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C h a p t e r t h r e e Pioneering Women Austin  Eaton  Stein  Eliot  Williams  Cather Did American women writing in the twentieth century succeed in writing beyond the ending, in Rachel DuPlessis’s phrase, the ending in which a woman’s hopes are curtailed or altogether defeated? In 1899, Kate Chopin’s (1850– 1904) heroine walks into the Gulf of Mexico. Six years later, in The House of Mirth, Lily Bart dies her lonely death. Gertrude Steins’s Anna, Melanctha, Lena—they all suddenly wither and pass. Even Thelma and Louise, eight decades later, steer toward oblivion, although the viewer is left with the solace of last seeing them suspended in midair. Some imagined women do escape the closed ending: one thinks of Thea Kronberg in The Song of the Lark (1915), singing “The Ring of the Nibelung,” or Janie on her porch, at the end of Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), retelling her hard-won story. Yet the literature of the century contains fewer such cases than the changes on the ground might seem to warrant. In 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment brought the right to vote; in 1964, the Civil Rights Act included a provision called Title VII, which forbade discrimination in employment based on sex; in 1965 and 1973, Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade allowed for a woman’s control over the process of reproduction. It is possible to argue that the biggest change in the social world during the last one hundred years, bigger, even, than the movement we call “Civil Rights,” was the opening up of possibility in the lives of American women. That our literature proceeds from a less than wholehearted conviction of achieved satisfaction argues for something deeply and persistently unrequited in those lives. Mary Austin (1868–1934) presents a dramatic case of an American writer—too often a woman—who slips from fame to obscurity within a few years of her death. During her highly productive career, Austin published seven novels, plays, collections of folklore, studies in mysticism, and a brilliant autobiography. Her two best books were the short-story collections The Land of Little Rain (1903) and Lost Borders (1909). Austin lived a highly public life: she beachcombed with Jack London and George Sterling at Carmel; toured England with Herbert Hoover; huddled with H. G. Wells over his marital difficulties; and received a rose from Conrad, on her departure from England. The first woman to convert the arid landscapes of California and New Mexico into a literary subject, Austin would have been, in Pioneering Women 31 1920, on anyone’s list of the major living American writers. But by 1940 she was being dropped from the anthologies, and it would be almost forty years before her work would again find a place in the college classroom. Part of the reason for the eclipse has to do with Austin’s interest in stories that, at midcentury, Americans had lost the capacity to hear. The great subject of Austin’s career is her search for a story that has “a woman in it.” She must look for such a story in out-of-the-way places, mostly in the high deserts of the American Southwest. Subject and setting enjoy an intimate connection in Austin’s work: both are marginal, underfunded, unstoried. And each refuses , in its own way, to come forth. Like the Woman at the Eighteen-Mile and the Walking Woman, “the earth is no wanton to give up all her best to every comer, but keeps a sweet, separate intimacy for each.” There is something untellable in a woman ’s story, Austin’s practice suggests, or at least a something that only two women, in a moment “of fullest understanding,” can share. In the climactic scenes in her two strongest short stories, both published in Lost Borders, Austin finally tracks down and compels a woman to “give up” her story. The reluctance with which these stories are given up stands in inverse proportion to the culture’s desperate need for them. And Austin makes it plain that only someone like herself, a ferocious female listener, can compel these stories forth. The title character in “The Woman at the Eighteen-Mile,” when Austin finally finds her, makes her auditor promise not to repeat her words. Mary has tracked the story as she would a lost love: “All this time the story glimmered like a summer island in a mist, through every man’s talk about...

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