Below are Earl's notes from his Student Textual Analysis of Austin's The Land of Little Rain


The Land of Little Rain by Mary Austin: Textual Analysis

Mary Austin was thirty-five years old when her first book, The Land of Little Rain, was published in 1903. Though its reception was enthusiastic (Pearce 36), Austin's literary success bore the precedent of substantial personal tragedy and hardship, often in the context of her interactions with people and society. Although the work does not directly reflect the unhappiness Austin often endured, it is my opinion that the peculiar tone and of atmosphere of The Land of Little Rain stems in large measure from the life-changing events of Austin's life preceding its publication. It is with this contextual focus that my analysis of the book proceeds.

A short overview of Austin's life previous to her literary success affords one a clear view of what events helped shape the finished author. Mary Austin was born Mary Hunter in Illinois, in September of 1868. She lost her father ten years later, along with her younger sister Jennie, “the only one who ever unselflessly [sic] loved me” (Pearce 13). When Mary was twenty, she and her remaining family traveled to California, where they would try and fail to make a homestead on fallow land (Pearce). It was here, under the glowering shade of financial failure, that Mary first became acquainted with the richness of nature. According to Pearce, “Even in the drought of the first April at Tejon, the mirages held a spell for her” (30).

However, despite her happy discovery of nature in early adulthood, Mary Austin (whose husband, Stafford Wallace Austin, she found frustrating and ineffectual) would remain within the bounds of society. Rather than forgoing the ordinary life of a young woman to pursue a career proselytizing the richness of Nature, Austin was compelled to teach school with her husband when his vineyard failed. She bore a daughter, Ruth, in 1892, who at eight years old was moved into an institution for the care of the mentally retarded. Ruth's handicap was declared by Austin's mother to be a judgment from on high (Pearce 35), which surely contributed to Austin's conception of “the dark cloud of the Hebrew Tribal God” (Austin 274). The misfortune of her daughter was perhaps the last great tragedy visited upon Austin to color The Land of Little Rain.

Of course, it is fair and pertinent to challenge the assertion that such hardship colored the work at all. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to find any evocation of Austin's personal tragedy—indeed, of Austin's feelings at all beyond her persistent, strangely demure admiration for the intricacies of the desert and its inhabitants. And although one essay in the book does masterfully portray a profound sense of loss and longing, it is not that of Austin but of a Shoshone medicine man, a longtime captive of the Paiutes. My argument, however, is that it is precisely this apparent lack of projected emotion in The Land of Little Rain that betrays the significance of Nature to Austin herself: an entity not only without tragedy or loss, but without the capacity for such.

In order to make an argument like this, one must distinguish between Austin's concept of Nature and the phenomena that take place within it. Certainly things of a tragic, or at least unpleasant, character take place within Nature, and Austin makes no secret of this. Life and death are nothing else in Austin's telling, and their consequences are not shunned for the sake of politeness. In “The Scavengers,” for instance, Austin has no illusions about the grotesque character of carrion fowl: “My friend Ewan told me … that not all the carnage of battle turned his bowls as the sight of … black wings rising ...” (Austin 18)

However, consider her paragraph two pages later:

“Probably we never fully credit the interdependence of wild creatures. … The hawk follows the badger, the coyote the carrion crow, and from their aerial stations the buzzards watch each other.”

Precisely the same sort of event is being described, but it is being described outside of egoism, human or animal. Austin rises in the course of the essay from the low-structure squeamishness we experience at a feast of carrion fowl to the sophisticated high-structure interplay of desert fauna during the very same event. In the first case, it is a horror found in nature. In the second, it is one of the beauties of Nature.

The chapter titled “Shoshone Land” serves as a further example of this high/low-structure division, though in this case the low-structure view is more directly anthropic. After a long description of Shoshone land itself, including many of the intricate, harmonious processes of plant, animal, and human existence within it, Austin turns to the death of her essay's central figure. She elaborates by telling of the many strictures of medicine men within the tribe—the regulations binding him and the privileges granted him, and the attendant expectations of his role within the tribe. A medicine man, “must yield his life and office” if three patients die in his care. The contrast between this and the page before, wherein Austin details how to sample native plants for food, is jarring. I would argue that Austin makes it so in order to contrast the arbitrary, unnatural functions and expectations of a medicine man, with the fluid dynamism of the land he inhabits.

This brings up a somewhat tangential point about Austin's prose style. Very often Austin will fill up a page with rich, even purple descriptions of the landscape and wildlife. These descriptions generally contain innumerable low-structure details: the colors and species of flowers, the way grass leans in the wind, or the network of roots seeking water below the sand. The abundance of such descriptions may suggest that Austin's real concern is not with the overarching concept of Nature, but with the specific behaviors and functions of those organisms and phenomena that she observes within it. Although this idea presents itself rather easily, I would argue against it with the following analogy: when we reflect on the delicacy of the hands of Michelangelo's “David,” or the vertical sonorities in certain bars of a Beethoven symphony, we do not ignore or forget in our appreciation of the low-structure that what we are describing is part of a larger whole, a high-structure impression that we carry away each time we look or listen at the piece in question, whether or not we happen to notice the distinct textures of nail versus knuckle, or how in such and such bar the dissonance is deliberate and symbolic. Each low-structure nuance would be pointless at best—more likely even harmful—had it not some harmonious relation to the high-structure entity comprising it. So, I think, it goes with Mary Austin's descriptions of nature.

My case is made best, I think, by what Austin has to say about human beings, simply because those whom she sees fit to describe at any length are unusual. They are, in some important sense, natural, in Austin's conception of the term: stoic, efficient, neither capricious nor arbitrary. The pocket hunter with his well-adapted livestock, searching patiently for riches in the land, hopeful but not desperate; the basket weaver who is not mournful or despairing when she loses her vision, but has learned along with her people to treat it as a matter of course; these people are not “at one with Nature,” nor have they abandoned the trappings of civilization. But they have developed what may be its most crucial characteristic: an unconcern for the petty, egoistic cares of life, and a harmony with the phenomena that surround them. It is not hard to see why Austin, whose worldly cares were more than most, might present such harmony with such even admiration.


Works Cited

Austin, Mary H. Earth Horizon. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Riverside, 1932. Print.
Pearce, T. M. Mary Hunter Austin. New York: Twayne, 1965. Print.