The Mary MacLane Project

This is small selection of earlier critical reaction to Mary MacLane, given in chronological order. Due to the volume of writing on MacLane it is by necessity somewhat random but gives a sense of the amplitude of opinion.

Porter Garnett - "The Importance of the Unimportant"

[Without the classical strictures of analysis], we can then measure Ella Wheeler Wilcox with the Marquis de Sade, Rabelais with Cardinal Newman, Nietzsche with James Whitcomb Riley, Havelock Ellis with Gelett Burgess, and Alfred Austin with Mary MacLane .... [MacLane] is, without question, a far more interesting phenomenon than the poet laureate Alfred Austin.

- Pacific Monthly, early 1900s

G. Stanley Hall - Adolescence - its psychology, and its relations to physiology, anthropolgy, sociology, sex, crime, religion, and education

In our civilization, I believe that bright girls of good environment of eighteen or nineteen, or even seventeen, have already reached the ... peculiar stage of first maturity, when they see the world at first hand, when the senses are at their very best, their susceptibilities and their insights the keenest, tension at its highest, plasticity and all-sided interests most developed, and their whole psychic soil richest and rankest and sprouting everywhere with the tender shoots of everything both good and bad. Some such - Stella Klive, Mary MacLane, Hilma Strandberg, Marie Bashkirtseff - have been veritable spies upon woman's nature; have revealed the characterlessness normal to the prenubile period in which everything is kept tentative and plastic, and where life seems to have least unity, aim, or purpose.

- Appleton, New York, 1904, volume ii, p 629

Lois Palken Rudnick - from Mabel Dodge Luhan: New Woman, New Worlds

[Mabel's] first topic [in her syndicated column, obtained through the help of Arthur Brisbane of the New York Journal], which was assigned to her, was most appropriate. She was asked to review I, Mary MacLane, the second volume of memoirs written by a woman who reads like a caricature of Mabel. MacLane had been born and lived most of her life in Butte, Montana, in an atmosphere devoid of cultural resources. She had devoted herself to fantasizing about herself as queen of a universe in which she was all-important and powerful.

Because Mabel was tempted by just this kind of solipsism at various intervals, she had no difficulty recognizing a case of "arrested development" that was so close to home. Her advice to MacLane sounds very much like the humanitarianism she had preached during her Village days: "Living is the outcome of being in relation to others of our kind"; exclusion from them is "death." Only now she recommended psychotherapy rather than involvement in radical causes.

- University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1984, pp 139-140

H.L. Mencken - "The Butte Bashkirtseff"

Of all the pseudo-rebels who have raised a tarletan black flag in These States, surely Mary MacLane is one of the most pathetic. When, at nineteen, she fluttered Vassar with The Story of Mary MacLane," the truth about her was still left somewhat obscure; the charm of her flapperhood, so to speak, distracted attention from it, and so concealed it. But when, at thirty-five, she achieved I, Mary MacLane, it emerged crystal-clear; she had learned to describe her malady accurately, though she still wondered, a bit wistfully, just what it was. And that malady? That truth? Simply that a Scotch Presbyterian with a soaring soul is as cruelly beset as a wolf with fleas, a zebra with the botts. Let a spark of the divine fire spring to life in that arid corpse, and it must fight its way to flame through a drum fire of wet sponges. A humming bird immersed in Kartoffelsuppe. Walter Pater writing for the London Daily Mail. Lucullus traveling steerage....A Puritan wooed and tortured by the leers of beauty, Mary MacLane in a moral republic, in a Presbyterian diocese, in Butte....

I hope my figures of speech are not too abstruse. What I mean to say is simply this: that the secret of Mary MacLane is simply this: that the origin of all her inchoate naughtiness is simply this: that she is a Puritan who has heard the call of joy and is struggling against it damnably. Remember so much, and the whole of her wistful heresy becomes intelligible. On the one hand the loveliness of the world enchants her; on the other hand the fires of hell warn her. This tortuous conflict accounts for her whole bag of tricks; her timorous flirtations with the devil, her occasional outbreaks of finishing-school rebellion, her hurried protestations of virginity, above all her incurable Philistinism. One need not be told that she admires the late Major General Roosevelt and Mrs. Atherton, that she wallows in the poetry of Keats. One knows quite as well that her phonograph plays the "Peer Gynt" suite, and that she is charmed by the syllogisms of G.K. Chesterton. She is, in brief, an absolutely typical American of the transition stage between Christian Endeavor and civilization. There is in her a definite poison of ideas, an ęsthetic impulse that will not down - but every time she yields to it she is halted and plucked back by qualms and doubts, by the dominant superstitions of her race and time, by the dead hand of her kirk-crazy Scotch forebears.

It is precisely this grisly touch upon her shoulder that stimulates her to those naive explosions of scandalous confidence which make her what she is. If there were no sepulchral voice in her ear, warning her that it is the mark of a hussy to be kissed by a man with "iron-gray hair, a brow like Apollo and a jowl like Bill Sykes," she would not confess it and boast of it, as she does on page 121 of I, Mary MacLane. If it were not a Presbyterian axiom that a lady who says "damn" is fit only to join the white slaves, she would not pen a defiant Damniad, as she does on pages 108, 109 and 110. And if it were not held universally in Butte that sex passion is the exclusive infirmity of the male, she would not blab out in meeting that - but here I get into forbidden waters and had better refer you to page 209. It is not the godless voluptuary who patronizes leg-shows and the cabaret; it is the Methodist deacon with unaccustomed vine-leaves in his hair. It is not genuine artists, serving beauty reverently and proudly, who herd in Greenwich Village and bawl for art; it is precisely a mob of Middle Western Baptists to whom the very idea of art is still novel, and intoxicating, and more than a little bawdy. And to make an end, it is not cocottes who read the highly-spiced magazines which burden all the book-stalls; it is sedentary married women who, while faithful to their depressing husbands in the flesh, yet allow their imaginations to play furtively upon the charms of theoretical intrigues with such pretty fellows as Francis X. Bushman, Enrico Caruso and Vincent Astor.

An understanding of this plain fact not only explains the MacLane and her gingery carnalities of the chair; it also explains a good part of latter-day American literature. That literature is the self-expression of a people who have got only half way up the ladder leading from moral slavery to intellectual freedom. At every step there is a warning tug, a protest from below. Sometimes the climber docilely drops back; sometimes he emits a petulant defiance and reaches boldly for the next round. It is this occasional defiance which accounts for the periodical efflorescence of mere school-boy naughtiness in the midst of our oleaginous virtue - for the shouldering out of the Ladies' Home Journal by magazines of adultery all compact - for the provocative baring of calf and scapula by women who regard it as immoral to take Benedictine with their coffee - for the peopling of Greenwich Village by oafs who think it a devilish adventure to victual in cellars, and read Krafft-Ebing, and stare at the corset-scarred nakedness of decadent cloak-models.

I have said that the climber is but half way up the ladder. I wish I could add that he is moving ahead, but the truth is that he is probably quite stationary. We have our spasms of revolt, our flarings up of peekaboo waists, free love and "art," but a mighty backwash of piety fetches each and every one of them soon or late. A mongrel and inferior people, incapable of any spiritual aspiration above that of second-rate English colonials, we seek refuge inevitably in the one sort of superiority that the lower castes of men can authentically boast, to wit, superiority in docility, in credulity, in resignation, in morals. We are the most moral race in the world; there is not another that we do not look down upon in that department; our confessed aim and destiny as a nation is to inoculate them all with our incomparable rectitude. In the last analysis, all ideas are judged among us by moral standards; moral values are our only permanent tests of worth, whether in the arts, in politics, in philosophy or in life itself. Even the instincts of man, so intrinsically immoral, so innocent, are fitted with moral false-faces. That bedevilment by sex ideas which punishes continence, so abhorrent to nature, is converted into a moral frenzy, pathological in the end. The impulse to cavort and kick up one's legs, so healthy, so universal, is hedged in by incomprehensible taboos; it becomes stealthy, dirty, degrading. The desire to create and linger over beauty, the sign and touchstone of man's rise above the brute, is held down by doubts and hesitations; when it breaks through it must do so by orgy and explosion, half ludicrous and half pathetic. Our function, we choose to believe, is to teach and inspire the world. We are wrong. Our function is to amuse the world. We are the Bryan, the Henry Ford, the Billy Sunday among the nations....

- in Prejudices: First Series (1919), electronic edition - Mencken, Henry Louis, 1880-1956 - Text scanned (OCR) by Jeremy Jones - Text encoded by Melanie Polutta and Natalia Smith - First edition, 1998 - ca. 400K - Academic Affairs Library, UNC-CH - University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1998. - © This work is the property of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text.

Mary Cass Canfield - from Grotesques and Other Reflections, 1927 (orig. pub. 1917)

"I am Mary MacLane: of no importance to the wide bright world and dearly and damnably important to Me.

"Face to face I look at Me with some hatred, with despair, and with great intentness.

"I put Me in a crucible of my own making and set it in the flaming trivial Inferno of my mind. And I assay thus:

"I am rare - I am in some ways exquisite.

"I am pagan within and without.

"I am vain and shallow and false.

"I am of woman-sex and most things that go with that, with some other pointes.

"I am dynamic but devasted, laid waste in spirit.

"I'm like a leopard and I'm like a poet and I'm like a religieuse and I'm like an outlaw.

"I have brain, cerebration - not powerful, but fine and of a remarkable quality.

"I am slender in body and someway fragile and firm-fleshed and sweet.

"I am oddly a fool and a strange complex liar and a spiritual vagabond.

"I am eternally self-conscious but sincere in it.

"I am young, but not very young.

"I am wistful; I am infamous.

"In brief, I am a human being.

"And were I not so tensely tiredly sane I would say that I am mad."

This is how Mary MacLane of Butte, Montana (author, at the age of eighteen, of a volume called The Story of Mary MacLane), sums herself up in the opening chapter of her latest autobiography. No, I will not say sums herself up, for the above rather confused list of qualities pales into nothingness when compared with the subsequent expansions which fill her curious book. The too facile pen of this lonely lady plumbs with passionate, although remarkably uncontrolled and vague, intensity, the remotest depths of her own personality. I, Mary MacLane, contains 317 pages of self-expression, as I suppose it will be called. And whether Mary MacLane is telling us how her inner soul gloats over a "Cold Boiled Potato at Midnight," or how "Of inanimate things" she "most hates a loose shutter rattling at night in the wind" - the subject matter is always Mary MacLane, her intimate hates, loves, lonelinesses, doubts, aspirations, and despairs.

There is a popular superstition that any human being who sincerely writes himself or herself down for the public will create an interesting record for others to read. Cellini did it, and Marie Bashkirtseff, and the gentle and melancholy Amiel; but Cellini was a vainglorious artist writing out the events of his life with Latin brio and humour, and Amiel was a reserved philosopher of delicate and unerring taste, while Marie Bashkirtseff, oversensitive and introspective as she was, yet had an objective eye when looking at herself, a certain reasonable quality, and mixed her conceited self-analysis with a good deal of healthy outer ambition and interest in the people and happenings of her time.

Not so with Miss Mary MacLane. She lives in a morass of demoralized and despondent self-interest. All worlds revolve in Blinding Flames of Power - as she easily might, but does not, say - about her Tempestuous, Unsatisfied Ego. She is badly in need of change and diversion, as the doctors put it. Her book has such a shut-in atmosphere that one cries out, "More air," as one penetrates the labyrinth of its complexities. "Expressing breeds the last Expressions," says Mary MacLane, thus diagnosing her own disease. Her last Expressions are so complicated, so illusive, and so darkly worded that I defy most of the reading public to "get" them.

"I live long hours of nervous, profound, passionate self-communion. I discover the subtle panting Ego - the wonderful thing that lives and waits in its garbled radiance just beneath my skin."

What, oh, what, in the name of the Jabberwock, is a "garbled radiance"?

Heartbreaking is Miss MacLane's choice of adjectives, terrifying the continuous stream of them. At times she approaches Miss Gertrude Stein in a sort of frenzied lack of meaning, and a twisting and crippling of the EngIish tongue, which will cause her to be looked at askance by Swift and Bacon, Addison, Pater, and Stevenson, when she reaches another and a better world. Oscar Wilde, if he sees her there, will instantly invent some special form of torture for her, and the limpid Poe will wrap a black cloak more closely about him as he passes her by. Bad taste is in fact the dark shadow spreading over what is, after all, only an extra-ordinary book - the singular record of a not very singular ingrowing temperament. Melancholy, introspection, and sensitiveness are not ugly qualities, as the eternally graceful Hamlet bears witness, and yet I, Mary MacLane, is quite definitely ugly.

Undoubtedly this is because there is no sense of art in it, no intellectual control, no choice, no discarding. It is full of repetition of mood, overcrowding of inadequate adjectives and general lack of construction - in short, there is no honest artist's toil in it.

There is some danger that I, Mary MacLane may be embraced by a certain section of the public, which is always full of that hyper-sentimental curiosity that in this country washes up like a great sloppy sea at the feet of "Personality" - capital P. It is characteristic of a young race to want to solve every problem, penetrate every nook and cranny of existence, and know every secret of a man's soul, just as these things are characteristic of a very young person. The conserving power of reserve and the steady footsteps of silence it does not understand.

Neither, one may say, does Miss MacLane, Whether she confesses, "I am fond of green peas, baseball, and diamond rings," which has humour, or, "I wear No. 6 gloves, the calf of my leg is a shapely thing," or "I do not want of God a passport, a safe conduct into Heaven," one sees that Miss MacLane makes the mistake of considering all self-revelation interesting.

Her book is a weird medley of intelligence and acutely irritating stupidity, because she totally lacks the artist's rigorous sense of proportion, although she is an artist in the sense that her mind sees relations between things and resemblances. Her talent has remarkable blind spots. Her style, for instance, is what no writer's can afford to be - inconsiderate. I have a good mental picture of Miss MacLane sliding, rapidly downhill on a toboggan of frantic individualism. Her temperament has really fatally run away with her - she has not the canny and cold self-control of the artist, and her creation is no creation at all, but a rather indigestible mixed drink. "I am not Respectable, nor Refined, nor in Good Taste," says Mary MacLane, applying the sentence with perhaps a certain rebel satisfaction to her outer conduct; but unfortunately the judgment also applies to her as a writer, and makes her a bad one. It would be better for her to realize that good taste is the respectability of the brain, as it is also the real refinement and aristocracy of the soul.

Having expostulated with the weaknesses and exaggerations of I, Mary MacLane, and predicted a speedy tomb for it after its first succes de curiosite, I now want to weave a garland of regret over the monument. There are passages of rare intelligence and discernment, passages which are unfortunately swamped by the mass of trivialities, false oddities, and mistaken sincerities, which Miss MacLane has written down. Her chapter called "The Sleep of the Dead" has the quality of a fine prose poem; there is in it originality of thought and rhythm - a beautiful instinctive fitting of words to thoughts.

"When I'm dead I want to rest awhile in my grave; for I'm Tired, Tired always.

"My Soul must go on as it has gone on up to now. It has a long way to go, and it has come a long way ....

"But the sleep of the dead!

"I imagine Me wrapped in a shroud of soft thin wool cloth of a pale colour, laid in a plain wood coffin: and my eyelids are closed, and my tired feet are dead, and my hands are folded on my breast. And the coffin is nine feet down in the ground and the earth covers it. Upon that same, green sod: and above, the ancient blue deep sheltering sky: and the clouds and the winds and the suns and moons, and the days and nights and circling horizons - those above my grave.

"And my Body laid at its length, eyes closed, hands folded, clown there Resting: my Soul not yet gone but laid beside my Body in the coffin, Resting.

"- might we lie like that - Resting, Resting, for weeks, months, ages -

"Year after long year, Resting."

Again, in the little chapter called "The Strange Braveness," there is objective, clearly-thought-out poetry, with something in it of Walt Whitman's universal sympathy. At moments, too, Mary MacLane has finishes of delightful hurnour and a certain super-acute insight. Here is a strange little revelation of the human dread of discomfort:

"It is not Death I fear, nor Life. I horridly fear something this side of Death but outpacing Life a little: a nervousness in my Stomach - a very Muddy Street, a Lonely Hotel Room."

"I am tranquil, for to-day I had a walk that made me feel Sincere and Safe. It is a comforting feeling: it is like a beef-sandwich."

"I suppose I'm very lonely. It is luck - luck from the stars - not to be beset by clusters of people, people who do their thinking outside their heads, 'cheerful' people, people who say 'Pardon me': all the damning sorts scattered about obstructing one's views of the horizons."

When she does look at herself objectively as a character and stops telling us with her frankness, which savours uncomfortably of bravado, what kind of cold cream she uses, and just how devilish she thinks the smell of turpentine is, Miss MacLane is sometimes remarkably interesting. She says of herself: "She had not the usual defensive armour of the normal woman, for she was not a normal woman, but certain trends of varying individuals gathered into one sensitive wornan-envelope."

Again:

"I am a hundred times more introspective than most people, most women. Most women, even conventional ones, are lawless - the more conventional, the more lawless usually. And so most women beat me to life. Where they yield to an impulse the moment they feel it, I, because an impulse itself is adventure-fabric - I feet of its quality, test it for defects, wash a little corner of it to see if the color will run - and conclude not to use it."

And here, to end with, is Mary MacLane's voice as she raises it to interpret human struggle and weariness, singing almost at her best in the chapter called "The Strange Braveness":

If God has human feelings he must often have a burning at the eyes and a fullness at the throat at the strange Braveness of human people: their braveness as they go on in the daily life, with aching dumbish minds and disgruntled bereft bodies and flattened pinched gnawed hearts.

The easy human slattern way would be to sink beneath the burden.

Instead, people: I and Another and all others - seamstresses and monotonous clerks and lawyers and housewives: sit upright in chairs and talk into telephones and walk fast and eat breakfast and brush hair: all the while marooned in a morass of small wild unexciting tasteless Pain.

Of others - what do I know?

But I might say, "Look, God, I am not fallen on the ground, from this and that - utterly lost and down. But sitting, drooping but strong, in a chair, mending a lamp-shade - neat, orderly, and at-it in my misery."

- Harper & Brothers, New York, 1927, pp 48-60
(Note: some of Canfield's quotations of I, Mary MacLane are abridgings of the published text. Quotations are rendered as published in Canfield's piece.)

Workers of the Writers's Program of the W.P.A. in the State of Montana - from Montana: A State Guide Book

Reputedly the earliest fiction produced in Montana is the novel, Claire Lincoln [sic. - Clare Lincoln], by Decius M. Wade (1835-1905). It was published in i875. Writers from various parts of America have frequently used the Northwestern country for background, notably Owen Wister in The Virginian; but Montana writers did not claim popular attention until after 1900.

In 1902 The Story of Mary MacLane, a forerunner of the modern autobiographical novel, created a sensation. Discussion of its frank revelations swept from end to end of the country and made Mary MacLane (1881-1929) famous. H. L. Mencken devoted a chapter in Prejudices: First Series to this "Butte Bashkirtseff," in which he expressed the opinion that Butte was a Puritan town - a suggestion no doubt startling to the citizens.

- The Viking Press, New York, 1939, p 103

Workers of the Writers's Program of the W.P.A. in the State of Montana - from Copper Camp: Stories of the World's Greatest Mining Town - Butte, Montana

from the Introduction -

Butte is unpredictable. Yesterday, today and probably tomorrow she is a city of paradox - virtuous yet wanton, vindictive and forgiving, hard headed or charitable, kind, cruel, religious, agnostic, sordid, exalted, gay and tragic.

Magnificent when viewed by night from the Continental Divide, Butte has been likened to a diamond set in jet, but by day she is an uncorseted wench, dissipated from the night before. "Perch of the devil," she has been called by some, and "merciful mother of the mountains," by others.

This is the city where in 1902, a ghost, haunting the environs of adjoining Centerville shared space in the nation's press with Mary MacLane, a precocious young writer who was then communing with the devil at a cemetery on Montana Street, southern extremity of the camp, while writing her sensational autobiography, The Story of Mary MacLane. About the same period, Callahan the Bum spent the better part of a summer afternoon trying to hang himself from an awning rope on one of the main streets of the business district. When no heed was paid by the passing throng, he finally gave up in disgust, remarking that he would have succeeded but for the fact "the damn rope liked to choke him to death." Two sparrows in a fight to the death in front of a newspaper office caused a crowd of several hundred to gather and urge on the tiny gladiators, the newspaper holding up its presses so as to announce the victor in its afternoon edition.

Butte boasts of suburbs called Nanny Goat Hill, Hungry Hill, Seldom Seen, Dogtown, Chicken Flats and Butchertown. The society pages of the daily papers often feature side by side the likeness of a West Side society matron and that of a promised bride, whose address might be the kitchen of a Finnish boarding house on the "wrong" side of town.

Her saloons have been named The Alley Cat, Bucket of Blood, The Water Hole, Frozen Inn, Big Stope, The Cesspool, Collar and Elbow, Open-All-Night, Graveyard, The Good Old Summer Time, Pick and Shovel, The Beer Can, Saturday Night, and Pay Day.

- Hastings House, New York, 1943: introduction and pp 257-258.

Van Wyck Brooks - from The Confident Years

Few Western writers of this earlier time [i.e., the early years of the Twentieth Century] could bear comparison with the least of these [i.e., the great Eastern writers], for Fuller and Bierce alone were consciously artists, and Hamlin Garland, at best a heavy-handed craftsman, had largely lost the intensity of his early stories .... All the forts and agencies had their own visiting painters now who found the ragged Indians in tinsel and store-clothes as picturesque as Italian lazzaroni, but the books in which [Hamlin] Garland stated their case - for example, The Captain of the Grey-Horse Troop - were as undistinguished as The Story of Mary MacLane. This book by the Montana Marie Bashkirtseff was a great sensation in literary circles when the author went East to be lionized in Boston and New York after looking out, from her window in Butte, for several years before 1902, on the "deep, high, heavy, silent, sombre" mountains. For Butte was in the heart of the mountain West where in every little town no doubt there were other girls who felt they were "set in the wrong niche" but who were unable, like Mary MacLane - as they walked the "long lonely streets" with "long lonely thoughts" - to whistle in the dark. But, waiting for the devil, as she said she was, or a man who was "bad to his heart's core," this diarist who liked to think of Messalina had little else to think about except the things she might have done if she had not been "half buried ... in this barren ground." She was maddened by the six toothbrushes in the family bathroom, she wrote pages about the art of eating an olive, and she wandered over the green coppery dumps by the mines on the outskirts of Butte with a crazy old crone from Dublin Gulch.

Surveying, in her windy Montana town, the "grim wall of the arid Rockies that separates this Butte from New York," Mary MacLane would have been predestined for Greenwich Village a decade later - she was one of the types of the Villager of the pre-world-war years. Her "unleashed sex-fancy," as she described it, her confessions of the Lesbian and the demi-vierge for whom there was nothing more monstrous than a virtuous woman, made her for a while the most talked of young writer in the country; but her diary was much more cry than wool and Mary MacLane was a startling figure only because the times were so colourless and mild. In poetry especially the prevailing note was saccharine and timid, conventional and thin if also fastidious in form, so that William Vaughn Moody's poems and plays, suggested in part by the mountain West, seemed startling too at the time in their boldness and talent. In Chicago, teaching at the university, Moody had known Hamlin Garland, and in 1901 the two had taken a horseback camping trip through the cattle-raising country of Colorado and the wilder Rockies. They had crossed the flower-strewn, mountain meadows that were scattered between the canyons and peaks and the scenes of Moody's play The Great Divide, a Bret Harte story dramatized in a miner's cabin in Arizona, which Mood visited again in 1904.

Dutton, New York, 1952
pp 318-320

Bert Kaplan - from The Inner World of Mental Illness

"I am not good. I am not virtuous. I am not sympathetic. I am not generous. I am merely and above all a creature of intense, passionate feeling. I feel - everything. It is my genius. It burns me like fire."

Mary MacLane's genius of "intense, passionate feeling" is in a sense the genius of mental illness also. Despite all of its destructiveness and pain, the attempt to move into the realm of intense feeling, which is perhaps synonymous with intense experiencing and existence, is the one positive element in mental illness which we may understand and sympathize with. The dilemma of alienation and nothingness which Mary MacLane describes so beautifully and poignantly, is widespread in western society; and her suggestion that if goodness, and its corollary, normality, are nothingness, badness (and madness) comprehend a greater amount of intense feeling - and of life. Here, as in several of our documents, most notably perhaps Lara Jefferson's, there is the suggestion that within mental illness human existence is being lived in its most intense, naked, and perhaps most real form, real in the sense that it is unprotected by the structure of comforts and myths which we call culture, and also in the sense that whatever myths and delusions in terms of which one lives are one's own productions and not borrowed ones that are disguised as social realities.

Miss MacLane's book was written in 1901, before the days of Sartre and D.H. Lawrence, and probably in innocence of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, but is in their tradition and in its style and originality not completely unworthy of them. Her final plea, "Oh, that someone may understand it," is a challenge aimed directly at us. If we apply the coldly clinical "schizoid personality" or "schizophrenic" to her and send her on to the madhouse, or diagnose her as neurotic and send her to the psychiatrist for treatment, we will be doing what she dreads most when she asks "Will the wise wide world give me in my outstretched hand a stone?"

The sympathy that psychiatry has had for its patients has always been the sympathy of the well for the sick. It is a sympathy tinged with superiority, with an injunction to change, and, it seems to me, with the person who is suffering rather than with his illness. In the case where the two, person and illness, can be separated, this, perhaps, is good sense. But where the two cannot be separated, where, as in the case of Mary MacLane, what we might call the illness of psychopathology is nothing else than the person himself, it is not possible to sympathize with one and not the other. Sympathy then requires us to see what is valuable and meaningful in the illness itself, rather than to see it as something to be cured or replaced. Surely to say to Mary MacLane that we can help her be like all the people she feels alienated from is to give her a stone. What we can give her in its place is difficult to see. She says she wants understanding, love, and relationship. Perhaps the answer to understanding the problem of psychopathology is as simple as that.

- Harper & Row, New York, 1964; pp 263-264 (pb ed.)