A History of American Literature

Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 299

getting out to hunt for a remedy.” And Austin hunted for a remedy in fiction, factual

analysis, and autobiography. Her novel, A Woman of Genius (1912), for instance,

describes how a woman escapes from her restricted life through art; Love and the

Soul Maker (1914) is a discussion of modern problems of love, marriage, and divorce;

while The Young Woman Citizen (1918) is a handbook of politics for the newly

enfranchised woman voter. Her two major books reflect the range of her commit-

ments and her interest, in particular, in the liberatory impact of the West and the

necessary liberation of women. The Land of Little Rain (1903) is an evocative account

of the beauties and the mystery of Western desert life. It was one of the earliest books

to suggest that the true story of the West resided in its wilderness condition, its

challenge to all notions of human domination, rather than in ideas of rugged indi-

vidualism, empire, and conquest. Responsive to her own feelings expressed here,

Austin herself became an activist for environmental causes. Earth Horizon (1932), in

turn, her other major work, is an autobiography with a revolutionary form. Austin

records how she felt herself “marked” by a sense of destiny, special mission. She

remembers how she was mocked and criticized by her family for her “individual

divergences” from the norms of female behavior. She rehearses her annoyance with

the notion that “the crown of a woman’s life” should be “the privilege of being the

utterly giving and devoted wife of one man.” And to register the tensions inherent in

this conflict between the demands of society and her own needs, or what she terms

“tradition and realism,” she distinguishes between her socially ordained self and her

true self in an innovative way. Her true self, that finds fulfillment for instance in

intimate contact with the Western landscape, is “I” or “I-Mary”; the false self that

others would wish to impose upon her is “she,” “you,” or simply “Mary.” Austin sees

her story as special, but also typical. She constantly reminds the reader that other

women felt and fought as she did. “Mary wasn’t by any means the only girl of that

period,” she declares, “insisting on going on her own way against the traditions, and

refusing to come to a bad end on account of it.” Like an earlier writer with whom she

has much in common, Thoreau, she brags for humanity as well as for herself. And

she argues for another America in which “I-Mary” might be comfortable, where the

centers of power and place have radically shifted.

The immigrant encounter

From the land of little rain to the South Side of Chicago is an enormous leap, in

terms of landscape, life, and language. But that in itself suggests just how many

Americas were contending, arguing to be heard at this time. Chicago’s South Side,

and in particular the Irish working-class neighborhood of Bridgeport, was where

Finley Peter Dunne (1867–1936) located his most famous creation, Mr. Dooley, an

Irish saloon keeper, who was never reluctant to voice his opinions on life, current

events, and the social scene. Dunne, a journalist and editor of the Chicago Evening

Post, wrote a series of monologues for his paper. They were rich in dialect, a genuine

and on the whole successful attempt to catch Irish vernacular in print; and the mon-

ologues delivered by Dooley became a Chicago tradition. About three hundred

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