Book: I Await the Devil's Coming

Overview
Mary MacLane's I Await the Devil's Coming (1903) is a bold continuation of the candid, self-propelled monologue that made her famous after The Story of Mary MacLane. Framed as a series of diarylike meditations, provocations, and aphorisms, the book keeps the reader close to a restless intelligence that alternates between barbed satire and aching confession. The title announces an appetite for disturbance: MacLane courts scandal and spiritual upheaval alike as remedies for social boredom and inner isolation.
Rather than a linear narrative, the volume functions as an intimate encounter with a personality determined to be seen on her own terms. Sentences flare with urgency and theatricality; the speaker flouts conventional modesty and presses relentlessly at questions of passion, identity, and artistic longing. The result is less a plotted account than an energetic self-portrait, composed of repeated themes and daring rhetorical gestures.

Voice and Style
The work is defined by a fiercely individual voice, simultaneously juvenile and philosophic, comic and tragic. MacLane's prose moves between short, explosive declarations and ornate, fevered sentences; she invents aphorisms, apostrophes, and paradoxes that stake out her selfhood as a spectacle. The voice is performative, often addressing an absent interlocutor, God, lovers, or the Devil, which amplifies its confessional intensity.
This stylistic audacity is also rhetorical strategy. By refusing decorum, MacLane forces readers into complicity with her contradictions: she is at once self-adoring and self-accusing, proud and vulnerable. The cadence of the book, repetitive, insistent, lyrical, creates a sense of intimacy and urgency that can feel like a one-sided conversation with a brilliant, ungoverned mind.

Major Themes
Selfhood and the construction of an authoritative "I" are central. MacLane relentlessly interrogates her own desires, motives, and contradictions, producing a portrait of a woman who seeks to transcend social expectations by radical self-devotion. Love and erotic longing recur as both consolation and torment: MacLane longs for an intensity that might validate her existence, while often depicting conventional relationships as shallow or hypocritical.
Society and its hypocrisies are another persistent target. MacLane scorns middle-class respectability, gendered constraints, and the petty moralities of her milieu, preferring grand confrontations with the sacred and the profane. Religion, sin, and the idea of the Devil function as metaphors for revolt, MacLane's invocation of the Devil is less an embrace of evil than a demand for disruption, a hope for an event that would justify her transgressive honesty.
Art and mortality intersect through recurring meditations on beauty, fame, and the need to leave a mark. The book probes what it means to live for art when the world offers only compromise, and it dramatizes the tension between the desire for public recognition and the privacy of inward life.

Structure and Content
I Await the Devil's Coming is episodic and fragmentary, composed of short, stand-alone pieces, sentences, and extended paragraphs that accumulate into a larger emotional argument. There is no conventional plot, but there is progression of tone: moments of gladiatorial bravado give way to sudden admissions of loneliness and despair. The variety of forms, maxims, fevered monologues, rhetorical questions, keeps the reader off balance in a way that echoes the author's intention to shock and to awaken.
The book frequently repeats motifs, night, flame, hunger, the figure of the Devil, to create thematic resonance rather than narrative continuity. These recurring images act like leitmotifs in a musical composition, intensifying the overall mood and underscoring MacLane's central preoccupations.

Reception and Legacy
Contemporary reactions were polarized: some readers admired the fearlessness and wit, while others condemned the perceived vanity and immorality. The book amplified MacLane's celebrity as a literary provocateur and secured her place as a controversial but influential voice in early twentieth-century letters. Over time, critics have revisited the work for its contribution to confessional modes and for its candid interrogation of female subjectivity.
Today the book is often read as an early instance of unapologetic self-expression that anticipates later confessional and feminist writing. Its pleasures are uneven, the rhetoric can be excessive and self-contradictory, but its honesty, theatrical flair, and refusal to be domesticated remain striking.

Conclusion
I Await the Devil's Coming is an incandesent, unruly testament to a writer who made spectacle of interior life. It challenges readers to reckon with a voice that insists on its own authority, and in doing so it maps the fraught landscape of desire, rebellion, and artistic longing at the dawn of modern American literature.