Owen, Mary Alicia

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OWEN, Mary Alicia

Born 29 December 1858, St. Joseph, Missouri; died 5 January 1935, St. Joseph, Missouri

Also wrote under: Julia Scott

Daughter of James A. and Agnes Cargill Owen

The daughter of a Midwestern lawyer and financial writer, Mary Alicia Owen was educated in private schools and at Vassar College. She began her career by submitting verses, reviews, and travel sketches to a weekly newspaper in St. Joseph; eventually she became its literary editor. Under the pseudonym Julia Scott, Owen published short stories in Peterson's Magazine, Overland Monthly, Century, and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. However, Owen's most important work stemmed from her lifelong study of folklore.

Owen's native Missouri sheltered four groups that deeply influenced each other: the native Musquakie (Sacs) tribe, the French and English settlers, and the transplanted African slaves. Raised among these disparate peoples, Owen began collecting folklore, customs, and mythology. In 1888 she announced her findings on the voodoo magic practiced by ex-slaves; in 1891 she presented a paper on the Missouri-Negro tradition before the International Folk-Lore Congress in London. In 1893, with the encouragement of folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland, Owen published VooDoo Tales.

Owen cast this book in a form similar to Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus. Five old slave women gather around the cabin fire to share their tales with little "Tow Head," the plantation owner's daughter. "Big Angie" carries her eagle-bone whistle with her missal, her "saint's toe on her bosom and the fetish known as a 'luck-ball' under her right arm." Rendered in dialect appropriate to each speaker, the exploits of Woodpeckeh, Ole Rabbit, and Blue Jay have the flavor of true oral tradition. Although the form of VooDoo Tales suffers from the effort to combine serious research with literary entertainment, Owen's materials are compelling and accurate and the plots, language, and imagery are fresh.

Owen describes gypsy tribes in The Daughter of Alouette (1896). The Musquakie, who granted Owen tribal membership in 1892, are described in a paper presented before the British Association at Toronto in 1897. Owen later expanded this paper into a monograph, published by the English Folk-Lore Society in 1904. Accompanying the text is a catalogue of Owen's extensive collection of Musquakie artifacts.

Folk-Lore of the Musquakie Indians (1904) is a formal anthropological description of the tribe during a critical "clash of cultures." After carefully surveying their myths and yearly festivals, Owen introduced the catalogue of her collection. Although she rejects the merely picturesque or aesthetically pleasing artifact in favor of the sacred or ceremonial, Owen also recognizes that "to the wild man surrounded by civilization and making a stand against it, everything that pertains to his free and savage past has become a ceremonial object."

Among Owen's other works are The Sacred Council Hills (1909), a "folklore drama" portraying the Native Americans' plight, and Home Life of Squaws, of which no extant copy has been located. Owen's writing, like the cultures it described, was influenced by many different traditions: regional humor, pastoral romanticism, the reform spirit, and the pioneering research of other folklorists. Although VooDoo Tales retains considerable charm, Owen's books are most interesting for their eclectic blend of literature and science. In an age when specialization was less narrow, she synthesized several elements of late 19th-century thought. A member of numerous scientific societies, she based her work on professional, firsthand observations; her conclusions were guided by deep respect for the people of the Mississippi Valley and their ways of life.