The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich

First published: 1985

Type of work: Essays

Form and Content

Gretel Ehrlich challenges serious myths concerning gender and its relationship to the American West in the twelve essays that constitute The Solace of Open Spaces. Instead of positing the West as a man’s world in which men have all the power and are separated from the women’s domain of home and family, Ehrlich depicts tough, capable women who are working outside the home. Most women, including Ehrlich herself, work along with the men and pull their own weight, even in the midst of personal tragedy, by adopting typically masculine qualities.

On the one hand, this book is like a typical collection of essays in that each piece is an individual unit existing independently of the others. Each essay resonates with its own artistry. Each manifests its own distinct tone, subject matter, and point of view. Each stands wonderfully on its own. On the other hand, Ehrlich also brings the essays together into a single work that clearly has a unifying story and set of thematic concerns. She mentions more than once in the preface that the book is a “narrative” and that the accumulation of essays chronicles her relationship to Wyoming, first as a place to make a documentary film on sheepherders, then as a place to mourn the death of her lover, then as a place to live and work, and finally as a place to discover and consummate another love relationship. Seen in this way, each essay relies on the others for the telling of Ehrlich’s Wyoming experience, and the overall narrative transcends the concerns of the individual essays, although the essays do not create a chronological narrative by building on one another either consecutively or logically.

Instead, the essays are organized in a more unconventional narrative that Ehrlich herself describes in multiple ways in the book’s preface: She says that her narrative is “written in fits and starts,” is made of “digressions,” and constructs a foundation made of riprap. All these descriptions suggest a structure that is inspired by the spirit of the place about which she is writing, a structure that is imitative of the choppy and chaotic Wyoming landscape and the capricious and suddenly changing Wyoming weather. The book consists of three different kinds of writing that Ehrlich weaves together, foregrounding first one and then another: an autobiography in the story of her life experiences; a natural history in her detailed observations of the landscape, the weather, and the creatures of Wyoming; and an ethnography in her story of the people who live on the land. These three kinds of writing are what make the book so digressive and so given to “fits and starts.” They also suggest that Ehrlich’s experiences in Wyoming were not one-dimensional. She did not simply find herself becoming attached to the landscape or the people or a particular man; she found all these experiences happening at once with more or less equal poignancy.

Context

Although Gretel Ehrlich has written several works of fiction and poetry, The Solace of Open Spaces, her first collection of essays, has been her most well-received work to date. The book won an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and several individual essays from it have been anthologized. The Solace of Open Spaces fits into a literary tradition that is often referred to as nature writing. Although this tradition is profoundly male, epitomized by the works of well-known writers such as Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Edward Abbey, many women have also written nonfictional accounts of their relationships with nature. In the nineteenth century, women such as Margaret Fuller and Celia Thaxter, both of whom are little known today, wrote what could be called nature writing. In the twentieth century, writers such as Mary Austin, Rachel Carson, and Annie Dillard have also, like Ehrlich, depicted themselves as women who understand both the beauties and dangers in nature and who thrive when in contact with the natural world. Ehrlich’s The Solace of Open Spaces, though not as spiritual as Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), as politicized as Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), or as overtly feminist as Austin’s The Land of Little Rain (1903), fits solidly into this growing tradition of women writing about nature. This tradition can and probably should be looked at in conjunction with and also apart from the mainstream tradition of nature writing by men, if only to investigate the possible differences between the two.

The Solace of Open Spaces is an important book for several reasons, including the beauty of its language. Essays such as “The Solace of Open Spaces,” “The Smooth Skull of Winter,” and “A Storm, the Cornfield, and Elk,” with their surprising images, sparse sentences, alliteration, and metaphors, read more like poetry than what is usually thought of as essayistic prose.

Since the publication of The Solace of Open Spaces, Gretel Ehrlich has been working on other nature essays, some of which have been collected in her second collection of essays, Islands, The Universe, Home (1991). Ehrlich’s other books include Geode Rock Body (1970), To Touch the Water (1981), City Tales, Wyoming Stories (1986, coauthored with essayist Edward Hoagland), Heart Mountain (1988), and Drinking Dry Clouds (1991).

Bibliography

Austin, Mary. The Land of Little Rain. 1903. Reprint. New York: Penguin Books, 1988. A collection of essays about Southern California’s desert country which was published more than eighty years before The Solace of Open Spaces. Like Ehrlich, Austin concerns herself not only with the natural world but also with the people who live in a particular landscape, the communities of Piute and Shoshone Indians, Hispanic settlers, and turn-of-the-century miners.

Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. A collection of essays that has received more critical attention than any work of nature writing by a woman. Although Dillard’s essays are unquestionably more spiritual than Ehrlich’s, both writers cultivate a relationship with nature that is on their own terms, not on the terms that society might have prescribed for them.

Ehrlich, Gretel. “An Interview with Gretel Ehrlich.” Interview by James Wackett. North Dakota Quarterly 58 (Summer, 1990): 121. An interview in which Ehrlich talks about ranching, writing, rodeo, and her definition of the West. Some of the interview focuses specifically on her use of language in The Solace of Open Spaces.

Elbow, Peter. “The Pleasures of Voice in the Literary Essay: Explorations in the Prose of Gretel Ehrlich and Richard Selzer.” In Literary Nonfiction: Theory, Criticism, Pedagogy. Edited by Chris Anderson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989. A critical essay that explores the concept of voice in nonfiction by using examples from Ehrlich’s The Solace of Open Spaces as well as from essayist Richard Selzer’s work. Elbow closely analyzes the first two paragraphs from Ehrlich’s text, arguing that their voice is rich and complex.

Glamour. LXXXIII, December, 1985, p. 192.

Hasselstrom, Linda. Land Circle: Writings Collected from the Land. Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum, 1991. A memoir comprising essays and poems, Hasselstrom’s depiction of her experiences on a South Dakota ranch interestingly complements Ehrlich’s own depiction of ranching experiences in The Solace of Open Spaces. Hasselstrom’s book, like Ehrlich’s, chronicles a woman’s grieving for a loved one killed by cancer.

Kirkus Reviews. LIII, September 1, 1985, p. 928.

Library Journal. CX, November 1, 1985, p. 105.

The New York Times Book Review. XC, December 1, 1985, p. 41.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXVIII, October 25, 1985, p. 56.

Texas Monthly. XC, December 1, 1985, p. 41.

Time. CXXVII, January 6, 1986, p. 92.