Mary MacLane

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Mary MacLane (Frontispiece from The Story of Mary MacLane , Herbert S. Stone and Company, 1902)

Mary MacLane (born May 1, 1881 in Winnipeg , Canada, † around August 6, 1929 in Chicago ) was a Canadian - American writer. Her autobiographical literature is considered the forerunner of Confessional Poetry . MacLane was known as "The Wild Woman of Butte".

MacLane was a famous and popular writer in her day. Her shockingly honest literary debut caused a scandal and became a bestseller, and her two following works also sold well. She was considered wild and indomitable, and she cultivated this reputation, especially since she was openly bisexual and took a feminist stance. In her works she compares herself with a similarly frank diary author , the painter Marie Bashkirtseff , who died young a few years after MacLane's birth. The renowned literary critic HL Mencken called them the "Bashkirtseff von Butte".

Youth and origin

MacLane was born in Winnipeg, Canada in 1881 but lived most of her life in the United States. Her family moved to the Red River area of Minnesota soon after she was born . There she settled in Fergus Falls , which MacLane's father helped to build. After his death in 1889, her mother married the lawyer and friend of the family H. Gysbert Klenze. Soon after, the family moved to Montana , where they first lived in Great Falls and eventually settled in Butte . Klenze tried to make his fortune in mining as well as in other professional fields, and in the process used up the family's fortune. MacLane's first literary texts appeared in a school newspaper in 1898.

Literary works

From the beginning, MacLane's writing was characterized by an unmediated, spirited, highly individualistic style. However, she was also influenced by certain US realism writers, such as John Townsend Trowbridge (with whom she corresponded), Maria Louise Pool and Hamlin Garland .

At the age of 19, MacLane wrote her first book, which she called I Await the Devil's Coming (Eng. I await the arrival of the devil ). Her publisher, Herbert S. Stone & Co., changed the title to The Story of Mary MacLane. In the first month, more than a hundred thousand copies were sold. MacLane's debut influenced countless young women of her time, but also met with incomprehension from conservative critics and readers. The influential literary critic HL Mencken paid tribute to her work, albeit with slight mockery.

According to critics, MacLane's language is raw power, honest, fearless, confident, sensual and extraordinary, even by today's standards. She wrote openly about selfishness , her love for herself, sexual attraction and love for women, as well as her desire to marry the devil .

Stone published her second book, My Friend Annabel Lee , in 1903. This more experimental work was less successful, although MacLane is said to have made good money on it.

Her last book, I, Mary Maclane: A Diary of Human Days , was published by Frederick A. Stokes in 1917 . It sold moderately, but this may also have been due to the previous entry of the USA into the First World War .

In 1917 MacLane also wrote the 90-minute autobiographical silent film Men Who Have Made Love to Me for Essanay Studios , in which she also played the lead role. The film was produced by cinema pioneer George Kirke Spoor and was based on MacLane's article of the same name from 1910, which she had written for a newspaper in Butte. According to speculation, the film will contain one of the earliest scenes (if not the first) in cinema history, in which the fourth wall is broken, as the star author speaks directly to her audience. Individual film stills and subtitles have survived, but the film itself has not survived.

Influences

Among the numerous authors who refer to or have parodied MacLane are Mark Twain , F. Scott Fitzgerald , Harriet Monroe , the famous lawyer Clarence Darrow , Ring Lardner Jr. , Sherwood Anderson and Daniel Clowes in his comic book Ice Haven . Among the lesser known is Gertrude Sanborn , who published an optimistic reaction to MacLane's 1917 Book I, Mary MacLane , entitled I, Citizen of Eternity (1920).

Private life

MacLane had always resented living in the mining town of Butte, far from the US cultural centers. She used the proceeds of her debut to move to Chicago and then to the East Coast. She lived 1903-1908 in Rockland (Massachusetts) and wintered in St. Augustine (Florida) , 1908-1909 she lived in Greenwich Village . There she wrote and lived (according to her later publications) a decadent bohemian life. She was close friends with the feminist writer Inez Haynes Irwin , whom she mentioned in a newspaper article from Butte in 1910 and who, in turn, addressed MacLane in a magazine article from 1911.

For a while, MacLane lived with her friend Caroline M. Branson , who had been Maria Louise Pool's longtime companion until she died in 1898. MacLane and Branson lived together in Rockland in the house that Pool Branson had inherited. Mary MacLane was also friends with the writer Harriet Monroe for decades .

In early August 1929, MacLane died in Chicago at the age of 48 . By the beginning of the 1990s she was a bit forgotten, especially since her works were no longer available. Then, however, The Story of Mary MacLane and some of her journalistic work appeared in the text collection Tender Darkness: A Mary MacLane Anthology .

Rediscovery in the 21st century

In 2011 Tender Darkness (1993) published an expanded anthology entitled Human Days: A Mary MacLane Reader (with a foreword by Bojana Novakovic). Novakovic wrote the play The Story of Mary MacLane - By Herself in 2011 , which u. a. was performed in Melbourne and Sydney . The Story of Mary MacLane was published in a new edition in 2013 under the title I Await the Devil's Coming, requested by the author, with an introduction by Jessa Crispin . The book has since been translated into French, Danish, Spanish and German. The German translation from 2020 comes from the writer Ann Cotten . In her afterword she uses an experimental method of gendering with arbitrary endings, which Cotten calls "Polish gendering".

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Books

  • The Story of Mary MacLane (1902)
  • My Friend, Annabel Lee (1903)
  • I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days (1917)
  • Tender Darkness: A Mary MacLane Anthology (reprint) (1993)
  • The Story of Mary MacLane and Other Writings (reprint anthology) (1999)
  • Human Days: A Mary MacLane Reader (foreword by Bojana Novakovic) (2011)
  • I Await the Devil's Coming (2013), dt. I expect the devil to come , trans. by Ann Cotten , Reclam-Verlag (2020).

Selected items

  • [Untitled article on stoicism] (1898)
  • Consider Thy Youth and Therein (1899)
  • Charles Dickens - Best of Castle-Builders (Graduation Speech, 1899)
  • Mary MacLane at Newport (1902)
  • Mary MacLane at Coney Island
  • Mary MacLane on Wall Street (1902)
  • Mary MacLane in Little Old New York (1902)
  • On Marriage (1902)
  • A Foreground and a Background (1903)
  • Mary MacLane Discusses the 'Outward Seeming of Denver' (1903)
  • The Second 'Story of Mary MacLane' (1909)
  • Mary MacLane Soliloquizes on Scarlet Fever (1910)
  • Mary MacLane Meets the Vampire on the Isle of Treacherous Delights (1910)
  • The Autobiography of the Kid Primitive (1910)
  • Mary MacLane Wants a Vote - For the Other Woman (1910)
  • Men Who Have Made Love to Me (1910)
  • The Latter-Day Litany of Mary MacLane (1910)
  • The Borrower of Two-Dollar Bills - and Other Women (1910)
  • A Waif of Destiny on the High Seas (1910)
  • Woman and the Cigarette (1911)
  • Mary MacLane Says - (1911)
  • Mary MacLane on Marriage (1917)
  • The Movies and Me (1918)

Scripts and films

  • Men Who Have Made Love to Me (1918)

literature

  • Carolyn J. Mattern: Mary MacLane: A Feminist Opinion. In: Montana The Magazine of Western History. 27 (Autumn 1977), pp. 54-63.
  • Barbara Miller: 'Hot as Live Embers — Cold as Hail': The Restless Soul of Butte's Mary MacLane. In: Montana Magazine. September 1982, pp. 50-53.
  • Virginia R. Terris: Mary MacLane — Realist. In: The Speculator. Summer 1985, pp. 42-49.
  • Leslie A. Wheeler: Montana's Shocking 'Lit'ry Lady'. In: Montana The Magazine of Western History. 27 (Summer 1977), pp. 20-33.

Web links

Commons : Mary MacLane  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ MacLane: I await the arrival of the devil. P. 11.
  2. ^ The Chicagoan, Obituary, August 1929. Quoted in: Tender Darkness. Introduction.
  3. ↑ a b c Julia Watson: Introduction. In: The Story of Mary MacLane. 2002, ISBN 1-931832-19-6 .
  4. ^ New York Times obituary, August 9, 1929.
  5. ^ Tender Darkness , Bibliography.
  6. ^ Tender Darkness , Introduction.
  7. ↑ Michael R. Brown: The Mary MacLane Project marymaclane.com .
  8. ↑ Michael R. Brown: The Mary MacLane Project marymaclane.com .
  9. ^ A b "Mary MacLane", IMDb.com , accessed December 16, 2012.
personal data
SURNAME MacLane, Mary
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Canadian-American writer
DATE OF BIRTH May 1, 1881
PLACE OF BIRTH Winnipeg
DATE OF DEATH August 1929
Place of death Chicago