The Road to the Spring: Collected Poems of Mary Austin

A Modern Chisera

1 A Modern Chisera Born in 1868, Mary Austin lived through a period of significant cultural transitions, beginning in a recently reunited, post-Civil War United States and ending in a global industrial power on the eve of World War Two. In literary terms, she began in the era of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Emily Dickinson and ended with the emergence of Willa Cather, H. D., and Marianne Moore. From the 1890s to her death in 1934, Austin was steadily productive, publishing dozens of poems, short stories, novels, plays, and essays. Her writing was widely known and often highly praised by some of the best critics of the day, including Mark Van Doren and Carl Van Doren. She had deep roots in regional literature, promoting the prose and poetry of writers like Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, and Robinson Jeffers. She also helped to advance Imagism, the first important modernist movement in twentieth-century poetry, and she could claim Alice Corbin Henderson, Amy Lowell, and Harriet Monroe as friends and colleagues. Austin identified most closely with the desert country of the Paiute and Shoshone Indians in Owens Valley, California, where she lived as a young woman in the final decade of the nineteenth century. At the turn of the twentieth century, she was often part of the literary gatherings of the editor and writer Charles Lummis in Los Angeles, and in the first decade of the twentieth century she lived in the bohemian writers’ colony of Carmel, on the coast near Monterey, making a name for herself alongside Jack London, George Sterling, Upton Sinclair, Robinson Jeffers, and Lincoln Steffens. Just when modernism was appearing in the art and literature of Paris and London, 2 Austin was a well-known figure in the literary world of New York City, living there from 1912 to 1924. In the last decade of her life, she found a home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, doing important work in preserving and promoting the arts among the Pueblo Indians and Hispanic settlers. Both an outsider and an insider for the nearly forty years of her writing career, Austin was a recognized voice in the rapidly changing American literary scene. Modern readers know Austin best for a handful of essays and stories, most published in the early years of the twentieth century. The vivid prose of The Land of Little Rain (1903) remains Austin’s most original work. Published by Houghton Mifflin when Austin was thirty-five, the book still appeals strongly to readers and is often listed as an essential book in environmental literature. Readers of The Land of Little Rain readily catch the voice of a maverick, an outlier, a feminist, and a rebel. The book has kept Austin’s ideas alive in discussions of environmental literature, feminist writing, Native American studies, and regionalism. But Austin began her writing career as a poet, and she wrote poems throughout her career. Moreover , Austin’s poetry shows the evolving voice of an environmentalist , an ecofeminist, and an experimenter in free verse. In addition to the tough-minded renegade, Austin creates a powerful new figure in her poems—the Chisera, or Medicine Woman. The Chisera is a female shaman, at once a visionary prophet, social critic, and healer. The Chisera first appears in Austin’s verse drama The Arrow Maker (1911) as a conflicted, tension-ridden character. Caught between her love for the ambitious arrow maker and her duty to her community, the Chisera finds her true path by abandoning the vulnerabilities of human emotion and embracing the strengths of contemplative solitude. Austin wrote two different endings to the play. In the production version, the Chisera supplants her lover and becomes the visionary leader of her people, taking them into righteous war. In Austin’s preferred original version, the Chisera dies at the hand of her faithless lover as she announces the victorious path to her people. 3 For Austin, the role of the visionary Chisera is literary and cultural . The writer functions to show her people the road to truth—a road that will take the people back to the sources of their goodness and power as a community of believers. This is what Austin means when she calls for us to travel “the road to the spring . . . to the source of man’s medium, rather than to his emotions; a road which every people must take from time to time if it...