One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

May Dodd serves as the protagonist and unreliable narrator of the novel, her experiences and observations, recorded in her journals, providing the lens through which the reader views the entire “Brides for Indians” social experiment. As a dynamic and round character, she undergoes significant transformation while retaining the core traits of intelligence, resilience, and unconventionality that led her to the Cheyenne. Her journals function as a central symbol, representing her attempt to maintain her intellectual autonomy and create an honest record in a world built on deception. Initially incarcerated in a facility for defying 19th-century social norms by living with a working-class man, Harry Ames, out of wedlock, May’s decision to join the program is an act of desperate self-liberation. Her perspective is one of a woman who has already been cast out by her own culture, making her both a critical observer of its values and, at times, a more open-minded participant in her new one. Her voice combines irony with self-surveillance, which produces a credible but limited account that she knows may be used against her. She seeks rational control through description and categorization; this habit signals both intellectual discipline and anxiety about dissolution of self.