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Mary MacLane, the Wild Woman from Butte
In 1902, a woman named Mary MacLane from Butte, Montana, became an international sensation after publishing a scandalous journal at the age of 19. Rereading this often-forgotten debut, Hunter Dukes finds a voice that hungers for worldly experience, brims with bisexual longing, and rages against the injustices of youth.
By nakedly exposing her “inner life”, one that has been baroquely crafted to refract, and even fracture, the social gaze, MacLane pioneered a form of aesthetic insurgency perhaps more familiar to the era of online melancholia than Gilded Age and Edwardian society. “There’s something about caring for an un-self, or self-caring without asserting a self, only an image”, writes the artist and critic Audrey Wollen in relation to “Sad Girl Theory”, her proposal that self-destruction and its “finely honed techniques of display” can act as a form of feminist political resistance. Addressing the audience directly, with no care for the fourth wall, MacLane smokes and recounts her amorous affairs with six male archetypes — The Callow Youth, The Literary Man, The Younger Son, The Prize-Fighter, The Bank Clerk, and The Husband of Another.
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