In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Stein recalled that she wrote Three Lives while “looking and looking” at Cézanne's Portrait of Mme Cézanne (ABT, 34). Before she began these stories in 1905, she had written three narratives: Q.E.D., a semiautobiographical account of a lesbian triangle; Fernhurst; and five chapters of a family chronicle, which later served as the beginning of The Making of Americans. Compared to Three Lives and the texts that followed, these are conventional narratives, except for the theme of lesbianism that appears in Q.E.D. Three Lives, and especially the story “Melanctha,” which recasts Q.E.D. in a different social and racial milieu and a new idiom, reveals how radically Stein transformed her style in response to her initial confrontation with modernist painting.

Flaubert's “Un Coeur simple” was the literary point of departure for her first attempt to create a mode of realism analogous to Cézanne's in her own medium. In 1905 she began translating “Un Coeur simple” into English. She soon abandoned this project to write “The Good Anna,” her own story of the life of a simple servant woman. After completing it, she went on to write “The Gentle Lena” and “Melanctha” and named the collection of stories Three Lives (originally Three Histories, in deliberate homage to Flaubert's Trois Contes).¹

“Un Coeur simple” provided Stein with both a subject and a structural model for “The Good Anna,” the first story in which she began to explore this new principle of composition. Stein's Anna, like Flaubert's Félicité, is a hardworking servant, totally devoted to her employers; her own quiet existence, like Félicité's, is shaped by events in other people's lives. Flaubert's story narrates Félicité's uneventful life from her adolescence to her death. Its episodic narrative structure demonstrates a high degree of temporal and logical discontinuity. “The Good Anna” is an equally discontinuous episodic narrative, which recounts the life span of its heroine from childhood to death. Flaubert's unemphatic narrative unfolds the repeated pattern of Félicité's ardent loves and losses—her lover, her mistress's daughter, her own nephew, and, finally, her beloved parrot—which culminates in her epiphanic deathbed vision of the parrot as the Holy Ghost. “The Good Anna” lacks this kind of unifying pattern, but Stein's story makes deliberate use of some of the other narrative strategies Flaubert employed in “Un Coeur simple.” His text frequently juxtaposes short, even one-sentence paragraphs to create a slight discontinuity of action:

Elle eut envie de se mettre dans les demoiselles de la Vierge. Mme Aubain l'en dissuada.

Un événement considérable surgit: le mariage de Paul.²

[She wanted to join the ladies of the Virgin. Mme Aubain talked her out of it.

An important event suddenly emerged: the marriage of Paul.]

The “événement considérable” is merely reported in passing, not described. Stein makes similar use of short, unemphatic paragraphs to recount the events in Anna's life:

The wedding day grew always nearer. At last it came and went.

(TL, 33)

The wedding of her mistress's daughter changes Anna's life, forcing her to find a new employer; like the marriage in “Un Coeur simple,” it is merely noted in a short paragraph. For both of these servant women, the kinds of major events that shape the plots of conventional novels take place only in other people's lives, yet they have considerable effects on their own situations. Character is emphatically not destiny for these women. Because of their social position, the course of their lives is the by-product of the actions of others. Appropriately, their stories lack the strong sense of narrative causality that shapes traditional fiction.

Stein's Anna is a far more voluble character than Flaubert's Félicité. This difference indicates a major divergence between Stein's project and the literary model that served as her point of departure. While Félicité's speech is never quoted and only rarely reported, Stein eagerly embraced the challenge of creating speeches for characters whose command of standard English is limited. Both Anna and the characters in “The Gentle Lena,” the second story she wrote for Three Lives, are German immigrants. “Melanctha,” the third story, is set in a southern black community.

Paradoxically, the more accurately dialectal speech is rendered in fiction, the more insistently it calls attention to itself as linguistic artifice. The more radically language deviates from the norms of conventional narrative discourse to reproduce actual dialect features, the more insistently it resists the normal tendency of prose to “dissolve” easily into meaning. In Three Lives Stein avoided phonetic approximations of dialectal pronunciation, but she systematically used syntactical deformation and repetition to create stylized models of the dialectal speech patterns of her characters. In the first story Anna's speeches are frequently introduced by descriptions that call attention to their abrupt, jerky rhythms:

“Miss Mary,” Anna began. She had stopped just within the door, her body and her face stiff with repression, her teeth closed hard and the white lights flashing sharply in the pale, clean blue of her eyes. Her bearing was full of the strange coquetry of anger and of fear, the stiffness, the bridling, the suggestive movement underneath the rigidness of forced control, all the queer ways the passions have to show themselves all one.

“Miss Mary,” the words came slowly with thick utterance and with jerks, but always firm and strong. “Miss Mary, I can't stand it any more like this. When you tell me anything to do, I do it. I do everything I can and you know I work myself sick for you. The blue dressings in your room makes too much work to have for summer. Miss Jane don't know what work is. If you want to do things like that I go away.”

Anna stopped still. Her words had not the strength of meaning they were meant to have, but the power in the mood of Anna's soul frightened and awed Miss Mary through and through.

(29)

Her short, simple sentences, filled with grammatical errors, “had not the strength of meaning they were meant to have.” Consequently, in this passage and elsewhere in the story, the narrator surrounds Anna's quoted speech with descriptions and interpretations of her body language, which emphasize the inadequacy of her language to her emotions. In contrast to Anna, Mrs. Lehntman, who is called upon to help Anna speak to her mistress in this scene, speaks “slowly” and more fluently than her friend (43). The rhythm of her long polysyndetic sentences is markedly different from Anna's “sharp and short” utterances in the preceding passage:

“Miss Wadsmith, Anna feels how good and kind you are, and she talks about it all the time, and what you do for her in every way you can, and she is very grateful and never would want to go away from you, only she thinks it would be better now that Mrs. Goldthwaite has this big new house and will want to manage it in her own way, she thinks perhaps it would be better if Mrs. Goldthwaite had all new servants with her to begin with, and not a girl like Anna who knew her when she was a little girl.”

(35)

This story simply presents Anna's difficulty with language as a naturalistic character trait. The next two stories Stein wrote explore more extensively the role of language in shaping the thoughts and the lives of characters whose imperfect command of English makes self-expression an arduous labor. By dramatizing these linguistic struggles, the stories in Three Lives foreground the material reality of language as an arbitrary and problematic system, far from a transparent medium of communication.

In The Colloquial Style in America, Richard Bridgman has observed that in nineteenth-century American fiction dialectal speech was generally confined to a “special arena fenced in by quotation marks,” sharply contrasting with the normative narrative voice, except in a few first-person narratives like the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.³ In Three Lives the use of immigrant characters motivates the syntactical deformation that breaks their speech into unusual and assertive rhythmic patterns, but these stylistic effects overflow the restricted area bounded by quotation marks to pervade the entire narrative. Dorrit Cohn uses the rather infelicitous term “stylistic contagion,” borrowed from Leo Spitzer, to describe the encroachment of a character's speech style into the surrounding discourse; Hugh Kenner, in Joyce's Voices, more jocularly calls it the “Uncle Charles principle.”⁴ The style of “The Good Anna” is strangely mixed. It frequently approaches the simple diction and awkward syntax of the characters, but it also incorporates words like “coquetry” and “repression” (in the passage cited above) that are far removed from their lexicon and, consequently, from their mental horizons as well. In the subsequent stories Stein wrote for Three Lives, she sharply limited her lexicon to create a narrative idiom that closely approximates the speech of the characters. This assertive, evenly textured verbal surface is analogous to the surfaces of Cézanne's canvases, with their dense patterning of brushstrokes that unite objects and background in a tapesty of color patches of equal value.

Again, Flaubert can be seen as a literary model for compositional principles similar to those suggested by Cézanne's painting. Proust described reading Flaubert as undertaking a “continuous, monstrous, dreary, indefinite march” on the “great moving sidewalk” of his prose. For Proust, the beauty of Flaubert's style, which he greatly admired, was grammatical; it derived, in part, from the powerful and original rhythms created by his “deforming syntax” (syntaxe déformante).⁵ One of Flaubert's most striking innovations, which often motivates his peculiar manipulation of syntax, is the use of free indirect discourse that pervades most of his texts. This third-person, past-tense rendering of speech or thought which approaches the verbal style of a character allows for almost imperceptible shifts in and out of a character's point of view. It creates an even stylistic surface that approaches the structure of oral speech while it remains a distinctly “written” style. For Flaubert, the mot juste can be the word or phrase that is slightly wrong—flat or awkward, according to correct literary usage, but exactly the right word to approximate the sensibility of his characters.

Henry James provides an American model for a narrative discourse that incorporates traces of the rhythms of colloquial speech and thought. Although Stein always claimed not to have read James seriously until much later in her career, Q.E.D., one of her earliest narratives, suggests a recent and thoughtful reading of James. It is a limited third-person narrative, with a heroine who functions as a Jamesian central intelligence. Bridgman has argued that Stein's style in this early text owes much to James's example, especially in its use of repetition to create the effect of colloquial speech.⁶ James's dislocations of syntax render the fastidious mental discriminations and reevaluations of his eminently conscious characters. But Q.E.D. demonstrates nothing of James's technical virtuosity in registering subtle movements of consciousness through rapid alternations of psychonarrative, narrated monologue, and direct quotation of interior speech.⁷ Stein did not begin the use of syntactical deformation to model the process of thought until she wrote Three Lives.

While James generally preferred to focus on highly articulate characters with finely tuned moral sensibilities, Flaubert was fascinated by stupidity. In the Dictionnaire des idées reçues and in many of his narratives as well, he lovingly and ruthlessly exposed the linguistic and mental limitations of commonplace minds, the products of middle-class culture. In “Un Coeur simple,” however, he protects the simple Félicité from the corrosive effects of his irony by denying her a voice.⁸ In Three Lives, Stein extends the narrative strategies of Flaubert and James into a territory they shrank from exploring—the narrowly restricted linguistic universe that confines the speech and thoughts of simple uneducated characters. In “The Gentle Lena” and “Melanctha,” to a far greater degree than in the first story, the characters' speeches dominate the narratives, while anecdotal actions and circumstantial details, such as physical descriptions of characters and settings, are reduced to a minimum. In “The Gentle Lena,” Stein began to combine direct quotation with extensive use of narrated monologue, Flaubert's favorite device for blurring the distinction between the characters' speech and the narrative voice. In the second and third stories of Three Lives, there is no escape from the linguistic and conceptual boundaries that restrict the characters' expression and their thought.

In “The Gentle Lena,” the central character suffers as a result of her linguistic inadequacy. A recent immigrant from Germany with a limited command of English, she lacks the resources to defend herself adequately against the verbal barrages to which she is constantly subjected. Consequently, she becomes the passive victim of the desires, and the discourse, of others. Her aunt arranges a marriage for her, which neither she nor the prospective husband desires, but Lena can never voice her feelings: “Mrs. Haydon spoke to Lena about it very often. Lena never answered anything at all” (252). When Mrs. Haydon finally forces her to speak, her words reveal her linguistic helplessness, her total subjugation to the discourse that dominates her:

“Why, I do anything you say, Aunt Mathilda. Yes, I like him. He don't say much to me, but I guess he is a good man, and I do anything you say for me to do.”

“Well then Lena, why you stand there so silly all the time and not answer when I asked you?”

“I didn't hear you say you wanted I should say anything to you. I didn't know you wanted me to say nothing. I do whatever you tell me it's right for me to do. I marry Herman Kreder, if you want me.”

(253)

Mrs. Haydon, the German cook, and Lena's friend Mary all scold her repeatedly and at length, and the reluctant bridegroom's family subject him to similar verbal assaults. In this masterful series of long harangues, which combine narrated monologue with quoted speech, these characters unconsciously reveal the self-absorption that motivates their manipulation of Lena and Herman:

Did Lena think it gave Mrs. Haydon any pleasure, to work so hard to make Lena happy, and get her a good husband, and then Lena was so thankless and never did anything that anybody wanted. It was a lesson to poor Mrs. Haydon not to do things any more for anybody. Let everybody take care of themselves and never come to her with any troubles; she knew better now than to meddle to make other people happy. It just made trouble for her and her husband did not like it. He always said she was too good, and nobody ever thanked her for it, and there Lena was always standing stupid and not answering anything anybody wanted. Lena could always talk enough to those silly girls she liked so much, and always sat with, but who never did anything for her except to take away her money, and here was her aunt who tried so hard and was so good to her and treated her just like one of her own children and Lena stood there, and never made any answer and never tried to please her aunt, or to do anything that her aunt wanted. “No, it ain't no use your standin' there and cryin', now, Lena. Its too late now to care about that Herman. You should have cared some before, and then you wouldn't have to stand and cry now, and be a disappointment to me, and then I get scolded by my husband for taking care of everybody, and nobody ever thankful.”

(256)

Mrs. Haydon herself is unaware of the persistent contradictions between her professed concern for her niece's happiness and her outrage at the girl's passive resistance to her own plans. Her syntax, which loosely strings together short phrases with a plethora of coordinating conjunctions, clearly reveals to the reader the tenuous logic of her thought processes. The syntax and movement of this passage typify the way these voluble characters entangle themselves in webs of contradictions each time they berate the young people. Their repetition of the same judgmental words heightens the reader's awareness of language as an instrument of culture, enforcing the dominant values of a community. Both Lena and Herman tacitly reject the conventional wisdom that marriage always leads to happiness, but both are unable to articulate their reasons for opposing this social norm. Lena's only defense is silence, while Herman finally takes action by running away. After this, Mrs. Haydon calls Lena “stupid” to have lost him; the cook says it is Herman who is “stupid,” and, on the following page, Mary calls Lena “stupid to be sorry” to have lost him (257, 259, 260). “Stupid,” “disgrace” and other judgmental words are the blunt instruments of culture which, with their repeated blows, finally force the couple to submit to marriage.

After their capitulation, Herman adapts better to marriage than Lena does. For her, marriage and children only increase her isolation and alienation. As she silently succumbs to total passivity, “gentle,” the adjective used repeatedly to characterize her earlier in the story, is replaced by “lifeless.” Finally Lena dies in childbirth:

When the baby was come out at last, it was like its mother lifeless. While it was coming, Lena had grown very pale and sicker. When it was all over Lena had died, too, and nobody knew just how it had happened to her.

(279)

The discourse effectively blurs the moment of passage from figurative to literal lifelessness. This bitter play on words is an appropriate conclusion for this powerful story of victimization by language and the social conventions it enforces.

When Samuel Beckett staked out “impotence, ignorance” as his artistic terrain, in contrast to Joyce's exuberant linguistic virtuosity, he believed he was the first to embrace that project: “I don't think impotence has been exploited in the past.”⁹ Apparently he was not acquainted with Three Lives, in which Stein used the verbal impotence of her characters, combined with a similarly restricted narrative idiom, to create a poetics of impotence, of antieloquence. More systematically than the first two stories she wrote for Three Lives, “Melanctha” probes the ways in which the confines of her characters' language shape and, finally, impede their understanding. The central incident in “Melanctha” recasts her 1903 novella Q.E.D., a story of “college bred American women of the wealthier class,” in the vastly different social and linguistic world of a southern black community (Q.E.D., 54). Stein considered “Melanctha” the “quintessence” of the new compositional principles she developed in response to the work of Flaubert and Cézanne (TL, 15). A comparison of these two texts, written only three years apart, reveals how consciously she reevaluated the resources of her medium and how radically she transformed her narrative strategies in response to the twin challenges posed by the work of Cézanne and Flaubert.

The longest and most polished of the three works Stein wrote before Three Lives, Q.E.D. retraces the course of her own passionate and ultimately painful involvement with May Bookstaver, a fellow student at Johns Hopkins, from its tentative beginnings to her final realization of its hopelessness.¹⁰ Apparently Stein wrote Q.E.D. purely for herself, as an effort to understand her own recent and painful experience. Adele, its heroine, is a resolutely rational character, committed to verbal “analysis” and “dissection” of her experience (Q.E.D., 72, 82). Her first speech announces this fundamental personality trait: “I am reasonable because I know the difference between understanding and not understanding and I am just because I have no opinion about things I don't understand” (56). Her intense attraction to Helen soon threatens the placidity of her “reasonableness” and forces her to deal with things she doesn't understand. Challenging her naïve faith that “all morality [is] so easily reducible to formula,” her passion for Helen forces her to confront not only the question of lesbianism but also the problem of Helen's prior involvement with Mabel (93). Her gradual realization that Mabel is supporting Helen further intensifies the moral complexity of her situation.

Q.E.D. focuses on Adele's successive efforts to control her moral and emotional confusion by analyzing it in dialogues, letters, and interior monologues. According to Adele, the major obstacle that ultimately separates her from Helen is not Mabel but irreconcilable differences of temperament. “Their pulses were differently timed” (104); Helen's “courage,” her emotional spontaneity, is out of sync with the slower, more “cowardly” nature of Adele's responses, which stems from her need for intellectual and moral clarity. These differences make the “long struggle” between them as “inevitable as their separate natures” (92). Her lover, who resents being subjected to Adele's constant verbal analysis, perceives her resolute rationality as a barrier to emotional intensity: “Haven't you ever stopped thinking long enough to feel?” (66). The force of her passions temporarily overrides her habitual rational controls, and she lets herself feel and accept her love for Helen, with all its painful moral ambiguities. But by this time it is too late; their different rhythms of response have thwarted the possibility of union. Before the end of the novel, Adele has regained her habitual intellectual detachment, which allows her to enjoy observing the “working of the machinery” of their schematically opposed personalities as it grinds inexorably to the final impasse (121).

“Melanctha” transforms this narrative material into the story of a heterosexual love affair set in a black community, retaining not only the fundamental personality traits of the two lovers and the course of their passions but the specific content of many passages of dialogue and meditation as well. Adele becomes Jeff Campbell, a “negro” doctor, and Helen is re-created as Melanctha, a mulatto woman. The role of Mabel is split among three characters. Jane Harden initiates Melanctha into the “wisdom” of sexual passion and later reveals Melanctha's prior sexual experience to Jeff. After her affair with Jeff is over, Melanctha's affections are dominated by Jem Richards, her lover, and Rose Johnson, her friend. Leon Katz regards Stein's transformation of Q.E.D.'s thinly disguised autobiographical materials into “Melanctha” as a “mode of concealment … done originally for psychological rather than aesthetic reasons.”¹¹ Indeed, recasting Adele as a male character displaces the issue of lesbianism, taboo as a literary subject during Stein's lifetime, from the center of the narrative, although a trace of it still survives in Melanctha's relationship with Jane. But the other major differences between the two texts, especially the crucial change in social milieu that justifies the radical transformation of language in “Melanctha,” clearly reveal the predominance of the new aesthetic concerns Stein had begun to explore in the first two stories of Three Lives. In conformity with the episodic narrative structures of “The Good Anna” and “The Gentle Lena,” in “Melanctha” the material adapted from Q.E.D. becomes the central incident in a story that expands to encompass the heroine's life span from childhood to her early death. In the earlier text, the three women leave New York to travel around Europe. “Melanctha” eliminates these geographical movements, which are largely irrelevant to the dramatic interactions among the characters, and, with them, the kind of concrete descriptive details that create an illusion of circumstantial realism in Q.E.D. The realism of the later text inheres in the speeches and thoughts that constitute the essential action of the story.

Recasting Q.E.D. in the “negro” community of “Bridgeport” posed the challenge of creating a character who, like Adele and originally Stein herself, needs to “have it all clear out in words always, what everybody is always feeling,” but lacks the verbal and conceptual resources provided by their class and educational background (TL, 171). Adele's mind works incessantly to impose rational order on her experiences by formulating them “in definite words” (Q.E.D., 64). “All I want to do is to meditate endlessly and think and talk,” she confesses to Helen (80). Adele regards language as an infallible instrument for clarifying complex emotional and moral issues. For the characters in “Melanctha,” language is, itself, part of the problem. Both Jeff and Melanctha are painfully aware of the inadequacy of their language. During one of their first conversations, Melanctha accuses Jeff, “You don't know very well yourself, what you mean, when you are talking” (TL, 118). Jeff feels the same uncertainty about the efficacy of their communication: “I certainly do wonder, Miss Melanctha, if we know at all really what each other means by what we are always saying” (128).

This sense of the limitations of language is already present as an undercurrent of irony in Q.E.D., which pits Adele's garrulous nature against Helen's silences. From the beginning of their relationship, Adele's words reverberate hollowly out of emotional depths that cannot—or dare not—be named. At the first stirring of these new feelings, “somehow the silence now subtly suggested the significance of their being alone together” (58). Silence, subtle suggestions, a significance that remains forever unarticulated—these are the necessary conditions of the passions Stein explores in Q.E.D., written long before lesbian love entered the accepted discourse of our culture. Immersed in a relationship necessarily governed by a “convention of silence,” Adele uses her verbal arsenal to evade or deny her most profound emotions (77). By the time she finally succumbs to her deepest feelings and “learn[s] to stop thinking,” she has already lost Helen (86). The last interview between them shows Adele once more in complete command of her verbal resources—and, ironically, in full retreat from the significance of the emotional experiences she has undergone during the course of the narrative. She accuses Helen of hiding behind her silences, while the force of the text, for the reader, has been to reveal how much is hidden by her own customary verbosity. And her ringing affirmation, “Nothing is too good or too holy for clear thinking and definite expression,” utterly denies the validity of her unspeakable—yet utterly real—emotional engagement with Helen (132).¹²

Thematically, Q.E.D. marks the beginning of Stein's long career of testing the limits of language, but its narrative discourse is still cast entirely in the rational, analytical language of its central character, which it ironizes and punctuates with silences but does not otherwise surpass. “Melanctha” is the first of many texts in which Stein challenges the dominant cultural discourse stylistically as well as thematically. Even more deliberately than in the other stories in Three Lives, in “Melanctha” the characters' distance from mainstream American culture is used to motivate a systematic stylistic demonstration of the limits of rational discourse as a medium for interpersonal communication.

In Q.E.D., Adele's linguistic and conceptual system provides her with pat labels to classify her experience. She relies heavily on abstract nouns arranged in sets of binary oppositions: virtues and vices, cowardice and heroism, humility and arrogance. In “Melanctha,” Jeff shares Adele's need for conceptual order, but his more restricted lexicon does not include the abstract conceptual terms that dominate Adele's discourse. His speeches consistently translate Adele's abstract nouns into gerundial forms: “heroism” becomes “being game and not hollering”; “passion” is translated into “getting excited”; “living regular” replaces “the middle-class ideal.” These changes involve more than a shift to a more colloquial level of diction; Jeff's terms, derived from active verbs, suggest a closer connection to his immediate experience than Adele's abstract nouns convey. Adele can dispose of the bewildering contradictions in her lover's behavior by categorizing her as a “wonderful example of double personality” (Q.E.D., 81). Jeff, who does not have this kind of terminology at his disposal, has to work harder to come to terms with the same phenomenon in Melanctha:

“Melanctha Herbert,” began Jeff Campbell, “I certainly after all this time I know you, I certainly do know little, real about you. You see, Melanctha, it's like this way with me[.] … You see it's just this way, with me now, Melanctha. Sometimes you seem like one kind of a girl to me, and sometimes you are like a girl that is all different to me, and the two kinds of girls is certainly very different to each other, and I can't see any way they seem to have much to do, to be together in you. They certainly don't seem to be made much like as if they could have anything really to do with each other.”

(TL, 138)

Jeff's hesitations, his new beginnings, his repetitions, concretely embody the slow revolutions of his mind as he tries to define his contradictory feelings about Melanctha. His distortions of syntax (“much to do, to be together,” “much like as if”) function as linguistic symptoms of his inability to make a logical connection between the two extremes of Melanctha's personality. Later in the passage, which closely follows the sequence of Adele's speech in Q.E.D., Jeff's language fails him completely. Adele reports her observation of Helen's “infinitely tender patience that entirely overmasters” her (81). Attempting to describe the same aspect of Melanctha's personality, Jeff is so overwhelmed that he completely loses control of his syntax: “and a kindness, that makes one feel like summer, and then a way to know, that makes everything all over, and all that” (TL, 138).

Throughout the central section of “Melanctha,” Adele's succinct formulations are translated into a more limited lexicon and greatly expanded to dramatize the process of Jeff's efforts to comprehend Melanctha and his own experiences. Adele's speeches and interior monologues use abstract nouns in well-formed sentences simply to report the conclusions of her thought; they do not enact the confused, uncertain process of thinking. In “Melanctha,” deformations of syntax and repetitions of words and syntactical structures radically foreground the materiality of language as an unwieldy medium the characters must work with, and against, in their efforts to resolve complex moral and emotional issues. Like a Cézanne canvas, the assertive surface of this text resists easy comprehension and forces the reader to participate in its rhythmic patterning. In a Cézanne painting, the artfully patterned surface models the process of perceiving physical objects; in “Melanctha,” it embodies the slowly revolving thought processes of the characters as they take shape in language.

Jeff's struggle to understand Melanctha and his own awakening passion dramatizes the extent to which his language shapes and confines his thought. Like Adele, he begins with a moral framework that provides simple binary categories for classifying his experience: “living regular” is “good” and “getting excited” is “bad.” When Jeff is introduced into the story, the narrator uses the words “good” and “bad” as if they were reliable, univocal labels, in apparent complicity with Jeff's system of moral judgment. Jeff is “good”; his father is “good”; Melanctha is “good now to her mother” (TL, 110). But in the early part of the story, which presents Melanctha's initiation into sexual and emotional maturity as a “wandering after wisdom,” the rich polyvalency of the repeated words “wandering” and “wisdom” eludes moral categorization. In sharp contrast, Jeff confronts Melanctha with a rigid set of moral labels. At first he has her safely categorized: “he did not think that she would ever come to any good” (112); he refuses even to acknowledge that she had a “good mind” (116). As he comes to know her somewhat better, he reverses his initial judgment: “Melanctha really was a good woman, and she had a good mind” (131).

Beginning with their first conversation, Melanctha directly challenges Jeff's conventional notions of goodness:

You certainly are just too scared Dr. Campbell to really feel things way down in you. All you are always wanting Dr. Campbell, is just to talk about being good, and to play with people just to have a good time, and yet always to certainly keep yourself out of trouble. It don't seem to me Dr. Campbell that I admire that way to do things very much. It certainly ain't really to me being very good.

(123)

This episode begins the disintegration of the linguistic and conceptual grid through which Jeff has habitually processed his experience, which begins to break down as his passion for Melanctha strains against its rigid structures. Like Adele's in Q.E.D., Jeff's passion plunges him into a moral dilemma. But Jeff's scruples seem much more narrowly moralistic than Adele's, because both the social taboo of lesbianism and the question of Helen's “prostitution” have been eliminated from this story. Brought up to believe that “real, strong, hot love” is the worst form of “getting excited,” bad for himself and his people, he is afraid of sexual passion. When he learns of Melanctha's previous sexual experiences, he judges them unequivocally “bad,” but the increasing strength of his feelings for her do not allow him to dismiss her so easily (151). He roughly rejects her first direct sexual advances as “ugly” (155). Although he later accepts them, the ambivalence remains: “It was all so mixed up inside him. All he knew was he wanted very badly Melanctha should be there beside him, and he wanted very badly, too, always to throw her from him” (156). The more desperately he attempts to decide who, and what, is “good” and “bad,” the more obviously these words fail to provide a stable framework for moral judgments. His attempts to verbalize his feelings poignantly illustrate the insufficiency of the labels he had previously used so confidently to order his experiences.

As he constantly repeats the words “certainly” and “really” in his increasingly desperate efforts to discover what is “certain” and “real” about his experience, these verbal props signal his actual uncertainty and provide a constant ironic counterpoint to his struggles:¹³

“I certainly am wrong now, thinking all this way so lovely, and not thinking now any more the old way I always before was always thinking, about what was the right way for me, … and then I think, perhaps, Melanctha you are really just a bad one, … and then I always get so bad to you, Melanctha, and I can't help it with myself then, never, for I want to be always right really in the ways, I have to do them. I certainly do very badly want to be right, Melanctha, the only way I know is right Melanctha really, and I don't know any way, Melanctha, to find out really, … which way certainly is the real right way … and then I certainly am awful good and sorry, Melanctha, I always give you so much trouble, hurting you with the bad ways I am acting. Can't you help me to any way, to make it all straight for me, Melanctha, so I know right and real what it is I should be acting. … I certainly do badly want to know always, the way I should be acting.”

“No, Jeff, dear, … [a]ll I can do now, Jeff, is to just keep certainly with my believing you are good always, Jeff, and though you certainly do hurt me bad, I always got strong faith in you, Jeff, more in you certainly, than you seem to be having in your acting to me, always so bad, Jeff.”

“You certainly are very good to me, Melanctha, … and me so bad to you always, in my acting. Do you love me good, and right, Melanctha, always?”

(159–60; my emphases)

In Q.E.D., Adele describes a similar conflict in terms of an opposition between “passion” and “Calvinistic influence” or “puritan instincts” (103). In the passage above and elsewhere in “Melanctha,” intensive repetition of the simpler words “good” and “bad,” frequently in combination with “right” and “wrong,” dramatize more directly the impasse these characters have talked themselves into. Jeff and Melanctha call themselves and each other “good” and “bad.” In this dense verbal interplay, the repeated words dominate the discourse, not only as adjectives but in other syntactical functions as well. “Bad(ly)” appears twice as an intensifying adverb, in connection with the adjectives “good” and “right,” both of which are also brought into play as adverbs as the passage progresses. These shifts of grammatical categories augment the reader's sense of the slippery imprecision of these words. As their repetitions echo throughout the passage, these words are gradually emptied of any univocal meaning, while “really” and “certainly” ironically signal the characters' increasing linguistic helplessness and the impossibility of their ever achieving moral certainty through the unwieldy, ambiguous medium of their language.

Jeff's struggles with language are more intense than Melanctha's. Far from sharing his faith in the power of rational thought to clarify emotional experience, she sees it as an impediment that restricts his understanding: “you never can see anything that ain't just so simple, Jeff, with everybody, the way you always think it” (TL, 168). The conflict between her spontaneous, intuitive nature and Jeff's “cold slow way … to feel things in him” (174) re-creates the fundamental opposition between Helen and Adele in Q.E.D. Melanctha is a more eloquent and sympathetic character than Helen, however, and her challenge to Jeff's habits of mind is correspondingly more serious. Accused of being incapable of love because she refuses to “remember right,” she strongly defends the greater value of “real feeling every moment when its needed”:

“I certainly do call it remembering right Jeff Campbell, to remember right just when it happens to you, so you have a right kind of feeling not to act the way you always been doing to me, and then you go home Jeff Campbell, and you begin with your thinking, and then it certainly is very easy for you to be good and forgiving with it. No, that ain't to me, the way of remembering Jeff Campbell, not as I can see it not to make people always suffer, waiting for you certainly to get to do it. Seems to me like Jeff Campbell, I never could feel so like a man was low and to be scorning of him, like that day in the summer, when you threw me off just because you got one of those fits of your remembering. No, Jeff Campbell, its real feeling every moment when its needed, that certainly does seem to me like real remembering.”

(181)

In “Melanctha,” these contrasting rhythms of personality are more directly related to the question of the relationship between language and emotional experience. Jeff is “slow” because his experience is always mediated by rational reflection in language; his responses are always belated. Melanctha distrusts this form of mediation so strongly that she refuses to take responsibility for words she uttered in the past: “You always wanting to have it all clear out in words always, what everybody is always feeling. I certainly don't see a reason, why I should always be explaining to you what I mean by what I am just saying. … I never know anything right I was saying” (171). For her, “it ain't much use to talk about what a woman is really feeling in her” (135). Like Helen in Q.E.D., she sees a fundamental incompatibility between “thinking” and “feeling” (132), but because she is both a more sympathetic and a more articulate character than Helen, her position has a more powerful presence in “Melanctha” than Helen's has in the earlier text.

This opposition between rational analysis and emotional immediacy was one of Stein's central preoccupations during the early years of her career, beginning with her ironic re-creation of her own painful conflict with May Bookstaver in Q.E.D. and culminating in Tender Buttons. “Melanctha,” widely praised for its “colloquial realism,” was a crucial step in the process that would lead Stein far beyond the boundaries of conventional realism. Melanctha's articulated opposition to Jeff's habits of mind is only one of the many ways in which this text undermines the supreme value Adele (and, presumably, once Stein herself) invested in rational thought and expression. Time and again, its forceful demonstrations of how coercively the characters' language controls—and impedes—their perceptions and judgments prefigure the radical iconoclasm of Tender Buttons.

Jeff learns more from his experience than Adele ever does. Gradually his speeches demonstrate to him, as well as to the reader, how inadequate his language and the conceptual framework it dictates are to the moral and emotional complexity of his experience. Through his verbal struggles with Melanctha and with his own passions, Jeff gradually comes to doubt his own habitual intellectual stance: “Perhaps what I call my thinking ain't really so very understanding” (135). As he abandons his efforts to rationalize his experiences and allows himself simply to feel them, he begins to achieve for himself the “real wisdom” of passionate life that Melanctha already possesses. When he begins to sense the loss of her love, he asks for verbal assurances, but he can no longer be comforted by her repeated declarations that she loves him. Aware now of the gap between language and the reality of emotional experience, he “could not make an answer to Melanctha. What was it he should now say to her? What words could help him to make their feeling any better?” (198). At the end of Q.E.D., Adele reverts to her habits of abstract categorization as a means of distancing and controlling her pain; she dismisses Helen by labeling her a “prostitute” (121, 127). Jeff, with more wisdom, cannot use such words to deny his feelings. Even after he has lost Melanctha, he “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” (TL, 207).

Jeff's gradual attainment of this wisdom that transcends moral categories is ironically framed by Melanctha's involvement with Rose Johnson, who represents the unreflective, formulaic morality that initially governed Jeff's habits of thought. The text begins and ends with Melanctha's fatal emotional dependence on Rose, who “had strong the sense of proper conduct” (88). Ignoring Melanctha's years of faithful friendship and service, Rose harshly condemns her dealings with men as unequivocally “bad” and banishes Melanctha from her house with absolute self-righteousness. Rose mindlessly repeats the words “good” and “bad,” “right” and “wrong,” which were demonstrated to be so problematic in Jeff's struggles to achieve “wisdom.” As Melanctha is bludgeoned by these repetitions in a rejection that finally breaks her spirit and leads to her early death, the text offers its final, ironic demonstration of the terrible power of these words both to shape and to impede judgment, by restricting thought to the categories they create.

Repetition is central to the mode of realism Stein created in “Melanctha,” a densely patterned textual surface that models the process by which thoughts take shape in language. Although it makes use of some syntactical features common to nonstandard dialects, the language of “Melanctha” is not a literal transcription of Black English but a stylization of the speech and thought patterns of characters whose language is inadequate to their experience. Although the simple words the characters use are shown to be slippery, unstable instruments, their patterning forcefully enacts the play of passions, the frustrating processes of thought and communication. Wordsworth, a century before Stein, discovered the power of repetition to imitate the “craving in the mind” to bridge the gap between intense emotion and inadequate means of expression:

There is a numerous class of readers who imagine that the same words cannot be repeated without tautology: this is a great error: virtual tautology is much oftener produced by using different words when the meaning is exactly the same. Words, a Poet's words, more particularly, ought to be weighed in the balance of feeling, and not measured by the space which they occupy upon paper. For the Reader cannot be too often reminded that Poetry is passion: it is the history or science of feelings; now every man must know that an attempt is rarely made to communicate impassioned feelings without something of an accompanying consciousness of the inadequateness of our own powers, or the deficiencies of language. During such efforts there will be a craving in the mind, and as long as it is unsatisfied the Speaker will cling to the same words, or words of the same character. There are also various other reasons why repetition and apparent tautology are frequently beauties of the highest kind. Among the chief of these reasons is the interest which the mind attaches to words, not only as symbols of the passion, but as things, active and efficient, which are of themselves part of the passion.¹⁴

Wordsworth's project, like Stein's, was to explore the motions of the human mind in the medium of language. In poems like “The Thorn,” the occasion for these reflections, he created personae with limited powers of expression, whose verbal repetitions function mimetically, to dramatize their struggles to formulate their experiences in language. As Wordsworth observed, repetition foregrounds the materiality of language, of words “not only as symbols of the passion, but as things, active and efficient, which are of themselves part of the passion.” Far more radically than Wordsworth, Stein used repetition in “Melanctha” to undermine the functioning of words as univocal “symbols of the passion” while emphasizing their irreducible power to shape the process of thought.

But for Stein, as for Wordsworth, repetition has other uses as well. Repetition of words, sound, and syntactical patterns plays a major role in structuring poetic language. In “Melanctha,” the characters' speeches have their own “beauties” of sound and rhythm, even as they demonstrate the speakers' linguistic inadequacy. Passages of direct narration use the same verbal texture and rhythm to create a rich evocation of simple, elemental patterns of action. In the following passage, repetition reveals not linguistic helplessness but poetic power:

From the time that Melanctha was twelve until she was sixteen she wandered, always seeking but never more than very dimly seeing wisdom. …

Melanctha's wanderings after wisdom she always had to do in secret and by snatches, for her mother was then still living and ‘Mis’ Herbert always did some watching. …

In these days Melanctha talked and stood and walked with many kinds of men. … They all supposed her to have world knowledge and experience. They, believing that she knew all, told her nothing, and thinking that she was deciding with them, asked for nothing, and so though Melanctha wandered widely, she was really very safe with all the wandering.

It was a very wonderful experience this safety of Melanctha. … Melanctha herself did not feel the wonder. …

She knew she was not getting what she so badly wanted. …

Melanctha liked to wander, and to stand by the railroad yard, and watch the men and the engines and the switches and everything that was busy there, working. … For a child watching through a hole in the fence above the yard, it is a wonder world of mystery and movement.

(TL, 97–98; my emphases)

The lush surface texture flaunts its poetic play of alliteration, rhyme, and repetition of words. The repeated alliteration of w and m, the major sound motifs of the passage, contrasts with the repetition of sibilants and hard k sounds. Participial endings create a network of rhyme. Throughout the passage, sound creates a network of connections independent of syntax, which has a powerful semantic function. As the pattern of words beginning with w gradually unfolds, “wandered” and “wisdom” establish the theme and set in motion the associative chain that follows. Wandering, wanting, walking, watching, the men working—forms of these verbs recur, echoing through this passage and the pages that follow. The nouns “wonder,” “world,” and “wisdom” entwine themselves in this network of sound associations. A second alliterative chain links Melanctha first to her mother and then to the “mystery and movement” of the world of men. At the beginning, Melanctha's mother is watching her; by the end, Melanctha herself is watching the men working. Finally, several pages later, the words “woman” and “wife” appear to complete the sequence (103). As it gradually unfolds in the linear movement of the passage, this interplay of phonemic repetition and difference creates a rhythmic sound pattern that powerfully reinforces the life pattern of emerging sexual awareness that is the theme of the passage.

This long passage is the only section of “Melanctha” that makes systematic use of repetition to embody the rhythm of a life process. This text demonstrates the impotence of repetition, in the speeches and thoughts of its characters, more systematically than its power. In both cases, repetition is used to model the rhythm of a temporal process, and the realism inheres in the material patterning of language, foregrounded to create an iconic figuration of the object it models. After completing Three Lives, Stein soon lost interest in the problem of representing the speech and thought patterns of characters whose command of the language is limited and concentrated on exploring the power of repetition to render her own synoptic vision of characters and life processes.

Notes

1. In Gertrude Stein in Pieces, Richard Bridgman notes that Stein retained the title Three Histories until 1909, when her publisher persuaded her to change it to avoid confusion with his line of “real historical publications” (p. 46).

2. Oeuvres complètes de Gustave Flaubert (Paris: Club de l'Honnête Homme, 1972), 4:22.

3. Richard Bridgman, The Colloquial Style in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 46.

4. Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 33. Hugh Kenner, Joyce's Voices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 15–38.

5. Proust, “A propos du ‘style’ de Flaubert,” pp. 73–74, 81. Cf. Alfred Thibaudet's splendid chapter “Le style de Flaubert,” in Gustave Flaubert (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1922), especially pp. 277–82, 304–17.

6. Bridgman, Colloquial Style in America, pp. 169–74. Q.E.D.'s reference to “Kate Croy” (sic) clearly indicates that Stein had read at least The Wings of the Dove before 1903.

7. These terms are taken from Dorrit Cohn's Transparent Minds. This excellent study establishes a well-defined (and much-needed) critical vocabulary for analyzing fictional representations of consciousness.

8. In Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty (London: Paul Elek, 1974), Jonathan Culler observes that Félicité is one of Flaubert's characters who “have no language which they could claim captures their existence, and this is what protects them, for as soon as the critic speaks of them he begins muttering clichés about the purity of simple folk, the joys of unalienated consciousness. … When she does speak to others the very banality of her discourse, its blatant exposure to irony, works to save it from any effective irony” (pp. 208–9).

9. Quoted in Hugh Kenner, Samuel Beckett, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 33.

10. See Leon Katz's introduction to the volume Fernhurst, Q.E.D. and Other Early Writings, pp. ix-xxxii.

11. Katz, “The First Making of The Making of Americans,” p. 57.

12. The previous discussion of silence in Q.E.D. is indebted to an unpublished paper written by one of my students, Susan Abbott's “An Absence So Strange, a Presence So Vital: Issues of Lesbian Representation in Woolf, Stein, and Wittig.” This paper, combined with a suggestion from Leon Katz, forced me to rethink my previous approach to the issue of irony in this text.

13. Bridgman notes the ironic effect of the repetition of the word “certainly” (Colloquial Style in America, pp. 181–82).

14. Note to “The Thorn” (1800), in Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940–49), 2:513. Frances Ferguson's discussion of Wordsworth's writings about language in chapter 1 of Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977) brought this passage to my attention (pp. 11–16).