Inventing the Southwest: How Modernists Shaped an American Regional Experience
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INVENTING THE SOUTHWEST: HOW MODERNISTS SHAPED AN AMERICAN REGIONAL EXPERIENCE by Elizabeth Lloyd Oliphant BA in English and Southern Studies, University of Mississippi, 2008 MA in Literature and Cultural Studies, University of Pittsburgh, 2014 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of PhD in English and Cultural Studies University of Pittsburgh 2017 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH KENNETH P. DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Elizabeth Lloyd Oliphant It was defended on July 24, 2017 and approved by Jonathan Arac, Andrew W. Mellon Professor, Department of English William Scott, Associate Professor, Department of English Kirk Savage, Professor, Department of History of Art and Architecture Dissertation Advisor: Nancy Glazener, Professor, Department of English ii Copyright © by Elizabeth Lloyd Oliphant 2017 iii INVENTING THE SOUTHWEST: HOW MODERNISTS SHAPED AN AMERICAN REGIONAL EXPERIENCE Elizabeth Lloyd Oliphant, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2017 This dissertation traces the emergence of the Southwest as a distinct region with significant influence on U.S. literature and popular culture. I argue that modernist-era writers helped to promote the U.S. Southwest and to distinguish it as a unique region in the national imaginary. In addition to writing about the Southwest for modernist publications, these writers had a significant hand in shaping the experience of tourists in the region by working with the tourist industry. Building on the interventions of New Modernist Studies, this project expands the scope of literary studies to consider how writers affiliated with the modernist movement reached large audiences through commercial channels. The introductory chapter of this dissertation situates the project in scholarly conversations about modernism, regionalism, canonicity, and settler colonial studies. The remaining chapters take up case studies related to literary and commercial activity in the Southwest. My first chapter follows the career of author Charles Lummis, who popularized tourism and literature related to Spanish Colonial culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. My second chapter locates the growth of heritage tourism in the 1920s Southwest in projects of author Mary Austin. My third chapter looks at representations of tourism and imperialism in the Southwestern writing of D.H. Lawrence, Jean Toomer, and Lynn Riggs. My fourth chapter recovers the relationship between the modernist little magazine Poetry and the Southwestern tourism industry, showing that Poetry’s Southwestern issues featured poems that were later used in the promotional materials distributed by the Fred Harvey iv Company, a large tourism and hospitality business in the Southwest. The afterword to this dissertation offers a short close reading of the official brochure for the 1928 Santa Fe Fiesta, which brought together commercial, civic, and creative interests in the promotion of tourism and colonial nostalgia. The afterword also addresses some of the implications of understanding modernism as a literary movement that was partially driven by commercial interests. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………………………….ix 1.0 INTRODUCTION: MODERNISM, MARKETING, AND THE EMERGING SOUTHWEST……………………………………………………………………………………1 1.1 REGIONALISM AND MODERNISM……………………………………………...10 1.2 THE SOUTHWEST AND THE WEST……………………………………………..17 1.3 MODERNISM AND THE MASSES………………………………………………...23 1.4 THE PROBLEM OF PRIMITIVISM……………………………………………….32 1.5 CHAPTER OUTLINE………………………………………………………………..39 2.0 MENUS, MUSIC, AND MISSIONS: HOW CHARLES LUMMIS SHAPED TOURISM IN THE SOUTHWEST ………………………………………………………………………..44 2.1 REVISING THE WEST: THE SPANISH PIONEERS ……………………………48 2.2 LANDMARKS, RECIPES, AND SPANISH SONGS: LUMMIS’S HERITAGE TOURISM ………….…………………………………………………………….……….61 2.3 PLAYING SPANISH ………………………………………………………………...72 3.0 WHEN THE LOCAL AND THE OUTSIDER MEET: MARY AUSTIN’S MODERNIST, COMMERCIAL SOUTHWEST ……………………………………………80 vi 3.1 “A PERMANENT HOLD ON THE FUTURE” : SPANISH COLONIAL FOLKWAYS, TOURIST COMMERCE, AND AUSTIN’S PATH TO NEW MEXICO…………………………………………………………………………………..84 3.2 DETOURS, COLONIES, AND CULTURE CENTERS: AUSTIN’S CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE WOMAN’S CLUB OF TEXAS ………………………………………95 3.3 “YOU BELONG HERE?”: MARY AUSTIN’S STARRY ADVENTURE ……….105 3.4 CATHER, AUSTIN, AND THE AUTHOR AS TOUR GUIDE………………….115 3.5 CURATING SANTA FE…………………………………………………….………119 4.0 “THE SAME HILLS, THE SAME SUN”: TRANSNATIONALISM AND TOURISTS IN THE SOUTHWESTERN WRITING OF D.H. LAWRENCE, JEAN TOOMER, AND LYNN RIGGS.…………………………………………………………………….…………..121 4.1 MABEL DODGE LUHAN’S TAOS………………………………………………..125 4.2 “YOU’VE GOT TO DE-BUNK THE INDIAN”: D.H. LAWRENCE AND THE SOUTHWEST AS A CIRCUS………………………………………………………….128 4.3 “I STILL FIRMLY BELIEVE THIS IS THE GREATEST EARTH ON EARTH”: JEAN TOOMER’S DREAM OF A SOUTHWESTERN FUTURE………………….137 4.4 “THE SAME HILLS, THE SAME SUN, THE SAME ARID AND CRUEL EARTH”: LYNN RIGGS’S SOUTHWEST AS BORDERLESS INDIAN COUNTRY……………………………………………………………………………….154 4.5 THE SOUTHWEST AS FUTURE OR FANTASY………………………………..177 5.0 COWBOYS AND INDIAN DETOURS: HOW POETRY MAGAZINE IMAGINED MODERNISM IN THE SOUTHWEST………………………………………………….….179 vii 5.1 BADGER CLARK, POETRY, AND “THE PUBLIC THAT ENJOYS AND CREATES FOLK-POETRY” …………………………………………………………181 5.2 TOURISTS AND READERS ON THE INDIAN DETOUR …………….………195 6.0 AFTERWORD ……………………………………………………………….…………..205 APPENDIX A: “HIGH CHIN BOB” ……………………………………………………….214 APPENDIX B: BADGER CLARK’S LETTER TO POETRY MAGAZINE ……………217 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................................................................................219 viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS At the completion of this project it’s been a pleasure to reflect on the communities that supported my labor and enriched my thinking. I'm grateful to the University of Pittsburgh's English Department for institutional support and for giving me intellectual freedom as a scholar and a teacher. Special thanks to Jesse Daugherty for his administrative wizardry. I thank the helpful staffs at the Autry Museum, the Charles Redd Center for Western American Studies, the University of New Mexico, the Huntington Library, and the University of Arizona. I'm grateful to the staff of the New Mexico Museum of Art, especially Erica Prater and Kate Ware. Nancy Glazener has helped me put my thoughts and writing in order for the last 8 years. With good reason, her mentorship and friendship are legend among everyone who knows her. I thank her for countless working lunches, her good humor and friendship, and for always knowing the word or phrase that's escaped me. Among her many talents, Nancy writes and edits with the precision of a poet. I'm thankful for Jonathan Arac's wisdom and kindness at every stage of this project. I'm thankful to Kirk Savage and Bill Scott for joining this project and contributing their enthusiasm and wonderful ideas. I thank Nathan Kosub for his steadying influence, for taking me to the desert, and for those five years in Pittsburgh. He is my favorite traveling companion, my favorite fellow tourist. My mother raised me as a reader and a writer, and she’s supported and encouraged me in all my endeavors. There’s no way to thank her that feels sufficient. I learned from my father to practice ix a constant consideration of my environment. In a sense this has been the basis for my scholarly life, and I’m thankful for his loving support and his pride in my work. I'm grateful to my sister, a grounding figure my whole life and, as an adult, she's also been my professional inspiration. I'm so glad for the women I've met at Pitt, who are my family: Thanks to Swathi Sreerangarajan, for a constant, inspiring, often-hilarious exchange of working ideas. I'm grateful for her dispatches from South Dakota, and for our travels in California travels and Nevada. Pioneer sisters, for sure. Thanks to Amanda Phillips Chapman for clear-eyed advice (scholarly and otherwise) and for teaching me about gratitude. Thanks to Clare Sigrist for long walks and conversation, and for being fearless in her thinking. Thanks to Jess FitzPatrick, for perspective- shifting questions and for helping me finding the joy in scholarly work. Thanks to Jessica Isaac and Kirsten Paine for their friendship and scholarly support. Thanks to Jen MacGregor, for conversations that helped me find a framework for this project, for opening her home to me in Los Angeles, and for all our walks around Baldwin Hills. I'm grateful to my New Mexico writing partners. Thanks to Julie Williams for good friendship and for so many hours of writing and discussing our scholarship. Her work on embodiment in the American West has helped me grow as a scholar. Thanks to Stephanie Spong for gracefully blazing a trail to post-PhD life. Thanks to all associated with the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. The Center is a model of critical, rigorous, loving studies of culture and place. I especially thank Kathryn McKee for her generous guidance that put me on this path. Finally, this dissertation is for Nathan Kosub, and for my grandmothers, Maudie Miller Oliphant and Dorothy Russell Scott. x 1.0 INTRODUCTION: MODERNISM, MARKETING, AND THE EMERGING SOUTHWEST At the end of the nineteenth century, the American Southwest emerged as a fashionable topic in U.S. literary and popular culture. Authors traveled to the region, wrote articles about Southwestern history