Opal Whiteley
You might not have heard of Opal Whitely, unless perhaps you are from Oregon, or if perhaps you lived in the early 20th century, when her diary of childhood The Story of Opal (1920) was an instant best-seller, both in America and in England, and everyone (even Theodore Roosevelt, the President of France, and the Queen of Belgium) was reading it. The diary covers approximately one year in the life of a small girl who lives deep in the wild Oregon forest. It records incidents from her daily life such as doing chores at home for her mother and walking to a country school each day. She comes across as a girl with a rich imaginative life and a poetic, creative way of using language. She also comes across as an odd and lonely child who never could figure out who she was or who she belonged with. Opal’s diary gives us a rare, valuable glimpse into the mind of a little girl who presented signs of Asperger’s Syndrome (AS).
Sadly, as quickly as the unusual diary rose to fame, it sank to notoriety—in part because the reading public decided it could not make sense of its peculiar author. Opal’s place on the autism spectrum contributed to her brilliance as a writer, but also, unfortunately, prevented her from being accepted and respected as an author.
In the one-room country school she attended, she finished first and second grade in one year. She read every book she could find, and her teacher had boxes of books sent over from the state library in Salem so Opal could study independently. She devoured sentimental novels, but sometimes couldn’t remember if the events happened to a character or to her. She loved to write and was often seen writing in her diary. When it came to natural science, her photographic memory and enthusiasm led to her being the youngest student to enter the University of Oregon’s science department and to begin by doing graduate-quality work.
She showed signs of Asperger’s Syndrome from a young age:
She had sensory issues and was oblivious to hunger, cold, and pain.
She had food issues and either forgot to eat or shared her food with animals.
As a teenager, severe stress led to the loss of both hearing and speech for months.
She suffered from dyspraxia and was always dropping things.
Her vision was so acute she could see individual leaves, caterpillars, and birds at great distances (like Thoreau).
She had synesthesia: her hearing and vision were sometimes entwined, which added unusual beauty to her writing.
She would line up things (such as potatoes) in rows.
She had many rituals about counting things, numbers, and dates (and had a calendar ability).
She struggled with social skills and could not sustain back and forth conversations.
She lectured people she met on favorite topics (the French royal family, science, nature)
She did not play with other children, preferring the company of adults or animals.
Her voice was alternately either monotone, or feverishly high pitched.
She was unable to support herself and ultimately ended up in a mental hospital.
When she was a young adult, she shared a copy of her diary with a publisher in hopes of becoming an author. She told him she had written the diary when she was about 5, but that her sister had torn it to pieces in a fit of anger. Opal presented the editor with boxes and boxes of torn up fragments. He helped Opal piece them together, helped her edit her work, and published and promoted it.
Her diary has much to tell us about how her place on the spectrum influenced her use of language. It also has much to tell us about how a young girl on the spectrum worked—and struggled—to construct a fractured identity.
Like many other writers on the spectrum, Opal’s use of language is highly idiosyncratic. It is an unusual mishmash of French, King James English, encyclopedic facts, made-up words, and descriptions colored by synesthesia. She was always “trying on” different speech patterns. The reader is unsure what Opal’s true voice sounds like, even though this was a diary and presumably written from her own perspective. I am reminded here of James Joyce’s idiosyncratic use of language and his penchant for making up new words.
Her narrative strategy is fragmented and presents a fragmented self. There are two girls here: Opal, the daughter of a lumberjack in the Oregon woods, and Petite Francoise, the “true” descendant of the French House of Bourbon who crossed the Atlantic by ship. She alternates between the two identities and also writes about two different sets of parents, two homes, and two nationalities. She is convinced that she belongs in France and that the logging family is not her real family. She alternated between these two identities throughout her life. I am reminded here of Charles Dodgson the mathematician, and his alter-ego Lewis Caroll the author.
3. Opal’s life-writing is her attempt to construct a cohesive self. Most children from this time period attend church with their family—Opal describes having church service in the woods with her tamed animal pets. Many little girls this age have girlfriends that they might visit for a birthday party—Opal stages birthday parties for her pets and organizes flowers, etc. for them. Most people use routines or habits as a way to make order out of the clutter of everyday life—Opal is obsessed with counting things, lining things up, reciting historical events, and so on as a way to bring order to her day.
4. Characterization. Like Thoreau and Temple Grandin, Opal writes very little about the people in her life. Her real mother is cruel to her, and makes Opal spend time “under the bed” when she misbehaves. Her real father, her grandmother, and her sister are completely absent from the narrative. There are occasional references to adults who live in the vicinity, but almost no mention of other children from school. Instead, she fixates on mice, toads, chickens, bats, a horse, a cow, and a pig. They are the “people” of her world, and she has given them names and personalities, although they remain superficial and there doesn’t seem to be much character development. Her use of animals instead of people reminds me of Caroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Andersen’s Fairy Tales.
5. The over-arching theme of her diary is a search for belonging. She is the odd one in her family and is not accepted by them (like Andersen’s ugly duckling). The other children from school do not play with her. She is a loner who spends time in her own company, out in the beautiful Oregon forests. One may see this beautiful book as the story of a girl searching for acceptance—from her imaginary family, from adults who live in the area, and from the animals who become like a family (complete with celebrations of birth, christenings, and even funerals). She only feels “at home” when she is outside in nature, and finds it to be therapeutic and healing. She is like the young Yeats who often slept outside, under the rhododendrons, amongst his fairy friends.
Opal’s diary reveals to the world the thought processes and feelings of a child on the autism spectrum, a child who grew up in a community that didn’t understand, appreciate, or want her. We are lucky to have this written document that allows us to see the autistic child’s perspective. An informed, sympathetic reading of Opal’s diary reveals the challenges that life-writing poses for someone on the autistic spectrum. There were times when Opal was very discouraged as a writer, but she kept her pen busy throughout her life. I was touched when I found in her papers an encouraging letter her grandmother wrote to her when she was in college: “I think you will succeed…you have the determination and perseverance that makes success sure to those that are in love with their work” (University of Oregon Special Collections).
*For the past 100 years, there have been numerous debates going back and forth about whether nor not Opal “really wrote the diary” or whether she “actually wrote it as a child.” There is compelling evidence pointing in both directions. Katherine Beck’s work Opal: A Life of Enchantment argues that Opal was a liar and a fraud who deliberately fooled the world. Benjamin Hoff’s introduction to The Singing Creek Where the Willows Grow argues that Opal was, very likely, some kind of French royalty living in a logging camp and that as a child prodigy she definitely did write the diary at age 5.
I believe I have definitively solved the mystery, once and for all. See my book Writers on the Spectrum for a detailed analysis with documentation, but here is my theory, in brief: Opal wrote the diary, but she wrote it as a young adult, not as a little girl of 5. Her editor colluded in this with her because books written by children were selling very well in 1920. I believe Opal was manipulated by him and didn’t fully understand the implications of what was happening, and was happy to be a “real writer” and to get so much attention.
I solved the mystery two ways. First, I found some of her school papers at the University of Oregon Knight Special Collections, and discovered a list of “Books I read when I was 16” that she scribbled in one of her notebooks. I was able to find all of the books she listed, and when I read them, I could see how she plagiarized many passages in her diary by lifting descriptions and language from these books. The diary is hers, but is presented as a mosaic with bits and pieces taken from all the different books, like a crazy quilt. Or like Lewis Carroll’s Alice. Or like James Joyce’s Ulysses. The plagiarism doesn’t bother me. But the plagiarism does show that the book MUST have been written after she was 16, not when she was 5. Those books didn’t exist when she was 5. I prefer to see her book as a diary “about” her childhood, rather than a diary “from” her childhood.
I double-solved the mystery in one other way. Her diary entries are dated according to the birthdays of various French royalty, etc. I identified the dates of every diary entry she wrote. Then I went to the Oregon State University archives in Corvallis and looked up the weather records (for Cottage Grove, where she lived) for all of the days that she wrote. There were many days when the weather she wrote about: “it was a hot dry day” did not match the weather that was recorded: “high 49 degrees and rained 2 inches.” A child who plays outside all day long is going to notice the weather fairly accurately, it seems to me. Once again, I believe she did write the book, but she wrote it as a young adult, not as a child. It doesn’t matter. It still remains a beautiful expression of her world and an important work of literature.