Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain (1903)
Title page of the first edition
  • Born Illinois 1868 -- fever killed father and sister when she was 10. Solitary childhood.
  • Family moved to California 1888 -- homesteaded.
  • 1891 married Stafford Wallace Austin, son of waning gentry from Hawaii.
  • 1892 Wallace's business failed.
  • 1892 Austin gives birth to disabled daughter Ruth-- puts her in foster homes and Ruth dies in an institution 1918.
  • Member of Lummis salon in Pasadena.
  • Helped found artists' colony Carmel, California -- included people like Jack London.
  • Destruction of Owens Valley by Los Angeles Water Authority -- Austin leaves California 1905.
  • Moved to New York and travelled in Europe.
  • Settled New Mexico 1924.
  • Produced plays, feminist novels, folklore collections, studies in mysticism; in all, over 30 books and over 200 essays
  • Well connected -- knew Herbert Hoover (who would become president of the US 1929-33), H.G. Wells [who thought Austin "the most intelligent woman in America"], Joseph Conrad. She claimed Willa Cather wrote Death Comes for the Archbishop in her house.
  • Died 1934.
  • The Land of Little Rain -- Austin's first book 1903.

    • Turn of the century: Growth of big corporations --corporate mergers -- emerging power of industrial capitalism. As early as 1901, 1% of businesses owned 44% of all manufactured goods. In 1900 the richest 2% of the population owned 60% of the nation's wealth Massive growth in population: 76 million Americans in 1900, nearly 106 million by 1920.
    "The rage to conserve may betray the white, middle- to upper-class conservative desire to preserve, maintain, and even cling to their own privileges and position in the face of social unrest. Nine million people had immigrated to the United States during the 1880s and 1890s alone. The labor surplus drove wages down and the turn of the century surged with union organizing, protests, and strikes." (Stacey Aaimo, "The Undomesticated Nature of Feminism: Mary Austin and the Progressive Women Conservationists," Studies in American Fiction 26.1 [Spring 1998]: 73-96, p. 78).

    Mrs. Matthew T. Scott, speaking at the 1910 Conservation Congress:
    "We, the mothers of this generation -- ancestresses of future generations -- have a right to insist upon the conserving not only of soil, forest, birds, minerals, fishes, waterways in the interest of our future home-makers, but also upon the conserving of the supremacy of the Caucasian race in our land. This Conservation, second to none for pressing importance, may and should be insured in the best interests of all races concerned: and the sooner attention is turned upon it the better." (quoted in Aaimo, p. 79).

    "For it is woman who is the divinity of the spring whence flows the streams of humanity -- nay, she is the source herself. To her keeping has been entrusted the sacred fount. In her hands rests the precious cup, the golden bowl of life. Holier than the Holy Grail itself is this chalice glowing ever, with its own share of the divine fire, its own vital spark from the altar of Almighty power, Never has this office of cupbearer to creation placed greater responsibility upon woman than in this our own day, and this our own country." (quoted in Aaimo,  p. 79).

    The masculine myth of the West that predominated until very recently [and still does hold plenty of allure] is based on the polarity between East and West that we have already seen in Twain and is evident to some extent in the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny and the Turner thesis:

    East / West
    Culture /  Nature
    Art /  Life
    Civilised / Wild
    Tame /  Savage
    Feminine /  Masculine
    Soft /  Hard
    Security /  Risk
    Safety /  Danger
    Society /  Individual
    Constraint /  Freedom
    Convention /  Experimentation
    Responsibility /  Recklessness
    and so on ...

    "As a cultural imaginary, the 'Wild West' began as a place where desires of all kinds -- taboo desires especially -- found imaginative expression and release. In nineteenth-century popular iconography, 'western wilderness' was not only a proving ground for American know-how, but also a cultural space where forbidden sexual liaisons were rumored to take place: those of  white men with Indian or Mexican or Chinese women, of men with men (a less acknowledged event), and of white men with 'virgin land.' In 'wilderness,'  white men crossed the color line; they felt out (even if they also  denied) the seductions of homosocial worlds. In it, they indulged fantasies of lawlessness too -- the perverse pleasures of violence against one another, against Natives and Mexicans and Asians, against white women and the feminized landscape. Part of what made the Wild West wild, part of its 'lure,' was the availability of the sexual unknown." (Krista Comer, Landscapes of the New West: Gender and Geography in Contemporary Women's Writing [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999], p. 156).

    "[I]t is men who go mostly into the desert, who love it past all reasonableness, slack their ambitions, cast off old usages, neglect their families because of the pulse and beat of a life laid bare to its thews and sinews. Their women hate with implicitness the life like the land, stretching interminably whity-brown, dim and shadowy blue hills that hem it, glimmering pale waters of mirage that creep and crawl about its edges. There was a woman once at Agua Hedionda -- but you wouldn't believe that either.
     If the desert were a woman, I know well what like she would be: deep-breasted, broad in the hips, tawny, with tawny hair, great masses of it lying smooth along her perfect curves, full lipped like a sphinx, but not heavy-lidded like one, eyes sane and steady as the polished jewel of her skies, such a countenance as should make men serve without desiring her, such a largeness to her mind as should make their sins of no account, passionate, but not necessitous, patient -- and you could not move her, no not if you had all the earth to give, so much as one tawny hair's-breadth beyond her own desires. If you cut very deeply into any soul that has the mark of the land upon it, you find such qualities as these -- as I shall presently prove to you." (Mary Austin, Stories from the Country of Lost Borders, ed. Marjorie Pryse [New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987],  p. 160).

    "There was something else there besides what you find in the books; a lurking, evasive Something, wistful, cruel, ardent; something that rustled and ran, that hung half-remotely, insistent on being noticed, fled from pursuit, and when you turned form it, leaped suddenly and fastened on your vitals. This is no figure of speech, but the true movement of experience." (Mary Austin, Earth Horizon [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1932], p. 187).

    "It would come leaping out at me in cold contradictions of the accepted way of waking intelligence, with a keen sense of the long known, the reexperienced .... coyotes hot in the chase, and something older in me than thinking, off after them obsessed by the quarry, the entrancing, the utterly desired, sole object of endevour, the delightful other of consummation .... O Delightful, I could eat you up .... I could love you to death! As I walked in the wild, now and then, with just such reversions of knowing and thinking, the animals 'spoke' to me ... and not animals only, plants ... stones ... mountains." (Mary  Austin, "Lost Others." Unpublished ms.)

    "Desert is the name it wears upon the maps, but the Indian's is the better word. Desert is a loose term to indicate land that supports no man; whether the land can be bitted and broken to that purpose is not proven. Void of life it never is, however dry the air or villainous the soil." (Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain, p. 3).

    "Somehow the rawness of the land favors the sense of personal relation to the supernatural. There is not much intervention of crops, cities, clothes, and manners between you and the organizing forces to cut off communication. All this begets in Jimville a state that passes explanation unless you will accept an explanation that passes belief. Along with killing and drunkenness, coveting of women, charity, simplicity, there is a certain indifference, blankness, emptiness if you will, of all vaporings, no bubbling of the pot, [...] -- no bread-envy, no brother-fervor. [...] [I]t represents the courage to sheer off what is not worth while. Beyond that it endures without sniveling, renounces without self-pity, fears no death, rates itself not too great in the scheme of things; so do beasts, so did St. Jerome in the desert, so also in the elder days did gods. Life, its performance, cessation, is no new thing to gape and wonder at. [...] Here you have the repose of the perfectly accepted instinct which includes passion and death in its perquisites" (The Land of Little Rain, p. 34).

    "At Las Ulvas they keep up all the good customs brought out of Old Mexico or bred in lotus-eating land; drink, and are merry and look out for something to eat afterward; have children, nine or ten to a family, have cock-fights, keep the siesta, smoke cigarettes and wait for the sun to go down. And always they dance [...]." (The Land of Little Rain, p. 73).

    "Sometimes the speech of simple folk hints at truth the understanding does not reach. [...] Your earth-born is a poet and a symbolist. We breed in an environment of asphalt pavements a body of people whose creeds are chiefly restrictions against other people's way of life, and have kitchens and latrines under the same roof that houses their God. [...] Come away, you who are obsessed with your own importance in the scheme of things, and have got nothing you did not sweat for, come away by the brown valleys and full-bosomed hills to the even-breathing days, to the kindliness, earthiness, ease of El Pueblo de Las Ulvas." (The Land of Little Rain, p. 76).

    Further Reading
  • Aaimo, Stacey. "The Undomesticated Nature of Feminism: Mary Austin and the Progressive Women Conservationists," Studies in American Fiction 26.1 [Spring 1998]: 73-96.
  • Anderson, Eric Gary. American Indian Literature & the Southwest: Contexts and Dispositions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), chapter 7.
  • Norwood, Vera, and Janice Monk, eds. The Desert Is No Lady: Southwestern Landscapes in Women's Writing and Art (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987).

    • Wyatt, David. The Fall into Eden: Landscape and Imagination in California (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), chapter 4.
    Links

    The following primary texts are available from the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia: