Mary Austin Research Articles

Bernard Shaw in Sinclair Lewis

Running into Sinclair Lewis in Canterbury in 1921, writer Mary Austin took the recently famous author of Main Street, his wife, and a friend to nearby Herne Bay, where they chatted with Bernard Shaw for several hours. Afterward, Lewis his nose, forehead, and lankiness Shavian bought a fiery wig and whiskers and gleefully mimicked the preachy playwright.1 As a collegiate drama critic, Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) had been delighted but bewildered by Candida (1898); later, in New Haven in 1905, the Yale undergraduate had taken in the first performance of Mrs Warren's Profession. By this time, also the year of H. L. Mencken's laudatory little handbook, George Bernard Shaw: His Plays, Lewis had developed Shavianitis. In the clash between old actions of conduct and new ones, the campus rebel found Shaw's witty iconoclasm irresistible. Like Shaw, Lewis became an ingenious social satirist and a winner of the Nobel Prize in literature. Both the playwright and the novelist have been likened to Aristophanes and Swift. Lewis's more than two-score novels (and more than a hundred popular stories) mimic the speech and action of the American middle class, turning what seems photographic realism into good-humored caricature. Having read the Fabians Wells and Shaw, Lewis the young middle-class journalist and freelance writer was in 1911-12 a card-carrying member of the Socialist Party of New York. Like Shaw, Lewis would come to a final defense of capitalism, but his early novels expose readers to the possibilities of a beneficial world socialism. His flexible, highly readable prose (provoking laughter primarily through exuberant exaggeration) flings itself at American versions of sham, complacency, and hypocrisy in small towns, business, medicine, religion, marriage, welfare, philanthropy, and race relations. And like Bernard Shaw, the author of such major novels of the 1920s as Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, and Dodsworth has been accused of overstressing his ideas and effects at the expense of aesthetic proportion and coherence. Lashing out at corruption, brutality, obscurity,

Southern Neolithic Cultivation Systems: A Reconstruction based on Archaeobotanical Evidence

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. © 2001 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. All right reserved.

Undomesticated ground: recasting nature as feminist space

From Mother Earth to Mother Nature, women have for centuries been associated with nature. Feminists, troubled by the way in which such representations show women controlled by powerful natural forces and confined to domestic space, have sought to distance themselves from nature. In Undomesticated Ground, Stacy Alaimo issues a bold call to reclaim nature as feminist space. Her analysis of a remarkable range of feminist writings-as well as of popular journalism, visual arts, television, and film-powerfully demonstrates that nature has been and continues to be an essential concept for feminist theory and practice.Alaimo urges feminist theorists to rethink the concept of nature by probing the vastly different meanings that it carries. She discusses its significance for Americans engaged in social and political struggles from, for example, the Indian Wars of the early nineteenth century, to the birth control movement in the 1920s, to contemporary battles against racism and heterosexism. Reading works by Catherine Sedgwick, Mary Austin, Emma Goldman, Nella Larson, Donna Haraway, Toni Morrison, and others, Alaimo finds that some of these writers strategically invoke nature for feminist purposes while others cast nature as a postmodern agent of resistance in the service of both environmentalism and the women's movement.By examining the importance of nature within literary and political texts, this book greatly expands the parameters of the nature writing genre and establishes nature as a crucial site for the cultural work of feminism.

Re-representing the American "Ethnographic Imagination"

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

How to Author a Walk: Henry David Thoreau’s and Mary Austin’s Regional Narratives of Environmental Learning

Over the course of the last decade, Mary Austin has been recanonized as a regionalist woman writer and as an author in the Thoreauvian tradition of American nature writing. As a regionalist, Austin is thought to represent a female dominated branch of realist writing, given over to a feminist celebration of communal ways of life and ”woman’s culture.” A representative instance is her inclusion in the Norton Anthology American Women Regionalists (1992).

California & the Fictions of Capital

These essays on California's economy, culture, and literature between the 1880s and 1920s show how rural places were made over in the image of capital. The story told here is of the real and imaginary spaces that capital occupied, including its encounters with the realities and representations of race, gender, and class. Beginning with the geography and political economy of agrarian capitalism, Henderson moves on to examine the celebratory, if fretful, ruminations on economy in novels by Frank Norris, Mary Austin, and many other writers drawn to rural California before John Steinbeck redefined the scene in the 1930s.

Ansel Adams and Mary Austin: Taos Pueblo (1930)

In the spring of 1927, Ansel Adams drove with Albert Bender, the art collector and philanthropist, from San Francisco to Santa Fe. From their introduction a year earlier, Bender had been introducing his protégé to libraries, museums, fine printers, artists, and poets such as Ina Coolbrith, John O'Shea and Robinson Jeffers. Since the fall of 1926, Bender had been corresponding with the writer Mary Austin, and by the following spring he decided to pay her a visit. He invited Adams to accompany him, partly to do the driving.

Review: Dancing Ghosts: Native American and Christian Syncretism in Mary Austin's Work, by Mark T. Hoyer

Review: <i>Dancing Ghosts: Native American and Christian Syncretism in Mary Austin's Work</i>, by Mark T. Hoyer

Re-Imagining the Modern American West: a Century of Fiction, History, and Art

From the Mississippi west to the Pacific, from border to border north and south, here is the first thorough overview of novelists, historians, and artists of the modern American West. Examining a full century of cultural-intellectual forces at work, a leading authority on the twentieth-century West brings his formidable talents to bear in this pioneering study. Richard W. Etulain divides his book into three major sections. He begins with the period from the 1890s to the 1920s, when artists and authors were inventing an idealized frontier--especially one depicting initial contacts and conflicts with new landscapes and new peoples. The second section covers the regionalists, who focused on regional (mostly geographical) characteristics that shaped distinctively traits of character and institutions. The book concludes with a discussion of the postregional West from World War II to the ?90s, a period when novelists, historians, and artists stressed ethnicity, gender, and a new environmentalism as powerful forces in the formation of modern western society and culture. Etulain casts a wide net in his new study. He discusses novelists from Jack London to John Steinbeck and on to Joan Didion. He covers historians from Frederick Jackson Turner to Earl Pomeroy and Patricia Nelson Limerick, and artists from Frederic Remington and Charles Russell to Georgia O?Keeffe and R. C. Gorman. The author places emphasis on women painters and authors such as Mary Hallock Foote, Mary Austin, Willa Cather, and Judith Baca. He also stresses important works of ethnic writers including Leslie Marmon Silko, Rudolfo Anaya, and Amy Tan. An intriguing survey of tendencies and trends and a well-defined profile of influences and outgrowths, this book will be valuable to students and scholars of western culture and history, American studies, and related disciplines. General readers will appreciate the book's balanced structure and spirited writing style. All readers, whatever their level of interest, will discover the major cultural inventions of the American West over the past one hundred years.

Book Review: Dancing Ghosts: Native American and Christian Syncretism in Mary Austin's Work

Book Review: Dancing Ghosts: Native American and Christian Syncretism in Mary Austin's Work

Dancing ghosts: Native American and Christian syncretism in Mary Austin's work

How did an Illinois Methodist homesteader in West come to create one of most significant cosmological syntheses in American literature? In this study, Hoyer draws on his own knowledge of biblical religion and Native American cultures to explore Austin's creation of mythology of American continent she so valued. Austin lived in and wrote about the land of little rain, semiarid and arid parts of California and Nevada that were home to Northern Paiute, Shoshone, Interior Chumash, and Yokut peoples. Hoyer makes new and provocative connections between Austin and spiritual figures like Wovoka, prophet of Ghost Dance religion, and writers like Zitkala-sa and Mourning Dove, and he provides a particularly fine reading of Cogowea.

From the Editor

F r o m t h e E d it o r M e l o d y G r a u l i c h California became, as it had to, the New World’s New World, its last repos­ itory of hope. In California, you come face to face with the Pacific and your­ self. There is nowhere else to go. Just as both Los Angeles and San Francisco are, in their separate ways, recognizably Californian, so is California recog­ nizably American. All that California does is magnify what is brought to it; and often, under the strain of magnification, there occurs a sea change. — Shiva Naipaul, Journey to Nowhere: A New World Tragedy In Jean Stafford’s satiric western novel The Mountain Lion (1949), a tough old ranchman wearing a “Jesse James vest” tells his sickly grandchildren, raised in an orange grove in Covina, that “California is not the real West.” Fantasyland had not yet been built in 1949, but apparently California was already “unreal.” So what is California? The New World’s New World? “West of the West,” as the title of the The Land of Sunshine was conceived in 1894 to “boost” Southern California economically, but when Charles Lummis took over the editorship in 1895, he turned to “boosting” western writers. Lummis published some of the most sig­ nificant California writers at the beginnings of their careers: Mary Austin, Jack London, Robinson Jeffers, Sui Sin Far, Sharlott Hall. He broadened the magazine’s scope with a name change in 1902 to Out West and in his own col­ umns was an early advocate of the West’s importance in U.S. literary culture. M e l o d y G r a u l i c h 1999 Western Literature Association conference seems to query? Perhaps “postwestern”? When participants at the 1998 open editorial board meeting suggested that WAL should occasionally provide a forum for a “debate” or “conversation” about issues in the field, Krista Comer came up with an idea everyone liked: we could devote part of an issue to the place of California in western studies, as a kind of appetizer to this year’s conference banquet in Sacramento. So we offer you “California Dreaming.” It seemed particularly appropriate to ask one of this year’s Distinguished Achievement Award winners, California writer and longtime W LA member Gerry Haslam, to set a trail from which oth­ ers would diverge into their own less traveled byways. And then we sent the essay Gerry cowrote with his wife, Janice Haslam, to a bunch of folks who write about California. Multiethnic California calls out for a “babel of voices,” as David Wyatt argues in his piece, so we tried to enlist scholars working in newly emerging fields. With more than four bases to cover, we couldn’t hit a home run: we’re sorry, for instance, not to have an essay explor­ ing contemporary African American California writers. But “California Dreaming” does, I think, capture California’s diversity, offering a con­ versation among voices which will be familiar to W LA members and a host of new voices to WAL and the W LA. Some of these voices will be speaking at a special panel at the “West of the West” conference in Sacramento. Visually we include a mix of conventional images of California and “new West” images. Our vision was occasionally limited by per­ nicious details having to do with money, permissions, and availabil­ ity. Universal Studios, for instance, wanted to charge us $250 for an image from Bedtime for Bonzo of Ronald Reagan carrying books . . . . “California Dreaming” extends the cultural conversation to art, music, TV, performance art, and, of course, Disneyland. (Disney also wouldn’t provide images!) We’re happy to publish an essay on the work of this year’s other Distinguished Achievement Award winner, James D. Houston. Andrew Wingfield focuses on Houston’s exploration of California’s unique geology, climate, and setting on the Pacific Rim. And we particularly thank Jim Houston for his contribution to “California Dreaming” and artist Tom Killion for his wonderful woodcuts of the California coast. California, here we come. ...

Raising the Bar

R a i s in g t h e B a r A n n R o n a l d A vertical line runs from Henry David Thoreau, past John Muir and Mary Austin, alongside Aldo Leopold to Edward Abbey. Our contemporary nature writers inherit a genre shaped by their prede­ cessors—Thoreau’s seasonal and cyclical structure, Muir’s loquacious effusions, Austin’s meticulous observations, Leopold’s judicious twentieth-century land ethic, Abbey’s energetic and engaging narra­ tive voice. Would-be Thoreaus and Abbeys inherit, as well, an abid­ ing human concern for the land itself and a determination to under­ stand man’s place in relationship to the natural world. Against this vertical yardstick, even if we don’t mean to do so, we instinctively have measured each new writer and every new book. During the last decade, this axis has spun to the horizontal. New nature writers cluster all along it now, holding the parallel bar steady by the sheer weight of numbers. So many dozens crowd the field that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish among them, often problem­ atic to sagaciously determine which authors to read. And if we use the traditional Thoreau/Abbey yardstick to make our judgments, we calculate feet and inches in an increasingly metric field. The tradi­ tional measuring tape is old-fashioned, the computations too easy, the numbers necessarily skewed. Recent innovations in the field of nature writing spin the axis in new directions. So rather than mea­ sure a group of new authors against touchstones from the past, I want to test them against themselves. A t the same time, I want to make some guesses about how and why nature writing is changing these days. I A n n R o n a l d might even try to predict where the bar may be located in the future. I’ll begin with Terry Tempest Williams’s Desert Quartet because that slim volume is the most daring of the books piled beside me. Its prose bodily integrates human and earthly sensuousness— an “erotic landscape,” as it were. “I dissolve. I am water,” Williams writes, “I receive without apology” (23). Her words spill on the page like riffles in the stream. She is trying to turn sensory experience into erotic onomatopoeia and to see how far she can extend the senses. “The fire explodes. Flames become blue tongues curling around each other. My eyes close. I step forward” (41). So Williams shakes off the constraints of the traditional tape measure. Also distancing himself from the conventional crowd is Bernie Krause, whose journalistic prose invites the reader to make musical connections with the natural world. Into a Wild Sanctuary, subtitled A Life in Music and Natural Sound, combines autobiographical details of Krause’s musical background with an explanation of his training in and fascination for bio-acoustics. He sculpts natural sounds in tradi­ tional symphonic form by using the natural world as a biophonic orchestra. I’m familiar with Krause’s Nature Company CD series but, before reading Into a Wild Sanctuary, I knew nothing about the process of capturing and comparing the songs of old and new growth trees, for example, or the conversations of gorillas or of frogs. Unlike Desert Quartet, this book makes no attempt to echo emotion. Rather, it pragmatically explores the aural acuity necessary to be a bio-acoustic sculptor. Like Williams, however, Krause manipulates the senses in new and apperceptive ways. At the opposite end of the playing field are writers who consider nature more intellectually than intuitively. Neither Paul Shepard, in his posthumous Coming Home to the Pleistocene, nor Michael P. Cohen, in A Garden of Bristlecones, lacks passion for his subject, but each man brings a lifetime of learning and thinking to his work. Each ponders connections and continuities between science, history, and the human condition. The former author, in a series of gracefully analytic chapters devoid of personal vignettes, addresses the ways in which evolution has shaped our human minds and bodies and spec­ ulates how we might reconnect our lives with our genetic roots. The latter interlaces the scientific with the personal and speaks as directly to the...

Through the window, out the door: women's narratives of departure, from Austin and Cather to Tyler, Morrison, and Didion

An important moment in many novels and poems by American women writers occurs when a central character looks out a window or walks out the door of a house. These acts of departure serve to convey such values as the rejection of constraining social patterns, the search for individual fulfillment, and the entry into the political. Janis Stout examines such moments and related patterns of venture and travel in the fiction of five major American novelists of the 20th century: Mary Austin, Willa Cather, Anne Tyler, Toni Morrison, and Joan Didion. Moving between texts and between texts and contexts, Stout shows how women writers have envisioned the walls of both physical and social structures (including genres) as permeable boundaries, drawing on both a rhetoric of liberation and a rhetoric of domesticity to construct narrative arguments for women's right to move freely between the two.

The Southwest in American Literature and Art: The Rise of a Desert Aesthetic. By David Teague. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997. x ' 207 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $45.00, paper $19.95

Is there a way to appreciate the desert without destroying it, a way to enjoy it without consuming it and to love it without killing it? Moreover, how can literature about the southwestern landscape affect ways in which it is either exploited or preserved? When and how did the desert change dramatically in the eyes of Anglo Americans from barren wilderness to national treasure? By focusing on cultures that lived in the Southwest and by analyzing ways in which they described the land, David Teague persuasively argues against the destructive approach that Americans currently take to the region. Included are Native American legends and Spanish and Hispanic literature. However, the bulk of the study concentrates on Anglo American views of the Southwest, which have been generally at odds with the ecology of the deserts. Ranging from oral traditions of the Navajo, Zuni, and Hopi Indians to travel journals, fiction, and visual art, Teague examines the work of nearly thirty writers, artists, and explorers, including Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, Mary Austin, John Wesley Powell, and Frederic Remington. As he traces ideas about the desert over time, the author shows how American literature and art have come to represent the Southwest as a landscape to be sustained rather than transformed. Bound to gain a prominent place in ecological criticism and in literature of the Southwest, this book offers important insights for scholars and students of literature, environmental studies, history, anthropology, and Native American studies. Its originality and vigor will also appeal to general readers with an interest in the landscape-and the future-of the American Southwest.

Beyond Borders: The Selected Essays of Mary Austin

Beyond Borders: The Selected Essays of Mary Austin

Ansel Adams and Spanish Colonial arts

In May 1927 Ansel Adams drove Albert Bender, a businessman and patron of California artists and writers, and his friend Bertha Pope, a writer, to Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico. Santa Fe and Taos, with reputations as unique and somewhat exotic environments, were havens for artists and writers lured by the different type of experience this region promised. Adams, like others before him, was deeply impressed by northern New Mexico. The architecture, the local Native Americans and Hispanics, the imposing landscape, the grand spacious skies and clarity of light, as well as the colony of artists and writers suggested many possibilities for his work in photography. Adams recalls, ‘I fell quickly under the spell of the astonishing New Mexican light. The magical transference from dusty wind and heat to sparkling vistas and translucent air was unexpected and felicitous’.1 Bender assisted Adams with making inroads into the Taos and Santa Fe colony, by introducing him to prominent individuals in the community, including the distinguished writer Mary Austin. Twenty-five-year-old Adams, still developing his role as a photographer, respected this southwestern literary matriarch and was pleased at the opportunity to collaborate with her. Adams in a later recollection of Austin recounted her inspiring and commanding presence: ‘Mary Austin was, to my wife and I, a close friend, a driving genius, an enigmatic personality and a force to be reckoned with! She was a person of uncanny intuition; a strange blend of mysticism and stern factual knowledge’.2

The Undomesticated Nature of Feminism: Mary Austin and the Progressive Women Conservationists

THE UNDOMESTICATED NATURE OF FEMINISM: MARY AUSTIN AND THE PROGRESSIVE WOMEN CONSERVATIONISTS Stacy Alaimo University of Texas at Arlington In no national movement has there been such a spontaneous and universal response from women as in this great question of conservation . Women from Maine to the most western shore of the Hawaiian Islands are alive to the situation, because the home is woman's domain. She is the conserver of the race. Whatever affects the home, affects the very life of the Nation. —Margaret Russell Knudsen1 It is a common weakness of human nature to think of itself as idealistic when it is merely unimaginative. —Mary Austin2 At the start of the twentieth century, during a time of rampant racism , xenophobia, and gender anxiety, when women such as Margaret Russell Knudsen of the Progressive Conservation Movement were exalting white women' s mission to conserve natural resources in order to protect "the home" and enshrine "the race," Mary Hunter Austin saw nature not as a repository of resources for household use, but as an undomesticated, potentially feminist space. Austin, social critic, feminist , and nature writer, challenged the "Municipal Housekeeping" ideology of the Women's Progressive Conservation Movement, which adhered to a utilitarian conception of nature and promoted women's domestic skills as their qualification for conservation work. Austin disentangles women from domestic ideologies by invoking nature and releases nature from the grip of utilitarian philosophies by casting it as a woman. In Cactus Thorn and in other stories in which the desert appears as a seductive mistress, Austin takes the historically entrenched image of a feminine nature and turns it against itself, contesting discourses that position women and nature as resources for exploitation. Austin's startling creation of a sexual but not maternal land offers women a figure ofidentification outside the law by depicting nature as a force that exceeds and resists mastery. 74Stacy Alaimo Austin's desert mistresses seem particularly unruly and heretical when set against the gospel ofefficiency and the exaltation ofthe home then sweeping the United States. "Efficiency" impelled both the methodical mastery of nature through conservation and the management of the home through the emerging field of domestic science. Domestic science was one answer to the "problem" of the home, which became a major political issue at the turn of the century.3 Writers, clergy, and politicians railed about the sanctity of the home, and motherhood, not surprisingly, became an extraordinarily potent ideological nexus. What is perhaps most remarkable about Austin' s feminist perspective is the extent to which she was able to counter her time's omnipresent rhetoric, ideology, and politics of motherhood. As Molly LaddTaylor states of the Progressive era, "Virtually every female activist used motherhood rhetoric, and virtually every male politician appealed to motherhood." Teddy Roosevelt insisted that "woman must bear and rear the children as her first duty to the state," lest "the whole social system collapse;" the National Congress of Mothers, devoted to maternal ideals, not gender equality, boasted nearly 200,000 members; and the maternalist social reformers intervened in the domestic practices of immigrant women in order to naturalize the threat of cultural diversity and to ensure that good, Americanized citizens would issue from these homes.4 Though many women activists sought to radically redefine the domestic realm, they frequently invoked maternal ideals to forge their positions. Jane Addams, for example, celebrated women's motherly talents both within the family and as an important resource for social reform. Charlotte Perkins Gilman glorified motherhood, even as she denaturalized women's responsibility for housework and childrearing and advocated taking the kitchens and nurseries out of houses in order to free mothers to be "world-servant[s] instead of houseservant [s]."5 In contrast to Gilman, Addams, and other early New Women of her generation, Austin turned from maternal ideals in order to interrogate accepted notions of womanhood and the nature of gender. But unlike feminist modernists such as Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, and Gertrude Stein who were also overturning the "naturalness" of gender, Austin's writings do not repudiate the "natural" by depicting " 'unnatural' worlds and unstructured situations beyond the threshold of conventional order."6 Countering the ideologies ofmotherhood, the home, and woman...

Reading the West: New Essays on the Literature of the American West

Introduction Michael Kowalewski Part I. Nature and Place in Western Writing: 1. Region, power, place William W. Bevis 2. Burros and Mustangs: literary evolutionism and the wilderness west David Rains Wallace Part II. Reimagining the American Frontier: 3.The Literature of loneliness: understanding the letters and diaries of the American West Shannon Applegate 4. Quoting the wicked wit of the West: Frontier reportage and Western vernacular Michael Kowalewski 5. Bierstadt's settings, Harte's plots Lee Mitchell Part III. Modern Western Revisions: 6. Sentimentalism in the American Southwest: John C. Van Dyke, Mary Austin and Edward Abbey Peter Wild 7. Revisionist Western classics Thomas J. Lyon 8. Molly's truthtelling, or Jean Stafford rewrites the Western Susan J. Rosowski 9. Borders, frontiers and mountains: mapping the history of 'US Hispanic Literature' Margaret Garcia Davidson Part IV. Contemporary Western Writing: A Mosaic: 10. The return of the native: the politics of identity in American Indian fiction of the West Philip Burnham 11. Regionalism makes good: the San Francisco Renaissance Linda Hamalian 12. 'The Circle Almost Circled': some notes on California's fiction James D. Houston 13. Fighting the religion of the present: Western motifs in the first wave of Asian American plays Misha Berson.

Beyond Borders: The Selected Essays of Mary Austin ed. by Reuben J. Ellis

Beyond Borders: The Selected Essays of Mary Austin ed. by Reuben J. Ellis