Opal Whiteley’s “Explores: The Disappearing Region

Abstract

O p a l W h i t e l e y ’s “E x p l o r e s ”: T h e D i s a p p e a r i n g R e g i o n C a t h r y n H a l v e r s o n Now I sit here and I print. The baby sleeps on. The wind comes creep­ ing in under the door. It calls, “Come, come, petite Françoise, come.” It calls to me to come go exploring. It sings of the things that are to be found under leaves. It whispers the dreams of the tall fir trees. It does pipe the gentle song the forest sings on gray days. I hear all the voices calling me. I listen. But I cannot go. — Opal Whiteley, The Story of Opal Ellery Sedgwick, in recalling his long tenure as editor of the Atlantic Monthly, mused, “It was to women then that my thoughts oftenest turned, and a score of lonely, self-dependent histories were woven into the texture of the Atlantic” (Happy Profession 200). The turn into the twentieth century is notable for a surge of American interest in the pub­ lication, reading, and public discussion of women’s autobiography, par­ ticularly that written in diary form. This interest manifests itself through a cluster of related literary vogues: for young women describing their inmost desires (derisively dubbed “naked soul-ladies”), for little girls recording their “innocent” impressions of the world around them, for eccentric women describing far-off regions and distant philosophies.1 Writers such as Marie Bashkirtseff and Mary MacLane both tapped into and helped produce a readership for the life stories of unusual women and thus for texts that strayed far from traditional autobiography: the birthto -death chronicle of an eminent figure, usually male. Considering this interest in reading women’s lives, particularly unorthodox ones, the sudden fame of the Oregon diarist Opal Whiteley is perhaps not as surprising as it may first seem. The Story of Opal (1920), lauded as “the revelation of the imaginai life of a feminine Peter Pan of the Oregon wilderness,” was allegedly the real diary that Whiteley, twenty-two at the time of publication, had kept as a child of six and seven years (Thacher vi). First published as excerpts in the Atlantic Monthly, within a year the diary was rendered into a best-sell­ ing book that briefly made Whiteley a celebrity. The Story of Opal reads like a recipe for 1920 commercial success: describing Whiteley’s child­ hood communion with the creatures of the Oregon woods and the 1 9 8 WAL 3 7 . 2 SUMMER 2 0 0 2 simultaneous alienation from her family, the book at once profited from interest in young women’s diaries, little girls’ diaries, and the diaries of so-called faraway women. Thus, literary history helps us account for Whiteley’s fame. More difficult to explain, however, are the contradictions in the role played by region in her book’s success. Considering how essential Whiteley’s regional image and subject matter were to her book’s publication and impressive sales and considering our prevalent understanding of what early twentieth-century readers wanted from regional literature, it is startling that writer, editor, and readers all worked to “edit” details of place out of Whiteley’s book, to downplay the role of her childhood home in her life, character formation, and memoir. An investigation into the production and reception of Whiteley’s text sheds light on how region— the West, the Pacific Northwest, and Oregon— was con­ figured in the imagination of American readers during the 1920s and reveals ways in which regional identity is unexpectedly made absent. Whiteley was dubbed “Oregon’s wild rambler rose” (Bede, “Little Princess” n.p.). Yet while her childhood home near Cottage Grove, Oregon, is central to Whiteley’s glamor, readers nevertheless seem to will the disappearance of this site from her text and life, substituting instead a generic pastoral realm specific only to childhood. In the readings that follow, I consider how the phenomenon of The Story of Opal challenges some of our common...