Cultivating the Taos Mystique

Unlike the new development at Carmel and the recently revitalized fishing village of Provincetown, the old frontier trading post of Taos, New Mexico, was experiencing slow, steady growth at the turn of the twentieth century. The rapid, regional expansion of a modern, automobile-based tourism into Taos and a broadly-articulated modernist fascination with experiencing the ways of the primitive ‘other’ attracted a distinctively modernist coterie to the region and shifted the local power structures from the Native Puebloans and established Hispanic residents toward the relative newcomers: Anglo business and land owners. This chapter considers the development of the local tourism and real estate industry alongside a vogue for witnessing, appreciating, and representing Native American ceremonial dance ceremonials. Through analysis of literary representations of these dances by Marsden Hartley, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Harriet Monroe, Alice Corbin Henderson, and Mary Austin, this chapter identifies a fascination with Native dance as a distinctively modernist practice: ones that served, for each other and the larger world, as ‘a sign of modernism in us.’ Further, these dances were integral to the creation of the ineffable ‘Taos mystique’ that undergirded the local tourism and real estate industry.

Gender, Sexuality, and Love between Women in California’s Suffrage Campaign

The traditional narrative of the women’s suffrage movement has presented a “respectable” version of suffrage history primarily focused on the prominent role of elite, cisgender, heterosexual white women in fighting for the vote. Scholars are currently challenging that narrative. The story of California suffragists Gail Laughlin and Dr. Mary Austin Sperry “queers” our understanding of suffrage history by revealing the ways that suffragists transgressed normative boundaries of gender and sexuality not only in their norm-defying gender expressions, but in their non-heteronormative domestic arrangements.

Regionalism

In American literature, regionalism refers to works that describe a distinctive local geography and culture, and to movements that value smaller-scaled representations of place over representations of broad territorial range. Regionalism emerges from the perception of modern geographic plurality; writers and readers understand a larger unit of space (commonly the national territory) to be diversified at its periphery according to topographical features, economy, history, dialect, and manners. A region is always one among many within a common container, characterized by uneven development between center and periphery. Regionalism indicates that a writer has chosen to focus on one of the areas outside the centers of power, and to organize the work around that region. In American literature, regionalism has been associated with the sketch or short story, although the category can accommodate poetry and the novel. Regionalism’s detractors have treated it as a minor form portraying outdated folkways, more parochial than literature that features a larger spatial scale and cosmopolitan characters. Its defenders reject that evaluation, often arguing that regionalism provided access to female, nonwhite, and rural writers, who used the form in innovative and empowering ways. As a literary category, regionalism originates in the post-Civil war era, but many critics locate its origins in the antebellum period, when women writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe offered sketches of rural New England, while Southwestern humorists promoted the storytelling style and wilderness settings of the nation’s frontier territories. In the late 19th century, the term gets used interchangeably with “local color” to designate stories set in relatively undeveloped areas, such as coastal New England, the South, the Midwest, and California. Regionalist writers like Sarah Orne Jewett, Hamlin Garland, and Charles Chesnutt were perceived to be contributing to American realism, doing so by describing, piecemeal-style, the varied conditions of American life. In the 20th century, regionalist movements such as the “Revolt from the Village” school (Sherwood Anderson, Edgar Lee Masters) and the “New Regionalism” (Mary Austin and John Crowe Ransom, for example) rejected both modern American standardization and the “local color” writers, accusing those earlier artists of capitulating to East Coast taste. Writers who have been studied as instrumental in the development of 20th-century southern regionalism include William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor, and Eudora Welty, while Willa Cather, Wallace Stegner, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Gloria Anzaldúa have been especially important in literary regionalism of the West.

Yours for the (Marriage) Revolution

In 1915, Mary Austin (1868-1934) wrote to her old friend and fellow writer Jack London (1876-1916) to upbraid him for failing to write a novel that truthfully depicted the life of a modern woman, and by extension, companionate marriage. Companionate marriage was a rational system based in idealism, tailor-made for the Progressive Era and for revolutionists such as Austin and London in Greenwich Village, who shared their era’s enthusiasm for scientific systems. Austin and London protested conventional forms of marriage both from the sociological standpoint of its unnecessary conventions and from its failure to account for the irrationality of sexual desire and its dampening effect on genius. Yet their accounts of unconventional unions reveal another set of problems. Pitting conventional marriage against its more revolutionary counterparts, Austin, in A Woman of Genius and Number 26 Jayne Street, and London, in “Planchette” (1908) and Little Lady of the Big House (1916), critique conventional marriage but also cast a cold eye on its Bohemian alternatives, revealing the gap between the ideal and the real in progressive marriage by highlighting the stubborn realities of gender inequality and of the irrational desire, cast in London’s “Planchette” as the supernatural world, that plagued their idealistic efforts.

Selling the Santuario

This chapter begins with a nineteenth-century attempt by the Archdiocese of Santa Fe to obtain the privately owned Santuario. It then turns to the 1929 sale, which was orchestrated by Anglo artists and intellectuals in the newly formed Spanish Colonial Arts Society. The ostensible goal of buying the church was to preserve it for the Hispano population as well as its priceless Hispanic folk art, but the Spanish Colonial Arts Society immediately turned the deed over to the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, then under the leadership of Archbishop Daeger. The chapter provides an analysis of the racially charged decisions that were made concerning the ownership and fate of the Santuario. Key figures in the Spanish Colonial Arts Society who are discussed in the chapter include Mary Austin and John Gaw Meem.

The Shack Landscape and Its Restoration: A Natural history

“The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism,” wrote my father in Round River. As he was hinting, we can locate many of the parts, but how these fit together in the land organism was another matter. Finding the native plant species would be a good start. To reunite some of these came next. The work of our family was creative in its own right: figuring out what conditions these species needed, including by experimentation. Essential to that is appreciating how this landscape got its form—what processes have worked on it and with what results. This much helps us with our understanding of the setting and the soils—what I would call the lay of the land. In the work to restore old habitats and old vegetation types, it is really useful and interesting to know something of the land history, ancient and recent. As Mary Austin wrote, “To understand the fashion of any life, one must know the land it is lived in and the procession of the year.” The Shack experience involved both of these elements. When you live in an area, a natural question that arises is how the landscape got the way it is. What forces shaped it, and over what periods of time? In the Shack area, two different prominent ridges (about twenty-five feet in height) are oriented perpendicular to the Wisconsin River. One is the north-south ridge just west of the Shack—the Sand Hill/Clay Hill ridge. The other is the north-south ridge downstream from Gilbert’s farm; it is the ridge on which the Leopold Center is built. At the point where the river cuts the nose of that ridge (Barrows Bluff) are a great number of large boulders and clay. The Sand Hill site also has an enormous boulder on it. Both have sand on top near the river. I wondered how ridges like these formed in the first place. Then I read the report by Robert Dott and John Attig about the history of the glacial ice lobes in Wisconsin.