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Abstract
In the late nineteenth century Americans developed a complex “Wilderness culture” through which they understood and compensated for the challenges of an industrializing, urbanizing nation and abandoned Victorian dualisms, making way for the modern. California was the site of the era's most vibrant and influential wilderness discourse. This study analyzes the work of several key authors of the California discourse: geologist Clarence King, novelist Theresa Yelverton, naturalist John Muir, and essayist and short story writer Mary Austin, as well as members of the early Sierra Club.
These California writers went to the wilderness seeking new models of relationships between humans and nature and between men and women. In the 1870s Clarence King and Theresa Yelverton explored the mutability of gender through Indian characters and white characters who succumbed to wildness through contact with Indians. Both constructed landscapes that reflected the authors' struggles to reconcile polarities: domesticated spaces versus wild spaces; social duty versus individual freedom; and restraint versus passion. John Muir contributed a radical, coherent critique of the division of human and nature and an essentially erotic understanding of wilderness. Members of the Sierra Club used wilderness as a stage on which to test the limits and possibilities of heterosociality and the gender equality and similarity they were pursuing in their “civilized,” professional lives. Mary Austin's feminist critique of the frontier narrative exposed the links between exploitation of wild nature and exploitation of women by men. Wilderness was a dynamic intellectual construct through which people understood and pursued the transition from Victorian to modern culture in America.
