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  • Mary Austin's Regionalism: Reflections on Gender, Genre, and Geography
  • Betsy Klimasmith
Mary Austin's Regionalism: Reflections on Gender, Genre, and Geography. By Heike Schaefer. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2004. 288 pp. $39.50.

Mary Austin, whose fiction, poetry, journalism, and drama drew largely on her experiences in the developing American West of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, left readers with a vast body of work rife with ecological insight, irony, artistry, pedanticism, and paradox. Austin was a western writer who spent significant periods of her literary career in New York, as well as a supporter of Native American rights and artistic production who appropriated Native American tales and songs into her own material. She was also a politically active environmentalist and feminist whose best-known passage essentializes both gender and the landscape:

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 [End Page 206] 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.

Given her political and literary slipperiness, it is unsurprising that critical treatments of Austin's varied texts have tended to be essays that examined a single facet of Austin's work or longer biographical studies that use Austin's mobile life and mercurial personality to help account for her wide-ranging oeuvre. In Mary Austin's Regionalism: Reflections on Gender, Genre, and Geography, Heike Schaefer gives Austin's work its most sustained theoretical treatment to date. Examining texts ranging from unpublished essays to Austin's best-known work, The Land of Little Rain (1903), Schaefer draws on Austin's writing along with a range of critical and theoretical approaches to landscape and gender to develop a complex exploration of Austin's theory and practice of regionalism.

Austin believed that "there is no sort of experience that works so constantly and subtly upon a man as his regional environment" (19), but this conception of region is simply broader than much literary criticism acknowledges. As Schaefer rightly points out, attempts to fit Austin into particular literary subgroups—to label her as, say, an American Woman Regionalist or an Environmental Writer—smooth away the complexities of her work and, more insidiously, work counter to the multiplicitous project that Schaefer sees Austin engaging in throughout her career.

Schaefer responds to the challenges of working with Austin as writer and theorist by expanding the definition of regionalism. First, she considers regionalism in relation to community, geographical determinism, realism, and national culture, using Thoreau and John Dewey as important intellectual models and foils for Austin. In subsequent chapters Schaefer explores nature writing, place as process, gendering nature, regional development, and regionalist fiction.

Schaefer is at her best when tackling the thorny issue of Austin's appropriation of Native American material for her projects. She addresses but moves beyond Austin's well-known use of Native American poetry to suggest that Austin's regionalist vision derived in large part from Native American approaches to land and region. Theoretically, this approach is most successful in her chapter on regional development, "Who Owns the Place?" Here, Schaefer argues, "Both Austin's efforts to engage her white readers in a cross-cultural regionalist learning process and her environmentalist attention to the intersections of human and non-human history are compromised at times by her primitivist view of Native American cultures and her racialized and evolutionary notions about the processes of cultural development" (151). Without shying away from Austin's more objectionable practices, Schaefer persuasively situates Austin's work and perspective within its cultural context. This helps to reveal the complexity and the real contributions Austin made (and may still make) to the fields of environmental...

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