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Those secret exhibitionists: women's diaries at the turn of the twentieth century

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Those secret exhibitionists: women's diaries at the turn of the twentieth century

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Content THOSE SECRET EXHIBITIONISTS: WOMEN’S DIARIES AT THE TURN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY by Tanya Heflin A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH) December 2009 Copyright 2009 Tanya Heflin ii Epigraphs Diarists: that shrewdly innocent breed, those secret exhibitionists and incomparable purveyors of sequential, self-conscious life: how they fascinate me and endear themselves to me by what they say and do not say. —Gail Godwin, “A Diarist on Diaries” The record of a woman’s life, written down day by day, without any attempt at concealment, as if no one in the world were ever to read it, yet with the purpose of being read, is always interesting; for I am certain that I shall be found sympathetic, and I write down everything, everything, everything. Otherwise why should I write? —Marie Bashkirtseff, diary entry, 1 May 1884 iii Dedication for my mother, whose hushed midnight scribbling inspired more than she could have known iv Acknowledgments Of the many influences that shape a project of this nature, none is more important for expanding its critical depth than its faculty advisors. My chair, Tania Modleski, has painstakingly nurtured and protected an intensely archival project that required time and support to complete, and her warmth and humor have bolstered me. Above all else, I am deeply grateful for her continual encouragement to trust my own critical instincts at every turn of the process, a bit of advice that has made all the difference. My primary committee members, John Carlos Rowe and Natania Meeker, have likewise provided their extraordinary expertise and good cheer at crucial points throughout the research and writing processes. The members of my early qualifications committee, Judith Jackson Fossett, Alice Gambrell, and Bill Handley, were invaluable in asking key question that helped shape the earliest iterations of the project. And the English Department at the University of Southern California has been tremendously generous in providing the advising, research grants, and research fellowships that were necessary for the project’s success. Also crucial to the project have been additional research grants provided by the USC Center for Feminist Research and by the USC-Huntington Institute for California and the West. I am deeply grateful to Bill Deverell, director of the ICW, for his gracious welcome to the vast resources of the Huntington Library, and I am likewise grateful to Sue Hodson, curator of literary manuscripts at the Huntington, whose warm and engaging storytelling about the collections piqued my curiosity and motivated me to track down the obscurest of leads for their rich payoff. The entire Reader Services Department of the manuscripts and rare books collection, Juan Gomez, Kadin Henningsen, Meredith Berbée, and Catherine v Wehrey, have all contributed to making my research fellowship at the Huntington one of the great pleasures of my academic career. For their patient assistance during my very first exploratory archive trip to study the paintings of Wa-Wa-Chaw, I am grateful to Natasha Johnson and Patricia Nietfeld of the Smithsonian Institute’s Native American Cultural Resources Center in Suitland, Maryland. And for their assistance in my later exploration of Wa-Wa-Chaw’s manuscript diaries, I am indebted to Chuck Rand and Melissa Owens of the Arthur and Shifra Silberman Native American Art Collection housed at the Dickinson Research Center in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. It has been my great privilege to share much of this material with the clever, curious undergraduates who have made up the courses I have taught in the USC College Honors Program, and I am thankful both to those inspiring students and to the directors of the Thematic Option Honors Program, Penny Von Helmolt and Robin Romans, for these rewarding experiences in the classroom. This project has benefitted tremendously from the close attention at various stages of draft of the many thoughtful readers, advisors, and friends to whom I am deeply appreciative. My thanks go to Memo Arcé, Michael Blackie, Joseph Boone, Amy Braden, Leslie Bruce, Sarah Fedirka, Andy Hakim, Rebecca Lemon, Teresa McKenna, Marci McMahon, Dirk Matson, Susan Miller-Cochran, James Penner, Daniel Enriqué Perez, Michael Picchiottino, Nancy Robinson, Meg Russett, Joshua Smith, Kathryn Strong, Mary Beth Tegan, Alison Tymoczko Jeffries, Alice Villaseñor, Wendy Witherspoon, and Erika Wright. And to the memory of Genie DeLamotte, whose early mentoring planted the seeds of this work, I feel a gratitude that is profound. vi It is perhaps telling that a project that asks that we recognize women’s private diary as an important body of narrative literature should have its root in a lifetime of stories told by generations of closet writers and kitchen-table storytellers. Grandma Miriam’s stories told of three little girls being raised by Lois, a single mother who raised her girls alone in a tar- paper cottage next to the railroad tracks after a scandalous 1930s divorce—taking in laundry, working as a cook, and somehow keeping her family together. Grandma Marjorie’s stories told of hard-scrabble mountain life in tiny Rocky Comfort, the Ozark village where she became second mother to her seven younger siblings after Ruth-Zelfa’s too-early passing. At the age of 80, Marjorie began to write her Ozark memoir in order to paint the picture of her mother and her grandmother, Leona Shewmake, whose vivid stories of childhood on the Cherokee reservation just across the border has captured the imagination of all her descendents. (A decade later, Grandma Marge continues to thicken her lively little book.) All these stories, and all their tellers, have enriched my life beyond measure. For their unwavering support and for their ongoing curiosity about my work, I thank my family —J.C. and Barb Heflin, Nancy and Pete Abell, and Troy and Kris Heflin. And finally, for their unending inspiration and sheer delightfulness, I thank especially the next generation of the family’s storytellers—Nicholas, Lauren, and Lydia Heflin—who will go on to carry the incomparable stories of all their feisty, fascinating grandmas into the next generation. vii Table of Contents Epigraphs ii Dedication iii Acknowledgments iv List of Figures viii Abstract x Chapter One 1 Deciphering the Code: A Holistic Approach to Reading Diary Literatures Chapter One Notes 47 Chapter Two 52 “I-Mary” Observes: The Manuscript Diaries of Mary Hunter Austin Chapter Two Notes 119 Chapter Three 122 “The low voice of a curiously-colored seashell”: Zitkala-!a Writes a Quiet Resistance Chapter Three Notes 179 Chapter Four 186 “The soul of a woman laid bare”: The Public Diaries of Mary MacLane Chapter Four Notes 234 Chapter Five 237 Conclusions: "My accidental imagination": Women’s Diary as a Writing Practice at the Turn of the Twentieth Century Chapter Five Notes 249 Bibliography 250 viii List of Figures Figure 1: A range of diary formats from 1882 to 1908. 3 Figure 2: Handwriting from the 1908 diary of Mai Richie Reed. 27 Figure 3: The Hunter family, ca. 1880. Jim, Mary, Susanna, and George. 63 Figure 4: Blackburn College Class of 1888. Mary Hunter at far left. 65 Figure 5: Detail of a page from the “Tejon Journal.” 71 Figure 6: A page from “Wildflowers of Inyo County 1901.” 80 Figure 7: Pages from “Sketches and Photographs of Inyo County 1903.” 82 Figure 8: Austin as photographed by her early mentor and later rival, 89 Charles Fletcher Lummis, in 1900. Figure 9: Pages from Austin’s New York journal. 93 Figure 10: Mary Austin rehearsing her cast for the 1913 production of Fire. 109 Figure 11: Portraits of Tom Torlino, whose Navajo name is Dilos Lonewolf. 127 Figure 12: Zuni children Mary Ely, Jennie Hammaker, Taylor Ely, 128 and Frank Cushing upon arrival at Carlisle. Figure 13: Zuni children during tenure at Carlisle. 128 Figure 14: Three Lakota Sioux boys (names unknown) upon arrival 128 at Carlisle. Figure 15: Three Lakota Sioux boys during tenure at Carlisle. 128 Figure 16: Group of Chiricahua Apache children upon arrival 129 at Carlisle in 1886. Figure 17: Group of Chiricahua Apache children during tenure at Carlisle. 129 Figure 18: Entire student body and teaching staff assembled on the 131 grounds of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, circa 1900. Figure 19: “Teachers Quarters and Band Stand, Indian School, Carlisle, Pa.” 162 Postcard circa 1908. ix Figure 20: Photograph of Zitkala-!a taken by Joseph T. Keiley, 1898. 169 Figure 21: “Sioux girl, Zitkala-!a wearing a white long-sleeved dress 172 and holding violin and bow, floral wallpaper in background.” Photograph by Gertrude Käsebier. circa 1898. Figure 22: "Zitkala-!a reading by windowlight.” Photograph by 172 Gertrude Käsebier. circa 1898. Figure 23: “Left profile of Sioux girl, Zitkala-!a, wearing multiple 172 strands of pearls around neck,” full length. Photograph by Gertrude Käsebier. circa 1898. Figure 24: “Right profile of Zitkala-!a holding a basket in front of her.” 172 Photograph by Gertrude Käsebier. circa 1898. Figure 25: Zitkala-!a. Photogravure by Joseph T. Keiley, 1901. 184 Figure 26: Washington Times, February 17, 1918 184 Figure 27: Entry from The Foolish Dictionary of 1904. 191 Figure 28: “Playing a Deep Game.” 193 Figure 29: Frontispiece to The Story of Mary MacLane, 1901. 221 Figure 30: Frontispiece to I, Mary MacLane, 1917. 221 Figure 31: “War Crimes.” 246 Figure 32: Inscription on reverse of “War Crimes.” 246 Figure 33: “Untitled 1.” Wa-Wa-Chaw’s self-portrait. 247 Figure 34: Detail of “Untitled 2.” 247 x Abstract Tapping into a rich and largely unexplored archive of unpublished manuscript diary materials, as well as private letters, published diary, autobiography, self-portraiture, pamphlets, and rare ephemera, Those Secret Exhibitionists traces the role that diary practice played in the development of feminist subjectivity for Native American and Anglo American women who were writing serially at the turn of the twentieth century. In this study, I take a holistic and transdisciplinary approach to diarists and their textual productions, drawing from the disciplines of feminism, narrative psychology, and Native American ethnic studies to argue that these small, quiet, understudied volumes provide an insight possible nowhere else in literature for understanding the interior formations of subjectivity, particularly for women writing during the tumultuous decades of the early twentieth century. During the period under study in this dissertation, I posit that the role of diary as a writing practice for both Native and Anglo women underwent two significant shifts that have lasted to the present day. First, diary-keeping for the first time began to be seen primarily as a feminine practice, a dramatic shift from the form’s original province as that of the elite man of singular achievement. Second, diaries began to turn inward, to become more introspective and psychologically oriented, so much so that at present the term diary suggests nothing so much as this deeply interior form of writing, which is far different from its role as domestic family chronicle from even a few decades before. These two simultaneous shifts profoundly changed both the forms of diary and its expanded role as a widespread and democratic writing practice. Those Secret Exhibitionists examines the diary practice of four key women writing during this period: Mary Hunter Austin, whose unpublished manuscript diaries reveal an xi internal conflictedness she carefully hid in her published work; Zitkala-!a (Lakota/Dakota Sioux), whose years at Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools forced her into the position of translator between Native and Anglo U.S. cultures in her autobiographical educational narratives; Mary MacLane, who made her private diary public and relished the ensuing scandal; and Bonita Wa-Wa-Chaw Nuñez (Luiseño), whose private diaries hint at the complexities of occupying an undefined position as both Native and Anglo, as both artist and activist, and whose body of work is emblematic of the rich archives still calling out for attention in the field of diary literatures. Far from being boring, tedious, repetitious, unintelligible, fragmentary, nonliterary, or otherwise trivial, as it sometimes has been assumed to be, diary formed a vital writing practice that allowed its practitioners access to expanded subjectivities and that now allows critics an unparalleled view into the tensions and complications of self-definition for turn-of-the-century Native American and Anglo American women writers. 1 CHAPTER ONE Deciphering the Code: A Holistic Approach to Reading Diary Literatures Paris, May 1, 1884— What if, seized without warning by a fatal illness, I should happen to die suddenly! I should not know, perhaps, of my danger; my family would hide it from me; and after my death they would rummage among my papers; they would find my journal, and destroy it after having read it, and soon nothing would be left of me—nothing—nothing—nothing! This is the thought that has always terrified me. To live, to have so much ambition, to suffer, to weep, to struggle, and in the end to be forgotten; —as if I had never existed. If I should not live long enough to become famous, this journal will be interesting to the psychologist. —Marie Bashkirtseff, diary entry 1 The experience of sympathy, empathy, of listening to the voices in . . . diaries is difficult to convey in writing. —Philippe LeJeune 2 Diaries, journals, daybooks, scrapbooks, commonplace books, ledger books, fragments, stray scraps of fabric and paper—the forms of women’s diary production are as varied as the motivations women took for writing their lives in the moments they lived them. Exploring the rich legacy of extant diary written by U.S. women, one quickly discovers a vast array of diary styles painstakingly handwritten into an equally vast, often surprising, array of material formats: ornate leather-bound volumes; tiny commercial line-a-day pocket diaries; keepsake daybooks stuffed to overflowing with inserted fragments, poems, photos, snippets; workaday ledger-books purchased for pennies; magnificent hand-stitched quartos self- designed for capturing the language of the self in its most undiluted yet least celebrated form. These striking material artefacts of the writing practices of diary are not irrelevant; indeed their variety is both emblematic of diary production itself and inextricably woven with the individual narratives, lives, motivations, hopes, dreams, traumas, and tragedies of the women who kept these diaries. The following study takes as its focus the textual diary production of several key women—writers and artists, political activists and scandalous bon 2 vivants—who were writing serially at the turn into the twentieth century, and it seeks to understand and theorize the usages each of them made of diary-keeping within the broader context of women’s autobiographical practice. In doing so, it explores a small, quiet, frequently overlooked subset of literary study that contains within it extraordinary potential for interrogating key questions that sit at the heart of literary, cultural, ethnic, and gender studies. Even while ongoing skepticism continues to discount interpreting this provocative body of work as “literary” at all, the close reader of diary literatures is immediately presented with timely critical questions regarding aesthetics, subjectivity, audience, narrative, reading strategies, canonicity, cultural biases, and individuality versus relationality as key orienting concepts. In the following study, I take an holistic and transdisciplinary approach to diarists and their textual production, ultimately arguing that these small works—both quiet and provocative, both private and public—provide an insight possible nowhere else in literature for understanding the interior formations of subjectivity, particularly for Native American and Anglo American women writing during the tumultuous decades of the early twentieth century. 3 Figure 1. A range of diary formats from 1882 to 1908. 3 My overriding orientation in reading these diaries, inspired by theorists who have gone before, is to approach them with the “sympathy, empathy, . . . listening” that Philippe LeJeune suggests in the epigraph above. Helen Buss describes this engaged approach as an “ethics of love,” while Jeanne Braham terms it a “lens of empathy,” and John Paul Eakins 4 frets compassionately over the sticky “ethics of life writing.” The simple fact that critical theorists—a cerebral group that as a whole perhaps leans rather more toward intellectualizing than emotionalizing—so frequently discuss this body of work by drawing overtly upon the language of emotion points toward the effect this literature has on its readers, as well as the engrossing complications inherent in its study. Recounting his surprise at his unexpectedly interior responses to the archived diaries of one subject, Claire Pic, LeJeune remarks, “It took me almost a whole year of work, not only scientific, but also within and upon myself in order to clarify and accept the identification that triggered my sudden delight and enthusiasm for Claire’s writing” (108). 4 Common themes found within much diary criticism are this striking level of identification with the “subjects-in-process,” 5 a willingness to engage in personal narrative criticism in connection with more detached discussion of the subject, and a profound potential to become thoroughly engrossed, even a tad lost, in the archives themselves. My approach throughout this study has been to read each work on its own terms, deciphering the codes that the author herself has embedded within it, and beginning from a stance that, in LeJeune’s words, “assum[es] that every diary is interesting” in and of itself without question (“‘Journal de Jeune Fille’” 112). This key tenet to my approach, addressing each diary as having merit on its own terms, with its corollary that the onus of decoding the work rests on its reader—that decades-later onlooker for whom the text was almost certainly not intended—is designed to redress one of the challenges that diary literature has faced in its contemporary criticism: namely, that these works are boring, tedious, repetitious, unintelligible, fragmentary, nonliterary, or otherwise trivial. In her evocative study of Martha Ballard, an eighteenth- century midwife who kept a copious decades-long diary, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich draws her 5 richest interpretation from her close focus on what she remarks is the “trivia that so annoyed earlier [male] readers” of Ballard’s diary (33, in Bloom 28). This discounting of the “trivial” nature of the work, a claim made frequently even by diarists themselves, who call their work “scribblings,” “nothings,” and famously by Virginia Woolf, “night-writings,” belies the richness that emerges from the work to reward its patient readers. For diary, particularly the very specific psychological form of diary that found its footing in the early years of the twentieth century, is the singular literary form that is most peculiarly suited to attending closely to the finest details of the burgeoning interior self that came to into being in an strikingly new way for women during these decades. Moreover, because diary represents the writing practice that was engaged in most prolifically by women during this period, if one is interested in women’s experience of coming into subjectivity, one must necessarily go to the form where that experience is articulated. Diaries, those beloved little volumes that meant so much to the women who were attempting to define and give voice to their interior experiences, 6 are the material embodiment of the difficult undertaking of self-making as it has been left for us to interpret. In her influential study of American women’s diary, A Day at a Time, Margo Culley articulates the importance of approaching this body of work in an engaged and appreciative way: Calling this form of autobiographical writing “literature” identifies the many examples of fine writing contained in diaries and journals and also acknowledges that this periodic life-writing springs from the same source as the art created for a public audience: the urge to give shape and meaning to life with words, and to endow this meaning-making with a permanence that transcends time. (xi) In the following study, I take seriously this remarkable body of work, examining the diary practice of four key women writing during this period: Mary Hunter Austin, whose 6 unpublished manuscript diaries reveal an internal conflictedness she carefully hid in her published work; Zitkala-!a (Lakota/Dakota Sioux), whose years at Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools forced her into the position of translator between Native and Anglo U.S. cultures in her autobiographical educational narratives; Mary MacLane, who made her private diary public and relished the ensuing scandal; and Bonita Wa-Wa-Chaw Nuñez (Luiseño 7 ), whose private diaries hint at the complexities of occupying an undefined position as both Native and Anglo, as both artist and activist, and whose body of work is emblematic of the rich archives still calling out for attention in the field of diary literatures. 8 In doing so, I attempt to make sense of diary as a critical writing practice for these dynamic women, as well as to understand its role in articulating and even being constitutive of subjectivity for these diarists, who both energized the form for themselves and simultaneously altered its trajectory as a writing practice in ways that have continued even to the present day. Further, because the subjectivities of the women under study in this dissertation are interwoven in complex and often unexpected ways with the history and context of Native-white relations in the period, a thorough study of these women, their life-writing, their varying opportunities for publication, and their effects upon each other provides us with a glimpse into larger mechanisms of emerging subjectivities within the complex social milieu of Native-white interactions in the early twentieth century. DIARY AS FORM Definitions of Diary Most contemporary critics of diary make a point to articulate their usage of the terms diary and journal as being largely interchangeable. 9 As early as 1755, Samuel Johnson’s 7 Dictionary equates the two words: Diary is defined as “an account of the transactions, accidents and observations of every day; a journal.” Indeed, the etymology of the roots dia and jour both trace back to the single concept of the day, and throughout its long history, the form of diary has been understood most saliently as a textual record of days, written in the moment, serially, as the days passed in the lived experience of the writer. Our contemporary usage of diary as a record of daily events traces to the late sixteenth century, when it was borrowed from the Latin diarium, drawn from the Latin dies, or simply “day.” Suzanne Bunkers and Cynthia Huff point out that the Latin roots of diary suggest more specifically a “daily allowance,” and go on to argue a connection between the form’s seriality and its usefulness in women’s daily lives: “. . . [T]he very repetitiveness and frequent interruptions of a day’s work for most women make diaries a logical mode for women writers to choose to pen their life stories” (5). Bunkers and Huff are not alone in drawing explicit links between the form’s emphasis on dailiness with traditional forms of women’s work, as this point is made repeatedly in the criticism across a trajectory of feminist theorists of diary, including Culley, Elizabeth Hampsten, Rebecca Hogan, and many others who argue that diary as a form is “particularly conducive” to women’s writing (Bunkers and Huff 5). 10 While changes in women’s relationship to diary as a writing practice have taken place across the decades and centuries, certainly in the nineteenth-century U.S. period, which leads directly into this study, it is the case that historical and social influences converged to cause diary-keeping to come to be perceived widely as a genteel, positive, and encouraged avocation for middle- class girls and women, in part because it conformed explicitly to the daily patterns encouraged for and adopted by these women. In this sense, then, a key definitional 8 characteristic of the term diary necessarily include its dailiness, its seriality, its quality of in- the-moment continual presence, and its lack of closure. In contemporary usage, the terms diary and journal both carry this attention to dailiness, yet the term diary carries a far more focused set of meanings and nearly always either refers specifically to the keeping of a personal, private, daily recording of observations, or refers metonymically to the physical book in which this record is kept. Significantly, as I discuss in greater detail below, the connotation of the word diary also became in the twentieth century closely and persistently associated with women, and more particularly with young girls, for whom a wide range of commercially available diary books are marketed, whereas virtually none are explicitly marketed for young boys. 11 In comparison, the term journal, while sharing the same conceptual root of “day” with diary, is associated with a far broader set of denotations. Journal comes to English via its modern French cognate, whose roots are in the Old French jurnal, which traces back to the Latin diurnalis, which gives English the scientific term diurnal, or “during the day.” The French tradition of the journal intime, which strongly influenced the psychological turn of American diary practices in the early twentieth century, gives us one aspect of our contemporary denotation of journal as similar or equivalent to diary. However, the term journal frequently denotes a more detached, observational, and frequently scientific point of emphasis, which broadens its usage from the more discrete term diary. For example, scientists frequently gather observations of experiments in notebooks that they call journals; newspaper reporters are most frequently called journalists; writers of all kinds routinely collect observations in journals; and, not least, one very familiar denotation of the term journal describes the periodic publications of professional organizations and academic disciplines. In these senses, the seriality suggested 9 by the root jour is invoked, yet the personal quality that adheres to the term diary is deemphasized or absent entirely, and the multiplicity of these usages broaden the term journal beyond usefulness when considering the personal diary as a writing practice. For reasons of specificity, then, throughout this study I will most often favor the term diary for its finer discreteness in meaning, understanding that this term is inextricably entwined with the term journal, and that both terms represent a subset of life-writing that is part of a larger umbrella of autobiographical practice. As we see, terminology surrounding the form is hardly clear- cut, and in fact, each of the writers in this study uses these and associated terms quite idiosyncratically—Austin insists on the term journal, while Wa-Wa-Chaw tends to prefer her own term of fragments, for example. In my discussions of each writer independently, I will whenever possible address her work by making use of the terms she herself has embedded within it. History of Diary In its broadest sense, diary as a form for the serial chronicling of the self or community reaches back as a global tradition for centuries, though its writers, audiences, purposes, and forms have changed dramatically over time. Extant works that display earmarks of diary convention come from as early as the second century CE, when Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations reveals his positing of an interior dialogue in a serial format. 12 The famous Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, written by the well-placed Japanese court lady in 990- 1002 CE as a series of evocative lists of personal observations, likewise reveals a sensitivity to the interior experience that modern readers find familiar. Similarly, Arabic forms written serially are extant from as early as the tenth and eleventh centuries CE. Across centuries and 10 cultures, the bulk of diary was written by elite classes and most often by men of high standing who set about documenting their lives for posterity. Because the minimum requirements for participating in this diary practice included literacy, leisure, and material access to technologies for writing, for centuries diary lay out of reach for the working classes, and especially for women and people of color, whose lives were often not deemed significant enough to be recorded. In Europe, beginning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, personal diaries were being kept by notable figures including most famously Samuel Pepys (as well as his wife, Elizabeth de St. Michel, although Pepys is known to have destroyed her diary at her death). As Europe came to the Americas, diaries from Puritan settlers chronicled their keepers’ hardships while pronouncing their hardy religious faith, and frequently during these periods, the recording of individual experience was defined almost entirely by spiritual experience, as the traditions of both autobiographical practice and subjectivity itself are closely entwined with spiritual practice throughout this period. Significant changes to both European and American diary forms occurred in the late- eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Literacy expanded, Romanticism made way for a secular experience of the self, and the material technologies for embarking on a writing practice became more widely accessible. By the early nineteenth century, white middle-class women in the U.S. were writing diaries in far larger numbers than at any time before, and as Culley recounts, their diaries functioned for decades largely as chronicles of the family, of the community, and frequently (specifically for white women), of the dramatic journeys westward during U.S. expansion. During this period, the practice of circulating these diaries among family and friends became common, so much so that many of the extant U.S diaries 11 from these years came into the archives after their writers sent them back home to the family and friends they had left behind in the East. The history of autobiographical practice for Native American women differs from that of European practice in that it follows a trajectory that reflects a divergence in foundational cultural conceptions regarding the appropriate role of the self, as well as the cataclysmic events of Native American social and political history. Hertha D. Sweet Wong divides Native American autobiographical practice into three periods, the early period (pre- Columbian through the nineteenth century), the transitional period (spanning the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries), and the contemporary period (mid-twentieth century to the present) (“Native American Life Writing” 126). Wong argues that in order to understand the autobiographical practice of the early and transitional periods, one must recognize the profound conflict between the focus on the individual self inherent in Western cultures versus the focus on the relational self in Native cultures. She explains: Generally, Native peoples see themselves as connected to an entire network of kinship relations with family, clan, community, earth, plant and animal life, and cosmos, while Western non-Natives envision themselves as separate from such relations. In many indigenous contexts, it is understood that to speak or write about oneself, calling attention to one’s own accomplishments (as is often the case in autobiography), reveals a poor upbringing (displaying an inappropriate and exaggerated individuality that may diminish communal values), while in many Western contexts to announce oneself directly is considered straightforward and honest. (169) Wong and H. David Brumble III identify alternate forms of literacy that position a version of a relational autobiographic self from the earliest periods, including oral traditions, quillwork, wampum belts, and pictographic life narratives. Understanding Native women’s diary practice requires recognizing multiple forms of self-writing practices, as well as recognizing the complex interplay of relational and individual selfhoods, which are 12 particularly complicated during the transitional period, when Native children were routinely removed from their families and placed into Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools. Because these boarding schools took as their explicit objective the destruction of the children’s link with Native cultures and held the stated goal of encouraging them to develop an “Americanized” identity, the subjectivity of women who attended these schools is quite complex insofar as each child identified in multiple ways with both sets of cultural values. I discuss these complexities at length in the case of Sioux writer Zitkala-!a and Luiseño artist Wa-Wa-Chaw in Chapter Three and the Conclusion of this study, and the diary and autobiographic practice of each writer approaches these questions of subjectivity and selfhood in idiosyncratically pertinent ways. 13 During the period under study in this dissertation, I will suggest that the role of diary as a writing practice for both Native and Anglo women underwent two significant shifts that have lasted to the present day. First, diary-keeping for the first time began to be seen primarily as a feminine practice, a dramatic shift from the form’s original province as that of the elite man of singular achievement. Second, diaries began to turn inward, to become more introspective and psychologically oriented, so much so that at present the term diary suggests nothing so much as this deeply interior form of writing, which is far different from its role as domestic family chronicle from even a few decades before. As I will argue throughout this dissertation, these two simultaneous shifts have profoundly changed both the forms of diary and its expanded role as a widespread and democratic writing practice. First, the shift regarding diary’s association with women occurred precisely during the decades I address in this study, and I see evidence that some of the writers under study here, including most popularly the infamous “exhibitionist” Mary MacLane, were at least 13 partially responsible for this pronounced shift in opinion. Previously, the mid-nineteenth- century rhetoric regarding the division between public versus private “spheres” had bound middle-class white women ever more tightly to the “private sphere,” which became associated with the putatively “private” practice of diary. Culley argues, As the modern idea of the secular diary as a ‘secret’ record of an inner life evolved, that inner life—the life of personal reflection and emotion—became an important aspect of the ‘private sphere’ and women continued to turn to the diary as one place where they were permitted, indeed encouraged, to indulge full ‘self-centeredness.’ (4) In this vein, diarizing became an accepted form of genteel middle-class female “accomplishment,” along the lines of light music and embroidery. Simultaneously, compulsory education for middle-class Anglo girls was expanded, thereby putting the skills necessary to write a life in text in reach for a larger swath of young women. Meanwhile, Native American girls were being routinely removed from their families and sent to the BIA boarding schools for three-year periods of acculturation, which included both a forced denial of any remnant of Native languages and lifeways and an inculcation into Western literary forms, including autobiographical forms. 14 For writer Zitkala-!a, this Western education and acculturation, while painful and often violent, also combined with ancient Native American forms of autobiographical practice to inspire her to create an entirely new form of life-telling practice, a hybrid form that honored both relational and individual selves and that went on to influence a generation of Native life-writers. By in the early- to mid-twentieth century, the persistent association of diary-keeping with girls and women was firmly established, and it continues through the present with diary-keeping being typically gendered as a female activity. For example, contemporary self- help guides written about journaling are frequently directed at a female audience, and 14 commercially available diaries and journals are designed and marketed for women and girls at an appreciably higher rate than those designed for men and boys. 15 Indeed, the most dynamic critical activity regarding diary from the last three decades has been forwarded overwhelmingly by feminist theorists, to whom the present study is indebted as it draws from this critical tradition and thereby itself reproduces the presumed link between diary and women. 16 Yet this ready association is belied at least somewhat by the realities of diary collections as they have been acquired by major literary and historical archives. In fact, despite these automatic associations, the lion’s share of diaries held at major archive libraries continues to be comprised of those penned by men, and more specifically white men. 17 The reasons for this circumstance are complex, involving both the popularity of the form for men prior to the late-nineteenth century and the historical acquisition practices of individual archive libraries, among other factors. However, of note here is the near-total shift in perspective that has taken place in the last century regarding widespread popular associations of diary-keeping today being most routinely connected to women and girls. The second major shift in diary practice that occurred in this period is associated with the development of the field of psychology and its rapid spread across European and American cultures in the first two decades of the century. The research of leading psychologists, including William James, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, G. Stanley Hall, and others brought attention to the interior workings of an individualized and complex self, a concept that sparked a cultural revolution in identifying and valuing an interior, private, secret, hidden, and non-unitary selfhood. Psychology’s influence on diary practice was indirect but profound, and in this study I read diary practice as occupying a unique interface between the psychological and the literary, being equally indebted to both areas of influence. 15 On this point, diary theorists generally agree, as Culley explains, “The journey inward comes to dominate diary writing in the twentieth century, but the reader must remember that the idea of the diary as the arena of the secret, inner life is a relatively modern idea and describes only one kind of diary” (xiii). What I term in this study the “psychological diary,” that form of diary that is occupied with recording and reflecting upon the interior aspects of selfhood, was not possible in a self-reflexive way until the disciplines of psychology began to articulate and make available the languages with which to conceptualize and communicate this modern imprint of the self. This style of diary practice burst into public consciousness with the exuberant Mary MacLane in 1901, as I discuss later in this study, yet MacLane’s exultant recording of the self was not without its forebears from the very late nineteenth century. In a circumstance that is all but forgotten in U.S. literary history, in 1889 the journal intime of Marie Bashkirtseff, a young Russian-French woman who wrote scandalously interior and self-revealing diaries, was translated into English, published in the U.S., and devoured by a generation of girls who emulated the shocking and scandalous exhibitionism of these diaries, which proposed to do nothing short of telling “everything-everything- everything!” (1 May 1884). Bashkirtseff was an accomplished painter who had kept a diary that spanned 104 volumes throughout her teens and twenties until her premature death from tuberculosis at the age of 25. In the last months of her life, as her death became imminent, Bashkirtseff wrote a preface to her diary—beginning “What is the use of lying or pretending?”—in which she set forth the rationale by which she had written her diary, hoping that it would reach beyond her death, and recognizing, as she states in the epigraph above, that her words will be “interesting to the psychologist,” at least (1 May 1884). Despite her journals having been heavily redacted by her conservative mother, Bashkirtseff’s heartfelt 16 and deeply revealing words went on to have a profound effect on a generation of French girls. Inspired by the tragic romance of her life and the sensitivity of her reflections, hundreds of girls began to keep their own journaux intimes in the late 1880s. 18 Within five years of her death, Bashkirtseff’s diary was translated into English, now entitled I Am the Most Interesting Book of All, and went on similarly to inspire a generation of American girls, including Mary MacLane, who made use of her standpoint as a woman of the expansive American West to push the form to even greater extremes of psychological interiority, and, in the view of her scandalized contemporaries, singlehandedly linked women’s psychological diary to the trope of female nakedness through her uninhibited “naked-lady” exhibitionism. 19 However, reading diary practice through a psychological lens compounds in complexity when it attempts to understand fully the diary practices of both Native and white women writing synchronously in this period. Even as we recognize what these diarists experienced as a liberatory potential to be found in writing about the self in defiance of repressive pressures, we must recognize the Eurocentric norms of autobiographical practice as a whole, which, in the words of Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, remains “one of the cultural formations in the West implicated in and complicit with the process of colonization” (28). Furthermore, the formal psychologies of self that developed during this period assumed the template of a white European self, at first scarcely including women or even Americans who were white, let alone women of color. For Native American women, particularly those women who were students at the BIA boarding schools, autobiographical practice was a complex endeavor that both made use of the tools of the West (e.g., English language, autobiographical genres, the extreme focus on separated individuality) and subverted them to suit their own self-defined purposes. For writers like Zitkala-!a, Wa-Wa-Chaw, Mourning 17 Dove, Ella Deloria, Charles Eastman, Francis LaFlesche, and Susette LaFlesche, among others, the flexible tools of autobiographical practice became crucial to articulating a version of selfhood that contained elements of both Native and Anglo cultures. More crucially, the self-reflexivity of diary practice allowed the diarist actively to sort through the elements of subjectivity that were being proffered by both cultures, absorbing those that were of use, and in the cases of Zitkala-!a and Wa-Wa-Chaw, actively resisting those that were not. Joel Pfister outlines the overriding U.S. cultural imperative toward individuality as it affected Native children who were placed into the BIA boarding schools and affirms the agency inherent in Native children’s responses to these acculturating pressures: When I first studied [the boarding school] Carlisle’s publications . . . , I was taken aback by the school’s rhetoric of individuality. It was my close reading of the language and tone of the material in these archives which made me realize that the making of “individuals” was not only a provocative but an extremely complex enterprise and that Natives played significant roles in it, as critical agents, by no means just as victims. (Individuality 14) The conflict between the cultural orientations of individuality versus relationality are a key feature of the Native women’s life-writing that emerges from this period, and the practice of diary-keeping provided Native American women a vehicle for sifting through these complex aspects of developing selfhood. Yet even today, in critical practice the life-writing of Native women is rarely approached with a sensitive recognition of the interior psychological self that inhabits their work. Instead, the criticism of their writing most frequently attends solely to its social nature, its resistance to Americanization, etc. In this study, I follow the lead of Wong, Gerald Vizenor, Ron Carpenter, and other scholars of Native American literature in refusing to read these writers as somehow mythically “pure” embodiment of “Indian-ness,” but as women 18 who from the late-nineteenth-century transitional period onward were continually interacting with and affected by both Native and “mainstream” Eurocentric American cultures. In my chapters for Zitkala-!a and Wa-Wa-Chaw, I attend to the relational and community-oriented nature of much of their writing—particularly that of Zitkala-!a whose primary lifelong social identification was as a social activist for the betterment of Indian peoples—yet I simultaneously wish to avoid the apparent assumption of many critics that Native American literatures can be explored in social and cultural terms only. That is, both Zitkala-!a and Wa- Wa-Chaw occupied complex positions in both Native and Anglo cultural milieus, and as such their diary and autobiographical practice reflects both communitarian/relational and deeply individualized psychological concerns. Especially for these two women, who were both so actively engaged with mainstream Eurocentric culture from childhood and on through their political work for the Indian Rights movement(s), reading their autobiographic practice as indivisibly bicultural is appropriate and necessary. As such, attending sensitively to the interior and psychological aspects of their work, not solely the more external social aspects, is an important move toward fully and holistically appreciating their contributions to autobiographic practice. For all the writers under study here, I approach their works with an effort to read them on the terms that are embedded within them, in line with the approach that I argue that all diary, and especially the deeply interior form of psychological diary, must necessarily be addressed. Psychologies of Selfhood Prior to the advent of psychological diaries at the turn of the twentieth century, diary for women remained subject to what Judy Simons has called “the buried practice of female 19 diary keeping” (253). Yet in the two decades that follow, the rise of modern psychological conceptions of a complex non-unitary self coupled with women’s expansion beyond the private sphere to produce circumstances ripe for women to make use of the tremendously flexible form of diary both to bring new iterations of self proleptically into being and to record and make art out of the interior experiences of self-creation that this period wrought. T.J. Jackson Lears, Joel Pfister, and Nancy Schnog detail the rapid and pervasive rise of “psychologizing” in the first decades of the twentieth century. 20 Pfister outlines the trend as being definitive of modernity: When did it become chic to be “neurotic”—or, more broadly, to survey and present oneself as “psychological”—and how and why did this happen? Probably by the 1910s and surely by the 1920s we can properly speak of the growing popularity and even the cachet of “psychological” identities partly produced by and made available through mass and high culture (psychological and pop psychological books, articles, and advertisements, therapy, literature, theater, films, art). . . . This mass-cultural and high-cultural “psychological” spin on the formation of subjectivities was in certain respects something new in American culture, a hallmark of the “modern.” (Inventing the Psychological 157) Asking “[w]hat is at stake in the cultural fabrication and acceptance of the term psychological identities[?],” Pfister goes on to define the term as “an identity conferred upon one who recognizes and refers to himself or herself as determined by, or sometimes beset by, distinct ‘psychological’ processes, patterns, and problems” (157). While Pfister does not concern himself with either diary practice or women’s perspectives specifically, his tracing of the cultural diffusion of ideas that worked to “psychologize” individuals on a broad scale is useful to my exploration of how individual female diarists began to write fluently and perceptively in a discourse that could articulate a psychological self. 20 In this sense, diary practice inhabits a unique interface between the literary and the psychological. Culley points toward this rare juxtaposition, as well as its hidden dangers: The act of autobiographical writing, particularly that which occurs in a periodic structure, involves the writer in complex literary as well as psychological processes. It is a paradox that the process whose frequent goal is to establish self-continuity involves at its heart a dislocation from the self, or a turning of subject into object. (10) Recognizing the problems inherent in any “turning of subject into object” is, of course, crucial to understanding the role of self in diary practice for these women. In this vein, the findings of twenty-first-century narrative psychology are useful to understanding these complex interactions at work, as researchers in the field, most notably Jerome Bruner and Dan McAdams, have produced empirical evidence that the active creation of the character of “self” in autobiographical practice is in some ways constitutive of subjectivity itself. In other words, the version of self that a diarist creates determines, at least in part, the lived subjectivity that that diarist goes on to experience. 21 McAdams coined the term “selfing” to describe the difficult and anguishing task he argues is required of all psychologically modern adults “as they live in and through modern societies, faced with the unique problems and possibilities of modernity, including the problem of constructing the modern self” (“Personality, Modernity, and the Storied Self” 296). McAdams proposes a “life story model of identity” that “asserts that people living in modern societies provide their lives with unity and purpose by constructing internalized and evolving narratives of the self” (“The Psychology of Life Stories” 100). For the writers in this study, writing at an historical moment that was marked by extraordinary flux regarding gender, ethnicity, class, social mores, and opportunities for women, diary practice became crucial not only to literary production, but also for providing Native and Anglo women with a means to execute the 21 tricky process of “selfing” in the face of quickly changing experiential realities. As I will detail in the chapters that follow, this extraordinary confluence of circumstances led to a shift in diary form that transformed it into a writing practice of both self-creation and self- denial, both shocking “exhibitionism” and secretive hiding, both mechanism for liberation and vehicle for solipsistic escape—all of which became nearly inseparably gendered as female—and this utterly new sense of diary as an ineluctably psychological form has remained in place to this day. Characteristics of Diary In the last thirty years of critical attention to diary literatures, critics have outlined various conceptualizations of distinct forms of diary production. For example, Thomas Mallon differentiates seven major types of diarists: chroniclers, travelers, pilgrims, creators, apologists, confessors, and prisoners (ix-x). For Mallon, these divisions are meant to suggest that each diarist is compelled by an overriding preoccupation, a focus that serves to unify any individual diary as a distinct production. Bunkers and Huff likewise outline the varying purposes to which diary has been put, ranging from serving as “a testing ground for constructions of identity and narrativity,” to expressing an “imprint of the self,” to serving as an “aide-mémoire,” to standing in as “a constant friend to their writers” (15-20 passim). In this study, I am primarily concerned with the distinct form of diary that rose to prominence in the first decades of the twentieth century, what I am calling the “psychological diary,” a form that first came into being during these decades as an identifiably new practice in response to the discovery of the psychological self and has come to be nearly synonymous with diary practice today. In psychological diary, the energetic focus of the text is trained on the 22 individual’s observations of the self, that dynamic and non-coherent body that Julia Kristeva has described as a “subject in process,” and it privileges the emotional responses of the writer as she encounters the world. In these diaries, the unique sense of the subjective self is assumed to be worthy of close attention, just as a naturalist may observe the natural world or a scientist may observe the experiment. The reactions felt by this self in response to stimuli, both external and internal, are assumed by the writer to be worthy of recording. In fact, the writer often expresses a sense of wonder at the particularities of the character that emerges from the pages of the volume. Virginia Woolf in her diary delights in this new character that had sprung from her pages seemingly spontaneously: “Oh yes, I’ve enjoyed reading the past years diary, & shall keep it up. I’m amused to find how it’s grown a person, with almost a face of its own” (28 December 1919). In this limited sense, diary shares a commonality with autobiography as a life-writing form in which the subject is identical to its author. The uniqueness of this feature, in which the writing “I” takes as its subject the written-about “I,” has caused many readers to conflate the two genres as being nearly identical species of life-writing. However, I would argue that despite this seeming equivalence, this likeness in subject matter is virtually their only salient commonality. That is, autobiography as a form shares many more crucial features with the novel than it does with diary, so much so that I would argue that traditional autobiography must rightly be considered a highly specialized form of novel insofar as it presents a defined character and moves that character through a narrative story designed for publication and consumption by a reading public. In contrast, diary is defined by a number of features that distance it considerably from both autobiography and novel and in fact set it apart as a completely separate and altogether unique genre of literature. 23 First, true to its rootedness in the “daily allowance,” diary is characterized by its spontaneity and its firm location in the present moment, as it is most often written in very close chronological proximity to the observations narrated. In this sense, diaries tend to be written in the midst of things, in which the writer exists always in a continuous present, and to be marked by a lack of closure, ending only upon the death of the diarist or the abandonment of the diary. Interestingly, that abandonment is rare in psychological diary in that the diarist frequently describes being attached to the diary in a nearly existential way, and for many diarists the writing is habitual, ritualized, and deeply entwined with subjectivity. Further, unlike autobiography or any other form, diarists do not write in retrospect, having narratively shaped their experiences over time, and they do not know how the story will end while in the moment of writing. The fact that later readers of the diary do know the “ending,” that is, the outcome of the diarist’s life, adds a layer of dramatic irony to the reading that is often quite poignant for readers. While the writing style of any individual diary is deeply idiosyncratic, diary as a whole tends to be marked by ellipticality, repetition, gaps, and heavily stacked paratactic structures. That is, as a very loose rule, diaries tend most often to be written for the writer, so the background and surrounding contextual details that an outside reader needs to make sense of the work tend to be absent in most diaries, and this is especially true of psychological diaries. In addition, frequently these diaries are coded, using symbols, abbreviations, and secret ciphers with the apparent (and understandable) intention of making the work impossible for snooping family members to apprehend. However, there do exist diaries that are the exceptions that prove this rule. Virginia Woolf, for example, penned her diary with the knowledge that her husband Leonard, who was deeply involved in promoting her literary career, would be reading it, and it therefore reads far less like the 24 more private diaries that make up the bulk of diary literatures and more like her own inimitable published writing. 22 Yet this example—as well as those of Bashkirtseff, who with the knowledge of her looming death developed the hope of “staying on this earth by whatever means possible” by having her diaries published posthumously, and of MacLane, who decided mid-way through one year’s diary to try to gain fame by sending it out for publication—all point toward the complicated questions of audience involved in diary production. To what degree is the diary written for the diarist—to bring an expanded sense of self proleptically into being, for example—and to what degree is it written for onlookers or even a wide public readership? As I will explore in the following chapters, each diarist in this study maintains a relationship with any presumed audience that is self-defined and unique to her, a relationship that in some cases defines the text and in others appears to be all but nonexistent. The psychological diary of the early twentieth century is qualitatively different from other diary forms in both its subject matter, that is, the taking of the self as the focal subject to be exhibited in every detail, and in the aesthetics of the language. Whereas previous forms of diary centered around chronicling the writer’s life in a family and community, using prosaic descriptive language of events, the psychological diary is more likely to focus explicitly on the interior self, and its language mirrors this shift as it is more evocative, more fragmentary, and more freely associative when compared to diaries produced during earlier decades and centuries. Further, the psychological diary is frequently characterized by an overt sense of compulsion and ritual that is not associated with less emotionally engaged styles of diary practice. These diarists continually remark upon their diary practices as being 25 all but existentially necessary for them. In an example that is echoed across the literature, lifelong diarist Mallon writes, My diary has now been with me so much longer than any other companion or home that I cannot imagine a life without it. I’m sure a part of me thinks I’d be not just diminished but threatened with extinction, if I were ever to pull its plug. (xii) Gail Godwin echoes this sense of driving necessity when she differentiates between her diary- and fiction-writing practices: I need to write a diary, just as I need to write fiction, but the two needs come from very different sources. I write fiction because I need to organize the clutter of too many details into some meaning, because I enjoy turning something promising into something marvelous; I keep a diary because it keeps my mind fresh and open. Once the details of being me are safely stored away every night, I can get on with what isn’t just me. (12) The sentiment of compulsion, sometimes described even as “addiction,” is so common among psychological diarists from the beginning of the twentieth century through the present that I would suggest that it has become partially definitional of the form. Certainly we can assume that any present twenty-first-century reader was not the audience that the writer specifically had in mind, and the elliptical fissures and codes in the work are frequently understood to mark the text as what some diary critics have deemed a “true diary” (Bloom) or an “ideal diary” (LeJeune). These critical assessments of worthiness are problematic insofar as a blanket evaluation is ultimately impossible to uphold; however, they do point toward the multiple challenges to be found in reading diaries. Diaries, as serial productions, frequently lack an obvious shape. They may have a central character (the self) but they may not always, or even frequently, have a clear narrative progression. Further, handwritten diaries are messy. Inks fade over decades, paper deteriorates, and penmanship varies from writer to writer, from volume to volume, from day to day. These books are 26 simply difficult to read. For many volumes, the reading requires a glacial patience simply to make out the words on the page, let alone to make deep connections that allow the critical reader to decipher the codes that give the work context. The inescapably slow pacing of reading manuscript diaries affects each critic differently, but not infrequently it seems to work, perhaps counter-intuitively, to enhance the reader’s empathic connection with the writer. We readers connect with the words on the page, and reading these books is a fully tactile experience. The covers are worn, the pages may have a distinctive scent—after a century cheap commercial notebook pages give off an odor of woody must, for example. Expensive hand-made volumes announce themselves as especially treasured by the careful penmanship with which the writer begins the volume, even if her slant becomes less regular over the course of a few weeks. Because of the tactile nature of the work, while reading diaries in manuscript form, one cannot escape an overriding recognition of the diarist as a fully embodied human being, and for many critics of the form, that connection found in the diary archives is profoundly rewarding. Mallon articulates the obvious ethical problem of reading manuscript diary, namely that it is without question a “massive invasion of people’s privacy” (xviii), and in this light, the tactile and emotional sense of connecting with manuscript diarists serves if nothing else as a counterbalance to remind readers to treat the work one encounters, which is literally a creation that is one-of-a-kind in all the world, with a sense of respect for the burgeoning subjectivity of its flesh-and-blood writer. 23 27 Figure 2. Handwriting from the 1908 diary of Mai Richie Reed. 24 Diary in the Archives Because manuscript diary literatures are by definition one-off pieces of textual production, 25 studying them in person in the archives remains the ideal condition under which to appreciate them most fully. 26 In this study, I have attempted to do so wherever feasible, and each chapter makes use of archival materials with two chapters being grounded entirely in archived manuscript diaries. These materials have been underutilized in scholarship, and an archival approach has allowed me to introduce new literary and historical material into the critical discourse, as well as to generate fresh critical readings of both new and longstanding texts. Working primarily with archival material presents unique challenges, however. Most significantly, when reading manuscript diaries that are available only in a research archive, I must assume that most readers will not be able themselves to access these 28 texts directly. This circumstance unarguably represents an exciting opportunity, yet it is nonetheless an obvious limitation insofar as it limits readers’ ability to understand the texts beyond my interpretation. Throughout this study, I attempt to compensate for this concern by providing detailed context regarding all aspects of the diary: tactile features, 27 verbatim quotes from passages of the diary, an indication of the repetitions and gaps of the diary (which I will argue allow us to suss out the diarist’s preoccupations), and as much “thick description” of the historical, geographic, social, and even domestic contexts surrounding the diary as possible. 28 My objective in providing this level of contextual material is to present as close to a direct experience of these rare texts as possible in which to center my analyses. This “challenge,” however, is also a large part of what makes archival work so very rewarding. Indeed, because diary literatures are so elliptical in nature, rarely providing the contextual background that would have been extraneous to the diarist herself, I have come to view diary literatures as being virtually unique in literary study. In addition to being logistically difficult to access in an unedited form, diary possesses an ellipticality that requires extensive mediation in order to interpret it. Deciphering the code of any given diary requires not only a comprehensive understanding of that diarist’s life and works, but also a wide reading of other manuscript diary materials that were written in the same period and enough understanding to recognize and identify the specific cultural, historical, and social events to which the diary obliquely alludes. Huff describes the complications of this approach, writing: I would like to suggest here that our position as readers of texts which are not part of the historically sanctioned mainstream tradition is a very complex one, which requires us to situate ourselves within the text as much as possible. Yet because we have even more difficulty as readers participating in the textual, historical, and personal design of manuscript diaries than we 29 would, say, of a piece of fiction, we must simultaneously realize our limited position and try to thicken our understanding by engaging the inner and outer worlds of the diary. (“Reading as Re-Vision” 506) All told, it is a challenging set of tasks, yet because diaries provide us our best view into the emergence of the subjective self in the moment of its happening, it is a crucial one. In their quiet role as the tactile and textual record of a fleeting self, these books bring to mind nothing so much as the image of a creature trapped in amber or an accidental snapshot. Armed with the context to decode them, we readers find in these volumes the rarest of opportunities to glimpse an elusive “imprint of self.” 29 Research archives differ in their approaches to archiving manuscript diaries, and researchers from separate disciplines likewise differ in their uses of these materials. 30 Historians have arguably made the earliest, most enthusiastic, and most frequent usage of diary, and feminist historians from the second wave were the first to recognize the extraordinary wealth of information regarding women’s daily lives that were to be found in these neglected volumes. As historians began to value these works, research archives responded by recognizing and appreciating the women’s diaries within their collections, as well as increasing their efforts to collect new volumes as they became available. 31 Yet historians approach these texts almost entirely as sources of information. While this function is one that diaries richly fill, serving as an artefact of facticity is not diary’s only function, nor indeed can diaries necessarily be assumed to be “factual” in the first place. The aesthetic value of diaries, as I suggested earlier, have only begun to be explored fully by literary theorists, yet too often that exploration has been done without a full reading of historical and cultural contexts, which leads to a privileging of those texts that either 1) provide an original or pleasing linguistic aesthetic; 2) fit neatly into existing aesthetic constructs (e.g., 30 Modernist); or 3) were written by celebrated literary figures. Each of these subsets of diary literatures is of great value, of course, but privileging certain texts on only these grounds leaves out extraordinary work by lesser-known diarists, including especially writers of color, whose works are far more scarce in the archives. 32 Throughout this dissertation I approach each diary in the most holistic way possible by drawing the best practices from each disciplinary approach to diary. From the historian, I borrow the emphasis on apprehending fully the cultural contexts that surround the production of the work; from the psychologist, I respect the diary as an artefact of the “subject in process”; and as a literary critic, I approach the work as an aesthetic whole connected to a long history of literary tradition. This holistic and fully rounded approach, it is my hope, is sufficient for bearing witness to the emergence of the self that is the subject of each of the diary practices within this study. FOCUS AND RATIONALE OF THIS STUDY The scope of diary literatures in the U.S. is vast and largely unstudied, yet this dissertation is necessarily demarcated by several analytical categories, specifically those of period, geography, gender, and ethnicity. For diary literatures produced during this period, these factors are indivisibly linked, as these writers were embedded in a web of cultural and societal norms that partially determined the selves that they produced within their diary practices. The Progressive Era (1890-1920) and the Allotment Era (1887-1934) Spanning roughly from 1890-1920, the Progressive Era in social and political life in the U.S. was marked by an extraordinary flux of changing attitudes, norms, expectations, and 31 material realities. Outraged by the human misery and stark injustice that they saw around them, women began to organize in greater numbers than ever before and drove a new cultural narrative that focused on human progress and social reform. Movements and organizations that had their roots in this era include women’s suffrage, reproductive rights, antitrust law, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the National Women’s Party, the Society of American Indians, the National Child Labor Committee, the Women’s Trade Union League, Industrial Workers of the World, the N.A.A.C.P., Hull House and other settlement houses, and publications such as McClure’s Magazine that encouraged the investigations of “muckrakers” committed to social reform. The Progressive Era provided a potent forum for women activists and writers, whose voices, capitalizing on an authority imbued by the widely-accepted view of women’s “essential superiority” in the “moral sphere,” made themselves heard in sites ranging from the podiums of the ubiquitous Women’s Clubs to the journalism and fiction of both small and large presses. However, the advent of Modernism, with its idolatry of the “new,” its reactionary “culture of virility,” and its privileging of apolitical, usually white, usually masculine voices, prematurely foreclosed this radical flowering of activist women’s voices before the end of the 1920s. Notably, the Progressive Era is concurrent with the period defined as the Allotment Era, a pivotal period in Native American history, during which the Dawes Act of 1887 had the material effect of gradually dissipating Native American communal land holdings via an “allotment” system that ostensibly purported to instill in communal Native peoples the value of individual land ownership, yet shortsightedly provided neither for economic viability nor future generation’s inheritance. Over the 47 years that the Dawes Act reigned, Native landowners lost an astonishing 90 million acres, or two-thirds of their U.S. holdings, mostly 32 through sales of arable lands to nearby white homesteaders at bargain prices. For later historians, the travesties of the Allotment Era, which were marked not by the drama of violence but by quiet attrition, have in some respects been nearly as damaging to Native communities as the original violent suppressions that characterized the First Encounter(s). Throughout this period, the reading public was enthralled by the trope of the noble “Vanishing Indian,” and writers who tapped into its nostalgia were highly sought-after, even as Dawes Act policies of allotment were rewriting the maps of actual Indian lands and BIA policies of assimilation were imperiously refashioning actual Indian communities, families, languages, and subjectivities. The diary and autobiographic practice produced by Native writers, including Sioux writer Zitkala-!a and Luiseño diarist Wa-Wa-Chaw, engages these injustices as an indivisible element in the creation of a new version of Native American female subjectivity. This historical moment is complex in that it both continued many of the injustices of the nineteenth century, now carried out with dehumanizing factory-like efficiency, and simultaneously witnessed the birth of newly efficacious strategies and forums for popular protest. These decades witnessed the convergence of a number of bright new cultural possibilities—an overarching zeitgeist of the narratives of reform and progress; a wildly proliferating journalistic press; psychoanalysis’ powerful new legitimization of interior subjectivity; and women’s empowerment in the public sphere via reform rhetoric. Indeed, the period represents a brief, glorious moment of ascendancy for at least some visionary women writers, who were achieving publication in greater numbers than ever before. At the same time, however, this period was also characterized by stark Nativist anti-immigration rhetoric, tremendous rates of lynching, terrifying new technologies of warfare, and 33 exaggerated displays of white and masculine supremacy, and strict policies of Dawes Act allotment and Indian assimilation. The generation of women who make up this study were born during a twenty-year period from 1868 (Austin) to 1888 (Wa-Wa-Chaw), and they kept diaries that spanned from 1888 all the way through the mid-twentieth century. 33 While evidence of these writers’ engagement with self-creation is found throughout this entire span, in this project I maintain a narrow focus on their production during the years that largely overlap the decades that span the Progressive and Allotment Eras. The American West as “Functional Myth” for Women The Progressive Era and particularly its Dawes Act are tightly linked to the geographic location of the American West—a construct that is as mythic as it is material. Scholars of the American West argue that as a construct, our national creation of an origin story for the hardy American values of self-reliance and individualism serves far more as a “functional myth” than as a reflection of historical reality (Murdoch). The nineteenth- century American West—that backdrop for dime novels and boys’ penny stories of heroes, Indians, cowboys, homesteaders, horse-thieves, and outlaws—was endlessly romanticized and had become a source of nostalgia already for turn-of-the-twentieth-century Americans, who had very likely taken in one of the traveling “Wild West” shows or a heartrending performance of Hiawatha as these popular performances circuited the country during the summer months. 34 This mythic creation served many purposes. Alan Trachtenberg argues that the success of U.S. nationalism required the land itself to provide a sense of unity since its peoples were diverse and growing moreso with increased immigration. The land’s original inhabitants, the Native peoples whose more than 500 separate nations were typically 34 understood by white Americans as being a single people, were tasked with the role of providing the new nation with a unifying ethos. In this way the values of “nobility,” “ruggedness,” etc., that were popularized in the trope of the “Vanishing Indian” became transferred to the land itself and ultimately metonymically extended then to its new inhabitants from Europe, defining “American character” for the people of this new nation- state. The spaciousness of the American West came to represent potentiality, an unmarked land of undeveloped prospects where young men could go to find their fortunes—and, in a circumstance that becomes ever more clear in retrospect, where young women could likewise capitalize on that latent potentiality to create entirely new embodiments of female subjectivity that could break free from the more binding restrictions placed on women in the settled communities of the East. In a review that reflected an unselfconscious enthusiasm that would later be sneered at by the Eastern literary establishment, Oscar L. Triggs, a literary professor at the University of Chicago (then still considered a rustic way-station to the American West) exclaimed over the breaking of societal and literary bounds that Mary MacLane was able to achieve in the 1901 publication of her diaries: “Only a life spent in a barren region in the West could have given a woman the power to write such a book!” (New York World). His meaning was taken up instinctively by readers both Eastern and Western: only an upbringing in the lawless, isolated, and unformed West could have allowed for the sui generis that Triggs saw as evident in MacLane’s pages. The West’s “barrenness” and its apparent lack of societal structures allowed for a flowering of a more deeply seeded genius, one that would have been thwarted outside the isolated garden of the West—a notion that 35 draws ideas from both America’s own functional myth and the ethos of the Romantics who preceded it. Women writers and artists found this freedom to be especially fruitful. Annette Kolodny suggests that male writers had long imagined the West as a woman’s body, sexualizing it as a landscape to be “won,” while women writers wrote the West as a garden to be managed. Yet the women in this study, while partially identifying themselves with the land, were more likely to claim kinship with it, rather than ownership, relying upon a potent connection to the land to energize their efforts on its behalf while simultaneously drawing from its potentiality to define themselves. Cathryn Halverson suggests that Georgia O’Keeffe remains the figure who most saliently embodies this symbiotic relationship between woman artist and the West. Halverson argues that a spiritual sense of oneness with the land imbued women artists in the West with a new authority: They deemphasized the degree to which they experience the land around them as theirs, and describe a sense of ownership running far deeper than that bought with legal title. This sense derives from their artistic, epistemological, or emotional commitment to the land. Georgia O’Keeffe expressed it in declaring of a mountain she often painted, “It’s my private mountain. It belongs to me. God told me that if I painted it enough I could have it.” (14) 35 For white women from the American West, including Mary Austin and Mary MacLane (from California and Montana, respectively) this complex interaction of geography and gender provided a profoundly significant means of escape from the norms that confined Eastern women, and both writers exploited the latent possibilities to the fullest. The woman born of the West, it seemed, could claim an existence as a solitary artist or intellectual of a kind found nowhere else. Austin and MacLane are joined by O’Keeffe, Laura Gilpin, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Gertrude Atherton, Elsie Clews Parsons, and other white women who were 36 born of the West, or who migrated to the West, in order to take part in its artistic, intellectual and gender freedoms. In fact, both Austin and MacLane capitalized strategically upon this potential by relying on their readers’ ready associations between women, the land, the West, and the positive qualities that adhered to the “Vanishing Indian.” Participating in this complex linkage of associations, Austin and MacLane in their writing each performed a subtle bit of “Indian playacting,” Philip Deloria’s term for whites who take on the mantle of “Indian-ness,” performing the professed qualities of Native peoples for reasons that ranged from identificatory to family bonding to publication and public recognition. 36 Doing so made Austin and MacLane complicit in what was then an unrecognized pattern of behavior that vexed the lived reality of actual Native peoples immeasurably, even while it simultaneously rewarded both writers—first, by getting them widely published in the national press, and second, by helping them to invent a separate and self-defined version of subjectivity. For Zitkala-!a and Wa-Wa-Chaw as Native women, the association of their work with the American West is more entrenched, yet ultimately perhaps less accurate. That is, both women dynamically traversed the nation, inhabiting multiple geographic points for strategic reasons, and the bulk of their work was accomplished as much or more in the established East Coast as in the West. However, by virtue of their ethnic identities as Sioux and Luiseño, respectively, both writers were consistently defined as “Western” throughout their lives because even as early as the turn of the twentieth century this reflex association between Indian and West was already well established and reinforced through popular entertainments, including most famously Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World. However, Zitkala-!a , while born on the western Yankton Dakota Sioux reservation, attended school in Midwestern Indiana, taught in eastern Pennsylvania, and, 37 after working on the Ute reservation and raising a family, spent the rest of her life working politically as a founder of the Society of American Indians in Washington, D.C., where she is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Even more telling, Wa-Wa-Chaw’s geographic location is almost entirely centered in New York, from her childhood on Riverside Drive to her death in Spanish Harlem, despite her birth to a California Luiseño Indian mother in what she called a “squalid wooden shack and mud floor” in region spanning present-day San Diego to Los Angeles. For these writers, the American West served as a point of origin, despite their lifelong associations with the East Coast. More important to their development of subjectivity, however, the West’s service as a “functional myth” for white America caused these women to be perceived throughout their lives as the living embodiments of the “Vanishing Race,” and their textual and artistic work was pigeonholed as such. In fact, this perception is one that Zitkala-!a and Wa-Wa-Chaw alternately fully participated in and struggled to break free from throughout their literary, artistic, and political careers. Seen in all its complexities, the American West, then, functions as a demarcated geographical location, but its far more salient role is that of an Imaginary that both entrapped its inhabitants in stereotype, yet also allowed for a cultural and gender fluidity that challenged these women diarists to invent entirely new and self-defined subjectivities that, as the beleaguered Professor Triggs remarked, could have happened only in “a barren region in the West.” Strategies of Expansion for Women The geographies of the mythic American West provided fertile ground for these diarists to break free from gender constrictions, and they built strategically upon this 38 opportunity by drawing from a linked set of cultural movements to propel them toward greater independence and self-definition. The “Indian playacting” evident in writers such as Austin, in my view, is one facet of a larger cultural enthusiasm for primitivism, orientalism, spiritualism, and depth psychologies—all part of a widespread mainstream response among intellectuals and artists against the dehumanizing effects of modernity. T. J. Jackson Lears defines this growing sense of dissatisfaction as it spans the period from 1880-1920 as American antimodernism, which he suggests is “the recoil from an ‘overcivilized’ modern existence to more intense forms of physical or spiritual experience supposedly embodied in medieval or Oriental cultures” (xv). As they began to recognize the hidden costs of modern culture with its diminished experience of authenticity, according to Lears, a wide swath of intellectuals, artists, the “educated bourgeoisie,” and members of the middle and upper classes felt a terrifying helplessness in the face of anonymous modernity and yearned for the more authentic lives of an imagined pre-modern era. Lear explains: Transatlantic in scope and sources, antimodernism drew on venerable traditions as well as contemporary cultural currents: republican moralism, which promoted suspicion of urban “luxury”; romantic literary convention, which elevated simple and childlike rusticity over the artificial amenities of civilization; a revolt against positivism, gathering strength toward the end of the century, which rejected all static intellectual and moral systems, often in the name of a vitalist cult of energy and process; and a parallel recovery of the primal, irrational forces in the human psyche, forces which had been obscured by the evasive banality of modern culture. . . . [C]ritics [of modernity] shared a common view that modern culture had narrowed the range and diffused the intensity of human existence. They longed to rekindle possibilities for authentic experience, physical or spiritual—possibilities they felt had existed once before, long ago. (57) Evident throughout the diaries under study in this dissertation, as well as the great majority of psychological diaries that dominate the twentieth century, is an intense yearning for a sense of “authenticity” in human life as a key aspect of burgeoning subjectivity, what Lears 39 describes as “part of a much broader quest for intense experience” (xv) that was seen as having been lost to modernity. Sharing a preoccupation with the unseen and numinous aspects of human and extra- human life are movements as varied as primitivism, orientalism, spiritualism, “vitalism,” depth psychology, and “Indian-ness.” Seemingly disparate, all are connected in their underlying function as attempts to get at a root of something deeper and more “essential” than the materialism of civilized culture, and all are associated with what was perceived as a “feminine” polarity. Lears is largely unconcerned with the feminist aspects of antimodernism, yet he notes its cultural expressions as being connected with the “essences” of the feminine: “Those who recognized the problematic qualities of modern identity sought a wider selfhood by embracing the 'childlike' or 'feminine' aspects of premodern character” (57). The writers in this study are split regarding their overt expressions of either femininity or feminism, yet all to one degree or another tap into the antimodern yearning for greater and greater authenticity in human life. MacLane delves deeply into the fractured unconscious and id impulses of depth psychology; Austin disdains Freud, and is instead preoccupied with both her self-defined spirituality and earth-based Indian lifeways as means for apprehending a more deeply “tap-rooted” reality; Zitkala-!a quietly uses the tropes and teaching methods of Sioux storytellers to translate the difficulties of split identity to a white audience; and Wa- Wa-Chaw attempts to revivify in her paintings and her diaries a sense of her own lost and deeply mourned connection with Native peoples. All these writers drew upon a “genius” that transcended traditional education—and they do so for reasons that were not only artistic and intellectual, but also deeply pragmatic. 37 As women, as Westerners, and for Zitkala-!a and Wa-Wa-Chaw, as ethnic outsiders, all four 40 women were excluded to one degree or another from the benefits of traditional higher education. Of the four, Austin had received the most complete education, graduating in a twelve-person senior class from tiny provincial Blackburn College; however, throughout her writing life she would express tremendous insecurity about the quality of education it provided her as she dealt with New York publishers and intellectuals. Zitkala-!a likewise received two years of college education at Earlham College, a small Quaker institution in Indiana, in addition to a few months of training at the Boston Conservatory, but graduated from neither institution due primarily to a lack of financial support. MacLane was preparing to attend Stanford University until her stepfather squandered the family savings in a mining scheme. And Wa-Wa-Chaw, while adopted into the privileged Duggan family, was educated solely at home and rejected from Bowdoin College due entirely to her ethnicity. Yet each woman was deeply engaged in intellectual life, and each needed to claim a base of authority from which to speak. The expansive mytho-geographies of the American West provided them a script for solitary female intellectualism that did not rely on the sanctioned forms of knowledge that could be conferred only by established Eastern universities. Instead, a new authority vested in interior forms of knowledge found in the antimodern movements— which were perceived as ancient, earth-based realms of knowledge—provided these culturally savvy women an authority that did not depend upon the male-driven intellectual centers of the East Coast. In arenas in which an interior expertise was far more valuable than institutional knowledge, these women could thrive—and not least, they could publish. For the mainstream population, these unfamiliar arenas held an intense fascination, not just among the educated elite but, as Lears describes, pervasively among the upper and middle classes, who drove publications such as Harper’s and Atlantic Monthly to seek out writers who 41 had insight and access to these foreign, “exotic,” and fascinating slices of life. Propitiously, for these writers, these two circumstances—the isolation of their geographies and the authority to be found in areas that relied on interior knowledge—converged, and these women capitalized upon this circumstance to discover and create new subjectivities for women in their diary and autobiographic practices. Each writer in this study took what would frequently have been assumed to be an extreme limitation, their regional isolation and paucity of traditional education, and—by excelling in forms that could profit from interior, solitary authority—transformed them instead into their greatest sources of insight and expression. Convergence of “Native” and “American” Race and ethnicity are key analytic categories for all four women in this study, all of whom, I will argue, are participating in both Anglo and Native American cultures in a complicated and often exploitative dance. As white writers, both MacLane and especially Austin, perform “Indian-ness” in various ways, and Austin in particular takes on the mantle of Indian expert and advocate in a way that, from the perspective of the Native cultures she purported to help, was both diminishing in its condescension and appropriation, yet one that nonetheless provided a sometimes helpful advocacy for bringing political attention to otherwise neglected Native American plights. In this sense, Austin was a woman of her time insofar as this marked paternalism was shared by whites who were nonetheless genuinely sympathetic to the injustices suffered by Native peoples. As Sioux and Luiseño writers, Zitkala-!a and Wa-Wa-Chaw had roots in Native cultures yet by virtue of their white- dominated educations and environments, both were affected equally, if not more so, by 42 mainstream white culture. Many theorists of Native American cultural studies discuss the problems of twenty- and twenty-first-century critics approaching Native texts as if they were somehow “pure,” that is, unsullied by contact with mainstream white U.S. culture (see Sands, Wong, Krupat, Swann, Vizenor, Warrior, etc.). However, particularly in the period that Wong has called the “transitional period,” spanning the late-nineteenth to early-twentieth centuries (that is, precisely the period of this study), the influence of white culture on Native cultures was profound, unavoidable, and deeply determining for Native communities, families, and individuals. Virtually no family was untouched by one or many members’ attendance at BIA schools, for example, and as those former students returned home they were encouraged to take their “Americanized” identities as “dual citizens” home with them for the “improvement of race.” In the case of Carlisle students, for example, graduates were harshly excoriated in print if they were to “go back to the blanket,” the shorthand term for rejecting European-style clothing, an act interpreted by both whites and Natives as the most obvious symbol for rejecting “Americanization.” For Zitkala-!a , who writes of herself as “hang[ing] in the heart of chaos” when she describes the pull she feels toward both her Sioux mother at home and her desire for European education, negotiating this tricky convergence of “Native” and “American” was a lifelong occupation. For Wa-Wa-Chaw, who just after her birth to a Luiseño mother had been, in her words, “stolen” by the progessive New York activist “Mother” Mary Duggan and raised on Riverside Drive—cared for by turns as “daughter” and seemingly as an Indian “curio”—expresses in her diary her lifelong efforts toward establishing and making sense of her ethnic identity. For all four of these women, ethnicity is crucial to understanding their subsequent diaric self-creation, hence becomes a key analytic category. 43 As continues to be the case with African American, Latina, Chicana, and Asian American women’s diary practice, the archival holdings for Native American women diarists remain far slimmer than for white women diarists, who are already represented in far fewer numbers than white male diarists. Dana Nelson describes this circumstance regarding archive practices regarding diarists of color, succinctly, as “problematic in a way that only a few scholars have begun to probe” (246). While the scope of this dissertation requires its limitation to Native American women and white women who made use of Native tropes in their diaries of self-creation, a small but growing body of criticism has been forming around the diary practices of women of color from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The rich diary practices of African American diarists, including Charlotte Forten Grimké, Mary Virginia Montgomery, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson, have been productively explored by critics including Dorothy Sterling, Gloria Hull, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and others. Likewise diary from Latina and Chicana writers ranging from Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz to Rosario Castellanos have been usefully explored, notably by Genaro Padilla, whose broadly influential work on testimonio has effectively defined the form. For the purposes of this study, I have made use of archival and diary-oriented material to the greatest degree possible, taking into consideration both the problems of the current archives and the challenge of identifying strictly “diary” texts when working with Native American authors. For Wa-Wa-Chaw, this effort was fairly simple insofar as her diary fragments have been well-preserved in the archives of the Silberman Native American Art Collection and her paintings (those 34 that remained after she gave away her collection to the many neighborhood children, to whom she was a beloved figure) have been housed at the Smithsonian Native American Cultural Resources Center, though they have scarcely been displayed in the public galleries. For 44 Zitkala-!a, the Native woman writer who has had perhaps the greatest influence on later generations of Native American writers, the problem is more difficult and I have relied here on the closest approximations in both form and archival material by making use of her most intimate autobiographic work and by relying on archival Carlisle School materials held at the Huntington Research Library. Demarcated by these analytic boundaries, and tapping into the rich archive of manuscript diary materials, as well as published diary, private letters, self-portraiture, pamphlets, dime novels, and traditional autobiography, this project traces the role that diary practice has played in the development of female and feminist subjectivity for Native and Anglo American women while it simultaneously explores more broadly the long and neglected histories of diary as a widespread and democratic writing practice. In making the arguments that follow, I strive to take seriously a body of material that remains a significant, but understudied, contribution to American letters and attempt to stake out new territory within the larger fields of literary and autobiographic studies. Further, since the bulk of the material covered in this study remains largely unpublished, it is my hope that the uncovering of this “new” material will be valuable to the scholarship of multiple disciplines that are concerned with the questions and insights it raises, particularly for the fields of literary and cultural studies, gender studies, Native American studies, psychology, history, and archival practice. 38 CHAPTER OVERVIEW The women whose works comprise this study each makes independent use of the versatile writing practices associated with diary and autobiography. In a period of burgeoning 45 subjectivity, growing awareness of the unconscious, and tremendous societal and cultural flux, their diary practices both helped them proleptically to bring new versions of self into being, as they simultaneously left behind the literary artefacts of this selfing process for later scholars to interpret. In the following chapters, I will trace several variants of diary practice, relying upon the diary and autobiographical practices of a number of representative, though not comprehensive diarists and lifewriters to illustrate the many forms and potentials that diary literatures can accommodate. Writing a series of traditional manuscript diaries, available only in the archives, Mary Hunter Austin used her private journals to observe the worlds around her in the style of a naturalist, embedding within these volumes the secrets that she kept hidden in her widely published work, even those works that purported to be “autobiographical.” Writing a series of autobiographical educational narratives, Zitkala-!a performed the tricky balancing act—expressing in language that self that “hangs in the heart of chaos”—that she was required to maintain as a doubly conscious writer, destined to translate Sioux culture continually for whites as she advocated for pan-Indian rights throughout her long and politically influential life. Writing a public diary, Mary MacLane’s bold exhibitionism almost singlehandedly brings the variant of deeply psychological public diary into being, influencing a generation of Modernists who were exhilarated by her stream- of-consciousness style as she wrote it twenty years before the advent of High Modernism. And producing a series of self-portraits and an indisputably private diary, Wa-Wa-Chaw, is in many ways the most mysterious figure in this study. In the final chapter to this study, I center my concluding arguments about the possibilities of diary practice with a glimpse into her 38 mystifying volumes of “fragments,” found only upon her death at the age of 84, a legacy that reveals nothing short of the struggle to write an independently defined self 46 proleptically into being, while honoring both the white culture of the East Coast that raised her and the virtually unknowable Luiseño culture that gave her birth. All of these writers, through their struggles and triumphs, in their most subtle lines of beauty and their rawest confessions, stretch the flexible form of diary to its limits as they struggle mightily to bring new and independently defined versions of self into being. 47 CHAPTER ONE NOTES 1 Written by Bashkirtseff in the year of her death. 2 From “The ‘Journal de Jeune Fille’ in Nineteenth-Century France.” 3 Taken at the Huntington Library, this photograph hints at the vast range of tactile formats of diary production that were in usage at the turn of the twentieth century. The diaries pictured here were penned by Mary Hunter Austin, Harriet Hale Rix, and Mai Richie Reed. As with all photographs of unpublished diaries in this study, these images were photographed by the author in the Ahmanson Rare Books Room of the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. 4 In contemporary French literary criticism, LeJeune is viewed as a relatively canonical critic from an earlier period, an observation made by Natania Meeker upon reading an early version of this chapter. Given this status, his own affective involvement with the little- studied body of female diary literatures is striking, as is his influential argument for incorporating this body of work into the larger scope of French literature as a whole. 5 Borrowing Kristeva’s term. 6 Margo Culley discusses this attachment, in which women named their diaries and addressed them fondly as dear friends, in One Day at a Time. 7 Also called Payomkowishum, meaning “People of the West” in the Luiseño language. As I discuss in the Conclusion to this dissertation,Wa-Wa-Chaw was never certain of the specific tribal affiliations of her ancestors, as her only information came from the memories of the Duggan family that adopted her. 8 As did most of their peers, Zitkala-!a and Wa-Wa-Chaw used both Native and English names. Also known as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, Zitkala-!a published all her work under her Sioux name, meaning “Red Bird” in English, and throughout this dissertation I follow her lead in referring to her by her preferred public name. Likewise I make use of the name “Wa-Wa-Chaw,” meaning “. . . near the water,” by which the Luiseño artist signed all her work and preferred to be called late in life. As I discuss in the Conclusion, Wa-Wa-Chaw’s ethnic and cultural identities are complex in that she was adopted at birth from a Luisenõ mother by a wealthy white family and only in later life was able to reestablish some connection to her tribal affiliation. In the case of both of these writers, I make use of their preferred names in various contexts in which they arise (for example, using “Gertrude” when discussing Zitkala-!a’s school years) and falling back on their preferred public/professional names at all other times. 9 Key diary theorists who articulate this collapsed usage include Margo Culley, Suzanne Bunkers and Cynthia Huff, and Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. 48 10 While care must be taken to avoid too-ready assumptions linking diary-keeping with assumed notions about historical women’s daily lives, in the larger general sense indicated by these theorists, I would agree that the specific social and historical circumstances of the nineteenth-century domestic lives of women caused diary-keeping to serve this avocational function for many middle-class girls and women. 11 To illustrate, in an ad hoc experiment, a quick search for commercial diaries available on Amazon.com returns dozens titles for girls, with the first page titles including The Busy Princess Diary: The Diary That’s Written For You!, Girl’s Diary, Butterfly Diary with Lock, The American Girls Diary: A Journal for Writing Your Secrets, and Flights of Fancy (Fairy Lock and Key Diary). The covers of all are predominated by shades of pink and purple. In contrast, for boys the same search returns nothing that is in the form of a commercial blank diary intended for boys to record their thoughts. Concerned that my own gender bias was somehow skewing the results of my ad hoc experiment, I then search “children’s diary” and am given a page that consists almost entirely of the girls’ diaries from the first search. While it is beyond the purview of this study, there is a larger cultural point to be made here regarding the forces encouraging girls to keep diaries and giving rise to a discomfort that many boys might face when admitting to keeping a diary when the practice is de facto assumed to be for girls. 12 Marcus Aurelius indeed sounds a bit “marymaclaneish” as he exclaims, “Enough of this wretched, whining monkey life!” 13 While this study takes as its focus the diary practices of Native and Anglo women writing during this period, the specific histories of Latina women’s testimonios and African American women’s life-writing practices in the decades that followed the Emancipation are equally rich, and the challenges surrounding the archival study of manuscript diaries of women of color are similar, as I discuss on pages 41-42 of this dissertation. 14 The complexity of the role that BIA boarding schools played in the lives of the Native American children who attended them is considered far more fully in the context of Zitkala- !a’s educational narratives in Chapter Three of this dissertation. 15 See endnote 11. 16 Feminist diary theorists who have been crucial to this study include Margo Culley, Suzanne Bunkers and Cynthia Huff, Harriet Blodgett, and Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. 17 For example, of the nearly 500 manuscript diary holdings at the Huntington Library, the ratio of male to female diaries appears to be approximately 5:1. 18 Philippe LeJeune discusses this body of work at some length in “The ‘Journal de Jeune Fille’ in Nineteenth-Century France.” 49 19 In Chapter Four I explore in more detail this trope of female nudity was linked to female diary in MacLane and capitalized upon by later writers, including Mark Twain, who tapped into the trend by publishing Eve’s Diary in 1906. 20 See Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880- 1920 and Pfister and Schnog, Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America. 21 I discuss these findings in greater detail Chapters Three and Four of this dissertation. 22 In In the Presence of Audience, Deborah Martinson discusses Virginia and Leonard’s dual work on her diaries, in which Leonard frequently made notations after having read them. 23 The affective quality of Buss’s “ethics of love” and Braham’s “lens of empathy” are borne, in my view, from the profound sense of interpersonal respect that reading these diaries fosters. 24 Mai Richie Reed’s diaries of her travels in the American Southwest are representative of the extraordinary diaries kept by non-famous women in the early decades of the twentieth century. Reed’s diary is housed in the manuscripts collection at the Huntington Library. Photograph by the author. 25 I refer here to diaries produced before the technologies of widespread computer use encouraged digital-based diary-keeping, which is easily reproducible and therefore less tied to the original material text. I address the changes to diary-keeping that these technologies have brought about in the Conclusion chapter of this study. 26 Of course, an even superior condition is to come into private possession of diary sets, as Margo Culley and Philippe LeJeune describe having done; however, this circumstance is so fortuitous as be all but impossible. 27 Including photographs of the manuscript volumes when possible. 28 It is useful to note that in his exceedingly influential introduction of the concept of “thick description,” “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” ethnographer Clifford Geertz overtly references the elliptical manuscript akin to diary as a ready example by which to illustrate his meaning: “The point for now is only that ethnography is thick description. What the ethnographer is in face faced with . . . is a multiplicity of complex conceptual structure, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which he must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render. And this is true at the most down-to-earth, jungle field work levels of his activity: interviewing informants, observing rituals, eliciting kin terms, tracing property lines, cencusing households . . . writing his journal. Doing ethnography is like trying to read 50 (in the sense of ‘construct a reading of’) a manuscript—foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior.” 29 Here I borrow James Olney’s evocative phrasing. 30 I am indebted to Sue Hodson, curator of the extensive manuscripts collections at the Huntington Library, for her patient and elucidating conversations with me regarding the sometimes subtle and unexpected considerations that the archivist encounters when acquiring a set of manuscript papers and preparing them for scholarly availability. Hodson’s expertise as an archivist lies in the area of privacy issues, about which the Huntington’s policies are recognized as defining for the field. For any set of diaries written after the mid- twentieth century, the privacy of the author and her immediate family is an obvious concern. Less obvious is the web of third parties who frequently populate diaries, a circumstance that has caused legal problems when, for example, the children of mentioned figures bring suit due to alleged slander or other perceived privacy concerns. For these sometimes subtle reasons, I believe there may always be a lag time of 50 to 100 years before private diaries are available for research by critics of diary literatures. For excellent examinations of these issues, please see Hodson’s publications in the bibliography. 31 That said, because the reputations of large archives remain in their ability to acquire the papers of famous historical and literary figure, the manuscript diaries of less famous figures, who in some periods are disproportionately women and people of color, continue to be only partially represented in the archives. 32 See page 41-44 for a discussion of this persistent problem. 33 Austin was born in 1868 and wrote her first journal in 1888; Zitkala-!a was born in 1876 and published her autobiographical narratives in 1900; MacLane was born in 1881 and published her diary in 1901; and Wa-Wa-Chaw was born in 1888 and wrote her private diary/memoir intermittently through the 1960s. I have organized the chapters of this study to follow this generation of women in a roughly chronological manner in order to understand the practice of diary writing as it developed. 34 “Buffalo Bill” Cody (1846-1917) remains perhaps the most emblematic character to have popularized long-standing notions of the American Old West. His traveling “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West” shows ran for over thirty years—opening in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1883, traveling across Europe in 1887-1888, performing at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, and continuing until it closed its last performances in 1913. 35 O’Keeffe’s quote originates in Elizabeth Duvert, page 201. 36 In Chapter Two, I take up more fully Deloria’s important tracing of Indian playacting as it occurs persistently across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through individuals and 51 organizations ranging from the Campfire Girls, Boy and Girl Scouts, mid-century Indian hobbyists, and late-century New Age movements, for example. 37 The turn-of-the-century discourse surrounding “genius,” particularly female genius, was important to many women writers in this period, as I will discuss in more depth in Chapters Two and Four. 38 Throughout this project I suggest that engaging fully with manuscript diary literatures requires a transdisciplinary approach, one that makes use of the best practices of a number of disciplines that interact with the forms of diary as a unique literary form and writing practice. This dissertation is therefore indebted to the ongoing discourse of scholars from a broad range of disciplines. From the genres of autobiographical practice, life-writing and diary, key figures include Georg Misch, Roy Pascal, Georges Gusdorf, William Spengemann, Philip Spalding, James Olney, Phillippe LeJeune, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, and Linda Anderson. From the feminist study of diary, key figures include Margo Culley, Suzanne Bunkers and Cynthia Huff. From the field of Native American Studies, key figures include Philip Deloria, Hertha D. Sweet Wong, David Brumble III, Arnold Krupat, Gerald Vizenor. Kay Sands, Gretchen Bataille, Ruth Heflin, Catherine Davidson, Clara Sue Kidwell and Alan Velie, From the field of American Cultural Studies and History: T.J. Jackson Lears, John Carlos Rowe, and Cathryn Halverson. From the field of narrative psychology, key figures include Jerome Bruner and Dan McAdams. From the study of the history of psychology in the U.S., key figures include Joel Pfister and Nancy Schnog. From the practice of Archival Studies, key figures include Sue Hodson, Cynthia Huff, and Heather Beattie. 52 CHAPTER TWO “I-Mary, looking on”: The Manuscript Diaries of Mary Hunter Austin “ . . . to accept it, even when it came this revitalizing fluid of which I was for the moment the vase, the cup . . .” —Mary Austin, A Woman of Genius “I see now that it has been a mistake to try to write the story of my life as a woman distinct from my life as an artist. Yet I was moved to make the attempt because of the conviction arrived at through years of intimacy with most of the women who have made my generation notable, that the life of a gifted woman is, in respect to the things that are supposed to count most with women, always a squalid affair.” —Mary Austin, unpublished manuscript fragment Always a complex and prolific writer, two years before her death Mary Hunter Austin published a third-person autobiography that contains no fewer than five distinct “Mary” characters. The one to whom she most closely associated her individuality and “genius” was “I-Mary,” that singular aspect of self who throughout her life served as the concentrated focal point for her associations with language, books, writing, and genius. In the following passage from Earth Horizon, Austin recounts the sudden and life-changing “arrival” of I-Mary into her consciousness: She came so suddenly and always so inevitably that I doubt if anybody ever knew about her, or could be made to understand. This would have been a few months after Mary had passed her fourth birthday. Jim had turned six in July and in September was invested with a primer and started to the public school. He started to school with Pa, going to his office in the morning, and home in the late afternoon, but on blustery days such as this, he was kept in the house. Mother was kneading the bread and Jim was studiously reciting his A B C’s. At the other corner of the bread board, Mary was busy with a bit of pinched off dough and looking over his shoulder. ‘A,’ said Jim, and ‘O.’ ‘O,’ said Mary, making her mouth the shape of the mark. Presently Jim pointed out ‘I.’ ‘Eye?’ said Mary, plumping one floury finger on her own. ‘No,’ said Mother, ‘I, myself, I want a drink, I-Mary.’ ‘I-Mary.’ Something turned over inside her; the picture happened. There was the familiar room, the flurry of snow outside; Mama kneading bread; Jim with his molasses-colored hair ‘roached’ on top, so that the end of the curl 53 fell over in the middle of his forehead; Mary in her flannel frock and blue chambray pinafore, on her stool at the corner of the board . . . how small her hand looked beside Mama’s . . . the grimy bit of dough rolled out like a worm . . . And inside her, I-Mary, looking on. I-Mary, I-Mary, I-Mary! (46, ellipses as in the original text) This close description of the sudden arrival of an observer self, a subjective phenomenon embraced later by both psychologists and mystics, is central to Austin’s life-long self- identification as writer, naturalist, mystic, woman, and “genius.” Throughout her life, Austin would write from the interior position of I-Mary, describing her writing process as one in which she entered a trance to gain access to a transcendent “Inknower,” or “Genius,” in order to produce a body of work that is both intensely observant of the external environment while being simultaneously deeply intuitive in tone and content. Yet as important as I-Mary would come to be to Austin’s “mystical process of writing,” as her friend and rival Willa Cather described it, 1 affording Austin a measure of subjective separation and a cognitive means for accessing what she perceived as an expansive font of human “deep-self” and “genius,” 2 it also made her subject to criticism by her contemporaries, especially insofar as her writings about Native Americans and other subjects external to her direct experience relied upon her peculiarly intuitive approach. Ina Sizer Cassidy, a close friend from Austin’s later years in Taos, writes warmly, but wryly, of Austin’s propounding upon sundry subjects from the authority of the voice of I-Mary: “I-Mary is always well prepared on any subject she investigates” (205). In a lead article for The New Mexico Quarterly, which was published by the tight-knit group of Taos/Santa Fe intellectuals of which Austin had been an integral part, Cassidy remembers a 1923 desert excursion taken with Austin and Austin’s close friend Daniel Trembly MacDougal, director of the Tucson Desert Laboratory. Written four years after Austin’s death, throughout the article Cassidy 54 refers to Austin always as “I-Mary” and captures the tone of patient tolerance afforded Austin by this time in her life: The role of mentor is a favorite one of I-Mary’s, and, with her remarkable memory for the printed word, she really is a rich source of information. Whether this role is prompted by a spirit of generosity, a desire to share her knowledge, a subconscious prompting from her old “teacher” habit, or an exposition of egotism, one is never sure. Her friends commend her for it; her enemies condemn. . . . . Sometimes I-Mary, in the absorption of her subject, forgets that she is not on the lecture platform, bless her! But she does make it interesting, and more understandable. (205) This later-life I-Mary emits a stern warning to Cassidy against removing beautiful olla jars from an abandoned Papago site, proclaiming sagely that “[t]he tribal gods watch here and protect these important caches” (207). Another contemporary, Grant Overton, would describe Austin’s presence as having “an Indian-like solemnity, a pervading shyness. All that she says has a certain value. She speaks seldom. Her utterance is rather slow and her remarks are usually grave. The desert has cloistered her.” Yet the stringent, solemn, oracular voice that Austin cultivated in her later Taos years contrasts dramatically with the lyric I-Mary who wrote a sensuous love-poem to the exotic desert in The Land of Little Rain, a book that twenty-first-century poet Robert Hass has extolled as “a slight, fierce, remarkable book, . . . a secret book of self-invention” (xi, xiii). Both iterations of I-Mary are inseparably entwined with Austin’s lifelong search for what she would call a “tap-root of human genius,” a genius that, for Austin, found its source deep within the land, within women, and within Native peoples of the American West. 55 “I-Mary” and “Genius” In the chapter that follows I take up two sets of unpublished manuscript diaries, each written at a critical moment in Austin’s convoluted writing career, and through these virtually unstudied volumes, I suss out the complex trajectory—by turns exhilarating yet deeply troubling—that the subjective original “genius” of I-Mary follows over time. Biographer Esther Lanigan Stineman captures the pleasures and frustrations of working with the original manuscript materials of an author as varied and vexatious as Austin: “Mary Hunter Austin’s voice is one of the most unusual, gifted, eccentric, exasperating, tragic, enigmatic, elitist, and idiosyncratic in American literature” (1). Certainly Austin’s favor has waxed and waned throughout the decades since her death in 1934. Having published 35 full- length books and over 250 articles in a broad spectrum of more than 65 of popular and elite venues, Austin’s oeuvre spanned the genres of poetry, novel, autobiography, essay, literary theory, social criticism, and popular journalism, and it spoke on subjects as disparate as nature, the desert, California, the American West, politics, women’s rights, water rights, land- centered spirituality, psychic phenomena, Spanish sheep-herding cultures, regional literature, and notably, Native American arts, cultures, languages, and literatures. Viewing herself as a self-taught expert on many subjects, and positioned to exploit a decided flair for drama, Austin was widely called upon for public lectures on her diverse specialties via the Louis J. Alber World Celebrities Lecture Bureau, a national agency that promoted well-known personalities for lectures to civic groups, women’s clubs, literary societies, the Chautauqua circuit, and university events. Receiving $200 or more per lecture, 3 Austin found that a particularly well-received topic, given the public’s insatiable appetite for colorful and nostalgic tales of the “Vanishing Indian,” was her dramatic lecture on “Primitive Woman,” a 56 subject about which she had positioned herself to be a renowned expert (Langlois 155). 4 Austin spent tremendous energy from the 1910s through the end of her career fighting for greater recognition as both “woman writer” and “Western writer,” the two aspects of her writing persona that she perceived as being not fully appreciated in the East Coast centers of literary power. Long out of favor with critics who preferred High Modernism, her work would not receive extensive critical attention until her recovery in the 1980s and 1990s by feminists, poets, and critics of environmental literature, who recognized in Austin a writer who was deeply engaged in expanding the available subjectivities for women, who had long before articulated American literature as a multicultural body bounded only by diffuse “lost borders,” and who effused lyrically about the stark beauty of the parched landscapes of the American West, lamenting “I am too arid for tears, and for laughter / too sere with unslaked desires” (“Song of a Maverick,” lines 1-2). Yet Austin is indeed, just as Stineman describes, an “exasperating” writer, and for every line of expansive lyric beauty in her work, one likewise finds a paternalistic line extolling upon her own unique insight into the “noble natures” of “primitive” peoples, an assumption that unavoidably gives pause to twenty-first-century readers first approaching Austin. “I had a long and intimate acquaintance with primitives,” she writes as support for her own deep and intuitive authority as an expert on Pueblo art, for example. “If I don’t know about Indian Arts, who does?” she asks without a hint of irony in a 1931 letter to the U.S. Secretary of the Interior. Stung by the rebukes of male experts who relied upon, in her words, “formal intellectualization” and an “ivy league education,” Austin argued for the viability of an epistemological approach that relied upon her “creative instincts” and “feminine intuition” for her unique ability to grasp a deeper truth, claiming: “I have naturally 57 a mimetic temperament that draws me toward the understanding of life by living it” (American Rhythm 37). Recognizing Austin’s unwavering confidence in the validity of her intuition as a reliable research method is crucial not only to making sense of her writing about Native American cultures, but also to understanding her self-designed strategies for insisting upon voice and authority for women during a period in which women writers were often undervalued as “merely” domestic, regional, or otherwise not authorized to speak on weighty matters. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century critics of Austin have fallen largely into two separate camps, depending upon which aspect of her voluminous body of work they most fully address. Those readers who focus on Austin’s early work, the rhapsodic and lyrical portrayals of the then-exotic aridity of the California desert in The Land of Little Rain and her social critiques of the limitations placed on women artists in A Woman of Genius, for example, find much to appreciate in Austin. Writing against prevailing tradition, Austin muscularly insisted upon an expanded place for women writers in the public marketplace, and she did so by creating a version of independent female selfhood that had scarcely been seen before, rooted firmly in the rugged and “genius”-cultivating American West. Yet at the same time, those readers who address primarily her works on Native American cultures, particularly those later works that carry the full weight of her unflinching confidence in her own interior authority, find a writer whose voice seems at odds with her earlier voice and one whose egocentrism and whose market-driven appropriation of Native cultures and even Native identity is difficult to reconcile with the first lyric contributions of this “I-Mary” voice. The discrepancy between these conflicting voices has divided critics: those readers interested in environmental literature and feminist recovery (including T.M. Pearce, Augusta Fink, Melody 58 Graulich, Robert Hass, and others) at first celebrated the recovery of a largely forgotten feminist writer with analyses that largely overlooked the inconvenient racism of much of her work. Graulich explains, “Critics were excited and intrigued by Austin’s portrayals of powerful, unconventional women; her exploration of women artists; her role as a feminist theorist; her portrayals of relations between women; her re-vision of male themes and myths, particularly of the American West; her depictions of American Indian women; and her strong, original, often defiant voice” (xiv). In time, American studies and cultural critics (including Karen S. Langlois, Sherry Smith, Joel Pfister, Alan Trachtenberg, and others) excoriated Austin for her appropriative and colonizing stance toward Native peoples, ridiculing her “career as an Indian savant” (Langlois 158) and her “abundant self-confidence regarding knowledge of Indian cultures and art”(Smith 177), even while she viewed herself as a much-needed “Indian advocate” arguing for the humanity of Native peoples in a period that still debated the exact location of where Native peoples and other non-Europeans fell on an assumed racial scala naturae of biologically determined complexity and intellectual aptitude. While the critical discussion has largely bifurcated into these two camps, each of which has independently made arguments that are perceptive and appropriate regarding Austin’s complicated contribution to American letters, in this chapter, I wish to offer a set of previously unstudied manuscript materials that may partially bridge this division in scholarship. Rather than reproducing the critical view that approaches Austin’s writing as if it were in effect two separate bodies of work—one body that is embraced as liberatory by feminists and a separate body that is decried as colonizing by cultural critics—in this chapter I will argue that these two trajectories are not only important to understand individually, but 59 are in fact inseparably linked for Austin. That is, not only is Austin’s self-promoted expertise as “Indian advocate” not unrelated to her feminism, it is in fact one of the overt strategies she devised specifically in order to extend her reach and power as a female writer, as well as a rhetorical means for expanding a national discussion of women’s roles and rights. Even more, Austin’s strategic version of feminism caused her to draw an explicit parallel in her fiction and drama between the oppression of Native cultures, whom she consistently linked to an ancient land-based spiritual power, to that of women, whom she argued likewise drew their greatest power from an ancient, land-based, “genius” intuition that she strove to make visible to a white masculinist reading public. This strategy was one that would have mixed, often negative, effects for Native peoples, yet I will argue it is impossible to understand Austin’s work without recognizing these connections as crucial to her strategy for gaining access to ever greater empowerment. For Austin’s overriding preoccupation throughout her long writing career returns again and again to center around the question of “genius,” particularly female genius, which for her was embodied in the figure of I-Mary, and to which she had unique access by virtue of her geographic rootedness in the West and her association with, in her words, “the genius process in the stone age of culture as exhibited by my friends, the Indians” (Everyman’s Genius). Drawing from both “sides” of the critical divide on Austin, in this chapter, I wish neither to celebrate, nor to excoriate, but instead to understand more fully the pressures, mechanisms, and compromises that make themselves apparent in a close reading of Austin’s lifelong project toward developing an independent version of female subjectivity within the complex milieu of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. I will suggest that a new view into Austin’s work is to be gained by closely reading two fascinating sets of unpublished manuscript diary materials that were written coincident 60 to two critical periods in Austin’s writing career. The first set includes three manuscript books associated with Austin’s first move to the sparse, exotic outland of the Mojave region of California. Compiled in the years spanning 1889-1903, this set includes a traditional diary that Austin called her “Tejon Journal,” as well as a sketchbook she titled “Wildflowers of Inyo County, 1901” and a scrapbook she titled “Sketches and Photographs of Inyo County, 1903.” 5 Coinciding with her first published writing, including several short sketches for Overland magazine and The Atlantic Monthly and the 1903 publication that would elicit her most lasting praise, The Land of Little Rain, this set of diary materials provides an unparalleled glimpse into the burgeoning “genius” of I-Mary in its first flowering. Equally important to this study is a second set of diary materials written at a point in Austin’s career when she had moved East to Greenwich Village and was attempting to define herself publically as a national artist. Resenting what she felt as her marginalization as a Western and female writer, in 1911-1912, Austin was striving to be taken seriously for her social novels that explored the constraints placed on the woman artist, yet she was also just discovering the cachet that her newfound New York literati acquaintances attached to her identity as a woman from the “exotic” and isolated West, creating a rift between the work to which she felt committed and her desire for literary career success. Written during the period in which she published both her social novel A Woman of Genius and the play The Arrow-Maker, ostensibly an “Indian culture play” but perhaps more saliently a feminist allegory, these diaries provide insight into the pressures and compromises of identity formation for Austin, and by extension for the pressures exerted on many white women artists and writers in this period. Looking at these two sets of unpublished diary materials in the context of the published writing that Austin 61 was producing simultaneously affords us a view into the development of her peculiar “genius,” that “inknowing” I-Mary who consistently links her work across the decades. Mary Hunter, “I-Mary,” and “Mary-by-herself” in Carlinville, Illinois While Austin viewed herself as a Western writer, and is invariably discussed as such, she was in fact born in the settled Midwestern community of Carlinville, Illinois, in 1868 and was raised there until she moved to California with her family at the age of 19. Born into a largely conventional middle-class Protestant family, Mary Hunter was particularly close to her father, George Hunter, a Yorkshire attorney who had emigrated to the U.S. and served as a captain in the Civil War. Never fully recovering from the malaria he had contracted while hiding in a swampy Southern marsh during the war, George Hunter’s death in 1878 was a long-expected, yet heartbreaking blow to the young Mary. A bookish man, George Hunter shared his love of literature with his nine-year-old daughter, in whose precociousness he delighted, according to Austin’s later recollections. Doubling the loss, Mary’s younger sister Jennie died unexpectedly from diphtheria a mere two months later, a tragedy that the young Mary blamed squarely on her mother’s delay in securing a physician for Jennie. After losing the only two family members to whom she felt close, Mary retreated inward. In her autobiography, Earth Horizon, Austin portrays a strained relationship with her mother, Susanna Graham Hunter, whom she paints as a conventional woman who openly preferred Austin’s elder brother Jim and who did not appreciate her daughter’s regard for books and learning. Accounts differ about Susanna Hunter’s character, however, as the family’s Carlinville neighbor Mrs. Keplinger recalled, “Susie Graham was a brilliant woman” who “didn’t care for domestic affairs much more than her daughter, but she never missed a 62 lecture or chautauqua; and she spoke well herself, as she had occasion to do in the temperance movement developing then” (Pearce 35-36). Yet certainly the young Mary felt herself to be profoundly misunderstood. In their recent biography of Austin, Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson describe Mary’s sense of isolation and the interior divisions it induced: At the best of times, Mary Hunter felt herself a changeling. Her needs and tastes differed so drastically from those of her siblings and mother that she thought of herself as two separate people: “I-Mary,” a confident young woman embraced by the world, and “Mary-by-herself,” an outcast, as her phrase suggests, isolated from society and her kin. (13) Left in dire financial straits by the death of her husband, Susanna Hunter, whose family had originally descended from the genteel French Daguerres, hired herself out as a nurse, leaving ten-year-old Mary to care for her two-year-old brother, George. Precocious, quiet, and introspective, Mary from the first gave the impression of being an unusual child, as Mrs. Keplinger recalled: She was always an oddity . . . . She had two great braids of hair on top of her head and used to wander around the yard staring at everything. I always wanted to see down into her, but I never felt that I could. I couldn’t fathom her. My husband used to look out the window at her and say to me, ‘I wonder what will become of Mary. I wonder what she will be.’ (Pearce 79) 63 Figure 3. The Hunter family, ca. 1880. Jim, Mary, Susanna, and George. Yet despite the family’s dramatic fall in fortune and her concerns about Mary’s “oddity,” Susanna did well by her daughter in enrolling her in the small local Presbyterian Blackburn College, to which Mary matriculated at the age of sixteen. Despite her love of literature and her desire to write, Mary first chose to major in psychology, then switched to botany, reasoning: “English . . . I can study myself; for science I have to have laboratories and a teacher” (Earth Horizon 167). As is evident in the observational quality of her nature writing, her diaries, and much of her fiction, Austin’s writing would always reflect her original training in the natural sciences, and she remarks on the melding of the two orientations as constitutive of her unique perspective upon the world: “. . . it was, though Mary did not know it herself, the born novelist’s identification with alien personalities, the scientist’s itch to understand by getting inside the material in which he works” (Earth Horizon 159). Immediately upon Mary’s graduation from Blackburn in 1888, the Hunter family 64 undertook an adventurous and arduous move west to California to join eldest son Jim, who had scouted out land near Rancho El Tejon, believing that a good living could be made by cultivating the vast arid regions of western land, a providential belief that Hass notes was “based on the widespread nineteenth-century fantasy that water somehow ‘followed the plow’” (xxvi). Already determined to put her unusual intellect to use as a writer, Mary Hunter kept notes about the punishing, exhilarating journey from Carlinville first by train to San Francisco, by steamer to Los Angeles, by stagecoach to Pasadena, and by horse across the Tehachapi Mountains into the Tejon Valley. “One Hundred Miles on Horseback,” her first published work, would appear early the following year in The Blackburnian, the newspaper of her recent alma mater, which provided a small and familiar readership for whom Mary Hunter would tailor a dramatic tale in her first step toward staking out an independent, rugged, unusual female adventurer self. In an early indication of her lifelong impulse for anticipating her audience, Mary opened her first published piece by sketching a scene that would not only please her landlocked Midwestern readers, but also in one quick brushstroke would educate, impress, and implicitly telegraph her authority to them: Those whose lives have been spent in the prairie lands of Illinois can have little conception of the pleasure of a journey on horseback through the most picturesque part of California. To us, wearied with two thousand miles of hot and dusty railroad travel, and two days and nights of anguish in a Pacific coast steamer, the prospect was delightful beyond comparison. (1) 65 Figure 4. Blackburn College Class of 1888. Mary Hunter at far left. From her very first weeks in California, for Austin the vast unscriptedness of the American West became linked to the written word as being crucial to the success of what she herself would identify as “one of man’s earliest instinctive efforts to achieve subjective coördination” (Earth Horizon 159). For a writer whose lifelong output would suggest a struggle to achieve this “coördination” of selfhood, Austin’s notable self-awareness in her 1932 autobiography is telling. In future years, Austin would connect her overriding yearning for an independent subjectivity to a prevailing discourse surrounding “genius,” which offered women intellectuals and artists an expeditious escape from the strictures that had traditionally limited them. Austin writes of this period as a still moment when “life stood at the beating pause between the old ways and the new,” and Nancy Porter describes Austin as part of a “transitional generation of women” who negotiated the compromise of “relinquish[ing] the perquisite of protected genteel womanhood for the rewards and 66 responsibilities of the pursuit of public achievement” (296-97). Elizabeth Ammons argues that this turn-of-the-century generation grew to refuse the category of “woman writer” in order to claim instead the title of “artist”: Paradoxically, this claim both liberated and confined women. On the one hand, they found themselves free from many of the limited definitions that had constricted women aspiring to be artists in earlier periods . . . . On the other hand, turn-of-the-century women writers found themselves, often in deep, subtle ways, emotionally stranded between worlds. They floated between a past they wished to leave (sometimes ambivalently, sometimes defiantly) and a future they had not yet gained. They were full members neither of their mothers’ world, at the one extreme, nor of that of the privileged white male artist, at the other. Further, the ways of living and types of writing associated with “art” had by and large been shaped by men; they were not necessarily compatible with the kinds of lives and types of stories that women writers wished to express. Tension between the tradition they aspired to enter and the lives and fictions they sought to create as women was inevitable. (10) For Austin, a linchpin in her strategy to negotiate this tension would be her articulation of female genius, about which Stineman concludes “of all the problems Austin grappled with as a writer, none preoccupied her more than exploration of the nature of genius,” which she linked inextricably to her Westernness and to her engaged relationships with Native peoples as she first encountered them in the isolated Tejon Valley. The California Journals While her easy comfort in claiming the term “genius” would not come for several self-doubting years, Austin’s unpublished California journals reveal a writer who was already conscious of and vigilant about developing an ineffable something that she already suspected was somehow unique to her. Already deeply concerned with whether her writing “was good or not,” Austin records her anticipation after having shown an early poem about “wild 67 hyacinths . . . on the mesa, long twining stems between two green spears” to “a lady” whom her mentor, the colorful General Edward Beale, had assured her “would be able to tell me if they were good” (mss 15). Despite the Mrs. John A Logan’s warm letter or encouragement to the budding writer, Austin registered immediate discontent: “. . . I don’t know what she knows about poetry. People seem to think you just want to be praised, but I want to feel sure” (mss 19). Throughout these early diaries, already evident are the themes, preoccupations, and stylistic elements that would carry through her published work for four decades. The volume is perhaps most similar in its “fierce” voice and theme to The Land of Little Rain, the book that many critics have assumed to be her most important literary contribution. 6 Containing sketches and anecdotes of the land, its rhythms, its people, and its nonhuman inhabitants, the journals reveal the fresh, curious, appealing, and often contrarian voice of a young woman who was already preoccupied with large questions about life, death, and spirituality, and who had already trained her keen observation toward seeking the proper balance of relationships between people and the land. Compiled intermittently between 1888 to 1903, Austin’s California journals provide an unparalleled view into the early development of the aspiring writer, for whom it seemed that every turn of the path provided a new, alien, and utterly absorbing vista. Approaching all things with an observant bent that combined scientist with artist, Austin’s eye from the very first perceived the desert from a completely original perspective, one that saw in the subtleties of the desert a physical and often dark natural drama that she was able to translate into small narratives that were suspenseful, gripping, and engagingly human. This skill was made evident on a national stage when Austin’s very first published book was enthusiastically embraced by an Eastern readership who read with a deep curiosity about the 68 storied West that it had little likelihood of visiting firsthand. First published as a series of short “local color” sketches in The Atlantic Monthly, The Land of Little Rain humanizes the arid desert in a way that had not yet been seen, and it centers around the preoccupation with water—the thirst for which is ubiquitous in Austin’s writing. Water, for Austin, characterized both the great unquenchable thirst that drove the West, as well as a more profoundly metaphysical human thirst for an ineffable “quenching” to which she would return again and again in her work. Relying neither on the mythic tales of “cowboys and Indians” that were widely popularized in boys’ magazines and dime novels, nor on the sentimental appeal of Helen Hunt Jackson’s wildly popular 1884 novel Ramona (storied to have been set just 50 miles south in Rancho Camulos), Austin’s narrative interpretation of desert life announced itself immediately as something thoroughly new. Early in The Land of Little Rain she writes: By the end of the dry season the water trails of the Ceriso are worn to a white ribbon in the leaning grass, spread out faint and fanwise toward the homes of gopher and ground rat and squirrel. But however faint to man- sight, they are sufficiently plain to the furred and feathered folk who travel them. Getting down to the eye level of rat and squirrel kind, one perceives what might easily be wide and winding roads to us if they occurred in thick plantations of trees three times the height of man. It needs but a slender thread of barrenness to make a mouse trail in the forest of the sod. To the little people the water trails are as country roads, with scents as signboards. (11) For Eastern readers accustomed to the West as backdrop for tall-tale adventures or tragic, sentimental love stories, this perspective from “the eye level of rat and squirrel” revealed an compelling new panorama, and it remapped the desert in ways that made it hospitable for eastern Americans while retaining its arid exoticism and its land-centered appeal. Graulich concludes that “Austin’s descriptions of the natural world often instruct her readers how to 69 read the desert landscape of the ‘country of lost borders,’ which looks lifeless to the uninitiated but is actually filled with complex patterns” (xiii). Later in the book Austin anthropomorphizes the speech of even those natural creatures that least appeal to humans: There are three kinds of noises buzzards make, —it is impossible to call them notes, —raucous and elemental. There is a short croak of alarm, and the same syllable in a modified tone to serve all the purposes of ordinary conversation. The old birds make a kind of throaty chuckling to their young, but if they have any love song I have not heard it. (51) Humanizing even the odious buzzard as speaking in “conversation” and “chuckling” to their young, Austin’s intuitive anticipation of her readers’ viewpoint and her continual translations of the natural world to a human perspective would become hallmarks of her approach. 7 For Austin, this impulse to engage and sometimes shock her readers can be found in even the very first lines of her first extant journal, which opens with a sketch that is notable for its detailed yet uninflected observation of danger, death, and desiccation in the arid desert: The ground is baked hard, the roads are powdery. Buzzards sit on every fence post. A few lean cattle totter in the trails, they lie down and can not get up. The buzzards walk around them and even perch on their backs. But they do not begin to eat until the life is well out of them. The cow-boys tell me that coyotes will begin as soon as the stock is down. They like the warm blood. (mss 1) Unflinching in its calm description of imminent death, Austin’s sangfroid would have been viewed as remarkable, even scandalous for a young woman of the 1880s. Yet Austin viewed herself as a botanist and natural scientist, as well as a literary writer, and she described painstakingly what she observed in the landscape before her. She continues the first entry by narrating her participation of a scene not uncommon for California desert settlers: Driving up for water we drove through a band of sheep. An eagle swooped down and carried off a lamb not 30 yards from us and rose slowly. Jim shot 70 it. It was measured 7 ft – 7 in from tip to tip of wings and 4 ft – 4 in from beak to tail. The lamb did not make any noise when the eagle struck but the eagle screamed harshly when the herder struck at it with his staff. (mss 1-2) Her undaunted descriptions of the violence and inevitable death of the natural world mark her as a writer who is both trajecting out of a nineteenth-century preoccupation with death while retelling it in an unsentimental voice that would speak to a new century. Describing her singular achievement in The Land of Little Rain, Hass categorizes the book as “the last book in the genre of Victorian nature study and one of the first in the emerging genre of twentieth-century environmental literature” (xii). Further, he suggests, it is “a book that told the country something about itself,” a feat that in retrospect is important to understanding the wide-ranging national project toward articulating the boundaries of a core shared national identity, one that Austin throughout her career would argue must necessarily embrace both the land and its original inhabitants. Written in a consistent right-leaning slant in pale black-grey ink, Austin’s journal format does not at first appear notably different from hundreds of women’s diaries of the period, though its contents are striking in their resolute observation of the darks and lights that make up an alien natural world. As with many manuscript diaries, the first several pages of the diary are the most carefully penned, as if the writer finds herself gradually warming up to her task and losing self-consciousness, and within a few pages Austin’s lower-case t-cross begins missing its base, trailing behind by as much as a millimeter to hover over the rest of the word. This characteristic habit is one that Austin will continue lifelong throughout her handwritten work whenever she picks up speed. Lined in pale blue, the pages are edged in red and worn at their rounded corners. In this first volume, Austin does not divide her entries by date, as is most common for diaries of this period, though she does indicate 71 month, and the separations between entries can frequently be surmised by subtle changes in handwriting, ink intensity, and skipped lines. Externally the slim volume is bound in a dark black-brown hardboard with a deep burgundy spine, and we may deduce that Mary purchased this notebook for 10 cents on her way through Los Angeles, as it bears the price next to the purpled stamp of Jones’ Book Store. The inner page identifies the volume in Austin’s handwriting: “1888 at Tejon near General Beale’s Ranch.” 8 Figure 5. Detail of a page from the “Tejon Journal.” 9 Austin had been in the Tejon Valley for several months when she began to keep this journal, and during this time she had already established the habits of “sit[ting] out among the dunes in moonlight” and riding throughout the desert alone on horseback, much to the consternation of her mother, who worried about her health and reputation. Suffering poor health intermittently throughout her life, in 1885 Austin had suffered what her family called a “breakdown” of health that she would later attribute to the stifling nature of settled small- town domestic life in Carlinville. Just one month before penning these careful lines in her 72 diary, she had recovered from a second prolonged break in health that she later attributed both to physical malnutrition from attempting to subsist on settlers’ poor fare of wild rabbits and venison purchased from “Mountain Men” (Goodman and Dawson 9) and to being “plagued with an anxiety to know” (Earth Horizon 196). Writing of her experience in her autobiography some 40 years later, Austin by then had forged a link between the dual hungers she experienced during her first months in the desert: Her trouble was that the country failed to explain itself. If it had a history, nobody could recount it. Its creatures had no known life except such as she could discover by unremitting vigilance of observation; its plants no names that her Middlewestern botany could supply. She did not know yet what were its weather signs, nor what the procession of its days might bring forth. Until these things elucidated themselves factually, Mary was spellbound in an effort not to miss any animal behavior, any bird-marking, any weather signal, any signature of tree or flower. Animals are like that, thrust into strange captivity, caught up into fearful question, refusing food and sleep until they die. But in Mary’s case there was no fear but that she might miss the significance of the question, to which as yet she had no answer, the magic words which would unlock as much at least as anybody knew of the meaning of what she saw. (Earth Horizon 194-95) Explaining her bout of ill health and “apathy” on this restless hunger for understanding, what she called “the black spell of her wanting to know,” and describing herself as an animal attempting to acclimate to an unfamiliar environment, Austin describes her “cure” as being deeply sourced in her new surroundings, and its discovery as providing a profound breakthrough that would propel her forward to her destined career as a writer: The deadlock was broken by the discovery, after the leaves were off, of wild grapes in one of the Tejon canyons, and after a week or two of almost exclusive grape diet, Mary began to pick up amazingly. It was so like Mary, her family remarked to almost starve to death on a proper Christian diet and go and get well on something grubbed out of the woods. But there was more to the incident than that; there was the beginning of a notion in Mary’s mind of a poor appetite of any sort being cured by its proper food; that there was something you could do about unsatisfactory conditions besides being heroic or a martyr to them, something more satisfactory than enduring or 73 complaining, and that was getting out to hunt for the remedy. This, for young ladies in the eighteen-eighties, was a revolutionary discovery to have made. (195) For Austin this cure was both physical, her nutritional malnourishment having been resolved through the wild foods provided by nature and procured independently, and it was simultaneously deeply resonant with a concomitant spiritual hunger. Goodman and Dawson remark that “‘[m]alnutrition seems the perfect metaphor for a young woman starved for meaningful work and affection” (9), and Austin highlights in her autobiography the sudden and profound insight she attained as the possibilities for self-defined agency became suddenly and manifestly available for a young woman who had been raised merely to “endur[e] or complain[].” The significance that Austin assigned this breakdown and subsequent resolution in health is important both to Austin’s recollection of her development and also as it sets the stage for the diary she was inspired to produce immediately upon the restoration of her health. In the weeks of her first breaking away from the familial and societal restrictions upon her, Austin analyzes in her journal her stubborn compulsion to explore the vast desert alone on horseback: I suppose it is not really safe, as I know so little about horses and people tell me it is easy to get lost. I heard Mother tell Mrs. Dunham that she hoped something would happen to give me a good scare, as she is never easy a minute when I am out of sight. I think the openness of everything scares Mother, she has always lived in towns. And it frets her that I am not homesick. I can not make her understand that I am never homesick out of doors, but that in people’s homes, especially in houses that she calls “home- like” and “beautifully furnished” I am often very homesick. I used to be homesick in our own house. But I am not homesick with the sky, nor with the hills though I am sometimes afraid of them. (mss 6) 74 While in this journal Austin does not explicitly reference her recent bout of “malnutrition,” in these lines we see a young woman who has begun to dare to resist tradition and to be guided by an interior drive that is at odds with social and domestic expectation. In this passage, Austin not only narrates the resistance implicit in rejecting her mother’s dictates and flouting her fears, but she also does so in notably domestic terms. Austin swiftly and irreparably reverses the word “homesickness,” a domestic term that calls to mind a host of expectations surrounding the proper role of nostalgia in family life. Implicitly rejecting a conventional usage that is represented by Mother and Mrs. Dunham, a small coterie representing feminine respectability, Austin turns the word on its head: “Homesickness” is not merely a nostalgic longing for “home,” but is more saliently the “sickness” that can be caused by too much restriction in the “home”—a potentially deadly trap for a curious, adventurous young woman like Austin. Within just the very first few pages of Austin’s private journal, we see a remarkable turn of language and an emerging confidence to flout societal norms in search of an individually self-defined and more compelling iteration of subjectivity. One momentous influence to the development of Austin’s daring resistance can be traced to the looming figure of General Edward Beale. A storybook hero who seemed larger than life, Beale was owner and patron of the sprawling 270 thousand acre Rancho El Tejon, and by 1889 he was well-known as the legendary military veteran, war hero, frontiersman, rancher, Indian agent, and friend to notable American characters including Kit Carson, Buffalo Bill Cody, and Ulysses Grant. Friends would describe him as “a sparkling combination of scholar, gentleman, and Indian fighter” (Thompson). Seen in his time as a celebrated American hero, one who had “successfully pursued a personal El Dorado of 75 adventure, status, and wealth,” Beale was easily the most mythic and famous person Austin had come to know in her twenty years. In her journal, she writes a shorthand list of the stories he had told her to date, as if to commit them to memory: General Beale has come back to the ranch[,] a charming old gentleman. He has already told me unforgettable things about the Commodore’s buttons about the battle with Pio Pico about Kit Carson about how he carried the official news of gold to Washington. (mss 13) In something much like awe of her new acquaintance, Austin sensed that he recognized her rare qualities, and she became furious when her mother (concerned perhaps about her reputation) strongly cautioned her against forming a close friendship. As she would do throughout her life, Austin resented the restriction and attributed it to her mother’s continual and unfair privileging of her brother Jim. Relating the interest that “Gen. Beale” had shown in her poetry, Austin complains, “Mother didn’t like my showing them, she said I would bore him, and that it is Jim he is interested in, not me” (mss 15). But Beale was something of a closet writer himself, penning philosophical lines in his own journal— “Thoughts, feelings, passions, and events—these are the real moral timekeepers. What is it to me the mere ticking of a pendulum!” 10 And he had indeed recognized something original in Austin. He encouraged her to develop this talent, despite the restrictions of her gender, and he provided her not only a model for daring and self-contained independence, but also her first connections with a larger literary world in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Years later, Austin would praise Beale for what she viewed as his enlightened view of Native Americans, stating that he believed “it is wiser for Indians to become the best sort of Indians rather than poor imitation whites,” a view that aligned with her deeply critical view of the 76 efforts of Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools to assimilate and “Americanize” Native children. While Beale’s long interactions with Native peoples are neither so simple nor so defensible, it is the case that later in life he had come to respect the specific Native families living within Rancho El Tejon, and that he encouraged Austin to develop first-hand relationships with them. In an age when few white Californians were even aware of the vast diversity of California tribal affiliations, Austin’s committed efforts to learn directly from the local Chumash, Yokut, Serrano, Cahuilla, Gabrieleño, and Mojave peoples of her personal acquaintance, was, if nothing else, unusual for a middle-class white woman of her generation. And some of the most striking passages in both her diaries and her published work from this period come in those brief moments that paint fine portraits of the individual men and women she met during these years. Stineman describes Austin as being “[f]ascinated by the habits of those whose lives were regulated by the rhythms of the land” (82), and nearly every close human description from this period is centered either on a Native woman, such as basket-weaver Sevayi; on a Spanish, Mexican, or Native shepherd, such as Little Jim or Kern River Pete; or on a mysterious woman so radically displaced from society and integrated with nature as to have no name at all, called simply the “Walking Woman” by locals. Unlike anyone else publishing at this time, in this regard Austin makes a unique narrative double move: On one hand, she foregrounds the needs and sensibilities of her human readers by placing them at the “eye level of rat and squirrel,” demonstrating a deeply savvy understanding of her readership by translating animal perspectives into human ones, and thereby compellingly interpellating her readers as participants in an alien world as she shifts their view from one close-up natural object to another. On the other hand, with the exception of the comparatively rare passages in which this close-up is trained on a human 77 subject, Austin’s prose keeps humans present, but present only in the most narratively distant locations. For Austin, people are merely one part of the natural world and are scarcely privileged as separate from or superior to it, a viewpoint that was rare among her contemporaries. She minimizes or even absents altogether the human actors for large swaths of this larger, more ancient drama, and when she does train her focus on human actors, they are indivisibly knit within the landscape. This relationship is woven so seamlessly through Austin’s work that a reader becomes aware of this narrative move only when comparing it to the writing of her contemporaries, for whom humans are the central players and the landscape serves merely as backdrop. While this approach to the humans vis-à-vis the natural world would become more familiar in later environmental writing (including the literary output of Austin’s younger friend in the Carmel artist colony, Robinson Jeffers, and the later environmental writer who would begrudgingly acknowledge a debt to Austin, Edward Abbey) within the publishing world to which Austin contributed her work, this was an utterly new perspective, and one that struck a chord immediately with her readership. 11 That said, while unremarked upon in her own period, in recent years this narrative assumption has caused critics to question Austin’s strategy as essentializing the peoples and characters (Native Americans, Spanish shepherds, and others) who are embedded within the landscapes in her works. Indeed, Austin’s views in this matter are contradictory, and they reveal a tension that lies at the heart of both her work and the racial attitudes of the larger culture of which she was a member. While critiquing Austin’s approach within the context of her useful discussion of the cadre of white writers who centered their careers in writing about Native American subjects, Sherry Smith comments upon the complications of 78 understanding the progressive versus reactionary status of these writers’ opinions at any given time: Most of my sample lurched toward rethinking ‘the Indian’ in fits and starts, humanizing Native Americans on one page and dehumanizing them on the next; giving Indians histories at one point, but denying them a future at another; using the language of race, while simultaneously undercutting its power and meaning; rooting their understandings in old concepts of primitivism or social evolutionism, while concurrently moving toward new ones such as cultural relativism. (213) In a period when Native American writers were just beginning to write self-told autobiographies, such as those produced by Zitkala-!a and Charles Eastman, white writers and scholars saw little problem in attempting to speak for indigenous peoples, and most often, in fact, they viewed themselves as being radically progressive for having done so. In this regard, Austin’s writing is of a piece with many of her contemporaries: These authors and most “western” ethnographers, whether professional or popular, never doubted their authority to speak for “natives.” It was a time when Indians were just beginning to gain the education, language, skills, and publishing connections that would allow them more direct access to non- Indian readers. It was a time when Indians were just beginning to assert their right to speak for themselves. Moreover, it was a time when many intellectuals believed that all distinctive ways of life were destined to dissolve into the “modern”; and no one imagined these distinctive ways would reassert themselves . . . . (Smith 13) In the midst of her critique, Smith reminds readers that given the starkly anti-Indian rhetoric of the period, potentially positive outcomes that could be wrought among a mainstream white audience even from language that sounds strikingly paternalistic to twenty-first century ears: Astoundingly simple messages such as Indians are human beings, Indians have families that love one another, and Indians carry on lives of religious beauty and deep spirituality served to counter deeply held notions that Indians were more bestial than human, had little sense of connection to family or home, and were pagans. (15) 79 In this context, the positions and actions of both Beale, that reformed “Indian fighter,” and Austin, the curious and progressive white woman who attempted to understand and “befriend the Indian,” must be recognized as being embedded in what must have seemed an impossibly confusing web of social theories about race and progress. Trained as a scientist, Austin’s primary strategy for cutting through the complications of these abstractions was to attempt to observe and delineate her subject in extraordinary detail, painstakingly recording the most minute features and implicitly purporting, at least, to allow her readers to draw their own conclusions from the available evidence. In passing, Austin describes the shadows that fell in a field the locals called the “Weed Patch”: The shadows on the sands are blue. The bush lupine shadows are blue and the shadows of the yellow-flowered bushes that Juan calls charmise. But the shadows of the sagebrush are a kind of rust sun burned black, and are stretch[ed] tight to the ground, they are not airy like the other shadows. (mss 8) 12 The close attention to the shifting light, the fine gradations in color, and the sculptural qualities of density and airiness suggests a perspective that embodies the observational qualities of the botanist, as Austin often pointed out, and it simultaneously brings to mind that of the attentive artist, as well. In fact, as her sketchbooks reveal, Austin was skilled in the visual arts, with her greatest strengths revealing themselves, perhaps characteristically, in her close-up studies of natural objects. The large sketchbook to which she attached the title “Wildflowers of Inyo County 1901” contains 19 pages of meticulously observed watercolor sketches of local flora, each page containing three to five specimens in the manner of the beautifully rendered botanical studies of the nineteenth century. Drawn in a delicate and skilled hand, these paintings burst with color and reveal the artist’s acute observational gifts. 80 Dawson and Goodman comment, quite correctly, that these rarely viewed pages “suggest the road not taken, a career she might have chosen as a visual artist” (10). Tucked into the back of this sketchbook are two unfinished views that differ notably from the close-up wildflowers. Attempting to capture the panoramic perspective of the larger landscape, these two paintings reveal far less skill than the close-up renderings, and are perhaps emblematic of Austin’s perceptive gifts as a whole. Her most successful work, in both images and words, comes most often when she attends with preternatural closeness to the finest details of her subject. Figure 6. A page from “Wildflowers of Inyo County 1901.” 13 81 Compiled two years later, the multiform sketchbook that Austin titled “Sketches and Photographs of Inyo County 1903,” is a rich and surprising little book, stuffed with photographs, pen-and-ink sketches, and small, pointed narratives. Fine close-detail work again abounds in this book, which is illustrated throughout with her clear drawings of unusual objects: specialty bells, a ranchhand’s homemade water pouch, roughhewn working tools, etc. Austin includes multiple views of the clever nozzle and screw-top of a “goat-skin wine bottle from Ostend” (mss 6) and she includes the measurements of an unusual bag she identifies as a “cayacs.” She lavishes attention on a beautiful hand-made yoke, which she identifies as “the yoke and bell of Narcisses Duplin’s best-leader called Le Dieable” (mss 9). As a sidenote, she records the criticism this rendering had received: “Pete says yoke is drawn with too much flare.” She has pasted in photographs of “cow-boys” at work, goat and sheep herders amidst their flocks, Little Pete’s busy sheds at shearing time, and a family grouping comprised of two women and five children at home in their small adobe and saguaro thatched house. She includes a beautifully lit full-page photograph of the view from her open-walled study that she identifies as “looking toward Kearsarge from my wickiup across Naboth’s field and the long trail” (mss 19). A small clutch of chickens pecks the ground in the lower right corner. 82 Figure 7. Pages from “Sketches and Photographs of Inyo County 1903.” 14 83 These more visually oriented manuscript materials combine with the diaries and published work that she produced during these years to reveal a woman who had been reared in a conventional middle-class Midwestern environment yet who had become enamored with a landscape that she viewed as exotic, utterly novel, and deeply “tap-rooted” into a spiritual reality that her more “civilized” upbringing had allowed to wither and die. They also reveal an emerging artist who was beginning to find her material and to make her mark on it. Austin learned quickly that her work was most compelling when she allowed her peculiar knack for seeing her subjects closely, almost as if viewed from “within,” as she would later recall. This skill becomes evident visually when comparing her detailed watercolor sketches to her far less successful panoramic vistas, and over time she would come to apply this skill in close portrayal to her human subjects, as well. In later years, Austin would write novels that attempted to reveal a broader view of society, but in these early years, she kept her attention trained on the single subjects that most fascinated her. In her 1888 diary, she draws the following sketch of the Walking Woman, the mystifying figure who would haunt Austin for decades: Over on the temblor we met the Walking Woman. I had heard of her. The cow-boys call her Mrs. Walker but nobody knows her name. She told one of the women at Temblor that her first name is Jenny, but she answers to Mrs. Walker. She is not very tall, but her hair is thick and grayish and it is impossible to tell how old she is. She has a black bag which she carries over her shoulder on a stick. The men say she does not allow any liberties. They say she has just as good sense as anybody, except that she is a little bit crazy. Mother says she looks like a woman who has had a child. (mss 21) Sketching only the external details, and merely suggesting any back story through the narrative frame of the “cow-boys”’ hearsay and her mother’s knowing comment, Austin’s account of her enigmatic muse would need to wait for its full treatment until 1907, when she 84 would publish an associative piece in The Atlantic Monthly suggesting that the Walking Woman’s nearly-Delphic wisdom was mysteriously, yet inextricably linked to her organic embedment within the land, to productive labor for women, and to the exalting experience of maternity. Somehow, against all prevailing norms, the Walking Woman had managed to unshackle herself from “all sense of society-made values” (“The Walking Woman” 220). Eagerly wishing for an opportunity to speak alone with the woman, the first-person narrator opens the piece with language that closely echoes Austin’s diary: The first time of my hearing of her was at Temblor. We had come all one day between the blunt whitish bluffs rising from mirage water, with a thick pale wake of dust billowing from the wheels, all the dead wall of the foothills sliding and shimmering with heat, to learn that the Walking Woman had passed us somewhere in the dizzying dimness, going down to the Tulares on her own feet. We heard of her again in the Carrisal, and again at Adobe Station . . . . (216) The span of nearly twenty years has refined Austin’s skill for painting the desert stage, yet the energy of her first fascination with this mystifying cipher remains. The Walking Woman travels from place to place, at home everywhere and nowhere, refusing to be pinned down to a single locale. Finally seizing an opportunity to converse with her alone on a plain, the speaker learns that “in her talk was both wisdom and information, and the word she brought of trails and waterholes was reliable as an Indian’s” (217). Water, that elemental symbol as central to desert life as it was to a turn-of-the-century woman’s “genius,” retains here, as always, its central position in Austin’s work, and in this important sketch, she draws together many of her preoccupying themes in the figure of a wise and spiritual woman who lives as part of the ancient land, who is engaged in productive labor, who retains a separateness from an impoverishing culture, and who manages to live, in Austin’s view, with nearly as much nobility and truth “as an Indian,” a claim that represents highest praise for Austin. 85 Ultimately, the Walking Woman tells the speaker a gripping tale that communicates for Austin’s Atlantic Monthly readership the necessity for women to be allowed to engage in fulfilling work as well as to mother: The Walking Woman stretched out her arms and clasped herself, rocking in them as she would have hugged the recollection to her breast. “For you see,” said she, “I worked with a man, without excusing, without any burden of me of looking or seeming. Not fiddling or fumbling as women work, and hoping it will all turn out for the best. It was not for Filon to ask, Can you, or Will you. He said, Do, and I did. And my work was good. We held the flock. And that,” said the Walking Woman, the twist coming in her face again, “is one of the things that make you able to do without the others.” (219) This short piece is characteristic of much of Austin’s oeuvre, inseparably linking her feminist ideals for women’s opportunities for valuable work with her privileging of land-based human experience. Stacy Alaimo notes the potentiality inherent in this strategic linkage: Austin sought in nature a place that was not domesticated and that did not domesticate women . . . . No utilitarian ground, Austin’s land pulsates spiritually, aesthetically, and erotically. Sometimes Austin celebrates the borderland as a place to think beyond the confines of gender; sometimes she couples women and nature through mutual strength and resistance to male domination. Often, by picturing the land as a mistress, Austin creates a feminine land that counters domestic ideology and conjoins women and nature not as victims but as powerful allies. (72) In The Land of Little Rain, Austin had drawn a detailed portrait of Seyavi, the basket-maker who earned an independent living, modeled after a Paiute friend who helped Austin through a difficult pregnancy and early childrearing years, a portrait that Smith interprets as “offer[ing] a model to women of how to live without a man and how to live a life of artistry” (171). Just so, the Walking Woman and other independent Western women whom Austin portrayed served an important function for both Austin and her middle-class female readers who were inspired to explore new and independent subjectivities for themselves. 86 In “The Walking Woman,” Austin’s linkage between her heroine’s wisdom and her status as almost-Indian is inexact, but it is crucial to discerning Austin’s understanding of the boundaries of what may constitute “Indian-ness.” While in some of her work, “Indian-ness” was viewed as genetic trait, passed down racially and culturally from tribally identified biological parents, in much of her writing Austin appears to view “Indian-ness” as far more broadly transferrable. In his groundbreaking study Playing Indian, Philip Deloria suggests that this belief that “Indian-ness” was absorbable was pervasive among white Americans “from the Boston Tea Party onward” as new arrivals to North America attempted to take on the traits and qualities seen as being embedded in and inherent to their adopted land. Deloria writes, “As England became a them for colonists, Indians became an us” (22) and suggests that “playing Indian” allowed American revolutionaries to “imagine themselves a legitimate part of the continent’s ancient history” (25). As the nineteenth century moved into an ever more dehumanized modernity in the twentieth, Deloria (in agreement with Smith, Trachtenberg, Lears, and others) argues that “To reaffirm modern identity, Americans needed to experience that which was not modern.” In short, they needed “a heuristic encounter with the primitive” (105). For Deloria, this encounter played out for the white middle class on stages ranging from the Campfire Girls, 15 the Boy Scouts, the mid-century Indian hobbyists, the 1960s-70s counterculture, and the 1990s New Age spiritual movements. Smith elaborates the central role played by white writers who used “Indian- ness” to ward off the perils of modernity: What they believed they saw in Indians’ lives—mystery, beauty, spirituality, artistry, and community—appealed to them precisely because of its apparent divergence from Anglo-American emphases on possessive individualism, conformity, rationality, scientific determinism, materialism, and corruption. (9) 87 For Austin—who famously claimed, “So that when I say I am not, have never been, or offered myself, as an authority in things Amerindian, I do not wish to have it understood that I may not, at times, have succeeded in being an Indian!” (American Rhythm 41)—the experiential “heuristic” of primitivism served as part of a deep and abiding strategy in her arsenal not only for intellectual and artistic production, but also for defining an individualized, subjective self on her own terms, and for offering up that version of selfhood as a model for others. The final pages of Austin’s Tejon journal close with a meditation that appears qualitatively different from the close-detail work that characterized the pages preceding it. Rather than closely observing any specific element of the natural world before her, Austin here articulates a more abstract philosophical conclusion she has drawn. In this closing, penned in 1903, Austin displays the shift toward “intuitive research” that would bring her so much criticism in later years: I think there is a profound truth in the idea of the Indian that life is suggestible, that each is modified by each. That perhaps is the secret of protective mimicry. It is the thought in the mind of the bird that sees the insect to resemble a dead leaf. Is it or isn’t it a leaf? It is, let it alone. That is how children learn by some sort of impulsion that reaches them from their elders—not consciously being hypocrites but trying to respond protectively. It is like Indians who when asked an unfamiliar question try to give you back what they think would make you friendly to them to say. They are not liars—nor is the leaf insect a liar to the bird. The answer that he gives keeps the bird from being a menace to him. How would it be then if we gave that answer back to death—You cannot hurt me. I am undying in my nature! —Would we not then become immortal? Is it not an illusion to say so, it is the assertion of a profound possibility. Fear—Why do we pretend to be ashamed of it. Does not life learn more by fear than by hoping. Let me not be afraid to fear, nor ashamed of any of the motions of life in me. (mss 60-61) 88 This curious passage, not likely to be numbered among her finest by either Austin or any of her readers, is nonetheless noteworthy for the many striking moves it makes, whether consciously or not. Perhaps most striking is the unqualified metaphors Austin uses to speak of “the Indian,” first likening “him” to the child who attempts to please his elders, and then drawing a direct line equating her representation of the Indian’s response to that of the leaf insect. Despite the likelihood that Austin was attempting to defend her subjects by stating “they are not liars,” evident throughout this passage are the culturally pervasive paternalism shown toward indigenous peoples and an uninterrogated association that uses non-human terms to characterize human beings. For Austin, the inveterate primitivist whom we have seen speak of herself in animal and nature terms at any given opportunity, 16 this move is not as simple as it might have been for her more mainstream peers, who did not share her supreme respect for all aspects of the natural world. Nonetheless, it is striking for its baldness. Further, this passage demonstrates a second strategy that Austin relied upon throughout her career when she attempted to draw profound spiritual life lessons from what she saw around her in the natural world, a world that for Austin included Native peoples as the most “tap-rooted” and, for her purposes, the most direct and illustrative representations of how humans should rightly live within natural laws. This complex relationship is a subject that would come to occupy Austin more and more in coming years. 89 Figure 8. Austin as photographed by her early mentor and later rival, Charles Fletcher Lummis, in 1900. Impressions of New York As Austin’s writing career developed, her network of intellectual contacts widened, and she found herself living and working in the literary community of Greenwich Village for several years as she attempted to establish a national reputation as a writer. In 1911 and 1912, during the first two years of her 14-year residence in Manhattan, she compiled another richly detailed journal, this one about her life in New York. Written, she claims, at the request of her close friend and presumed lover, the influential Progressive journalist Lincoln Steffens, to whom she refers familiarly as “Steffy,” Austin regularly shared portions of this manuscript with him. She opens the diary with a characteristically contrarian statement that this diary will not be a success because she cannot write about city life as perceptively as she can about the West: 90 March 28 1911 I have opened this account at the instance of my friend Lincoln Steffens to prove to him that I can not write a book about the city as interesting as the Land of Little Rain. Steffy is saturated with the city. He can look at his watch any time of day and tell you what is going on in any part of it at that particular hour, and he can’t understand that it will take me more years to learn my way about it than were necessary to know the trails from Mojave to Lone Pine. And he does not know how slow I am . . . nobody knows that and if I tell them they do not believe it. (mss 7) 17 Like all manuscript diaries that are written with a specific audience in mind (e.g., Mary MacLane’s published diary, Virginia Woolf’s diary for Leonard), this diary exhibits a quality of carefulness with language, indicating perhaps a self-consciousness that did not characterize her previous California journals. Yet it also demonstrates the close observation of detail trained on unfamiliar subjects that characterizes all her work, whether polished for publication or remaining hidden in her notebooks. Approaching all things as a curious and attentive outsider, Austin filled this expansive volume with close portrayal of city life and characters that rivals her best writing on the desert and occasional reveals a surprisingly vulnerable aspect, despite her acknowledged readership in “Steffy.” In the twenty-three years that had passed since Austin began her California journal, her life and her increasingly active career had taken her from Rancho El Tejon to the Inyo Valley, where she married and gave birth to a daughter; to San Francisco, where she was mentored by California poet laureate Ina Coolbrith and psychologist William James; to Los Angeles, where she developed a close friendship with Charles Fletcher Lummis (who would later become her most scathing critic); to Carmel, where Austin enjoyed a likeminded companionship with George Sterling, Jack London, and others to found a thriving artists’ colony; to Italy and England, where she fled after a devastating cancer diagnosis, expecting to die in Europe and instead believing herself to have been miraculously healed by “the art 91 of useful prayer” (Earth Horizon 310). In 1911, she made her home in New York, where, newly invigorated, she set out to make her mark on America’s most important literary community. Long estranged from her husband Stafford Wallace Austin, the Berkeley- educated son of a Hawaiian government secretary whom she had surprised her family by marrying in 1891, Austin now lived as an independent woman and an artist. In several painful years that are not represented in diaries (though they may arguably be represented fictionally in published stories and are partially revealed in her autobiography), Mary gave birth to a baby, Ruth, the daughter she had looked forward with great eagerness to raising with all the intellectual opportunities that she felt her own childhood to be lacking. With the scientist’s interest in heredity and the Californian’s awareness of “breeding stock,” Mary was deeply hurt, ashamed, and confused when it became evident that Ruth had been born with severe developmental disabilities. Her mother reportedly echoed the prevailing judgment of the time, telling Mary “I don’t know what you’ve done, daughter, to have such a judgment upon you” (Earth Horizon 257). Of this stinging rebuke, Austin writes simply, “It was the last word that passed between us” (257). Austin would throughout her life blame Ruth’s condition on Wallace, whom she despised for secretly carrying what she would list under his name in the index to her 1932 autobiography as his “hereditary taint” (374). Frequently alone at home while Wallace traveled for various speculations, Austin relied on the support of neighbors including Paiute women who helped her manage Ruth’s difficult condition. In 1904, with the money she earned from the immediate success of The Land of Little Rain, Austin made the choice that she would always describe as deeply painful to place Ruth in a private institution in Santa Clara, where Ruth would remain until her death in 1918 during the influenza pandemic. Immediately upon this placement, Austin purchased a home in 92 Carmel and left her marriage permanently, though the legal divorce would not take place until 1914. By the time she reached New York, her reputation as a Western writer was well established through books including The Land of Little Rain, The Basket Woman, The Flock, Isidro, Lost Borders, and Santa Lucia, yet she was disappointed in her national sales, and she believed herself to be limited by her one-dimensional association with the West. Having felt herself to be a changed person after her three-year tour in Europe, where she overcame ill health and was delighted to find that numbering among her London fans were writer H.G. Wells and feminist Anne Henrietta Martin, Austin came to New York with a commitment to write social novels. She longed for recognition for works that were not about the desert, and declared that she could not write another book like The Land of Little Rain: I had used up all I had in the first one. I should have had to find another country like that, and pay out ten thousand dollars to live in it ten or twelve years. I wrote what I lived, what I had observed and understood. Then I stopped. (Earth Horizon 320) In her New York journal, Austin took precisely this approach as she set out to describe Manhattan as if it were an undiscovered country laid out for her to observe. Unlike the comparatively small and inexpensive notebook format of her Tejon journals, Austin’s New York journal is immense in size and presentation. Measuring more than 14 inches long and 9 inches wide, this massive volume is bound in a thick hardback cover whose binding is marked “Record,” reflecting its design for commercial or official usage. The front and back covers of the volume bear the outline of a stylistic pattern that is suggestive of the distinctive patterns found on Navajo blankets and craftwork in the West, a feature that presumably appealed to Austin in her selection. Four triangles at the corners are 93 bound in a deep carnelian red set off by a strip of black. A thick book, the volume contains 200 heavyweight pages lined and numbered in blue. Tucked throughout the journal originally were handbills, newspaper clippings, photographs, and other ephemera that Austin had collected and inserted between various pages. Several inner pages are stained, impressed, or otherwise marked by these prior insertions, though these objects have since been removed and placed in separate envelopes during the archiving process. While Austin’s Tejon journals were of dimensions that were well within the norm for diaries of the period, her New York journals present themselves on a far grander scale than either her previous journals or the volumes favored by other diarists of the period. 18 In all physical respects, this journal announces itself as carrying a weighty significance. Figure 9. Pages from Austin’s New York journal. 19 94 While it is impossible to claim with any certainty that the austerity of the physical format reflects the author’s intention, it is the case that as a physical object, this diary is striking and unique in its form. Because manuscript diaries are not simply of interest for their textual content, but are indeed also one-off artistic productions, the physical choices made by a diarist must be recognized as significant in much the same way that material choices may be useful to understanding fully the more traditional visual arts. A painter’s choice to mix sand or other substances with her oils to thicken an impasto may suggest a muscularity of approach, for example, and just so, Austin’s decision to repurpose an outsized volume that was originally designed for a larger official record, particularly one that is covered in traditional motifs that suggest Native American arts and crafts, may be interpreted as giving this diary as a material whole the impression of Austin’s confidence as a writer, her seriousness of purpose, and her established identity as a Westerner. And, in fact, the content of the diary aligns well with its external presentation. Barring her occasional references to “Steffy” and those rare moments that gesture toward, but never fully elaborate upon, her private emotional vulnerabilities, the bulk of this very long journal demonstrates Austin’s painstaking rendering of the scenes to be found in New York as if it were an unfamiliar landscape. Whereas in much of her nature writing, humans are depicted as part of the weave of the natural world, in this journal Austin takes pains to observe and depict the human relationships more centrally, with an eye especially to the women who made up the Village, the tenements, the police station, the suffrage marches, the Italian grocer shops, and the other tableaus of early twentieth-century life in Manhattan. Upon leaving Europe for New York, Austin had recommitted herself to building her reputation as a writer, and remembering perhaps discussions with reformers like Anne 95 Henrietta Martin, she had come to view the social novel as a potent vehicle for reform. At one point she declared, “I shall never again write about the West.” This pronouncement came to be proven false, of course, as Austin would be drawn again and again to the West, even moving permanently to become part of the artist colony of Santa Fe and Taos from 1924 to her death. Yet at the critical moment during which she made a firm recommitment to her career in 1911-12, Austin’s fine-tuned observational apparatus was trained on the strange new environment of New York City. In her characteristically descriptive fashion, Austin sets forth the sensory details of her new setting: I am living in an apartment house, subletting furnished rooms. There is very good furniture in the five small rooms, which my landlady tells me she inherited. . . . she might have . . . but the carpets and the pictures came from a bargain counter. There are also some family portraits in oil, very badly done, which hang in the hallway which is fortunately so dark you can not see them. There is also a life size child on a rocking horse in the room I use for a study. With an amount of gilt frame vastly out of proportion to the child. This I have covered with a sheet. My landlady is from Texas and rather puts it over me on that account. The house is so full of all sorts of little interesting noises and outbursts of activity, the dumb waiter traveling up and down, feet passing overhead, a piano going and a woman who sings. These sounds come from the air shaft and sound mysteriously not pertaining to any place. There are little bubbly noises from the steam heater that might have been transmitted from the unknown source of waters. Hardly any noise reaches me from the street, now and then the wail of a woman, like a north wind, or the puffing of the train along the water front. (mss 7) The sights and sounds of her rented rooms are relayed through a voice that has become stronger, darker, funnier, and more biting and witty in its portrayal of her new companions. The first page of this diary presents the assured voice of a writer who is aware of the effect she has on people and who is confident about the position she occupies in this new world. The rooms with their “bargain counter” accoutrements are beneath her, as are the familial 96 details, the singing, and the bustle of her fellow boarding-housemates. And as she did throughout her desert writings, Austin here uses richly detailed sensory imagery to place us in position to experience, for example, the aural environment as it bubbles, wails, and puffs around her. In this diary, Austin’s handwriting is both more regular, yet more difficult to decipher than in her Tejon diary. At a glance, the blue and black ink of her handwriting runs at a precise right-ways slant, yet the individual words are often much more difficult to decode than in her previous diaries. As always, her t-crosses miss their base more often than not. The format of this commercial volume provided large left-hand margins, and Austin has filled these with notations in red pen, in a shakier hand than the original text, indicating that Austin reread this volume and highlighted passages as she reread. Unlike her previous diary, and more in line with diary convention, in this volume Austin does date entries regularly in the margin. Paragraphs are frequently connected with occasional line spacings to represent a new topic. Unusual for handwritten diary, Austin frequently does not use capitalization within the entries, and more commonly, her spelling is frequently irregular. Entries are often illustrated with small drawings, such as the schematics of how a friend’s flat has decorated or a sketch of the particular lay of a lace collar on a woman’s dress. The overall effect is that this is a volume upon which Austin lavished countless hours of attention and detail. Of the hundreds of small scenes that captured Austin’s attention to be recorded in this diary, several stand out for the connections they bear to Austin’s overriding goal during these years to expand her career in an effort to become a truly memorable, important, and recognized American writer. And many of these scenes are centered on women’s lives in this unfamiliar environment. Just as she had done in her Tejon journals, especially when dealing 97 with her most serious topics, Austin relies on her peculiar skills as an observer to record the details, occasionally providing authorial commentary, but more often not editorializing, but implicitly relying on readers to make interpretive connections. Dozens of quick character sketches populate this diary, including Austin’s description of a woman who caught her interest, Mrs. Conway, whom she met in a small domestic shop called a “hokey pokey”: June 2 Visited the widow in the hokey pokey shop. Slender. A trace of southern accent. Rather pretty once still pleasant-looking. Cigars, unhealthy looking candies, papers, . . . stationery &tc. Living room in black, some attempt at mourning. Black skirt, black and white waisted collar from some other dress. Lucaslip showing from breasts. —saw this. Conway the woman who managed the May family, American town, the sort of woman who in a small town would have been president of the woman’s club. A black silk dress, but soiled, . . . her daughter almost 12, neatly dressed, Mrs. C a working woman, was told she sews in a shop but she does not look it. She was taking her daughter to the dressmaker she said to have a dress made for her. (mss 37) The shorthand notation in this passage is representative of many of these character sketches, in which she quickly pulls out the telling detail that reveals the deeper truth of her subject. Mrs. Conway’s showing slip, her silk dress “but soiled,” her mismatched dress and collar, her hasty mourning—all are suggestive of character in the manner of the social novelist. Likewise, these details suggest a voice that is by turns sympathetic to the plight of women yet simultaneously observant of any social misstep. A second suggestive passage relates a heated exchange that occurred between two women in the police station: 29 [March 1911] . . . At the Police court the only thing that was interesting was a decent looking working woman who complained against a neighbor who had slandered her. The neighbor woman had said that she had heard [a] man in the complainant’s room in the night. “I wouldn’t have said it, Judge, but I knew it to be a fact, and her sister told me it had happened before.” The woman 98 had gossip written all over her, the judge sent her away with a reprimand, but the complainant protested too much. (mss 8) Austin’s interest here has been captured by two women embroiled in a dispute that is suggestive of the conflicts of women’s roles in the period, a subject that occupied much of Austin’s thinking as she was in the process of writing A Woman of Genius during this year. Insightfully perceiving more to the story than the surface complaints, Austin here efficiently renders several of the available roles and pitfalls for women—gossip, slanderer, working class laborer, and sexually promiscuous woman—and she quickly hints at the acute importance of reputation for women on the precarious edge of economic class, as well as a knowingness of sexuality as occupying a legitimate role in women’s lives. Often perceived by contemporary critics as sexless or matronly, Austin was in fact progressive for her time, living independently while still married, participating in the freedom of the artists’ colonies of Carmel, and having close sexual friendships with Steffens and MacDougal, both of whom were married during Austin’s relationships with them. Yet her feminism was bounded idiosyncratically by her limitations and by the mixed, often contentious, quality of her relationships with women throughout her life. Stineman invokes psychoanalyst Karen Horney to explain Austin’s vexed relationships with women, beginning with her mother (213-14). Writing in the 1920s about Austin’s generation, Horney grapples with the turmoil and resentment felt by daughters who are devalued within the family in favor of their male siblings. Over the decades Austin would count as friends a number of influential women—Mabel Dodge Luhan, Lou Hoover, Willa Cather, Anna Henrietta Martin, Ina Sizer Cassidy, Annie Traquair Lang, 20 Anna Ickes, Ina Coolbrith, Alice Fletcher, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and many others—and invariably these relationships 99 were marked by periods of amity followed by periods of rebuke and hurt feelings on both sides. Sometimes-friend Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant remarked in a memorial tribute to Austin, “although in theory she was a feminist, believing that women more than men carry the creative fire, she actually preferred the society of men, and depended upon men for her deepest companionship” (96). Stineman goes so far as to state that “Austin took the position that constructive social thought should be a male realm to which she alone among women had earned admittance” (130). While it is perhaps too bold a claim to state that Austin felt she alone had earned this vaunted status, certainly it is the case that for Austin the greater population of women had allowed themselves to remain caged, protected, and limited in their thinking and had not strived to achieve the original and hard-won outlook that she had. This view reveals itself in her implicit judgment of the working-class and middle-class women who appear in her diary, and it is uppermost in her mind as she is laboring to suss out the distinctions that separates a “woman of genius” from the rest of humankind. For Austin, genius is the key strategy for women to break away from the limitations society has placed upon them, yet it is a key that will unlock the door only for the select few who have been given the appropriate gifts. Sergeant perceptively gets to the heart of Austin’s feminism—that women by virtue of their sex and gender “carry the creative fire”—and for Austin this special gift is linked to their role as child-bearers and as the sex that is closer to nature and as such to the divine “Inknower” who dwells in the natural world. Goodman and Dawson succinctly summarize Austin’s view: “Austin’s definition of ‘genius’ reflects one of its oldest accepted meanings as a guiding spirit rather than exalted intellectuality or creativity” (135). For Austin, the ability to quiet the mind in order to access this inner genius was paramount, and this belief accounts for her practice of entering a “trance” in order to 100 write, a practice that caught the attention, and ridicule, of friends including Willa Cather and Carl Van Doren. At the heart of this complex web of connections associated with genius lies her reversal of the hierarchy that places nature, animals, women, and indigenous peoples from “the stone age of culture” at the very apex of access to this divine genius of creativity. This complex connection lies at the heart of her appeal to 1990s ecocritics, and it is the theory and belief that undergirds much of her work across the fields of feminism, nature writing, and Native American arts. In a 1912 review of A Woman of Genius, Austin’s friend Charlotte Perkins Gilman centers on the protagonist, Olivia Lattimore, as a focus for speaking to the tricky business of women attempting to articulate their own talent and access to creative genius: Olivia is not a loveable person—as is often the case with geniuses. In the pursuit of her work, or perhaps we should say, in her work’s pursuit of her, she is forced to sacrifice not only much that was dear to her, but the dearest wishes of others. This also is frequently the case with geniuses. We are quite used to its expression in men. (qtd. in Graulich, “Gilman” 280) With these words, Gilman could be speaking of her friend Austin (as Austin herself acknowledges Olivia to be a thinly veiled autobiographical proxy), or she could be speaking for herself, or for any other woman of their generation who dared claim the title artist and was there by forced to endure the complaints of the family and society who felt itself abandoned by that self-determined act. In these senses, then, Austin’s feminism must be recognized as a complex one, and her New York diaries reveal this complexity in both her choice of subject matter and in the language she used to characterize her subjects. Having met many feminist activists and reformers During the course of her life—beginning with Frances Willard, her mother’s greatest inspiration whom Austin met when Susanna arranged a WCTU speaking 101 engagement featuring Willard—Austin strongly supported suffrage, yet revealed certain contradictory misgivings about it in her diary: 6 June [1911] A suffrage meeting—middle class women not very attractive nor intellectual, but so well dressed as somehow to give the impression of promising more. Alert minded but with rather wearying lack of cultivation in tone and communication. Among them two or three rather more plainly dressed with much more of personality and the precision of tone that is characteristic of experience and power. These turned out to be rather notable organizers. The head of the district a plump well-filled-out fresh looking perfectly tailored woman of 35 no speaker but a fine organizer—deserving of study, one of the few who did not vaguely irritate me. Can’t account for the irritation. (mss 39- 40) Austin’s disapproval in this entry is notably class-based, sizing up the attendees based upon their manner of dress: the better dressed women are disappointingly lacking in substance, suggesting a status of nouveau riche, while the plainly dressed women wield a respected power over the gathering, and one of these, while nameless, is deemed “deserving of study” based on her skill. The eye that Austin casts upon this gathering and the voice she uses to describe it are far removed from those of the hopeful girl who longed for good opinion of the Confederate widow Mrs. John A. Logan as she assessed Austin’s verse. By this time, “I- Mary,” the observer self, has accreted a confidence about her role in the social world, and she has taken on a tone of weary wisdom. Without commentary to interpret it, Austin has pasted into her diary a telling clipping about this group of suffrage women, or others presumably very much like them, at a period of about a year later. Clipped from a publication whose title is lost, but whose heading suggests a newsy local publication, the brief piece is written in a chatty authorial voice: 102 In Our Village Suffragettes interrupted the sleepy drowsiness of the Square and the neighboring streets last Saturday. Back of the arch was a ticket of would-be voters gathering into groups and staging their demonstrative parade through the city. They were pretty to look at. Their many-colored clothes, spotted with yellow badges and ribbons like a forest with autumn leaves. Music bands were playing and even the shutters of the mansions on the north side could not resist the temptation to open themselves and to permit their inhabitants to look at that pretty protesting femininity. (affixed to mss 96) Austin records no record of her interpretation of the belittling authorial voice who highlights “that pretty protesting femininity,” and her inclusion of this clip into her diary suggests more questions than answers. Does Austin’s attention to the clipping suggest an outrage at the diminishing description of the protest with its focus on “prettiness” and spectacle? Did she find this line of criticism familiar due to her own prolonged attention to the “well dressed” appearance of the majority of the group? Is the inclusion and placement of the clip suggestive of a validation for her “irritation” with the gathering, justifying that discomfort that she “can’t account for”? Or is it included for its tone of diminishment? Austin’s diary gives no hint beyond the specifics of the details that she chose in her observational manner to describe and the fact that this clipping struck her fancy enough to glue it permanently into her diary. On the same day that she had described the suffrage meeting, Austin also left a hint that points to the gaps and omissions that make up this diary. After completing an entry that was extremely long—written in a nearly illegible cramped handwriting that covers three full pages of her 14’ x 9’ volume—about a tragedy involving forlorn children at a street event who cried as they were “waiting for papa,” Austin briefly gives the following hint: “What really happened on the above occasion I have not set down—a terrible incident, one that promises to bear bitter fruit in my own life. It is curious that I never do set down anything 103 important in this book” (mss 39). This gesturing toward something more, toward something kept private even from the putatively private pages of a diary, is one that Austin would repeat again in her autobiography when she remembers “I-Mary” as never quite being able to represent herself fully, yet continually moving toward an elusive version of subjective selfhood through fictional, poetic, and artistic means: More or less secretly she began to write poetry, which is, though one finds practicing psychiatrists still unaware of it, one of man’s earliest instinctive efforts to achieve subjective coördination. She no longer went masquerading, but she satisfied the urge for it by keeping three or four diaries in fictitious characters—she never by any chance kept one in her own. . . . For Mary it was a resort of desperation against the things that menaced her undeveloped talent. It was a way of asserting her right to her own states of mind, and securing the instinctively realized need for emotional stability. (Earth Horizon 159) When compared to a public diarist like Mary MacLane or a memoirist like Zitkala-!a, Austin’s usage of diary practice in some respects serves functions that are more artistic or heuristic than necessarily constitutive. 21 Yet even in the midst of her observational diary and her retrospective autobiography, Austin articulates the complex contributions these works have made to the development of her confidence to claim the right to “her own states of mind” and ultimately to achieving a existentially necessary version of “subjective coördination." Austin’s New York diaries are useful, as well, for sussing out her complex and frequently troubling views on race in the context of the shifting theories about race in the 1910s. While this diary, unlike her previous California diaries, does not focus its lens on indigenous peoples, it is written in the context of her growing reputation as an “Indian expert,” and it does record her very personal views on other races. Her journal records instances of both her racist reactions and of her grappling with the shame she felt in facing 104 her own limitations regarding race. In an early interpretation of Austin’s contributions, Graulich highlights only the most positive aspects of Austin’s multiculturalism: While contemporary theory has taught us how to read her . . . she also teaches us how to read the emerging map of multicultural “America,” a country of diffuse borders and intersecting histories, a country she herself surveyed for us. (xii) Yet as Austin makes plain in American Rhythm, while she esteems Native American culture as sitting at an apex of “tap-rooted genius” that European culture has lost, she does not afford the same respect to all non-European cultures. In fact, as Smith points out, Austin shared with her generation evolutionary views on race and regarded both African Americans and Jews to be “inauthentic” in comparison to Native Americans, who for her represented “the vase, the cup in which had mellowed for a thousand years the medicine for want of which the civilized world is tearing out its own vitals” (Land of Journey’s End 238). For Austin, Native American culture represented “the only existing human society that ever found, and kept for an appreciable period, the secret of spiritual organization” (238). While Austin worked throughout her life to reverse Eurocentric notions of race specifically about Native cultures, she did not always see the ranking of race as problematic in itself, but only as mistaken in its estimation of what position Native cultures should be ranked upon a hierarchical scala naturae. Entries in her diary make her complex and contradictory views somewhat more evident. Throughout the diary, Austin describes walking a street-by-street perambulation of the city, her various meandering paths taking her from the “Italian grocer shops” to the “hurdy-gurdy” players in the streets outside the tenement houses. She wanders into the neighborhood of San Juan Hill, an African American community on the west side of 105 Manhattan, where she becomes frightened by the “primitive” men she sees in the street, describing “something animal in the carriage, smooth, as though they walked on cushiony paws” (mss 31). By 1932, when she writes her autobiography, Austin has reflected upon this experience and begins to articulate her shame about it, yet her language suggests a continual formulation of her ideas about race, specifically regarding African Americans: . . . I was following a plan I had for getting to know New York; going up one street and down another, walking and staring. . . . I came into a district that puzzled me, sloping down toward the river, rather shabby houses with a singular effect of darkness, coming out of the doorways and windows, a light of darkness; so strange that I stopped on a street corner to look. And suddenly I saw three black men crossing the street toward me, black, and walking with the jungle stride. They were so black and so freely walking that I was frightened. I looked about, and saw first one and then another black man, and then black women, going up and down the street, walking and disappearing, coming out black as they came toward me, and losing the blackness. (Earth Horizon 346) The language and even the structure of this passage bring to mind Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the meditation on race anxiety written by a writer and acquaintance that Austin viewed herself as having championed in the U.S. for the book that she declared had “set the standard for the new century” (Goodman and Dawson 108). 22 Like Conrad, Austin had made regular use of the strategy of using a culturally familiar proxy to enter into a strange world in order to report on the exotic sights and sounds within it for consumption by a mainstream audience. Just as she had used this strategy in writing about the unfamiliar desert, so too is Austin here using the same technique to describe the unfamiliar, “black,” “jungle” world of San Juan Hill. Written many years after she had met and attended National Arts Club and society dinners with prominent African American figures including James Weldon Johnson, Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Countee Cullen, Austin’s depiction of her own changing 106 views attempts to set forth her later viewpoint as progressive by emphasizing her later ability to “not see it,” referring to her dinner companions’ dark skin. Describing a lengthy internal conversation during which she argues with an internal “Voice,” Austin explains, As a matter of fact, I think it was James Weldon Johnson and his wife; I noticed how pretty she was, and that he was partly white. Somewhat later, we were at the table and Mr. Johnson passed me the bread; then I noticed that his hand was black against the white plate, and I said to myself, ‘Why I’m eating dinner with a black man!’ I thought I ought to be more astonished at it. And then I heard the Voice . . . ‘Well, I don’t see it.’ ‘Oh, yes,’ I said, ‘that’s a black man.’ ‘Oh, no,’ said the Voice, ‘I don’t see it’ –and when I looked again, I didn’t see it either. (347) Throughout the rest of this lengthy passage—awkward in content, narrative structure, and language—Austin elaborates upon her view that the highest compliment she can pay to the African American men and women whom she respects for their literary and cultural accomplishments is to ignore the pigment of their skin. She continues, “I would look up and I would see that they were wearing their blackness, and then I would look again and they had laid it aside, the way people lay masks aside; so I knew at last what had happened to me, I was not seeing their blackness. . . .” (348). An extraordinary contradiction sits between Austin’s apparently sincere respect for the “genius culture” of Native Americans and her apparently hard-wrought ability to “not see . . . blackness.” She concludes this long meditation with two lines that suggest that this contradiction regarding race was never fully resolved for Austin: “I never went back to Harlem, popular as it became to do so. I did not wish to see them black, and I feared that with much looking, it might come upon me” (348). 23 Significantly, the two years narrated by the New York diaries coincided with events that were crucial to the direction of Austin’s literary career as a whole. In addition to the 107 tremendous expansion of her literary networks through the National Arts Club, her friendship with salon host Mabel Dodge, and innumerable society events, these years also saw the publication of A Woman of Genius and the production of Austin’s first major play, The Arrow-Maker. Austin had long had a penchant for theatre, an interest passed on from her father, who had been an enthusiastic amateur actor. She had written plays as a young girl and continued the practice in California at both Lone Pine and Carmel. At a time when grassroots local “folk drama” was gaining in esteem nationwide, Austin had hoped to stake at least part of her literary reputation on success in the theatre. The Arrow-Maker opened on 27 February 1911 at the New Theatre, a plush new venue seating over 2000 people that had been designed to house a new national movement in theatre (Goodman and Dawson 138). The company publicized Austin as “a foremost authority on Indians of the Southwest” (Goodman and Dawson 138) highlighting the contradictions between career pressures and artistic pressure that Austin experienced during these years. While Austin had determined to be taken more seriously by writing social novels instead of continuing her writing about nature, the West, or Native American culture, she had not reckoned on the cachet that these associations would have for her in the competitive literary marketplace of the East Coast. Spending a few months among the literati, Austin was quick to recognize the advantage to be gained by highlighting her areas of expertise, and The Arrow-Makers became the first production in which she attempted to meld her two great interests: an expansion of women’s roles and rights via the “noble” and picturesque settings of Indian life. The Arrow-Maker tells the story of the Chisera, the medicine woman of an unspecified tribe from the American West. The role of the Chisera was played by esteemed British actress Edith Wynne Matthison, who was a familiar figure on the American stage, having 108 been celebrated on the cover of The Theatre magazine in the months preceding the play. The Chisera is set apart from the tribe by virtue of her special relationship with the gods, and she has been forbidden to take Simwa, the arrow-maker whom she loves, as a husband. In a review that appeared the first morning after opening night, the New York Times reviewer describes the larger effect of the play: The American Indian, dramatized by one who has had much opportunity for studying the subject, was shown at The New Theatre last night in a three-act play, “The Arrow Maker,” by Mary Austin. Tribal customs, Indian costumes, ceremonial dances, were interwoven in a love story that was basically universal and as old as Adam. The audience received the piece with interested silence, and there was no doubt that it held the attention from the very first. (28 Feb 1911) The program noted that the songs, chants, and costumes were patterned after recordings and artifacts held in the Museum of natural History, and the dances were choreographed by Chief Red Eagle, “a Winnebago, who is half Piute” (New York Times). The reviewer lavished praise upon the scenic elements: “Pictorially, the production is one of the best that has been given at The New Theatre. . . . The costuming is brilliant and picturesque, and several incidental dances are full of interest.” Ultimately the Chisera intercedes with the gods for her tribe, but she then learns that Simwa has been promised to Bright Eyes for marriage, and she discovers that she has lost her magic because she has lost her hope for love. Simwa makes an impassioned denouncement of the tradition that “forbids the Chisera what every woman in the tribe takes for granted: companionship, love, and children” (Goodman and Dawson 139). The tribe is decimated by battle, and the Chisera is unable to use her powers until the women plead with her to heal their starving children. Ultimately, The Chisera discovers that her greatest love is for the tribe and through her performance of a powerful medicine dance, her powers return. About the opening night performance, one reviewer remarked pointedly 109 that both actors and characters seemed more “Anglo-American Indians” than American Indians (Stineman 114). 24 Figure 10. Mary Austin rehearsing her cast for the 1913 production of Fire, the folk drama follow-up to The Arrow-Maker that she wrote for the Forest Theater in Carmel. Photograph by S.L. Slevin. Mapping a feminist allegory onto the staged folk drama of an Indian culture play seemed to strike a compromise that promised to use Austin’s established reputation to gain her a greater audience, while simultaneously making a statement about women’s rights, not to mention securing her a lucrative start in the theatre. Austin had invested a great deal of her stock in the play, and she held high hopes that its success would bring her literary fame and an avenue to greater fortune. Unfortunately, despite the New York Times’ relatively positive review, audiences were not taken by the play’s message, and the run was cut short after an only eight performances, leaving Austin with a stinging disappointment. Smith 110 points out that “the script offered a feminist message wrapped up in an Indian story” (175), a device that Austin had felt sure would send her message home: “She tackled the theme of the waste of women’s talents in an Indian setting, believing that in such a context no tradition prevented women from exercising their powers” (175-76). In the lengthy explanatory preface that introduces the 1915 publication of the play for school and community theatre usage, Austin sets forth her rationale for universalizing women’s experience in this fashion: In The Arrow-Maker the author, without dwelling too much on tribal peculiarities, has attempted the explication of this primitive attitude toward a human type common to all conditions of society. The particular mould in which the story is cast takes shape from the manner of aboriginal life in the Southwest . . . but it has been written in vain if the situation has not worked itself out in terms of your own environment. The Chisera is simply the Genius, one of those singular and powerful characters whom we are still, with all our learning, unable to account for without falling back on the primitive conception of gift as arising from direct communication with the gods. . . . . [S]he is no more or less than just the gifted woman, too much occupied with the use of her gift to look well after herself, and more or less at the mercy of the tribe. What chiefly influences their attitude toward her is worthy of note, being no less than the universal, unreasoned conviction that great gift belongs, not to the possessor of it, but to society at large. The whole question then becomes one of how the tribe shall work the Chisera to their best advantage. (x-xi) In this single passage, Austin brings together the threads of “Genius,” spirituality, women, and indigenous peoples, and through this crucial connection point in her thinking we begin to see the web of associations that connects her previous work (e.g., The Land of Little Rain, The Flock, “The Walking Woman,” etc.) to the work that is to come in the later decades of her career (e.g., A Woman of Genius, Everyman’s Genius, The Land of Journey’s End, Earth Horizon, etc.). 111 Austin continues this elaboration by drawing upon her unique expertise, which she suggests has given her an unparalleled perspective for making these thematic connections: To one fresh from the consideration of the roots of life as they lie close to the surface of primitive society, this obsession of recent centuries, that the community can only be served by a gift for architecture, for administration, for healing, when it occurs in the person of a male, is only a trifle less ridiculous than that other social stupidity, namely, that a gift of mothering must not be exercised except in the event of a particular man being able, under certain restrictions, to afford the opportunity. There is perhaps no social movement going on at present so deep-rooted and dramatic as this struggle of Femininity to recapture its right to serve, and still to serve with whatever powers and possessions it finds itself endowed. But a dramatic presentation of it is hardly possible outside of primitive conditions where no tradition intervenes to prevent society from accepting the logic of events. (xi- xii) Austin hoped that the placement of the “struggle of Femininity” from her contemporary, “civilized” moment into a picturesque and “primitive” setting would both seduce her viewers with an “Indian tale” and simultaneously cast into high relief the “stupidity” of women’s restrictions in a society that purports to be “civilized.” This strategy of linking women’s oppressions with Native American oppressions for narrative or political purposes is one that Austin would continue to use in much of her work over the next two decades, yet it is not a strategy that she alone performed in a vacuum. Smith has characterized Austin as one of a group of “non-Indians competing for the right, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to construct identities for Indians” (5). More specifically, in her study of white women activists who were involved in the Pueblo Native American Arts and Crafts movement, Margaret Jacobs delineates some of the competitive pressures and motives that were operating just under the surface of this social reform work. According to Jacobs, white women who became active in the movement from 1900-1935, including Austin, Luhan, Cassidy, Sergeant, Elsie Clews Parsons, Alice Corbin 112 Henderson, Amelia Elizabeth White, Frieda Lawrence, Dorothy Brett, and many others, represented competing interests in Native American art that broke down along relatively clean lines. A heated debate developed between the “uplifters,” who argued for the “uplift” of the race through education, and the “preservationists,” who agued for an acceptance and celebration of cultural multiplicity and rejected education as assimilative. Jacob argues, perceptively, that this division regarding Native American arts mirrors the precise divisions in these women’s simultaneous feminist philosophies. That is, white activist women were using their advocacy of Native arts and crafts as a parallel forum in which Native arts became a salient part of feminist debate. Changes in notions of white women’s roles and sexual natures deeply affected white women who participated in the arts and crafts movement. In fact, they seem to have used the movement as a forum for articulating and debating their competing visions of gender and sexuality in modern America. Throughout white women’s private correspondence and promotional material regarding Indian arts and crafts, Indian women became powerful symbols of white women’s differing ideals. Women in both wings of the movement endowed Indian women artists with their rival visions. (“Shaping n.p.) In this schema, “uplifters” believed that Native Americans, represented by the female Pueblo artist, were being segregated from mainstream American culture and the benefits of modernity, while “preservationists” followed an antimodernist mode of feminism that idealized traditional Pueblo women as hewing most closely to an ancient feminist ideal that retained ultimate authority and power in a matrilineal Pueblo culture, an ideal that Austin spoke of often as “Mother-rule.” Each philosophy competed for dominance in an era that witnessed tremendous social reform in a countless number of arenas. Gesturing toward the stake each side held in the debate, Jacobs comments, “It is small wonder that female moral 113 reformers identified assimilation into modern American life as their goal for Native Americans; it was also their own ambition for white women” (“Shape” n.p.). A long line of critics has followed T.J. Jackson Lears to consider the competing motives of the groups of intellectuals and artists who resisted the dehumanizing forces modernism by embracing primitivism, Orientalism, spiritualism, and other more deeply “tap- rooted” sources. Smith situates the key role that an idealized version of Native American cultures played for these antimodern writers: Their views of Indians, then, served as vehicles for analyzing American culture in an era of great social and political upheaval. . . . To counter these [modern] developments and recover some sense of transcendent meaning in a desanctified world, antimodernists—particularly those from Northeastern middle and upper classes who exercised considerable cultural power—looked for alternatives and found them in Oriental and medieval religious beliefs, preindustrial arts and crafts and so-called primitive cultures. (8) For Austin, who had much at stake in solidifying her reputation for expertise in Native American matters, her early interactions with California Indians conferred upon her a version of authority that she used to argue her beliefs that recommended protection of select Native American cultures from the dehumanizing effects of modernism. Ultimately, Austin’s long-standing reputation as an “Indian expert” served many purposes for her, ranging from allowing her to “make her bread and butter as a writer” to allowing her to expand her own sense of independent subjectivity to one that occupied a role as “articulator of Indianness” (Smith 168). “Thus,” Smith concludes, in discovering Indians, Austin merely tapped into a heretofore buried but meaningful aspect of herself. Consequently, in articulating the meaning and significance of Indians to America, she felt completely comfortable projecting onto them the mysticism, spiritualism, and artistic impulses imprinted onto her own soul. (168) 114 Austin’s friend Ina Sizer Cassidy had concluded that Austin no longer needed to “talk with Indians, or to be with Indians in order to know them” (qtd. in Langlois 165). And Austin herself, in later life began to speak of her deeply internalized “Indianness” as being one of the gifts of a special grace which has been mine from the beginning, the persistence in me, perhaps, of an uncorrupted strain of ancestral primitivism, a single isolated gene of that far-off and slightly mystical Indian ancestor of whose reality I am more convinced by what happened to me among Indians than by any objective evidence. (Earth Horizon 267) Austin participated in both Native American and feminist debates during her 14 years in New York, and she became an even more vocal player in the Pueblo Arts and Crafts movement after 1924 when she moved permanently to “La Casa Querida,” the famous house she built as part of the Sante Fe / Taos artists colony. From this “beloved house,” Austin hosted a long list of eminent guests that included Ansel and Virginia Adams, 25 Robinson and Una Jeffers, and Willa Cather, who inscribed Austin’s copy of Death Comes for the Archbishop with the following lines: “For Mary Austin in whose lovely study I wrote the last chapters of this book. She will be my sternest critic—and she has a right to be. I will always take a calling-down from my betters” (Literary America 205). 26 By this time in her life, Austin was recognized nationally as an expert on an emerging strain of multiculturalism in American literature, and she would write a book that she considered a product of her peculiar genius at “seeing things from within,” American Rhythm: Studies and Reëxpressions of Amerindian Songs. Here she posited an argument that all of American literature, including all literature produced on North American soil by European Americans, is influenced by the particular rhythms of the land’s first inhabitants in a transferral of character via the land that has much in common with Deloria’s articulation of the long-standing white habit of “playing Indian.” While this book was not particularly well-received by critics, who ridiculed her non- 115 scientific research methods, Austin stood by her literary argument until her death. Despite her own limitations regarding her assessment of African American and Jewish contributions to American letters, Austin argued for a wider perspective on the borders of American literature, and she took her critics to task, arguing that mainstream American critics had “flinch[ed] from the task of competently knowing, not one vast pale figure of America, but several Americas, in many subtle and significant characterizations” (“Regionalism”). Reflecting the common popular assessment of her contributions to literature, The Bookman Anthology of Verse of 1922 introduces her entries under the following glowing biography, a tribute that hits all the notes that Austin would surely have approved: Few people in America understand native rhythms as does Mary Austin. Born in Illinois, she has divided her life between the Far West and the East, making it her special effort to understand the country as a whole. She has written plays, essays, novels and studies of American life. Her work among the Indians has given her not only an unusual mastery of subtle cadences in prose and poetry; but a certain mystic sense of the trend of national feeling that approaches the visionary. A commanding presence, an intuitive understanding and a discriminating tolerance makes Mrs. Austin a truly vital force in American life and literature. The Earth Horizon Stineman makes the point that Austin’s autobiography Earth Horizon is “as eloquent and revelatory in its omissions as in its disclosures” (4), and one must arrive at the same conclusion regarding her unpublished manuscript diaries, as well. Scarcely revealing her many vulnerabilities, Austin’s diary practice is one that must be approached with a willingness to apply the same “intuitive” research of “seeing things from within” that Austin applied to her own subjects. Austin’s feminism was of a kind that reflected her own biases and her own individual triumphs, and it is one that has provided readers and critics a blank 116 cipher capable of endless potential readings, not unlike Austin’s own usage of the inscrutable Walking Woman she had met in her youth. Written during a period when she was recovering from repeated illnesses and two abdominal surgeries, Austin researched her autobiography extensively, writing to former connections (i.e., distant family members, her ex-husband, and old friends) for their recollections, scrutinizing her old diaries, and digging up old clippings and articles by and about her. At one point she declares success in identifying a unifying throughline, claiming “It has always been a profound realization of my life that there was a pattern under it” (vii), yet mere pages later she undercuts this temporary unity by presenting a profoundly fractured narrative voice. Just as MacLane does in her public diaries, Austin chooses to articulate an individual identity by deliberately exposing the impossibility of a coherent self, and Earth Horizon is made up of five separate third-person “Marys,” in addition to the present-day “I” who speaks throughout the narrative. This complex structure sometimes appears deliberately confusing, yet it simultaneously refashions autobiography into a form that refuses the conventions of an assumed cohesive self in order to articulate a more diffuse self in what Linda Karell argues is “a remarkable act of self-creation” (in Graulich 167). Ultimately, she experimented strategically with the form to the point of rupturing it, insisting upon her multiply split identity for narrative effect. Eschewing the tradition of a unitary “I” as narrator, Austin insists upon the split voice, and she draws her authority from a matrilineal line stretching back to her daring ancestor Polly McAdams and to a borrowed tradition of Native American oral storytelling forms, two linked traditions that Karell suggests “repeatedly deny the single authority of a named author—traditions that, in other words, refuse the coherent gendered identity of the authorizing ‘I’” (172). “Although it is an 117 awkward narrative approach,” Karell comments about this unique structure, “the alternation [between first and third persons] repeatedly challenges the assumed stance of unitary selfhood privileged by traditional forms of male autobiographical writing by announcing these differences within herself rather than suppressing them” (171). In the end, Austin looks to the ancient Pueblan symbol of the “earth horizon” as a means of unifying the many complex threads of her manifestly contradictory life. Borrowed from the Sia band of the Pueblos, the earth horizon refers to “the incalculable blue ring of sky meeting earth, which is the source of experience” (Earth Horizon 33). By the time Austin had written her autobiography, the Sia band had all but disappeared, so we must rely on Austin’s reading of their Rain Song for her view of the significance of the concept: 27 It is pictured as felt, rays of earth energy running together from the horizon to the middle place where the heart of man, the recipient of experience, is established, and there treasured. By whatever road it reaches him, by the four-flowing ways of the earth, by the zenith or the nadir, experience is always significant and mysterious; never so significant as when most mysterious, most potent when least understood, exciting in the heart that subtle sense of relationship to the earth horizon which is the nurture of spiritual life. (33) In a passage that draws the inherent spiritual connection from an ancient Pueblan concept and translates it—as always—for her mainstream, largely white middle-class, readers, Austin exhibits the mystic lyricism that brought her literary fame. In this final book that brings closure to a long career of grappling with the issues of “genius,” Austin closes her autobiography with a humble reflection upon the limitations that circumscribed her approach to her own gifts and with an expression of gratitude for the subjective consciousness that mysteriously gave her the unique perspective of “I-Mary”: I have not been entirely happy in my adjustments. I have suffered in my life, in my means, in my reciprocal relations; but I have this pride and 118 congratulation, that I have not missed the spectacle I have been privileged to witness. I have not only had the pleasure of associating with those who have not known what it means, but I have had glimpses of its meaning . . . . I have seen that the American achievement is made up of two splendors: the splendor of individual relationship of power to make and do rather than merely to possess, the aristocracy of creativeness; and that other splendor of realizing that in the deepest layers of ourselves we are incurably collective. At the core of our Amerindian life we are consummated in the dash and color of collectivity. It is not that we work upon the cosmos, but it works in us. I suffer because I achieve so little in this relation, and rejoice that I have felt so much. As much as I am able, I celebrate the Earth Horizon. (368) 119 CHAPTER TWO NOTES 1 In letter from Willa Cather to E.K. Brown, Oct. 7, 1947, Cather collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. In Stineman footnote, p. 236. 2 Similar in many respects to Carl Jung’s articulation of the “psychogenetic residual,” Austin defines “genius” as “the free, untutored play of the racial inheritance into the immediate life of the individual” (Everyman’s Genius #). 3 Austin’s fee of $200 in the 1920s would have the purchasing power of $2000-2400 today. 4 As I will discuss in this chapter, Austin saw no concern in either the language or claims inherent in this title. By virtue of her long association with the West, this expertise was one what was readily granted her by the attendees of her lectures. 5 The four unpublished manuscripts I detail in this chapter are found Boxes 17, 18, 33, and 50 of the Mary Hunter Austin Papers in the Manuscripts Collection of the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Totaling nearly 5500 individual holdings, the Huntington’s collection is the primary depository for Austin’s manuscripts. 6 Contrasting this book with her later work, Peter Richardson suggests “Austin’s most important literary contribution preceded the invention of her public persona.” 7 Interestingly, Austin’s strategy of translation shares similarities with the approach Zitkala-!a took to reach the identical audience in her own contributions own contributions to The Atlantic Monthly just three years before. 8 A discrepancy exists in this as an accurate starting date. While the book contains this handwritten inscription, the details of her biography suggest that the entries in question must have been written in beginning in August of 1889. In reading the manuscript volume, I notice that five leaves appear to have been carefully cut out in that there are five pages at the back of the stitched volume that do not have corresponding pages at the front. This circumstance is not entirely unusual in diaries, which frequently have pages that presumably have been self-censored or otherwise removed. While we will never know the exact circumstances, one likely possibility is that Austin began the notebook originally in 1888 and set it aside during her spring illness, then excised the pages to restart or repurpose the notebook. A second possibility is that Austin wrote the inscription years or decades later when she was preparing her papers for her autobiography or another purpose and that she had remembered 1888 as the year she first moved to California. 9 Photograph taken by the author in the Ahmanson Rare Books Room of the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. 10 Quoted in Goodman and Dawson, p. 7. 120 11 And it has continued to do so as the slim volume of The Land of Little Rain has scarcely fallen out of print in over 100 years. 12 In this passage, as in all the handwritten passages, I have attempted to transcribe Austin’s words faithfully, including tense shifts and dropped letters. By “charmise,” Austin presumably refers to the plant generally known as “chamise,” which grows profusely in the California high desert. 13 Photograph taken by the author. 14 Photograph of pages taken by the author. 15 In fact, through her friendship with Ernest Thompson Seton, Austin was involved with the Campfire Girls, the girls’ empowerment organization whose principles, ceremonies, names, and attire were founded in 1910 based on an idealized view of pan-Indian culture. The Seton Village for Campfire Girls was situated just a few miles from Austin’s home in Santa Fe. 16 As she does, for example, when likening herself to an animal “thrust into strange captivity” during her illness, as I discuss on page 70. 17 As is common with handwritten diaries, this one begins after a pause of several blank pages. In the following analysis, I will number the manuscript pages using the numbers preprinted in the volume, rather than adding confusing by renumbering the pages to begin the first written entry on page one. 18 While I would hesitate to claim unequivocally that this volume is the largest diary format that exists from the period, it is certain that it is the largest I have seen in my perusal of manuscript diaries in the Huntington Library archives and elsewhere. 19 Photograph of pages taken by the author. 20 During my research in the Huntington archives, I was shown a previously unidentified hand-painted poster of Austin depicting her as a fortune-teller or seer, apparently painted for a carnival or fundraising event. Because the large-scale painting was accomplished with evident skill, I suspected it had been done by a trained artist, and with some digging, I discovered that it had been painted by Austin’s acquaintance Annie Traquair Lang, a young artist whose portrait of William Merritt Chase continues to hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Austin and Lang were both members of the National Arts Club and likely became acquainted during Austin’s stay there in 1911-12. 21 As I will discuss in Chapters Three and Four. 121 22 In fact, Austin and Conrad had met during her stay in London, where Conrad expressed his view that she “wrote better than any woman he knew,” and each expressed a great affinity for the other’s books (Goodman and Dawson 108). 23 In later life, Austin also became increasingly vocal about her objection to her view of literary power as being wielded by Jewish editors and critics in New York and Boston, and she often voiced these objections in race-based anti-Semitic language. About Waldo Frank, she wrote, “Can the Jew with his profound complex of election, his need of sensuous satisfaction qualifying his every expression of personal life, and his short pendulum-swing between mystical orthodoxy and a sterile ethical culture—can he become the commentator, the arbiter, of American art and American thinking?” Her New York diaries contain occasional sketches of Jewish life, including her reflections on the first Jewish wedding ceremony she had attended in 1911. Austin’s apparent anti-Semitism was at times virulent, was shared by many Christians in the early twentieth century, and was strongly connected to her resentment over being overlooked as a national writer because she had been pigeon- holed as a Westerner, a circumstance she blamed explicitly on Jewish editors and critics. 24 In an interesting counterpoint to Austin’s theatrical production, Zitkala-!a also wrote the libretto and songs for The Sun Dance Opera, a light opera based on Ute and Sioux traditions that was first performed in Utah with Ute and Sioux performers in 1913. In 1938, the opera was revived at the Broadway Theatre by the New York Light Opera Guild, but for this performance white performers played the key roles and sole writing credit was giving to Zitkala-!a’s white collaborator, William F. Hanson. 25 Ansel Adams, who collaborated with the elder Austin on one of his first major publications, Taos Pueblo, was notably intimidated by her, yet touched by her generosity and spoke at her memorial: “Seldom have I met and known anyone of such intellectual and spiritual power and discipline.” 26 This warm inscription belies the later rift between the two headstrong women. 27 This circumstance illustrates Smith’s point that white intellectuals felt no qualms about speaking for Native American cultures that they believed to be “vanishing.” 122 CHAPTER THREE “The low voice of a curiously-colored seashell”: Zitkala-!a Writes a Quiet Resistance By daylight and lamplight, I spun with reeds and thistles, until my hands were tired from their weaving, the magic design which promised me the white man’s respect. —Zitkala-!a, “Incurring My Mother’s Displeasure” What did it mean to be the first generation to hear the stories of the past, bear the horrors of the moment, and write to the future? —Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance The last several pages of The Indian Helper, the in-house publication of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, was regularly devoted to brief educative updates on how its former pupils had fared after they had left Carlisle to enter the wider world. The template for this regular feature appeared in 1892 in an interview with the school’s founder, Richard Henry Pratt, who had recently returned from visiting the Pine Ridge Agency, which was still reeling from the Ghost Dance Massacre of 1890. 1 Pratt, the decorated military officer who had by then become synonymous with the influential Carlisle experiment in Indian education and assimilation, was already widely known for his infamous exhortation: “Kill the Indian, save the man!” During his visit to Pine Ridge, in addition to procuring new students for his program, Pratt made inquiries about the outcomes of the young charges who had made up the Sioux population of his very first class at the converted Pennsylvania military barracks in 1879: Thirteen years ago when Carlisle was started I was sent to Pine Ridge Agency for pupils. I brought from there 17 boys and girls. I made inquiry about each one and found their record as follows: Frank Twiss has been at work for the Agent nearly ever since his return. He is now the butcher, painter and tinsmith, has always done well, is unmarried, is the owner of sixty-two head of cattle and three horses. 123 Robert American Horse has been catechist under Bishop Hare for seven years. His record is without blemish. He is just now away at some church school to improve his education. Guy Burt was a scout and helper about the Agency; died three years ago. Generally did well. Lucy Day has done well at times. Her surroundings as well as the surroundings of all are greatly at fault. Maggie Stands Looking, now Mrs. Belt, is teaching school. Out of an enrollment of thirty-two, thirty-one of her pupils were present, and if one may judge fairly from such a brief visit, Maggie is doing good work. Her husband was somewhat educated in reservation schools, is the policeman of that district and is a good part of the force which secures such good attendance. Roger Cloud Shield, after going back to the Agency, desired very much to return to Carlisle; was not permitted to do so, and after being home about a year, committed suicide. The schoolhouse, the home, the children, the teachers and all the surroundings were as complete, pleasant and satisfactory as could be expected under such Indian camp reservation influences. (Indian Helper, 18 November 1892, 1-4 passim) These half-dozen narrative entries, characterized by their rigid delineation of appropriate versus inappropriate post-Carlisle conduct, are typical of Carlisle’s prolific publications, which under the vigorous oversight of editor Marianna Burgess, began publishing in 1880 under the name Eadle Keatah Toh, went through several name changes, and ended its run as The Red Man in 1917, just before the Carlisle Indian School closed its doors. 2 All told, the publications ran several hundred of these brief narratives, all penned by Burgess, whose explicit goal was to provide teaching scripts to encourage ideal conduct for the school’s newly assimilated proto-citizens. 3 By praising in glowing terms the former students she perceived as examples of successful assimilation and damning those she perceived as having “gone back to the blanket” (the Carlisle publications’ derogatory epithet for students who 124 had reclaimed tribal dress or lifeways), Burgess wielded formidable influence over the more than 10,000 children who lived within Carlisle’s walls in its 39-year run. These telling narrative scripts, which have scarcely been considered by scholars, open a window onto the vast experiment in the forced assimilation and ideological subject-creation that was being conducted at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. This chapter will analyze the role of narrative autobiographical practice as integral to, and ultimately constitutive of, many boarding school students’ development of a self-defined subjectivity as they negotiated a complex terrain marked out between their originating tribal communities and the acculturating forces of white-run boarding school culture, two locales which were characterized by competing ideologies regarding the role of individual personhood within relational community. The Carlisle Indian Industrial School first opened its doors in 1879 on the site of a converted military barracks, and throughout its history, its primary driving force was Pratt, who saw himself as a staunch advocate for Indians by virtue of his belief that the solution to the much-discussed “Indian Problem” was not literally to kill all Indians or cause them to die off by attrition, as had been the de facto governmental policy for decades, but instead to assimilate Indian children into the values of white U.S. culture via education. In his view, and that of his many supporters, this solution was a radical step forward in that it perceived Indian children as “domesticable” and from that basis it thereby strove to acculturate them to find a place in “civilized,” and tacitly white, U.S. society, typically as farmers or laborers for the boys, and as industrious wives for the girls. Within an historical period that condoned outright murder of Indian “hostiles,” in which white society regarded traditional Native lifeways as barbaric and primitive, and in which racist ideologies of white superiority 125 dominated all discourse, Pratt’s views were seen as a revolutionary and humane “solution” to the “problem,” and his “noble experiment” of vocationally-oriented boarding school education at Carlisle quickly drove the creation of over twenty-five off-reservation Indian schools across fifteen states and territories in the expanding nation by the turn of the century (Coleman 44). 4 From the very beginning of the experiment, the public was fascinated by the evidence of transformation that began buzzing around Pratt’s testing ground at Carlisle. An obscure 1880 internal report from the Department of the Interior’s Office of Indian Affairs notes with great “astonish[ment]” the progress of the four-month-old trial run in transforming “wild” and “untamed” Native children into “civilized” young proto-citizens of a new nation 5 : [The children] were last October utterly without any civilized knowledge or training whatsoever. ‘They had never been inside of a school or a house,’ said one of the employees. They were brought to the barracks filthy, vermin covered, and dressed in their native garb. When they were assigned to their sleeping quarters ‘they lay down on the veranda, on their bellies, and glared out between the palings of the railing like wild beasts between the bars of their cages.’ The first thing to do was to clean them thoroughly and to dress them in their new attire. Baths are compulsory thrice a week. The vermin have been suppressed, all the more easily because the boys have allowed their hair to be cut in the fashion of white people. Everything except swallowing, walking, and sleeping had to be taught; the care of person, clothing, furniture, the usages of the table, the carriage of the body, civility, all those things which white children usually learn from their childhood by mere imitation, had to be painfully inculcated and strenuously insisted on. In addition to this, they were to be taught the rudiments of an English school course and the practical use of tools. Three and a half months have passed, and the change is astonishing . . . . (Department of the Interior 1) 126 The reporting agent found the arrangement to be “most gratifying,” and his delight at Pratt’s “progress” rests largely upon his utter astonishment at the physical and behavioral “transformation” of the Native children (1-2). Even more enthralling to the wider public was the pictorial evidence that soon began to stream out of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, due to Pratt’s savvy hiring of local commercial photographer Jonathan Nicholas Choate to take “before and after” portraits of incoming Native students. 6 Tapping into the public’s taste for the uncanny and foreign (in an age of carnival “freak shows,” minstrel shows, Wild West shows, spiritualism, primitivism, etc.), as well as a burgeoning nostalgia for the “Vanishing Race,” Pratt offered the photo sets as inducements for garnering new subscribers to the Carlisle publications: For submitting ten new subscribers, a Carlisle supporter would receive two PHOTOGRAPHS, one showing a group of Pueblos as they arrive in wild dress, and another of the same pupils three years after, or, for the same number of names we give two photographs showing still more marked contrast between a Navajo, as he arrived in native dress, and as he now looks, worth 20 cents a piece. (The Indian Helper, 23 November 1888) Typical images produced by Choate’s studio feature an individual student or small group of tribally related students on the day they arrived at Carlisle juxtaposed with the same student or same grouping at a period of months, or most often, three years later. The three-year timeframe is significant in that it had become the widely accepted model for acculturation that governed the boarding schools, which contended it would take three years of total immersion for indigenous students to learn English, to begin to sever ties to tribal lifeways, and to replace their traditional values with the values of mainstream European American culture (Spack 174). Emphasized in each of the Carlisle portraits was the keen focus on “citizen’s dress,” 7 or “disguise,” as a marker of subjectivity, as well as hairstyle, pigmentation, 127 bodily posture, and other visual signifiers of culture and identity. These pictorial representations of human transformation, which streamed out of Choate’s studio by the hundreds, had a dramatic effect on turn-of-the-century viewers—who along with the anonymous Department of Interior agent experienced a scopophilic pleasure in the uncanny juxtaposition of “wild” and “tame”—and who viewed this pictorial evidence of transformation as proof both of human progress and of the mutability of subjects in the context of an emerging national narrative regarding individual subjectivity. Figure 11. Portraits of Tom Torlino, whose Navajo name is Dilos Lonewolf. Photographs taken by Choate upon Torlino’s arrival at Carlisle in 1882 and his departure in 1885. Torlino’s photo set was heavily promoted in The Indian Helper (above). 8 128 Figures 12 and 13. Zuni children Mary Ely, Jennie Hammaker, Taylor Ely, and Frank Cushing. Cabinet cards by Choate, circa 1880. 9 Figures 14 and 15. Three Lakota Sioux boys (names unknown) upon arrival & during tenure at Carlisle. Photographs by Choate, circa 1880. 10 129 Figures 16 and 17. Group of Chiricahua Apache children (Samson Noran, Fred'k Eskelsejah, Clement Seanilzay, Hugh Chee, Ernest Hogee, Margaret Y. Nadasthilah, Humphrey Escharzay, Beatrice Kiahtel, Janette Pahgostatum, Bishop Eatennah, and Basil Ekarden) upon arrival at Carlisle in 1886 and four months later. Photographs by Choate. 11 As evidenced in both the narrative templates presented in The Indian Helper as sanctioned life-scripts for appropriate, meaningful conduct and in the stylized portraiture of Indian children “before and after” their boarding school experiences, the guiding principles of Pratt, Burgess, and other self-described “Indian Emancipators” 12 were characterized by a relentless disavowal of competing indigenous conceptions of personhood and an imperious sense of the unimpeachable merit of inculcating into Indian children the “white man’s system of individual ownership” in order to transform them from “abject creatures” into proto-citizens of a vibrant new nation-state (Pratt, “Chained” 15). These implicit assumptions about the relative value of cultures is evident in The Indian Helper’s description of one of the Choate photograph sets on offer, describing “eight reservation Indians in full and hideous dance dress, or rather undress with more feathers and toggery than clothing . . . showing from what degradation and barbarism the Carlisle Indian School would rescue the Indian youth if encouraged to do so” (The Indian Helper, 12 April 1895, qtd. in Enoch 125). 130 For Pratt, who never saw himself as anything less than Indian peoples’ greatest champion, the compromise of diminished cultural identity scarcely registered when measured against what he saw as the manifest gains to be won by inclusion into the larger nation. In an address given long after his retirement, 13 Pratt mockingly derides his critics as he sets out the logic of his bargain: Can’t you hear the system’s pleading voice for prolonged control in the enunciations urged on the public attention, “He is the original inhabitant and is so picturesque;” “He loves such beautiful art;” “Such enchanting music;” “We must improve but not transform;” “He loves his children, we must not break up families.” Are his picturesqueness, his art, his music, his Indian identity, his family relations, his property more important to be preserved than those of other men or the man himself? If in preserving these we destroy the man, where is the gain? When have we hesitated to encourage the breaking up of families of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Islands of the Sea or to promote the abandonment of their race qualities in order that we might gain and develop men of all races into our vast and unique body of citizens? (“Why Most of Our Indians are Dependent”) 14 As Ruth Spack points out, this acculturating process was implicitly “subtractive” rather than “additive” 15 : “Students were expected not to become bicultural but rather to substitute the Christian majority culture for their own. They were to learn English not as an additional language but rather as the only language worth of acquisition” (Spack 174-75). Termed “The Universal Course of Study,” this monolithic governing philosophy was in place in federally funded boarding schools until it was abolished by the Merriam Report in 1928. Ultimately, Pratt never wavered in his view that his life’s work was done for the betterment of Indian peoples, even decades later when the Indian Rights movement drew the public’s attention to the militaristic violence of the schools, the losses engendered by cultural forgetting, and the limitations of an unquestioned national commitment to forced assimilation. 131 Figure 18. Entire student body and teaching staff assembled on the grounds of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, circa 1900. 16 Zitkala-!a’s Autobiographical Narratives Emerging from this cultural crucible was the Yankton-Nakota Sioux writer Zitkala- !a, upon whom the contradictions inherent in Pratt’s autocratic compromise were not lost. Gertrude Simmons (who would adopt the name Zitkala-!a in 1900 with her first publication 17 ) was graduated in 1895 from White’s Manual Labor Institute, a Quaker school patterned explicitly after the Carlisle experiment. She was recruited by Pratt himself to teach at Carlisle from 1897 to 1899, until her frustration with Pratt’s methods and her disillusionment with the unquestioned national commitment to forced assimilation caused her to seek richer ground as a writer, editor, activist, and prominent leader in the American Indian Rights movement for the next three decades. Writing about her own experience of ineluctable acculturation, Zitkala-!a movingly portrays her hard-won understanding of 132 shifting subjectivity, her complicated feelings of complicity and betrayal, and her sense of despair as she shuttled back and forth between her boarding school in the East and her Yankton Sioux family in the West: After my first three years of school, I roamed again in the Western country through four strange summers. During this time I seemed to hang in the heart of chaos, beyond the touch or voice of human aid. My brother, being almost ten years my senior, did not quite understand my feelings. My mother had never gone inside a schoolhouse, and so she was not capable of comforting her daughter who could read and write. Even nature seemed to have no place for me. I was neither a wee girl nor a tall one; neither a wild Indian nor a tame one. This deplorable situation was the effect of my brief course in the East, and the unsatisfactory “teenth” in a girl’s years. (“School Days,” “Four Strange Summers” 190-91) Zitkala-!a’s experience—of having “no place,” of hanging suspended in-between, of being neither “wild” nor “tame”—is shared by many of her generation and is detailed in the autobiographical educational narratives she went on to publish to national acclaim. Autobiographical narratives from this period are key to understanding the impact of boarding school experiences on generations of Native American children, who frequently shared similar multivalent feelings about their boarding school experiences. 18 In his history of Native American autobiography, H. David Brumble delineates educational narratives as one of the six “fairly distinct kinds” of Native American autobiographical practice, a genre that has had a long and complicated history in Native American letters (11). These narratives, written under a variety of publication circumstances and for a non-monolithic audience, provide the cornerstone to this study because they provide an unparalleled view of the interior experience of widespread, explicit, targeted efforts at wholesale subject formation in a cross-cultural context. 19 In particular, Zitkala-!a’s autobiographical writings— due to her exquisite self-awareness, her resistance to Carlisle’s normatizing scripts, her self- 133 defined (often controversial) political positions, and her standing as one of the earliest independently self-writing Native female autobiographers 20 —reveal the potential for engaged autobiographical practice to be both reflective of and at least partially constitutive of active self-defined subjectivity. Born on the Yankton Sioux reservation in the same year as the Battle of Little Big Horn (1876), Gertrude Simmons was raised by her mother Ellen Taté Iyóhiwin (Reaches for the Wind), who was Yankton-Nakota, and she heard stories of an absent father, a white trader named Felker about whom little is known (Davidson xv). A mere five years after Carlisle Indian Industrial School had first opened its doors, its program of a vocationally- based off-reservation “Universal Course of Study” had begun replicating across the nation, and in 1884 Quaker missionaries arrived at the Yankton reservation to procure children for its new school. Young Gertrude, age eight, was enticed by the missionaries’ offer to ride the “iron horse” to a “Wonderland” of “big red apples,” though her mother was reluctant to allow her to leave, yielding sadly due to her belief that her young daughter “will need an education when she is grown, for then there will be fewer real Dakotas, and many more palefaces” (“Impressions,” “The Big Red Apples,” 45-47 passim; 47). Gertrude left in March 1884 for White’s Manual Technical Institute, a Quaker institution in Wabash, Indiana, and she did not return home for three years. Over the next several years through the end of the century, she would be graduated from White’s, be awarded a private scholarship to Earlham College, begin her brief tenure as a teacher at Carlisle Indian Industrial School, and ultimately publicly reject Carlisle’s educational philosophy in a series of autobiographical sketches published to national attention in the Atlantic Monthly, at which time she adopted the name Zitkala-!a. Meanwhile, extraordinary national events would change the course of 134 American Indian experience: In 1887 the Dawes Severalty Act was passed, ultimately having the devastating effect of divesting Indian lands and weakening tribal bonds; two years later Indian Territory opened to white settlers, who quickly outnumbered Indian peoples in the area; and in 1890 the Paiute prophet Wovoka reinvigorated the ancient Ghost Dance religion, which swept across the Plains Indian lands and to which the U.S. government responded with the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek, killing more than 300 Lakota Sioux in a span of hours. Zitkala-!a’s first publications reflect her thoughtful engagement in the challenges to Indian subjectivity wrought by these historic events. Penned in part while she was teaching at Carlisle, yet deeply critical of its foundational ideology, three autobiographical sketches of her girlhood and education were first published as a three-part series in the January, February, and March 1900 issues of Atlantic Monthly, and these pieces enjoyed a wide readership and the fascination of the public. Writing in a cultural moment that valued “local color” writing from across the nation, Zitkala-!a was surprised to find herself toasted as a “little literary skyrocket” on a visit to New York, as she describes her experience in a letter to her then-fiancé Carlos Montezuma (Davidson xix). The first of the series, “Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” describes her early life at home with her mother, ending on a suspenseful note just as the narrator, “frightened and bewildered as the captured young of a wild creature,” arrives at the “massive brick building” of the school (47). The next month’s installment, “The School Days of an Indian Girl,” maintains the uninitiated child’s perspective and makes sophisticated use of dramatic irony to inculcate readers into the foreignness of the European American boarding school experience to Native children, and as such it had a tremendous impact on the Atlantic Monthly’s primarily white readers, who had 135 been exposed exclusively to the rosy propaganda of “progress” that Carlisle and its surrogates had propagated. The final month’s installment, “An Indian Teacher among Indians,” which relates the narrator’s experience as a teacher at an unnamed boarding school with clear intimation of Carlisle, and which served up a strong indictment to the entire off- reservation boarding school system, was the final insult and betrayal to Pratt, Burgess, and the Carlisle publication machinery, which addressed her work in three separate issues of The Red Man (Enoch 135). Whereas prior to their publication, Burgess in The Indian Helper had announced the upcoming articles with obvious pride—“If her interesting articles get into such papers as the Atlantic Monthly her reputation is made among literary lines . . . . Thus the Indian is entering into the highest and best places . . . .”—afterward Zitkala-!a was archly denounced as an ungrateful traitor: “Those who take it upon themselves to point out the defects of the present system . . . should not fail to recognize the alternative, which is, in most cases, an environment of dirt, poverty, mental stagnation, and unmoral if not actively immoral influences” (The Indian Helper, 3 November 1899; The Red Man, June 1900, qtd. in Enoch 135-36). Indeed, Zitkala-!a’s Atlantic Monthly publications departed dramatically from the most familiar forms of Native American literature in that it was neither a collection of enchantment stories, nor a species of the more conventional pro-boarding-school educational/conversion narrative (e.g., Stiya, Thompson, Eastman, LeFlesche, etc.). Instead, Zitkala-!a’s contribution to the form rejected the scripted narrative of unambivalent progress and challenged readers with a nuanced, painful, ambiguous, and deeply interior portrayal of the conflicted experience of indigenous children from her generation who were the first to undergo boarding school acculturation. In his influential Manifest Manners, Gerald 136 Vizenor speaks specifically of this first boarding school generation when he asks his poignant question: “What did it mean to be the first generation to hear the stories of the past, bear the horrors of the moment, and write to the future?” (51). Zitkala-!a’s contribution to the pool of Indian School autobiography represents a further departure from most of the Native writing that was being published in white presses at the time in that it was written by a woman, in her own hand (i.e., without a translator or amanuensis), in English, and in a voice of nuanced but pointed resistance. The conflicts inherent in such an effort are vast. Martha Cutter suggests that the use of English itself is “problematic, an ambivalent tool—both the sign of oppression, and the means of escaping it” (37), and in the past decade Zitkala-!a’s work has been interpreted by Native American and feminist critics alternately as an important radical voice of resistance or as a misguided and even reactionary voice of “assimilationist rhetoric” (Bell). 21 I will argue that attempting to pin Zitkala-!a’s location on a continuum of resistant radical versus acquiescent assimilationist is an exercise that is blind to the complications inherent in her position, which is virtually unparalleled in her moment in time. Writing in English and making pointed use of the tropes of Christianity, Zitkala-!a writes a counter- narrative that methodically challenges the widely held assumptions about Indian “wildness” that are evident in the Department of Interior’s 1880 report, in Carlisle and Pratt’s many publications, and throughout dominant white culture. Yet her experience of European American-influenced education, at White’s, Carlisle, Earlham College, and the Boston Conservatory, gave her a perspective that also challenged the norms of her family and extended family on the Yankton reservation. Jane Hafen delineates the social specificities that mark the conflicted nature of Zitkala-!a’s experience: 137 She clung to her traditional beliefs while practicing Catholicism and other versions of Christianity; she had a Mormon funeral in Arlington, Virginia. She was wrenched from her traditions by the assimilating boarding school experience, yet she sent her only child to a Catholic school in Nauvoo, Illinois. She performed in public arenas and pandered to sentimental, colonial images while demanding legal rights and national sovereignties for Indians. She resisted Col. Pratt’s model of assimilation but joined with him in the campaign against legalized peyote use and in advocating the power of education. (Dreams and Thunder xi). Challenging the assumptions of both white and Native cultures in her work, “hanging in the heart of chaos” between them, Zitkala-!a found herself facing both criticism and praise from both positions, then as now. This fact points to the complications inherent in her autobiographical practice, which required her to walk a fine line as she translated her experience for two cultural viewpoints that at the time were quite diverse. Yet even this delineation does not go far enough to articulate the complications Zitkala-!a embodies. Ron Carpenter argues that critics do not recognize the ways in which Zitkala-!a was “always already bicultural,” that her birth to a Sioux mother and white father had already set young Gertrude apart, and that the Yankton reservation was already being profoundly influenced by white acculturation (1-2). Cathy Davidson suggests that Zitkala-!a “did not live a dual or fractured life. Rather, she moved in, out, and between worlds” (xiii): . . . Zitkala-!a trod the unstable terrain between radicalism, separatism, assimilationism, and intermittent conservatism . . . . [She] challenges easy categorization, suggesting that we don’t have ready access to the critical language needed to talk about the contradictions, multiplicity, or chaos—to use Zitkala-!a’s own term—that may exist within the work of a single author or the course of an individual life history. (xiii) Zitkala-!a’s autobiographical writing tells stories that, properly heard, begin to illustrate these complications. Yet throughout the telling, Zitkala-!a repeatedly gestures toward the difficulty she faces in translating her “quiet” stories for her multiple audiences. In “Chipeta, Widow of 138 Chief Ouray with a Word about a Deal in Blankets,” she explains, “It is an old time custom among Indians to enter upon a subject slowly and not rush to discussion at once, nor try to say all one desired to voice in one breath” (175). In “Iron Routine,” she expands this point with an analogy: Perhaps my Indian nature is the moaning wind which stirs [these sad memories] now for their present record. But, however, tempestuous this is within me, it comes out as the low voice of a curiously colored seashell, which is only for those ears that are bent with compassion to hear it. (190) Sprinkled throughout her publications and her private letters are similar brief hints that gesture toward the impossibility of her task, yet she nonetheless embraces this difficult project as her own given the uniqueness of her position as one of the very few people capable of recognizing the subtle complications inherent in her generation’s stories. Her first efforts toward this massive translation project appear in her Atlantic Monthly pieces. Throughout the twentieth century these three pieces were periodically read as children’s stories and were at times included in school readers, as on the surface they may be seen as appealing to a gentle nostalgia for “authentic” Indian experience. However, in the following pages, I will suggest that these pieces are skillfully accomplishing multiple tasks simultaneously, and when read critically they provide a subtle and scathing denunciation of the philosophies that drove turn-of-the-century governmental policies of assimilation and subject-creation. Each of the three interconnected pieces in the series is broken into short sections that cohere around a single theme, and while these short sections are typically viewed as being anecdotal in nature, I argue that each one is structured as a teaching story, skillfully blending the greatest teaching traditions of both the Christian parable structure, which has been noted frequently by critics, and also the teaching stories of Sioux storytelling 139 tradition. An “anti-formal close reading” 22 of these texts yields insight into the nature of subjectivity formation as it develops vis-à-vis autobiographical practice within a complex pluricultural ground. The first section of “Impressions of an Indian Childhood” opens when the narrator is a “wild little girl of seven,” in a vignette titled, simply, “My Mother” (37). This vignette, and the six that follow in the first piece, center on the daily life on the Yankton reservation in the year before the arrival of the recruiting missionaries. While Zitkala-!a never makes an overt statement of her objective, each of these vignettes focuses on a different Sioux value, and through them, Zitkala-!a highlights the education she was receiving from her mother and her community during these first few years at home. The narrator 23 opens the book with a poignant description of her mother: Often she was sad and silent, at which times her full arched lips were compressed into hard and bitter lines, and shadows fell under her black eyes. Then I clung to her hand and begged to know what made the tears fall. ‘Hush; my little daughter must never talk about my tears’; and smiling through them, she patted my head and said, ‘Now let me see how fast you can run today.’ (37) This portrayal of the mother as a stoic and unknowable figure is seen throughout the collection of stories, and the narrator’s relationship with her will be perilously strained as she comes to understand the larger world of “the East” in ways that go far beyond her mother’s imagining. In fact, this severing of the bond between mother and child was an intentional strategy used by the boarding schools in the service of their project of subject-making. Outlining Pratt’s articulation of this governing strategy, Spack discusses its centrality as a tactic in the boarding school’s overriding objective of “turning Native females into paragons of domestic virtue” (6): 140 To develop a middle-class, Christian “home,” the girls of course had to repudiate the teachings and practices of their own mothers and grandmothers, thus breaking centuries of tradition. And those working in the Indian Service knew that it was necessary to sever that mother-daughter connection, for, as Pratt put it, “[i]t is the women who cling most tenaciously to heathen rites and superstitions, and perpetuate them by their instructions to the children.” (Lomawaima 231; Pratt, “United” 247; qtd. in Spack 182). For girls, the boarding school experience revolved around daily stations in “sewing, care of dining-room, dish-washing, cooking, baking, care of milk, laundrying, and chamber-work,” and the girls were simultaneously derided for the “heathenish” customs of Native life and taught that these specific domestic skills were the key to running a “civilized” home upon graduation (Coggeshall 53). Yet for Zitkala-!a and many of her female classmates, the values of “civility” and “feminine grace” that were being inculcated and touted as the only possible option for “civilized” life represented a substantial loss of power. Recognizing that European American female power was drastically limiting in comparison to the power possessed by women within traditional Sioux culture, Zitkala-!a ultimately rejected these teachings. Describing Zitkala-!a’s realization, Spack writes, “ . . . she was just beginning to realize that the traditional power and prestige of Sioux women, which ‘white girls’ had never experienced, was being diminished by the very domestic culture she had been convinced to embrace” (6). The irony inherent in this circumstance was understood implicitly by her Sioux peers, yet it was virtually incomprehensible to her white audience, which had no point of reference for this kind of female empowerment. Displaying her consummate understanding of the borders between two paradigmatically divergent experiences of the world, Zitkala-!a draws her Atlantic Monthly readers (whom she would have presumed to be primarily white readers) very slowly, 141 skillfully, and gradually through her changing experience of the world. On these first pages, she runs freely at the encouragement of her mother: I was a wild little girl of seven. Loosely clad in a slip of brown buckskin, and light-footed with a pair of soft moccasins on my feet, I was as free as the wind that blew my hair, and no less spirited than a bounding deer. These were my mother’s pride,—my wild freedom and overflowing spirits. She taught me no fear save that of intruding myself upon others. (68) Knowing her readership (both whites and boarding-school-educated Natives) to be exceedingly well-versed in the Christian bible, Zitkala-!a opens her series with an unthreatening description that suggest the wild freedom of an edenic natural childhood. Her statement of a natural, inherent inward spirituality does the work of not only unconsciously tapping into readers’ sense of biblical Eden and implicitly arguing for an inward spirituality, but also begins to mark out an emergent sense of interior subjectivity: “I was not wholly conscious of myself, but was more keenly alive to the fire within. It was as if I were the activity, and my hands and feet were only experiments for my spirit to work upon” (37). While the full flower of this suggestion will not be capitalized upon until her later publication of “Why I am a Pagan,” Zitkala-!a has here immediately sown the seed of a different kind of subjectivity with this early suggestion of the self as intrinsically connected to something greater that moves immanently from within and operates it. Carpenter interprets this edenic imagery as being intended by Zitkala-!a effectively to assuage white readers with a familiar image of Native childhood in the wild (4), and she has been criticized by Betty Louise Bell, Robert Warrior, and others as participating uncritically in an assimilationist discourse. While I agree that Zitkala-!a is indeed tapping into a set of cultural associations surrounding nature, Native, Eden, and even tropes of “the noble savage,” I would argue that rather than participating in this discourse naïvely, Zitkala- 142 !a makes use of these widespread associations in order to shift them cataclysmically later in her narrative. Her edenic imagery functions as part of an overarching pattern of biblical imagery and Western cultural touchstones that encompasses the entire text in both overt and subtly subversive ways: The child is caught “eyeing the forbidden fruit,” as she “trod[s] lightly on the sacred ground” of a centrally located “plum bush” (43). She is tempted by “the great tree where grew red, red apples” that she is told grows in the “Wonderland” of the Eastern boarding school (46). Upon arrival, her hair is “shorn” like Samson’s, and like cowards among the Sioux (186). Speaking of the missionaries, she cries out the Latin tricolon, “They came, they saw, and they conquered!” (46). Yet while Zitkala-!a participates in the discourses of the West by alluding to familiar biblical tropes and producing a written work in the format of classic Western autobiography, her educational narratives also reveal a simultaneous hidden structure undergirding her work. Sioux storytelling tradition is a complex and ancient genre that consists of multiple categories of story type. A primary division exists between ohunkankan, which are expected to include fantastic elements and are traditionally translated as “story, myth, fable,” or “just- for-fun-story,” and wicooyake, which are centered on stories that refer to actual happenings within the memory of the storytellers or elders (Power 83). 24 Ohunkankan are primarily teaching tales that are intended to teach proper behavior, and unambiguous examples of ohunkankan include the “retold” Iktomi tales that Zitkala-!a published in Old Indian Tales, with similar publications of “retold tales” being published by her peers Charles Eastman and Ella Deloria. Within these two large divisions are a complex series of smaller subdivisions, including ehanni, or creation stories, local events, war stories, and hunting stories. While attention has been paid to Zitkala-!a’s position within a European tradition of narrative, 25 143 little has been mentioned of her working simultaneously within an ancient Sioux tradition, updating it for use as a new teaching story for a new generation, using her own experience as a transitional figure who was left to “hang in the heart of chaos” (191). Just as Sioux ohunkankan stories are intended to teach proper conduct to the uninitiated (children), so too does Zitkala-!a teach the uninitiated dominant white culture the underlying values of Sioux tradition, which had been previously invisible, unhearable, and assumed to be impossible by the dominant culture, which in its focus on solidifying a uniquely American sense of identity was effectively blind to the values and mores deeply held by non-European cultures. The clearest illustration of this underlying structure occurs in an early section of “Impressions,” entitled “The Legends.” Read as a teaching story, it reveals both Zitkala-!a’s strategies for reaching her uninitiated readers and the primary value placed on quiet hospitality. The episode begins as the child is at home with her mother: “The morning meal was our quiet hour, when we two were entirely alone. At noon, several who chanced to be passing by stopped to rest, and to share our luncheon with us, for they were sure of our hospitality” (38). This overt reference to hospitality and the proper ways to extend and accept it are repeated throughout the episodes in “Impressions.” Even more pointedly, the narrator illustrates the aspects of acceptable proper behavior that would have been most foreign to European American sensibilities: I loved best the evening meal, for that was the time old legends were told. I was always glad when the sun hung low in the west, for then my mother sent me to invite the neighboring old men and women to eat supper with us. Running all the way to the wigwams, I halted shyly at the entrances. Sometimes I stood long moments without saying a word. It was not any fear that made me so dumb when out upon such a happy errand; nor was it that I wished to withhold the invitation, for it was all I could do to observe this very proper silence. But it was a sensing of the atmosphere, to assure myself that I should not hinder other plans. My mother used to say to me, as I was 144 almost bounding away for the old people: “Wait a moment before you invite any one. If other plans are being discussed, do not interfere, but go elsewhere.” The old folks knew the meaning of my pauses. (38-39) This level of attention—to a quiet “sensing of the atmosphere,” to observation, to respect for elders—is taught as a matter of course to a child of seven years, and Zitkala-!a’s illustration is direct and given without explicit commentary or comparison to white culture. Returning to her mother, the child reveals another important lesson that she had been taught: My mission done, I ran back, skipping and jumping with delight. All out of breath, I told my mother almost the exact words of the answers to my invitation. Frequently she asked, “What were they doing when you entered their tepee?” This taught me to remember all I saw at a single glance. Often I told my mother my impressions without being questioned. (39) Zitkala-!a’s attention to the lesson of keen observation is telling here, as is her usage of the word “impression” in that it echoes the title of the piece and subtly underlines her particular qualifications as an observer. The section continues with the telling of Iktomi tales around a fire, revealing a strikingly warm communal scene with the child’s head “pillowed” in her mother’s lap, her “eager listening to every word,” and her joining in the laughter of the “old women” who “made funny remarks” as “bright flames leaped into the faces of the old folks as they sat around in a great circle” (39). The most important teaching lesson of the section surrounds the telling of an ohunkankan that the narrator describes as being “such a fearful story” as is “rarely . . . told by the camp fire”: “Its impression was so acute that the picture still remains vividly clear and pronounced” (39). In describing it as such, by surrounding it with mystery, Zitkala-!a 145 ratchets up her white audience’s interest and prepares it for a crucial lesson in discerning the quiet lessons hidden in her stories: . . . I remember the glare of the fire shone on a tattooed star upon the brow of the old warrior who was telling a story. I watched him curiously as he made his unconscious gestures. The blue star upon his bronzed forehead was a puzzle to me. Looking about, I saw two parallel lines on the chin of one of the old women. The rest had none . . . . After the warrior’s story was finished, I asked the old woman the meaning of the blue lines on her chin, looking all the while out of the corners of my eyes at the warrior with the star on his forehead. I was a little afraid that he would rebuke me for my boldness. Here the old woman began: “Why, my grandchild, they are signs,—secret signs I dare not tell you. I shall, however, tell you a wonderful story about a woman who had a cross tattooed upon each of her cheeks.” It was a long story of a woman whose magic power lay hidden behind the marks upon her face. (39-40) This story about the proper way to ask for stories, to hear stories, and to tell stories occurs within the first few pages of Zitkala-!a’s three-part series. It alerts her readers that they must be attentive to the existence of “signs—secret signs” that dare not be told. And in revealing the old woman’s strategy of tactical diversion, of telling a parallel story, not her own story but instead another marked woman’s ohunkankan—that ancient story form that allows for fantasy to teach the true lesson—Zitkala-!a is gesturing toward the narrative value she finds in hiddenness and disguise. For the reader whose “ears are . . . bent with compassion to hear it,” Zitkala-!a tells a story that is both hers and also simultaneously encompasses more than a single individual in its “I.” Zitkala-!a is not alone in her usage of autobiographical narratives to tell the story of both the individual and the community using a mixture of fact/fiction (in a European context), of wicooyake/ohunkankan (in a Sioux context), or of their many narrative counterparts across Native cultures. Contemporary Native American scholars recognize the 146 autobiographical components inherent in a wide range of traditional and contemporary forms, including pictographic life narratives, wampum belts, quillwork, coup tales, informal autobiographical tales, self-examinations, self-vindications, educational narratives, stories of quests for visions and power, and “as-told-to” collaborations (Brumble; Wong). When considered in its manifold forms, Michelle Raheja and Stephanie Fitzgerald assert, “Autobiography constitutes the most prevalent form of discursive production by indigenous people in North America” (1). In addition to the many forms these autobiographical narratives have taken, the objectives of autobiographical practice have also served a wide variety of purposes for Native peoples, as well as for the institutions that sought to control them. Raheja and Fitzgerald’s overview provides an efficient sweep of these many purposes and forms: Autobiography has had many functions in American Indian communities: as a powerful means of constructing tribal identities; a form of cultural preservation; a mode of surveillance in the hands of reservation and government agents; a springboard for thinking about issues of sovereignty, nationalism, and historiography; and a therapeutic tool to help deal with historical and personal trauma. Traditional forms of self-life narration existed prior to European invasion and occupation and included pictographic and oral narratives such as personal artistic representations on buffalo robes and naming ceremonies. This tradition of a wide range of personal narrative styles continued and expanded as Indians gained literacy in English and began to tailor their experiences to new literary forms such as the spiritual autobiography and the classic chronological personal narrative, at the same time maintaining older modes of self-life narration. (1) In an important recent overview of the field, Wong divides twentieth- and twenty-first- century scholars of Native American autobiographical practice into three groups. The first two have claimed that the field of Native American autobiography cannot exist either a) because they were “ethnocentric enough to assume that indigenous people were ‘primitive’ and therefore had no sense of self and no writing with which to record it”; or b) because 147 they were cultural relativists for whom “autobiography by a Native person was still a Western form that erased even a trace of Native subjectivity and culture” (“Native American Life Writing,”126). Wong establishes a third position, which both recognizes autobiography as an historically Western form and also investigates “indigenous modes of self-narration and examine[s] the interaction of the two historical and cultural contexts” (126). 26 This position is important because it allows for the existence of multiple subjectivities as a standpoint from which to tell the story of the individual and communal self. From this third position, one of the key conceptions that twentieth- and twenty-first- century interpretations of Native American autobiography has hinged upon is Arnold Krupat’s influential distinction between “persons” and “individuals,” in which he concludes that Native American autobiography can be characterized by a “synecdochic sense of self” (Ethnocriticism 212). Glossing Jane Faijins’ distinction between person as referring to a “bounded entity invested with specific patterns of social behavior, normative powers, and restraints” and individual as “an entity with interiorized conscience, feelings, goals, motivations, and aspirations,” Krupat argues that traditional Native American autobiography provides evidence of its writers/speakers tending to construct themselves as “persons” more than “individuals.” In forwarding this argument, he posits, Metonymy and synecdoche I take as terms that name relations of a part-to- part and a part-to-whole type. Thus where personal accounts are strongly marked by the individual's sense of herself predominantly as different and separate from other distinct individuals, one might speak of a metonymic sense of self. Where any narration of personal history is more nearly marked by the individual's sense of himself in relation to collective social units or groupings, one might speak of a synecdochic sense of self. (Ethnocriticism 212) In this sense, Krupat suggests that traditional Western modes of autobiography have been predominantly metonymic in character while Native American modes have been 148 predominantly synecdochic. Concerned about essentialism in Native American studies and the academy, Krupat further posits a “strategic essentialism” that sees Native American literature as “exist[ing] in a mixed or hybrid state, with no ‘pure’ or strictly autonomous text existing,” arguing that Native American literature is inherently an intercultural practice. Krupat’s widely influential articulation of the “synecdochic self” has been taken up by a generation of scholars, including Wong, who pushes the distinction further in her reading of indigenous women writing autobiographically. Wong argues that beyond inhabiting a “synecdochic self,” Native American women may write from a position which is not merely relational, as feminist and Native scholars have noted separately, but “doubly relational” (“First-Person Plural” 168). Drawing from Bakhtin, Wong articulates a crucial question for understanding women’s autobiographical practice: “When a Native woman writes or speaks in the first-person singular, who else is crowded into that ‘I’?” (168). Making the point that “[g]enerally, Native people see themselves as connected to an entire network of kinship relations with family, clan, community, earth, plant and animal life, and cosmos,” Wong nonetheless cautions against simplistically viewing Natives as writing in “first-person plural” and non-Natives writing in “first-person singular” (169). Nonetheless, she points out a telling contrast: In many indigenous contexts, it is understood that to speak or write about oneself, calling attention to one’s own accomplishments (as is often the case in autobiography), reveals a poor upbringing (displaying an inappropriate and exaggerated individuality that may diminish communal values), while in many Western contexts to announce oneself directly is considered straightforward and honest. (169) 149 Ultimately, Wong concludes that “numerous kinds of relational subjectivities are possible,” and cautions against the critical and popular tendency to seek “authenticity” and thereby attempt to impose an historical fixity on indigenous peoples (169, 170). Wong’s question—“who else is crowded into that ‘I’?—is important to understanding Zitkala-!a’s Atlantic Monthly pieces and their position within a canon of women’s autobiographical practice. Most scholarly assessments of Zitkala-!a’s work take pains to define it carefully as “semi-autobiographical” and to caution against reading it as strictly “autobiographical” due to Zitkala-!a’s changing of personal and place names and her ambiguity regarding other minor details. Carpenter argues that critics’ assessment not to consider Zitkala-!a’s work as fully within the genre of autobiography is an ethnocentric disavowal of the complications inherent in Native autobiographical practice. I would argue further that this reticence and the confusion about which elements of Zitkala-!a’s work “qualify” as “autobiographical” and which elements are excluded from this designation ultimately serve to highlight the complications of autobiographical practice as a form that is uniquely intertwined with issues of representation and subjectivity. Further, it points to the ways in which, as Wong and many other scholars of Native American literature have noted, Native American autobiography is particularly tangled up in an historical evaluation of its “authenticity” as measured by ongoing fascination with historical fantasies of Native peoples and lifeways. Complicating the form even further, the continual threat of cultural loss often requires explicit acts of imaginative creation in order to tell individual and community stories: [Many] writers define themselves as American Indians by selecting and arranging the fragments of myth, history, and identity they inherit. More than genetic inheritance or cultural practice, Native American identity, for many 150 of the autobiographers, demands an act of will and creativity; an act of reinterpretation and reclamation to assert a lost or threatened but felt relationality. (Wong, “First-Person Plural” 175) Within this context, I read the overarching project of Zitkala-!a’s educational narratives as speaking multivocally, including both her own self-defined subjectivity and a larger sense of communal self within her voice, and I interpret the ambiguities surrounding place and name details in her educational narratives as indicative of this expansion of the “self” implied in her project of self-representation. First publishing at precisely the turn of the century (January 1900), Zitkala-!a is in the rare position of having facility in both Dakota-Lakota and European American language, story, and culture, and her lifelong dedication to the causes of Indian Rights suggest her acceptance of the heavy mantle of translating between these cultures at a difficult moment in Native-white relations. The second installment of her serialized educational narrative reveals one of the key strategies she used to accomplish this project. “School Days of an Indian Girl” picks up where the first sketch had ended, which was at just the moment when the narrator has entered the “massive brick” school in the East: Trembling with fear and distrust of the palefaces, my teeth chattering from the chilly ride, I crept noiselessly in my soft moccasins along the narrow hall, keeping very close to the bare wall. I was as frightened and bewildered as the captured young of a wild creature. (“Impressions” 47) In addition to the “chilly” and “bare” impersonality of the school, the contrast between her “noiselessness” and the loudness of the school is repeated throughout the rest of the piece in the hard floors, the hard shoes, the clanging bells, and the loud voices of the teachers (“School Days” 185-186 passim). Carpenter suggests that this repeated focus on the quietness of Native life in opposition to the loudness of school life, along with the concomitant 151 inability of the child’s white teachers to hear her, is intended to teach readers “to listen for those textual moments where the autobiographical subject is silent because the autobiographical persona had indicated that silence is constitutive of a bicultural identity” (22). Just as the old woman at the fire taught the child to listen for the hidden parallel story and as her mother taught her to listen and “sens[e] the atmosphere,” the child’s silences also point toward the most important teaching aspects of the story. Maneuvering her readers to experience this quietude required a rather complex narrative move, which occurs most clearly in “School Days.” Preceding this section, “Impressions” is written from the perspective of the young pre-boarding-school child, who exists in a nearly edenic state in connection with the warm maternal influences of her mother and the community of women who surround and protect her. The narrator’s function in this world is to report it as an embedded informant to a primarily white audience who will read it as a bucolic, or quaint, or peaceful, specimen of “local color” writing. In counterpoint, “School Days” maintains the child narrator’s point of view, yet because the child now enters a world that is at least partially familiar to readers (in that it is a Christian and European American educational site in which English is the sole acceptable language) and that is simultaneously utterly foreign to the narrator, in the first moment of “School Days” the narrative strategy has suddenly reversed itself. This sudden enantiodromia has the jarring effect of highlighting how utterly bizarre the customs of the white-run boarding-school environment appear to the uninitiated child, and through her eyes, to her primarily white readers. This is a complicated strategy requiring a reliance on extensive dramatic irony, and Zitkala-!a’s narrative reveals her skill in persuasively translating this shift for her readership. 152 Passages throughout this section are characterized by extremely rich sensory image and sensation as if to bring readers bodily into the experience of the small child: Entering the house, I stood close against the wall. The strong glaring light in the large whitewashed room dazzled my eyes. The noisy hurrying of hard shoes upon a bare wooden floor increased the whirring in my ears. My only safety seemed to be in keeping next to the wall. As I was wondering in which direction to escape from all this confusion, two warm hands grasped me firmly, and in the same moment I was tossed high in midair. A rosy-cheeked paleface woman caught me in her arms. I was both frightened and insulted by such trifling. I stared into her eyes, wishing her to let me stand on my own feet, but she jumped me up and down with increasing enthusiasm. My mother had never made a plaything out of her wee daughter. (185-86) By vividly describing the sense impressions, Zitkala-!a brings readers bodily into the child’s terrifying experience, but she also calls attention to the shocking lack of respect she felt in having her very body handled as a “plaything” for her teachers. While later in the series she describes these teachers as “well-meaning” if “ignorant,” the language she uses to convey this immediate introduction to school life draws a stark distinction between her school teachers and those home teachers and elders who had treated her with an unquestioned warmth and respect. Throughout “Impressions,” the storytellers around the campfire bestow lessons in propriety, and later when one of the “old grandfathers,” Wiyaka-Napbina, calls while her mother is out, the young child reciprocates with an imitation of the hospitality she has seen her mother perform. Playing the part of “a generous hostess,” the child fills the coffeepot of old grounds “half full of warm Missouri River water” and puts in on a “heap of cold ashes” (42). She pours her guest “a cup of worse than muddy warm water” and offers it to him “with the air of bestowing generous hospitality” (42, 43). The old teacher accepts graciously, and when the child’s mother returns he tells of the child’s flawless hospitality: “My granddaughter made coffee on a heap of dead ashes, and served me the moment I 153 came” (43). The narrator, in looking back, sees the humor of the episode, but highlights the unerring respect for children revealed in the customary teaching method: But neither [my mother] nor the warrior, whom the law of our custom had compelled to partake of my insipid hospitality, said anything to embarrass me. They treated my best judgment, poor as it was, with the utmost respect. It was not till long years afterward that I learned how ridiculous a thing I had done. (43) The daily treatment of indigenous peoples by white culture at the turn of the century would have provided clear evidence to Zitkala-!a of the ignorance of most of her white readers to the strong traditions of propriety and the teaching already in place in traditional cultures. In her Atlantic Monthly series, she begins to challenge the notions of even “well- meaning” whites who assume that Native children entering the boarding schools are receiving their very first teaching lessons, and she goes further to quietly illustrate the ways in which readers who “are bent with compassion to hear” may recognize the more subtle and highly developed sense of propriety that Sioux children are taught from even their earliest years. Jessica Enoch argues that Zitkala-!a is a “resistant educator” who intentionally writes a counter-narrative to the “master narrative” that Pratt produced through the vehicle of the Carlisle publication system. Enoch explains, Zitkala-!a was aware of Carlisle’s educational narrative and . . . was incensed by Carlisle’s assumption that its education transformed the Indian from savage to civilized. Her essays reverse the dichotomy that Carlisle sets up, flipping the script, to use Keith Gilyard’s phrase, of this component of Carlisle’s educational plan by telling stories of home that are not filled with barbarism and impropriety. (126) Not only are Zitkala-!a’s stories of her childhood upbringing “not filled with barbarism,” they illustrate an extraordinarily fine-tuned sense of propriety, one that is well beyond the 154 ken of her white teachers at the boarding school, whose “ears . . . could not hear” her language or her cries (187). In contrast with “Impressions,” in which the informed child narrator brings uninformed readers into a bucolic world, “School Days” turns any reader expectation of nostalgia on its head by relating a series of horrific and terrifying incidents. Continuing with her marked strategy of using vivid sensory imagery to locate readers, Zitkala-!a describes an episode that was common to all children who entered the boarding schools in “The Cutting of My Long Hair.” She first sets the stage with the overwhelming sensation of the noise as it sounded on her first day: The first day in the land of apples was a bitter-cold one . . . . A large bell rang for breakfast, its loud metallic voice crashing through the belfry overhead and into our sensitive ears. The annoying clatter of shoes on bare floors gave us no peace. The constant clash of harsh noises, with an undercurrent of many voices murmuring an unknown tongue, made a bedlam within which I was securely tied. (186) The disorientation caused by the aural stimulus provides the backdrop for the painful challenge to identity yet to come: Late in the morning, my friend Judéwin gave me a terrible warning. Judéwin knew a few words of English; and she had overheard the paleface woman talk about cutting our long, heavy hair. Our mothers had taught us that only unskilled warriors who were captured had their hair shingled by the enemy. Among our people, short hair was worn by mourners, and shingled hair by cowards! (187) As seen in the Choate photographs that opened this chapter and as described in the Department of Interior agent’s laudatory report, a primary strategy used by the boarding schools was to begin its project of creating new “civilized” subjects by first transforming the exterior dress and physical bearing of its students. 155 In his examination of the mechanisms of subject-formation, Joel Pfister argues that the Indian boarding schools from this period, due to their overarching “rhetoric of individuality,” function as a crucible site through which we may observe the work of subject- making as everywhere evident, and this “individualizing” functions in both exterior and interior ways: Those who sought to ‘individualize’ Indians . . . developed strategies of subjectivity and emotion production that aimed to prescribe how an ‘individual’ should properly pursue happiness, meaningfulness, and work— for example by desiring an affectively intensivized romantic bond, having a sentimentally privatized family, being willing to work at just about any job to possess goods and own property. (12) Arguing that “the individual” was a cultural category still under construction in early modern U.S. culture, Pfister usefully explores the ways in which boarding school children were caught up as test subjects in this “history of individualizing” (13). Pfister’s positing of Carlisle as a crucial site for understanding the nature of “individualizing” has been a cornerstone to my study. However, while Pfister approaches autobiography essentially as documentary historical evidence that is tangentially supportive of his larger goals, my approach places autobiographical practice at the center point and views the educational narratives that emerged from the boarding schools as key to understanding the act of autobiographical self-description as itself constitutive of identity, even as the resulting documents are also evidence of that formation. For Pratt and his colleagues at other turn-of- the-century off-reservation schools, the first mark of this “individualizing” was to be made on the physical body of the students, with the objective of promoting the deep internalization of European American values through intensive acculturation. 156 Yet in her autobiographical narratives, Zitkala-!a reveals her spirit of resistance to these efforts as appearing on this very first day. When her friend Judéwin concludes, “We have to submit, because they are strong,” the narrator states, “I rebelled. ‘No, I will not submit! I will struggle first!’” (187) She creeps upstairs and hides, listening to “loud voices” calling her name (187). In a suspenseful passage, she is searched for and eventually found: “I remember being dragged out, though I resisted by kicking and scratching wildly. In spite of myself, I was carried downstairs and tied fast to a chair” (187). Ultimately her fight is in vain and she is overcome, and the passage detailing the breaking of her spirit contains some of the most poignant emotion of the series: I cried aloud, shaking my head all the while until I felt the cold blades of the scissors against my neck, and heard them gnaw off one of my thick braids. Then I lost my spirit. Since the day I was taken from my mother I had suffered extreme indignities. People had stared at me. I had been tossed about in the air like a wooden puppet. And now my long hair was shingled like a coward’s! In my anguish I moaned for my mother, but no one came to comfort me. Not a soul reasoned quietly with me, as my own mother used to do; for now I was only one of the many little animals driven by a herder. (187) This heartbreaking sweep of her bitter disappointment in following the missionaries to the rosy “promised land” of “red, red apples,” stands as the first passage in the series to explicitly disavow the boarding school system, and in doing so it begins to harvest the seeds Zitkala-!a had implicitly planted throughout even the bucolic earlier episodes. Critics have long suggested that some boarding school narratives may serve as a kind of “reverse captivity narrative” (Totten 106, Huhndorf 189), and in this central section to her series, Zitkala-!a’s narrative shares key conventions of the form. 27 And like the heroines of traditional captivity narratives, Zitkala-!a does not remain in this defeated stance for long. Her renewed resistance begins immediately in the next section 157 when she writes, “a mischievous spirit of revenge possessed me” (188). The power variables in her environment were extreme, yet Zitkala-!a narrates episodes of resistance that provided her a deeply satisfying interior sense of “triumph” (189): One day I was called in from my play for some misconduct. I had disregarded a rule which seemed to me very needlessly binding. I was sent into the kitchen to mash the turnips for dinner. . . . I hated turnips, and their odor which came from the brown jar was offensive to me. With fire in my heart, I took the wooden tool that the paleface woman held out to me. I stood on a step, and, grasping the handle with both hands, I bent in a hot rage over the turnips. I worked my vengeance upon them. . . . I saw that the turnips were in a pulp, and that further beating cold not improve them; but the order was, “Mash these turnips,” and mash them I would! I renewed my energy; and as I sent the masher into the bottom of the jar, I felt a satisfying sensation that the weight of my body had gone into it. Just here a paleface woman came up to my table. As she looked into the jar, she shoved my hands roughly aside. I stood fearless and angry. She placed her red hands upon the rim of the jar. Then she gave one lift and strode away from the table. But lo! the pulpy contents fell through the crumbled bottom to the floor! (188-89) The “mischievous spirit” evident in this small rebellion is found throughout the episodes of “School Days.” Its context here is entirely domestic, and it could be diminished by being read on the surface as a small and insignificant rebellion, yet its import for the human subject at the heart of the boarding schools’ efforts to subjectivize Native children is monumental. Indeed, I argue that it is the construction of this resistant counter-narrative, which manifestly rejects the imprint of a limiting state-designed “individuality,” that allows boarding school autobiographers to create and inhabit a self-defined subjectivity. In discussing the agency claimed by Native students within the boarding school system, Pfister argues that “ . . . the making of ‘individuals’ was not only provocative but an extremely complex enterprise and that Natives played significant roles in it, as critical agents, by no means just as victims” (13). In this episode, Zitkala-!a’s narrative of active resistance functions to bring into existence an 158 independent subjectivity that is capable of resisting the normatizing pressures of the boarding school environment, making it possible for greater and greater resistances as the narrative continues. Zitkala-!a concludes her kitchen resistance with the following “triumphant” flourish: “As I sat eating my dinner, and saw that no turnips were served, I whooped in my heart for having once asserted the rebellion within me” (94). 28 Contemporary empirical evidence that suggests support for my argument that the writing of autobiographical practice is at least partially constitutive of subjectivity comes from the field of narrative psychology. Tapping into recent interest in narrative approaches to understanding human behavior in fields as diverse as the social sciences, medicine, and law, narrative psychologist Dan McAdams has posited a “life story model of identity” which he describes as “assert[ing] that people living in modern societies provide their lives with unity and purpose by constructing internalized and evolving narratives of the self” (“The Psychology of Life Stories” 100). McAdams builds upon Jerome Bruner’s foundational studies of legal narratives and Theodore Sarbin’s prediction that “the general idea of narrative could provide a new root metaphor for the field of psychology as a whole” (101) to design studies that examine autobiographical memory and subjects’ relationship with their own personal “myth-making” (Ideas). From these studies, McAdam concludes that “identity itself takes the form of story, complete with setting, scenes, character, plot, and theme” (101). In interpreting their findings, McAdams and other narrative psychologists draw significantly upon literary theory regarding narrative structures and interpretations, yet their work has yet to have been taken up in turn by literary theorists or, most significantly by theorists of autobiography. I would suggest, however, that because autobiographical practice is intimately bound up in issues both of literary narrativity and in personal subjectivity, the empirical 159 findings of narrative psychology are exceedingly important to understanding the constitutive nature of autobiographical practice and its interweaving of narrative “fact” and “fiction.” Of particular usefulness to this study of educational narratives are McAdam’s conclusions regarding the timing of the construction of personal narratives: In late adolescence and young adulthood, people living in modern societies begin to reconstruct the personal past, perceive the present, and anticipate the future in terms of an internalized and evolving self-story, an integrative narrative of self that provides modern life with some modicum of psychosocial unity and purpose. (101) Coincidentally echoing the phrasing of Vizenor’s important question regarding Zitkala-!a’s generation—the first to “hear the stories of the past, bear the horrors of the moment, and write to the future”—McAdams here provides a theoretical ground for reading the developmental particularities of Zitkala-!a’s Atlantic Monthly series. Uniquely positioned as a writer who maintained a dual/multiple subjectivity and who served as an original translator between cultures, Zitkala-!a in her educational narratives marks out her first public statement of her position, and these narratives reveal a nuanced position that speaks to multiple audiences, using multiple narrative strategies, and representing multiple subjectivities. While autobiographical theorists grapple with the complications of “truth- claims” in autobiographical texts, and while some of Zitkala-!a’s critics question whether her work should even be granted status as “autobiographical,” McAdams usefully sets these concerns in a psychological context: Life stories are based on biographical facts, but they go considerably beyond the facts as people selectively appropriate aspects of their experience and imaginatively construe both past and future to construct stories that make sense to them and their audiences, that vivify and integrate life and make it more or less meaningful. (101) 160 Critics’ concerns over Zitkala-!a’s strategies of a communitarian autobiographical practice that speaks for multiple subjects and the license she takes with naming and location seem short-sighted when viewed from a larger sense of the flexibility in truth-claims afforded by this more expansive conception of lived narrative. Ultimately, narrative psychologists suggest that “the purpose of the life story is to form a cohesive identity so that one does not get pulled apart by the deconstructive forces of modernity” (Thorne and Latzke 372). Due to the explicit objective of Carlisle to create scripted new subjects and the turn-of-the-century U.S. culture’s overarching pressures toward assimilation, one can scarcely imagine a context in which individuals would have faced greater “deconstructive forces” than the Indian boarding schools, and for Zitkala-!a and her generation, educational narratives served as particularly fortifying counter-forces to those pressures. While neither McAdams nor other narrative psychologists focus specifically on the meanings of autobiographical practice in Native contexts, their work is nonetheless extremely useful to understanding the constitutive function that the writing of autobiographical stories and the construction on personal myths may have provided for Native American students who wrote within the context of surviving the Indian boarding schools’ acculturating objectives. For Zitkala-!a specifically, the crafting of these self-defined stories of resistance within her autobiographical narratives helps to create a subjectivity that stands in opposition to the dominant normatizing strictures of Carlisle and the philosophies of assimilation that defined this period for Indian peoples. Ultimately, Zitkala-!a’s multiply relational narratives functioned to clarify a self-defined subjectivity that was strong enough to take on and defy the dominant cultural forces that would attempt to define her from outside. 161 Zitkala-!a’s embodiment of this self-defined subjectivity is most evident in the final installment of her Atlantic Monthly educational narrative, published in the March 1900 issue. “An Indian Teacher Among Indians” provides the most stinging possible indictment of the structure and philosophies that undergird the boarding school system, and as such it was taken by Pratt and Burgess to be a spiteful betrayal. Whereas the narrator of the first installment was the initiated child illustrating a foreign location for uninitiated readers, and the narrator of the second installment was the uninitiated child revealing the terror of the new location to insensible readers, the final installment reveals a narrator who has facility in multiple worlds and whose unique perspective gives her an authority that surpasses that of her readers. Further, the final installment is constructed to reveal the narrator’s burgeoning subjectivity as it develops and matures over time with new experiences and realizations within the text. The piece opens with the narrator’s arrival at the boarding school at which she has been hired to teach. As with her previous narratives, Zitkala-!a never explicitly names the school, yet it was immediately understood by Pratt to be Carlisle, and Zitkala-!a confirms in letters to Montezuma that the published account adheres closely to her lived experience (Spack 186). The narrator describes an impression of “thickly clustered buildings which made it a quaint little village” and “large trees among the houses gave the place a cool, refreshing shade, and the grass a deeper green,” all of which closely respond to Carlisle’s features (382). (See figure 9.) Furthermore, the narrator’s description of “the imposing figure of a stately gray-haired man” who welcomes her echoes contemporaneous accounts of the military man Pratt: “For some reason I was awed by his wondrous height and his strong square shoulders, which I felt were a finger’s length above my head” (382). 162 Figure 19. “Teachers Quarters and Band Stand, Indian School, Carlisle, Pa.” Postcard circa 1908. Weary and recovering from an undisclosed illness, the narrator settles into her surroundings, and within a few months she is assigned to travel West to recruit new students for the school. Memorably, the “superintendent” announces this decision with an exclamation: “I am going to turn you loose to pasture!” (106). With wry awareness of its double meaning, Zitkala-!a riffs on the analogy to domesticated animal husbandry that the superintendent has used, noting that a “ . . . midsummer’s travel across the continent to search the hot prairies for overconfident parents who would intrust their children to strangers was a lean pasturage” (383). Yet the narrator travels with the hope of seeing her mother again for the first time in several years. Zitkala-!a never overtly mentions the premise of the boarding schools to “sever the bond” between mother and daughter, but the narrative objective of her entire 163 Atlantic Monthly series drives toward a homecoming which will reunite mother and daughter in the third act. Poignantly, however, this reunion is unimaginably complicated, as the daughter’s experiences have changed her almost beyond the mother’s recognition. Arriving in her mother’s home, which is now a log cabin infused with the “smell of damp clay” from rains that had saturated the logs and earth floor, the narrator asks her mother why the house has not been cemented, which allows for a discussion of the reservation’s extreme poverty and the BIA’s systematic stripping of available jobs from Sioux workers, including Zitkala- !a’s brother Dawée (David), only to give them to opportunistic “white robbers” (384). When the narrator speaks of fighting this injustice, the mother explains that it was Dawée’s attempt to “secure justice for our tribe” that caused him to lose his job, and takes comfort in religion: “My child, there is only one source of justice, and I have been praying the Great Spirit steadfastly to avenge our wrongs” (384). The daughter’s outrage at this approach leads to an interaction that is both emotionally resonant yet also indicative, in its pointed lack of commentary by the narrator, of a pronounced breach that has become uncrossable. The section ends with the following enigmatic lines: “Sh! my child, do not talk so madly. There is Taku Iyotan Wasaka, 29 to which I pray,” [the mother] answered, as she stroked my head again as she used to do when I was a smaller child” (109). Angry with the neglect and injustice she finds on the reservation, frustrated with her mother’s acceptance in the form of a passive version of fused religion, the adult narrator here accepts her mother’s caresses as the only form of communication not lost in the gap between their circumstances. Ultimately, Zitkala-!a’s most damning criticism is reserved for the final section of the series, entitled “Retrospection.” After leaving her mother, the narrator returns to the school, yet her reconnection with her mother has given her a renewed perspective. She writes: “I 164 slowly comprehended that the large army of white teachers in Indian schools had a larger missionary creed than I had suspected” (385). Most offensively to Pratt, she maintains that this creed is based on “self-preservation” more than service to Native peoples. She outlines the shocking behavior of some of her fellow teachers, who include an “opium-eater” who “had a feeble mother to support”; an “inebriate” doctor, whose “fair wife was dependent upon him for her daily food”; and a teacher who “tortured an ambitious Indian youth by frequently reminding [him] that he was nothing but a ‘government pauper’” (385). She becomes furious at the school for making spectacles of the children: . . . from morning till evening, many specimens of civilized peoples visited the Indian school. The city folks with canes and eyeglasses, the countrymen with sunburnt cheeks and clumsy feet, forgot their relative social ranks in an ignorant curiosity. Both sorts of these Christian palefaces were alike astounded at seeing the children of savage warriors so docile and industrious. (386) Her sudden recognition and rage at the injustice comes to head in a quietly dramatic climax that occurs on the penultimate page of the entire three-part series: Alone in my room, I sat like the petrified Indian woman of whom my mother used to tell me. I wished my heart’s burdens would turn me into unfeeling stone. But alive, in my tomb, I was destitute! For the white man’s papers I had given up my faith in the Great Spirit. For these same papers I had forgotten the healing in the trees and brooks. On account of my mother’s simple view of life, and my lack of any, I gave her up, also. I made no friends among the race of people I loathed. Like a slender tree, I had been uprooted from my mother, nature, and God. I was shorn of my branches, which had waved in sympathy and love for home and friends. The natural coat of bark which had protected my oversensitive nature was scraped off to the very quick. (386) Ultimately, the “rebellious spirit” that leads the narrator to speak this rejection would lead Zitkala-!a to leave Carlisle to embark on a course of study at the Boston Conservatory of Music, as well as a long career as an influential leader of the pan-Indian Rights movement as 165 a founding member of the National Council of American Indians, whose work led directly to the Merriam Report of 1928, which ultimately abolished “The Universal Course of Study” and dramatically improved conditions for Native children. Writing that she finds it “heart rending to see a government try experiments upon a real race,” Zitkala-!a would spend her life devoted to the improvement of conditions for Native peoples. Little Literary Skyrocket Building on the success of her Atlantic Monthly pieces, in 1901 Zitkala-!a brought out a book of “retold tales,” Old Indian Legends, which contained ohunkankan teaching stories featuring the Sioux trickster figure Iktomi, and this collection aligned with the publications of many Native writers from her generation who were likewise publishing in English the particular retellings of the stories they heard growing up. 30 Zitkala-!a writes in the preface that she intends her stories to be read by both the “blue-eyed little patriot” as well as the “black-haired aborigine,” and indeed her stories were used in public school readers during various decades of the twentieth century. Helen Keller introduces the 1919 reprinting of the volume on a page headed “This book should be in every home”: I thank you for your book on Indian legends. I have read them with exquisite pleasure. Like all folk tales they mirror the child life of the world. There is in them a note of wild, strange music. You have translated them into our language in a way that will keep them alive in the hearts of men. They are so young, so fresh, so full of the odors of the virgin forest untrod by the foot of white man! The thoughts of your people seem dipped in the colors of the rainbow, palpitant with the play of the winds, eerie with the thrill of a spirit-world unseen but felt and heard. (Old Indian Legends, 1919 xix) The exuberant language of Keller’s introduction reflects the delight with which the stories were met by white readers within a context of romance toward the “Vanishing Race,” a 166 nostalgic attitude on the part of white readers that Alan Trachtenberg argues is a direct function of a perception of diminished threat from Native peoples as their tribal lands were divested and their numbers dwindled (Shades of Hiawatha). Reflected in Keller’s words is the widespread contemporaneous view of indigenous peoples as metaphorical “children” vis-à- vis European American culture with its ongoing commitment to Manifest Destiny in the Americas. Keller’s quote here encapsulates many of the attitudes about Native-white relations held by even “well-meaning” whites during the period: a parental/ward relationship, a romance regarding the “primitive” (e.g., “wild, strange music”), an association of Native peoples with the land in a romanticized way, though not in a political or material way. This attitude, held by those who would have seen themselves as appreciative of Native American cultures and saddened by reservation poverty, represents the Janus face of policies of cultural difference and social theories of evolutionary superiority that pervaded the times. 31 Popularized by nineteenth-century anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, European American social evolution theory posited that civilization developed in a series of unambivalent stages and that “over time, a society could advance from ‘savagery’ (hunting and gathering) through ‘barbarism’ (making crafts, cultivating crops) to ‘civilization’ (developing a written form of language)” (Spack 194, Bannan 788). Keller’s language taps into long-held notions regarding the “picturesqueness” of Native cultures, even as it ostensibly lauds the stories. 32 Regarding contemporary Native American writers and artists, Elizabeth Bird points to the challenges to individual subjectivity and community self- definition at the heart of these “well-meaning” attitudes: The current wave of Indian images might seem benign—who would not want to be presented as perfect, beautiful, and all-knowing? But this benign 167 image is deeply impersonal and distanced, once again ignoring Indian peoples as individuals and allowing real Indian people no subjectivity. (11) In this assessment, Bird highlights the problems of romanticization as they exist in the present, and their resilience today suggests the uncritical form these sentiments would have taken in the period of overt nostalgia that coincided with Zitkala-!a’s most prolific publishing phase. As her work was being published, Zitkala-!a found herself toasted as a bright new literary figure and was declared by Harper’s Magazine as one of 100 “Persons Who Interest Us” in 1900. In addition to her publications and her musical performances (as a member of the 1900 Carlisle traveling band and as an accomplished violinist at the Boston Conservatory who performed at the White House for William McKinley), she is recorded as having given a series of particularly moving performances of Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha,” the sentimental staged poem that had become a phenomenon that was then sweeping the nation (Trachtenberg). With its stereotypic portrayal of a romantic and tragic Indian princess, this stage performance was deeply entwined in the nostalgic representation of the “Vanishing Race,” and it is this performance that Bell, Hafen, Warrior, and other critics have pointed to as evidence of Zitkala-!a’s own assimilationist tendencies. Indeed, the staunchly pro- assimilationist Pratt himself was intimately involved in designing her presentation of the poem, going so far as attending to the details of her dress. In a letter dated 24 February 1900, Pratt writes to Zitkala-!a: I think well of your using a buckskin dress if you can get one that will serve. It is more than likely I would borrow one from the Smithsonian. Will drop a line to find out. My recollection is that I purchased several for them years ago. 168 Zitkala-!a’s response to his offer is unavailable; however, the timing of the letter in comparison to the serial publications that were coming out of Atlantic Monthly in nearly simultaneous monthly installments (January through March 1900), suggests that Zitkala-!a’s opinions of Pratt had by this time solidified and that their working relationship was nearing an end. Even so, Zitkala-!a garnered great praise by her impassioned portrayal of Hiawatha, her performance having been described as “sensuous” by at least one local newspaper. Viewed as an enticing living embodiment of this stereotype of Native femininity, since she first arrived in the East her portrait had been sought after by a number of photographers, for whom the image of the literary Indian maiden with the solemn visage was irresistible. Barbara Michaels describes the appeal: Artists, and then photographers, had been picturing [Native Americans] since early explorations of the New World, with varying attitudes ranging from anthropological to romantic. But especially after the massacre of the Sioux at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1890, Americans came to realize that the old Indian ways were doomed. Instead of being views as a threat, Indians began to be seen as an endangered species . . . . and sympathetic interest in Indian arts, crafts, and culture … burgeoned from the mid-1890s through the first two decades of the twentieth century. . . .”. (29) Joseph T. Keiley’s first photographic portrait (figure 19), taken in 1898, conforms to the prevailing tropes of idealized Native femininity with its soft and gauzy lines and its romantic de-personalization. For Keiley, Zitkala-!a was representative of the best of Native women, and as such, he portrayed her as a gauzy, otherworldly, demure feminine figure. Her eyes are downcast, her head is tilted romantically, and her dress is vaguely patterned as representatively “ethnic,” but ultimately indistinct. 33 As such, Zitkala-!a’s individual features are scarcely recognizable as she is subsumed into Keiley’s vision of an abstract 169 representation of an idealized Native female form that aligns with the contemporaneous performances of “Hiawatha” as regal Indian princess. Figure 20. Photograph of Zitkala-!a taken by Joseph T. Keiley, 1898. In notable contrast to Keiley’s image stands a series of nine portraits taken by New York photographer Gertrude Käsebier, who developed an ongoing friendship with Zitkala- !a. 34 Zitkala-!a spent time in Käsebier’s home, staying as a guest for some weeks, and Käsebier took a series of portraits of her in both Western and Native dress. Unlike Keiley and other contemporaries who were photographing American Indians, all of whom were notably male (e.g., Karl Moon, Edward Curtis, Frank Rinehart), Käsebier’s photographs often reveal an attention to the personality and individuality of her subjects. Käsebier, like Mary Austin in the previous chapter, was strongly influenced the antimodern Arts and Crafts Movement that celebrates the primitivist and orientalist elements of visual culture, and as a 170 sometimes-member of Alfred Steiglitz’s loosely organized “Photo-Secessionists,” Käsebier was also deeply conscious of the photograph’s potential as a manipulated art object. Even so, her representational objectives appear to be mixed as she produced both intimate portraits of Native American subjects alongside more stereotypic images of sitters from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. This tension between two opposing representational intents is characteristic of the period, and even in her most commercial work, her conflict is apparent, as Michaels suggests: Käsebier seems to have had two concurrent if conflicting aims in photographing Indians from Buffalo Bill’s troupe. On the one hand, as with other sitters, she wanted to capture individual personalities. On the other hand, she wanted to suggest an archetypal Indian. (30) Her studio images of Zitkala-!a, however, are characteristic of her attempt to convey the personality of the sitter, and Zitkala-!a’s multivalent subjectivity appears to have provided rich material for her work. In contrast to Keiley’s gauzy representative figure, Käsebier takes pains to highlight Zitkala-!a’s particular individuality and interests, using the traditional language of portraiture in its placement of symbolic objects. Käsebier is known to have photographed most of her subjects a number of times, and as Judith Davidov explains, “in portrait, she was after a ‘true’ representation of character, in the tableaux vivants, the creation of a fictional likeness” (99). In three of the nine photographs of this series, Zitkala-!a poses with her violin, gesturing toward her musicianship and foretelling her upcoming study at the Boston Conservatory (figure 11). In two additional photographs, Zitkala-!a poses reading an open book by the light of a window, suggesting her literary interests (figure 12). In three photographs, she poses in traditional Sioux dress, in profile, one with a hand over her eyes as if to survey a great distance (figure 13). The final photograph captures Zitkala-!a in partial 171 profile, before a decorative floral wallpaper, dressed in the flowing white dress of a middle- class white woman, but with traditionally beaded hair and clutching a Native basket to her chest (figure 14). This image, which attempts visually to symbolize both white and Native subjectivities, has become iconic as a representation of Zitkala-!a’s multiple subjectivities, appearing on the cover of Hafen’s edited collection of Zitkala-!a’s work and in several shorter chapters and articles (Wexler, Davidov, Michaels, Lavender, etc.). Its appeal lies in its representation of Zitkala-!a as the doubly relational subject who “hang[s] in the heart of chaos” as she is frozen in film at the turn of the century. Davidov asserts that ““We are meant to understand from her profile, set between the artificial flowers and the Sioux basket she clutches to her chest, the conflict of the young woman’s double heritage” (101). Throughout this series, Käsebier’s images are striking because they attempt to capture Zitkala-!a’s particularity as both Yankton Sioux and as inextricably entwined in European American tradition. Even more, they constitute the first photographs of a Native woman that attempt to attend to this level of individuality. Unlike Keiley’s gauzy fantasy or Choates’s propagandistic images promoting Carlisle’s brand of assimilation, Käsebier here fixes images that reveal an attempt to escape the pervading notions of turn-of-the-century romanticized Indian subjectivity and instead portray an independent and self-defined individual. 35 172 Figure 21. “Sioux girl, Zitkala-!a wearing a white long-sleeved dress and holding violin and bow, floral wallpaper in background.” Photograph by Gertrude Käsebier. circa 1898. Figure 22. "Zitkala-!a reading by windowlight.” Photograph by Gertrude Käsebier. circa 1898. Figure 23. “Left profile of Sioux girl, Zitkala-!a, wearing multiple strands of pearls around neck,” full length. Photograph by Gertrude Käsebier. circa 1898. Figure 24. “Right profile of Zitkala-!a holding a basket in front of her.” Photograph by Gertrude Käsebier. circa 1898. 173 Ultimately, Zitkala-!a would conclude that her greatest contribution to American Indian rights lay not in her literary career but in her political work, and within two years after her Atlantic Monthly publications, she had begun that work on the Ute reservation, having married not the Eastern and pro-assimilationist physician Montezuma, Pratt’s protégé to whom she was affianced, but the Ute agency worker Captain Raymond Bonnin, a childhood friend who shared her commitment to working locally on the reservations. Noting the fiery political exchanges to be found in their letters, Spack suggests that Zitkala-!a and Montezuma’s correspondence “mirror[s] the schism within the Native community between those who favored full assimilation and those who worked to preserve native cultures even as they adopted European American ways” (195). In Utah, Zitkala-!a worked in the Ute community, teaching school and developing community programs that relied on a grassroots and communitarian approach in direct opposition to Pratt’s autocratic teaching methods (Davidson xx). Her literary work continued in short pieces of fiction, legends, poetry, essays, and her collaboration on The Sun Dance Opera, but her primary focus during these years remained in local community-based efforts. In 1916, in the midst of her deeply felt and controversial anti-peyote campaign, which ironically put her in camp with the Pratt and the Women’s Temperance Society and pitted her against liberal ethnologist James Mooney, Zitkala-!a was elected to a leadership position in the Society of American Indians (SAI), the Native-run political organization that was concerned with tribal self-determination, opposition to the abuses of the BIA, and other issues of often-conflicting concerns to Native peoples. When the SAI dissolved due to conflicts arising both from within the organization and from external pressures, Zitkala-!a formed the Indian Welfare Committee 174 within the General Federation of Women’s Clubs and republished her earlier autobiographical sketches, short stories, and retold tales in two popular volumes. In 1926 she founded and was elected president of the National Council of American Indians (NCAI), whose motto was “Help Indians Help themselves in Protecting their Rights and Properties” and which was profoundly influential to John Collier and the Merriam Committee, whose 1928 report focused attention on BIA reservation abuses and led to fundamentally changed governmental Indian policy in the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act. Zitkala-!a commitment to self-definition, first evident in her Atlantic Monthly educational narratives and again in her Käsebier photographs, comes to a head in the midst of this active political work. Based directly in her experience doing community work on the Ute reservation, Zitkala-!a takes a notably unpopular stance against ceremonial peyote usage, which she viewed as ultimately damaging to its practitioners. Unlike Pratt or the Women’s Temperance Society, whose opposition was based in culturally monolithic assimilationist or prohibitionist rhetoric, Zitkala-!a’s view was in line with her overarching concern for the welfare of Indian peoples, yet it landed her squarely in a conservative camp. Testifying before Congress, Mooney called Zitkala-!a’s qualifications into question, denouncing her as a fraudulent representative who “claims to be a Sioux woman” (Davidson xxiii). In what Davidson terms “the most oddly symbolic and confused moments of white-Indian relations of the time,” Mooney based his denunciation upon Zitkala-!a’s pan-Indian mode of dress in a Washington Times photograph that had been recently published. 36 He condemns her as being inauthentic by virtue of her costume: She wore a fringed dress whose style identified its provenance as a southern Plains tribe; her belt was that of a Navajo man; and the fan she carried was, itself, a type used by men in the peyote ceremony. (qtd. Davidson xxiii) 175 In this attack, wrought in the midst of his otherwise liberal and progressive effort to win the right for tribal usage of peyote in religious ceremonies, Mooney both participates in a contemporaneous discourse regarding “authenticity” and “racial purity” and employs an age- old tactic of gendered power. Davidson points out: He overemphasized her physical appearance and thus drew attention away from the seriousness of her interests in the political issues at hand. In doing so, he also discredited her racial authenticity, insinuating her lack of knowledge of Indian culture and her haphazard affiliation with different tribes. (xxiii) However, while Mooney’s assumption of academic and masculine cultural authority before Congress that day was impressive, this episode was not the first encounter Zitkala-!a had had with European American interpretations of her subjectivity based on outer costuming. Her educational narratives, her staged performances, and her photographic portraiture all give evidence of the central role of dress, costuming, disguise, and exhibitionism in her embodiment of multiple subjectivities. In a 1917 letter she mentions having been requested to give a piano solo “all in Indian dress,” about which she writes: I have agreed, for in this case the use of Indian dress for a drawing card is for a good cause. No doubt, there may be some who may not wholly approve of the Indian dress. I hope it does not displease you. Even a clown has to dress differently from his usual citizen’s suit. In [newspapers], italics are resorted to, with good effect. (qtd. in Davidson xxiii) While contemporary critics may find fault with her politics or her strategies of “survivance,” 37 her awareness of the complications inherent in her complicated position of embodying multiple subjectivities in a most transitional of national moments is evident. 38 176 The Man-on-the-Band-Stand Zitkala-!a’s literary foil at Carlisle may well have been Marianna Burgess, the editor who ran Carlisle’s Printing Training program for 37 years and who penned the narrative scripts for appropriate post-Carlisle conduct that ran in the weekly publications for nearly four decades. Both were influential women who were deeply engaged in Indian causes, in writing, and in editing; yet their political positions stood them in defiant opposition to each another. Beginning her tenure in 1880 in an environment that was not conducive to open female authority, Burgess never signed her own name to her written work, but instead created the persona of the Man-on-the-Band-stand, a panoptical figure who was placed in a position to see all and who commented autocratically on all that he saw. 39 About Burgess’s authorship, Jacqueline Fear-Segal writes: Marianna Burgess almost certainly wrote the Man-on-the-Band-stand. She might share his initials, and she played on this in the paper, constantly energizing the mystery surrounding his identity, but she and he were not one and the same person. The Man-on-the-Band-stand was a constructed persona, far more ubiquitous and powerful than Marianna Burgess could ever hope to be. All-seeing, all-hearing, but selectively revealing in the columns of The Indian Helper, this imaginary persona strutted across the pages that allowed for his construction: a commanding, authoritative, omnipotent, but illusory presence. (125) In addition, Burgess penned the influential faux educational narrative Stiya while disguised under the pen name “Embe” (again playing on her initials). The volume’s full title is Stiya, A Carlisle Indian Girl at Home: Founded on the Author’s Actual Observations, and it was written from the perspective of a boarding-school educated Indian girl. As such, it attempts to capitalize on the popularity of the Indian school educational narrative, and it does so in the most propagandistic way possible. A copy of the volume was sent home with each Carlisle graduate in an attempt to solidify the acculturation they had received at Carlisle. Leslie 177 Marmon Silko recounts the heated argument about this volume between her great- grandmother Grandma A’mooh and her Aunt Sally, in which Grandma A’mooh was incensed by its portrayal of the Pueblo people and “lifted the lid on her cookstove to drop in the book,” while Aunt Sally, who had attended Carlisle, found Stiya to be “important evidence of the lies and racism and bad faith of the U.S. Government with the Pueblo people” (1). The contradictions between Burgess’s propagandistic Stiya and Zitkala-!a’s instigating educational narratives in the Atlantic Monthly mark an important battle in a long war, which Silko succinctly aphorizes: “Books have been the focus of the struggle for the control of the Americas from the start” (1). Ultimately, Zitkala-!a’s autobiographical narratives, placed in the context of their emergence out of the “noble experiment” in subject-making at the Carlisle School, are important for understanding the complex mechanics of subjectivity formation in this transitional period. When Pratt and Burgess presented a scathing disavowal of Zitkala-!a’s Atlantic Monthly publications in three sequential issues of The Indian Helper, Zitkala-!a proclaimed her insistence on living a self-defined subjectivity in a buoyant letter to Montezuma: See the Helper! This is the way Pratt loves me! Ah! But he is pigheaded and little divine. I must live my life. I must think in my own way (since I cannot help it). I must write the lessons I see—Let all the so called Missionaries and teachers in Indian schools spout as they please. I will have a place in the Universe and no one can cheat or crowd me by a single hair’s breadth. (Letter to Montezuma, 13 April 1901, qtd. in Enoch 136) It was through her very first educational narratives that Zitkala-!a first made use of the constitutive potential inherent in the modes of autobiographical practice to “write the lessons” she saw—speaking at times to “a countless heedless—senseless! herd of 178 people,” 40 —and thereby to claim her own influential, utterly individual, and ultimately self- defined “place in the Universe” of early twentieth-century women’s autobiographical practice. 179 CHAPTER THREE NOTES 1 Notably, Pratt scarcely mentions the massacre, except to make passing reference to the “hostiles” and their activities, though his first report occurred a mere three months after the December 1890 massacre. 2 The Carlisle School’s publications department was operated by indigenous students (boys only) as part of their “Printing Training,” and it produced an ongoing series of both weekly and monthly publications. Each monthly issue included a treatise on some aspect of assimilation and/or allotment, while each weekly issue contained news items regarding events of the school. The names of the publications changed frequently, though Marianna Burgess remained the editor throughout the run. The following list of publication names was compiled by Barbara Landis of the Cumberland County Historical Society: Eadle Keatah Toh. April 1880 - March 1882. Published monthly. (Name changed to Red Man and Red Man & Helper.) School News, June 1880 - May 1883. Published monthly. The Morning Star, April 1882 - December 1887. Published monthly. The Red Man, January 1888 - June 1900. Published Monthly. The Carlisle Indian Boys’ & Girls’ Friend, 1885 (July 31 & August 7). Published weekly every Friday. The Indian Helper, 1885 - 1900. Published weekly every Friday. The Arrow, August 25, 1904 - June 19, 1908. Published weekly. The Carlisle Arrow, September 1908 - 1918. Published weekly. Name changed to The Carlisle Arrow and Red Man in 1918. The Indian Craftsman, February 1909 - January 1910. Monthly magazine. Name changed to The Red Man in 1910. The Red Man, February 1910 - June 1917. Monthly magazine. (http://home.epix.net/~landis/primary.html) When possible, I will refer to the specific publication by name, and when speaking of the entire run in general, I will refer to the Carlisle publications as a whole. 3 Burgess wrote all these entries, as well as the rest of each publication under the name/figure of the “the Man-on-the-Band-stand,” a panoptical male alter ego created by Burgess for publication that I will take up toward the end of this chapter. 4 In addition to these 25 federally funded off-reservation boarding schools, the U.S. government also supported 81 on-reservation boarding schools and 147 day schools. 5 This document is one of many I discovered in the archives at the Huntington Library, and to my knowledge has not been discussed elsewhere. In addition to the “astonishment” discussed here, the report also notably reveals an overt horror of miscegenation that reflects the contemporaneous view of intermarriage: 180 I hope arrangements will be made by which a sufficient number of girls can be educated to supply these young men and boys with wives; this point, which you yourself consider so important, is rendered emphatic to me by what my father told me of marriages between Christian men and heathen women in Hindustan, and also by personal observations among our southern freed people after the late war. 6 More than 3000 images by Choate have been catalogued in a number of collections, including the Library of Congress, the National Anthropological Archives of the Smithsonian Museum Support Center, the Yale University Beinecke Collection, and the Speck-Choate Photograph Collection at the American Philosophical Society. 7 A report in the March 1891 The Indian Helper shorthands the wearing of “citizen’s dress” versus “Indian dress” as a key determinant of how Carlisle students are progressing after having left the school, as the following listing indicates: Of those who returned July 29, '90: Frank Conroy is a scout and does blacksmith work. Alex Yellow Wolf is a scout. Edward Kills Hard dresses in blanket and was with the hostiles; denies having taken any part. Thos. Black Bull Porcupine is in camp; wears citizen's dress. Lewis Crow-on-Head lives near agency; wears citizen's dress. Ota Chief Eagle is a scout; returns to Carlisle as soon as enlistment term is served. Joseph Long Wolf is a scout. Edward Yankton in camp; citizen's dress; no work. Charles Dakota has gone with Cheyennes; Arthur Standing Elk and Laura have also gone with the Cheyennes. Julia Walking Crane wears Indian dress and she is married to Clayton Brave. Isaac Kills Hard, with the hostiles. 8 Portrait of Tom Torlino, in Partial Native Dress and Wearing Silver Cross Necklace, and Portrait of Tom Torlino, John Choate Negatives 1879-1902, Smithsonian. 9 Mary Ely, Jennie Hammaker, Taylor Ely, and Frank Cushing, Zuni, and Frank Cushing, Taylor Ealy, Mary Ealy, Jennie Hammaker, Pueblos, Cabinet Cards 1H and 2J, Speck-Choate Photograph Collection. (Changes in spelling and tribal designation are indicated in Choate’s original records.) 10 Choate #125 and Choate #57,490, John Choate Negatives 1879-1902. Smithsonian. 11 Chiricahua Apaches as They Arrive to Carlisle Indian School, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and Chiricahua Apaches Four Months after Arriving at Carlisle Indian School, Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Library of Congress. 181 12 Pratt repeatedly refers to himself using this soubriquet in his speeches and letters. 13 Pratt was forced to resign his post on June 30, 1904, in response to his criticism of the Bureau of Indian Affairs reservation policies, which he viewed as obstacles to his goals of total assimilation; nonetheless, for two decades afterward he actively continued to tour the country giving speeches espousing Indian assimilation as embodied in his approach to the boarding school system. 14 Pamphlet of an address given in 1915. 15 Spack borrows this terminology from linguist Wallace Lambert (Spack 174-75). 16 This Choate image has in recent years become an iconic representation of the mass assimilation undertaken at Carlisle and can be found in numerous places, including the Cumberland County Historical Society, and the collections held by Yale, the Smithsonian, and the Library of Congress. 17 In my discussion, I pattern my usage of her names upon her own usage and apparent preferences. Zitkala-!a, which means “Red Bird” in Dakota, is the self-devised name that Simmons adopted when first publishing her work in 1900, and she continued to publish her literary work under that name throughout her career. I use the name Zitkala-!a when speaking of her literary work, her childhood name Gertrude Simmons when speaking of her historical childhood, and her adult married name, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, when addressing her political work in those contexts in which she uses that name. (Likewise, on those occasions when she uses the name Zitkala-!a in these later political contexts, I make every attempt to follow her usage.) 18 Significant educational narratives that emerged during this period include those of Charles Eastman, Francis La Flesche, Lucy Thompson, etc. In addition, the purported educational narrative Stiya, A Carlisle Girl at Home had a wide influence on returning students, with whom a copy was sent home, though the staunchly pro-assimilation volume was actually penned under the pseudonym “Embe” by Marianna Burgess herself (i.e., initials M.B.). 19 While an ideal circumstance for the purposes of this study would be to draw from handwritten manuscript diaries written by Zitkala-!a, these volumes do not appear to be extant. The next best available source material for her experience of developing subjectivity in this period, then, remains in the deeply personal autobiographical series that makes up the bulk of this chapter. 20 Zitkala-!a, Charles Eastman, Francis LaFlesche and others from their generation were among the first Native American autobiographers to write their works without the mediation of anthropologists or ethnographers in the “as-told-to” format that was common in the nineteenth century. 182 21 Since the reassessment of Zitkala-!a in recent Native American scholarship, she has become a subject of controversy regarding her complex political and activist positions. Betty Louise Bell rejects her “assimilationist rhetoric.” Robert Warrior argues that her pursuit of U.S. citizenship hindered sovereignty and that her anti-peyote stance was reactionary. Ruth Spack defends these positions on the grounds that she left the reactionary SAI and instituted the more activist NCAI in its place. 22 In Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism, John Carlos Rowe outlines a rationale that makes use of “anti-formal close reading” in order to attend closely to the literary features of a text without displacing it from its cultural context, but instead using the text itself to widen the historical and cultural discourse surrounding the work. He explains: Despite my reservations about traditional literary criticism’s ability to interpret the relation between literary culture and US imperialism, I still rely on techniques of close reading in the following chapters. Although some chapters deal with several texts, each chapter situates a single author within cultural and historical “contact zones” by way of interpretations of specific texts. The goal of such readings, however, is not the same as many formalist interpretations, which often work to establish the discreteness and uniqueness of the literary work apart from sociohistorical circumstances. My interpretations locate the texts historically and culturally as contributions to the public debates that have motivated these texts. In this context, literary explication respects the complexity of ideological discursive formation, which includes the roles played by literary texts and culture in general. Such attention to the text also has the advantage of demonstrating how cultural studies can follow the logic of a text without lapsing into trivial formalism or celebration of literary ambiguity or linguistic undecidability. These anti-formal close readings are designed to use the text to gain access to a wider historical and cultural field of debate and inquiry. (16) 23 Most critics make the gesture that we must read this narrator as only “semi- autobiographical” because Zitkala-!a makes use of some measure of poetic license and ambiguity in her depictions, naming, place names, etc. However, as I discuss later in this chapter, this designation is complicated by Zitkala-!a’s role of speaking for multiple “I’s,” as Hertha D. Sweet Wong argues. Throughout this study, I read Zitkala-!a’s educational narratives as autobiographical accounts (with the common practice of changing or omitting names and other details) and ultimately claim further they are intertwined with her individual subjectivity in profound ways, yet must be understood with cognizance of the permeable boundaries that characterize autobiographical practice as a whole. 24 Powers quotes Buechel (374) and Clark (1) in his discussion of Sioux story forms. 25 See Ron Carpenter, Jessica Enoch, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Ruth Spack, Dorothea Susag, Gary Totten, and Hertha D. Sweet Wong. 183 26 In this third set of scholars, Wong includes herself, as well as Kathleen Mullen Sands, Gretchen Bataille, H. David Brumble III, Arnold Krupat, and David Murray. 27 Conventions of traditional captivity narratives include a narrative are centered in a theme of spiritual redemption based in relying upon Christian faith in the midst of challenges and temptations inherent in the captor’s foreign and “exotic” culture. Wong suggests that earlier Native American writers had likewise created hybridized narrative structures to reach their predominantly white audiences, as well: “[William] Apess and [George] Copway both used narrative structures adapted from Christian conversion narratives and focused on spiritual confessions and testimonials” (133). 28 Don Pease discusses the “constituent powers” of resistance that emerge from the fissures in the national discourse surrounding American Exceptionalism. In this episode Zitkala-!a relates a domestic resistance that the child is capable of performing, a fissure that I read as being of a piece with larger national resistance despite its individual domestic scale. 29 While Zitkala-!a translates this name as “absolute Power” in a footnote to the 1921 reprinting of the piece, the name is simultaneously suggestive of the profound intertwining of Sioux religious tradition and Christian missionizing throughout the nineteenth century. The term Iyotan Wasaka is used frequently as a translation for God in The English and Dakota Service Book, which was published in 1884 and distributed by Episcopal missionaries throughout the Dakotas. 30 Other Sioux writers of her generation who produced similar collections, for example, include Ella Deloria, Charles Eastman, and Chief Luther Standing Bear. Comparing these, critic Jeanne Smith concludes that Zitkala-!a’s retellings include significant story changes that are meant to comment upon the contemporaneous political and social issues pertinent to turn-of-the-century Native American issues (in Davidson 4). 31 Austin’s writing and advocacy for California and Pueblo Indians comes to mind in this vein. Interestingly, Austin, as an antimodern advocate, viewed Native American graduates of institutions such as White’s or Carlisle with suspicion and pity for having lost the “tap- rooted spirituality” that she viewed as having been their cultural birthright prior to white American interference in the boarding schools. No clear record exists of Zitkala-!a and Austin having met, yet many aspects of their publication and political histories brings them traveling within the same orbits. 32 Spack also points out Zitkala-!a’s own entanglement in the widespread theories of social evolution as it reveals itself in her letters. Spack argues that Zitkala-!a both uncritically accepts portions this theory, herself repeating regrettable statements of prejudice against Italian “day-gos,” for example, and also subverts it in relation to her boarding school experiences. 184 33 Catherine Lavender, who joins Judith Davidov to note the distinctions between Keiley’s and Käsebier’s photographic styles, suggests that Keiley provided Zitkala-!a with the Chinese garments she wears in the studio in his quest to capture a universalized “exotic ‘type.’” 34 The two met through Käsebier’s son Frederick, who was near in age to Zitkala-!a and had become her friend. 35 While it lies outside the argument of this chapter, it must be noted that in a span of just three years, Keiley had expanded his vision, and his 1901 portrait of Zitkala-!a reveals a much greater interest in individual representation through its full-frontal aspect and its direct gaze, even though it still retains its interest in the “exotic” via usage of Native dress and its romanticism via the gauzy lines of the photogravure process. Figure 25. Zitkala-!a. Photogravure by Joseph T. Keiley, 1901. 36 The photograph that appeared in the February 17, 1918, issue of the Washington Times: Figure 26. Washington Times, February 17, 1918. 185 37 Gerald Vizenor’s influential neologism “survivance” emphasizes the positive outcomes of those necessary compromises made by Native peoples to ensure survival and a cultural flowering in the face of U.S. colonialism (Manifest Matters: Narratives on Postindian Survivance, pp. 3-5). 38 In regard to Mooney’s charge, furthermore, while no record of Zitkala-!a’s specific response survives, it may be inferred that as she was at the time representing a pan-Indian political organizations, her pan-Indian dress may well have been in support of her larger commitment to American Indian rights in a pan-Indian context. 39 See figure 18 for a sense of the centrality of the bandstand in the physical layout of the Carlisle complex. 40 Letter to Montezuma dated 12 April 1901. 186 CHAPTER FOUR “The soul of a woman laid bare”: The Public Diaries of Mary MacLane Only a life spent in a barren region in the West could have given a woman the power to write such a book. A reader of this book will see the soul of a woman laid bare. --Oscar L. Triggs, “Prof. Triggs Enthuses over Mary MacLane,” New York World, 1902 ‘The stripping naked of a woman's soul’ is bound to contain interesting material at least. And exciting? At times, yes. --Motion Picture News, 1918 It is as if I have made a portrait not of Me, but of a room I have just quitted. —Mary MacLane, The Story of Mary MacLane The turn of the twentieth century witnessed a publishing vogue for a species of writing that had not yet been seen in American letters. In early 1902, the Chicago publishing house of Herbert S. Stone received an unsolicited packet in the post, and editor Lucy Monroe, who had recently championed Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, immediately recognized the manuscript’s value. 1 Within three months, Stone had published The Story of Mary MacLane, and within six months the slim red volume had sold over 80,000 copies nationwide—an impressive figure by twenty-first-century standards and nearly unheard-of in its period. The book’s nineteen-year-old author, Mary MacLane, had originally wanted to entitle her book more sensationally as I Await the Devil’s Coming, a title that would have befitted the diary’s content topically, yet Stone chose instead to highlight the serialized diary structure of the volume, and MacLane’s deeply psychological little book, begun as a private diary and written over a period of a mere three months, went on to cause a sensation in the literary, publishing, and social milieus far beyond the confining atmosphere of her “aloof arid metallic and distinctive and gray-purple . . . Butte-Montana” (I, Mary MacLane). H. L. 187 Mencken praised MacLane’s language for its “drunken exuberance,” Gertrude Stein would later claim MacLane as one of her key influences, and University of Chicago literary professor Oscar Triggs effusively “enthused” over MacLane (much to the delight of the Eastern press), providing the earnest turn of phrase that I have borrowed for the title of this chapter: “A reader of this book will see the soul of a woman laid bare.” 2 And the book touched a raw nerve among its reading public. Young girls formed secret “Mary MacLane Girl Clubs” at which they emulated her passionate and unrestrained self-expression by writing their own radically introspective, “marymaclaneish” diaries. 3 Rumors circulated in the mainstream press that at least one unhappy MacLane devotee had even taken her own life in isolated Kalamazoo, Michigan, after a passionate reading of MacLane’s lyrical “longing for life” beyond her confining world. 4 Meanwhile, her more conventional readers were predictably shocked by the scandalous interiority they read from the pen of such a young woman, and these readers viewed the public’s fascination with MacLane as a dire marker of the decline of feminine propriety. One outraged letter-writer tsk-tsks in the pages of the St. Louis Mirror: . . . [A]ll this latterday business of the woman who wants to go about exposing her ‘naked soul’ to the atmosphere, just so we can see that it has as many spots as a coach-dog. These ‘naked-soul’ ladies are a great affliction. (#) The pages of the New York World, a publication that would later commission a series of articles from MacLane, reported that one “well-known New York litterateur” dismissed Triggs’s effusion as an unseemly response from the backwoods outpost of Chicago, twice earmarking Triggs’s “soul of a woman” comment for ridicule: Where is the woman living in the East who has ever written a burning thought like that? One more palpitating passage may be given here to show 188 ‘the soul of a woman laid bare,’ as Prof. Triggs says: “Oh, damn! damn! damn! Damn every living thing on earth! The whole universe is damned!” How whimsically delicate! Prof. Triggs has said things before which challenge the admiration of the world, long before Mary MacLane laid her soul bare . . . . (New York World, 28 June 1902) These responses to MacLane were vivid, immediate, and contradictory—spanning the vast range from fawning adulation to sharp-cutting derision, and revealing a profound interest in the secrets held, as if bodily, by the “bare,” “naked,” and “exposed,” feminine subject. From drawing rooms and girls’ private reading cubbyholes to literary salons and publishing houses, readers were reading MacLane’s private diaries now made public, and everyone had an opinion about this strange and psychologically-attuned new form of private-turned-public women’s writing. What emerges from these divergent and vocal pronouncements is a suggestive snapshot of a culture that is in the very moment of breaching the stays and bonds that had held women in their “proper” place for centuries. In this chapter, I read MacLane’s published diaries with an eye toward situating them within the genre of diary practice. Clearly influenced by the publication of Marie Bashkirtseff’s journal intime (an inspiration MacLane overtly references early in her diary) MacLane would go on to influence the practice of diary keeping for a new generation of American diarists who were inspired by the interiority and drama of her “Portrayal” of the individual self of an otherwise ordinary young woman. As the first American woman to publish a deeply personal, deeply psychological book of life-writing in diary format, MacLane forwarded a new iteration of female subjectivity that had not yet been seen in so overt and unabashed a form in the U.S. MacLane’s published diary patterns itself on the already familiar form of serial diary, yet it maintains a shape and follows a structured narrative line that allows for repetitions that accrete meaning as the days build, suggestive of 189 a hybrid of diary and novel structures. As I discuss here, two primary tropes drive the narrative. First, MacLane situates the reader unremittingly within her own physical bodily experience—in all its “nakedness,” its “bareness,” and its vivid viscerality. Second, she participates in the discussion of female Genius that was likewise engrossing her literary peers (e.g., Austin, Gilman, etc.). These two tropes reflect preoccupations that could be of use to a generation of women who were seeking to create independent subjectivities, and in this remarkable volume, MacLane fuses the two—thereby investing them with an energy that she uses to drive her narrative and her efforts toward constituting a new version of female subjectivity. Furthermore, throughout the volume, MacLane plants clues that teach attentive readers the necessary strategies for apprehending this new form of psychologically attuned self-representation. Linked by format and theme to the projects of both Mary Austin and Zitkala-!a , MacLane’s project pushes the most intimate details of the self into a thoroughly public arena. In this chapter, I will take up MacLane’s subtle, strange, and complex public diaries, arguing ultimately that her earliest work had a profound and largely unrecognized influence not only on the writing practices of both the diarists and modernists who followed in her wake, but that it also has much to teach us theorists of diary about ways of reading fully this most irreducible of forms. As a text which is deeply interior, bodily, entwined with the psychological, and inextricably located in an imaginary yet profoundly racialized American West, Mary MacLane’s slender volumes hold a unique place in the history of American women’s diary. 190 A Genius, A Thief, A Liar From our remove of over a century, during which MacLane’s name has become all but forgotten, the ubiquitous mark that her peculiar little book made in her own moment seems nearly impossible to fathom. While published and first marketed as a literary book, tapping into the market Stone had discovered for Chopin’s The Awakening and promoted by the publisher as “the book of the year for 1902,” 5 MacLane’s Story went on to inflame the imagination of popular culture, and that flame took hold and burned intensely for the first few years of the new century. The Vaudeville act of Weber & Fields developed a popular comic burlesque based on The Story of Mary MacLane featuring her dashing Devil in the thrilling key role. A “Mary MacLane highball” was widely advertised as “cooling, refreshing, invigorating, devilish, the up-to-date drink.” 6 Her name and likeness were used to sell a brand of cigar, and popular songs featuring Mary’s Devil were written and widely performed. 7 MacLane’s name was on the lips of everyone: women, men, girls—especially those “impressionable young girls” who emulated her—society figures, literary and publishing figures, and gossip culture. From her own “grey-purple Butte-Montana” to Chicago, to New York, readers were fascinated by this young woman who seemed to rebel against “everything!” and to embody a version of femininity that had not yet been seen or fully imagined. Penelope Rosemont describes MacLane simultaneously as a “presurrealist,” as a fully-realized embodiment of the New Woman, and as the woman who gave mainstream culture its first glimpse of the Flapper who would become ubiquitous two decades later (4- 5). Clarence Darrow exclaimed that “No more marvelous book was ever born of a sensitive, precocious brain.” 8 H. L. Mencken praised MacLane’s usage of language: 191 I know of no other writer who can play upon words so magically. She is one of the few who actually knows how to write English. She senses the infinite resilience, the drunken exuberance, the magnificent power and delicacy of the language. 9 MacLane’s local personage around the environs of Butte was described variously. One hometown acquaintance defended the suddenly infamous MacLane as having “as modest, ladylike, and sensible a manner as any young lady in Butte,” while other residents highlighted her eccentricities: she was known to “prowl around the cemetery late at night” and to provoke the women who made up Butte’s stuffy and respectable social classes. 10 While difficult to pin down precisely, just as she had intended herself to be, MacLane from the outset had made her name ubiquitous enough that mentions of her throughout the press were made without any need for contextual clues to place her. She had become, for a few short years, a household name, just as she had predicted she would: “Let me but make a beginning, let me but strike the world in a vulnerable spot, and I can take it by storm!” (Story January 17). Figure 27. Entry from The Foolish Dictionary of 1904, a popular volume of cultural humor penned by Gideon Wurdz that was reprinted often throughout the early twentieth century. As with most ephemeral mentions of MacLane of the period, here her celebrity required no context or introduction to be widely understood by her contemporaries. 11 192 The “vulnerable spot” she struck had its heart in the shared cultural anxiety surrounding changing roles for women at the turn of the new century, and she found her mark in her ability to speak to girls on the cusp of defining a new version of female subjectivity within this cultural flux. MacLane’s rebellion against the constraints of propriety and her resistance to easy categorization were the very selling point of her work—a fact that her publishers exploited—and were also evidenced early in MacLane, who had outlined the limits of her self-writing in her high school newspaper as early as 1898 at the age of 16: “I set down only the outside layer, because the inside is too good for you. Anyway, I want to keep it for myself. Nothing’s any good if everybody can know it.” 12 This early self-protective instinct may at first appear to be at odds with her decision three years later to send her private diary off to strangers in the city for publication, yet MacLane operated throughout her career on disparate and contradictory levels, exhibiting herself as both a savvy reader of the cultural zeitgeist and simultaneously, especially in this first work, as a naïf who was “only an unusual girl writing her heart out,” as she would describe in a publicity interview: The book, you understand, was not written for publication. It was the portrayal of my emotions, the analysis of my own soul life during three months of my nineteenth year. I wrote then all the time, just as I do now, but, though the book is in diary form, it is not a diary. Just why I sent it to the publishers would be hard to say, but when I had finished it I felt that it was literature, because it is real and because it was well written. And I know that the world wants such things. "Are you as sure now as you were then that you are a genius?" No. You may think me crude, and probably I am crude, but I am not so crude as I was, for I am clever enough to see that the girl of nineteen who thought herself a genius was only an unusual girl writing her heart out. (New York World, 22 July 1902) Novelist Zona Gale, writing in a 1902 interview that appears to have exasperated its author, captures MacLane’s elusive strategy in an exchange in which MacLane exclaims, 193 But I pose all the time. I never give my real self. I have a hundred sides, and I turn first one way and then the other. I am playing a deep game. I have a number of strong cards up my sleeve. I have never been myself, excepting to two friends. Impossible to pin down, continually shifting the selves she displays for view, yet writing in a vivid prose that both appears to reveal for the world the deepest of yet-unseen psychological layers – her “inner life shown in its nakedness” – and to capture the imagination of her readers with its intensity, MacLane embodied the original “‘naked-soul’ lady,” and her public diary gives a glimpse into the risks and rewards this apparent self-revelation held for women at the turn of the twentieth century. Figure 28. “Playing a Deep Game.” Characteristically derisive in tone, The Chicago Tribune accompanied this rendering of MacLane’s “Poses” with the following copy: “Miss Mary MacLane, who arrived in Chicago this week from her home in Butte, whence came before her the ‘story’ of her life, has learned the art of posing. Her attitudes give evidence of having been well studied—perhaps more thoroughly with a view to ‘effect’ than her odd manners and literary work” (1901). 194 Moreover, MacLane’s writing calls into question all the boundaries that had been assumed to demarcate diary as a formal category. Where diary had been viewed as dry, MacLane’s incantatory language enchants and astonishes. Where diary had already been strongly linked to female adolescents and their giddy girlishness, MacLane explodes off the page with an exultant and liberatory psychological sophistication. Where self-writing had been posited on notions of a stable unitary self, MacLane overtly splits that self into delineated characters and puts those characters into conversation, even argument, among themselves. And where diary itself had been presumed to be a casual and happenstance form characterized by seriality, repetitiveness, dailiness, simplicity, triviality, and lack of closure, MacLane presses the form to its very limit with her bold experiment of using those attributes once seen as limitations to draw readers into its power, to cause them to interrogate women’s ways of knowing, and to use interiority itself to restructure identity and break open a liberatory space for women who, like MacLane, had felt themselves entrapped by the restraints of nineteenth-century scripts of white middle-class American womanhood. Largely ignored in the previous criticism of her conflicted and maddening diaries is a recognition of their controlled muscularity and the subtle analytical power on display within them, as well as of their function as evidence of the constitutive role private and public diaries played for women who were going about the work of self-defining an independent subjectivity in the complex moment of the dawn of the twentieth century. 195 The Sand and Barrenness of Butte-Montana Despite her best efforts at escape, made possible by her receipt of the astonishing windfall of $17,000 13 in the very first month of her diary’s publication, MacLane will forever be associated closely with the rough turn-of-the-century western mining town of Butte, Montana. Born in 1881 in Winnipeg, Canada, MacLane was the third child of Margaret MacLane, 14 by all accounts a conventional middle-class woman, and James MacLane, a dashing riverboat gambler, Gold Rush speculator, cattle-rancher, flatboat fleet-owner, and government agent, whose daring exploits made him a figure of local legend. Relying upon his lively “Highland Scot” personality, to which Mary would later lay claim as the source of her “peculiar genius,” James maintained a prestigious government position and provided his family with a comfortable upper middle-class existence first in Winnipeg and later in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, where he moved his family in 1885 in order to profit from the booming Western mining claims. 15 When Mary was eight years old, James died of meningitis, about which Mary would later write coolly, Apart from feeding and clothing me comfortably and sending me to school—which is no more than was due me—and transmitting to me the MacLane blood and character, I can not see that he ever gave me a single thought. Certainly he did not love me, for he was quite incapable of loving any one but himself. And since nothing is of any moment in this world without the love of human beings for each other, it is a matter of supreme indifference to me whether my father, Jim MacLane of selfish memory, lived or died. MacLane’s references to her father here carry the whiff of bravado, which is belied in part by her later rhapsodizing on her father’s gift of “Highland blood” in her diaries, as well as the presence of the dashing characters who would populate her volumes. Margaret remarried within the year to Henry Klenze, an unsuccessful mining speculator whom Mary disdained 196 as having squandered her father’s accumulated wealth on failed claims, thereby destroying any opportunity for Mary and her elder sister Dorothy to attend Stanford University as they had long intended to do. 16 The more conventional Dorothy found work at the local library and later married, while Mary found herself stifled by the “sand and barrenness” of the “uncouth, warped Montana town,” where she engaged as little as possible with either her family or the community—instead keeping to herself, reading voraciously in a wide range of books, wandering peripatetically among the sparse surroundings, and fostering her own “peculiar genius” in order better to envision her escape into the “wide, bright world” beyond her confining home life in the bleak and decadent mining town. MacLane’s earliest portrayal of Butte encapsulates her baldly unflattering opinion of the geography: “Butte and its immediate vicinity present as ugly an outlook as one could wish to see” (Story January 13). Yet though she would soon escape to Chicago, then Boston, then Greenwich Village, MacLane would return to Butte in 1910 after a series of unsuccessful books, financial failures, and medical recoveries, and from her small writing room in her parents’ old house, she would begrudgingly write about Butte: There is nothing benign, nothing enlightening—no gentleness, no pity in its barren beauty. But its hard chaste influence on the sensitive spirit is beyond any analytical power to gauge . . . . Its wonderful aridness starves human nerve-soil till the sad wide eyes of the soul grow bright . . . from denial and unconscious prayer. (I, Mary MacLane 287) Marking her as a Western writer who is both characterized by and seeking escape from the West, yet inescapably drawn back to it, this forlorn statement encapsulates the bind MacLane by which would find herself defined throughout her writing life. Indeed, Butte was an extraordinary environment for a sensitive young writer to have been immersed during the years of her adolescence and coincident creative awakening. In 197 her discussion of the mining town’s colorful history, historian Mary Murphy details the defining role played by prostitution in forming the cultural make-up and polarized strata of the town, describing prostitution as “a firmly established business in Butte [where] prostitutes continued to demonstrate persistence and flexibility in pursuit of their trade” (“The Private Lives of Public Women” 35). Separately, in her discussion of MacLane’s early years, critic Cathryn Halverson discusses MacLane’s gnawing discomfort among the society ladies of Butte who built their reputations upon critiquing the town’s ubiquitous “soiled doves.” Surprisingly, however, neither MacLane’s contemporaries nor her later critics have explicitly explored the role that Butte’s uniquely polarized views of gender, class, and occupation played in MacLane’s writing nor the ways these helped shape her idiosyncratic and then-radical views on femininity and gender. Specifically, MacLane’s residence in Butte coincides precisely with the height of Butte’s infamous red-light demimonde, named “Venus Alley,” a square block of brothels and alleyways that housed architecturally-unique windowed “cribs” from which the “soiled doves” would beckon openly to the thousands of miners who flooded the Blue Range Mine between 1878 and 1917, when Butte’s red-light district was closed. 17 On any given night, hundreds of women worked Venus Alley, giving rise to Butte’s well-known epithet as “The Perch of the Devil.” 18 Among the numerous western mining towns in which the sex trade was prominent, Butte was viewed by many historians as the most riotous, lawless, unchecked, and licentious—a reputation reflected in the fact that its last active brothel reportedly did not close its doors until 1982, when its final proprietor, Ruby Garrett, was pressured to close due to tax violations. 19 In a mark of how wholly this town defined its female inhabitants by their relationship to the sex trade versus the “respectability” of societal 198 standing, in 1914 the City Council of Butte decreed a legal differentiation distinguishing two categories of female-ness: “respectable” women only were to be referred as “women,” while women who participated in the sex trade of Venus Alley were to be considered “lewd and dissolute female persons” who were proscribed from behaving in an “improper, profane, or obscene manner” in the presence of “actual” “women” (Carroll 1). Though critics have thus far not addressed the specific effect this extraordinary environment had on MacLane’s writing or her views of gender, her family home sits a mere twenty-minute walk from the center of the demimonde, and MacLane’s later writing reflects a considered consciousness of the division between the “respectable” class of society matrons and the sex workers of Venus Alley, with whom she reportedly drank and “caroused” regularly after her 1910 return to her hometown. 20 During these decades the purported autobiography of the renowned madam Madeleine Blair 21 was published to great scandal, and while MacLane is relatively circumspect about her sexuality in her published writings, her letters hint at numerous instances of her own prostitution while living destitute in New York and Chicago in the later years of her life. 22 While her earliest diaries merely hint at sexuality and do not suggest anything so shocking as prostitution itself directly, MacLane’s upbringing in Butte, with its lively public demimonde operating openly merely a few streets away, provides an erotic undercurrent to her writing that readers noticed, responded to, and attributed to her being a woman raised “in a barren region of the West.” A Naked Portrayal At first glance, The Story of Mary MacLane appears to follow the serial structure of a traditional diary, using simple dated divisions, writing entries for most dates, repeating itself, 199 and paying at least some attention to the dailiness, seriality, and triviality that diary theorists claim as hallmarks of the form. Margo Culley, in her influential introduction to A Day at a Time: The Diary Literature of American Women from 1764 to the Present, points to the dual aspects of dailiness and repetition, added to women’s assumed roles as chief family historian and chronicler, combining to define the bulk of middle-class white women’s diaries from the eighteenth century onward. Yet, from its very first page, The Story of Mary MacLane announces itself as a completely new, other, and bold species of the diary form—one that pronounces proudly, vividly, and vehemently the value of the individual female self as worthy of close inspection and detailed attention. MacLane begins: 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, of whom the world contains not a parallel. (January 13, 1901) In these first words of introduction, MacLane prepares the way for an implicit argument for the value of her project based on a kind of special genius for interior observation that had been unseen before the arrival of this book. While middle-class, white, American women had previously written diaries of a collective or family self, and while public men had written diaries when the writer was notable, famous, or otherwise worthy of recording his life, MacLane here sets forth an audacious claim that the life and, even more astonishingly, the interior experience of one unknown, yet unparalleled, woman is worthy of public record and the public’s attention. Twenty years later, Franz Kafka, then already noted for his fiction, would record a similar impulse in his diary: I don’t believe people exist whose inner plight resembles mine; still, it is possible for me to imagine such people—but that the secret raven forever flaps about their head as it does mine, even to imagine that is impossible. (qtd. in Godwin 12) 200 Eighty years later, inveterate diarist Gail Godwin would write similarly: I made my first diary, with half sheets of notebook paper, cardboard, and yarn, and I wrote in it passionately, because I felt there was nobody else like me and I had to know why—or why not. (12) MacLane’s impulse to record the interior experience was to be taken up by generations of diarists in the twentieth century, yet the strangeness of this bold pronouncement—written before Freud had even yet popularized the mechanisms of the unconscious—utterly shocked her readers. In addition to the shocking content of her self-revelation, MacLane’s linguistic style had scarcely been seen before, hearkening as it did to the exuberance of Whitman, yet simultaneously gesturing, in its use or repetition and ellipses, toward the Modernists who were yet to come. The musicality of her language, which deepens and grows more complex as the book progresses, works as an incantatory announcement of motif from the very first entry, a collection of single individual lines that will be made more complex throughout the book: 23 I am convinced of this, for I am odd. I am distinctly original innately and in development. I have in me a quite unusual intensity of life. I can feel. I have a marvelous capacity for misery and for happiness. I am broad-minded. I am a genius. I am a philosopher of my own good peripatetic school. I care neither for right nor for wrong—my conscience is nil. My brain is a conglomeration of aggressive versatility. I have reached a truly wonderful state of miserable morbid unhappiness. I know myself, oh, very well. I have attained an egotism that is rare indeed. I have gone into the deep shadows. All this constitutes oddity. I find therefore that I am quite, quite odd. (January 13) 201 This proclamation of her unusualness, her “oddity,” her “genius,” and her ability to see, as she later writes, “far, far inward,” mark an overt self-definition that had not yet been seen by a woman in letters, and her young age and apparent unselfconsciousness in making these bold pronouncements are at least partially responsible for the chord she struck among her astonished readers. In his long meditation on diarists and their diaries, diarist/critic Thomas Mallon concludes that ultimately the diarist’s greatest motivation is simply to proclaim: “I was, I was—I am!” (293). Likewise, in the opening lines of her first work, MacLane claims her presence overtly, unapologetically, bodily. And in her next entry, dated January 14 th , MacLane goes on to clarify the objective she held for her intellectual project: “I am filled with ambition. I wish to give the world a naked Portrayal of Mary MacLane: her wooden heart, her good young woman’s body, her mind, her soul.” MacLane takes great pains to distinguish her “Portrayal” as being something both within the diary format—daily, serial, fragmentary, written in the present moment—yet simultaneously, to her mind, something much finer, much deeper, and capable of much greater clarity in its view of the yet-uncharted psychological self. This is not a diary. It is a Portrayal. It is my inner life shown in its nakedness. I am trying my utmost to show everything—to reveal every petty vanity and weakness, every phase of feeling, every desire. It is a remarkably hard thing to do, I find, to probe my soul to its depths, to expose its shades and half-lights. (January 27) This overt pronouncement of self-revelation is linked invariably by both MacLane and her critics with bodily revelation—the inner life made “naked”—and much of her audience’s astonishment drew explicitly from the unflinching expression of bodily experience that MacLane relays. Teenage girls’ bodies had never yet been represented so boldly, nor, importantly, from the internal perspective of the inhabiting girl herself. In a move that 202 perhaps prefigures the later century’s debates of “post-feminism,” both author MacLane and publisher Stone argue for the value of female visibility and bodily expression and simultaneously capitalize upon its cultural shock value in order to drive sales. From both author and critics, the language surrounding MacLane’s newly invented version of diary overflows with tropes of female nudity—“naked-soul,” “inner nakedness,” “nudity,” “exposed,” “laid bare,”—and the greatest shock is driven by the audacity inherent in exposing the “Portrayal” of the feminine, that sacred category of selfhood that had until this moment been presumed to be sanctioned as private, rather than public. Meanwhile, in language that sings vividly and musically, with the attention to line of a poet and the attention to motif of a composer, MacLane sets out a pronouncement of her own irreducible female “genius.” Genius, she declares, consists of the ability to see “far, far inward,” and she declares herself utterly supreme in this ability: I am able to stand off and gaze critically and dispassionately at myself and my relationship to my environment, to the world, to everything the world contains. . . . I am able indeed to tell what I am and where I stand. I can see far, far inward. I am a genius. Charlotte Bronte did this in some degree, and she was a genius; and also Marie Bashkirtseff, and Olive Schreiner, and George Eliot. They are all geniuses. And so then am I a genius—a genius in my own right. (January 24) From the outset, she links her project to a number of literary figures whom she admires for also having possessed the “genius” to turn inward. The early twentieth-century conversation surrounding “genius” is a key strategy for women attempting to sidestep the limiting traps of gender, as I discuss regarding the work of Mary Hunter Austin in Chapter Two of this dissertation. Equally important, in this passage MacLane situates herself within a long tradition of introspective writers, a strategy she will later build upon as she weaves a subtle 203 argument for the value of close inspection of the individual self. In addition to Brontë, Bashkirtseff, Schreiner, and Eliot, MacLane praises seventeenth-century French author and courtesan Ninon de l’Enclos for her “broad-minded opinions” regarding women’s sexuality, 24 and she specifically links herself to Lord Byron as the one soul in whom she “find[s] suggestion of [her]self”: In [his] sublime outpouring there are few to admire the character of Don Juan, but all must admire Byron. He is truly admirable. He uncovered and exposed his soul of mingled good and bad—as the terms are—for the world to gaze upon. He knew the human race. And he knew himself. (January 13) MacLane’s overt praise for the bravery necessary to “expose” one’s “soul,” here directed toward Byron, also drives her own work, and in a linkage that becomes more apparent throughout The Story, MacLane makes an implicit argument to look to the single individual for a representative or holographic point of study for “human nature,” a stance that would be later questioned for its assumption of white European psychological normativity, but nonetheless was soon to be widely adopted by the early psychologists who were her contemporaries: William James, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, G. Stanley Hall, etc. Indeed, just as Bashkirtseff had articulated the role her diary might play—“If I should not live long enough to become famous, this journal will be interesting to the psychologist”—so too MacLane recognized that the interior map-making she had undertaken had much in common with the work of the psychologist: I have entered into certain things marvelously deep. I know things, I know that I know them, and I know that I know that I know them. Which is a fine psychological point. It is magnificent of me to have gotten so far, at the age of nineteen, with no training other than that of the sand and barrenness. Magnificent—do you hear? (January 24) 204 MacLane’s magnificent, genius Portrayal blatantly ignores the most familiar and common attributes of earlier women’s diary (e.g., recordings of prosaic daily events, family happenings, community life) and instead makes use of the form’s elasticity to record the interior working of the single mind, erecting a central character to act as self, and proleptically creating a new version of female subjectivity even as she wrote it into being. As diary theorist Suzanne Bunkers argues, “Diary would become a place where the writer could generate a sense of self and establish its integrity, a place where she could contemplate her relationships with others and understand better what it meant to be a woman in her culture” (9). For MacLane, the first task in accomplishing this extraordinary project was to erect the central character who would take up the role of the “genius” self of her diaries. I Was a Wild Little Savage A key aspect of MacLane’s definition of character, and one that she repeats at key points throughout her first book, is linked with her close identification with her Highland Scot “blood.” She explains clearly: “I am peculiarly of the MacLane blood, which is Highland Scotch” (January 13). MacLane takes pains to differentiate the Highland versus the Lowland Scot, pointing out that her convention-bound mother, brothers, and sister all took after the Lowland Scots of her mother’s side, whereas she “alone of her generation” took after her father, whose daring exploits and charismatic nature had been legendary within her family. There are a great many MacLanes, but there is usually only one real MacLane in each generation. There is but one who feels again the passionate spirit of the clans, those barbaric dwellers in the bleak, the well-beloved Highlands of Scotland. 205 I am the real MacLane of my generation. The real MacLane in these later centuries is always a woman. (January 19) MacLane’s self-definition as Highland Scot is useful to her as a tool that allows her to separate from the expectations of her provincial family (especially her mother) and instead posit a more adventuresome and expansive version of female selfhood that draws strength not only from the recent ancestry of the dashing absent father but also from the ancient ancestry of an entire culture of spirited highland warriors. That MacLane’s characterizations of this cultural tie are largely imagined or borrowed from the fanciful romances of Sir Walter Scott is far less significant than their usefulness to her as a means of legitimizing her longed- for and necessary escape from the traps of domestication and conventionality that her mother’s conventionality represented. MacLane’s dramatic characterizations of the daring and dramatic traits of the Highland Scots are crucial to her strategy of escape: Some people think, absurdly enough, that to be . . . descended from the Scottish clans is to be rather strong, rather conservative, firm in fait, and all that. The idea is one that should be completely exploded by this time. I think that the Scotch as a nation are the most difficult of all to characterize. Their trait and tendencies cover a wider field than those of any other. To be Scotch is to be anything. . . . Always I think of the cruel, hardened, ferocious, weather-beaten, kilted Clan MacLean wandering over the bleak winter hills, fighting the powerful MacDonalds and MacGregors—and generally wiping them from this earth,-- marching away with merrily shrieking pipes from fields of withered, blood- soaked heather—and all this merely to gather intensified life for me. I feel that the causes of my tragedy began long, long ago from remote germs. (Mar 21) This descriptive vein, which recurs through several passages that are separated by a span of months, brings together MacLane’s project of radical self-definition, her identification with the “wild,” and her geographic location in the American West—all of which converge to fuel 206 MacLane’s escape. The language of this passage—“barbaric,” “hardened,” “wandering,” “tragedy,” “ferocious”—are here used by MacLane to discuss the “wildness” of the earth- based culture of the Highland Scot, and they are simultaneously words that are found commonly in white descriptions of indigenous cultures across the American West during this period of nostalgia for “the Noble Savage.” Alan Trachtenberg usefully discusses the convergence of “Indian and immigrant” throughout this period as being necessary to the defining of Euro-Americans’ collective sense of “American Identity.” Likewise, Philip Deloria articulates the usefulness of “Indian playacting” to whites who settled in North America. Throughout this volume, MacLane consistently taps into this mythologized connection with a similarly earth-based, spiritually connected, “ferocious,” “savage,” and extraordinarily daring ancestry in order specifically to support her efforts at creating a version of female subjectivity that will be expansive enough to inhabit without the claustrophobia of contemporary conceptions of respectable female identity. With this strategy, MacLane’s ethnic identification can be compared usefully to that of Mary Austin. While MacLane does not overtly reference Native American identity in the explicit ways that Austin did in order to anchor and validate her expertise and authority, MacLane does use language that telegraphs a similar connection to the land and that thereby insists upon an authority that would not have been available to a young middle-class white woman raised outside the American West. For women, particularly white women in the American West during these decades, the usefulness of these alternate responses to modernity—the psychological, the spiritual, the “primitive,” the Native, the Western—were crucial to escaping the binds of expectations for conventional female subjectivity. 207 MacLane’s exploitation of these connections to drive her escape become even more apparent in the language of the narrative that she uses to characterize herself as a child. In the following passage, MacLane suggests a kind of nascent self that is sui generis, a child of nature who is utterly and unimpeachable “of her own kind.” The language she uses to do so is also unmistakably coded as tapping into the common rhetoric of the period drawn from fellow diarist Rousseau’s notions of the “Noble Savages” as mythologized across the American West: I can remember a time long, oh, very long ago. That is the time when I was a child. It is ten or a dozen years ago. Or is it a thousand years ago? . . . When I was a child I lived in Canada and in Minnesota. I was a little wild savage. In Minnesota there were swamps where I used to wet my feet in the spring, and there were fields of tall grass where I would lie flat on my stomach in the company of lizards and little garter snakes. . . . I was tanned and sunburned, and I had an unkempt appearance. My face was very dirty. The original pattern in my frock was invariably lost in layers and vistas of native soil. My hair was braided or else it flew about, a tangled maze, according as I could be caught by some one and rubbed and straightened before I ran away for the day. My hands were little and strong and brown, and wrought much mischief. I came and went at my own pleasure. I ate what I pleased; I went to bed all in my own good time; I tramped wherever my stubborn little feet chose. I was impudent; I was contrary; I had an extremely bad temper; I was hard-hearted; I was full of infantile malice. Truly I was a vicious little beast. I was a little piece of untrained Nature. (January 25) MacLane here shares with Rousseau the autobiographer’s interest in the “natural” human creature outside of culture. She explicitly draws on language that is shared in her contemporaries’ discussions of the indigenous peoples who populate the American West. The language of this passage, with its coded attention to the “native soil,” the “braiding,” the hands that are “little and strong and brown,” serves to conjure up associations with Native 208 peoples, while MacLane herself implicitly connects them with her claimed ancestry of Highland Scot identity. Trachtenberg discusses strategies by which European immigrants to the Americas drew on these affinities to the land as a way of cementing a kind of American identity. This strategy, while subtle, is nonetheless an important clue to understanding both how MacLane situated herself within a Western authority that is coded as grounded in the land and how she used the constitutive possibilities inherent in diary practice to assume and assert an independently created identity. I Look Far, Far Inward As it would happen, MacLane’s Story did in fact go on to be of direct and explicit interest to academic and clinical psychologists. In 1904, G. Stanley Hall, the distinguished first president of the American Psychological Association and contemporary of Freud, discusses MacLane as one of a short list of writers, including Bashkirtseff, whose writing causes them to be “veritable spies upon woman’s nature”(629). In his work on adolescence, he sets forth his analysis of adolescent “female nature,” using MacLane’s text as an informed species of field research. He discusses these writers’ uniquely positioned insight into a “peculiar” stage of psychological development, which he terms their “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 the tender shoots of everything both good and bad. (Adolescence 629) While no record of MacLane’s awareness of or response to Hall’s analysis of her work is extant, and while MacLane might well have rejected Hall’s determination of what she recognized as her own “genius” as merely a kind of developmental phase, Hall has here 209 nonetheless echoed MacLane’s own proclamations throughout her book that she will seek “far, far inward” and reveal the most expansive, exhilarating, intense aspect of self that one may possibly encounter within, an encounter that she shares freely and “in its nakedness” with the world. In this sense, MacLane’s book and others of its kind 25 function as a version of interior “field research” conducted by psychologically minded writers who were denied the access to education that would allow for more sanctioned forms of research, and as such it was particularly useful to women, minorities, and the working classes. Conceiving of this interior focus as a legitimate form of research was first proposed by William James in his influential 1890 volume Principles of Psychology, in which he proposed the psychologist’s own “introspection” as one of his four key methods for conducting psychological research (the other three being more predictable methods of experiment, analysis, and statistical comparison). Catherine Halverson makes the point that MacLane had planned to attend first Stanford University, then later Radcliffe College, both opportunities that were denied her first by her family’s financial reversals and later by the apparent denial of her application in the confused months after her first fame. 26 Denied access to formal study, and bound by limited financial means to the isolated environment of Butte, MacLane made use of what was available to her by setting her sights “far, far inward” and describing in the most vivid possible detail the riches of the landscape that she observed within. We Three Go Out on the Sand and Barrenness Writing from the remove of the West and at a time when the discipline of psychology was in its infancy, MacLane’s interior exploration of the self reveals a remarkable 210 sophistication and intrinsic grasp of what psychologists would later theorize as the mechanisms of the psyche. Very early in her “portrayal,” beginning with the entry dated January 15 th , MacLane delineates and gives name to multiple aspects of the psyche, a prescient recognition when viewed in light of the rudimentary understandings of the mechanisms of the psyche as they were commonly understood in her late-nineteenth-century context. (Freud, for example, would not go on to outline his conception of the structure of id/ego/superego until 1920 in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.) In her entry dated January 15 th , MacLane writes: We three go out on the sand and barrenness: my wooden heart, my good young woman’s body, my soul. We go there and contemplate the long sandy wastes, the red, red line on the sky at the setting of the sun, the cold gloomy mountains under it, the ground without a weed, without a grass-blade even in their season—for they have years ago been killed off by the sulphur smoke from the smelters. So this sand and barrenness forms the setting of the personality of me. This division of the self into “we three,” the heart, the body, the soul, is just the first of the divisions of self that MacLane identifies and names from within her self throughout the book, others include the Devil and the Anemone Lady, both of whom stand as separate and projected aspects with whom the “I” of MacLane’s text will interact. In her later follow-up book, I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days, the 1917 book that revisits the themes and interiority of The Story from a more psychologically mature perspective, MacLane retells a conversation she has with this Soul, by this time a fully separated and articulated figure: At rarish intervals comes my Soul to visit me. My Soul is a light sheer Being. My Soul is like a young most beautiful girl marked and worn by long cycles of time but not anyway aged. She comes dressed in something like gray-white de-soie muslin or fine-grained crêpe silk, a loose-belted frock reaching to her ankles. 211 My Soul is unmoved by the world and the flesh and their feeling, as befits a Soul. She looks on me with a chill faëry-ish contempt, as also befits a Soul. The quality of her contempt is of weary understanding and is like a caress. In the dusk of yesterday came my Soul to visit me—a dusk of a deep beauty. The last glow of the sun lay along the earth, and all was gentian blue. I leaned against my window-pane watching it, and beside me sat her Presence. Her Presence makes me feel wonderfully gifted: it is mine, this Soul all Golden-Silk and Silken-Gold! We talk on many topics, of many things . . . . (215) 27 This delineation of “my Soul” as a fully separate entity, both of the self and separate from the self, is, an anthropomorphized projected aspect that allows the individual to externalize an idealized aspect of subjectivity. It likewise suggests the late-nineteenth and early- twentieth-century passion for spiritualism, which Ann Braude discusses as a significant source of empowerment for women, who, like MacLane were denied access to sanctioned forms of knowledge via higher education Playing a Deep Game In her analysis of the role of emotional life for women writers in the late nineteenth century, Nancy Schnog argues that women writers drew on a pre-Freudian idiom of “moods” in order to effect the “emotional ‘deepening’ of the female subject” (105). Schnog suggests that middle-class women writers who “sought to reinvent themselves as individuals and artists” did so by reasserting “romantic concepts of genius that posited a ‘deep’ inner life”(105). For Schnog, this depth is based on women’s ability to provide an “emotional reportage” that drew validity from a “powerful dose of American romantic ideology,” particularly that of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Schnog concludes: The white middle-class woman writer who wanted to represent the female self as an artistically inspired and emotionally profound individual took hold 212 of a pre-Freudian idiom—a romantic language of “moods”—as a means of expressing these previously unrecognized potentials. (105-06) Pointing to contemporary reviews of Chopin’s The Awakening (published just months before MacLane’s Story) Schnog points out that Chopin’s novel engendered criticism for being “morbid,” “unhealthily introspective,” and a “picture of soul-dissection” and that Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s novel The Story of Avis received similar criticism ten years earlier because its “author represent[ed] unhealthy and abnormal moods of mind and emotions as being normal and typical” (Culley 145-153 and Kessler 273, qtd. in Schnog 109). Chopin and Phelps number among a subset of women writers in the years leading into the twentieth century who attended closely to the interiorities of women’s emotional life under the thin veil of the novel form. These writers represent a departure from the sentimental novelists of the generation that preceded them in their approach to emotional life not as a simpler and more positive sentiment with a focus on women’s connections within family, but by highlighting emotional tension, conflict, “moodiness,” spontaneity, and depth—representing a version of a female self as one capable of artistic depth and range. Writing in the wake of these introspective novelists, MacLane forwards this attention to the potentialities of the expanded notions of female selfhood dramatically. By focusing on the unconscious, inherent, and nearly inevitable purchase assumed by readers of the “true story,” a purchase outlined decades later by diary theorist Philippe LeJeune as a key component of “le pacte autobiographique,” MacLane claims for herself the “genius” of emotional depth previously found only in novel heroines as the very key to her own identity. She further claims the darkness of the self to be as much a source of power as its light, overtly rejecting the value of “sentiment” in its focus on femininity and “respectability.” 213 The Art of the Small Things In her study of Progressive Era women’s autobiography, Jill Conway suggests that the lack of available scripts for politically active women constituted one of the major hurdles for prominent autobiographers including Jane Addams, Ida Tarbell, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman to writing the stories of their lives as closed autobiographical accounts. While MacLane’s project could rightly be viewed in some senses to be almost diametrically opposed—her project does not set out to narrativize in retrospect the events of a politically significant life, but instead attempts to gives voice in the present to the silent, interior, private experience of a single unknown woman, for example—her challenge is strikingly similar. With a lack of available scripts for a fully realized psychological and female self, MacLane must invent this self, and simultaneously invent the means of writing this self. In her influential volume Writing a Woman’s Life, Carolyn Heilbrun suggests the difficulty of overcoming the challenges of “scriptlessness”: I have read many moving lives of women, but they are painful, the price is high, the anxiety is intense, because there is no script to follow, no story portraying how one is to act, let alone any alternative stories. (39) In addition to inventing a new kind of story and giving it a newly expanded form, an act that was to have a dramatic effect on the writing practices of a generation of readers, MacLane also was pressed to embed within her works the suggestion of strategies for a reading practice that would be appropriate to her work. Just as Zitkala-!a was required to teach her Euro-American audience a reading practice that allowed for silences and quietness and patience borne of the Sioux ohunkankan, 28 so, too, MacLane must teach her audience how to read her self-invented diary form. 214 Later theorists of diary have articulated the slowness and idiosyncrasies of approach that we twenty-first-century readers must adopt in order to understand these books appropriately. LeJeune usefully posits that we diary readers must begin from a stance in which we “assume every diary is interesting.” That is, we must “decipher the code” of each diary individually, idiosyncratically, gradually, and patiently—maintaining a reading practice that is open to the individual ways in which each diary writer does the work of “achieving an identity” (“réalisation d'une identité”)—LeJeune’s turn of phrase that usefully suggests the difficult work of becoming, that task upon which each individual self had embarked in the act of writing her diary. Helen Buss usefully builds upon this enlarging approach by suggesting that we approach manuscript diaries with an “ethics of love” by which we meld reading practices that have often been seen as mutually exclusive, and for which we give account using Geertzian “thick description.” Sprinkling her entries with allusions (both direct and indirect) to centuries of previous autobiographies, MacLane herself proves a savvy reader of life-writing. Hence for the reading at hand, these contemporary approaches combine usefully with the strategies that MacLane herself implicitly embeds within her book as she attempts to teach us how to read, as she calls it, “the art of the small things” (January 29). MacLane’s savvy reading of previous autobiographers may be detected throughout The Story, and MacLane is unafraid to push her allusions to the very breaking point in the logical extremes of self-analysis. Where St. Augustine uses several pages of his fourth- century Confessions to elaborate on his adolescent theft of luscious pears from a neighboring tree as a lengthy conceit for Edenic temptation, MacLane likewise uses a vivid depiction of food imagery to illustrate the most important aspect of her overall project: “the art of the small things.” Throughout the book, MacLane has taken pains to illustrate a rationale for the 215 usefulness of her microscopically close “Portrayal,” a type of analysis that opens her to accusations of egotism, and of girlish self-absorption. In her lengthy meditation on an olive, she claims, “And so I have made my olive and my art perfect,” explicitly drawing a linkage between her extraordinarily close observation of the experience of eating a single olive and her detailed observations of the working of her own mind. Of crucial importance to this link is the body itself, the gastric juices and the very “chyme” itself being of overt importance to MacLane’s experience of the body, once again with the emphasis being on the internal experience of one’s own body. MacLane’s meditation upon the eating of the single olive runs a full nine pages and takes up the entirety of her January 28 th entry. A heavily redacted excerpt is as follows: I am an artist of the most artistic, the highest type. I have uncovered for myself the art that lies in obscure shadows. I have discovered the art of the day of small things. . . . But I—I have acquired the art of eating an olive. Now listen and I will tell you the art of eating an olive. I take the olive in my fingers, and I contemplate its green oval richness. It make me think at once of the land where the green citron grows—where the cypress and myrtle are emblems; of the land of the Sun where human beings are delightfully, enchantingly wicked,--where the men are eager and passionate, and the women gracefully developed in mind and body—and their two breasts show round and full and delicately veined beneath fine drapery. . . . I set my teeth and my tongue upon the olive, and bite it. It is bitter, salt, delicious. The saliva rushes to meet it, and my tongue is a happy tongue. As the morsel of olive rests in my mouth and is crunched and squeezed lusciously among my teeth, a quick temporary change takes place in my character. . . . The bit of olive slips down my red gullet, and so into my Stomach. There it meets with a joyous welcome. Gastric juices leap out from the walls and swathe it in a loving embrace. My Stomach is fond of something bitter and salt. It lavishes flattery and endearment galore up on the olive. . . . (January 28) 216 The passage continues in this vein for nine full pages, during which the writer describes taking three bites of the single olive, each one described in several paragraphs that detail the rush of the body to meet it: “The kisses of gastric juice become hot and sensual and convulsive and ecstatic” (January 28). Ultimately with the third bite, MacLane describes an utter single-pointedness of attention: “The entire world is now surely one delicious green olive. My mind is incapable of conceiving of but one idea: that of a green olive. Therefore the green olive is a perfect thing—absolutely a perfect thing” (January 28). In this passage MacLane will suggest that this level of close attention will make a thing “perfect” and conversely that “When a thing is perfect, no matter how hard one may look at it, one can only see itself—itself, and nothing beyond” (January 28). At this line, still only halfway through what appears to be a simple meditation upon the physical fact of an olive, MacLane forwards a sophisticated and coded argument for the art of looking closely at a thing, the very project of her entire book. The stunningly close introspection that MacLane offers of her psyche is here validated as being the key to recognizing “perfection” itself, not a specific perfection that MacLane is claiming for herself, but instead a sense of the automatic perfection that close observation creates by allowing no room for the “disgust and disapproval” that MacLane attempts to deflect in the passage. Instead, MacLane argues for the perfections of fallibility, engaging her Devil in a taunt: “Where now, Devil, is your damnation? If this be damnation, damnation let it be! If this be the human fall, then how good it is to be fallen!” (January 28). Never explicitly referring to Augustine, MacLane here alludes to his usage of the fruits of the earth to evoke the Fall, yet she subverts Augustine’s sense of tragedy and fallen sinfulness—as she does consistently throughout The Story—and 217 here revels in her fallenness, and revels in the physicality of the human experience to be capable of the joys of the flesh: “And so, bite by bite, the olive enters into my body and soul. Each bite brings with it a recurring wave of sensation and charm” (January 28). Ultimately, MacLane uses the sensuousness of the single olive to link the body to what she argues is the crucial work of human “genius” to study the self as a means of understanding the mysteries of human experience on a larger scale. She writes: This is the art of Eating. I have acquired it by means of self-examination, analyzing—analyzing— analyzing. Truly my genius is analytical. And it enables me to endure—if also to feel bitterly—the heavy, heavy weight of life. (January 28) This genius for self-analysis is linked to earlier male autobiographers, including Rousseau, who writes in his confessions, I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent and which, once complete, will have no imitator. . . . I am made unlike anyone I have ever met; I will even venture to say that I am like no one in the whole world. As Halverson points out, in this respect MacLane’s contemporaries might have suggested that Rousseau himself sounds notably “marymaclaneish” in this passage, here pithily using the term that came to diminish later women’s diaries that hewed to this form (77). This quality of focus on the individual and “genius” self has been discussed by critics as setting MacLane’s project apart from those of earlier women diarists and life-writers and aligning her more closely with male writers. In her influential study of diary, Margo Culley argues that eighteenth and nineteenth-century women writing diary and autobiography drew from dominant Puritan views of women’s roles and therefore reflected in their writing a need to be “useful to others” (76). In this regard, Culley concurs with the view of other influential theorists (e.g., Mason, Smith/Watson, Friedman) that argues that women until this period 218 were largely writing chronicles of family life, community life, and their children’s lives, all with an undercurrent of the individual self gaining its primary value by being “useful” in relation to others. If so, Mary MacLane’s writing represents a dramatic departure from this preoccupation. Where nineteenth-century women diarists chronicled the varied lives of their children, MacLane in contrast utterly disavows her entire family within the first several pages of The Story, and she instead spends the entirety of the rest of the text developing a “Portrayal” that closely examines only her own “perfectly imperfect” and “genius” self. The “others” with whom MacLane’s subjects come in contact are never the actual family or community members with whom she co-exists, but are almost always—with the single notable exception of her desired Anemone Lady Fannie Corbin—instead the externalized and projected Others from within her own self with whom she continually converses: the Devil, her Soul, and her “good young woman’s” body. Where male autobiographers (Rousseau, Adams, Franklin, Thoreau, Emerson, etc) assume the viability and even necessity of their self-text given their established societal role as important public men whose authority is unquestioned, MacLane must continually argue for the value of her own text from within the text—as in her subtle argument in the olive passage and more overt passages throughout. Given her identity as female, as Western, as young, as uneducated, as seemingly unexceptional, MacLane’s work cries out on every page for validation of the genius she recognizes within. 219 A Wondrous Liver Within A key strategy of MacLane’s text that made her simultaneously titillating, shocking, and unplaceable to her readers is located in her unflinching descriptions the most visceral aspects body. MacLane’s writes of the body, not from the perspective of the external other who holds the gaze, but from the interior position that exists unapologetically within it. Scarcely does she mention the external appearance of the body, despite her playful discussion in interviews of “posing” and her public’s frequent discussion of and apparent fascination with her bodily persona and dress. Instead, here MacLane’s perspective is centered solidly from within the body, and she adamantly redirects her readers’ gaze to view from this interior position, as well, with a poet’s exultation of the body’s wise, mysterious workings: You may gaze at and admire the picture in the front of this book. It is the picture of a genius—a genius with a good strong young-woman’s body, and inside the pictured body is a liver, a MacLane liver, of admirable perfectness. . . . Sometime in the midst of the brightness of an October I have walked for miles in the still high air under the blue of the sky. The brightness of the day and the blue of the sky and the incomparable high air have entered into my veins and flowed with my red blood. They have penetrated into every remote nerve-center and into the marrow of my bones. At such a time this young body glows with life. My red blood flows swiftly and joyously—in the midst of the brightness of October. My sound sensitive liver rests gently with its thin yellow bile in sweet content. My calm beautiful stomach silently sings as I walk a song of peace, [the while it hugs within itself the chyme that was my lunch.] 29 My lungs, saturated with mountain ozone and the perfume of the pines, expand in continuous ecstasy. My heart beats like the music of Schumann, in easy graceful rhythm with an undertone of power. My very intestine even basks contentedly in its place like a snake in the hot dust, vibrating with conscious life. 220 My strong and sensitive nerves are reeking and swimming in sensuality like drunken little Bacchantes, gay and garlanded in mad reveling. The entire wonderful graceful mechanism of my woman’s-body has fallen at the time—like the wonderful graceful mechanism of my woman’s-mind— under the enchanting spell of a day in October. (January 18) Anticipating that readers would fixate on the author photograph that makes up the frontispiece of the book, MacLane refuses to allow the gaze to rest on her external appearance and forces the reader to refocus on the body as it is useful to the writer, that is, on the functioning viscera and organ structures within it: blood, liver, stomach, lungs, heart, nerves, and the “very intestine even” that allow her her long walks, and make up her “graceful mechanism.” Further, in this passage, as with the passage of the olive, MacLane makes explicit the linkage between the “graceful mechanism of my woman’s-body” as being “like the wonderful graceful mechanism of my woman’s-mind”—both sources of power necessary to her as a whole and healthy organism. MacLane’s unapologetic and visceral embodiment is here apparent, and worth noting in its rarity among girls of her generation. In these passages we see the body as the unapologetic carrier of the “genius” self, and MacLane directly connects the genius of the interior psyche with the genius of the body. MacLane ends this set of entries with a reiteration of her insistence on redirecting the gaze of her reader: Yes, you may gaze long and curiously at the portrait in the front of this book. It is of one who is a genius of egotism and analysis, a genius who is awaiting the Devil’s coming,--a genius, with a wondrous liver within. (Jan 24) Characteristically, she closes the entry with a half-playful promise: “I shall tell you more about this liver, I think, before I have done.” 221 Figure 29. Frontispiece to The Story of Mary MacLane, 1901. Figure 30. Frontispiece to I, Mary MacLane, 1917. This Is Not A Diary And, unsurprisingly, she fulfills that promise toward the end of the book. While critics have commonly read The Story as being “thematically complex,” despite it being “simple in shape and subject” (Halverson 20), I would argue that the structure is far less “simple” than it would appear. On its surface, the book appears to be made up of a series of simple, dated entries, a bit random in its skipping of dates, just as a “real” diary would be. Yet within this apparent structure lies a repetition of motifs that is analogous to that of a musical composition. While MacLane’s Story was promoted by its publisher as a “public 222 diary,” and while MacLane herself insists upon its function as a “Portrayal,” the book is far more structurally complex than it at first appears. Its chronologically dated entries and its episodic nature draw conventions from diary and thereby appears to inform its readers’ reception of it as fresh, as nakedly revealing, as providing an intimate glimpse into the “truth” of a “naked soul,” and as implicitly drawing upon the implicit promise of self- revelation LeJeune suggests as “le pacte autobiographique.” Indeed, researchers of MacLane invariably view the book in this fashion—as a scattered, episodic disconnected diary of chronological entries. Yet the structure of the book belies this assumption on multiple levels. Throughout The Story, MacLane writes in a stunningly associative manner, relying heavily upon both proximity and repetition as if to cast an incantatory spell upon her readers. In passages that read much more like incantatory poetry than as the stodgy prose typically associated with traditional life-writing, MacLane often bases entire passages around a single word or compounded phrase around which she circles playfully throughout the passage. This repetition works on every level of the text, within phrases (“the wise wide world,” “my waiting, wailing heart”) within sentences, within paragraphs, and perhaps most obviously within passages, which are most often centered radially on an idea that is considered in numerous and countering ways. 30 Even more striking when reading the text in its entirety is the hypnotic sense of repetition and nearly musical return to motifs between the dated passages. Key elements of these returns include the Devil figure, the Anemone Lady, the Grey Dawn, the “sand and barrenness,” the “red, red line,” the bread and stone, the “wooden heart,” the “good strong woman’s body,” and even that ubiquitous “wondrous liver.” Each of these motifs is brought up in various lights and considered and reconsidered in ever-changing juxtapositions with 223 other motifs, and none is dropped without resolution before the close of the book. This fact of deliberate conclusions gives us one clue that MacLane’s Story is less spontaneous and more crafted than it appears to be at first glance, or than it was assumed to be by its contemporary readers. In the final “L’Envoi” that she wrote upon its publication, dated October 28, 1901 (six months after the book’s final entry), MacLane continues her “deep, deep game” by overtly guiding readers to believe that the book had been comprised of virtually a random collection of writing: And so there you have my Portrayal. It is the record of three months of Nothingness. Those three months are very like the three months that preceded them, to be sure and the three that followed them—and like all the months that have come and gone with me, since time was. There is never anything different; nothing ever happens. (October 28) Earlier, MacLane has informed us readers that she is a “thief, a genius, a liar, and a fool,” and here she taunts us to determine when she is lying to us even while also insisting that she has been giving us a strictly observed psychological “Portrayal.” Instructing her readers to read her pages as a spontaneous and chronological recording of three quotidian months, she continues to play her “deep game.” Yet within the same concluding passage, she gives us clues to some of the puzzles she has set forth in her game. These “three months of Nothingness” are part of a repeated chain of threes that recurs in nearly every passage of the book. She tells the Devil that she will be happy in her marriage to him for three days; the Italian peddler woman laughs “divinely” that three days is the length of time a husband is “sweet” before he “make[s] rough house . . . and raise[s] hell”; she eats her three boiled eggs every morning; she repeatedly breaks her own identity down into the trios of her “wooden heart,” “her soul,” “her good young-woman’s body”; and the projected Others with whom she converses are 224 three: the Devil, the Anemone Lady, and the sylph-like “hunted” Soul. This repetition of threes—that inescapably weighty number of sacred myth and story—gradually accumulates meaning throughout the book, though it appears to have gone unnoticed by her contemporary readers and critics. MacLane brings this repetition to a head in her final L’Envoi: My Portrayal in its analysis and egotism and bitterness will surely be of interest to some. Whether to that one alone who may understand it; or to some who have themselves been left alone; or to those three whom I, on three dreary days, asked for bread, and who each gave me a stone—and whom I do not forgive (for that is the bitterest thing of all): it may be to all of these. (October 28) This passage marks the first time MacLane has made reference to “those three” together and it is not ultimately made clear which “three” she refers to. There have, after all, been many, many “dreary days” represented in the book, and her “asking for bread” has not been used directly on any of them and indeed was used instead in relation to her dissatisfaction with her family. Yet three vivid passages stand out. Three times MacLane separates her self from a projected Other and illustrates a compelling conversation with each one: On March 16 th , she relates that “then came my soul and confronted me,” and she converses with that “weeping, hunted thing.” On April 3 rd , she spends “an hour in passionate conversation with the Devil,” who sits in her “frail willow chair” while she sits across him on the “ugly red velvet sofa” discussing desire, love, sex, passion in the form of “sprigs of dripping wet sweet-fern . . . stuck inside my hot linen collar.” And in the passage that serves as the emotional climax for the book, though it refuses absolutely to provide narrative closure 31 and leaves only MacLane’s sense of loss and aloneness, on April 11 th , MacLane writes an unacknowledged letter of searing limerence to her Anemone Lady, Fannie Corbin, whose 225 friendship contains “many things”: “It contains infatuation, and worship, and bewitchment, and idolatry, and a tiny altar in my soul-chamber wheron is burning sweet incense in a little dish of blue and gold. Yes, all of these.” (April 11). These three conversations, written in the most vivid language found in a book built upon language-play, are earmarked here in the final L’Envoi as the three entwined keys to the “puzzle-lock” of her “wooden heart.” None of these figures, not even the Devil for whom she so patiently “awaited”—in the repetition with which she closed more than a dozen passages—gave her the bread for which she pled: “I have asked for bread, sometimes, and I have been given a stone. Oh, it is a bitter thing— oh, it is piteous, piteous!” (April 4). Adding weight to the significance of the tripled repetitions of these projected characters of the book, MacLane concludes the L’Envois with yet another significant tripling: But none of them, nor any one, can know the feeling made of relief and pain and despair that comes over me at the thought of sending all this to the wise wide world. It is bits of my wooden heart broken off and given away. It is strings of amber beads taken from the fair neck of my soul. It is shining little gold coins from out of my mind’s red leather purse. . . . It means everything to me. Do you see, it means everything to me. (October 28) Three vivid images of small valued offerings: wooden heart-bits, amber beads, shining gold coins—are here connected with the three elements of her self: the wooden heart, the fair soul, the “genius” mind. Further, the logic of tripling repeats in her stringing of emotion— “relief and pain and despair” follow the earlier “analysis and egotism and bitterness”—and again repeat even in the finer level of word strings: “the wise wide world.” Taken in one small passage, the effect might be subtle enough to be overlooked, yet this book-long attention to layers and layers of repetition, which would be emulated two decades later by Gertrude Stein, over time conjures an incantatory, spell-making, sacramental effect as it 226 accumulates meaning throughout the book. And, as MacLane repeats, this fact means ‘everything!” to the desperate, solitary, unseen girl who is constructing a self from sand and barrenness: “Everything!” Further evidence for reading the structure of The Story as a crafted text that guides its readers skillfully to a defined conclusion, rather than the merely interesting, spontaneous, episodic, haphazard entries of a nineteen-year-old’s “girlish” diary—can be found in the thematic emphasis to be found in each of the months represented. Every passage in the book is marked by attention to one central kernel ranging from the visceral kernel of the liver or the good porterhouse steak and onions, to the cerebral kernel of a conversation with a projected aspect, to the observational kernel of a vivid character portrait of the townspeople’s varied July 4 th celebrations. Every passage centers around a theme and elaborates upon it in a radial fashion. While most of her contemporaries read the passages as merely chronological, a thematic pattern to the months emerges upon closer inspection. The eighteen passages of January are devoted to introductions of MacLane’s personal identity, her reading tastes, her influences, and most emphatically her project’s rationale and its value: “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” (Jan. 13). The fifteen passages of February reveal an unstated but evident move to portray the world that exists beyond the bounds of the individual self with a vivid description of the peculiarities of the town of Butte, its inhabitants, and her family. Even in these February descriptions, however, the centrality of her position as spectator of these outside others never waivers. In a clear contrast to what Culley identifies as the “usefulness to others” that preoccupies the chronicling found in earlier women’s diaries, MacLane, even when focusing 227 outward in the most observant and vivid of descriptions, 32 never loses her standpoint as the observant self gazing outward at the “wise wide world.” This solid centering within the self is remarkable, especially when comparing the MacLane’s diaric self with those of her contemporaries. The trajectory of the book notably builds in that March’s twenty-two passages, which tend to be longer than the previous months’ entries, focus most closely on detailed observation of interior emotional states, but rather than simple solipsism, they observe closely the internal states brought about by the interactions between the separate self (as examined in January) and the observed other (as examined in February). Ultimately, the book concludes with seven passages that cover the first two weeks of April, when MacLane brings together the emphases of the previous three months to a satisfying emotional climax that (while technically “non-fiction”) is experienced very much like the emotional climax associated with the classic structure of the novel. April 3 rd gives us the dramatic Devil in a passion encounter, April 4 th bemoans the paucity of the stone given when bread was asked for, April 10 th gives us a recognition of “divinity” in the form of the peddler woman, and April 11 th gives us that final disappointment: the unanswered, unrequited, unresolved letter to the beloved Anemone Lady, Fannie Corbin. The final entry proper brings together the continued evocation of the ecstatic divine in a last repetition of the “red, red line” and puts it into perspective with all the other colors that have made up the repeated motifs that have shaded the book. Drawing on the reclaimed power inherent in the “shadow” and the reclaimed primacy of “feeling” and “passion,” MacLane brings all to a close with the repeated signature line that she had intended to take as the book’s title. In its entirety, the final passage concludes the book with a controlled drawing together of its many themes: 228 April 13 I am sitting writing out on my sand and barrenness. The sky is pale and faded now in the west, but a few minutes ago there was the same old-time always- new miracle of roses and gold, and glints and gleams of silver and green, and a river in vermilions and purples—and lastly the dear, the beautiful: the red, red line. There are also heavy black shadows. I have given my heart into the keeping of this. And still as always I look at it—and feel it all with a thrilling passion—and await the Devil’s coming. The vibrant colors, the emotional contrasts, and the “thrilling passion” are characteristic of MacLane’s public diary, and this final passage gestures toward the drama that would shape the rest of MacLane’s work and life. I am Someway the Lesbian Woman After the extraordinary success of The Story of Mary MacLane, MacLane would be toasted from Chicago to New York, and she would develop close friendships with many important publishing women of the period, including Harriet and Lucy Monroe, Inez Haynes Irwin, and Caroline Branson (Maria Louise Pool’s partner). As Halverson illustrates: Accounts of these years usually celebrate a romantically bohemian life. Cutting family ties, in New York she associated with artists, actresses, bohemians, and anarchists, indulged in café life and haute couture, attended prize fights, and gambled away her earnings from The Story. (67) Traveling with friends from Greenwich Village to Rockland, Massachusetts, to St. Augustine, Florida, MacLane insinuated sexual relationships with “over a thousand” men, yet she was relatively discreet about her lesbian relationships, a fact that Virginia Terris and Barbara Miller suggest has made researching her relationships difficult. In The Story, MacLane had written of her love for her “Anemone Lady,” Fannie Corbin, asking “Are there many thing in this cool-hearted world so utterly exquisite as the pure love of one woman for another 229 woman?” Yet ultimately MacLane would feel rejected by Corbin, who treated her coolly upon their meeting in New York. By 1902, the term lesbian had just come into common usage, and MacLane’s reviewers appear to have interpreted her love for Corbin as being “that between a young girl in need of guidance and her older mentor” (“Mary MacLane to Go to Radcliffe College,” qtd. in Halverson 183). By 1917, in her follow-up public diary I, Mary MacLane, MacLane would write more openly: Also I am someway the Lesbian woman. It is but one phase—one which slightly touches each other phase I own. And in it I am poetic and imaginative and worldly and amorous and gentle and true and strong and weak and ardent and shy and sensitive and generous and morbid and sweet and fine and false. (276) In a long, complex passage, MacLane both meditates on her own deeply meaningful relationships with women and in simultaneously appears to join in a cultural pathologizing of lesbian desire: The Lesbian sex-strain as an effect is reckoned by prenatal influence—and, as I conceive, it comes also of conglomerate incarnations and their reactions and flare-backs. Of some thus bestowed it makes strange hard highly emotional indefinably vicious women, turbulent and brilliant of mind, mystically over-borne, overwrought of heart. They are marvels of perverse barbaric energy. (276) Ultimately, MacLane posits that “all women have a touch of the Lesbian,” yet she overtly distances herself from what she defines, presumably in anticipation of her readers’ judgments, as its “vice”: For myself, there is no vice in my Lesbian vein. I am too personally fastidious, too temperamentally dishonest, too eerily wavering to walk in direct repellent roads of vice even in freest moods. There is instead a pleasant degeneracy of attitude more debauching to my spirit than any mere trivial traînant vice would be. And a fascination in it tempers my humanness with an evil-feeling power. I have lightly kissed and been kissed by Lesbian lips in a way which filled my throat with a sudden subtle pagan blood-flavored 230 wistfulness, ruinous and contraband: breath of bewildering demoniac winds smothering mine. (276-77) In this passage, MacLane makes a complex move of both denying the physical aspects of desire (uncharacteristic for her) and simultaneously illustrating its passion and its creative fire. Notably, she links its passion to “demoniac winds,” suggestive of the crucial role her passionate “Devil” played in her first public diary. Later in this passage MacLane links the ability to feel such passion to a genius creative ability in which “a little flame, pale but primal, leaps from the flattest details of life” (279). For MacLane, her creative originality is inextricably wrapped up in her ability to experience love for women: These bewildering fruitful beautifulnesses in this life—. —withal the same inherence which makes me someway Lesbian makes me the floor of the setting sun—strewn with overflowing gold and green vases of Fire and Turquoise—a sly and piercing annihilation-of-beauty, wonderful devastating to feel—oh, blighting breaking to feel—oh, deathly lovely to feel!—. It is the bewitched obliquities that run away with me: grind, gnaw, eat my true human heart like bright potent vitriol. (279) This astonishingly written passage with its extremes of feeling and its rupturing of grammatical structure is itself an example of sheer “marymaclaneism,” and in it she explicitly links her “gifts and phases” of “genius” to the greater sensibility that allows her to experience life with the body, to love both women and men, and to write an “unusual girl[‘s]” self into being in a form that brought into popularity a new model for diary writing practice. An Errant Daughter of Literature MacLane’s psychological diaries inhabit a unique and influential place in the history of diary practice in this period. Linking the body with the text, and the literary with the 231 psychological, they contributed a new script for diarists to follow. Yet after MacLane’s first bright flame of public success, despite several attempts in numerous magazine articles, two subsequent books, and a silent feature film—provocatively titled Men Who Have Made Love to Me—MacLane never recaptured her first public fame. Assuming a bright future of monetary success, she quickly depleted the fortune gained by The Story of Mary MacLane and spent most of the rest of her life struggling financially and emotionally. Living her last few years anonymously in a hotel that the 1920s Chicago press identified as a “black-and-tan,” marking it as a white hotel within a largely African American neighborhood of south Chicago, MacLane was found in her rooms a few days after death in August 1929. Lucille Williams, the African American photographer and artist who is believed to have been her partner, explained to the press, “She was my friend, and she was ill and needed me. That is why she lived where she did, to be close to me” (qtd. in Halverson 73). Accounts differ on MacLane’s cause of death with speculations including suicide, tuberculosis, and complications from an abdominal operation. Her landlord posited simply that her death had been caused by nothing more than “loneliness and a broken heart” (Halverson 74). Having built her career and her reputation on living a vivid life of resistance, independence, and sexual adventurousness, MacLane’s obituaries in the Chicago, New York, and Montana presses expose an undertone of relish upon the circumstances of her death. The following anonymous obituary, entitled “Once Successful Author Dies Alone: Body of Mary MacLane Found in Room at Edge of Chicago’s Black Belt,” published in the Appleton Post-Crescent, illustrates the barely-contained schadenfreude that is found in dozens of short voyeuristic obituaries that appeared across the nation: 232 Chicago— Mary MacLane, a successful author 15 years ago, died last night in a lonely room on the fringe of Chicago’s black-and-tan belt. The author of “I, Mary MacLane,” “Men Who Have Made Love to Me” and other romantic writings, Miss MacLane had virtually disappeared. It was some time after her death before it was realized she was the Mary MacLane whose own romantic adventures as well as her books had stirred the imaginations of the reading public of a few years ago. No one was at her bedside as she died. Her body was found by the proprietor of the small hotel where she had lived for the last four years. Her death, a doctor’s certificate said, was due to natural causes. Miss MacLane’s retirement about six years ago was believed to have been caused by disappointment. It came after the sale of her books had fallen off and financial reverses set in. Ill health added to her troubles. (17) Despite the voyeuristic pleasure that characterizes these accounts of her death, MacLane was also eulogized in some circles as an unparalleled “errant daughter of literature.” Asking “What seed fell upon that provincial soil to produce this amorous diarist with a narcissus complex?,” The Chicagoan declared “the career of Mary MacLane is Chapter I in the History of Flapperism”: [MacLane is] the first of the self-expressionists, and also the first of the flappers. She represented the missing link between the shaved bare leg of the present and the bashful ankle of the past. She should be as important to any student of modern manners as the Java ape-man is to anthropologists. She throws the subject into perspective, for she broke loose upon a startled world as far back as 1902. MacLane’s self-defined life, glimpses of which she provided us readers unparalleled access through her public diaries, was one marked by extremes and reversals, but also depths and accomplishments of feeling and self-awareness that were illustrated in her diary works. These diaries would shine brightly but briefly, yet they influenced a new generation of women who would go on to write deeply psychological diaries. It was to these diarists whom MacLane spoke most deeply when she asked, “And shall my bitter little story fall easily and 233 comfortably on undisturbed ears, and linger for an hour, and be forgotten? Will the wise wide world itself give me in my outstretched hand a stone?” (124) 234 CHAPTER FOUR NOTES 1 As Cathryn Halverson relates, Stone received the manuscript after MacLane’s first choice of publisher, the Fleming R. Revell Company, an evangelical literature press, found it unsuitable yet strongly believed it should see publication. George H. Doran describes “a most extraordinary manuscript coming to our office. . . . Clearly we could not publish it, but Mary must have a publisher” (qtd. in Halverson 19). 2 As would D.H. Lawrence and Hart Crane, among other later Modernists. 3 “Marymaclaneish” was a word that would come to be used by both the press and MacLane herself, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, for this style of exuberant, self-descriptive, and deeply introspective prose. 4 Upon hearing this news, MacLane’s retort suggests her deeply held disdain for the restrictions of small-town provincial life: "I read of the Kalamazoo girl who killed herself after reading the book. I am not at all surprised. She lived in Kalamazoo, for one thing, and then she read the book. Who should be blamed, me or Kalamazoo?" (qtd. in “Our Talkative Mary.”) 5 The notice placed in “Chronicle and Comment,” Bookman (April 1902): 115. (In Halverson 172). 6 Butte Intermountain, May 16, 1902. In Wheeler, p. 25. 7 See Halverson for a detailed overview of the numerous commercial uses of MacLane’s name and likeness, some of which MacLane had approved and some not (pages 28-30). 8 Qtd in Rosemont 5. 9 Blurb from dust jacket of the original publication of I, Mary MacLane. 10 Wheeler relates the following anecdote: “At a literary reception held in her honor by some of the local society matrons, she was said to have turned to one and asked if she ate with her feet in a trough. When the astonished woman answered in the negative, Mary replied, ‘You look to me like a hog’” (25). 11 Coincidentally, two entries below “Devil” sits Wurdz’s entry on “Diary,” which he defines as “An honest autobiography. A good keepsake, but a bad give-away,” indicating the already common suspicion held about the veracity of published autobiography in 1904. 12 Editorial for Butte High School Ledger, January 1898. 235 13 This sum is the current equivalent of approximately $450,000, and was earned by MacLane within the first month of sales. 14 Scholars regularly refer to her mother as Margaret MacLane or Margaret Klenze, and I have been unable to find her original birth name. 15 The Great Falls Tribune paints a colorful account of MacLane’s father in “Mary Elizabeth MacLane,” May 4, 1902 (qtd. in Halverson 42): Mary’s father gained his name from his boating experience on the Red River of the North. In the early days before railroads he owned boats carrying freight and passengers between Fargo and Fort Garry, which was then an outpost of civilization near where Winnipeg now stands. In this way he gathered together considerable money, and he added to his pile occasionally by taking a hand of poker—it was said that he could beat them all there . . . . While society looked askance at the family from the rumors that the father had made considerable of his money by gambling, he was everywhere liked and a more generous man to the poor of any community never lived. (10) 16 Halverson suggests that the sisters learned of this circumstance only as they were packing to leave for Stanford (43). 17 Murphy argues that at this point prostitution simply went underground, whereas prior to 1917 it was a public trade. 18 This naming was popularized by Gertrude Atherton’s social novel set in Butte, Perch of the Devil. 19 The Dumas Brothel, the building of which is still standing in Butte, is the most famous of the historical brothels and sits in the heart of the former Venus Alley. 20 In her autobiography, Gertrude Atherton recounts MacLane’s stories of her carousing in Venus Alley when she returned to Butte after 1910. 21 “Madeleine Blair” is almost certainly a pseudonym that was used widely by sex trade workers. This autobiography, a fascinating work in its own right, was first published in 1910, then republished as a sensationalized volume of pulp fiction in 1951, complete with a new cover and the subtitle “A Girl’s Own Story of a Life in Vice!” 22 Numerous letters written by MacLane hint at her use of prostitution in order to pay bills. For example, MacLane wrote a series of letters to Stone, desperately requesting his payment of money owed her from her book after the publisher declared bankruptcy, in which she vividly recounts her desperation: “The feeling of never having quite enough to eat, and being owed a thousand dollars, is not pleasant. Neither is the feeling of having to go into 14 th 236 street, with the nightly brigade of half-hungry women, to drag my living from it” (March 4, 1909, letter to Stone). 23 And it requires a fairly lengthy quotation to observe the incantatory repetition. 24 De l’Enclos’s role as “courtesan” is important in the context of MacLane’s absorption of Butte’s demimonde. 25 Schreiner, Bashkirtseff, Stella Klive, Hilma Strandberg, etc. 26 Influential Chicago sisters Harriet and Lucy Monroe (the latter having been MacLane’s champion at Herbert S. Stone publishers) had supported MacLane’s application to Radcliffe; however, there appears to have been confusion regarding letters lacking support from MacLane’s former teacher and “Anemone Lady,” Fannie Corbin. 27 Later in this passage, the Soul relates a fantastic story about having been a prostitute, suggesting that the prostitute’s life is the most honest of any possible lives (222). 28 See Chapter Three of this dissertation for my discussion of this point. 29 This clause is removed from later reprintings of the book. 30 As I discuss in Chapter One, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has remarked upon the richness that is overlooked by readers who do not recognize the significance of these repetitions and who consider them, in fact, to be “boring.” 31 Heilbrun, in Writing a Woman’s Life, suggests that women’s lives are defined too much by closure. In this sense, MacLane is already confounding the norms that Heilbrun would be describing nearly a century later. 32 “Vivid” to the point of being racially insensitive by twenty-first-century standards, though well within the norms of the discourse of her own period and class. 237 CHAPTER FIVE Conclusions: “My accidental imagination”: Women’s Diary as a Writing Practice at the Turn of the Twentieth Century The prospect of people reading my diaries after I am dead does not disturb me in the least. I like to think of pooling myself with other introspective hearts: madmen (and women), prudes, profligates, celebrities, outcasts, heroes, artists, saints, the lovelorn and the lucky, the foolish and the proud. —Gail Godwin Clustered almost precisely at the turn into the twentieth century, the diary practice that makes up the core of this study reveals the preoccupations of representative women from a generation that was immersed in cultural, societal, domestic, and gender expansions. Because diary and autobiographical life-writing maintain a focus on the individual self as a subject worthy of deep exploration, these texts provide later readers a glimpse into the formations of subjectivity that is unparalleled in literature. Yet because they range so far and because each text varies so dramatically as to be all but idiosyncratic, considered as a whole this body of literature perhaps suggest more questions than answers: What do these texts show us about the shifting psychological subjectivities of the women who penned them? To what degree can we interpret these volumes as being representations of an “imprint of self”? To what degree might they even be constitutive of self-in-the-making? What aspects of cultural difference are crucial to understanding these shifting and variable forms of the practice of private writing? And how should we position these books, especially the unpublished one-off volumes that were intended solely as private writings, in the larger understanding of American women’s literary production? Addressing these unusual and illustrative texts with an approach that is transdisciplinary and holistic, in the preceding chapters I have attempted to attune to the historical and cultural specificities of each writer in order to locate the role that diary has 238 played in her work, as well as the role these specific diaries have played in forwarding the position of diary as a writing practice. With links stretching back for centuries to the self- writing practices of Rousseau and to the life-teaching practices of ohunkankan, these writers have individually and collectively made new uses of the self-expansive possibilities inherent in the interior practices of diary and life-writing. In doing so, they have each expanded the practice in ways that made new scripts of self-representation available for later generations. In this brief conclusion, I wish to trace connections between these life-writers in order to highlight several surprising confluences between them and to offer the illustrative example of a later twentieth-century diarist who drew strength from these turn-of-the-century innovators of diary as a writing practice. Tracing the linear chronology of these diary practices is useful in that it puts these individual writers in context with each other and highlights the influences both subtle and profound that they had upon one another. Immediately prior to the American writers under study here, the private diary practice of Marie Bashkirtseff (1858-1884) was begun in 1871 and ended at her death in 1884, soon after which redacted portions found publication in French. In 1889 her diaries were translated into English and were discovered by U.S. readers, who were immediately enthralled. At virtually the same moment, Mary Hunter Austin (1868- 1934) began writing her first California journals. While little evidence suggests that Austin was aware of Bashkirtseff’s published journaux intimes immediately upon their publication, these volumes were clearly deeply influential for Mary MacLane (1881-1929), who famously devoured them during her teen years in the 1890s and whose 1901 diary, published in 1902, would bring the diary of the psychologically-attuned and exhibitionistic female self to the fore on a new continent for a new generation. Meanwhile, in the first three months of the 239 new century, January – March 1900, the personal autobiographical narratives of Zitkala-!a (1876-1938) both contributed one of the earliest self-told autobiographical narratives written by a Native American woman and fed the appetite for regional “local color” narratives popularized by The Atlantic Monthly. Likewise, Zitkala-!a’s series is never explicitly referenced by Austin; however, given its celebrated appearance as a western and Native American- themed series in the very same magazine that accepted her own short California piece “The Shepherd of the Sierras” in July of the same year (as well as six subsequent pieces that ultimately became the 1903 volume The Land of Little Rain) it is almost certain that Austin was aware both of Zitkala-!a as a writer and of the immediate enthusiasm that her Native American story garnered. In fact, with numerous publications overlapping in the span of a mere four years, Austin, Zitkala-!a, and MacLane were in direct competition for scarce publication space and literary attention at this defining moment at the very turn of the century. In 1900, Zitkala-!a published her autobiographical series and Austin published her first short pieces in The Atlantic Monthly. In 1901, MacLane drafted her private diary and began the process of bringing it to press, while Zitkala-!a published her book of Sioux tales Old Indian Legends and Austin drafted and began to publish the short California pieces that would become The Land of Little Rain. In 1902, Zitkala-!a published “Why I Am a Pagan,” another short piece in The Atlantic Monthly, while MacLane’s diary saw publication as The Story of Mary MacLane and her public literary career ignited. In 1903, Austin’s The Land of Little Rain was published as a collected book and allowed her the freedom to leave her marriage and help found the artists community of Carmel-by-the-Sea. Notably, each of these women saw immediate and phenomenal success at virtually the same moment at the turn of the century. Zitkala-!a was 240 celebrated as the “little literary skyrocket,” MacLane’s frenzied fame was extraordinarily lucrative, and Austin’s much-desired literary reputation was quickly established upon her publication of the immediately beloved The Land of Little Rain. Of the three, Austin had perhaps developed the most savvy regarding the publishing market ever since she had determined early to “earn her bread as a writer.” Yet all three found fame almost simultaneously during these eventful years at the turn of the century. These writers’ simultaneous successes gesture toward an aspect of literary history that deserves greater study, a publishing phenomenon that mid-century critic Frank Luther Mott identified as the “Literary Fevers” of the 1890s into the twentieth century. As early as 1947, Mott suggested that during these decades, “enthusiasms for certain books and authors gathered force suddenly and spread widely through the country with all the exaggerations and the delirium of eulogy that follow upon such epidemics” (183 qtd. in Halverson 172). In a discussion of MacLane’s sudden and unexpected celebrity, Halverson usefully points toward the 1902 Munsey’s article entitled “Literary Chat,” which puzzled over the “enormous and absolutely unprecedented sale” that was being enjoyed by books, such as MacLane’s journal, that straddled a literary and popular market (qtd. in Halverson 30). Significantly, for Zitkala-!a, and especially for MacLane, these publishing successes came from the most personal and interior writing they would ever produce. Yet MacLane, especially, was offering an overtly “exhibitionistic” glimpse of the young woman’s “soul laid bare,” and the public was enthralled by the revelation. While for Austin, this success did not come from her most personal life-writing, it did come from her skillful humanization of an impersonal desert, large sections of which she drew in some cases directly from her private journals, as we have seen. 241 Austin and Zitkala-!a, however, are the two authors in this study who were most clearly in competition for readers. Both published during the same timeframe in The Atlantic Monthly, a publication that was viewed as the most prestigious of the national magazines and the first choice for publication for both authors. Both women, each in her own way, straddled the two cultures and wrote as if translating Native culture for a white audience. Living until age eight on the Dakota Sioux reservation, Zitkala-!a had learned at boarding school the lessons of Anglo American culture and used her unique position as “hanging in the heart of chaos” between cultures to translate and win greater respect and sympathy for Native peoples. Austin spoke to white Americans as a familiar voice, one of their own, a conventionally raised Midwestern girl, respectably married, a mother, who had developed an expertise in Native American life and who was trusted by whites to convey it in familiar terms. Both used similar narrative strategies to place readers in an alternative perspective from which readers could suddenly see a new landscape. Austin painted an exotic vista in familiar human terms to which readers could relate. Zitkala-!a at times did the same (e.g., in “Impressions of an Indian Childhood”) and at times reversed the strategy to paint scenes that would be familiar to whites (e.g., school buildings in “The School Days of an Indian Girl”) in terms that allowed readers to experience their alienness for the first time. Yet of the two, only Austin was to go on to enjoy a full career in publication, while Zitkala-!a chose to shift her focus to reservation work and political activism. While both attempted to bring awareness of Native issues to a large mainstream audience, there existed a fierce competition for publication interest, and only Austin went on to enjoy a career as a published career writer. With scarce explicit evidence, one can only speculate about the factors that led to these relative decisions, yet one must suspect that their comparative embrace by readers and 242 earning capacity played a role. While from the perspective of more than one hundred years when it would be expected that a Native writer would be an expert on Native subjects, at the turn of the twentieth century, a largely white audience frequently expressed far greater comfort at having a Native experience mediated by a familiar (i.e., white) translator and proxy. 1 Asking the crucial question “Who gets to tell the stories?” in an article of the titled the same, scholar Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (Crow Creek Sioux) posits an answer that has demarcated the complexities of Native American representation to mainstream culture for centuries: “Those who get to tell the stories are the people America wants to listen to.” My Accidental Imagination As I have suggested throughout these chapters, each of these important figures has used the versatile forms of diary and life-writing practice to represent and to expand or even to constitute aspects of individual subjectivity as they have shifted over these years of their writing. Further, when these works found publication in a public forum, they would go on to have an effect on later practitioners of diary. One significant figure whose life-writing was produced several decades after the passing of this generation is Luiseño writer Bonita Calachaw Nuñez, whose paintings and writings were signed in the name Wa-Wa-Chaw. 2 A complex figure whose written and artistic production resists categorization and lies outside existing critical frameworks, Wa-Wa-Chaw’s work has scarcely been addressed by scholars. 3 Yet for all its complications, Wa-Wa-Chaw’s privately written diary practice is nonetheless an attempt to claim the right to be recognized as one of those who “gets to tell the stories.” As an early twentieth-century artist, writer, and activist uniquely situated to experience tremendous tensions between her Native American birth and her Anglo 243 American upbringing, Wa-Wa-Chaw wrote and illustrated an extensive set of idiosyncratic life-writing that explores these tensions at length. While the small set of scholars 4 who address Wa-Wa-Chaw’s work at all designate these writings as “diary,” they are in fact hybrid works in that they conform simultaneously to mixed aspects of diary, memoir, and autobiographical life-writing. That is, like diary, they appear to have been written for private usage and not necessarily intended for publication; however, like memoir, they were almost entirely written in the last decades of Wa-Wa-Chaw’s life, rather than serially in the moment. Similarly, while they are almost entirely undated, they appear to have been compiled in the 1960s and largely remember Wa-Wa-Chaw’s childhood from decades earlier. Not written for public consumption, Wa-Wa-Chaw’s life-writings display an associative quality of language, and they are interspersed liberally with pen-and-ink drawings that evoke her larger paintings. Scribbled and undated in 38 inexpensive drug-store notebooks, Wa-Wa-Chaw’s cache was discovered in her modest East Harlem apartment only upon her death in her 80s and it has been available publicly thus far only in a haphazardly editorialized version. 5 Scholar Stan Steiner met Wa-Wa-Chaw in the late 1960s, and in a sketch that describes his role in her life as being “nearly a grandson,” he collected her work in a non-critical edition that placed its strongest emphasis on his view of the spiritualized aspect of her identity. Given its placement in the 1970s, one of the periods that Philip Deloria discusses as being important to the history of “Indian playacting” and spiritualized Indian “hobbyists,” Steiner’s tone throughout the edition reveals the salience of these popular conceptions of Native American identity as guiding the editing of this unusual volume for a popular press. 244 Having been adopted at birth and raised in the upper-class Manhattan household of brother and sister Mary and Cornelius Duggan’s household, Wa-Wa-Chaw’s upbringing was paradoxically both sheltered (as she appears never to have received education outside the home) and simultaneously filled with extraordinarily stimulating contact with the key political, scientific, and artistic figures of her time. 6 Likewise, Wa-Wa-Chaw appears to have had very little contact with urban American Indians during her early years, and it was only later in life that she traveled back to her Luiseño birthplace in an attempt to connect with her birth-mother and birth-family. Her attempts were never fruitful, and she returned to Manhattan never having achieved the sense of origins she sought. Ultimately, after the death of the Duggan siblings and the dissolution of her brief marriage to Miguel Carmonia-Nuñez, Wa-Wa-Chaw was subject to extreme poverty, reduced to supporting herself by selling her vivid, brilliant paintings on the streets of Greenwich Village, alongside her bottles of homemeade “Indian Liniment.” Throughout her diaries, Wa-Wa-Chaw catalogues these experiences, including the insults she sustained as the rare urban Indian; even more suggestively, however, her diaries evoke a deep sense of isolation and a yearning for connection, as well as a strident self-consciousness of her own complicated performance of “Indianness” throughout her life. As intensely private works, these writings and drawings suggest nothing so much as their function as artefacts of one individual consciousness working toward an integrated sense of identity. In direct contrast to MacLane’s usage of diary to manipulate a reading public and to forge a public identity, Wa-Wa-Chaw’s usage of diary had the much more private and utilitarian function of forming and performing individual identity itself. 245 My interest in Wa-Wa-Chaw arose when I had the opportunity to explore her paintings in the archives of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian’s Cultural Resources Center, which warehouses 34 of Wa-Wa-Chaw’s medium- to large-sized oil paintings. In my visit to the archives, I was astounded to discover that few other than staff had even requested to see these works in recent memory, and the paintings were stored in narrow utilitarian rolling shelves, still bolted into their original delivery crates, and impossible to photograph from a direct front angle. Indeed, because separating the paintings from the crates is precise and labor-intensive work, most pieces had been only generically titled by museum staff (e.g., “Untitled with Two Figures”). Having persuaded the archivists to remove two of the crates during my visit, I made a discovery that excited them nearly as much as it excited me: These paintings are indeed titled on the back in Wa-Wa-Chaw’s own hand, and furthermore these titles are often extensive, witty, and wryly sardonic, sometimes completely reversing the painting’s surface meaning. Figure 31, for example, depicts two Native American children stylistically held within cupped hands and standing before a shelf of books. The fullest significance of Wa-Wa-Chaw’s political commentary on BIA educational policies, however, is not entirely revealed until one reads the biting inscription on the reverse: “War-Crimes: Victims of the First World War” (underline in Wa-Wa-Chaw’s hand, see Figure 32). 246 Figure 31. “War Crimes.” Figure 32. Inscription on reverse of “War Crimes.” Wa-Wa-Chaw’s compelling and complicated body of work raises significant questions for the study of autobiography and life-writing, for Native American Modernism, for the Progressive Era overall, and for our understanding of the processes of ethnic and cultural identity formation. What constitutes an “authentic Indianness” and how is it performed and read? What are the effects of an ethnic self-positioning such as Wa-Wa- Chaw’s, given the constraints of her multiple environments, both upper- and lower-class Manhattan during the tumultuous opening decades of the twentieth-century? How does community, real and imagined, operate in the formation of cultural identity? In what ways do the processes of diary-writing function to support or divert the formation of individual and cultural identities, especially for one inhabiting Wa-Wa-Chaw’s complicated ethnic position? Ultimately, with their depictions alternately of warm communal groupings and of the solitary feminine figure peeking out from the frame, Wa-Wa-Chaw’s diaries and paintings perhaps 247 suggest nothing so much as a deep yearning for inclusion into a welcoming community. In so doing, these works illustrate another sophisticated usage of diary forms, this time allowing the writer to negotiate a complicated ethnic positioning, which suggests a key strategy for integrative identity formation. Figure 33. “Untitled 1.” Wa-Wa-Chaw’s self-portrait. Figure 34. Detail of “Untitled 2.” All four of these women—the three diarists who found phenomenal public literary fame at the turn of the century and the private, reclusive artist who found no fame at all but who is linked inextricably to them by their influence in her later diary/memoir practice—all four and countless others have used the versatile and generative practice of diary-keeping to write their lives serially in the moment in which they lived them. In this study, I have attempted to understand each individual diarists’ practice of life-writing by approaching her work holistically and by using the codes that the diarist herself has embedded in her work to 248 understand it most fully. With all its variations, its inconsistencies, its gaps and fissures, the very specific psychological form of diary practice as it came into being during the flux years of the turn-of-the-century is a literary form that in many respects stands alone. As the writing practice that was produced most prolifically by a generation of women who had to compete for access to wide publication, diary—more fully than any other literary production—carries the potentiality of providing the barest of glimpses into the secret struggles of developing an independent subjectivity. These introspective women—the “naked-soul ladies,” the “secret exhibitionists,” the “foolish and the proud”—who used the practice of diary-keeping to accomplish the improbable task of bringing selves into being, have left us a treasure of tiny, musty, scribbled manuscript volumes, a legacy of self- formation that we have barely even begun to appreciate. 249 CHAPTER FIVE NOTES 1 This phenomena continued throughout the twentieth century, as may be witnessed as late as the 1990s when contrasting the popularity of Kevin Costner as white stand-in and interpreter in Dances with Wolves as compared to concurrent Native-centered productions that were less enthusiastically embraced. 2 As I have throughout this dissertation, I will use Wa-Wa-Chaw’s preferred publication name to address her work here. 3 Because her writing post-dates that of the other women in this dissertation by several decades, her work in most respects lies outside the purview of this focused project. However, because her writing suggests yet untold stories of women’s experience later in the century, I intend to pursue her manuscript diaries further in an enlargement of this project that extends further into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. 4 Art Historian Kathleen Ash-Milby has addressed Wa-Wa-Chaw’s paintings, and Stephanie Fitzgerald has addressed the editorialized volume Spirit Woman. Otherwise, Wa-Wa-Chaw has been anthologized occasionally, but has been scarcely addressed in a critical fashion. 5 Stan Steiner, in his introduction to the volume Spirit Woman, tells the personal story of having discovered strewn throughout her apartment boxes of her writings totaling some 38 volumes of diary material. 6 Her diaries mention visitors include scientists, writers, society figures, and Native American figures including Carlos Montezuma, who had been Zitkala-!a’s one-time fiancé. 250 BIBLIOGRAPHY Abbott, H. Porter. Diary Fiction: Writing as Action. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984. 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Creator Heflin, Tanya (author)

Core Title Those secret exhibitionists: women's diaries at the turn of the twentieth century

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Degree Conferral Date 2009-12

Publication Date 11/12/2014

Defense Date 10/28/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag American ethnic studies,American West,archival studies,autobiography,California,diary,feminism,Gender Studies,late nineteenth century literature,narrative psychology in literature,Native American studies,OAI-PMH Harvest,representations of self,subjectivity in literature,twentieth century literature,women's writing,writing practice

Place Name California (states), land regions: West (geographic subject), USA (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Modleski, Tania (committee chair), Meeker, Natania (committee member), Rowe, John Carlos (committee member)

Creator Email heflin@usc.edu,tanya.heflin@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2734

Unique identifier UC1451853

Identifier etd-Heflin-3373 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-285284 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2734 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Heflin-3373.pdf

Dmrecord 285284

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Heflin, Tanya

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu