| Authors of animal stories appearing in both American Literature and environmental anti-grazing rhetoric have melodramatically cast domestic animals as female Eden-wrecking villains and wild animals as male noble savages. This dichotomy influenced political decisions which were potentially destructive to Mary Austin's rural community, located along the eastern flank of California's Sierra Nevada mountains. Using interdisciplinary ecocriticism, this study illuminates the way Austin revises the ancient--yet postmodern and subconsciously powerful--animal story to blur the boundaries of this wild/domestic dichotomy, diffusing its power over the imagination and public policy.;The introduction summarizes modern grazing research and places Austin's animal observations within the current controversy about whether or not "wilderness" is a human construct. The first three chapters illustrate the domestic side of wild animals, while the second three reveal the wild side of domestic animals. Chapter one explains how Austin disrupts the traditional gender stereotypes of wild and domestic animals. Chapter two examines how Austin's animal stories reinvision the West as a home, maintaining that humans inherited many domestic skills from wild animals: food gathering, home building, raising and educating young, forming social groups, and making or following trails. In personal support, the third chapter, "My First Daughter was an Antelope," recounts my own rural life hunting, fishing, and raising very domestic wild animals.;Chapter four investigates Austin's The Flock (1903) as a challenge to John Muir's allegoric wild-over-domestic sheep hierarchy. Allegorically through sheep, Austin encourages respect for human masses, the racially other, the old, the eccentric, and "ignorant" rural people. Chapter five suggests that Austin's wild desert cow influenced Edward Abbey's politics and covert use of an indigenous desert cow to blur boundaries between the wild and domestic. As further support, I again turn to a personal essay, "That One-Eyed Hereford Muley," to recount my own experiences with very wild domestic animals.;Despite the central role that animal stories played in Austin's early writing, critics have for too long dismissed these stories as juvenile. Decades ahead of deconstruction, Austin used animal stories to argue against linear, dualistic, or hierarchial ranking of animals, people, places, and literary styles. |
