Genre, Location, and Mary Austin's Ethos

Abstract

Scholars in rhetoric are increasingly attentive to the power of places and spaces to shape rhetorical performance. This article takes up the connection between ethos and location identified by several recent scholars, arguing that affiliation with and representation of material environments plays a crucial role in ethos. Ethos strategies are further shaped by genres, which are theorized as locations and environments in order to capture a fundamental dynamic between strategy and social norm. To demonstrate the strengths of understanding ethos in relation to both geographical and genre location, I analyze the ethos-maneuvers of Mary Austin, prominent early twentieth-century feminist, activist, and nature writer whose thirty-year public career merits attention from rhetorical scholars. In articulating how genre shapes Austin's efforts to develop her location in the deserts of the American West into a persuasive public ethos, I argue that ethos emerges in genre-specific formations.

Acknowledgments

I thank the editor of RSQ and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and helpful feedback, and Jane Danielewicz, Jordynn Jack, Sarah Hallenbeck, and Heather Branstetter for their generous responses to early versions of this article.

Notes

¹For instance, the Houghton Mifflin ad “Gift Books for the Holidays” excerpts a San Francisco Bulletin review that calls LLR “a classic of California.”

²One reviewer of Austin's 1905 novel Isidro praised the “virility” of its style (“Isidro” 601); another reviewer, of her 1906 history of shepherding, The Flock, called Austin's books “little works of art lying in the tenuous interspace between stories and descriptive writing” (Kerfoot 824).

³Throughout this article I use “literary nature essay” rather than “nature writing” to identify with greater precision the distinct genre in which Austin wrote, as I explain further in the third section.

⁴Of copious recent feminist and literary scholarship on Austin, see especially Lanigan; Schaefer; Graulich and Klimasmith.

⁵Although recent biographers treat the issue of Austin's marriage and motherhood sensitively (see Ellis 8–9; Lanigan 49–54; Goodman and Dawson 30–34), earlier critics treated Austin severely; for instance, Edward Abbey wrote in 1980 that Austin's “marriage was a failure, her first and only child a mental retard, but in 1899, at the age of thirty-one, she sold a story to the Overland Monthly … . That did it; she dumped her husband and child, left the Owens Valley, and became a full-time literary bohemian” (Abbey ix–x).

⁶On the question of appropriation in Austin's writing, see Salzer; Viehmann; Lape.

⁷Although American women before Austin wrote about the natural world (Susan Fenimore Cooper, for instance), Austin is often cited in this regard because of the literary status her naturalist writing immediately attained. See Mabey; Stewart; Lyon; Finch and Elder. Austin is the first woman included in the influential “Chronology” in Lyon's This Incomperable Lande.

⁸See Lutts; Stewart 85–103 for more detail on the “nature fakers” debates.

⁹Langlois notes that at the turn of the century Houghton Mifflin “was considered the arbiter of good taste in literature and the reigning symbol of America's literary tradition” and that the boxed, embossed, and richly illustrated first edition of LLR signaled an appeal to “the genteel, affluent buyer” (32).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Risa Applegarth

Risa Applegarth is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 3143 MHRA Building, 1111 Spring Garden St., Greensboro, NC 27412, USA.