[In the following essay, Ruddick discusses the “buried psychological allegory” in “Melanctha” that owes much to the psychological studies of William James.]

Since the fifties, Gertrude Stein's critics have been alert to the possibility that her work owes something to the psychology of William James.¹ Stein hinted at a debt; James, her college professor and a mentor of sorts, was one of “the strongest scientific influences that I had.”² But it has been difficult to establish a concrete point of likeness between Stein's handling of personality and James's mental theory. The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to a buried psychological allegory in “Melanctha” that imports its figures from James.

“Melanctha” is a version of Q.E.D., Stein's early novel sometimes known by its posthumous title, Things As They Are. Q.E.D. is a minimally disguised account of Stein's affair with May Bookstaver, a member of her circle in Baltimore.³ The story has some interest but suffers from an inert and abstract prose. Stein did not publish it, but thought it worthy of reworking.

If much of Q.E.D. reappears in “Melanctha,” however, something in the treatment has changed. There are no longer the bald moralism and aridity of Q.E.D. Stein has detached herself from the episode and has a new patience with the mixed tones of life. A psychological deepening has taken place. For what in Q.E.D. were plain facts of autobiography have been displaced into an intricate narrative of the mind. The battle of wills between the lovers of the earlier piece becomes, in the characters of Melanctha Herbert and Jeff Campbell, a battle of rival mental states. Everywhere in “Melanctha” the spare details of Q.E.D. are worked into metaphors for larger patterns in the life of the human psyche.

The new psychological freight is derived from James, whose psychology courses Stein had taken a decade earlier. In a lecture called “The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans,” Stein described the notion of the mind that emerged from her experimental work in psychology at Harvard:

Then as I say I became more interested in psychology, and one of the things I did was testing reactions of the average college student. … [S]oon I found … that I was enormously interested in the types of their characters. … I expressed [my] results as follows:

In these descriptions it will readily be observed that habits of attention are reflexes of the complete character of the individual.⁴

In the Psychology James had written that “what is called our ‘experience’ is almost entirely determined by our habits of attention.”⁵ For both James and Stein, then, “habits of attention” function as a key to character.

What precisely are “habits of attention?” For James, every moment of perception presents us with a barrage of sensory impressions, intermingling, teeming, and confused. If the individual is to accomplish anything in life beyond “star[ing] vacantly” (P, p. 273) at this array of phenomena—indeed, if he is to begin in the very business of survival—he must decide which of them to notice. Our “practical nature” (P, p. 222) compels us to remain inattentive to all but those objects that bear upon our particular needs. As a result, “we actually ignore most of the things before us” (P, p. 37). “We are seeing flies, moths, and beetles by the thousand,” for example, but for most of us, for all “save an entomologist,” “these things are non-existent” (P, p. 39). They fail to enter our experience. Our practice of bringing into focus only those objects that suit our immediate practical needs, and of ignoring the remainder of perceptual life, James calls that of “selective attention”—or “habits of attention” (P, pp. 37, 39).

Selective attention is exercised in varying degrees among different individuals. Adults, for example, are more likely than children to approach the world with inflexible patterns of apperception that exclude the majority of impressions. “In mature age,” writes James, “we have generally selected those stimuli which are connected with one or more so-called permanent interests, and our attention has grown irresponsive to the rest.” “Childhood,” on the other hand, “has few organized interests by which to meet new impressions and decide whether they are worthy of notice or not” (P, p. 88). The result is an extreme “sensitiveness” in youth “to immediately exciting sensorial stimuli”—particularly to stimuli of “a directly exciting quality,” “intense, voluminous, or sudden”; and to “strange things, moving things, … etc.” (P, p. 88). The child apprehends the world in all its confused fullness, rather than filtering it according to his needs. He is captivated by sensory impressions not because they serve as “means to a remote end”—not because they bear upon some personal interest—but because they are “exciting or interesting per se” (P, p. 90).

Here we begin to see filaments of connection with “Melanctha.” Stein's heroine herself is described as “always wanting new things just to get excited.”⁶ In James's phrase, she is occupied with what is “exciting or interesting per se.” This distinguishes her from Jeff Campbell, whose experience is directed by specific needs. Jeff cultivates new experiences, if at all, only “so that he could understand what troubled people, and not to just have excitements” (p. 116). As happens with the characteristic Jamesian adult, his contact with the world always has some “practical fruit” as its terminus (P, p. 15). Jeff—who believes in “always know[ing] … what you wanted” from experience (p. 117)—stands as a model for that habit of selective attention that elevates to notice only those objects that bear upon ends. The single question endlessly debated by Jeff and Melanctha is whether life is to consist in “excitements” cultivated for their own sakes or should be directed toward broader goals.

For James, the attraction to what is “exciting … per se” is typical of childhood. In this case, Stein's heroine has the mind of a child. But James does not neglect to add: this “sensitiveness to immediately exciting sensorial stimuli,” although usually outgrown, “is never overcome in some people, whose work, to the end of life, gets done in the interstices of their mind-wandering” (P, pp. 88–89). In some adults perceptual life continues to consist of immediate, aimless sensation. In such individuals, “so-called permanent interests” fail ever to become prominent and screen out the teeming impressions of life.

This would explain the case of Melanctha. James uses the term “mind-wandering”—or “wandering attention” (P, p. 95)—to describe this condition of receptiveness to sensation. Now Melanctha herself is defined as a “wanderer.” Those readers who have seen in Melanctha's perennial “wanderings” a prolonged euphemism for sex have missed the subtlety of Stein's intent. One might reverse the emphasis and say that sex itself stands in “Melanctha” as a metaphor for a certain type of mental activity. Melanctha's promiscuity is part of an experential promiscuity, an inability to approach the world selectively. Her sexual wanderings are emblematic of that indiscriminate “wandering attention” that refuses to impose a pattern upon experience and that takes life unmediated.

This metaphoric treatment of sexuality in “Melanctha” emerges in sharper outline when one considers precisely what sorts of material have been added to the original plot of Q.E.D. In Q.E.D. there is little that is indirect or euphemistic about the treatment of sex (although certain scenes are understandably omitted from the narrative). The story's “passionate embraces” are named for what they are; there is none of the misstatement that seems to pervade “Melanctha.” The wanderings that occur in the story are the quite literal wanderings of two young women through New York in search of a trysting place.⁷ But in “Melanctha,” sexual wanderings become “wanderings after wisdom,” after “world knowledge,” after “real experience” (p. 97). “And so Melanctha wandered on the edge of wisdom,” searching for “something realler” (pp. 101, 108)—if this is euphemism, it is euphemism of an elaborate sort that causes us to think as carefully about the nature of “wisdom,” “knowledge,” and “experience” themselves as about the romantic developments being described.

Melanctha and Jeff represent mental poles. Jeff “always know[s]” what he “want[s]” from experience; Melanctha, who does not “know what” she “want[s],” refuses to exercise a reductive vision (pp. 117, 100). To this question of selective attention, James adds the following idea: we are aided in the business of selection by a mass of words and concepts, to which we “become more and more enslaved” with the years (P, p. 195). Objects that fail to conform to our “pigeonholes” and “labels” are “simply not taken account of at all.”⁸ These words and stock concepts, moreover, not only determine what objects we will select for notice but also distort our perceptions of those objects that we do observe.

For “whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part (and it may be the larger part) always comes out of our own mind” (P, p. 196). For most of us, sensation is actually modified by “ideas in the mind” (P, p. 193). Rarely does a datum of perception appear to us in its “sensational nudity” (P, p. 181); what James terms “preperception” almost always occurs to obscure the object in a mantle of thoughts and anterior associations (P, p. 99).

This issue enters “Melanctha” as an opposition between “thinking” and “feeling.” Melanctha typically charges Jeff with an inability to “feel” because his “thinking” interferes.

“Don't you ever stop with your thinking long enough ever to have any feeling Jeff Campbell,” said Melanctha a little sadly. …

“No, I don't stop thinking much Miss Melanctha and if I can't ever feel without stopping thinking, I certainly am very much afraid Miss Melanctha that I never will do much with that kind of feeling. …”

(p. 132)

Jeff is prevented from knowing things directly by an ingrained habit of cerebration. For as James says, “a pure sensation” (what Melanctha calls a “feeling”) is a thing “rarely realized in adult life” (P, p. 179). Thinking, with its mass of associations, gets in the way of immediate experience. Melanctha is the rare adult capable of taking things in without adapting them to conventional ideas or labels. This is why for her every experience is “new” (p. 119). She has what James in a fanciful moment defines as genius—“the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way” (P, p. 195).

There seems to be an extraordinary emphasis in “Melanctha” on the issue of speech. For language is the consummate labeller; “thinking in words” is for James the most common means of distilling perceived realities (P, p. 213). Jeff Campbell tends to “think … in words” (p. 155). As a corollary, he seems to be “talking … all the time” (p. 134). Melanctha, for her part, “never talked much” (p. 134). She senses that “when you get to really feeling[,] [y]ou won't be so ready then always with your talking” (p. 135).

Memory is another issue. Jeff Campbell knows how to “remember right” (p. 178); indeed he has violent “fits of … remembering” (p. 181). Melanctha, on the other hand, “never could remember right” (pp. 100, 107, 178). Pages are expended on a mysterious argument on the question of “remembering right.”

What is the quarrel about? On one level, memory is a metaphor for romantic fidelity—“no man can ever really hold you,” Jeff tells Melanctha, “because … you never can remember” (p. 191). But here again the sexual theme has deeper implications on the level of perceptual theory. Memory is part of the mechanism of “preperception.” James writes that the associations that a particular experience will arouse in a person will depend largely on his memory (P, p. 193). The more previous experience he brings to the phenomena before him, the less freshly he perceives them (P, p. 143). Thus Melanctha's pathological forgetfulness is a corollary of her “mind-wandering,” her refusal to impose categories. Jeff charges her with “never remembering anything only what you just then are feeling in you” (p. 182).

Melanctha and Jeff embody contrary mental tendencies. It has been common to view the lovers of “Melanctha” as a case of conflicting characters who reach a romantic “standoff” because of their hopelessly “antithetical” natures.⁹ “Melanctha and Jeff,” writes one of the story's more discerning readers, “observed in the light of a characterology are polar opposites”—and for this reason their liaison fails.¹⁰ But the story is strewn with hints that there is something more benign in the bond that unites Stein's lovers. For if Melanctha and Jeff represent contrasting character types, they are also personifications of warring principles that clash and merge in every mind.

“Genius” for James is “the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.” Its antithesis is the “enslave[ment] to stock conceptions” (P, p. 195). Now for James, the two qualities exist in some combination in every psyche. There is “an everlasting struggle in every mind between the tendency to keep unchanged, and the tendency to renovate its ideas. Our education is a ceaseless compromise between the conservative and the progressive factors” (P, p. 194). The mind mediates perpetually between the “conservative” factor that holds to fixed categories and the “progressive” factor that moves beyond habitual modes of apperception to absorb the unfamiliar.

The two faculties coexist in a state of “everlasting struggle.” The relationship of the lovers of “Melanctha” is itself described as a “struggle.” “It was a struggle, sure to be going on always between them,” “a struggle that was as sure always to be going on between them, as their minds and hearts always were to have different ways of working” (p. 153). In the dynamic of “struggle” and “compromise” that unites the divergent energies of the Jamesian mind, one finds a pattern for the complex pairings, partings, and mental adjustments of the lovers of “Melanctha.”

In James, the conservative and the progressive elements are peculiarly interdependent; neither can survive in isolation. The difficulty of being, on the one hand, purely conservative in one's perceptual habits has already been suggested. To the mind utterly hardened in its intellectual patterns, much of the world will simply be lost. What is not lost will be distorted by associations, preconceptions, habitual thoughts. The progressive factor alone, the impulse of mind that seeks out fresh impressions, can bring such a mind back into contact with the tang of things as they are.

It is precisely this need for novel perceptions that attracts Jeff Campbell to Melanctha. He sees in her a “teacher” who will instruct him in “new feeling” and “wisdom” (pp. 125, 158, 205). Jeff as we find him at the beginning of the story stands in need of what James termed mental “renovation.” Fixed habits of thought have distanced him from the world; he has been “thinking” and “talking” so long that “really he [knows] nothing” (pp. 124, 130, 137). Melanctha will give him “a way to know, that makes everything all over” (p. 138) and that will bring him into contact with “real being” (p. 149).

Mental conservatism requires the aid, then, of the progressive tendency if it is ever to recover a sharp sensational focus. But Melanctha has needs too that draw her to Jeff—perhaps more urgent needs. For “if we lost our stock of labels,” writes James, “we should be intellectually lost in the midst of the world” (P, p. 103). In a “swarming continuum” (P, p. 38) of phenomena, perplexed, chaotic, and vague, we must have at least some principle of selection or we should be reduced to “star[ing] vacantly” at the whirling mass before us until we died of inanition (P, p. 233). “Unless our consciousness experienced a partiality for certain of the objects which, in succession, occupied its ken, it could not long maintain itself in existence,” for among other things our very bodies depend upon our having stable mental categories for food, shelter, danger, help (P, p. 103).

This is a radical way of restating the fact that selective attention is necessary if we are ever to realize our personal interests. The practice of fresh, unselective perception may be (as Melanctha says) “exciting,” but it is also highly impractical—indeed, life-threatening—if it is carried too far. James states the issue in evolutionary terms:

Its own body … must be [a] supremely interesting [object] for each human mind. … I might conceivably be as fascinated … by the care of my neighbor's body as by the care of my own. … The only check to such exuberant non-egoistic interests is natural selection, which would weed out such as were very harmful to the individual. …

(P, pp. 61–62)

Melanctha typifies the mind dominated by “exuberant non-egoistic interests”; “not know[ing] what … she … want[s]” (p. 100), lacking selfish pursuits of any sort, she “wander[s] on the edge of wisdom” (p. 101) with no thought of personal safety. Her “reckless” quality is an extension of a perceptual recklessness that admits new experiences at any cost (p. 208).

In repetition, indeed, of James's formulation, the “exuberant non-egoistic” Melanctha is as much interested in “the care of [her] neighbor's body” as in “the care of [her] own.” The only work she ever performs is that of tending the ill, the confined, the newborn. In this she stands in sharp contrast to the “selfish” Rose Johnson (p. 214), who guards her own interests while neglecting the care of others—of the ailing Melanctha, whom she turns away at the end of the story, and of her own infant, who dies because she “forgets” him.

“Selfishness” is James's own term for the selection we exercise in the interest of survival (P, p. 61). Rose is at once the supremely self-centered character of “Melanctha” and the consummate mental conservative, who knows “what she want[s]” from experience, who “never f[inds] any way to get excited,” and who speaks in the voice of “strong common sense” that never proceeds beyond the blandest prejudgments and stock ideas (pp. 201, 207, 199). Melanctha would profit from a modicum of the conservatism or selfishness that marks Rose and, to a lesser extent, Jeff. Her perceptual life, stimulating as it is, is dangerous. She achieves knowledge through a series of close escapes, and she is only “in her nature” when “deep in trouble” (pp. 101, 92). Melanctha is drawn to Jeff—and finally to Rose—precisely because these characters lead lives of “solid safety” (p. 210). “Melanctha Herbert never had any strength alone ever to feel safe” (p. 233), so she clings to those whose mental stability complements the fluid frenzy of her own mind:

And Melanctha Herbert clung to Rose in the hope that Rose could save her. Melanctha felt the power of Rose's selfish … nature. … She always felt a solid safety in her.

(p. 210)

Melanctha all her life loved and respected kind … good … people. Melanctha always loved and wanted peace … and goodness and all her life … poor Melanctha could only find new ways to be in trouble.

(p. 93)

In the persons of Melanctha and Jeff, antipodal patterns of mind draw together out of mutual need. The “struggle” in which the two engage is a struggle necessary to both. In James's terms, it is the struggle that must take place between “the conservative and the progressive factors” in each mind if cognition is to proceed with the proper suppleness. And finally, it is a struggle that subtly changes and reanimates both lovers. This is a point likely to be missed by the conventional reading that finds in the relationship merely two people “in a standoff.”¹¹ Jeff and Melanctha work upon each other to achieve that “compromise” of perceptual attitudes that is integral to the functioning of the Jamesian mind (P, p. 194).

The compromise is effected largely in the person of Jeff. A different fate lies in store for Melanctha. Jeff yields to Melanctha because he is in need of perceptual “renovation.” He feels that he ought “to know more” (p. 124), to experience new phenomena, to learn to “feel” (p. 132). And this is precisely what happens to him in the course of the story. At first Jeff “h[olds] off” (p. 109); as always happens when habits—even perceptual habits—are renovated, “the material opposes” initially “a certain resistance to the modifying cause” (P, p. 2). Jeff is for some time “too scared … to really feel things” (p. 123); he finds himself recoiling instinctively from the first rush of fresh, alien sensation that, in James's suggestive phrase, is a “threatening violator or burster of our well-known series of concepts” (P, p. 195).

But he is not so fixed as to remain quite a conservative mind at all. Gradually he “beg[ins] to feel a little”; he ceases to be “sure … just what he want[s]”; he stops “think[ing] in words”; he begins to “wander”; and before long he is “los[ing] all himself in a strong feeling” (pp. 116, 129, 155, 149, 154). We know that a genuine transformation has occurred when “at last he had stopped thinking”—“now at last, he was really feeling” (p. 144).

This gradual opening to “feeling” reaches a peak about halfway through the story when Jeff and Melanctha commit themselves to an extended phase of “wandering.” Jeff acquires a new approach to the phenomena of the immediate universe:

Jeff always loved in this way to wander. Jeff always loved to watch everything as it was growing, and he loved all the colors in the trees and on the ground, and the little, new, bright colored bugs he found in the moist ground and in the grass he loved to lie on and in which he was always so busy searching. Jeff loved everything that moved and that was still, and that had color, and beauty, and real being.

(p. 149)

What strikes us is the sudden emphasis on particular, sharp, individual impressions. It is quite a change for Jeff, who was initially repelled by “new things” altogether (p. 119), to be interested in “little, new, bright colored bugs.” This is purposeless, wandering, unselective attention at its height. We may even be reminded, by the little “bugs” that now appeal to Jeff, of one of James's own illustrations: “We are seeing flies, moths, and beetles by the thousand, but to whom, save an entomologist, do they say anything distinct?” (P, p. 39). To Jeff, now that selective attention has been relaxed, such trivial and unserviceable objects do enter consciousness in their vivid particularity. “Bugs” are elevated to importance as repositories of “real being.”

“You see Melanctha,” Jeff remarks in the same period, “I got a new feeling now, you been teaching to me, … like really having everything together, new things, little pieces all different, like I always before been thinking was bad to be having” (p. 158). “Little pieces all different”—the uniqueness of each object comes sharply into focus as the generalizations and preconceptions fade. As Gertrude Stein was fond herself of remarking, “[w]hat is strange is this”: every phenomenon, if perceived naively, is seen in its distinctness from all other phenomena.¹² Stein is echoing James's own fondness for “that quality sui generis which each moment of immediate experience possesses for itself.”¹³

The word “and” makes nine appearances in the space of the two sentences above. “Jeff always loved to watch everything as it was growing, and he loved all the colors in the trees and on the ground, and the little, new, bright colored bugs”—and so forth. The importance of conjunctions in Stein—and this is a bias inherited from James—cannot be overstated.¹⁴ These central passages, in which “and” fuses a variety of perceptions in what seems a single moment, reflect what one critic has called the technique of parataxis in Stein, whereby a mass of phenomena are shown “all … equally and simultaneously existing in perceptual fact.”¹⁵

Here again the submerged issue is one of attention. James comments that, as a result of selective attention, “accentuation and emphasis” are ubiquitous in perception (P, p. 37). It is virtually impossible for the normal adult to attend uniformly to a number of simultaneous impressions (P, p. 37). Only God or the staring sluggard can survey all parts of the universe “at once and without emphasis” (P, pp. 222–223). But in Jeff, as “little pieces all different” come before consciousness connected by the equalizing “and,” just this condition of dispersed attention prevails. No longer is all but a single aspect of the perceived world suppressed; mental categories cease to substitute, for the “manifold” terms in which reality actually appears to us, “terms few and fixed” (P, p. 213). In these scenes the world reappears to Jeff in its primal multeity. He is learning from Melanctha how not to select.

This marks a period of intellectual disintegration. Something “break[s] up” in Jeff Campbell (p. 195). The dizzying continuum outside the self begins to penetrate the hardened barriers of perceptual habit. This process may be carried too far. Real experience must not be imbibed too plentifully or the structure of the mind will give way altogether—as perhaps it does symbolically in the person of Jane Harden, who lives so hungrily that she simply “went to pieces” in the end (p. 108). Structures of mental habit should give way gradually; they should exhibit the same elasticity that for James characterizes all varieties of habit. While “yield[ing] to an influence,” they must “be plastic enough to maintain [their] integrity, and not be disrupted” (P, p. 2). Some such principle describes the process whereby Jeff Campbell assimilates experience. He proceeds in steps, in cycles of direct feeling followed by recuperation and quiet (p. 206). He “held off” (p. 109) at just the right moments. At points he has to “h[o]ld himself hard to keep from breaking” (p. 204).

Of course what is being described is on one level the risk of love. But the pain Jeff experiences is also that of incoming “wisdom” (p. 205). For all new experience is a “threatening violator or burster of our well-known series of concepts” (P, p. 195); every unfamiliar impression must tear, however subtly, at the fabric of the mind.

Jeff's periods of suffering are followed by times of healing, reintegration, reflection (p. 204). In these periods new knowledge, earned in the realm of immediate experience, is assimilated:

Now Jeff was strong inside him. Now with all the pain there was peace in him. … Now Jeff Campbell had real wisdom in him, and it did not make him bitter when it hurt him, for Jeff knew now all through him that he was really strong to bear it.

(pp. 204–205)

Finally, Jeff converts his new insights into instrumental knowledge:

Jeff always had strong in him the meaning of all the new kind of beauty Melanctha Herbert once had shown him, and always more and more it helped him with his working for himself and for all the colored people.

(p. 207)

He returns to “regular … living” (p. 193) in the realm of convention and practical interests, but with a mental formulation of the world that has been enriched by contact with direct experience.

In James, indeed, this is the pattern that characterizes all learning. The mass of ideas is transformed by the absorption of novel impressions. This is the end toward which the “everlasting struggle in every mind” between “the conservative and the progressive factors” draws (P, p. 194). Stein herself, as early as her Radcliffe themes, recognized that “pain and struggle” were at the source of intellectual advance.¹⁶ New perceptions and old formulations must clash and be synthesized to produce a “victorious assimilation of the new” that realigns the mind with realities (P, p. 195).

This, then, is the compromise of opposing mental principles that occurs when Jeff absorbs a new way of thinking through Melanctha. His struggle with Melanctha, far from “destroy[ing] his life” as has been claimed,¹⁷ preserves him from intellectual death. Yet things do not turn out so well for Melanctha herself. Although Jeff assimilates successfully the new mode of perception that he has encountered in his antithesis Melanctha, she fails in turn to be impressed by his “solidity,” his firm conceptual grip on the world. She tries adapting to him for a time, but ends by reverting to her former “excited,” “reckless,” “wander[ing]” ways (pp. 219, 208).

A devastating blow is struck when Rose Johnson casts Melanctha off. The desertion “almost killed her” (p. 233). This seems an exaggerated response, unless we remember that in herself “Melanctha Herbert never had any strength alone ever to feel safe” (p. 233). In Rose, she loses her last point of contact with the “solid safety” of the conservative temperament from which she has always derived support (pp. 210, 233).

Melanctha needed Rose always to let her cling to her. … Rose always was so simple, solid, decent, for her. And now Rose had cast her from her. Melanctha was lost, and all the world went whirling in a mad weary dance around her.

(p. 233)

“Melanctha was lost”: as James said, if we relinquished our mental conservatism, “we should be intellectually lost in the midst of the world” (P, p. 103). Melanctha loses touch with the “solid” tendency, and “all the world went whirling in a mad weary dance around her.” This precisely describes what would happen if the mind were released from all patterns of perceptual habit and banished to the flux of unfamiliar, direct sensation. Melanctha virtually drowns in the continuum of the world.

Her physical death, some paragraphs later, seems to follow as a matter of course. Critics have long seen in the stories of Three Lives, each of which ends with the death of a heroine, shades of naturalism. This reading assumes a particular pungency when the story is viewed as Jamesian allegory. For in Melanctha we observe a character unfit for the world who is weeded out by a brand of natural selection.

In James, the individual who lacks any mechanism of selective attention is ill-suited for the business of self-preservation. The survival of the fittest militates against those “exuberant non-egoistic” individuals who, careless of their own personal safety, diffuse their attention equably over experience. “Its own body … must be” a “supremely interesting [object] for each human mind” (P, pp. 61–62). But Melanctha has persisted in wandering on the perilous “edge of wisdom” (p. 101), where personal interests are suppressed in the name of “excitement.” In the end, “tired with being all the time so much excited” (p. 161), she succumbs to the social and bodily “suicide,” which, as James notes, would be the outcome of any life of wholly unselfish or unselective perception (P, pp. 60–61).

There is something to the notion that the “struggles” in which Stein's early characters engage are struggles for mental dominance, a sort of evolutionary battle of behavioral types. But this is to simplify matters. The dual struggle of “Melanctha” does end in death for the heroine, who is ill equipped to “fight to win out” in a world that demands a special breed of mental “selfish[ness]” (pp. 223, 210). But in Jeff Campbell struggling polarities are synthesized in a single mind, and the result is an instance of intellectual enrichment in which mental structures meet the world of “real being” that exists outside the self (p. 149).

Notes

1. Comparisons have been made between Stein's style in various periods and the “stream of consciousness” described by James. See Michael J. Hoffman, The Development of Abstractionism in the Writings of Gertrude Stein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965), pp. 52, 86–87, 213; Donald Sutherland, Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1951), pp. 6–8; Ronald Levinson, “Gertrude Stein, William James, and Grammar,” American Journal of Psychology, 54 (1941), 124–128; Richard Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 102, 133–134; Carl Van Vechten, “How to Read Gertrude Stein,” in Gertrude Stein: A Composite Portrait, ed. Linda Simon (New York: Avon, 1974), p. 51; Edith Sitwell, from Taken Care Of, anthologized in Simon, p. 111. Beyond these stylistic analogies, Bridgman notes seeing something Jamesian in the “crude opposites” portrayed in The Making of Americans (p. 75); Hoffman associates with James what he takes to be a practice in Stein of “character definition by verbalization” (p. 51); and Wendy Steiner, in Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), convincingly compares James's concept of identity and Stein's manner of approaching the subjects of her literary portraits (pp. 29–30).

2. Gertrude Stein, Wars I Have Seen (New York: Random House, 1945), pp. 63–64.

3. See Leon Katz, Introduction to Fernhurst, Q.E.D., and Other Early Writings by Gertrude Stein (New York: Liveright, 1971), pp. iii-viii.

4. Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten (New York: Random House, 1962), p. 212; emphasis added. Hugo Münsterberg directed the experimental work described here, but there is little evidence that he was an influence; Stein had learned her psychology from James. See The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which Stein gives Münsterberg a brief mention but continues: “The important person in Gertrude Stein's Radcliffe life was William James” (in Selected Writings, p. 73).

5. Psychology: The Briefer Course (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1961), p. 39. This shortened version of The Principles of Psychology was the text in Stein's first course with James. Further references to this work will be made parenthetically in the text as P.

6. “Melanctha,” Three Lives (New York: Vintage, n.d.), p. 119. All further references to this work will be made parenthetically with page numbers in the text.

7. See Q.E.D., in Fernhurst, pp. 75–80.

8. “The Hidden Self,” A William James Reader, ed. Gay Wilson Allen (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), p. 93; see, too, Psychology, pp. 192, 195.

9. Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces, pp. 53, 56.

10. Norman Weinstein, Gertrude Stein and the Literature of the Modern Consciousness (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1970), p. 19.

11. Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces, p. 53.

12. Quoted in A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1971), p. 150.

13. Ralph Barton Perry, In the Spirit of William James (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1938), p. 80.

14. See Stein, “Poetry and Grammar,” Lectures in America (New York: Vintage, 1975), p. 213; Levinson, “Gertrude Stein, William James, and Grammar,” p. 126.

15. Donald Sutherland, in A Primer, pp. 148–149.

16. See the theme of 20 December 1894, anthologized in Rosalind S. Miller, Gertrude Stein: Form and Intelligibility (New York: Exposition Press, 1949), p. 122.

17. See, for example, Miller, Gertrude Stein, p. 31.