SOURCE: “Wrestling Your Ally: Stein, Racism, and Feminist Critical Practice,” in Women's Writing in Exile, edited by Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram, The University of North Carolina Press, 1989, pp. 181–98.

And this movement that began with a moving evocation of truth, begins to appear fraudulent from the outside, begins to mirror all that it says it opposed, for now it, too, is an oppressor of certain truths, and speakers, and begins, like the old oppressors, to hide from itself.

—Susan Griffin, “The Way of All Ideology”

It is crucial that women participate in the open questioning of the exclusionary project of canonization, in literary theory as well as in literature. Through the pioneering efforts of such feminist scholars as Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, Paul Lauter, and Jane Tompkins, we could begin to imagine what a truly reconstructed canon would offer. In the spirit of sisterhood we believed that as feminist scholars we were allies, united in our mutual liberation project. As allies we would join forces and assert our authority, concentrate on re-discovering, re-reading women's texts historically suppressed by those in charge of creating literary canons.

In theory, the availability of previously “suppressed” or “lost” texts would unite academic women of diverse races and classes as “mujeres de fuerza” (women of strength) in a political coalition whose immediate goal was restructuring the literary canon which legitimized the social power of male hegemony. In practice, however, women who might have been natural allies in a struggle against exclusionary, patriarchal practices in the academy instead are estranged because the feminist mainstream has not dealt adequately with differences of women on the periphery of the power structure: working-class women, Chicanas, Afro-American women, women of the Third World, for examples.

In 1983 Shari Benstock, as editor of Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, (TSWL)called for a reevaluation of the choices made by women in power to establish a feminist canon (“Feminist Critique,” 148). She cautioned us to realize the danger of women's mirroring patriarchal, exclusionary tactics in our own literary project. “Have women writers and women critics,” she asked, “successfully set up shop in a separate part of the literary universe, establishing a canon that parallels the established one, defining a gynocentric axis from which radiate the various forms of women's literary imagination?” (“Feminist Critique,” 139).

Benstock then cited an example of white feminists who privilege feminist criticism but exclude issues of race and class. She saw that this blindness potentially establishes a literary hierarchy no less exclusionary than the traditional male literary canon. Her example was Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Writing.¹ Russ, perhaps unintentionally but significantly, relegates Third World women, women of color, and lesbians to the back of the bus, so to speak. Though Russ discusses her slip at length, nevertheless, Third World women, women of color, and lesbians, the “aliens” of Russ's universe, find it hard not to see the irony in Russ's own form of suppression. Indeed, Russ's exclusionary practice is symptomatic of an almost exclusively white feminist movement and, in turn, of liberal feminist critical theory. These symptoms point to the urgency for us to confront the contradictions of white, middle-class women who fetishize an abstract marginalization, oblivious to the concerns of the alienated women who exist only at the periphery of the women's movement, the contemporary exiles of the feminist literary and critical projects.

As women on the border, we are aware of the dangers inherent in celebrating marginalization. We fear that like those liberal feminists who have made careers out of their own marginalization, we too might diffuse political praxis, thereby defeating the Third World feminist project. Feminism as a critical political stance is a fraud when practiced in a cultural and historical void. To avoid echoing the patriarchal, capitalistic exclusionary agenda, feminist criticism must integrate race and class issues with gender issues.

Questions of difference within feminist projects also must be addressed; we must remember that insidious racism is so ingrained in the ruling-class consciousness that it can emerge even in the most sympathetic discourse. Benstock continued her editorial by urging her colleagues to examine the “authority of our own experience … to challenge its assumptions and maneuvers.” But she then undermined her own commitment to a feminist liberalism when she called for “essays on women writers in foreign language literatures, essays on women of color, essays on third world women writers” (“Feminist Critique,” 147, 148). Even the sympathetic Benstock unconsciously designated as “object,” as “other,” as “foreign,” the study and practice of non-English-speaking, nonwhite women's writing.² Surely the editor of one of the leading feminist literary journals did not assume that white feminist critics in the First World must take up the banner for women they perhaps consider to be inarticulate, uneducated Third World sisters. As a Chicana, a member of a group clearly alien to the pages of TSWL, I propose to take Benstock's challenge further.

My response is that of a bilingual woman of color whose use of Spanish is not considered foreign in East Austin, Texas, East Los Angeles, the barrios of Chicago, or in many other cities of the United States. Third World women who live at the periphery, within the national borders of the United States, women of color, working-class women, refuse to become objects of theoretical studies by white, liberal feminists or by “mainstream” patriarchal critics. We “other” women insist on decentering the privileged position that liberal feminists have created for themselves as we articulate and examine issues which many feminist theorists apparently have great difficulty in addressing.

Another site of our struggle with the hegemonic tendencies of our white, liberal, U.S. sisters is the literary anthology. Chicana writers have been exiled from the pages of important texts like the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (NALW). Editors Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar express regret for omitting Chicanas and Italian-American women from the collection, citing the same “space-restrictions” excuse the male editors of anthologies have long used. The implication to Chicanas is that our writing is too marginal to be canonized in this mirroring of the male power structure. The implication to those women exiled by their allies is that they are too alien to be included in a female ruling-class tradition that is also part of the white power structure. Compared with the issues that some of our compañeras in the field face, however, the plight of the Chicana writer in academia is one we find painful to face. As daughters of the campesino, women of the working class, we are in danger that our new status as bourgeois academics allows us such self-indulgent rhetoric as “Chicana writers have been exiled from the pages of important texts.”

Another way of looking at this problem, however, is through Lorna Dee Cervantes's assertion that theoretical criticism for the Chicana “is not an arbitrary practice, it is a strategic aim. … A Chicana critic is one who wants to undermine the system she lives under through a calculated act of intellectual and discursive sabotage” (“Chicana Critics,” 8). Through such acts of sabotage we engage in a guerrilla warfare with women who preserve their privileged positions when they merely urge conciliation without actually changing the oppressive system. Liberal feminists express dismay when Chicanas call for a boycott of offending anthologies. When they wonder why women fight other women, why the unquestioned, male-centered anthologies were never subjected to a similar boycott, we answer as second-generation feminists, often trained by white feminist mentors to demand more from women who themselves struggled against exclusionary phallocentric practices.³ We expect that white, liberal feminists understand that their history is not monolithic. They must remember that history for those of us who are Chicanas is the dual history of oppression as women and exploitation as daughters of the campesino. Our dual history is tied, for example, to the history of farmworker boycotts our parents and grandparents used as acts of sabotage in places like the Rio Grande Valley, an area of Texas where 90 percent of the people who live below the poverty level are Chicanos.

The issues exiled women confront, however, are even more problematic than exile from the canon. In articulating a feminist poetics, scholars point out the dangers of allowing stereotypes of women in literature to stand unchallenged. When we consider which women to include in a women's studies curriculum, we must acknowledge other dangers when we resurrect writers patriarchal academics buried simply on the basis of gender. Gertrude Stein, in many ways an example of the exiled woman writer, is a case in point. The patriarchy banished her from its canon while it privileged the boys she taught to write.

Only one year after Shari Benstock challenged us to include “other” women for publication in TSWL, she published an essay on the problem of where to place Gertrude Stein in the feminist alter-canon:

Do we want the women writers we discover to join the canon of male writers or do we want a separate canon, and if we want a separate literary canon and a separate critical practice—our own—how will these differ from the “enshrined canons of achievement” around which course descriptions, dissertations … and academic careers construct themselves? Do we claim the center for ourselves (taking up the Modernist project) or do we redefine the limits of authority by which the center constitutes itself (taking up the post-Modernist project)? Or do we, like Gertrude Stein, try to do both? … And such questions poise themselves—and in so doing poise us—on that awkward border between Modernism and post-Modernism, between practice and theory.

(“Beyond the Reaches,” 10)

I propose that it is that “awkward border” between practice and theory that liberal feminists such as Russ, Benstock, Gilbert, and Gubar neglect to acknowledge as the space where racism can enter and undermine the effectiveness of the feminist project. In theory, Benstock can call for sensitivity toward women of color, but in practice she includes the white supremacist Gertrude Stein in her feminist pantheon of great writers. In theory, women of color can aspire to membership in the feminist critical school; in practice, we find an editorial essay in a leading feminist journal which praises a writer whose racism and class bias I will examine in this essay. I propose that we use the same feminist and deconstructive methodologies in the study of Gertrude Stein as those tools that Benstock sees merged in a “most fortunate marriage of theory and practice” (“Beyond the Reaches,” 19) to dismantle and work out the extreme “marital” alienation between liberal, white feminists and feminists of color whose literary and critical discourses have been exiled by their allies. My project, then, is a dual one. As well as drawing attention to the exile of Chicanas from the feminist canon I hope to explore the writing of a woman we are encouraged to consider a literary foremother.

The reader can approach Gertrude Stein's Three Lives in the spirit of re-discovery. Imagine the secure comfort of a naive student who “discovers” an allegedly suppressed literary mother. It was in this spirit that I began the first “life,” “The Good Anna.”

At first, the pathetic character of a German immigrant, Anna seems to be representative of one stereotypical version of an older woman: bitter and alone. As Stein develops her character, however, Anna's attitudes about class and gender become the narrator's assumptions of traits possessed by all “lower-class” servants. The question of whether the good Anna is really “good” becomes irrelevant as statements that I wanted to accept as ironic became suspiciously stated as facts: “Anna had always a firm old world sense of what was the right way for a girl to do” (Three Lives, 24), as well as the distinction Anna made between the class of “maid” and that of “servant.” Anna's penchant for controlling her employers' lives seemed to be presented as a model of how “good help” should behave. The good Anna would never allow herself to sit down with her superior, Miss Mathilda: “A girl was a girl and should always act like a girl, both as to giving all respect and as to what she had to eat” (24).

At this point in the story, the naive reader could still believe that Stein presented the good Anna's servant credo as idiosyncratic to the unique character in a fiction. Stein's tone is ironic, the reader can argue. Surely Stein is being consciously ambiguous so the reader can see for herself that these are class issues that must be subverted. When we were undergraduates, our professors warned us about the intentional fallacy; as sophisticated readers we are supposed to understand that Anna's situation is a result of her own peculiarities. Readers can comfort themselves with the belief that Stein was creating a portrait of a woman who manipulates those around her by sacrificing her own life for them.⁴ Anna is the consummate martyr figure who uses self-sacrifice to gain power over people. Surely that is all Stein is saying.

This naive reader, however, was becoming more uneasy. Was it possible that Gertrude Stein, the writer I was supposed to admire, could not see the obvious class issues that contribute to Anna's character? I began to question phrases like “obedient, happy servant” and “by nature slatternly and careless,” which Stein used to describe other working-class women. By now I was being forced to question whether I could ever again read for character and plot and literary technique and ignore more pressing political issues.

“Melanctha,” the next “life,” had promised to be an avant-garde portrait of a black woman who searches intensely for self-knowledge and seeks an outlet for her sexuality. But for the readers who are of the working class and/or are women of color, the betrayal soon is unmistakable. The more this naive reader read, the more obvious it became that Stein believed in the basic “unmorality of the black people,” that she believed that the “negroes” have a simplicity which is exhibited in their “joyous, earth born, boundless joy” (86).

Clearly, the next step for the naive reader to take is to search the academic sages for published support for a growing disgust with the narrow, prejudiced portrayals of the women in Three Lives. We find blindness instead of insight. Issues that seemed to provide the very reasons to undermine Stein's portrayals are hailed by some critics as the reasons to study and include Stein in canon formation.

In his 1973 biography of Stein, Howard Greenfeld discusses intellectual influences on her, the most important one being her relationship with William James, who first introduced the young Stein to the use of language “under unusual circumstances” (13). Her published psychological experiments are relevant to her presentation of the “lower-class” German immigrants and the “half white mulatto girl” in Three Lives.⁵ But Greenfeld's analysis of the characters' speech in the stories is most disturbing:

These tales, especially “Melanctha,” are somewhat unconventional in language and style. Gertrude tried to re-create the actual sounds and rhythms of her characters using colloquial speech and a kind of sing song repetition. Her overall desire was to create what she felt Cezanne had created in his paintings, works in which each element was as important as the entire work itself. … The author herself never intrudes—the people in these stories speak for themselves, in their own voices.

(Greenfeld, 42)

For Greenfeld to claim that these characters speak “in their own voices” is incomprehensible. If we accept his statement, we must ignore the always present, powerful, controlling narrative voice that is Stein. Greenfeld, however, can be explained away as a symptom of the phallocentric disease. His aestheticist, ahistorical, non-class-conscious analysis is typical of the critical approach of many scholars of his school, New Criticism.

Unfortunately, even the poststructuralist feminist critic Marianne DeKoven is not immune to using such an approach. DeKoven is one of those contemporary critics who sidesteps issues of race and class in awarding Stein a place in the feminist canon as an experimental writer whose style is emblematic of antipatriarchal writing. DeKoven claims that she cannot deconstruct Stein's work because it is already deconstructed: “It is the indeterminate, anti-patriarchal (anti-logocentric, anti-phallogocentric, presymbolic pluridimensional) writing which deconstruction, alias Jacques Derrida, proposes as an antidote to patriarchy” (xvii). Although DeKoven admits that Stein never intended for her writing to be anti-patriarchal, she insists that there is “specifically feminist content” in Three Lives (xviii). The feminist content, however, is obscured by more disturbing issues.

DeKoven defeats her own thesis by concentrating on purely patriarchal, theoretical concerns. She addresses only the linguistic structures in Stein's works. DeKoven also forgets the perhaps mundane concerns of the “objects” that Stein portrays in her three studies: the working class, women, and people of color. DeKoven's work is an example of the flaws of deconstruction without the mediation of either class or race analysis.

Undoubtedly it is easier for such a critic to deal with “signifiers” and forget that real people, races, and classes are affected by the stereotypes she never challenges. When DeKoven places Stein's work in opposition to patriarchal linguistic structure because of Stein's “linguistic radicalism,” the critic forgets that linguistics are part of a totality—the content, the plot, the theme.

For a deconstructionist like DeKoven to look at the totality of Three Lives, particularly “Melanctha,” would be to subvert her own thesis, which is, “in theory,” valid. She claims to focus her “current French feminist, post-structuralist, and psychoanalytic criticism” on the “interplay of language and culture,” yet she accepts the most insidious forms of class and race bias. Liberal feminist critics must address this bias. Her brief analysis of “Melanctha” exposes her ties to the patriarchy as much as it unwittingly unveils Stein's own prejudices. Melanctha is defeated by a “divided self,” DeKoven claims (31). In the short novel, “wisdom becomes an emblem of everything in life that is desirable but difficult to attain; excitement, of everything that is alluring but dangerous” (44). DeKoven goes on to assert that “Stein's very success in rendering in language a unique core of personality leads her away from recognizable depiction of character. In ‘Melanctha,’ it is the wavelike cadence and the repetition of a reduced, strangely resonant and at the same time simple, childlike vocabulary that hold our attention most forcefully as we read, beyond our recognition of character, anticipation of plot, or reflection upon theme” (44–45).

When we as feminist critics accept blatant slurs like the claim that black people speak with a “childlike vocabulary,” when we do not question Steinian images of “negro sunshine” or assumptions of the “simple promiscuous unmorality of the black people,” we are lulled and mesmerized by Stein's cadence and repetitions. Perhaps this is Stein's political agenda. The reader loses consciousness of the racism and classism because s/he is encouraged to think only of an aesthetic category, urged to remember that Stein wrote at a specific time, in a particular culture. But these embarrassments that feminist scholars do not discuss at any depth are at the center of “Melanctha.” It is a story that appeals primarily to intellectuals who assume that everyone who reads Stein will accept the slurs in the spirit of linguistic authenticity, of authorial irony, of Stein's exotic depiction of the “primitive.” These are the tactics of ruling-class ideology; these are the methods the ruling class employs to retain power over the dominated.

In a more sensitive essay on Stein, Catharine Stimpson discusses the author's disregard for displaying class bias.⁶ Stimpson also explores how Stein's need to mask her lesbianism forced her to devise tactics that would allow her to live as a “possibly tainted anomaly.” Indeed, Stimpson does address Stein's racism in her treatment of black people as strongly sexual creatures. She points out that “problematic passion among whites is transferred to blacks, as if they might embody that which the dominant culture feared” (501). But she does not seem to believe that the racial issue is of prime importance as she glosses over the unpleasantness of Stein's bigotry: “The facts that Stein disliked raw racial injustice and that a black author, Richard Wright, praised ‘Melanctha’ in itself must be balanced against the fact that racial stereotypes help to print out the narrative” (501).

I find it disturbing that even a leading feminist like Stimpson turns to Wright, a misogynistic writer, to exhibit her spirit of egalitarianism. Why does Stimpson need to defer to Wright's authority in her attempt to deal with the embarrassing problem of Stein's perhaps unintentional bigotry? Stimpson seems to believe that though she sees the blatant racism in “Melanctha,” a simple footnote stating that white intellectuals in Stein's time overlooked it as a matter of course says enough about the race issue.⁷

In contrast, though Stimpson is content to accept Wright's evaluation as evidence of an Afro-American consensus, John Brinnin includes Claude McKay's response to “Melanctha”: “In the telling of the story I found nothing striking and informative about Negro life. Melanctha, the mulatress, might have been a Jewess. And the mulatto Jeff Campbell—he is not typical of mulattoes I have known anywhere. He reminds me more of a type of white lover described by a colored woman” (quoted in Brinnin, 121).

In her essay on the Afro-American female literary tradition Lorraine Bethel reminds us that “Black women writers have consistently rejected the falsification of their Black/female experience, thereby avoiding the negative stereotypes such falsification has often created in the white American female and Black male literary traditions” (177). She cites Wright's Native Son as an example of “how the falsification of the Black experience for the purpose of political protest can result in characters that reinforce racist stereotypes” (187).

From the first page of “Melanctha,” the racial slurs obscure any sympathetic portrayal of a character in Stein's story. The stereotype begins immediately as two women are introduced. Melanctha Herbert is “patient, submissive, soothing, and untiring”; Rose Johnson is “sullen, childish, cowardly, black Rose,” who “grumbled and fussed and howled and made herself to be an abomination and like a simple beast” (Three Lives, 85). Stein's always controlling narrator casts Rose into literary infamy as a “careless and negligent and selfish” woman whose baby dies from her neglect, although she had “liked the baby well enough and perhaps she just forgot it for awhile, anyway the child was dead and Rose and Sam her husband were very sorry but then these things came so often in the negro world in Bridgepoint, that they neither of them thought about it very long” (85).

Although Stein's assumption that poor black people care less, feel less pain about a baby's death can be explained away as a sociological reality viewed by the author when she was a Johns Hopkins medical student, the portrait is not just of one black couple who lost a child and soon forgot. It is an indictment of the “negro world in Bridgepoint” and, by association, of the “negro” world in general.

The hierarchical scale that Stein presents is as obvious as it is vicious. Of course, “white” is the privileged center. Stein takes for granted that her reader will assume that the white race is superior, so she places her characters in opposition, privileging white over black, good over bad, intelligent over simple-minded, sophisticated over childlike vocabulary. Since the world she portrays is the “other” world of black people, the gradations she makes are within the context of an already flawed black world.

Stein wants her reader to remember which “girl” is “good” and which is “bad.” Since Melanctha and Rose belong to this alien, primitive race, perhaps Stein feared that her bourgeois readers would not be able to tell them apart so her technique is the “badder” the “girl,” the “blacker” the skin. At one end of the spectrum is Rose, a “real black, tall, well built, sullen, stupid, childlike, good looking negress,” who was “never joyous with the earth born, boundless joy of negroes,” but was instead a “careless and lazy woman brought up by white folks” (85–86). Even Stein cannot decide how ultimately to place the black people in her story. She wants them all to conform to her vision of this foreign race, but she keeps undermining her own project by making exceptions. She stresses that Rose has not taken advantage of her white patrons' kindness when they raised her as their own child but, in the instinctual way of the “lower” orders, has “drifted from her white folks back to the colored people.” She is unable to become part of the higher order not only because of skin color but because of the innate depravity of her black soul: “She needed decent comfort. Her white training had only made for habits, not for nature” (86).

Stein is not content to portray the “real black” Rose as inferior because of her unique psychic makeup. The implication is that Rose is deficient because of her genetic composition as well as her skin color. For Stein, color is fate in the same way that character is fate. “Rose had the simple promiscuous unmorality of the black people,” the Stein narrator proclaims. The degree of the characters' sexuality is equivalent to the degree of their depravity.⁸

Tied to Rose in a kinship of dark sexuality is Melanctha's father, James. “Melanctha's father was a big black virile negro” (90). As Angela Davis suggests, the stereotype of the hypersexuality of black men seems to fascinate Stein.⁹ She describes Melanctha's mother's attraction to this man solely in terms of this myth: “He only came once in a while to where Melanctha and her mother lived, but always that pleasant, sweet appearing, pale yellow woman, mysterious and uncertain and wandering in her ways, was close to sympathy and thinking to her big black virile husband” (90). James is not within the realm of the “nicer colored folk.” On the contrary, this evil presence is described as a “powerful, loose built, hard handed, black angry negro. Herbert was never a joyous negro.” Like the black Rose, “he never had the wide abandoned laughter that gives the broad glow to negro sunshine” (92).

Melanctha, on the other hand, “was a graceful, pale yellow, intelligent, attractive negress. She had not been raised like Rose by white folks but then she had been made with real white blood” (86). The reader should be properly impressed and should learn more about this curious specimen, a “mulatto girl,” who is half white and half the product of a very black, virile James: “Melanctha was pale yellow and mysterious and a little pleasant like her mother, but the real power in Melanctha's nature came through her robust and unpleasant and very unendurable black father. … Melanctha Herbert almost always hated her black father, but she loved very well the power in herself that came through him” (90).

Melanctha's mystery lies in her search for “wisdom” and in her “wandering” in quest for that self-knowledge. But Stein has already informed the reader that even “with her white blood and attraction and her desire for a right position,” Melanctha is sexually active but has “not yet really been married” (86). The assumption that black people have a typically “promiscuous unmorality” has been made. The reader is to understand, then, that Melanctha's secret yearning for knowledge is inextricably tied to her sexuality, but only in a negative context: that of a deviant, savage “unmorality” found in its natural state in the inferior races. After all, these are the “colored folks,” those childlike creatures Stein likes to compare fondly to nature in her acclaimed “experimental” style: “And the buds and the long earthworms, and the negroes, and all the kinds of children, were coming out every minute farther into the new spring, watery, southern sunshine” (195). The reader who has been mesmerized by Stein's radical writing style may overlook the “negro” next to the earthworm in Stein's great chain of being.¹⁰

Even in a scene that is supposed to show her heroine's education as a wanderer, Stein cannot resist stereotype as she caricatures the railroad porters from whom Melanctha is to “learn”: “As the porters told these stories their round, black, shining faces would grow solemn, and their color would go grey beneath the greasy black, and their eyes would roll white in the fear and wonder of things they could scare themselves by telling” (99).

Stein's class prejudice further intrudes on the Melanctha persona when the wandering girl befriends black dockworkers in the daytime but turns to “upper class” black men for her real lessons. Stein depends upon this same class distinction when she portrays Melanctha's relationship with Jane Hardin, “a roughened woman,” who “had much white blood and that made her see clear, she liked drinking and that made her reckless” (104). Jane initiates Melanctha into active sexuality; Stein implies a lesbian relationship along with sex with white men. Significantly, some of the most believable exchanges are between these two women who obviously care about each other as people. Stein needs to mask and code her own lesbianism, but she allows the reader a glimpse of herself as a woman-identified woman whose story might have worked if she had not needed to mask her sexuality and transfer it to an aberrant “other.”¹¹ Jane and Melanctha's sexual wandering is more credible and described less patronizingly, but both these women have white blood and therefore Stein can deal with them more sympathetically than she does the other black characters.

When Melanctha's major love interest is introduced into the story, it becomes clear that Stein's overt racism frames the central story of Melanctha and Dr. Jefferson Campbell. As Catharine Stimpson states, this love story is a coded autobiographical version of Stein's love affair with May Bookstaver (495–501). Stein suddenly drops the racial generalizations in this subplot that makes up the major part of “Melanctha.” Perhaps when Stein was being “personal,” she was able to suspend racist ideology.

Unfortunately, once the racism all but disappears, blatant class bias takes its place. Jeff becomes the Stein persona who espouses a bootstrap mentality. He states that his “colored” people do “bad” things because they “want to get excited” (Three Lives, 121). As a mouthpiece for Stein, this character has no social or political awareness. Campbell's repressed sexuality emerges in his confused philosophy of correct behavior: “I certainly do only know just two ways of loving. One kind of loving seems to me, is like one has a good quiet feeling in a family when one does his work … and then the other way of loving is just like having it like any animal that's low in the streets together, and that don't seem to me very good” (124).

Once this love story section is over, Stein returns to her racist frame. She concludes that Melanctha is too much a product of her “very black virile father” to settle for a bland, mulatto, bourgeois domesticity with Dr. Jeff. She drives him away and turns instead to a “lower class” man, a “young buck” who eventually discards the complex Melanctha.

Stein brings her narrative full circle when she returns to the story of Rose and Melanctha and the baby's death and Sam's sympathy for Melanctha in her troubles. With the repetition and the celebrated run-on sentences, Stein drills in racist stereotypical characterizations of these inhabitants of the Afro-American world. The narrator reminds the reader that Rose's baby dies because of her negligence and again that neither Rose nor her husband thinks about it very long. Black Rose begins to feel jealous of her husband's passing attentions to Melanctha, and in a brutal scene, the always “careless, negligent selfish” Rose severs the friendship with the victimized heroine.

Melanctha's deterioration proceeds rapidly. She has driven Jeff away and is now betrayed by Rose. Stein then finishes the job by giving her previously healthy though melancholy heroine a disease, putting her in a home for “poor consumptives,” and killing her off with a swift stroke of the pen in one sentence. We are to understand that since “these things [come] so often in the negro world” (85), neither Stein nor her seduced feminist readers think about issues of race and class for very long.

As a woman of color, I will reply to Benstock's question on the direction that feminist criticism is now to take. I cannot presume to be able to answer the opposition between aesthetics and content that writers such as Gertrude Stein force us to confront, but we do need to continue challenging the authority of those who forget that there are differences within the feminist project. We know what can happen when women begin to question their allies. The Chicana writers who are compelled to write what they know sometimes write passionate poetry of wife beating, of rape, of betrayal by their men and culture. These women risk the label of “vendida,” sellout.

The poet Lorna Dee Cervantes writes: “Consider the power of wrestling your ally. His will is to kill you. He has nothing against you” (Emplumada, 1). We are killing Chicana and Italian-American women's writing when we leave it out of our breakthrough Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. We are killing the dignity of women of color and working-class women when we continue to promote authors like Gertrude Stein without acknowledging their race and class prejudice. What are we to conclude when the editors of NALW include “The Gentle Lena” portion of Three Lives but leave out the more blatantly racist and class-biased “Melanctha” and “The Good Anna”? We must consider the power that we hold when we choose to exile some literatures and canonize others. The women exiled from the pages of feminist journals, anthologies, and course syllabi are indeed “alien and critical” as we make ourselves subjects in feminist literary analysis.

Notes

1. In her Afterword, Russ lumps together all the “other” women she neglected in the text proper. Black women, Chicanas, Native American women, and lesbians become a collective “other” and lose their inherent “difference.” For further evaluation of Russ's Afterword as afterthought, see Carol Sternhell's review. In formulating my ideas while trying to suppress my rage at being designated an outsider in the women's society of outsiders (feminist scholars) I have been guided and encouraged by Jane Marcus. I appreciate not only her encouragement but also her ability to share my anger and teach me how to harness it in my writing. A version of this essay was first presented at the 1986 Modern Language Association convention held in New York. The panel was called “Women Writers in Exile I: Communities of Exile.”

2. This is an example of the feminist “theory” versus “practice” that Gayatri Spivak discusses in the Foreword to her translation of “Draupadi” by Mahasveta Devi. Shari Benstock is also an example of how committed feminists can begin to transform theory into practice. At the 1987 South Central MLA Feminist Forum she included my essay “Chicana Feminism: A Counter Discourse,” in which I suggested that women of the Southwest boycott the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. As a result of that panel, the 1988 South Central MLA Feminist Forum had a section called “Women of Color in Academia,” and the caucus panel, “The Politics of Feminism.” Benstock continues to show her commitment to Third World feminisms in coediting with Celeste Schenck a series for Cornell University Press, Reading Women Writing.

3. For a discussion of feminist scholarship in terms of “generations” see Jane Marcus's “Daughters of Anger.”

4. See Steiner, Exact Resemblance, and DeKoven, “Gertrude Stein and Modern Painting,” for discussions of Stein as a cubist writer.

5. See Brinnin, Third Rose, for a thorough discussion of Stein's undergraduate psychology experiments.

6. See Stimpson, “The Mind, the Body, and Gertrude Stein,” for a complete analysis of Stein's acceptance of pseudo-scientist Otto Weininger's anti-Semitic, misogynistic ideology in his 1909 Sex and Character. Stimpson posits that Weininger provided some hope for Stein when he claimed that “the homosexual woman is better than the rest of her sex. Actively partaking of male elements, she may aspire to those aesthetic and intellectual pursuits that are otherwise a male province” (497). Another important essay is Richard Bridgman's “Melanctha” (1961). I was surprised and further disillusioned with contemporary feminist Stein scholars when I discovered in this essay similar points as mine on the racism in “Melanctha.”

7. This opens up the debate on the appropriation of Afro-American experience by white feminists, an issue I cannot adequately address in this essay. For further elaboration, see Bell Hooks in Ain't I a Woman, especially her critique of Stimpson's “‘Thy Neighbor's Wife, Thy Neighbor's Servants.’” Richard Wright's position on Stein's representation of the Afro-American dialect was part of another debate among the writers in the Harlem Renaissance. For a discussion of these issues see Wahneema Lubiano's chapter “The Harlem Renaissance and the Roots of Afro-American Literary Modernism,” in “Messing with the Machine.” Brinnin cites the Wright quotation, which appeared in a review by Wright of Stein's “Wars I Have Seen,” first published in PM Magazine March 11, 1945. Wright states: “Miss Stein's struggling words made the speech of the people around me vivid. From that moment on, in my attempts at writing, I was able to tap at will the vast pool of living words that swirled around me.” In spite of Wright's own political affiliations, the social and political position of Afro-Americans as an internal colony in 1945 are revealed in his implication that it took reading a story written by a white person to make him suddenly value black English. See his 1937 review of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God for an example of his misogynism. It is ironic that he in effect destroyed Hurston's literary career when he critiqued her novel yet he admired Stein's depiction of the Afro-American experience.

8. See Stimpson, “The Mind,” 497, on Stein's interest in Weininger's pseudo-scientific work. Stein still believed Weininger's claims when she wrote Three Lives.

9. See Davis, “Rape, Racism, and the Myth of the Black Rapist.” Davis cites Stein's Three Lives in her examination of the sexual abuse of black women by white men. She states: “Such assaults have been ideologically sanctioned by politicians, scholars and journalists, and by literary artists who have often portrayed Black women as promiscuous and immoral. Even the outstanding writer Gertrude Stein described one of her Black women characters as possessing ‘the simple, promiscuous unmorality of the black people’” (176).

10. For an analysis of the construct of the “mulatta” figure, see Spillers, “Notes on an Alternative Model.”

11. For further elaboration of Stein's revision of the autobiographical Q.E.D. into the coded “Melanctha,” see Stimpson, “The Mind,” 498–502; also Ruddick, “‘Melanctha.’”

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