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Contexts for Reading Gertrude Stein's the Making of Americans

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Contexts for Reading Gertrude Stein's the Making of Americans Contexts for Reading Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans Lucy Jane Daniel Thesis submitted to the University of London for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University College^ London February 2002 ProQuest Number: U642307 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest U642307 Published by ProQuest LLC(2015). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Abstract This thesis provides a contextualizing approach to Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans (1903-1911), using her notebooks, correspondence and college compositions dating from the 1890s, as well as the more well-known Femhurst, QED, and ‘Melanctha’; the study ends in 1911. Each chapter discusses representative texts with which Stein was familiar, and which had a discernible effect on the themes and style of the novel. In view of a critical tradition which has often obscured her nineteenth-century contexts, this reading provides a clearer definition of the social and intellectual environment which shaped her literary experiment. In chapter 1 I consider the influence of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Women and Economics (1898). Stein’s college themes and the speech, ‘The Value of College Education for Women’ (1898), reveal her feelings about the possibility of female creativity. Stein’s essay, ‘Degeneration in American Women’ (1901), which was only recently discovered, is also informed by contemporary gender politics. Stein’s inclusion of sections of her early novella, Femhurst, into the middle of The Making of Americans may be seen as the pivotal episode of the novel, demonstrating Stein’s disillusion with the realistic idiom. It is influenced by her reading of Alfred Hodder’s philosophical work. The Adversaries of the Sceptic (1901), and his novel. The New Americans (1901). These are discussed in chapter 2. In chapter 3 I discuss the characterological intent of Stein’s novel in relation to Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character (1903). Stein’s work presents direct stylistic similarities to and verbal echoes of Weininger, not only in her use of his types. Weininger’s anti- Semitism and anti-feminism influence Stein’s images of American as masculine and robust, and Jewish as effeminate and degenerate. Stein eventually satirizes the sexologist’s method. Ill Finally, in chapter 4 I show how the inadequately addressed question of Stein’s Jewishness may be linked to her reception of contemporary immigration stories. These include Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) and Mary Antin’s The Promised Land (1912). Stein’s college essay, 'The Modem Jew Who Has Given up the Faith of his Fathers Can Reasonably and Consistently Believe in Isolation' (1896), which represents Stein’s clearest expression of her view of race, and a college theme which is her earliest attempt at an immigration story, also throw light on representations of Jewish and American identity in The Making of Americans. IV Contents Acknowledgements pagg v Abbreviations vi Introduction 1 1 Feminism and Anti-Feminism 36 2 New Americans 90 3 Sex and Character 145 4 The Modern Jew 192 Conclusion 240 Bibliography 246 Acknowledgements I would like to thank Kasia Boddy for her unflagging patience and encouragement, and her invaluable advice on all aspects of the thesis. David Trotter’s help with the organization and argument of the thesis is also enormously appreciated. I am grateful to them both for giving up their time to help me, and to the English Department at University College, London for giving me the opportunity to teach and learn there. Thanks to the Humanities Research Board for funding, and to UCL Graduate School and the University of London Central Research Fund for financing my research trip to Yale, where much of the material for the thesis was gathered. For friendship and encouragement during the writing of this thesis, I would also like to thank Charlotte Brown, Jane Cameron, Grace Chapman, Sally Clark, Daniel DiClerico, Rowland Hughes, Fiona Jackson, Susie Jordan, Melissa Lynch, Judith Plastow, and Clare Young. Thanks for being so funny. I also want to thank my family, including my sisters, Ann Fraser and Cathryn Stone, for all their kindness and support. Muchas gracias a Kike Martinez, for being patient and wise, and for giving me confidence. Also for looking after me and being great in general, gracias mi amor. Most importantly, I want to thank my parents for everything they have done to make this thesis possible. This is difficult to convey and impossible to summarize here, but I could not have completed it without their financial help, nor without their love and support, which is always unfailing - so it is for them, with love and thanks. VI Abbreviations AS The Adversaries of the Sceptic Femhurst MA The Making of Americans NA The New Americans SC Sex and Character WE Women and Economics INTRODUCTION ‘She began at this time a long book which has not yet been published called “THE MAKING OF AMERICANS BEING THE HISTORY OF A FAMILY’S PROGRESS”. She used this as a study of style. It is tremendously long and enormously interesting and out of it has sprung all modern writing.’^ S t e in ’s Co n t e x t s In 1902, while still living in the United States, Gertrude Stein began making notes for a story of three generations of a recently immigrated but assimilated, bourgeois American family, which, when she started writing it in 1903, she called The Making of Americans Being the History of a Family’s Progress’. This project, based on her own German Jewish family, who had arrived in America in the 1840s, very quickly petered out; Stein moved to Paris and completed instead the three stories of black and immigrant working women which comprise Three Lives (1905-6, published 1909). Following favourable reviews, she returned to The Making of Americans’ and transformed it, between 1908 and 1911, into her 925-pagemagnum opus, published in 1925, The Making of Americans (hereafter MA)? Since its first publication MA has commonly been seen as a failure, if often a glorious one.^ Only one full-length study has so far been published on MA, despite its gigantic proportions and its status as one of the earliest documents of literary modernism."^ Its apparent unassailability may be overcome by a contextual study which resituates it within the concerns from which it originated. There has been no such contextual study. Evaluating MA in later years, Stein declared that it was completely new. While she claimed that Joyce had ‘one hand in the past’, in her work she said ‘the newness and * Stein, autobiographical notes forGeography and Plays, 1922, Yale Collection of American Literature (hereafter, YCAL). ^ The edition I am using is The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress (Normal, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995). This is a facsimile reprint of the original 1925 Contact Press edition. ^ Aiken, ‘We Ask for Bread’, New Republic, April 4, 1934, 219; Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 61; and Fullbrook,Free Women (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1990), 74-80, all regard it as a ‘disaster’. ^ Moore, Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans. difference is fundamental’.^ In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein sees Henry James as the ‘parent’ to whom she is ‘naturally antagonistic’, and perhaps this is a useful way of looking at her approach to influence.^ There has been a perception of MA - partly fuelled by Stein’s own rhetorical insistence that it represented a complete break with the past - as a work which somehow defies traditional attribution of context and cultural inheritance. Ammons, for example, generalizes that Stein’s language is ‘Simple, unliterary, decontextualized’ Bowers states that ‘Stein’s work will not support a traditional exegesis because it cannot be reduced to messages or even to themes outside the world of the text.’^ These comments are based on Stein’s later work, and the late publication of MA clearly complicates its reception; nevertheless it makes it all the more important to affirm the origins of Stein’s brand of modernism in turn of the century debates. By 1925 MA still had the power to appall its readers (or rather, its non-readers, since many of them confessed to being unable to read it), but it was completed in 1911, making it a document of a pre-war era occupied with a different set of problems, and also making it one of the first and most daring modernist literary experiments - its relation to contemporary debates is therefore particularly significant. Benstock argues that ‘we can no longer ‘map’ modernism without mapping its conceptual definitions and founding assumptions’.^ Stein is clearly not a referential author on the scale of Joyce, but that does not mean that references are absent from her work. MA richly exemplifies modernism’s concern over how to make use of the past. Stein was extraordinarily well read, in terms of volume, scope and diversity of reading - but her voracious reading was culled from what took her fancy, and she was not a conventional reader.Benstock has claimed that Stein’s allusiveness ‘needs far greater attention than it has so far received’. ^ Stein quoted in Haas, editor,A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1971), 29.
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