This 19-year-old wrote a racy book on teen angst before teen angst was a thing — and became famous
Mary MacLane’s book tantalized America, and sold 100,000 copies
In 1902, Mary MacLane announced to the world, “I am a genius … I care neither for right nor wrong — my conscience is nil.” One would be forgiven for wondering if MacLane was a psychopath. She did have all the telltale signs: delusions of grandeur, the easily wounded ego, the impulsivity, the penchant for gambling and petty theft. But MacLane was not a psychopath. She was a teenager—and a very precocious one at that, who wrote a book that would stun Americans with its honesty and wickedness.
Her memoir, The Story of Mary MacLane, revealed the young female mind as Americans had never seen it before.“I long to cultivate my element of Badness,” she wrote. “I would like to live about seven years of judicious Badness, and then death.” She may very well have been the most delightfully irreverent teenager who ever lived — as she herself would be the first tell you.
The book, written as journal entries over the course of a winter and early spring in which nothing happens, sold 100,000 copies in its first month — an astronomical figure for the time. It was also condemned and even banned in many places. MacLane shocked audiences with her frank confessions and discussion of sexuality. She wrote rapturously of her “fine young body that is feminine in every fiber,” and praised the Devil (her memoir is dedicated to him) for giving it to her. But mostly, she tapped into women’s sense that they were stifled, and unleashed or at least gave name to their smoldering desire for rebellion. Worried parents held meetings about burgeoning “MacLaneism” in their daughters. One newspaper wasn’t sure what to make of her, and crowdsourced the answer instead, asking readers, “What do you think of Mary MacLane?”
MacLane was born in Winnipeg, Canada and mostly raised in Butte, Montana, a mining town of around 50,000 at the time. While much of the emerging Western literature was full of praise for the wide open spaces and limitless possibility of the Big Sky State, MacLane described the landscape as dead and the people intolerably provincial. “I am intensely thankful to the Devil for my two good legs and the full use of them under a short skirt, when, as now they carry me out beyond the pale of civilization.”
Her memoir made her a literary celebrity. Even years after its publication, she was praised by Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. In the short term, she got the hell out of Butte and headed to New York (of course), where she enjoyed being spotted at the most bohemian spots in Greenwich Village. She lead a 4th of July parade in Boston, reclining on a divan in a float while the crowd cheered. This was a new America and MacLean represented the “New Woman.”
MacLane’s work was radical for its unabashed rejection of female domesticity. Of her dead father she wrote, “He is nothing to me.” Of her siblings and mother, “They are also nothing to me.” She identified with men. “I have the personality, the nature, of a Napoleon,” who “threw himself heavily on the world, and the world has never since been the same.” She was hungry for experience but because she was a female Napoleon, not a male one, “I do not conquer; I do not even fight. I manage only to exist.”
MacLane’s memoir is often read as a lesbian text. She was in love with her female teacher, whom she refers to as “my anemone lady.” “Often I think if only I could have my anemone lady and go live with her in some little out-of-the-world place high up on the side of a mountain for the rest of my life … but Miss Corbin would doubtless look somewhat askance at the idea of spending the rest of her life with me on a mountain.”
MacLane embodied teen angst before teen angst was a thing. “I have in me the germs of intense life,” she wrote. Teenage moodiness and alienation wouldn’t begin to be discussed in the media for another half century, but MacLane revealed the teenager’s emotional landscape as eternal. Her mother had “an utterly distorted idea of my nature and its desires, if indeed she has any idea of it.” She had that bewildering combination of apathy and intensity that would come to define adolescence. “I am obscure; I am morbid; I am unhappy; my life is made up of Nothingness,” she bemoaned. “I want everything and have nothing; I have been made to feel the ‘lure of green things growing,’ and I have been made to feel also that something of them is withheld of me.”
Though we usually look to writers for their keen analysis, readers looked to MacLane for her unapologetic myopia. She was mired in that vibrant, brief, and painful time when young people find themselves inexhaustibly interesting and worry a great deal that their lives can never live up to the enormousness of their feelings. The realization of the self is nearly as astonishing as the fact that the world does not share your wonder. Everything MacLane did was interesting to MacLane. “I have eaten my dinner,” she announced before launching into a paean to Omaha porterhouse steaks and green onions. There is an entire entry devoted to her method of eating olives.
But MacLane’s apparent egotism may have been more complex. As Literary Scholar Patricia Meyer Spacks pointed out, in a time and place bent on marginalizing women, asserting herself was a form of resistance. Insisting on being someone — and a fabulous someone at that, in a culture that wants to diminish you — was truly radical.
After such a magnificent, fire-breathing first act, it’s not surprising that Mary MacLane’s adult life was disappointing, though no less irreverent. She published two more books that didn’t do well. She wrote and starred in a movie called Men Who Have Made Love to Me about her romances with six types of men. It was banned across the country. In later years, she distanced herself from her attraction to women calling it “twisted” and “warped.”
She missed Butte, the whetstone against which she had sharpened her identity. “I know that I love Butte. I didn’t at nineteen,” she said a few years after she left. In 1909, she moved back. But she could never manage to bottle that wild yearning that made her famous again. In 1919, she was allegedly arrested for stealing dresses. One historian found evidence that she was working as a prostitute. She died alone and penniless at 48 of unknown causes. It was a miserable end. At nineteen she had said she longed for “seven years of judicious Badness, and then death,” but she had ended up with a couple of decades more.
