Women in/on nature: Mary Austin, Gretel Ehrlich, Terry Tempest Williams, and Ann Zwinger

Women In/On Nature: Mary Austin, Gretel Ehrlich, Terry Tempest Williams and Ann Zwinger discusses how four women who write about the American West describe their relationship to the natural world. The dissertation shows how troubled these writers are by the dichotomous nature of twentieth-century culture and argues that they shape their work, in varying ways, by leveling hierarchies and collapsing dichotomies.;Although Mary Austin's The Land of Little Rain (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974) is looked at by critics as a book of nature writing depicting the natural history of California's southwestern desert, in many ways the book is less about the landscape than about Austin's need to create a refuge for herself. Writing this book allowed Austin to control a world rich in connections that were in many ways only available to her in a text. Gretel Ehrlich and Terry Tempest Williams, by contrast, used conventionally feminine tropes to illustrate their closeness to the natural world. In The Solace of Open Spaces (New York: Viking, 1985) Ehrlich envisions a kind of marriage between herself and Wyoming and between other Wyoming residents and their state. This concept of marriage is endowed with a kind of sanctity and involves the way humans think about their interconnected relationship to everything in the universe. In Refuge (New York: Pantheon, 1991) Williams's trope of the family expresses the author's close relationship to the earth. By extending her notion of the family beyond human relationships, Williams creates a circular-shaped family where people, plants, animals and all non-living matter are represented as separate and equal members.;In the last chapter of the dissertation I discuss Run, River Run (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1975) by Ann Zwinger, a writer whose close relationship with nature differs from that of the other three writers. While Austin, Ehrlich and Williams all immerse themselves in nature physically, emotionally, spiritually, psychologically and/or sexually in varying ways and to varying degrees, Zwinger strives to present the natural world as a pure entity separate and apart from issues of her own selfhood, identity and autobiography.