Mary Austin’s California Gothic

Abstract

Ginsberg contends that Mary Austin’s early regionalist short fiction about California features unforgiving landscapes in which humans struggle against an environment whose features of danger, terror, and death are expressed in Gothic terms. She argues that Austin’s Gothic is rooted in the split selves and the mysterious nature gods that haunt Austin’s autobiography, Earth Horizon. She finds that Austin uses Gothic tropes to critique Victorian conventions of sex and gender. While recent scholarship has focused on Austin’s late modernist works, less attention has been paid to Austin’s dark Naturalism. By considering the American Gothic, the female Gothic, and the Ecogothic, Ginsberg shows how the landscapes of the desert Southwest are rendered using Gothic features in Lost Borders, Austin’s early regional stories of the Mojave desert.