Where the Country of Lost Borders Meets Jeffers Country:
The Walking Women of Robinson Jeffers and Mary Austin
Carmen Lowe
(Vol 4, Nr 4)

1.  The Country of Lost Borders is Mary Austin’s literary landscape, a desert country that extends west from the Grand Canyon to California’s San Joaquin Valley and south from Death Valley down into Mexico. Within this great expanse of desert and mountain, canyon and mesa, Austin locates most of her short stories and novels. Her adult life was rooted in the Californian desert from the time her family homesteaded there in the late 1880s until she finally settled in 1924 in Santa Fe at a house she called Casa Querida. Because Austin’s literary landscape comprises desert lands, one rarely thinks of her or her fiction in conjunction with Robinson Jeffers, another California writer whose work conveys the reality of a harsh and austere region. Overlooking the Pacific Ocean from his home, Tor House, Jeffers wrote poems that delineated his own literary landscape of ocean cliffs and coastal mountains, redwood canyons and pristine beaches. Jeffers Country extends west from the coast ranges abutting the Salinas Valley to the Pacific shore and from Monterey south well beyond Sur. Although the works of Mary Austin and Robinson Jeffers cover different geographical territory, they share much of the same thematic territory, especially the idea that the land itself is the main character of their literature, for it above anything else determines human reality.

2.  Mary Austin and Robinson Jeffers share a vision of nature that seeks to diminish “man’s” self-importance and dominance over the “not-man,” a vision that drew both writers to live in and write about sublimely austere regions of great natural beauty; however, the predominant critical view is that, given their differences in gender and genre, Austin and Jeffers write very different types of literature. For example, T. M. Pearce, in his discussion of the friendship be-tween Jeffers and Austin, claims that, “No more dissimilar writers than Mary Austin and Robinson Jeffers have appeared in American literature,” and as evidence he contrasts the “horror,” supernaturalism, and “harsh human entanglement” of Jeffers’s narrative poems to Mary Austin’s more harmonious and benign sense of nature’s influence, which Pearce reads as “more directive than destructive” (257). Views like Pearce’s, however, are an oversimplification of both authors, for (as I argue later) Jeffers’s Inhumanism has at its core a profound empathy and gentleness, while Austin’s vision of human community within nature is based on her own brand of “inhumanism.”

3.  In Jeffers’s work, this gentleness is revealed within his most remarkable and memorable heroine, Clare Walker of “The Loving Shepherdess,” a 1929 narrative poem that bears striking resemblance to Mary Austin’s 1909 short story “The Walking Woman.” The similarities between these narratives have prompted at least one scholar, Robert Ian Scott, to propose the possibility of Jeffers’s using Mary Austin’s “The Walking Woman” as a source for “The Loving Shepherdess” (4). I agree that it is possible and likely that some time before 1929, when Jeffers began to write “The Loving Shepherdess,” he read Mary Austin’s vividly descriptive regional writing of California, perhaps The Land of Little Rain (1903) or Lost Borders (1909). However, whether Jeffers actually “used” Austin’s “The Walking Woman” as a conscious or subconscious source for “The Loving Shepherdess” is perhaps less important than the dialogue about nature, regionalism, gender, and genre that occurs between these works when they are compared. In fact, the dialogue carried on by these two works suggests that “The Loving Shepherdess” is not so much “influenced” by “The Walking Woman” as it is a response to Austin’s story or a rewriting of it. This essay will analyze the literary dialogue carried on between “The Walking Woman” and “The Loving Shepherdess” and argue that “The Loving Shepherdess” rewrites “The Walking Woman” and in the process deepens Jeffers’s own notion of Inhumanism.

THE WALKING WOMEN

4.  Some of the most apparent similarities between Jeffers’s “The Loving Shepherdess” and Austin’s “The Walking Woman” are the shared details of location, character, and theme. Both Jeffers’s narrative poem and Austin’s short story feature dispossessed women who wander remote areas of California. Austin’s walking woman roams the San Joaquin Valley, while Jeffers’s walking woman moves north along the coast then into the Carmel and Salinas Valleys before dying in the San Joaquin Valley. The walking women of Jeffers and Austin also bear the same last name: Walker. Clare Walker’s name befits her nun-like poverty and self-renunciation, while Austin’s character has lost her given name in her years of wandering and is called Mrs. Walker by the local people. At different points in their lives, both Walkers are shepherdesses: Mrs. Walker discovers a new life while rescuing a flock of sheep, and Clare Walker loses her life in a futile effort to protect her sheep. “The Loving Shepherdess” and “The Walking Woman” also share a similar narrative structure, for both the story and the poem take place after the significant action has occurred; the traumatic events that turned each woman out of society are recounted when the wandering woman meets in the wilderness a sympathetic interlocutor willing to hear her life story. From each woman’s story emerges an examination of the role of nurturing in the hostile natural habitats in which the walking women learn to survive. For example, images of failed motherhood are central to both works: Mrs. Walker has had a baby and lost it, while Clare is pregnant and knows that neither she nor the baby will survive the fruitless labor. In both works, however, human nurturing and human loss are diminished and subsumed by the austere beauty and indifferent cycles of the natural environment.

5.  Despite these similarities, there are some significant differences between Austin’s “The Walking Woman” and Jeffers’s “The Loving Shepherdess.” The most obvious difference is that of genre: “The Walking Woman” is a short story in the realist tradition with a focus on the social realties that women face; “The Loving Shepherdess” is a poem whose realistic details and narrative easily obscure its symbolic structure.¹ Although Clare Walker is Jeffers’s most realistic and believable character, she is still more representative of archetypal and natural forces than she is of social forces.² Another notable difference is that Austin’s nameless Walking Woman is portrayed as an independent, willful woman-a proto-feminist-, while Clare Walker is utterly passive, meek, and self-sacrificing. The differences in character are part of the separate thrusts of the works. Austin’s “The Walking Woman” is about the consolidation of a  woman’s ego, the discovery of the self via a close interaction with nature. Jeffers’s “The Loving Shepherdess” is about the loss of the ego, the shattering of the self via a close interaction with nature. These significant differences are in their very opposition part of the dialogue carried on between these two works.

THE WALKING WOMEN AND THEIR BIOREGIONS

6.  One of the most pervasive similarities between Jeffers’s poem and Austin’s story is the way in which both works portray the landscape and the way the walking women interact with it. Each narrative portrays its bioregion-a geographical area unified by landscape, climate, vegetation, and animal life-as an essential part of the narrative action. Therefore, each walking woman acts as an interpreter of the bioregion she traverses. The bodies of the walking women, then, become consistent with the respective bioregions to the point at which each woman becomes a figure for some aspect of nature itself.
Mary Austin’s “The Walking Woman” is about a semi-fictional woman who has lost her own name in her solitary walks through the California desert from the lower San Joaquin Valley to the Mojave, from Tule Lake to the Little Antelope Valley. Austin introduces her Walking Woman as a force of nature, a mysterious presence so completely consistent with the desert that this nameless woman can at times disappear into it:

The first time of my hearing of her was at Temblor. We had come one day between blunt, whitish bluffs rising from mirage water, with a thick pale wake of dust billowing from the wheels, all the dead wall of the foothills      sliding and shimmering with heat, to learn that the Walking Woman had passed us somewhere in the dizzying dimness, going down to the Tulares on her own feet. (Stories 255)

8.  The mystery behind the Walking Woman resides in what she does: she    walks across the desert, with no apparent home or destination, carrying nothing but a blanket and a black bag, occasionally keeping company with shepherds, miners, cowboys, and other marginal people. She does not have a name, but people call her “Mrs. Walker,” and the reports of her that reach town are distorted, skewed, and contradictory. The story sets up a subtle comparison between the mirage-like character of the desert, how one’s perspective of it shifts, and the mirage-like character of the Walking Woman, whose appearance also shifts according to one’s perspective. Some people see her as lame, walking with a limp, or homely, with a twisted face and body. Others say that she is handsome and straight in body and mind. The only way to get a correct vision of the Walking Woman is to meet her in the desert, which the narrator does, finding her strong and, if not handsome, at least healthy and normal looking. But she notices that the Walking Woman does have a sort of twist to her face that seems to come and go. Thus, the story highlights the difficulties of perception, especially the skewing and obscuring of the Walking Woman and the desert she epitomizes, while emphasizing the accuracy of vision that the Walking Woman has attained.

9.  As Austin demonstrates in The Land of Little Rain, “seeing” desert places requires a fundamental shift of perspective and an awareness of how the desert defines its own boundaries by the shape of the land, the slopes which determine patterns of wind and water flow and, thus, the placement of seasonal lakes and plants. The shape of the land, its seasons, and its sparse water-holes determine the movements of animals and their habits. As a wanderer in the desert, the Walking Woman survives by not imposing assumptions upon the desert, but by moving according to its own rhythms of wind, water, and weather like a migratory animal. Thus, she comes to know the region better than anyone, for she is an authority on its history-natural and human-and her knowledge “about trails and water-holes was as reliable as an Indian’s” (Stories 257). The story gives her credit for knowing the truth about remote and incredible incidents, the truth about the wild creatures and wild places. On foot in the desert, the Walking Woman gains an intimacy with the land and an accuracy of vision that belies the mirage-like obscurity and skewing of the perceptions of society.

10.  Robinson Jeffers’s Clare Walker also demonstrates the limitations of human society. The poem opens with a description of the utterly meek Clare being tormented by a group of cruel school children who mock Clare’s poverty, her outlaw status, and her gentleness toward her small flock of sheep. Like Austin’s Walking Woman, the true reasons for Clare’s wandering remain a mystery, but it is clear that she finds solace within the beauty of the sea pastures and redwood forests that she passes through. Walking with her staff of rosy madrone wood, Clare comes to represent the bioregion itself, one mapped not by geographers but by Clare’s almost instinctual wandering.³ In her movement north from her home somewhere south of Big Sur, along the coast to the Carmel River, then northeast to the San Joaquin River, Clare crosses and unites Jeffers’s literary landscape and demonstrates its organic cohesiveness. While Jeffers’s earlier long narrative poems describe one or two limited areas in great detail, Clare’s migration covers all of Jeffers Country and allows him to review and link these places together. More than any other poem, he focuses on the relation of place to place and the minute details of the bioregion, such as the names of the weeds that the sheep eat and the wildflowers:

                             . . . I long for that place
Like someone thinking of water in deserts. Sometimes we hear the sea’s thunder, far down the deep gorge.
The darkness under the trees in spring is starry with flowers, with redwood  sorrel, colt’s foot, wakerobin,
The slender-stemmed pale yellow violets,
And Solomon’s-seal that makes intense islands of fragrance . . . (CP 2: 102-03)

THE AESTHETICS OF RELINQUISHMENT

12.  The way in which both Jeffers’s Clare Walker and Austin’s Walking Woman interact with their respective bioregions participates in what Lawrence Buell calls “the aesthetics of relinquishment.” Buell describes two types of relinquishment within the environmental imagination. The first type is a “voluntary simplicity” of relinquishing material possessions for a closer union with the natural world (144-45). Both “The Walking Woman” and “The Loving Shepherdess” are narratives of loss which feature this type of relinquishment, but Austin’s story in particular explores this type of voluntary simplicity, for “The Walking Woman” mediates between a woman’s identification with nature and her urgent need for individual autonomy in a world where it is frequently denied her. The second type of relinquishment is “more radical . . . to give up individual autonomy itself, to forgo the illusion of mental and even bodily apartness from one’s environment” (Buell 144). “The Loving Shepherdess,” in describing the life and death of Clare Walker, imagines what such a radical self-relinquishment would be like. In both Austin’s story and Jeffers’s poem, relinquishment in the form of profound loss leads to greater awareness of the natural environment and humanity’s place within it.

13.  In “The Walking Woman” and in her other stories, Austin asserts that relinquishment is necessary for survival in the desert, for the desert strips away the inessential and leaves behind in its survivors a type of purity. During her desert walks, then, the Walking Woman loses her name, any home she had, and most of her material possessions. She also gains invaluable freedom by losing the conventions of society and its confining feminine role. The Walking Woman further escapes the confinement of the conventional female role by gaining, and eventually losing, what she considers the three essentials of a happy life: meaningful work, love, and a child. The Walking Woman discovers these essentials during a sandstorm when she helps a shepherd save his flock. The sandstorm changes the Walking Woman, for by learning to move within its blinding power, she discovers her abilities as an individual rather than as a lady who must be protected. The Walking Woman’s response to the sandstorm is the paradoxical key to Austin’s perspective of humanity’s relation to a bioregion. The Walking Woman surrenders to the force of the storm, but also resists it by refusing to let it take her life or the lives of the sheep. In a way, the storm gives the Walking Woman a new life by bringing her to the edge of survival, what Austin describes elsewhere as the “bare core of things.” The Walking Woman, then, in surviving the sandstorm, is shaped by it. She finds her true humanity by her combined surrender and resistance to natural forces, a humanity open to love and nurturing which the Walking Woman discovers in helping the shepherd-a complete stranger-and then falling in love with him and having a child with him.⁴ Yet the story rejects mating and reproduction as a woman’s sole  role, for the baby dies, the shepherd moves off with his flock, and the Walking Woman remains alone in the desert. Although she has lost the most treasured things in her life, the Walking Woman is content with once-having-had and seems to live her life without normal human desires for companionship or possessions. Like the desert she has come to love, the Walking Woman is remote, frequently inaccessible, and not defined by man.

14.  Like “The Walking Woman,” Jeffers’s “The Loving Shepherdess” is a narrative of relinquishment, only with a more profound process of loss. Clare’s troubles begin when the naive and motherless teenager becomes pregnant and her boyfriend shoots her father in an argument. The father dies, the boyfriend flees, and Clare’s pregnancy ends in miscarriage. The miscarriage reveals that Clare’s pelvis is deformed so that childbirth would kill her and the baby. The narrative suggests that a similar defect killed Clare’s own mother. As both mother and father are dead, Clare inherits her family’s sheep farm on the coast, which she also loses. A spring storm wrecks a ship near Clare’s home, and a horde of desperate shipwrecked people take over the farm and begin to kill Clare’s sheep for food. Because she loves the sheep, Clare leads the flock away, abandoning her farm and spending the summer in a truly pastoral existence. The problem is that Clare becomes pregnant again. Convinced that she will die when the baby is due in April, she begins an unexplained journey north as if that direction will save her, her baby, and her sheep. Yet, she projects her fear for herself onto fear for her sheep, paranoid that the shipwreck people will pursue her north into central California’s sparsely settled coast ranges to eat her sheep, metaphorically gobbling up the last of California’s unenclosed spaces and its pastoral heri-tage. The involuntary losses that set Clare in motion are followed by Clare’s voluntary self-sacrifice and desire to give away the few remaining possessions she has, including the meager scraps of food she is given. Self-sacrifice becomes a mania for Clare: she wants to sacrifice her self for her sheep, her body for the sexual comfort of strange men, her life for the baby that cannot be born. All Clare’s efforts end in loss, and Jeffers addresses her directly as a figure for his literary landscape at the “continent’s end,” a figure for the bedraggled, abject end of humanity,

Walking with numbed and cut feet
Along the last ridge of migration
On the last coast above the not-to-be-colonized
Ocean, across the streams of the people
Drawing a faint pilgrimage
As if you were drawing a line at the end of the world . . . (CP 2: 74)

LOST BORDERS AND RELINQUISHED BOUNDARIES

16.  Mary Austin’s Walking Woman and Robinson Jeffers’s Clare Walker are outside of social boundaries, living a marginalized or outcast life. Yet the social dispossession of these walking women highlights the ways in which the land upon which they walk is bounded. “The Walking Woman” concerns itself with property and boundaries and brings to conclusion a book organized around the idea of man-made boundaries imposed upon what cannot be bounded. As a feminist, Austin saw a correspondence between the bounding of nature as prop-  erty and the bounding of women as property. Thus, the Walking Woman’s unsettled wandering and personal freedom correspond to the desert’s un-bounded and unowned expanse:

A Walking Woman is the precise opposite of a confined woman; the endless mobility-not an escape journey, but simply endless mobility-is a powerful symbolic challenge to the enforced physical restriction of women at a moment in history when they had only recently worn clothes designed to suggest that they “glided” rather than walked on two feet. (Jaycox 9)

18.  “The Walking Woman” ends with a validation of the Self that the Walking Woman has found in her desert travels. Watching her saunter off into the desert like a Western hero, the narrator notices that, “She had a queer, sidelong gait, as if in fact she had a twist all through her. Recollecting suddenly that people called her lame, I ran down to the open place below the spring where she had passed. There in the bare, hot sand the track of her two feet bore evenly and white” (Stories 262). These straight and even footsteps end the story and the book Lost Borders, a type of validation of the Walking Woman’s path, her chosen way of life. As tracks, they reinforce her presence and her reality, but these tracks in the sand also emphasize the ephemeral nature of her migratory existence. The Walking Woman, because she does not settle anywhere, does not permanently mark the desert any more than a mirage. She stands for the anti-thesis of settlement, domestication, and the forms of property they entail. Through her journeys and her migratory life, the Walking Woman provides a summation for Austin’s efforts to write the desert, acting as a model of female independence and a symbol of the power of the desert-not as in Austin’s usual portrayal of the desert’s power to kill, but its power to possess those who love it and to resist all attempts to be possessed.

19.  Possession of the land is also a major theme in Jeffers’s “The Loving Shepherdess,” which demonstrates the subdivision of the land, its appropriation and re-articulation by people who have little love for or knowledge of the bio-region they dwell within. The poem highlights the contrast between Clare Walker’s impoverished generosity and the greediness of the ranchers and other landowners she encounters. She must seek good pasture for her sheep, but is barred or chased off any land grazed by cattle. She encounters one large and beautiful ranch which will be sold and subdivided by the greedy sons of the dying rancher. In another scene, almost Dickensian, she stands out in a cold rain, feverish with illness and hunger, and spies through the window of an isolated house while a family sits in physical comfort but emotional despair, hating each other. They chase Clare away. She also stops at the fictional      ranches and abandoned farmhouses that were the scenes of disaster from       Jeffers’s earlier works. Houses in Jeffers frequently signify the confined space of human entanglements, the location of tragedy. A wanderer in the wilder-ness, Clare seeks to escape the house of negative human desires and disaster-her father’s house-and turns out to find a new home in all of nature. Yet her access to unenclosed spaces is jeopardized by the rampant so-called “development” which concerned Jeffers at the time he was writing “The Loving Shepherdess.” In a letter dated April 1929, Jeffers writes to Arthur Davison Ficke, “Mal Paso Canyon . . . has just been subdivided by a development company. The devils . . . The ranch at Point Sur, that I took liberties with in last year’s book, has lately been bought by some wealthy person who intends to breed polo-ponies there. Indeed most of the ranches about here are being bought by wealthy people for horse-breeding-which is certainly more decent that sub-divisions . . .” (SL 148). Like Clare, the California coast is entirely giving, available to everyone, and undone by its utter beauty and desirability.

20.  “The Loving Shepherdess” describes Clare Walker’s resistance to the borders of property, but the poem is more concerned with exploring the breakdown of personal and bodily boundaries. Just as Jeffers focuses on the physical details of the bioregion, he focuses on the body of Clare, her coloring and leanness, her nakedness as she walks about semi-nude and bathes out of doors.⁵ The remarkable physicality of Clare highlights her peculiar mental state, indeed her saintliness, by emphasizing how she perceives no boundaries between herself and others and, being boundariless, loves all people and all creatures. For Clare, love is a physical thing, and she loves all things in a physical way. Thus, when she gives her body to any man who desires sexual comfort, she engages in a strangely abject but sin-free sacrament of physical communion, and, as Herbie Butterfield adds, sacrifice:

. . . Clare’s generous promiscuity is but a partial expression of a larger vision that extends beyond the human to embrace all beings, all things, all deeds even . . . Within such a comprehensive pantheism, her individual body    might readily be sacrificed, given away, or literally incorporated elsewhere. (204)

Indeed, Clare’s first experience of feeling the boundaries between herself and nature vanish was during her first orgasm:

                                             [“]One morning of great white clouds gliding from the sea
When I was with Charlie in the hollow near the madrones, I felt a pleasure  like a sweet fire . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The clouds were as bright as stars and I could feel them . . . [”]
“Through the shut lids of my eyes while the sweet fire
Poured through my body: I knew that some dreadful pain would pay for such joy.[”] (CP 2: 84-85)

22.  Although Clare fears death and tries to prevent it from taking away her beloved sheep, she also seems to desire death in the same way that she desires physical communion with people, animals, and the entire natural world. The intensity of Clare’s desire for physical communion with animals is demonstrated by her profession of love for a hawk: “There was one of those great owly hawks / That soar for hours, turning and turning below me along the bottom of the slope: I so loved it / I thought if it were hungry I’d give it my hand for meat” (CP 2: 89). This passage emphasizes Clare’s tremendous empathy, but it also demonstrates Clare’s subconscious desire for self-sacrifice, for a communion with death itself. The hawk in this poem, as in many of Jeffers’s poems, represents the death that swoops down unexpectedly and carries off its prey, as in the scene in which Clare witnesses a hawk attacking a heron. When she sees the heron chased into the woods by the hawk, Clare is truly terrified and cries, “Oh what can save him, can save him?” (CP 2: 62). Because Clare has lost her sense of personal boundaries, she cannot distinguish between the fear she feels for the heron’s death and fear of her own approaching death that hawk and heron foreshadow.

23.  Yet the creature she most identifies with is one that is also on a journey to death, a salmon migrating back to its spawning pool to reproduce and die:

                                               Far up the Carmel Valley
The river became a brook, she watched a salmon
Row its worn body up-stream over the stones
And struck by a thwart current expose the bruised
White belly to the white of the sky, gashed with red wounds, but right itself
And wriggle up-stream, having that within it, spirit or desire,
Will spend all its dear flesh and all the power it has gathered, in the sweet salt pastures and fostering ocean,
To find the appointed high-place and perish. Clare Walker, in a bright moment’s passage of anxious feeling,
Knowing nothing of its fate saw her own fate reflected. (CP 2: 104-05)

25.  Many of Jeffers’s poems celebrate death as a reunion with the earth and its biological life; death is the way in which Jeffers’s characters exceed their humanness and overcome the boundary of consciousness that had separated them from the life of the earth. In “Vulture,” for example, to be eaten and digested by a vulture is a joyous communion: “To be eaten by that beak and become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes- / What a sublime end of one’s body, what an enskyment; What a life after death” (CP 3: 462). “The Loving Shepherdess,” however, withholds that comforting thought of communion with nature and emphasizes finality and fruitlessness instead. Throughout her journey, Clare had sought to deny boundaries or overcome the physical boundaries of the body through an ecstatic (but transient) union. Yet at the moment of her death, Clare (and the reader) come to the sad truth of our fundamental separation from others, a profound existential loneliness that defines the human condition. Of course, this sense of separation is a psychological one, as Jeffers asserts throughout his poetry, for humanity is not separate from nature except through a type of self-awareness that focuses too much on the human mind. What Clare (or perhaps the reader) realizes at the moment of her death when her beloved sheep fail to appear, is that she has been living a delusion, that all of her efforts to cheat death through love and nurturing have failed. Even though Clare is virtually egoless in her giving and abjection, she is in fact building her ego through these very things. In fact, she extends her ego by breaking down the barriers between herself and others. But the clarity that arrives when she realizes her sheep are all gone is the final shattering of that communal ego. Although Clare has at last broken through what may be called the borders of consciousness, her death brings no resurrection of humanity’s hopes.

IN HUMANISM AND NURTURING

26.  The stories in Mary Austin’s book Lost Borders describe the way in which a place that defies human attempts at delineation, confinement, and settlement causes “the borders of conscience [to] break down” (Stories 156). These borders of conscience include the petty laws of social custom as well as the sublimely terrifying confrontation with the desert’s indifference to mankind, for as Austin writes, “Of all its inhabitants it has the least concern for man” (Stories 45). Here, where Austin’s brand of regionalism intersects with her rejection of anthropocentrism, is where the similarities between her and Jeffers are most pronounced.

27.  In 1932 Mary Austin wrote a brief article, “Regionalism in American Fiction,” articulating the primacy of the bioregion in her fiction and arguing for a more critical notion of what literary regionalism means: “The first of the indispensable conditions [of a true literary regionalism] is that the region must enter constructively into the story, as another character, as the instigator of plot. A natural scene can never be safely assumed to be the region of the story when it is used merely as a back drop” (“Regionalism” 105).

28.  While Austin is considering here the role of the bioregion only within fiction, her comments parallel exactly the role of the bioregion within Jeffers’s poetry: “Mountain and ocean, rock, water and beasts and trees / Are the protagonists, the human people are only symbolic interpreters” (CP 3: 484). Jeffers describes how his poetry

. . . grows rather intimately from the rock of this coast. Someone said to me lately that it is not possible to be quite sane here, many others feel a hostility of the region to common human life. Immigration overpowers a place, at least for awhile, but where the coast is thinly peopled it seems really to have a mood that both excites and perverts its people. (SL 68)

. . . a certain indifference, blankness, emptiness if you will . . . no bread-envy, no brother-fervor. Western writers have not sensed it yet; they smack the savor of lawlessness too much upon their tongues, but you have these to witness it is not mean-spiritedness. It is pure Greek in that it represents the courage to sheer [sic] off what is not worth while. Beyond that it endures without sniveling, renounces without self-pity, fears no death, rates itself not too great in the scheme of things; so do beasts, so did St. Jerome in the desert, so also in the elder day did gods. Life, its performance, cessation, is no new thing to gape and wonder at. (Stories 71-72)

30.  The attitude expressed here is what Jeffers would describe forty-five years later as Inhumanism.⁶ I want to emphasize, however, that Austin’s “inhumanism” is not the same as Jeffers’s. Jeffers’s art seeks to demonstrate the ontological non-significance of humanity by shifting attention to the cycles of the natural world; Austin’s art focuses on how one becomes more human (in the sense of becoming more humane, less self-centered, less caught up in social custom) by los- ing some of that “humanity” via a life-threatening encounter with the natural world. Thus, Austin’s fictional characters enact real human behavior and real human conflicts, while Jeffers’s characters represent natural and unconscious forces that act upon humanity; Austin’s emphasis is social and communal, while Jeffers’s is symbolic and archetypal. Regardless of the differences and similarities in their “inhuman” attitudes toward the human position within the natural world,

31.  Austin’s inhumanism most likely did not inspire Jeffers’s Inhumanism, though perhaps gave it more depth. I believe that, for both writers, this attitude came directly from keen observation of and love for their respective bioregions. Indeed, Austin herself, in describing how little birds seeking winter shelter in mountain ravines routinely starve, admonishes her reader, “you are not to pity them. You of the house habit can hardly understand the sense of the hills. No doubt the labor of being comfortable gives you an exaggerated opinion of yourself, an exaggerated pain to be set aside. Whether the wild things understand it or not they adapt themselves to its processes with the greater ease” (Stories 109). For Austin, understanding nature requires a certain detachment from human emotion and the importance of one’s own life. Like Jeffers, Austin locates pity within anthropocentrism and views it as a hindrance to a clear sense of the processes of nature. Both writers arouse our pity for our fellow creatures, then purge it via a tragic confrontation with the inhuman indifference of the natural world.

32.  The central theme of Jeffers’s “The Loving Shepherdess” is also the idea of pity. What Jeffers explores in “The Loving Shepherdess” is the paradox of pity, the way in which it both ennobles humanity and degrades our abilities to clearly perceive, understand, and accept the ways of nature. Pity becomes a form of hubris, the tragic yet noble flaw of Clare Walker, the too-loving shepherdess. While the poem demonstrates that empathy is an ennobling human virtue that seems to come spontaneously to people who work closely with nature, the poem also demonstrates the limits of pity and the fact that even human empathy has no final place in the scheme of things. Thus, the poem traces the tensions between the spontaneous instincts of pity, empathy, and nurturing and the realization that the universe is ultimately indifferent to these very ennobling virtues. This tension is most evident in the mystical vision shared by Onorio Vasquez and Clare, a vision interpreted by Onorio as the primal indifference of the universe and by Clare as the primal necessity of nurturing within that same universe.

33.  In his vision, Onorio sees a single small point of light surrounded by blackness, which he interprets as the beginning of the universe, the eye of God. Here, Onorio’s vision corresponds with Jeffers’s Inhuman vision of the universe. But then, unable to understand his vision fully, this eye of the universal God becomes the mystic’s own eye reflected, a solipsistic and empty universe. Onorio revels in the absolute fact of the dissolution of everything. The fact that all things come from one being and return to it gives him an inhuman solace. Onorio’s vision reveals a universe absolutely inhuman and indifferent with no space for nurturing.

Clare has the same vision, but she interprets it differently:

I did have a strange dream. I went out across the starlight
Knocking through flight after flight of the shiny balls
And got so far away that the sun and the great earth
And beautiful moon and all the stars were blended
Into one tiny light, Oh terribly little,
The flame of a pitiful little candle blown over
In the wind of darkness, in the fear of the night. It was so tiny
I wanted to be its comfort
And hold it and rock it on my breast. One wee flicker
In all the wild dark. (CP 2: 99)

35.  Clare’s mystical vision also demonstrates how Clare, in her saintly excess of pity and generosity and in her communion with the bioregion and its creatures, becomes more than human. When Onorio Vasquez counsels Clare to get an abortion to save her own life, Clare responds that her never-to-be-born baby is living in a golden world of its own: “. . . I am its world and the sky around it, its loving God. It is having the prime and perfect of life, / The nine months that are better than the ninety years. I’d not steal one of its days to save my life” (CP 2: 94). In her utter selflessness, Clare sees herself as a type of wandering planet supporting life. Her nine months of carrying life correspond to the billions of years that Earth will carry its biological life, only to be extinguished at last. Even though the evolutionary existence of life is frequently harsh-the side of life that Jeffers tends to portray-nurturing is equally important, an evolutionary strategy employed by a multitude of creatures via symbiosis and the rearing of offspring. Clare represents this spirit of nurturing on planet Earth, and in her mystical vision she voices the nobility and importance of the urge to nurture. In her visitation to Jeffers Country, Clare Walker allows Jeffers to re-evaluate an aspect of nature he often overlooks: the intense and spontaneous nurturing qualities of nature that co-exist and thrive within the harshness of nature, the pointless persistence of life despite the inevitability of extinction.

NURTURING AND FEMININITY:
CONFRONTING THE FEMININE TRADITION OF LITERARY REGIONALISM

36.  For Jeffers, nurturing is part of nature’s “excess”-“the great humaneness at the heart of things”-, a beautiful extension of the basic processes of life, which seems to have only the indifferent cycles of dissolution and rebirth at its core (“The Excesses of God,” CP 1: 4). As Mark Mitchell notes in his discussion of “The Excesses of God,” Jeffers associates the excess of nature with its “feminine” qualities (119-20). Jeffers emphasizes, however, that our vision of nature (always filtered through projections of human gender onto the non-human) prevents us from understanding that this “excess” of nature, the ”high superfluousness” of beauty, is not extraneous in the sense of being unnecessary or merely additional, but is truly “at the heart of things” (“The Excesses of God,” CP 1: 4). The “feminine” qualities of nature, then, are perceived as an excess or a superfluousness because they exceed our androcentric understanding.

37.  Like Jeffers, Mary Austin refutes the notion that the feminine is an “excess” and locates a feminine drive for nurturing at the core of existence. In Austin’s time, femaleness was associated with an excess within existence, and women were additional, peripheral, not quite necessary, and were, moreover, expected to reify their status as excess through a process of self-decoration and the accumulation of objects and social rules of propriety. Mary Austin, however, rewrites this notion in her desert stories by demonstrating what is left after the desert burns off the excess trappings of civilization, eliminating by force whatever is unneeded, decorative, or a hindrance. Her female characters, especially, are transformed by the desert, reduced to an essential femaleness after the excess fluff of societal conventions has been burned off by desert necessity. Austin goes so far to gender the desert female in order to demonstrate that a woman can be both beautiful and cruel, nurturing and heartlessly indifferent (Stories 159-60).

38.  The desert represents the forsaking of so-called civilization, as well as an austere purity that forces Austin’s desert women-usually betrayed and abandoned by men-to “come very near to the bare core of things” (Stories 93). At this point, survival depends upon what Austin calls “mother wit,” the deepest instinct which resides in all female creatures, an intelligence for nurturing life under the harshest conditions. What may seem contradictory, but which Aus-tin stresses is not, is the complicity between harshness and nurturing within nature. The keenness of “mother wit” is in fact honed on a life lived “very near to the bare core of things,” a life stripped of all but the most basic necessities and dependent on the meager offerings of a harsh bioregion. For Austin, nurturing is inseparable from the harshest functions of evolution, for “mother wit” is only revealed at the bare core of existence.

39.  Both Jeffers and Austin probe the role of nurturing within the seemingly cruel processes of nature, and both gender this capacity as feminine. Unlike Austin, however, Jeffers seems not to believe in gendered “essences” within humanity or nature.⁸ Austin believes in a feminine essence within women, female creatures, and all of nature. Thus, her “nature writing” is inseparable from her feminist writing in that both seek to enhance the position of the femi-nine within human society. Yet, Austin also seeks to reshape what the “feminine” means; thus, Austin’s portraits of the feminine desert and tough heroines emphasize a femininity that is as vital, resilient, and resourceful as life itself. In portraying certain attitudes as “masculine,” Austin focuses on self-interested greed, lust, brutality, and the desire to have ultimate power over women and nature. As in many of her stories, “The Walking Woman” demonstrates the parallels between women and land as property, as valued (or rather devalued) for the wrong reasons by conventional society.

40.  Likewise, Jeffers sees parallels between the social conditions of women and humanity’s abuse of the planet. Mark Mitchell has pointed out that Jeffers’s Inhumanist effort to shift attention from “man” to “not-man” includes women in the “not-man” category (117-18). Indeed, Jeffers’s female characters represent natural forces-such as sexuality, death, and regeneration through violent action-that are misunderstood, abused, or severely bounded by “man.” And his male characters frequently represent the laws of patriarchy that in Jeffers’s poetry are always shattered by natural facts. Thus, in “The Loving Shepherdess,” the tragedy that sends Clare Walker wandering is triggered by an argument between two men who have property claims on her: her father and the father of the child she is carrying. After Clare loses her father, her boyfriend, and her unborn baby, Clare decides that she does not belong to one person, and her deliberate promiscuity reinforces her excess, her body as something outside of the law.⁹ Like many of Jeffers’s heroines, Clare’s feminine sexuality-sensuous, pleasurable, non-reproductive-is opposed to the law of the father  as symbolized by houses and the patriarchal families they contain. In most of Jeffers’s narrative poems, the house ends up destroyed by the uncontrollable excess of feminine sexuality and the natural forces it represents.¹⁰

41.  By creating a character like Clare Walker, Jeffers takes on some of the concerns of Mary Austin and her feminine literary tradition of writing nature: women’s causes, the distribution of property, the value of nurturing. He also features ways in which women share the social position of the natural world as something to be exploited. And he features a woman’s frank sexual desire as something beautiful. But Clare’s excessive pity and generosity makes her al-most a parody of the “natural woman” featured in works by Mary Austin and Sarah Orne Jewett. Indeed, Clare’s attention to her flock, while sometimes touching, becomes a parody of over-attention to the sometimes-petty problems of the human “flock.”¹¹ For Jeffers, the main problem with the feminine lit-erary tradition is that in those narratives nature is always secondary to the    progressive social concerns of the authors. Jeffers, however, wants to radically “dehumanize” humanity’s perception of the natural world and the universe. Despite the provocative social problems that “The Loving Shepherdess” reveals and despite the reader’s attraction to the provocative Clare Walker, the central fact of “The Loving Shepherdess” is that human concerns are peripheral.¹²

42.  Jeffers’s emblem for this inhuman vision is, of course, the hawk. In contrast, Mary Austin, following the example of Sarah Orne Jewett, chooses a different bird-the heron-as emblem for the image of women allied with nature and the concept of the potential for a harmonious and fair human society that has learned to live within its natural environment. Austin uses the heron in the last story of The Land of Little Rain, a description of a small California town that has transformed its arid bioregion into an oasis, a humble place where communal nurturing and harmony are key. Austin claims this town is a real place, but refuses to reveal its location: “Where it lies, how to come at it, you will not get from me; rather would I show you the heron’s nest in the tulares” (Stories 143). The heron’s nest here alludes to “A White Heron,” Sarah Orne Jewett’s 1886 short story about a nature-loving girl who allies herself with the heron and protects its nest from the gun-toting male ornithologist who wants to kill the rare bird as a prized specimen. Although the bird hunter has befriended the girl and seems an ideal husband, by protecting the heron and refusing to reveal the location of its nest, the heroine protects what is free, wild, and invaluable within herself. By alluding to this story, Austin suggests that her ideal community is, like the heron’s nest, a center of nurturing in alliance with the “feminine” natural world and against the “masculine” forces of destruction. By identifying herself with the girl who refuses to reveal the location of the heron’s nest, Austin reinforces her alliance with a certain tradition of nature writing dominated by women writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rose Terry Cooke, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Susan Cooper, Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, and Celia Thaxter.¹³ This feminine tradition asserts, as does “The Walking Woman,” an essential correspondence between women and nature on a biological level and also asserts that, on a social level, women can find freedom and self-possession through an identification and alliance with nature.

43.  Given the importance of the heron to Austin and women’s literary regionalism, Jeffers’s use of the heron in “The Loving Shepherdess” is especially in-triguing.¹⁴ Here, the heron symbolizes Clare Walker, her frail grace, and her confrontation with the hawk-like death that eventually grips her within its talons. Jeffers describes Clare as a heron, “her grotesque cloak / Blown up to her shoulders, flapping like wings / About the half-nakedness of the slender body” seconds before he describes how “A heavy dark hawk balanced in the storm / And suddenly darted; the heron, the wings and long legs wavering in terror, fell, screaming, the long throat / Twisted under the body; Clare screamed in answer” (CP 2: 61).¹⁵ In “The Loving Shepherdess,” the heron represents Clare’s beauty, grace, and solitude; the fact that the doomed heron is probably flying from its feeding grounds to its nesting area when it is attacked by the hawk also reinforces the heron as a figure for nurturing. The “dark hawk” is death, the indifferent force that shatters the individual, that cuts off-yet reinforces-the drives of renewal, life, nurturing. The struggle between the white heron and the dark hawk is also part of Jeffers’s reworking of the Christ story in “The Loving Shepherdess,” an aspect analyzed by many Jeffers scholars including Butterfield and Brophy, and the religious allegory of the poem should not be overlooked. For example, Brophy reads the “thrice-falling” heron as a symbol of Christ and a reflection of Clare’s role as an ironic Christ figure (“Afterword” 146). However, Jeffers’s symbolism is complex, layered, and multiple, and Clare’s heron can stand for the failure of saviors of all types, including those who would reform society through a nurturing communalism.

44.  “Hawk” and “heron,” then, become interesting symbols for two strains of writing nature. The heron is the emblem of nurturing for the American tradition of women’s nature writing. The hawk is Jeffers’s symbol of the Inhuman forces of nature which shatter the individual, a figure adopted by Ted Hughes when he imagines “Nature thinking” in the form of a roosting hawk that proclaims, “My manners are tearing off heads” (qtd in Gifford and Roberts 68). The “hawk” strain of nature writing is primarily “masculine” and favored by modern poets, while the “heron” strain is primarily “feminine” and favored by writers of realist prose fiction. “The Loving Shepherdess” seems to mediate these strains in Jeffers and respond (directly or not) to the feminine tradition by interrogating the place of nurturing and pity in a world ruled by hawks.

45.  As in the different interpretations of the shared vision of Onorio and Clare, Jeffers enfolds the concerns of the feminine tradition of literary regionalism within his harsh Inhumanism to give both more depth and complexity. As a metaphor for these two literary strains, the hawk hunts the heron in “The Loving Shepherdess,” but the reader never knows if the heron survives, for both birds disappear into the woods. Thus, Jeffers does not entirely reject the feminine tradition of literary regionalism, but he does reject its focus on the consolidation of the human ego, and in his rewriting of this tradition in “The Loving Shepherdess” reveals nature as profoundly liberating because it shatters the limitations of the human ego. Clare’s painful end shatters her delusion that self-sacrifice will protect her flock and cuts off the hope that nature will always be gentle and kind. Yet somehow the tragic realization that occurs at the end of “The Loving Shepherdess” is far more liberating-for the reader and for our idea of nature-than an ending which would allow her to merely walk off into her own desert.

A CONCLUSION TOWARDS A BEGINNING

46.  Despite their different treatment of similar themes, Mary Austin’s “The Walking Woman” and Robinson Jeffers’s “The Loving Shepherdess” share some remarkable similarities: both are narratives of women who wander specific bioregions near California’s San Joaquin Valley; both Austin’s Walking Wo-man and Jeffers’s Clare Walker are sometime shepherdesses who are homeless and possessionless, sexually liberated, of questionable sanity, whose stories question the idea of man-made boundaries and demonstrate the role of nurturing within the most hostile habitats.¹⁶ These similarities bring up a question about literary history: Did Mary Austin’s “The Walking Woman” inspire Robinson Jeffers’s “The Loving Shepherdess”? Jeffers never mentioned Mary Austin as an influence for any of his works, but a closer examination of the literary relationship between Austin and Jeffers suggests that Jeffers had an awareness of and interest in Austin’s work long before his initial letter to her in 1929.
Although Austin and Jeffers did not meet until 1930, they lived in the same small village at the same time: they both lived in Carmel from 1914 to 1924. Mary Austin first came to Carmel in 1903 on a visit with George Sterling. In 1906, she bought a house there, and she, Sterling, and Jimmy Hopper formed a tight-knit trio of bohemian writers that became the nucleus of Carmel’s fledgling artist colony. However, by 1914, when Jeffers moved there, Mary Austin was travelling so frequently that she was hardly ever home. At one point, Austin and Jeffers were even next-door neighbors, and Edith Greenan’s biography of Una relates an amusing incident of their proximity. One day in 1917 when the Jefferses were living in an isolated log cabin outside Carmel village, they heard a voice intruding into their solitude. Una said the voice was “ringing through the trees, a woman’s voice, loud and threatening: ‘Blood . . . savagery rampant . . . shoot them down’” (Greenan 29). The Jefferses were “astounded and de-lighted by this outburst,” and the next day inquired around the village; they discovered they had heard Mary Austin practicing an anti-war speech in her backyard (Greenan 29-30). She lived just across the gulch from the Jefferses’ cabin.

47.  Although Mary Austin and Robinson Jeffers were neighbors and shared the same circle of literary friends (including George Sterling, James Hopper, Mark Van Doren, Arthur Davison Ficke, Lincoln Steffens, Albert Bender, and, later, Mabel Dodge Luhan and her circle), we know little about their relationship as writers. We do not know how familiar Jeffers was with Austin’s writing before 1929 when he and Austin began corresponding. Letters reveal that Jeffers read at least one of Austin’s books before that time-The American Rhythm, first published in 1923. Other letters imply that he was much more familiar with Austin’s writing. In a 1926 letter to George Sterling, Jeffers participates in some literary gossip about Mary Austin by relaying what Jimmy Hopper has said about her: “[Hopper] thinks it pitiful that Mary abandoned her first and proper field” (SL 61). This letter suggests that Jeffers had discussed Austin’s writing with Sterling and Hopper, who believed that Austin’s “first and proper field” was the literary regionalism of her highly successful and widely admired first books: The Land of Little Rain (1903), The Flock (1905), and Lost Borders (1909). Jeffers’s repeating Hopper’s assessment of Austin’s talent suggests that Jeffers himself had read enough of her work to come to the same opinion. Yet whether Jeffers actually read Mary Austin’s Lost Borders and its final story “The Walking Woman” before he wrote “The Loving Shepherdess” is still unknown.

48.  I find it interesting that Jeffers was drafting “The Loving Shepherdess” just as he was beginning his correspondence with Mary Austin. Although it is not clear who started the exchange of letters and books, it seems that Jeffers began their correspondence in the winter of 1928-1929 by sending Mary Austin a copy of his recently published Cawdor. Austin reciprocated with her 1915 The Man Jesus and a letter.¹⁷ In his reply to this letter, Jeffers mentions that he has just finished his own portrayal of Jesus in “Dear Judas,” and he tells Austin, “I (like thousands of others) have long admired your works and your life” (SL 142), a statement that presents Jeffers as a long-time reader of Austin’s writing. From Una’s letters to Mary Austin, it seems that both the Jefferses read her works, for Una writes in 1932 that she and Robin think Earth Horizon is better than anything Mary has written so far (Literary America 258).¹⁸ This statement suggests that both Una and Robinson Jeffers were familiar with Austin’s writing. Yet whether “The Walking Woman” was among the works they read aloud to each other and their children at Tor House cannot, as yet, be answered.

49.  To conclude, the literary and social relationship between Mary Austin and Robinson Jeffers merits further study. Both writers are now receiving much critical attention; yet, still, they are rarely examined together. Mary Austin is a favorite of feminist theorists and scholars interested in literary regional prose, while Jeffers appeals primarily to poets and scholars interested in poetry. Gender and genre, once again, keep these two writers apart. Although this essay has proposed the possible impact of Austin on Robinson Jeffers, one must also consider Jeffers’s impact on Mary Austin. One month after “The Loving Shepherdess” was published in Dear Judas, Mary Austin wrote an editorial in the Saturday Review of Literature in which she declared: “. . . I do seem to discover the great poet, a poet of Greek dimensions in Robinson Jeffers. At least I feel that no undergraduate need feel under any obligation to forego the thrill of being alive in his time” (590). In conferring this honor on Jeffers, perhaps Mary Austin recognized a literary kinship between Jeffers Country and her own Country of Lost Borders.
 

1 Robert Brophy’s argument that Jeffers’s narrative poems take on a symbolic structure based on the tragic rituals of myth also applies to “The Loving Shepherdess.”
2 In a panel discussion on the female archetype in Jeffers, Mark Jarman argues that the most compelling aspect of Clare Walker is “the physical fact of her body” and her “depth, reality, believability” (112). While this is true, Betty Adcock is also correct in her remark in the same panel that “Jeffers characters are as much forces of nature or of fate as they are people. As such, they are larger, more bitter, more awful, more profoundly compelling than ordinary people” (134).
3 See Mark Jarman’s comments on the relevance of the madrone-wood staff in linking Clare to her bioregion (115).
4 Mary Austin’s frank discussion of women’s sexuality outside of marriage is why Lost Borders was considered immoral. Female sexuality is another parallel between Austin’s Walking Woman and Jeffers’s Clare Walker. The important difference is that the Walking Woman pursues free love for purposes of self-fulfillment, while Clare pursues a self-destructive promiscuity in order to enact a sacramental self-sacrifice.
5 Another interesting parallel between “The Loving Shepherdess” and “The Walking Woman” is the narratives’ interests in conveying the physical details of the women’s bodies. “The Walking Woman” pays great attention to Mrs. Walker’s face, mannerisms, voice, and style of walking, especially in determining if her body is twisted or straight.
6 Lawrence Buell remarks that Austin is “fomenting the same doctrine of the ‘hard and brutal mysticism’ of the desert region that Edward Abbey later in-vokes to puncture armchair romanticism” (176). Abbey, of course, owes much of his “inhuman” doctrine to Jeffers.
7 For a different interpretation of the shared vision of Onorio and Clare, see Brophy’s “Afterword” to Dear Judas. Brophy sees Clare’s intense desire to protect the universe as a denial of life because it is an attempt to suffocate it in the womb.
8 For an excellent discussion of Jeffers’s attempts to avoid gendering nature, see Patrick D. Murphy, 162-63.
9 Even in the poem, Clare’s own body seems to acquit her from the accusation that she, not her boyfriend, killed her father. She has a miscarriage in the middle of the trial, is rushed to the hospital, and is then beyond being judged. The trial no longer has any bearing upon her life.
10 Mary Austin apparently objected to the sexual content in Jeffers’s poetry, for in a December 1929 letter to her, Jeffers responds, “You are right of course about the unessentialness of sex as a motive in literature” (SL 162).
11 Brophy reads “The Loving Shepherdess” as “an ironic parable” of the human illusion of saviorism (“Afterword” 150).
12  Jeffers realizes that “The Loving Shepherdess” will be easy to misinterpret, and he places within his narrative a character who misinterprets Clare and her journey. The old man who lives in the house of hateful human entanglements romanticizes Clare and wishes that property would be abolished and people could live wild and free like Clare. He is so self-absorbed that he does not notice the physical misery that such a life has exerted upon poor Clare, and for the poem he represents the type of person who wants a herd-like social movement. Clare does not represent any sort of social movement or the abolition of property or even women’s rights; she represents the tension within Jeffers’s own Inhumanism between turning away from humanity to face the essential in-    difference of the universe and retaining the sweetness of love, nurturing, and generosity.
13 For further discussion of Austin’s relation to what is variously called wo-men’s literary regionalism, women’s environmental writing, and local color, see Marjorie Pryse, xiv-xvii, and Lawrence Buell, 44-49 and 177.
14 Of course, the animals that appear in Jeffers’s poems reflect the fauna of the coastal region: snowy egrets, great egrets, great blue herons, and black-crowned night herons all dwell in Jeffers Country. Jewett’s heron is the great egret (Casmerodious albus), a large, snow white bird with a long neck and  “a magnificent veil of white plumes” on its back during the breeding season (Udvardy 419). Jeffers frequently describes the herons that appear in his poems as “night-herons,” which could refer to the black-crowned night heron (Nycticorax nycticorax), a smaller, greenish-gray bird with a short neck and none of the elegance of its taller cousins, or could simply function as a description of the way some type of heron flies from the shore to its nest after sunset. The heron in “The Loving Shepherdess” is most likely a great egret like Jewett’s heron.  Jeffers describes this heron as a long-necked “wide heron” flying with diffi-culty over the redwoods. “Wide” could refer to a bird with a large wingspan, as the great blue heron and great egret both have, or could refer to a bird heavy with fish. “Wide” is also homophonous with “white,” suggesting a bird whose color opposes that of the “dark hawk” that hunts it. Another reason for the heron’s being white is that it foreshadows Clare’s death: through Una, Jeffers was familiar with the Gaelic superstition that white birds flying at night are omens of death (Greenan 31).
15 A few lines earlier, Jeffers had compared Clare to the moon waning like a falling white bird: “Her look went westward to the day moon, / Faint white shot bird in her wane, the wings bent downward, falling in the clear over the ocean cloud-bank” (CP 2: 60).
16 One reason for the similarities between the lives of two characters created by two different writers is that Austin’s Walking Woman and Jeffers’s Clare Walker were both based on real women. “Mrs. Walker” was a woman who wandered the California desert around Bakersfield in the late nineteenth century; Mary Austin saw her in 1889 and recorded this description in her unpublished “Tejon Notebook”:

Over on the Temblor we met the Walking Woman. I had heard of her. The cow-boys call her Mrs. Walker but nobody knows her name. She told one of the women at Temblor that her first name is Jenny, but she answers to Mrs. Walker. . . . They say she has just as good sense as any body, except that she is a little crazy. Mother says she looks like a woman who has had a child. (qtd in Wyatt 76)

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