenth century. Dorman’s West is “the seventeen coterminous states” straddling, and west of, the hundredth meridian; hence, he includes the six Great Plains states but not Alaska and Hawaii (p. xii). The discussion toggles among the“nationalist”West (how perceptions of the region have shaped thinking about the entire nation); a variety of “localist” Wests (Mary Austin’s Inyo Country, for example, p. 11); and otherWests,including arid,agrarian,Hispanic, Native American, environmental, urban, the built (high-dam and irrigated), and of course, the cowboy or Old West. Dorman touches on about all theWests one can think of; the region is plastic and inclusive. For him, regionalism has three dimensions:spatial conceptualization as on maps, “its qualities and characteristics” or “regional identity,” and “self-identification” or one’s ties to the region (p. 3). Not all of these dimensions surface at every turn, but they appear often enough to contain a concept — regionalism — that otherwise threatens to become fuzzy and shape-shifting. The introduction opens with the regional ideas of John Wesley Powell and proceeds to discuss Josiah Royce and Frederick Jackson Turner — the West as nature and how people must adapt to it, the West’s cultural identity, and the West as synecdoche for the nation. Dorman then proceeds through six chapters, each covering fifteen to twenty years, to show howWestern regionalism took on different and expanding meanings in the context of those times.Chapter 1,“Back-Trailing”(from Hamlin Garland’s pullback from Minnesota toWisconsin ), begins with the 1880s land boom and the Purchase back issues of the Quarterly. Call 503.306.5230 or send an e-mail to museumstore@ohs.org.  OHQ vol. 114, no. 3 1890s Great Plains bust.Dorman’s comprehensiveness — and this is only the beginning — is evident as the first page and a half of the chapter positions Powell, Laura Ingalls (Wilder), Hamlin Garland,Theodore Roosevelt,Frederic Remington, Willa Cather, Jules and Mari Sandoz , Walter Prescott Webb, Turner, and Ole Rolvaag as expressors of regionalism in one way or another. Such blanket coverage decorates every chapter; historians, literary figures, artists and sculptors (less often), city planners, and environmentalists stud almost every page. On this leisurely walk one finds many a good idea, many a novel observation, and many an arresting phrase. Readers who are not hurried will be rewarded. Chapter 2, “Walking” (beginning with Charles Lummis’s long walk to California), lays out...

Go East, Young Man: Imagining the American West as the Orient (review)

Reviewed by: Go East, Young Man: Imagining the American West as the Orient Ryan R. Schumacher Go East, Young Man: Imagining the American West as the Orient. By Richard V. Francaviglia. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2011. Pp. 360. Color and b&w illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9780874218091, $36.95 cloth.) In the preface in Go East, Young Man: Imagining the American West as the Orient, Richard V. Francaviglia describes how an article he had been planning to write on the phenomenon of Orientalism in American West turned into a book. This admission hints at both the principal strength and weakness of Go East, Young Man: Francaviglia has amassed an impressive amount of evidence showing an under-appreciated and under-examined stream of American thought; however, he has not quite succeeded in putting together a coherent narrative that can be carried throughout the entire book. Francaviglia distances himself from Edward Said's highly influential book, Orientalism, and its critique of European colonial projects in Asia and North Africa. Although Francaviglia occasionally uses terms like "imperial nostalgia" (62), Go East, Young Man is primarily a book about personal experiences for visitors to the American West rather than a critique of culture and political power. Indeed, much of Francaviglia's inspiration for writing the book came from being reminded of the landscape of Southern California's Mojave Desert—with its date palms and a community called Mecca—while visiting Israel. Francaviglia contends that the Holy Land and North Africa held a special fascination for travelers of the nineteenth-century [End Page 321] American West, which he shows through such evidence as Mary Austin Holley calling Texas "a land of milk and honey" (51) and in John C. Frémont naming Pyramid Lake, Nevada, after the famed structures in Egypt. The author shows this fascination most vividly in Go East, Young Man's strongest chapter, which is on Mormon Utah. Here, an oppressed religious minority that found a home on the arid shores of the Great Salt Lake obviously felt a great affinity for the Biblical Jews of Egypt and believed they had found their own sacred ground. Francaviglia's Orientalism is a much broader concept than just comparison to the Middle East and North Africa, though. His evidence is not limited merely to travel accounts or explorers' journals. The second half of the book is devoted largely to visions of the Far East (especially China and Japan), and throughout the book, he marshals an impressive array of evidence from such sources as paintings, postcards, Hollywood films, political cartoons, architecture, and fiction. Much of the visual evidence is beautifully reproduced in color images, giving Go East, Young Man an aesthetic appeal not often found in academic texts. Unfortunately, with such a broad argument and such an array of sources focusing on a diverse set of locations from the Mississippi River to the arid Southwest to the humid Northwest, the book is not very cohesive. The chronology can be confusing at times. The book is best read in segments rather than taken as whole. And with cities like New Canaan, Connecticut, and Lebanon, Tennessee, dotting the American landscape, one has to wonder why Francaviglia believes Orientalism in the United States is a special feature of the American West rather than a trans-regional phenomenon. However, he has succeeded extremely well in highlighting an important way Americans have understood their landscapes throughout the last two hundred years. Ryan R. Schumacher Texas State Historical Association Copyright © 2013 The Texas State Historical Association

Landscape Culture: Ansel Adams and Mary Austin's <em>Taos Pueblo</em>

California arts patron Albert Bender introduced Ansel Adams to Mary Hunter Austin in 1927 during a visit to New Mexico. In 1929, Adams returned to Santa Fe and Taos to take photographs that became his contribution to a collaboration with Austin, 1930 photobook Taos Pueblo. During his stay in Santa Fe, Adams also took a portrait photograph of Austin. Hoping to use portrait as a publicity photo for her lecture tours, Austin was disappointed to find that photograph did not capture the effect it is still necessary for me to make on my public.1 Looking at photograph, one can certainly detect pictorialist approach that defines Adams's early work; portrait has a soft focus, and background is hazy (figure 1). Adams was, by 1929, shifting away from pictorialism and towards a straight photographic style that privileges clean lines, deep focus, and a realist representation of shadow and light - style that he would become known for in later decades.2 The reason for Austin's disappointment can be understood by comparing her portrait to another author's portrait published just a year earlier.In 1928, Adams's portrait of Robinson Jeffers was used as a frontispiece to an art-book edition of Jeffers's poems by Grabhorn Press. While similar to Austin portrait in many ways, Jeffers portrait has a much softer focus and a warmth that seems to connote artistic genius, a quality very important to Austin and a frequent subject of her writing3 (figures 2 and 3). Furthermore, layout of Jeffers book, with frontispiece facing title page, emphasizes photograph as a transparent signifier of poet himself, reminiscent of frontispiece to Walt Whitman's 1855 Leaves of Grass.* Adams's portrait of Austin does not have nearly as much shadow as Jeffers portrait. Austin looks directly at viewer, and Adams's use of shallow depth-of-field highlights not only design of her Native American jewelry but also her facial expression, making her look far more severe than sublime. The portrait does not represent Austin as an American genius in touch with an exotic Southwest, as much as it captures Austin as a stubborn, material being, gazing directly at viewer.Austin's dissatisfaction with Adams's portrait, then, is a familiar moment in modernism as a younger artist, in this case, Adams, struggles to overcome stylistic conventions and expectations of a previous generation, represented here by Austin, an established regionalist writer known for her stories about California and New Mexico. Austin might come off as familiarly antimodernist in her initial exchange with Adams, very much in keeping with traditional accounts of regionalist writers in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.5 However, while modernism has often been thought of as the antithesis of regionalism, they are better thought of as intertwined and mutually constitutive aesthetics.6 As Scott Herring has argued in his introduction to Regional Modernism special issue of Modern Fiction Studies, and modernism have always been compeers in terms of spatiality and in terms of periodization.7 Erika Doss's study of painter Thomas Hart Benton and his famous student Jackson Pollock also emphasizes ways in which Benton and Pollock, painters known, respectively, for their regionalism and abstract expressionism, share an investment in art as a mode of social reform, an element often recognized in regionalist art but less so in abstract expressionism. Doss argues that this aesthetic of social reform was downplayed, even erased, from accounts of abstract expressionism as modernist aesthetics were codified as apolitical, impersonal, and self-reflexive by middle of twentieth century.8Since modernism and regionalism were so closely intertwined in early to mid-twentieth century, it makes sense that Adams and Austin's differences in 1929 led not to rupture but instead to a collaborative book project in 1930: Taos Pueblo. …

Mary Austin, Stafford Austin, and the Owens Valley

Mary Austin, Stafford Austin, and the Owens Valley

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...

Genre, Location, and Mary Austin's Ethos

Scholars in rhetoric are increasingly attentive to the power of places and spaces to shape rhetorical performance. This article takes up the connection between ethos and location identified by several recent scholars, arguing that affiliation with and representation of material environments plays a crucial role in ethos. Ethos strategies are further shaped by genres, which are theorized as locations and environments in order to capture a fundamental dynamic between strategy and social norm. To demonstrate the strengths of understanding ethos in relation to both geographical and genre location, I analyze the ethos-maneuvers of Mary Austin, prominent early twentieth-century feminist, activist, and nature writer whose thirty-year public career merits attention from rhetorical scholars. In articulating how genre shapes Austin's efforts to develop her location in the deserts of the American West into a persuasive public ethos, I argue that ethos emerges in genre-specific formations.

Sisters of secession: the unclaimed legacies of two Southern American Irish women

Mary Austin Carroll (1835–1909) and Florence Jane O'Connor (dates unknown) were both Irish American women of fervent religious belief who are unfamiliar to contemporary readers. The first objective of this piece is to introduce them and to give an account of their work. As a nun, and later a superior in the Order of the Sisters of Mercy, Mary Austin Carroll's work has sometimes been lost to her own preference for anonymity. Her literary production and importance arguably eclipse more celebrated male pro-Confederate contemporaries like Father Abram J. Ryan. For her part, Florence O'Connor's singular work, The Heroine of the Confederacy, provides critical insights into how Irish American women naturalised Catholicism in the South and reconciled it to Lost Cause remembrance. This essay attempts to place these women within the larger context of Southern Irish Americans with Confederate sympathies and argues for the lasting significance of their literary and rhetorical legacies within American Irish histories.

Thick and Thin

Thick and Thin Gregory Morris (bio) I am not a mystical guy. I have never known, or been especially comfortable with, the spiritual and the unseen. I have little confidence or interest in the immaterial. I place my faith in solid substance, in the tangible. I like to tap my toe on Samuel Johnson's rock. I am, for the most part, a material boy. I have also generally resisted the temptation to let loose of the body, to occasionally take its leave. None of that transparent eyeball business for me, thanks. Transcendence is just too impermanent, ephemeral. I like to stay in place, and I find the body generally a good place to be. I am also one who had, until fairly recently, never known deserts. My life has been lived almost entirely near waters: large rivers, great lakes, even for a short while in a seam in the American landscape between the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. To be more precise, though, I have known deserts only through language, through the words of those who have made the desert an intimate part of their lives. What I understood about deserts—American deserts, in particular—I took from people like Ed Abbey, Terry Tempest Williams, Charles Bowden, Mary Austin. I have been, for the most part, a guy most comfortable with waters. But it was a desert place that got me into trouble and out of my body. Six summers ago, my wife and I traveled to southern Utah, drawn by [End Page 23] the slickrock and by the power of landscapes with fabled names: Zion, Bryce, Grand Staircase-Escalante, Capitol Reef. We wanted to get to know desert, to learn some of its language. And so we walked, covering trails, absorbing heat, craving waters, and painting ourselves with the red dust of Navajo sandstone. We desired desert, and the desert gave itself to us in dry waves of feverish heat. By the time of that June's summer solstice, we found ourselves at Arches National Park. Solstice is a time of imbalance between light and dark, but we were in a place that seemed to be created from balance itself. Mammoth rust-red arches and long, narrow fins of sandstone rose out of the dust-dry earth of this desert-place. Prickly pear cactus bloomed in bright, yellow bursts. Wyoming paintbrush and golden columbine and cliff rose threw out brilliant dashes of color amid the sere browns of grasses exhausted by heat and sun. As the day waned and the night sky made its color shift from blue to pink, the near-full moon rose, its yellow perfection framed by one of the two Window Arches. Like everyone else there, we grew silent, capable only of watching the spectacle as it unfolded. We had seen the desert—or this desert—through its day. We were weary, footsore, dressed in the red dust that is the signature of this place. We had gained a kind of ground truth—minor and minuscule, to be sure—but still a palpable knowledge. We had taken the diurnal impress of this place upon us. But what of the desert at night? What of a desert blackened into quiet, unmeasured space? What are we and the desert left with when the colors and the landmarks—the hoodoos, the arches—are erased? Near the midnight of that day, my wife and I drove outward, leaving the park to itself. Before we had made the park gate, though, we stopped at a trailhead. I wanted to take one last, brief hike in this place and in its dark. This want was really more of a compulsion, a felt and undeniable need to move down and into that darkness, and to do so on my own, without intention and intentionality. My wife accommodated my desire, walking with me only partway before hiking back to the car, letting me traverse the Park Avenue Trail alone. I had the trail, this place, to myself. The farther I descended, picking my way with some care, the darker the desert-world became. That night's sky came fuller with stars. The just-past-full [End Page 24] moon illuminated my...

Modernity, Mestizaje, and Hispano Art: Patrocinio Barela and the Federal Art Project

Modernity, Mestizaje, and Hispano Art: Patrocinio Barela and the Federal Art Project Stephanie Lewthwaite New Mexico’s reputation as a cultural center dedicated to the preservation and revival of Native American and Hispano arts since the early 1900s is well documented. While the anthropological and archaeological “discovery” of the Southwest, the art colonies of Taos and Santa Fe, and the revival of Spanish colonial arts under Anglo patrons are well known, the Hispano artists who straddled multiple art worlds during the early twentieth century are less so.1 The “recovery” of Hispano artists—initiated by William Wroth and Charles Briggs and continued more recently by Laurie Kalb and Tey Marianna Nunn—remains far from complete.2 Although we know more about the Hispano artists who achieved regional and national acclaim during this period, most often through the New Deal’s WPA-funded Federal Art Project (FAP), Eurocentric aesthetic and anthropological categories of place, tradition, and authenticity have occluded the significance of their work. As Tey Marianna Nunn claims, Hispanos were invariably perceived as ethnic craftspeople rather than as artists in their own right.3 The positioning of Hispano art through terms such as craft, folk, and primitive precludes a thorough analysis of the connections among art, ethnicity, and modernity, and an understanding of Hispano artists as “modern” cultural agents. I examine the life and work of Hispano artist Patrocinio Barela. A santero sculptor (a carver of saints and devotional images) sponsored by the FAP in 1935, Barela was one of the few Hispanos to achieve national acclaim as an artist rather than as a craftsperson. Barela lay at the intersection of several complementary discourses about art and Americanism during the New Deal. Barela was an everyman, a universal laborer-cum-artist who was both a “modern primitive”4 and a product of cultural mixing between Europe and indigenous America. Barela Stephanie Lewthwaite is a lecturer in the School of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom. Journal of the Southwest 52, 1 (Spring 2010) : 41–70 42 ✜ Journal of the Southwest symbolized the New Deal’s drive to democratize art by promoting a more pluralistic Americanism and by improving inter-American relations. However, New Deal rhetoric elevated Barela while sidelining him from modernity as a primitive, untrained, and instinctive artist. Barela has rarely been considered as a modernist in the conventional sense.5 Yet, a re-examination of Barela’s aesthetic forms and the multiple artistic, social, and ethnic worlds in which he circulated as a “transcultural agent” suggest the emergence of an “alternative hybrid modernism.”6 Barela must be repositioned within an evolving modernist multicultural art canon, for the wider processes of modernization and intercultural exchange that impacted Hispano communities during this period deeply informed Barela’s work and the evolution of a new santero aesthetic. Hispano Art, Anglo Patronage, and the New Deal New Mexico’s reputation as a cultural center dedicated to the preservation and revival of Native American and Hispano art after the early 1900s framed the New Dealer’s response to Barela’s work. The state became “America’s Orient” and an alternative cultural frontier where archaeologists, anthropologists, and avant-garde artists “discovered” new models of cultural exchange and coexistence. The state’s rural, folk, and indigenous communities in particular served as bulwarks against the modern machine age and as sites for spiritual and cultural rebirth.7 In the midst of America’s “crisis of modernity,” fears about cultural loss and regional distinctiveness spawned efforts to preserve local ethnic cultures, and Native American and Hispano arts in particular.8 Yet, the Hispano revival derived less momentum regionally and nationally than the Native American revival, because Hispano arts were invariably viewed as utilitarian objects rather than as art. Anthropologists and archaeologists demonstrated greater interest in the indigenous Pueblo culture.9 However, parallels between the treatment of Native American and Hispano arts exist, for Hispano art was also subject to the preservationist impulses of Anglo artists and reformers during the 1920s and 1930s. This revival was driven by vocational manual arts training programs in rural Hispano schools and by the Spanish Colonial Arts Society, established in Santa Fe in 1925 under Mary Austin...

California at the Point of Conflict: Fluvial and Social Systems in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Joan Didion's Run River

I think I would like to write the story of this whole valley, of all the little towns and all the farms and the ranches in the wilder hills. I can see how I would like to do it so that it would be the valley of the world. The development of American literature has, to a large degree, depended on shifting and highly social attitudes toward conquering, developing, and, finally, trying to save the land, air, and water we claim as ours. Because of California's highly dramatic and highly volatile relationship with the landscape, and a population as large as it is diverse, California literature is generally unable to escape some kind of mark left by the environment. As Jack Hicks points out, an “essential feature” of the region we call California “is the extent to which its many endowments—stunning climate, spectacular landscape, abundant resources—lived up to some of the visions and fleshed out the hopes for a promised land” (3). Begun in the minds of both Europeans and Americans as an imaginative construct, the state's fiction and nonfiction, whether novel or promotional tract or the myriad of publications in between, explore the collision of dream and reality. Often three “large metaphors” guide this exploration: El Dorado, Continent's End, and the Pacific Rim, all of which, while utilized in many racial and social analyses of the state's inhabitants, are based in its “natural blessings and expansive terrain” (Hicks 5). Whether overt, as in Robinson Jeffers' 1924 homage to the wild and holy Big Sur coastline in “Continent's End” and Mary Austin's land-based pilgrimage in her 1903 Land of Little Rain, or covert, as in T. C. Boyle's geographically dependent analysis of race and class, the recent Tortilla Curtain, land and water, indivisible in the West, are important signifiers in much of California's literature.

American Literary Regionalism in a Global Age (review)

Reviewed by: American Literary Regionalism in a Global Age William M. Morgan American Literary Regionalism in a Global Age. By Philip Joseph. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2007. 256 pp. Cloth, $45.00 Philip Joseph's American Literary Regionalism in a Global Age participates in "the ethical turn" of recent literary criticism. Without engaging directly with the thinking about literature and aesthetics that American pragmatism has inspired, Joseph nonetheless defines literature as a form of pragmatic exploration. Suffused by a continual return to "the disordered and contradictory living matter surrounding it," literature in Joseph's account resists categorical imperatives and ideological injunctions. It instead enacts an unending transaction with the everyday, focusing the reader's mind on how new events continually reveal the "limitations of one's judgments." [End Page 184] Literature thus commits to "open-end critique" as its mode of knowing, and this habit of mind, for Joseph, is "a crucial resource, to be recognized and protected, in an increasingly globalized, interconnected world." When the kind of inquiry literature provides is "practiced in good faith," it leads readers to new forms of knowledge about themselves and their communities. Literature leads, that is, "to democratic judgments, informed by consideration of multiple viewpoints." Teaching us as much about criticism as regionalism, Joseph, at his best, practices what he preaches. In his discussion of Abraham Cahan's fiction, he shows us how Cahan "test[s] his early faith," "poses" questions and "freely ponder[s]" contradictory views of the Jewish community, and "negotiate[s] between desires." The verbs Joseph uses throughout this chapter indicate how deeply a pragmatic mode of thought informs not only his approach but also Cahan's explorations of center and margin, citizen and immigrant, American and Jew. Resisting the conventions of both the Yiddish press and the mainstream American magazine culture where he published his work, Cahan depicts "Jews whose authenticity as Jews is unresolved and perplexing." According to Joseph, Cahan thus dramatizes his own equivocations about "the possible outcomes of Jewish relocation in America." As is true of this chapter, much of the book engages us in a consideration of different points of view about the relations between the literary writer, his or her regionalist literary works, the local communities that the works are about, and the ethics of representation and citizenship revealed by the works and at play in the print cultures where they were published. In both moments of regionalist literary output that Joseph studies closely (the 1890s, 1920s, and 1930s), he sets up contrasts in order to consider and in a way validate diverging perspectives. First, he juxtaposes Sarah Orne Jewett and Hamlin Garland to examine a spectrum of beliefs about the responsibilities of regionalist artists to the local communities they represent. Then he stages a fascinating debate about literature, locality, and cultural authenticity through a contrastive reading of works by Mary Austin and Willa Cather. Joseph's investigation of Austin's complex racial politics and her anti-touristic, feminist, rigorously place-centered regionalist aesthetic is astute, for instance. And the legitimacy that he grants her matters all the more because he himself is more sympathetic to Willa Cather's aesthetic and views. Joseph's reading of Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) most clearly demonstrates his claim that the regionalist works he studies and values, through their "recognition of the unencumbered subject as the starting point for modern conceptions of citizenship," help us to rethink academic debates about civil society and literature's continuing contributions to the [End Page 185] public sphere. Yet if this approach is well-chosen to reveal Cather's peculiar genius, it proves less useful when applied to Zora Neal Hurston. Here we see that "justice" and the rationalistic terms and nationalistic concerns of civil society theory keep us at a distance from what is most interesting in Hurston's writing. In particular, Hurston's own abiding interest in the hybridized Afro-Caribbean and African American folk cultures, especially in the religious practices of Hoodoo and Voodoo, should have been brought to bear more fully on the investigation into the local, the global, and the role of the artist and her literature in negotiating between the...

The American “Lives” of Jesus: The Malleable Figure of Christ as a Man of the People

The religious culture of late nineteenth-century America involves a curious combination of theological debate and popular social reform rhetoric. A battle for cultural authority emerges in print culture between church leaders and social reform writers, particularly domestic novelists. This discourse is exhibited in the proliferation of religious biographies, which were profoundly influenced in American popular culture by Congregationalist clergyman Henry Ward Beecher, who published The Life of Jesus, the Christ in 1871. This genre was quickly appropriated by popular novelists, and read in tandem, these biographies allow us to view a discourse that represents a shifting of power in the mediation of social reform rhetoric that ultimately materializes in the social gospel movement, a reform platform that marries Christian ethics with modern cultural concerns that are largely related to the Industrial Age. While American Protestantism in the nineteenth century, particularly in the Northeast, seemed to be moving away from its Calvinist roots and arguably toward an ecumenical Christianity, or at a least nondenominational Protestantism, Calvinist clergy nevertheless played a key role in the negotiation of both religious and social liberal reform. Because of increased access to the written word, the impact of such reform efforts affected national audiences with farreaching results. Popular preachers coming out of various Calvinist creeds, such as Presbyterian Thomas De Witt Talmage and Congregationalists Henry Ward Beecher and Charles Sheldon, relied on the printed word to reach audiences of thousands although each was equally skilled in oratory, drawing in huge crowds to their affiliated churches. These three prominent figures, along with several other popular literary figures, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Mary Austin, experimented with a variety of literary forms including sermons, religious tracts, fiction, and even religious biography in their reconsideration of biblical authority in relation to contemporary moral ethics. It is in the religious biographies especially, which are known as the lives-of-Jesus biographies, that one finds an interesting rhetorical intersection of hermeneutics, theology, and sociology. Beecher's is central to an examination of this genre because he bridges the gap between church leaders and social reform writers as he strives to find a literary form that allows him to construct a highly personalized theology that seeks to reach a public well beyond the confines of the traditional church congregation. Beecher's preference for interpretive hermeneutics shows his awareness of earlier biblical criticism undercutting scriptural authority, and we must view his as an expression of his desire to show the ongoing relevance of the Bible to the modern age rather than a dismissal of scriptural authority. Richard Fox writes, In the late nineteenth century, liberal Protestantism was the established religion of a nation without an officially established religion. Beecher's force derived from his command of a religious tradition that was rapidly secularizing thanks in no small part to his own work (Trials of Intimacy 21). These lives-of-Jesus biographies reveal the struggle to contribute to a liberal Protestantism that in turn responds to the declining Calvinist ethos in American culture. A close examination of some of these texts will show that this particular form of religious tract was appropriated in an attempt to achieve something more comprehensive than merely religious reform or biblical criticism; indeed, these biographies extended the role of the church well beyond the level of individual spiritual salvation. They came to represent a key philosophical turning point in the integration of religious and social reform ideology, one that moves away from eschatological concerns to a stronger material consideration of how to establish God's Kingdom here on earth. …

Science, Nature Work, and the Kinaesthetic Body in Cather and Stein

This essay reads Stein and Cather's early autobiographical fictions as part of a complex negotiation of the gendered divide between the professionalizing sciences and the feminized field of “nature work.” Intrigued yet unsatisfied by scientific accounts of human consciousness as biological process, and wary of entanglement in popular associations of women's nature work with maternal sentiment and feminine virtue, Stein and Cather sought to modernize their “feel for mother earth” by rewriting it in unsentimental and authoritatively modern terms. To that end, both writers adapted notions of rhythm and kinaesthetic performance that originated in the new sciences of psychology and anthropology and were popularized by artists and intellectuals such as Isadora Duncan and Mary Austin. Using Duncan and the opera singer Olive Fremstad as models, Stein and Cather developed rhythmic conceptions of artistic production that sought to reconcile the modern scientific view of human interiority with a modernist celebration of human creative agency, and at the same time to distance themselves from women's nature work while continuing the nature worker's task of drawing attention to the vital continuity between human and nonhuman nature. Read in this light, their work reveals a shared and gendered ambivalence about science and nature that in many ways anticipates our own.