The Mary MacLane Project

2000 - Kathryn Beth Tovo

PhD dissertation on Mary MacLane: “The unparalleled individuality of me”: The story of Mary MacLane, by Kathryne Beth Tovo (University of Texas at Austin)

Abstract: This dissertation is one of the first book-length studies of Mary MacLane, a writer whose work played a significant role in the cultural and literary landscape of early-twentieth century America. In The Story of Mary MacLane (1902), her first and most popular autobiography, MacLane interrogated the cultural systems of gender and sexuality and implicitly challenged the connections between reading, writing, and morality in a manner that would come to be associated with feminism and modernism. - MacLane’s use of language and revision of the autobiographical genre defied a culture that placed increasing importance on standardization in these areas. The Story of Mary MacLane shapes autobiography as an interactive performance involving the autobiographical subject and audience and employs a rhetoric of fragmentation, the textual equivalent of her iconoclastic moral and religious views. These rhetorical strategies help cast MacLane as an “odd” woman; like the subject who identifies in herself a “strange attraction of sex” for another woman, the text itself crosses genres and violates categories. - The dissertation examines MacLane’s public interactions within the context of a culture fascinated by outlaws and others who violated conventional standards of behavior. In the manner of performance artists, MacLane made her public persona part of an assault on conventional morality and etiquette. Interactions with reporters, socialites, and other fans who flocked to meet her became occasions where MacLane exhibited an eccentricity she called “capering”—actions calculated to shock, offend, and amuse. - After the publication of The Story of Mary MacLane, young women in several states allegedly engaged in acts of social disruption and were pronounced victims of “MacLaneism” by the media. The dissertation explores “MacLaneism” and other responses from readers and the general public as they intersect cultural debates about the nature of genius, the power of books, and women’s reading practices. - Drawing on extensive archival and primary research, this dissertation reconstructs MacLane’s life and the public response to The Story of Mary MacLane within a broad contextual background of modernism, early feminism, and the beginnings of a celebrity culture.

1997 - Cathryn Luanne Halverson

PhD dissertation on MacLane and Opal Whiteley: Autobiography, genius, and the American West: the story of Mary MacLane and Opal Whiteley (University of Michigan) - Abstract: This dissertation is the first comprehensive study of the early twentieth-century American diarists Mary MacLane and Opal Whiteley. Their unorthodox and even mysterious texts The Story of Mary MacLane and The Story of Opal made these women two of the most notorious writers of their time. Their youth (both published their texts at the age of twenty, and Whiteley wrote hers when six and seven) and their remote origins of Butte, Montana and the forests of western Oregon further secured their intrigue. As westerners, MacLane and Whiteley were perceived by eastern readers as at once outlandish and parochial, western and midwestern, unique and representative. They also both contributed to and profited from their era's vogue for texts exploring the passions and claustrophobia of unknown, ordinary women. Their celebrity was brief, however, and today MacLane and Whiteley are almost wholly unknown. As authors of texts compelling in their own right and as figures that illuminate the dynamics of early twentieth-century print culture, MacLane and Whiteley deserve to occupy a central place in American literary history. This study, therefore, is at once both a recovery project that brings to light the extraordinary lives, texts, and careers of two masterly writers, and an exploration of the relations among region, autobiography, gender, celebrity, and artistic identity in early twentieth-century America. Using period reviews, popular magazine and newspaper accounts, publishers' archives, and personal correspondence as well as the diaries themselves, I focus on the role played by region both in MacLane and Whiteley's careers in eastern markets and in their textual and personal construction as artists. This study probes the origins and nature of the western female aesthetic that underpins familiar notions (as in the popular image of Georgia O'Keeffe) of the western woman artist whose art springs from a semi-mystical communion with a vast western landscape. To contextualize MacLane and Whiteley as western women writers, I also examine the autobiographical fiction of their better-known contemporaries Willa Cather, Mary Austin, and Mourning Dove. In contrast to Southern and New England women's, western women's writing has received little critical attention as a regional genre; especially neglected as western texts are those written by women who traveled not to but from the West. Early twentieth-century western women writers, I contend, are linked by their gendered and post-frontier rewriting of the romance of the West through their use of the region to define themselves as artists or geniuses. They identified themselves with the sublime landscapes into which they intermittently ventured, but against the provincial communities they actually inhabited; this perception of a bifurcated West particularly facilitated racial and class fantasies.

2017 - Per Faxneld

Substantial section on MacLane in Satanic Feminism: Lucifer as the Liberator of Woman in Nineteenth-Century Culture (Oxford Studies in Western Esotericism), Oxford University Press. (See also author's 2014 PhD thesis, Stockholm University.) - Amazon summary: According to the Bible, Eve was the first to heed Satan's advice to eat the forbidden fruit and thus responsible for all of humanity's subsequent miseries. The notion of woman as the Devil's accomplice is prominent throughout Christian history and has been used to legitimize the subordination of wives and daughters. In the nineteenth century, rebellious females performed counter-readings of this misogynist tradition. Lucifer was reconceptualized as a feminist liberator of womankind, and Eve became a heroine. In these reimaginings, Satan is an ally in the struggle against a tyrannical patriarchy supported by God the Father and his male priests. Per Faxneld shows how this Satanic feminism was expressed in a wide variety of nineteenth-century literary texts, autobiographies, pamphlets, newspaper articles, paintings, sculptures, and even artifacts of consumer culture like jewelry. He details how colorful figures like the suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton, gender-bending Theosophist H. P. Blavatsky, author Aino Kallas, actress Sarah Bernhardt, anti-clerical witch enthusiast Matilda Joslyn Gage, decadent marchioness Luisa Casati, and the Luciferian lesbian poetess Renée Vivien embraced these reimaginings. By exploring the connections between esotericism, literature, art and the political realm, Satanic Feminism sheds new light on neglected aspects of the intellectual history of feminism, Satanism, and revisionary mythmaking.

1977 - Carolyn J. Mattern

“Mary MacLane: A Feminist Opinion" - Montana: The Magazine of Western History (October, 1977). A useful supplement to Wheeler (1977) (see above). Examines MacLane as feminist.

2016 - MicKenzie E. Fasteland

Substantial mentions in PhD thesis: Empire and Adolescence: Whiteness and Gendered Citizenship in American Young Adult Literature, 1904-1951 (University of Michigan). MM Referred to throughout; cf. especially Chapter Three, "The Fault in Our Girls: New Women, Modern Girls, and Excessive White Desire in Literature for Teens, 1904-1928," sect. I: "'I, of Woman Kind and of Nineteen Years': Mary MacLane, Fan Culture, and Reading like a New Woman" - Abstract: This dissertation examines how American adolescent literary book lists and adolescent literature normalized White Anglo-Saxon Protestant subjectivities in the first half of the twentieth century. Figures like child study psychologist G. Stanley Hall and librarian Anne Carroll Moore created a gendered and racialized reading practice for American teens that would construct a functioning imperialist citizenry whereas teen authors Mary MacLane and Maureen Daly provided contesting (and occasionally colluding) models of adolescent reading. The introduction argues that early discourses around adolescent reading practices must be contextualized against American imperialist and military action to better deconstruct racialized images of adolescent citizenry. The first chapter examines how Hall’s literary genre for teens, “ephebic literature,” provided a new cultural model of adolescent development that pulled together stories from Greek mythology, medieval legends, and Western biography to imagine a model of imperialist citizenship bounded by race and gender. The second chapter proposes a revised stance on Moore’s career that both recognizes her contributions to increasing dialogue between librarians and their adolescent patrons and calls attention her post-WWI recommendations for teens, which did not reflect the ethnic and racial diversity that marked the New York Public Library’s patrons but relied instead on Western European and American literature that marginalized nonwhite or immigrant characters. The third chapter juxtaposes two case studies, one historical and one fictional, of two white adolescent “New Women” whose obsessive reading was framed as dangerous to nationalist goals. The first re-reads Mary MacLane’s memoir as an adolescent expression of fandom, one that intertwined plotlines from girl’s bildungsroman with the tenants of lyric poetry to create queer futurities and communities; the second returns to Moore’s recommendations for girls to articulate how her condemnation of Fanny Kilbourne’s Betty Bell was bound up in white respectability politics. The fourth chapter reframes Maureen Daly’s extensive career writing to and for teens into a complicated performance of a commercialized WASP subjectivity that marginalized her own Irish-Catholic background during and after WWII. This dissertation calls for young adult literary studies to examine these historical developments to better contextualize current problems increasing diversity in young adult literature.

1993 - Kimberly J. Davitt

Mentioned throughout in MA (History) thesis: Female visions and verse - Turn-of-the-century women artists and writers in the Montana landscape - University of Montana

Late 1970s? - Peggy Pascoe

Unpublished undergraduate essay on Mary MacLane, written at Montana State University. (Title page evidently missing. Identified by Butte Silver Bow Public Library as written before 1982. Copy in Butte-Silver Bow Public Library.)

1997 - Mary Murphy

Mentions in Mining Cultures: Men, Women, and Leisure in Butte, 1914-41 (Women in American History), University of Illinois Press (Champaign), 1997. Amazon summary: Probing behind the "wide-open city" moniker Butte has worn so well, Mining Cultures shows how the western city evolved from a male-dominated mining enclave to a community in which men and women participated on a more equal basis as leisure patterns changed and consumer culture grew. - Mary Murphy's engagingly written book is the first serious look at how women worked and spent their leisure time in a city dominated by men's work - mining. In bringing Butte to life, she draws on church weeklies, high school yearbooks, holiday rituals, movie plots, and news of local fashion, in addition to the more customary court cases, newspapers, and interviews. - Her lively chronicle of the growth of consumer culture in Butte is richly illustrated. It will interest those in western and women's history, leisure and consumerism studies, and labor and immigration history, as well as general readers.

2013 - Tove Solander

Brief mentions in PhD thesis: "Creating the Senses": Sensation in the work of Shelley Jackson, Umeå University (Sweden). Abstract: This monograph on the œuvre of contemporary American author and multimedia artist Shelley Jackson addresses the question of how literary works employ language to evoke sense impressions. Gilles Deleuze’s notion of aesthetic percepts is drawn on to develop a theory of literary phantom sensations which is then tested on the work of Jackson and related authors. Although imperceptible as such, it is argued that percepts are made perceptible in art in sense-specific forms as phantom sensations. “Phantom” is not meant to indicate a pale shadow of real sensations but the intensely perceived realness of phantom limb phenomena, in accordance with Deleuze’s understanding of the virtual as real but not actual. For the sake of clarity, literary phantom sensations are divided into phantom smells, tastes, touches, sights and sounds, with a chapter devoted to each in turn. It is found that different phantom sensations serve different functions in Jackson’s work, correlated to the cultural history of the senses as outlined by recent sensory scholarship. Phantom smells are associated with Deleuze’s concept of becoming due to their liminality. Phantom tastes contribute to an aesthetics of distaste in which shades of disgust are cultivated and drawn upon for literary effect. Phantom touch creates conceptual intimacy and invites the reader to handle words like toys in a game. Phantom sight is turned back upon itself in an anatomy of the eye. Phantom hearing is associated with forms of ventriloquism in which it is unclear who is speaking through whom and in which language itself throws its voice. However, it is also found that all phantom sensations similarly serve to create a material and affective connection between the body of the reader and the body of the text. Throughout the dissertation, Jackson’s work is read against and alongside that of other writers such as Djuna Barnes, Neil Bartlett, Brigid Brophy and Leonora Carrington. Together these form a trajectory termed minor writing for queers to come, which is meant to indicate that aesthetic and sexual-political radicalism go hand in hand. Furthermore, Jackson’s work is described as a form of body writing informed by feminist body art and écriture féminine. Specifically, Jackson takes her cue from early modern anatomical blazons and describes living bodies in pieces. Her work is also described as object writing: a literary equivalent to surrealist object art. A central method for making words more like things is to arrange her texts spatially rather than temporally, as exemplified by her electronic hypertexts.

2007 - Natasha Hurley

Brief mentions in PhD thesis: Getting Around: Circulation and the Rise of the Gay and Lesbian Novel (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey). Abstract: My dissertation reorients the prevailing understanding that the gay and lesbian novel came into view in response to the emergence of homosexuality >as a concept. I argue that the gay and lesbian novel has a much longer history, which I trace by considering the literary circulation of homosexual types--types that through course of the nineteenth century accrete more and more language to themselves while also generating new abstract terms to describe same-sex sexual sociability. Eighteenth-century literature was sparsely populated by minor characters or fleeting episodes of desire expressed between members of the same sex. By the end of the nineteenth century, minor characters evolve into protagonists and their episodic encounters are either multiplied or developed into novel-length narratives with the texture of entire worlds. "Getting Around" thus takes as its focus the development not just of queer characters or subjects, but of queer protagonists and complete narrative worlds in which those protagonists make sense. - My chapters focus both on the ways authors respond to the language of sexual types in other texts and on the ways other texts respond to them as they continue to circulate. My first chapter argues that Herman Melville's Typee has gradually acquired its status as a queer text: in the ways Melville engages with sexuality in missionary writings and in the way other writers engage with sexuality in Typee. This influence can be seen fully in Charles Warren Stoddard's writing, which I explore in Chapter Two. Stoddard's depictions of sexual sociability between men in the South Seas respond directly to Melville's and are, in turn, nurtured by Stoddard's wide circuits of literary and social circulation. My third chapter charts the circulation of female sexual types, tracing the overlapping, and mutually constituting, relationships between old maids and lesbians that are central to the social worlds depicted by Sarah Orne Jewett and Henry James. My final chapter turns fully to James's The Bostonians. In the space of one novel, I argue, James dramatizes the processes of sexual type production and social circulation that I have been documenting in American literature throughout the nineteenth century.

2010 - Chad Michael Okrusch

Brief quote in PhD thesis: Pragmatism and Environmental Problem-Solving: A Systematic Moral Analysis Of Democratic Environmental Decision-Making In Butte, Montana (Unversity of Oregon)