Talaan ng mga Nilalaman:
Si Mary MacLane, sa buong Mary Elizabeth MacLane, (ipinanganak noong Mayo 1 o 2, 1881, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada — natagpong patay noong Agosto 6, 1929, Chicago, Illinois, US), ang isinilang na Amerikanong manunulat na Amerikano at pangunguna na pambabae na ang frank autobiograpical account ng kanyang buhay — na isinulat sa edad na 19 at inilathala bilang The Story of Mary MacLane — ni Herself noong 1902 - naging isang instant pinakamahusay na nagbebenta at ginawa siyang isang tanyag na tao sa loob ng dalawang dekada. Tinaguriang "Wild Woman of Butte," ginamit niya ang isang istilo ng kumpetisyon ng modernista upang maipahayag ang mga erotikong pagnanasa. Lalo siyang nakalimutan hanggang sa ang interes ng pambabae sa buhay ng kababaihan ay muling nabuhay sa kanyang trabaho noong dekada 1970.
Galugarin
100 Babae Trailblazers
Makilala ang mga pambihirang kababaihan na nangahas na magdala ng pagkakapantay-pantay sa kasarian at iba pang mga isyu sa harap. Mula sa pagtagumpayan ng pang-aapi, hanggang sa paglabag sa mga patakaran, sa pag-reimagine sa mundo o sa pagkakaroon ng isang paghihimagsik, ang mga babaeng ito ng kasaysayan ay may isang kwentong isasaysay.
Buhay at gawa
Ang MacLane, ipinanganak sa Scottish at Canadian Presbyterian magulang, ay isa sa apat na anak. Ang kanyang ama na si James, ay nagtrabaho bilang ahente para sa gobyerno ng Canada, namuhunan sa mga baka at flatboats. Nang apat si Maria, ang pamilya ay lumipat sa Fergus Falls, Minnesota, kung saan tinutukoy niya ang isang kaakit-akit na sanaysay, "The Autobiography of the Kid Primitive" (1910). Ilang sandali matapos ang pagkamatay ng kanyang ama noong 1889, lumipat ang pamilya sa Montana at kalaunan si Butte, pagkatapos ay isang umuusbong na bayan ng tanso-pagmimina, kung saan pinakasalan ng kanyang ina ang isang "libog na litratista," si Henry G. Klenze, na kalaunan ay nagpakamatay. Sa bahay ng pamilya, isinulat ni MacLane ang isang pang-araw-araw na journal ng kanyang panloob na buhay at pang-unawa sa sarili mula Enero 13 hanggang Abril 13, 1901, na may isang kasabwat na napetsahan noong Oktubre 28. Sa talaang iyon ay tinutukoy niya ang kanyang gawain bilang "talaan ng tatlong buwan ng Wala,"Ngunit tahasang tumanggi siyang tawagan itong talaarawan:" Hindi ito isang talaarawan. Ito ay isang Portrayal. Ito ang aking panloob na buhay na ipinakita sa kahubaran nito. " (Siya ay orihinal na tinawag na I Await the Coming of the Devil, ngunit ang kanyang publisher ay naitala ito The Story of Mary MacLane — ni Herself.)
On the first page of Story, MacLane declares her uniqueness:
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):
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?” askeda 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.
Bilang isa sa mga unang modernong Amerikanong tanyag na tao, ang MacLane ay isang kamangha-manghang, kung sa kalaunan ay malungkot, figure. Siya ay inihayag na isang makabagong Amerikano Modernista na nakuha ang pansin ng Ernest Hemingway at Gertrude Stein. Nakikinig siya sa matigas na katigasan ng kanyang sariling katawan - "ang aking kahanga-hanga katawan ng batang babae, na nasisiyahan ako nang lubusan at kung saan ako ay labis na kinagigiliwan," habang inilalarawan niya ito sa The Story of Mary MacLane - ni Herself - at ang natural mundo, kasama ang "Pile of Stones at
Barrel of Lime, "mga olibo, sibuyas, at sipilyo. Sa kanyang masungit na pagtatanong ng dekorasyon, ipinagbigay ng MacLane ang katinuan ng isang kamangha-manghang, mapanlikha, masungit na Bagong Babae na nagugutom sa buhay at dati na hindi nag-isip ng mga posibilidad.
