Three Lives narrates the histories of three women in humble stations of life—these under the titles of “The Good Anna,” “Melanctha,” and “The Gentle Lena.” In each of these narratives Gertrude Stein employs repetition as a principal element in her style; but it is in the middle story, “Melanctha,” that the various forms of reduplication in words and sounds are most effectively utilized. For this reason, and also because the heroine Melanctha Herbert is negroid, I have chosen to examine this particular novelette as a revealing illustration of Stein's employment of primitive syntactical devices of narration in the development of a character who is not wholly civilized. Melanctha is not, on the other hand, a primitive aborigine, nor does the story exemplify primitivism—a belief that health and happiness are easiest approached by recreating the conditions of simplified early societies. My use of the word primitive in this article, as a literary method, concerns mainly those technical devices which characterize all art in its beginning stages. The fact that Melanctha has known fewer of the fruits of civilization than either Anna or Lena automatically renders her an appropriate personality for depiction in a language that is akin to primitive poetry.

“Melanctha,” Greek for “Dark-flower,” was written at a period when Gertrude Stein had become bored with studying brain anatomy in the medical school of The Johns Hopkins University. Earlier at Radcliffe she had learned from William James respect for scientific analysis. Perhaps this literary work, a treatment of primitive psychology, served as an escape from advanced studies, as an antidote to her laboratory labors on the human brain.

According to The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, the manuscript was typed by Miss Etta Cone, a distant connection, and then submitted to a literary agent in New York, who was unable to place it. Similarly, Bobbs-Merrill, though at the time briefly interested, finally reported their inability to publish the work. As a result Gertrude Stein made arrangements with the Grafton Press, of New York. She advanced a sum of money of her own, the book being finally published in 1909. This is the inauspicious background of a volume containing the notable account of the Negress Melanctha Herbert. Since its publication in 1909, it has grown steadily in popularity. Editions have appeared from the presses of John Lane, the Boni Brothers, and the Modern Library. In 1946 the Dial Press issued at New York a text for college students called Great American Short Novels; and in this book William Phillips, the editor, selected “Melanctha” for inclusion as one of the six most celebrated novelettes produced in the United States. Thus Gertrude Stein's unusual story has begun to achieve a really creditable reputation.

The novelette, whose full title is “Melanctha—Each One As She May,” has for its setting Bridgepoint, a name apparently suggested by the real Maryland village of Bridgetown. The central figure is Melanctha Herbert, who is described as half white, although actually her mother is yellow and her father black. There seems to be little plot: Melanctha has a number of colored women friends, in particular Jane Harden, with whom she has erotic relations. She also has a colored gentleman friend named Dr. Jeff Campbell, but she is unable to return his love by loyal devotion. With the exception of Dr. Campbell, all the characters are underprivileged Negro folk. There are suggestions of sexual perversity; Melanctha is controlled by some generic anxiety; her promiscuous behavior undermines her health and brings about her death. The motto prefixed to Three Lives is a quotation from Jules Laforgue about the prevalence of unhappiness in the mind irrespective of the individual himself or of his environment: “Donc je suis un malheureux et ce n'est ni ma faute ni celle de la vie.” The statement aptly explains poor Melanctha's deep disquietude.

Gertrude Stein's narrative is winning a high place among the short classics of American prose primarily because its treatment of the Negro is perhaps the best example of a type of primitiveness in contemporary fiction. As a study of primal natures, “Melanctha” is almost wholly preoccupied with the subject of sex, perhaps an inevitable concern for simple people with little else to think about. As for its technical structure, the narrative is written in a rhythmical, repetitious language—a style obviously appropriate for unveiling the unfettered reactions of the dark heroine. The psychological effect resulting from this matching of idea with form is impressive; and Stein's cadenced, echoing style becomes an artistic medium for describing erotic activities. The truly revolutionary aspects of “Melanctha” are even more apparent in the primitiveness of its style than in its subject matter. It is interesting that the lack of confidence in Three Lives displayed at first by publishers, even by its printers, the Grafton Press, was their objection, not to its narrative contents, but to its stylistic innovations.

The complete omission of cultural features in the novelette is definite evidence of the primitive. Except for the references to unspecified books read occasionally by Dr. Campbell, Gertrude Stein's work contains no mention of music, literature, or art. Instead, it deals with what may be termed the primal concerns of man and animal alike—that is, with sickness, fighting, and mating. The tone is at a basic level: without the slightest perturbation of shock, the characters admit into the pitch of their living scenes of brutality, such as knife slashing, as though these were customary, even expected actions—a part indeed of their own nature. Melanctha Herbert entertains no respect at all for moral traditions or social conventions. In being unfaithful to Dr. Campbell, she senses no violation of the code for true lovers; she simply complies with a compelling inner urge which she regards as completely natural and entirely without bearing on love true or false. Her unreasoning obedience to this basic instinct is the spontaneous action of a primitive mentality. It is only Dr. Campbell, the physician, who seeks to regulate his life by reason; and in doing so he becomes a misfit among his colored brethren. The criterion of behavior for the others is always instinct, intuition, feeling—the narrow, limited world of the senses.

The existence in aboriginal societies of irregular sex habits has its counterpart in the abnormal departures discussed in Gertrude Stein's novelette. Although Melanctha tended towards bisexuality, it is her wanton promiscuity which causes her to become sick with consumption and to die. The inference may be that a less primordial individual would have observed moderation. What led Melanctha into excesses was that the sexual experience somehow never fully gratified her. As the novelist expresses the idea, “it all had no excitement for her.” Gertrude Stein's discussions reflect primitiveness also in the attitude taken towards sex, for the characters are depicted as being like savages, innocently unmoral. There is certainly no attempt on the part of the author to delineate the sexual compulsion as attractive; however, it is never described as ugly and always as natural.

The sex life of this colored girl is difficult to trace with exactness because of the novelist's use of euphemistic expressions. The uneducated Negro avoids associating the sex act with anything repulsive by the employment of words with pleasant connotation; that is, like the uneducated “genteel,” he escapes frontal contact with reality by building up appearances. “Melanctha” is thus a lexicon of euphemisms for sex, such as “trouble,” “wandering,” “getting excited,” “power,” “kindness,” “wisdom,” these words being at times qualified by adjectives like “mysterious” and “uncertain.” Some kind of innate decorum may be the foundation of this refusal to discuss sex in any other than pleasant terms or hints. But in “Melanctha” verbosity and indirectness are the characteristic diction whatever the subject. The inability of the speakers to move quickly to a point and to explain this point with briefness may be a characteristic of simple people, whose tendency it is to embellish and enlarge upon the plain truth. As for Melanctha Herbert, “all her life [she] did not know how to tell a story wholly … for when it came to what had happened and what she had said and what it was that she had really done, Melanctha never could remember right.” No wonder her narration is cloudy, rambling, and chaotic. The overpowering array of euphemisms in “Melanctha” is absent in the two other stories in Three Lives. It is therefore good evidence that in her treatment of the Negro, Stein consciously emphasized this element of primitiveness in her style.

Of course repetitive devices constantly occur when the primitive literary technique is adopted. Repetition appears among the methods of the American poet Vachel Lindsay, whose poem “The Congo” depicts the aboriginal Negro in his native African habitat. The most individual characteristic of rudimentary poetry is, indeed, the recurrent refrain—the dominant feature of barbaric battle songs and chants. My friend Professor Arthur K. Moore, of the University of Kentucky, recently gave me a copy of a chant used in an intricate file dance for twentieth-century Papuan performers (from the Biak Islands of Netherlands New Guinea)—where reduplication is the dominant trait:

Wo-ke-ke                                                  Wa-ju-so
Wa-ke-ke                                                  Wai-ja-so
To-bo-po                                                   Om-fo-ri
Wo-ke-ke                                                  Wai-ja-so

It is significant that for the lucidity and brevity of civilized narration, the Negroes in “Melanctha” likewise substitute rhythm and reiteration. The impression so created graphically reveals the poetic bases of primordial thinking. Observe, for example, Gertrude Stein's description of Melanctha when aged eighteen:

And so Melanctha began once more to wander. It was all now for her very different. It was never rougher men now that she talked to, and she did not care much now to know white men of the, for her, very better classes. It was now something realer that Melanctha wanted, something that would move her very deeply, something that would fill her fully with the wisdom that was planted now within her, and that she wanted badly, should really wholly fill her.

Even Dr. Jeff Campbell, far superior in education to his humble colored patients, succumbs, when excited, to an instinctive predilection to repeat himself:

“But I certainly do admire and trust you a whole lot now, Melanctha. I certainly do, for I certainly never did think I was hurting you at all, Melanctha.”

At the beginning of his speech Jeff Campbell employs an expansive doublet, a familiar locution in elementary language. He declares: “Good Lord and Jesus Christ, Melanctha!” Also, in his letter replying to “Dear Melanctha,” Dr. Campbell resorts to meandering vernacular in his use of an echo word, as follows:

“I certainly don't think you got it all just right in the letter, I just been reading, that you just wrote me. I certainly don't think you are just fair or very understanding. …”

One further stylistic device demonstrates Gertrude Stein's artistry with primitive syntax. In the use of adjectives the author is not content to use two or three; instead, she customarily employs four or more, the achieved result being a type of rhetorical pyramiding. Perhaps the difference in effect may be more clearly perceived if a conventional use of adjectives is first quoted in a passage from Henry James' description of Mrs. Montgomery in “Washington Square”: “She was a small, plump, fair woman, with a bright, clear eye, and an extraordinary air of neatness and briskness.” Compare this with a passage referring to Melanctha Herbert: “She tended Rose, and she was patient, submissive, soothing, and untiring, while the sullen, childish, cowardly, black Rosie grumbled and fussed and howled and made herself to be an abomination and like a simple beast.” The foregoing quotation is not isolated; rhetorical pyramiding is found throughout the narrative. It is a form of rudimentary syntax in representing, as the next catalogue of compounds shows, quite possibly the easiest method of description: Melanctha “was always full with mystery and subtle movements and denials and vague distrusts and complicated disillusions.”

Gertrude Stein has relied on syntax rather than dialect to create her realistic impressions of Negro life. By using it she reproduces the actual, rhythmical talk of primitive people. A good illustration of this cadenced speech occurs in what Rose Johnson, a friend, has to say to Melanctha about suicide:

“I don't see Melanctha why you should talk like you would kill yourself just because you're blue. I'd never kill myself Melanctha just 'cause I was blue. I'd maybe kill somebody else Melanctha 'cause I was blue, but I'd never kill myself. If I ever killed myself Melanctha it'd be by accident, and if I ever killed myself by accident Melanctha, I'd be awful sorry.”

Without recourse to folklore, superstition, spirituals, or dialect—the stock-in-trade paraphernalia of the regional writer—the novelist has with her original style limned in full detail the humble background of Melanctha Herbert.

The experimental narrative of Melanctha's tragic frustration has become one of the masterpieces among short American novels. When it first appeared, it was favorably noticed by Carl Van Vechten, Eugene O'Neill, and Sherwood Anderson—all three of whom significantly later wrote on the subject of the American Negro. As an example of superb style, it is truly remarkable how effectively Gertrude Stein has exhibited the vernacular of colored people without once resorting to their dialect. Her lengthy, winding sentences represent the unfolding developments of life itself. Her procedure is so objective that one is aware of the characters, not as a particular race of man, but as a simple, unevolved people. This detached treatment promotes neither sympathy nor disapproval, though it is possible to become immersed in the atmosphere of Melanctha Herbert's own tragedy and to recognize that certain deeply abiding truths exist in her inner life.

“Melanctha” is the longest and the most powerful by far of the three narratives comprising Three Lives. Besides, it first introduces Stein's revolutionary technique. Uniquely recreating the thought processes of the characters through reduplicative, rhythmical language, it is not surpassed by her later art, where these poetic devices do not always fit so admirably the nature of her subtler subject matter. Her style is not outdone by the work of any other American novelist writing on the subject before or since its publication. In psychological effect “Melanctha” is superior even to “The Simple Heart” by Flaubert. He wrote his narrative as the second in a collection entitled Three Tales, so that it is possible that Stein's impulse to write about a lowly servant girl came from her knowledge of Flaubert's short masterpiece on the life of a French nurse. There is a final good and important reason for remembering Stein's work. Among novels about the American Negro by both white and colored writers, “Melanctha” is a nonpareil in its total lack of race-consciousness.