Mary MacLane

Mary MacLane (born May 1 or 2, 1881, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada—found dead August 6, 1929, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.) was a Canadian-born American writer and pioneering feminist whose frank autobiographical account of her life—written at age 19 and published as The Story of Mary MacLane—by Herself in 1902—became an instant best seller and made her a celebrity for two decades. Called the “Wild Woman of Butte,” she used a Modernist confessional style to express erotic desires. She was largely forgotten until feminist interest in women’s lives revived her work during the 1970s.

Life and works

MacLane, born to Scottish and Canadian Presbyterian parents, was one of four children. Her father, James, worked as an agent for the Canadian government, investing in cattle herds and flatboats. When Mary was four, the family moved to Fergus Falls, Minnesota, to which she refers in a charming essay, “The Autobiography of the Kid Primitive” (1910). Shortly after her father’s death in 1889, the family moved to Montana and eventually Butte, then a booming copper-mining town, where her mother married a “wandering photographer,” Henry G. Klenze, who later committed suicide. At the family’s home, MacLane wrote a daily journal of her internal life and self-perception from January 13 to April 13, 1901, with an afterword dated October 28. In that journal she refers to her work as “the record of three months of Nothingness,” but she explicitly refuses to call it a diary: “This is not a diary. It is a Portrayal. It is my inner life shown in its nakedness.” (She originally called it I Await the Devil’s Coming, but her publisher released it as The Story of Mary MacLane—by Herself.)

On the first page of Story, MacLane declares her uniqueness:

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I, of womankind and of nineteen years, will now begin to set down as full and frank a Portrayal as I am able of myself, Mary MacLane, for whom the world contains not a parallel.…I have in me a quite unusual intensity of life.…I am a genius.…I am quite, quite odd.

She rejects the role of domestic heroine and instead characterizes herself as (to use a modern-day term) a “bad girl”: “I long to cultivate my element of Badness.” Her use of confession was strategic, part of her condemnation of moral pretension. In Story she is as likely to denounce herself as a thief and an egotist as to declare herself a genius. “Every day of my life I am playing a part,” she explains; those labels represent an expression of her trying on autobiographical roles.

While MacLane’s family is all but invisible in Story, her literary antecedents are prominent. Although decrying her status as a woman—“it is a hard and bitter thing to be a woman”—she read many women writers, including Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and, above all, Marie Bashkirtseff, a Russian diarist and artist who lived primarily in France. Bashkirtseff died at age 25 and left as her legacy a diary declaring her genius and desire for fame. MacLane modeled her self-stylization on her European forebear, but she proclaims that her own “Portrayal” has “a stronger individuality.” MacLane frames her outbursts of ennui as a reaction to the “sand and barrenness” of Butte, but they are also indebted to the world-weary fin-de-siècle attitude of contemporary writers influenced in particular by Charles Baudelaire and, later, Joris-Karl Huysmans. Her journalistic eye for detail was likely derived from reading newspapers and magazines. While she denounced the then thriving mining town as “an empty, damned weariness” full of people who like “fried egg plant, fried beef-steak, fried pork-chops, and fried French toast,” she also lauded its diversity: “For mixture, for miscellany—variedness, Bohemianism—where is Butte’s rival?”

The primary characters in Story constitute an odd romantic group: the man-Devil; MacLane’s high-school teacher, Fannie Corbin; and her self-declared male counterpart whose personality she shares, Napoleon Bonaparte. As originally written, Story bore this dedication (though it did not appear in the book when first published):

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To the Devil Of the Steel-Gray Eyes, Who One Day may Come—Who Knows?—I Dedicate, with the Mad Love of A Young Weary Wooden Heart, This, My Book.

Throughout her entries MacLane characterizes the Devil as a fascinating man with eyes both “quizzical” and “tender.” She holds conversations with him as he teaches her about love and challenges her illusion that marriage brings happiness. MacLane also pines for Corbin, the “anemone lady,” “my first love,” who has moved away. Professing her love in several entries, she salutes Corbin as “the only one who has ever been kind to me.” MacLane’s later liaisons in Greenwich Village with both women and men led later scholars to view her as a proto-lesbian pioneer, although MacLane denounced lesbianism as a “warped” predilection. Nonetheless, she had lesbian encounters in New York and Chicago and reasserted her desire in a later memoir, I, Mary MacLane.

After The Story of Mary MacLane—by Herself was published, MacLane moved to Boston and then to New York City, where she was both celebrated as a sensation—including in a Fourth of July parade in which she lay on a silk divan—and criticized for Story’s shocking solicitation of the Devil and its frank and brazen musings on sexuality, friendship, and herself. Readers of tabloid newspapers were polled on their views of her; “MacLane Clubs” were started; and newly rebellious young women found in her a champion. After her meteoric rise, however, MacLane had difficulty maintaining her success. Her second memoir, My Friend Annabel Lee (1903), written as conversations with an imaginary friend, was a flop, and she repeatedly complained to her publisher about being impoverished. Returning to Butte in 1909, she began writing editorials for the Butte Evening News with memorable titles such as “A Waif of Destiny on the High Seas” and “Mary MacLane Meets the Vampire on the Isle of Treacherous Delights.” For years she worked on another memoir, I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days, which was published in 1917; perhaps owing to its lack of scandalous revelations, it did not attract many readers.

MacLane also developed a screenplay for a feature film with Essanay Studios, which she based on an article in which she characterized male-female relationships as a “fascinating game.” Released in 1918 as Men Who Have Made Love to Me, the film (now lost) starred MacLane as a vamp encountering six types of men. It received mixed reviews and was banned by censors in some U.S. states, but it achieved enough success to enable MacLane to move to Chicago. There, however, she fell into obscurity and poverty, and a decade later she was found dead in a rooming house on the city’s South Side. “What mystic or glandular voices spoke to Mary, bidding her go forth into the world as the Jeanne d’Arc of the Warm Mammas?” asked a laudatory eulogy in The Chicagoan.

Significance

A revival of MacLane’s work, particularly The Story of Mary MacLane—by Herself, occurred when feminist critics began recovering women’s out-of-print life narratives from archives in the 1970s. Historians praised her as a passionate and intriguing literary voice, and Patricia Meyer Spacks’s landmark The Female Imagination (1975) devoted a chapter to MacLane as an artist carving out a space of self-expression through devotion to a Romantic ideal. She has slowly been incorporated into the canon of Western women writers, and her work gained a wider audience through collections such as Tender Darkness: A Mary MacLane Anthology (1993), edited by Elisabeth Pruitt, and Human Days: A Mary MacLane Reader (2014), a complete but thinly annotated collection of her three narratives as well as her editorials and selected letters, edited by Michael R. Brown.

As one of the first modern American celebrities, MacLane is a fascinating, if ultimately tragic, figure. She has been proclaimed an innovative American Modernist who caught the attention of Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. She was attentive to the stubborn materiality of both her own body—“my admirable young woman’s body, which I enjoy thoroughly and of which I am passionately fond,” as she describes it in The Story of Mary MacLane—by Herself—and the natural world, with its “Pile of Stones and…Barrel of Lime,” its olives, onions, and toothbrushes. In her impudent questioning of decorum, MacLane conveys the sensibility of an adventurous, imaginative, defiant New Woman hungry for life and previously unimagined possibilities.