Autobiography, genius, and the American West: The story of Mary MacLane and Opal Whiteley.

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.