Cactus Thorn: (A Novella)

by Mary Austin, Melody Graulich

Overview

Set primarily in the lonesome southwest desert lands of the 1920s, this novella is a powerful story in which landscape reflects and defines character. In this beautifully written tale, a promising young politician, Grant Arliss, flees from this pressure-ridden life in New York City to the serenity of the desert’s open spaces.
There, he finds not only a place to sort out his confusion but also a remarkable woman, unlike any he has met. In his eyes, Dulcie Adelaid is an aloof creature of the desert who relies only on herself. Challenged and yet inhibited by the desert’s unrelenting force, Arliss admires Dulcie’s instinctive ability to thrive in the harsh country. She also provides a spiritual sustenance that he has never found with any other woman. Together they engage in lively conversations about his political convictions and her beliefs and values. Inspired, Arliss returns to New York where he delivers eloquent speeches to an overwhelmingly supportive constituency.
Placing Cactus Thorn in biographical, feminist, and literary perspective, Melody Graulich's commentary discusses how Austin’s themes are timeless in setting and moral tone. Foreword and afterword by Melody Graulich.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780874172539
Publisher:	University of Nevada Press
Publication date:	09/01/1994
Series:	Western Literature and Fiction Series
Pages:	163
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	3 Months to 18 Years

About the Author

Mary Austin (1868-1934) wrote more than 30 books during her career, including Land of Little Rain (1903) and Lost Borders (1909). Born in Carlinsville, Illinois, Mary Austin eventually ventured west with her brother and widowed mother to homestead in California. Throughout her essays, poems, plays, and stories, she focused on environmental issues and the relationship between individual experience and cultural histories.

Read an Excerpt

Grant Arliss had made two or three turns about the station platform before he saw her. So drugged was his gaze by the naked glare of a land whose very shadows looked rusted by the sun, he could scarcely take her in, lovely as she was, as a separate item of the landscape. She must have been sitting just there in the shelter of the alfalfa bales when the construction train had dropped him a quarter of an hour ago, taking him in with that same wide gaze, incurious as an animal's, which dropped without a spark as it crossed his own.

Editorial Reviews

"Formal in its dialogue, passionate and romantic in its evocation of the Southwest, where the central action takes place, this slender novella is at heart a feminist tract. . . . Written in 1927 and never before published, the story is timeless in setting and moral tone. Like Austin's other novels (Earth Horizon, Land of Little Rain), it is a powerful enactment of a woman's need to choose between a man and the land she loves." —Publishers Weekly



"In Cactus Thorn, Austin has combined the clear, bone-deep prose of her finest landscape writing with a complex psychological portrait of a love affair, producing what must surely rank as a new classic of western American literature."—San Francisco Review of Books



"Mary Austin speaks powerfully to our own historical movement, for she experienced and wrote about much that feminist scholars have recently unearthed—the transformative power of the land, the costs of women’s lives of action, essential tensions between the sexes, a woman’s love of what men once called the waste places of the West."—The Women’s Review of Books



"To paraphrase Graulich's summation: this book liberates a woman's wit, anger, and imagination."
—Judy Nolte Lensink, Wellesley College Center for Research on Women

From the Publisher

Formal in its dialogue, passionate and romantic in its evocation of the Southwest, where the central action takes place, this slender novella is at heart a feminist tract. The boy-meets-girl openinghe, Grant Arliss, a socialist politician from New York, she, Dulcie Adelaid, as skilled as an Indian in tracking the desert where she was raisedpromises a happy ending. But subtle clues signal otherwise: the eponymous cactus thorn, a tiny dagger with which Dulcie kills a snake rearing toward Grant, and Dulcie's conviction that one must act according to one's beliefbeliefs that she thinks Grant's socialism espouses and that his own life should reflect. The splendor of the desert and of their love for each other is disturbed when a drunken man appears and demands to see Dulcie. Grant sends him, through a murderous sandstorm, in the wrong direction; later, Dulcie reveals that he is her husband. Events then careen wildly to the shocking and yet logicalwithin its feminist ideology resolution. Written in 1927 and never before published, the story is timeless in setting and moral tone. Like Austin's other novels ( Earth Horizon , Land of Little Rain ), it is a powerful enactment of a woman's need to choose between a man and the land she loves. (September)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly