Mating Season

 Like Mary and Brooke, I was immediately struck by the trail of poison trickling through this section of The Land of Little Rain.  I was affectively disarmed from the start, gaping at the kind of nature that lurks in the margins, “along the desert edges of the West” (91).  This kind of nature does not invite, nor is it romanticized.  Nature that smells like “old blood” and stems from “clumps of rotting willows” (92) is not inspirational, such as it can be in Walden, or beautiful, as is the plant life in Canadian Wild Flowers.  Austin’s constant characterizing of this area as forbidding, ugly, even hostile, renders her conclusion perplexing.  She tells us the tulares are mysterious, happily so, and they are mysterious in a way that attracts our attention, though not strongly enough for us to disregard the “malaria” seething in its “dingy pools” (92).  So why does Austin follow up this treatise on a sickly and sickening environment with a gesture toward this same environment’s allure?

To address this shift in perspective, we must tend to the relationship between Austin and her readers.  As we noted in class, Austin initially offers herself as a guide to the territory, but as the text progresses, her role becomes less defined and more eerily ubiquitous.  As this transition occurs, the reader’s role is also transformed, from naïve explorer to hopeless outsider.  Jessica observed that Austin never makes the strange familiar.  Over time, then, the foreign reader becomes estranged – fictional, even.

In the portion about the tulares, this fictionalized reader is bombarded by images of grotesque, uninhabitable nature, but hidden among this rhetorical filth is a gem of a fact, untouched by the disgusted reader: Austin’s framework for this snapshot is “mating weather” (92).  All around are thus the sounds of life.  Austin attempts to alienate her readers from this landscape only to glorify it under the mystifying promise of newness.  This promise, however, is only available to that tireless brand of reader, the one who courageously accepts the tulares’ poisonous qualities in order to revel in the breath of life waiting to be appreciated.  So though the reader remains on the outskirts, so, too, does Austin, who creates a sort of communion of understanding with this diligent reader.  Both dared to dredge into the slime and rot to uncover the existence of a mystery “happy” in its secret, and both will resignify poison as birth.

Austin, Mary.  The Land of Little Rain.  1903.  Introd. Robert Hass.  New York, NY: Modern Library, 2003.