interior life. Jeff’s experiences demonstrate this theme at great length. When the reader first meets Jeff, he sees life simply and with a great deal of certainty: he ‘‘believed you ought to love your father and your mother and to be regular in all your life, . . . and to always know where you were, and what you wanted, and to always tell everything just as you meant it.’’ As his feelings for Melanctha grow, however, and as he becomes more in touch with his emotional life, his sense of certainty diminishes: ‘‘Then he knew he really could know nothing. He knew then, he never could know what it was she really wanted with him. He knew then he never could know really what it was he felt inside him.’’ Similarly, he discovers his inability to know and communicate with Melanctha, demonstrating, in Sutherland’s words, ‘‘an incoherence between two subjectivities.’’ In place of the traditional notions of truth and reality, Jeff and the reader come to depend on the ‘‘wisdom’’ of emotional experience.

At the opposite end of the spectrum from Jeff the reader finds Rose, who never doubts herself: ‘‘Rose was selfish and was stupid and was lazy, but she was decent and knew always what was the right way she should do, and what she wanted.’’ Jem, also, has little experience of doubt: the world and his own needs are apparently quite transparent to him. Tellingly, these are the characters who most hurt Melanctha and whom the narrator portrays as the least complex and the least compelling.

Stein conveys the ‘‘emotional wisdom’’ that Jeff learns through style as well as content. Stein’s centrality as a modernist writer stems from her stylistic innovations, from her efforts to rework narrative structure and sentences in order to represent the world in new ways, thus possibly portraying a reality not accessible to conventional forms. Paramount among these in ‘‘Melanctha’’ is the ‘‘prolonged present’’ she defines in her essay ‘‘Composition as Explanation’’: ‘‘a constant recurring and beginning there was a marked direction in the direction of being in the present although naturally I had been accustomed to past present and future, and why, because the composition forming around me was a prolonged present.’’ The idea for a prolonged present originated in the theories of William James, particularly in his idea of a human perception, which also stressed the ‘‘stream of consciousness’’ that Stein employs. In a sense, this rush of sensual perception and emotional experience is the reality in which Jeff learns to live and in which Melanctha seems naturally to exist. The prolonged present exchanges conventional notions of past and future, as well as causality, for time made up distinct but aggregate ‘‘now’’s. These two notions of time also have their place in the content of the story, particularly in Jeff and Melanctha’s arguments about memory: Jeff understands it as a consistent image of the past and Melanctha understands it as rewritten in each moment. Sutherland’s insistence that Stein’s ‘‘has to be read word by word, as a succession of single meanings accumulating into a larger meaning,’’ points out how her style captured this notion of time.

As much as she owed to William James for her stylistic innovations, Stein owed at least as much to the painters with whom she associated in Paris at the beginning of the century. Also entertaining new ideas of reality and perception, the artists searched for new modes of representation, depicting their subjects—the usual apples, landscapes, bodies, and faces—with very untraditional techniques. A cubist or fauvist painter might, for example, reduce his subject to its basic geometric shapes and intensify the colors; painting a room or a landscape, he might erase traditional distinctions between foreground and background, so that the wallpaper holds the viewer’s eye as forcefully as the still life on the table. A futurist might try to put on canvas several different views of his subject at once, so that a face becomes a fan of sharp angles and lines, repeating one part over again with slight variations. And painters working in many different styles would apply the paint heavily to the canvas, compelling the viewer to become aware of the paint itself as a material-and to realize that they are looking at a canvas, rather than at an actual apple or body. Translating these efforts onto the page with her use of repetition, disjointed sentences, and stream of consciousness, Stein leaves her reader with an awareness of how things are represented and none of the usual certainty about what is represented.

Source: Ondine Le Blanc, ‘‘An Overview of ‘Melanctha’,’’ in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 1999. Le Blanc is an editor and writer who has taught at the University of Michigan.

Gertrude Stein thought of herself as having spent her life escaping from the nineteenth century into which she had been born. This chapter is about the ambivalent beginnings of that escape. With the story ‘‘Melanctha,’’ Stein made her first leap into modernist modes of representation; she herself described [in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas] the story (immodestly but plausibly) as ‘‘the first definite step away from the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century in literature.’’ Yet the text looks backward at the same time.

‘‘Melanctha’’ carries on a private conversation with William James, Stein’s college mentor and the central figure in the early drama of her self-definition as a modernist. Along one of its axes, Stein’s story reads as a tribute to James’s psychological theories—theories that despite their well-known continuities with modernist aesthetics are nineteenthcentury in their ethics. Yet at the margins of the story, other material shows Stein already beginning to define herself against James.

The love plot of ‘‘Melanctha’’ borrows heavily from James’s psychology; indeed, Stein’s debt to James is much deeper than has been supposed. But like all intellectual precursors, James was a burden as well as an inspiration, and as early as ‘‘Melanctha’’ Stein began struggling to free herself from him. James’s psychology had appealed to her in college for its heartening vision of moral and practical success, which helped her to overcome some of her own self-doubts and inhibitions; in ‘‘Melanctha,’’ this ideology of success permeates her characterization of Jeff Campbell, who in fact is her idealized self-portrait through the lens of James. But Jeff and his success plot are already too limiting for Stein, and details at the fringes of the story signal alien ethical and artistic commitments that will soon move into the foreground as Stein wages war more consciously on her teacher.

Among the themes in ‘‘Melanctha’’ that stand in tension with the Jamesian plot of mental success is the notion of a wisdom superior to instrumental thinking, a wisdom grounded in the body. Technically, the story violates James’s values by indulging in a kind of aimless play; more than that, it transcribes irrational process, forming itself according to a principle of motivated repetition that is continuous not with James’s ideas but with the psychoanalytic view of mental life that will soon dislodge James’s presence in Stein’s work. Finally, ‘‘Melanctha’’ has a latent feminism, which places on trial the individualistic and (in Stein’s mind) ultimately male value system absorbed from James, which she still honors in the characterization of Jeff Campbell.

The two lovers in the story, Melanctha and Jeff, are the products of Stein’s imaginative self-splitting. As she experimented artistically with the different ethical systems that attracted her, she bifurcated herself into a manly Jamesian example and a mysterious woman who became a magnet for her conflicts. Melanctha is the locus of ambiguity in the story. As the focus of this chapter shifts, toward and then away from James, the character Melanctha assumes the appearance, first, of a mere failure in the evolutionary struggle, then of a priestess of the body, and finally of a victim of patriarchal relations. . . .

One way to bring out William James’s importance for Stein is to place Jeff, her purest Jamesian creation, against his prototypes in her earlier writings. In Jeff, Stein was able to envision a character who resolved and benefited from internal struggle. For her earlier characters, however, self-division had assured impotence. These characters were paralyzed by the tension between promiscuous and conservative impulses. In the portrait of Jeff Campbell, Stein reconceived this self-division in positive terms, terms that had been suggested to her a decade before by James.

Her very early, painfully divided characters are often versions of herself, and they suggest why James’s ideas might have appealed to her in the first place. Stein’s attraction to James in college had much to do with his giving her a language to apply to conflicts she perceived in herself. Her obliquely autobiographical college essays, known now as the ‘‘Radcliffe Themes,’’ shed light on her emotional life during the period in which she encountered James. These pieces dwell on the figure of a young woman in whom a strongly sensual nature competes with a need for self-mastery.

‘‘In the Red Deeps,’’ for example, is a selfportrait of a girl frightened by her own sadomasochistic fantasy life. She recalls a period during childhood when she experimented with various sorts of selfinflicted pain and fantasized about tortures she might devise for others. But she has an attack of conscience, characterized by a ‘‘haunting fear of loss of self-control.’’ The sexual component of the forbidden impulses is underscored by the title, borrowed from the chapter in The Mill on the Floss about romantic secrecy and guilt.

‘‘The Temptation’’ again sets illicit pleasures against self-reproach. The heroine, an indistinct surrogate for Stein, is in church one day when a strange man leans heavily against her. She enjoys the ‘‘sensuous impressions,’’ but again has a ‘‘quick revulsion,’’ and asks herself, ‘‘Have you no sense of shame?’’ Yet still ‘‘she did not move.’’ The conflict leaves her immobilized; she vaguely indulges herself, but only passively. Later her lapse stigmatizes her; her companions, who have seen everything, upbraid her, and she becomes ‘‘one apart.’’

When the characters Stein writes about in these college compositions are not oppressed by conscious fears of impropriety, they have vague inhibitions that are no less paralyzing. Stein writes a theme about a boy who is both frightened and interested when a pretty girl asks him to help her across a brook. Once again, ‘‘he . . . could not move.’’ Finally he accommodates her, only to flee in alarm. These characters never pass beyond the faintest stimulation; they prefer loneliness to the risk of losing control.

Although none of the characters in these early pieces is a lesbian, Stein’s emerging sexual orientation must have exacerbated her sense of being ‘‘one apart,’’ or (as a kind of self-punishing translation) secretly too sexual. Whether or not she yet defined herself as a lesbian, the pressures she was feeling, in some preliminary way, were those of the closet. Her characters in these essays do not dare to let anyone in on their sexual feelings. Stein’s own romantic experience in college was limited to a mildly flirtatious friendship with her psychology teammate Leon Solomons—a friendship that, as she recalled in a later notebook, was ‘‘Platonic because neither care [sic] to do more.’’ The relationship was close and pleasant, but to the extent that it bordered on flirtation it ironically made her feel asexual and freakish. In the meantime, as her college compositions intimate, she experienced intense longings and loneliness.

Stein’s preoccupation during her late teens with conflicts such as those in the ‘‘Themes’’ helps to account for her interest in James’s psychology, and explains why of all her professors she singled James out for a sort of hero-worship. James too sees a duality in human nature, one that traps a person between eagerness and self-control. But in his view, the self-division signifies not deviance but mental health. Every mind, by his account, has a promiscuous and a repressive element. In normal perceptual life, part of us is welcoming and indiscriminate, but another part excludes data from awareness. These are the two impulses that Stein later plays against each other in Jeff Campbell.

James’s theories doubtless helped to alleviate Stein’s guilt about what seemed threatening appetites and, at the same time, suggested a means of forgiving herself her inhibitions. The mind James describes naturally has its thirsty or revolutionary dimension, a menace but also a source of life: we would stagnate if we lost the taste for raw sensation. Stein evidently welcomed the parallel. The unruly libidos of the Radcliffe heroines are refigured in ‘‘Melanctha’’ as a form of perceptual openness: Melanctha Herbert is at once sexually and perceptually promiscuous, and she helps Jeff by introducing him to ‘‘excitements’’ both romantic and more broadly experiential. Stein later validates her inhibitions too, by associating them with selective attention. Jeff is romantically cautious and also incapable of focusing his senses on ‘‘new things’’; these qualities make him attractive to the heroine of the story. Indeed, the very struggle between yielding and self-control that immobilizes the characters of the ‘‘Radcliffe Themes’’ comes, with an infusion of James’s psychology, to seem a creative part of consciousness.

One way to think of Jeff is as Stein’s selfidealization through the filter of James. He is, after all, a version of Adele in Q.E.D., who herself was a virtually unaltered Stein. But he is a transformed Adele, robust and successful. Adele, incidentally— or Stein, in the intermediate phase of Q.E.D. —had fallen in love but still experienced all the internal pressures of her earlier personae in the ‘‘Radcliffe Themes.’’ Like the Radcliffe heroines, Adele-Stein is torn between her sexual curiosity and her inhibitions; the tension freezes her, making her an ‘‘unresponsive’’ lover. Ideologically, too, Adele feels caught, as her author did, between the lesbianism that marks her as ‘‘queer’’ and a bourgeois ideology that makes her wish to ‘‘avoid excitements’’ and become ‘‘the mother of children.’’

But in Jeff Campbell, Stein transforms the tension in herself between sexual needs and conservative values into a source of strength. Jeff’s competing impulses make him a more sensitive person and a better doctor. His one excursion into forbidden ‘‘excitements’’ only helps him to know himself better and to do more for others. James’s ideas helped Stein to create an idealized self, conceived in terms of psychic vigor.

On the other hand, ‘‘Melanctha’’ also contains an image of failure to thrive. The heroine of the story does not fare so well as her lover. She never achieves mental balance, and she dies. In portraying Melanctha, Stein slips outside the Jamesian framework and the self-idealization attached to it.

Melanctha herself, by William James’s standards, is weak. One way to account for her presence— were we to remain within the limits of the Jamesian paradigm—would be to see her as an example of the high costs, in Darwinian terms, of mind-wandering. Melanctha is not ultimately changed by her affair with Jeff. Whereas he assimilates the new mode of perception Melanctha has given him, she fails to be impressed by his ‘‘solidity,’’ his conceptual grip on the world. She tries to adapt to him for a time, but ends by reverting to her former ‘‘excited,’’ ‘‘reckless,’’ wandering ways.

Rose Johnson, who might have served as a replacement, then rejects her, and the desertion ‘‘almost killed her.’’ This might seem an extreme reaction, but in Rose, Melanctha has lost her last point of contact with the ‘‘solid safety’’ of the conservative temperament. ‘‘Melanctha needed Rose always to let her cling to her. . . . Rose always was so simple, solid, decent, for her. And now Rose had cast her from her. Melanctha was lost, and all the world went whirling in a mad weary dance around her.’’ Melanctha is ‘‘lost’’: as James said, without mental conservatism, ‘‘we should be intellectually lost in the midst of the world.’’ Melanctha loses touch with the ‘‘solid’’ tendency, and ‘‘all the world went whirling in a mad weary dance around her.’’ This is a fair description of what would happen to a mind severed from all perceptual habit and banished to the flux of unfamiliar sensation. Melanctha virtually drowns in the continuum of the world.

Her physiological death, some paragraphs later, seems to follow as a matter of course. Critics have seen in the stories of Three Lives, each of which ends with a heroine’s death, shades of naturalism. This reading assumes a special force in light of the Jamesian or Darwinian psychological drama of ‘‘Melanctha.’’ In Stein’s heroine one observes a character unfit for the world who is weeded out by a brand of natural selection. In James’s psychology the person who has no mechanism of selective attention is ill suited for the business of self-preservation. The survival of the fittest militates against those ‘‘exuberant non-egoistic’’ individuals who, careless of their own personal safety, diffuse their attention equably over experience. But Melanctha has persisted in wandering on the perilous ‘‘edge of wisdom,’’ suppressing personal interests in the name of ‘‘excitement.’’ In the end, ‘‘tired with being all the time so much excited,’’ she succumbs to the social and bodily suicide that, as James makes plain, would be the outcome of any life of wholly unsel- fish or unselective perception.

The case of Melanctha, if one reads it, then, in the light of James, is an admonition. Yet Melanctha’s failure by James’s standards could lead one as easily to question James’s values as to take a critical view of the heroine. I have sketched a reading of Melanctha’s story as a negative example, but it could just as well be thought of as a protest against the entire notion of mental success represented by Jeff. For in the moral universe of ‘‘Melanctha,’’ self-preservation is not clearly the highest good. Part of the story pulls away from the psychological framework supplied by William James and from the Darwinian gospel of success attached to it.

‘‘Melanctha’’ is Stein’s most deeply Jamesian text, but it comes belatedly, at a point when its author is just beginning to strain against James. Within a few years her notebooks show her explicitly defining herself against him. In ‘‘Melanctha,’’ her early ambivalence creates a kind of ethical polyphony. The story hovers somewhere between the ideas and views Stein shared with James and quite different, still indistinct values that would soon propel her in new directions.

James’s psychology is shot through with Darwinism; the important thing, in his view, is to thrive. Stein’s attachment to this perspective is evident in her sympathetic portrait of Jeff Campbell, the good doctor who does his work and moves ahead professionally. But Melanctha, who has no instinct for survival, is of course portrayed at least as sympathetically herself. She receives a much more positive treatment than her antecedent in Q.E.D., the thoughtless seducer Helen. In the move from Q.E.D. to ‘‘Melanctha,’’ the moral center of the story has shifted toward the promiscuous member of the couple, whose model was not Stein herself but her former lover May Bookstaver.

Melanctha, far from being merely an object of pitying diagnosis, has qualities that elevate her above a mere survivor like Rose. Her imperfect instinct for self-preservation is the cost of her superior ‘‘wisdom,’’ which the story sets against instrumental knowledge as embodied by Jeff and as preached by James. Against the background of James’s theories, the word wisdom in ‘‘Melanctha’’ can be thought of as referring to the heroine’s reckless immersion in the senses, but the word has a spiritual resonance as well. Jeff seems to be pointing to a mysterious power in Melanctha when he speaks of a ‘‘new feeling’’ she has given him, ‘‘just like a new religion to me.’’ The world she opens up for him is a world of ‘‘real being.’’ This spiritual quality of hers is never explained, but it pushes her beyond the ethical boundaries defined by James’s Psychology and, for that matter, by James’s own more spiritually oriented writings. Part of Stein’s story is about a ‘‘way to know’’ that has no bearing on practical life but is more elevated than mere sensory abundance.

At the risk of trying to define precisely something the text leaves vague and suggestive, I want to approach Melanctha’s wisdom by setting it alongside some other details in her story, which seem to have nothing to do with the framework of Jamesian psychology. Stein’s heroine has a special intimacy with the mysteries of the body. Melanctha is close to the upheavals of birth, death, and puberty. She watches over her dying mother; this seems to be the most important thing she has ever done for or with her mother. She tends Rose Johnson as Rose gives birth, acting as a sort of midwife, even to the extent of moving Rose away from her husband for the last part of the pregnancy. (‘‘When Rose had become strong again [after the delivery and the baby’s death] she went back to her house with Sam.’’ Melanctha’s story is bounded by her own puberty, the time in her twelfth year when she is ‘‘just beginning as a woman,’’ and by her death.

These details—the death of the mother, the birth of the baby, Melanctha’s puberty, and her death—were superimposed on the original plot of Q.E.D., and they signal changes in Stein’s thinking. The details involving birth and death—which, along with the setting in the black community, were inspired by Stein’s clinical experiences at Johns Hopkins Medical School—bear no obvious relation to the primary story of the romance with Jeff Campbell, and they give the narrative of ‘‘Melanctha’’ a wandering quality. Although they are never digested into the main plot, the narrative pulls back to these events, often out of sequence. The story begins, for example, not where one would expect it to begin but with the delivery of Rose’s baby, which, we will later find out, actually follows the entire love affair of Melanctha and Jeff: ‘‘Rose Johnson made it very hard to bring her baby to its birth. Melanctha Herbert who was Rose Johnson’s friend, did everything that any woman could.’’ I associate Melanctha’s hazily defined wisdom with her quality of presiding at moments of bodily change or upheaval. The text makes no such connection explicitly, but these fragmentary data embedded in ‘‘Melanctha’’ will begin to form a more cohesive picture in Stein’s later work.

Within a few years Stein will depart from James altogether by grounding her idea of consciousness in what might be called the rhythms of the body. She will develop a notion of wisdom as a kind of thought that knows its ties to the body. As her spirituality comes to the surface, an emphasis on bodily experience, as sacred and taboo, marks the difference from James’s own brand of spirituality. To quote from the dense text of Tender Buttons, the most extraordinary thing Stein wrote in the teens, ‘‘out of an eye comes research’’ (emphasis added); knowledge emanates from the eye, like tears. Or (to use a more opaque passage) spiritual knowing or ‘‘in-sight’’ is continuous with anatomical functions like giving milk or suckling: ‘‘MILK. Climb up in sight climb in the whole utter.’’ Tender Buttons stages bodily upheavals great and small, from eating to giving birth and dying. An early hint of these preoccupations appears in the liminal Melanctha, stationed at the crises of the body.

Significantly, William James’s psychology would not account in an interesting way for Melanctha’s intimacy with the body. Compared to a near contemporary like Freud, James seems to keep the body out of focus, except in its role as a machine absorbing data and maintaining itself in existence. Nor would Melanctha’s sexuality be something James would illuminate. Melanctha’s involvements in birth, death, and sensual experience give her a kind of wisdom distinct from James’s instrumental knowledge. To describe the notion of bodily consciousness that develops in Stein’s subsequent work, it will be necessary to use a vocabulary closer to psychoanalysis than to the theories of James.

Stein’s notebooks and subsequent works suggest to me that in her characterization of the embodied Melanctha, she was depicting something she saw in herself, for all her simultaneous identification with (and self-projection in) the more controlled and rational Jeff Campbell. In one of the notebooks for The Making of Americans, Stein identified a side of herself she called ‘‘the Rabelaisian, nigger abandonment, Vollard [the art dealer], daddy side.’’ That she associates her bodily gusto, or everything Rabelaisian in herself, with something she calls ‘‘nigger abandonment’’ suggests that the extreme racism she expresses in ‘‘Melanctha’’—for example, in depicting blacks as carefree and promiscuous— served (among other things) her own need to distance a part of herself about which she was ambivalent. She had her own sensuous side, which she projected in racial terms perhaps so she could simultaneously idealize and depreciate it; and by playing to the racism of her audience, she partially disguised the dimension of self-exploration in the story.

Source: Lisa Ruddick, ‘‘‘Melanctha’: The Costs of Mind- Wandering,’’ in Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis, Cornell University Press, 1990, pp. 12–54. At the time this book was published, Ruddick was teaching in the English Department at the University of Chicago.

Gertrude Stein always prided herself on her acute observations of human nature, a talent she attributed to her experimental training in psychology under William James and Hugo Munsterberg at Harvard. But by her own account of these experiments, she reveals an early penchant not so much to observe the individual instance as to categorize the larger type:

I was supposed to be interested in their reactions but soon I found that I was not but instead I was enormously interested in the types of their characters that is what I even then thought of the bottom nature of them and when in May 1898 I wrote my half of the report of these experiments I expressed the results as follows: ‘‘In these descriptions it will be readily observed that habits of attention are reflexes of the complete character of the individual’’ [in Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten, 1962].

Stein’s interest in defining and categorizing ‘‘bottom nature’’ continued through the next decade in such early works as Q.E.D (1903) and Three Lives (1905–6), and crested in the numerous chartings and minutely-refined adjectival strings that delineate the characters of The Making of Americans. In all of these works, the ‘‘bottom natures’’ that she originally identified at Harvard (nervous and easily aroused vs. phlegmatic) help to determine, in varying degrees and mixtures, the characterizations. In the ‘‘Melanctha’’ story of Three Lives, however, Stein set for herself a unique challenge in understanding character. For unlike the characters of the other early works, who were modeled after people Stein knew well from her childhood and college years, the characters of ‘‘Melanctha’’ belonged to a race that Stein had observed at first hand only while she delivered babies as a medical student in Baltimore:

It was then that she had to take her turn in the delivering of babies and it was at that time that she noticed the negroes and the places that she afterwards used in the second of the Three Lives stories, Melanctha Herbert, the story that was the beginning of her revolutionary work [Selected Writings].

One might expect that such first-hand experience would serve as an empirical check on Stein’s theories of bottom nature. But her experience was limited both by time (she was required to spend no more than two months at it) and, more importantly, by the vast cultural chasm dividing upper-middleclass, white medical students from the poor blacks they treated. It is not surprising, then, that Stein’s attempt to categorize the blacks in ‘‘Melanctha’’ according to their ‘‘bottom natures’’ is tainted by cultural bias. Although such early admirers of Stein as Richard Wright praised her depiction of blacks as being ‘‘the first long serious literary treatment of Negro life in the United States,’’ other critics, both black and white, have found it offensive. Richard Bridgman, for example, writes:

Gertrude Stein’s treatment of the negro is both condescending and false. . . . it swarms with cliches about the happy, promiscuous, razor-fighting, church-going darky [Gertrude Stein in Pieces].

The race references in ‘‘Melanctha’’ are infrequent, and when they do appear, they are stereotyped. Negroes possess shiny or greasy black faces; their eyeballs roll; their mouths gape open as they howl with laughter; they fight with razors, yell savagely, are often lazy and are insistently virile [American Literature 33 (1961)].

In fact, however, Bridgman is both too kind and not kind enough to Stein. For ‘‘Melanctha’’ contains a far wider range of skin tones than ‘‘shiny or greasy black faces,’’ and behaviors far more diverse than ‘‘razor-fighting and church-going.’’ But at the same time, Stein organizes these varieties into a racial hierarchy that is more ominously schematic than Bridgman suggests. Here are the characters of ‘‘Melanctha’’ arranged by the skin tones that Stein describes and accompanied by the ‘‘bottom natures’’ she gives them:

Rose Johnson: Melanctha’s friend; real black; tall, well-built, good-looking, sullen, stupid, childlike, lazy, promiscuous, unmoral, coarse, shiftless, selfish, decent, ordinary, slow

James: Melanctha’s father; black; coarse, big, powerful, virile, robust, unpleasant, brutal, rough, hardhanded, loose-built, common, decent enough, angry, never really joyous, looked evil [before fight], fierce and serious, knew nothing

railroad yard workers: greasy black becoming grey when scared; [fearful], eye-rolling

shipyard workers: yowling, free-swinging, powerful, loose-jointed, childish, half-savage

John: coachman for white family; light brown mulatto; very decent, vigorous, friendly, pleasant, but knew how to use a razor

porter at railroad yard: light brown; big, serious, melancholy, kind, gentle

Jeff’s father: butler for white family; light brown; good, kind, serious, religious, steady, very intelligent, very dignified

Jeff’s mother: pale brown; sweet, little, gentle, reverenced and obeyed her husband

Jeff: Melanctha’s boyfriend, doctor; mulatto; very good, strong, gentle, very intellectual, sympathetic, earnest, joyous, happy, laughing, studious, hard-working, scientific, quiet-living, [not seeking experience], [wants other blacks to adopt these qualities]

Melanctha’s mother: pale yellow; sweet appealing, pleasant, mysterious, uncertain, wandering in her ways

Melanctha: protagonist; pale yellow; intelligent, attractive, subtle, graceful, complex, mysterious, suffering, uncomplaining, despairing, pleasant [but has] nasty tongue, sudden and impulsive, has breakneck courage [but at first is a coward], [attracted to power], [hungry for ‘‘experience’’]

Jane Harden: Melanctha’s tutor and friend; negress but so white that hardly anyone would guess it; roughened, powerful, reckless, drinker [well educated: two years at ‘‘colored college’’], bad conduct, not afraid to understand ways that lead to wisdom, had much white blood and that made her see clear, good mind, white blood strong in her and she had grit and endurance and a vital courage

Several obvious generalizations can be drawn from this chart. First, Stein clearly links skin tone to personality traits. Second, her associations follow many of the established stereotypes that whites held of blacks: The ‘‘black’’ end of the scale represents coarseness, stupidity, and a ‘‘half-savage’’ childishness. Images of the fearful, eye-rolling, exaggerating Negro also appear at this end. The ‘‘white’’ end of the scale brings intelligence, complexity, and courage. In between, the ‘‘light brown’’ shade denotes seriousness, hard work, decency, kindness, and religiosity, while the ‘‘pale yellow’’ is complex, mysterious, uncertain, sweet but somewhat vague.

The racism of this hierarchy is most glaringly evident at its poles. Stein unfailingly mentions James Herbert’s blackness before adding other adjectives:

her robust and unpleasant and very unendurable black father

her black coarse father

big black virile negro

He looked very black and evil

a brute of a black nigger father

Appropriately, the ‘‘nigger’’ epithet above comes from Jane Harden, who resides at the other end of the scale, the almost-white. ‘‘Roughened’’ and ‘‘reckless,’’ Jane bears a curious similarity to James Herbert (a seeming contradiction considered below), but Stein leaves little doubt about the value of her ‘‘white blood’’:

She had much white blood and that made her see clear. . . .

Her white blood was strong in her and she had grit and endurance and a vital courage.

Unflattering qualities and stereotypes of blacks abound in ‘‘Melanctha.’’ Because infant mortality is so common in black neighborhoods, neither Sam nor Rose Johnson ‘‘thought about it very long’’ when their baby dies (from Rose’s negligence). Melanctha, ‘‘half made with real white blood,’’ ‘‘demeans herself’’ by serving ‘‘this lazy, stupid, ordinary, selfish, black girl [Rose].’’ We read of ‘‘the earth-born boundless joy of negroes,’’ the ‘‘wide abandoned laughter that gives the broad glow of negro sunshine,’’ ‘‘the good warm nigger time’’ Melanctha could have with ‘‘colored men.’’ Even when Stein attempts to praise, as in the last examples, her condescension is as embarrassing as her obliviousness to it is disturbing.

Yet for all of its obvious racism, Stein’s skintone groupings raise several questions. Why, for example, do some of the ‘‘mixed-blood’’ shades (e.g., the light brown) show fairly consistent qualities, while others (e.g., Jane Harden’s almost-whiteness) are contradictory? Curiously, this apparent inconsistency follows the dubious logic of Stein’s hierarchy. For the contradictions of the ‘‘mixed’’ shades seem to increase as they approach whiteness. Apparently, Stein equates complexity and contradiction with intelligence; i.e., with whiteness. Further, personality consistency depends on parental consistency—another aspect of Stein’s ‘‘bottom nature.’’ Thus, Melanctha’s contradictory behavior derives from the genetic opposition of her black father’s violent impulsiveness and attraction to power and experience, and her pale yellow mother’s ‘‘sweet, mysterious, uncertain, and pleasant’’ character. Although Jane Harden’s parentage is not given, we might assume a similar contrast of parental types. Conversely, Jeff’s parents are both good, kind, serious, and light brown—and so is Jeff.

If racism alone informs Stein’s groupings, then why are the ‘‘light brown’’ given white-oriented, ‘‘Uncle Tom’’ values (hard work, seriousness, politeness, self-sacrifice, and sensuous restraint), while the character closest to white, Jane Harden, shares the ‘‘roughness’’ and ‘‘recklessness’’ of the blacks? In one sense, the ‘‘bottom nature’’ of the light browns is perfectly logical. As servants of white families, Jeff’s father and John the stableman would be most prone to adopt the values of their employers or, more accurately, the values their employers would expect to see blacks adopt. Hence, Jeff’s moralizing about the values blacks should pursue— ‘‘I don’t believe much in this running around business and I don’t want to see the colored people do it. . . . I want to see the colored people like what is good and what I want them to have, and that’s to live regular and work hard and understand things . . .’’—is the voice of the white bourgeoisie coming through a black manikin.

But what complicates the question is that these white-oriented views are not entirely Stein’s own. Indeed, the central theme and action of ‘‘Melanctha’’— gaining sexual experience (‘‘wisdom’’), learning to trust one’s feelings and to live for the present moment—run counter to Jeff’s Puritanical restraint. Significantly, Stein does not bias the conflict toward either side. For she speaks not with the moral certainty of the white middle class, but, as Bridgman suggests [in Gertrude Stein in Pieces], with a voice divided between the energy and primness she inherited from family and culture and her own emerging sensuality and lesbianism. If anything, Stein’s sympathies are with Melanctha’s courageous immersion into life, not with Jeff’s queasy inhibitions. Thus, Stein had no reason to associate ‘‘superior’’ skin tone (white) with moral restraint.

It would seem, then, that the racial hierarchy in ‘‘Melanctha’’ works against the story’s thematic tension. Stein’s position, itself, is ambivalent: The stereotypes of her hierarchy locate her well within her culture, the white bourgeoisie of 1905–6; but her delineation of the sexual conflict places her quite outside this culture. One might well conclude, as Bridgman and Claude McKay [Quoted in The Third Rose, 1959] have, that the racial setting of ‘‘Melanctha’’ is both false and superfluous to the central story. But what does Stein’s hierarchy show about her theory of ‘‘bottom nature’’?

Certainly, her penchant for categorizing behavior is as evident in her racial hierarchy as it is in her behavioral ‘‘types.’’ But the types (nervous vs. phlegmatic) were at least Stein’s own generalizations (albeit, based on medieval humors), drawn from her observations in psychology experiments and developed thoughtfully over a decade. The racial types can lay no such claim to original perception: They were merely the cliches of her age. If Stein considered her racial hierarchy to offer valid examples of ‘‘bottom nature,’’ then her personality theories join the musty ranks of Gobineau, Chamberlain, and the other discredited racists as curious antiquities. If, as is more likely, however, she merely incorporated these racial stereotypes unthinkingly into her real concern with character and consciousness, then such uncritical acceptance casts considerable doubt on the depth and acuity of her perceptions of human nature, and points, rather, to an arbitrary and subjective conception. Either way, in the racial hierarchy of ‘‘Melanctha,’’ Stein’s theory of ‘‘bottom nature’’ bottoms out.

Source: Milton A. Cohen, ‘‘Black Brutes and Mulatto Saints: The Racial Hierarchy of Stein’s ‘Melanctha’,’’ in Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 18, No. 3, Fall, 1984, pp. 119–21.

. . . According to the general agreement the big thing in Three Lives is the middle story, ‘‘Melanctha.’’ It is a tragic love story ending in death from consumption; so that it is available to the traditional literary taste and the educated emotions. Furthermore it is, as Carl Van Vechten says [in his preface to Three Lives], ‘‘perhaps the first American story in which the Negro is regarded as a human being and not as an object for condescending compassion or derision.’’ It is a good deal to have attained that clarity and equilibrium of feeling in a difficult question, but ‘‘Melanctha’’ as a piece of literature does much more. Where ‘‘The Good Anna’’ and ‘‘The Gentle Lena’’ are composed as the presentation of a single type in illustrative incidents, ‘‘Melanctha’’ is composed on the dramatic trajectory of a passion. If ‘‘The Good Anna’’ roughly corresponds to [Gustave Flaubert’s] ‘‘Un Coeur Simple,’’ ‘‘Melanctha’’ corresponds roughly to Madame Bovary. Very roughly, and there is most likely no direct influence, but it makes an illuminating comparison.

Madame Bovary and the course of her passion are presented in an elaborate series of incidents, situations, landscapes, interiors, extraneous issues; in short they are measured and realized against a thick objective context as the things in the context are measured against her desire. Strangely enough this desire is never directly presented. It is measured somewhat by its casual source in her romantic reading—as Don Quixote is casually accounted for by his reading of the romances of chivalry—and it is known later by its various objects such as travel in far lands, luxuries, poetry written to her, and so on. As a blind desire, and probably as a death wish, it is symbolized by the awful blind beggar who is as it were Emma’s Doppelganger and who is finally put out of the way by Homais, the type of cheap rationalism. Emma’s power is measured again by her being too much for Charles, for Leon, and even for Rodolphe, and by the pathetic infatuation of the boy Justin. She has certainly a variety of states of mind, wild desire, remorse, boredom, religiosity, fear, and so on, but they are a succession of distinct states, presented as complete and not as in process. In brief, Flaubert’s art was spatial and intensely pictorial, not temporal and musical. Expressing directly and exactly the immediate movement, pulse, and process of a thing simply was not his business. But it was in this early period Gertrude Stein’s business, and in ‘‘Melanctha’’ she did express at length the process of a passion.

She did not yet disengage the essential vitality entirely from its natural context. There are some few descriptions of railroad yards, docks, country scenes, houses, yards, rooms, windows, but these are reduced to a telling minimum. There is also some accounting for the complex forces in the heroine’s character by the brutality of her father and the sweet indifference of her mother. She is described at the beginning of the story by contrast and association with Rose Johnson, her hard-headed decent friend, and again by the same contrast enlarged at the end of the story, when Rose casts her off. But the real demonstration of the story is the dialogue between Melanctha and her lover Jeff Campbell. In this long dialogue, which is like a duel or duet, the traditional incoherence between the inner and the outer life has been replaced by an incoherence between two subjectivities. It is conceived of as a difference in tempo, the slow Jeff against the quick Melanctha. Also there is already very much present in this story the difference, the radical and final difference in people, defined in The Making of Americans as the attacking and the resisting kinds or types. It is not quite the difference between active and passive, as both kinds are based on a persistence in being or in living, and they are further complicated by a deviousness and modulation in function. For example, how does a naturally attacking kind resist and how does a naturally resisting kind get provoked to attack? All this is elaborately and dramatically worked out in the long dialogue. ‘‘It was a struggle, sure to be going on always between them. It was a struggle that was as sure always to be going on between them, as their minds and hearts always were to have different ways of working.’’ Their differences, shade by shade, and their gradual reconciliations are presented through the whole course of the affair from indifference to gradual fascination to the struggle for domination by a variety of means, to the decline into brotherly and sisterly affection, and finally to the final break.

Gertrude Stein had already, in a story written in 1903 and called ‘‘Quod Erat Demonstrandum’’ but not published until 1950 and under the title Things as They Are, worked out a very similar dialectic of a passion. It is very interesting as a preliminary exercise for ‘‘Melanctha.’’ As its first title suggests, it is an intensive and exhaustive study of relations in a triangle. In its way it is a Jamesian study or demonstration, and its heroine mentions and quotes the heroine and/or villainess of James’ novel The Wings of the Dove, Kate Croy. But Things as They Are bears a more striking resemblance to the Adolphe of Benjamin Constant, it has the same merciless directness and concentration, and though Gertrude Stein had probably not read Adolphe in 1903 this earliest work belongs to the tradition of Adolphe and of La Princesse de Clèves. It has the same unwavering intellectual clarity applied to the perpetually shifting relationships of a passion throughout its course. That much is already mastered in this first work, but the handling tends more to commentary than to presentation and has not the sure grasp of the personal cadences of a character’s thought and feeling that makes the analyses in ‘‘Melanctha’’ a direct expression of character in movement. This is partly the fault of the characters themselves in Things as They Are. They are white American college women, whose speech and thought are bound to be at odds with their feeling. Gertrude Stein treats this difficulty handsomely enough as subject matter, but the expressive power of the prose is limited by its very propriety to the subject matter. It is very pure, immensely intelligent, and astonishing for a first work in 1903, but it is polite, cultivated, educated, literary. Compare with the passage from ‘‘Melanctha,’’ quoted above, the following from Things as They Are:

Time passed and they renewed their habit of desultory meetings at public places, but these were not the same as before. There was between them now a consciousness of strain, a sense of new adjustments, of uncertain standards and of changing values.

‘‘Melanctha,’’ in which the characters are Negroes, has thereby the advantage of ‘‘uneducated’’ speech, and of a direct relationship between feeling and word, a more fundamental or universal drama. It is a measure of her strength that in making the most of the advantage Gertrude Stein abandoned polite or cultivated writing completely and forever, so completely that the press where she had Three Lives printed sent to inquire if she really knew English.

At all events, ‘‘Melanctha’’ is, as I said the work of Henry James was, a time continuum less of events than of considerations of their meaning. The events considered in ‘‘Melanctha’’ are mostly the movements of the passion, how Jeff and Melanctha feel differently toward each other from moment to moment.

Like the characters of James, Melanctha and Jeff are preternaturally articulate about their feelings, but where James keeps the plausibilities by using highly cultivated characters to express the complicated meaning in an endless delicacy of phrasing, Gertrude Stein uses the simplest possible words, the common words used by everybody, and a version of the most popular phrasing, to express the very complicated thing. It is true and exciting that James often used the simplest possible word for his complicated meaning, but he had a tendency to isolate it to the attention, to force it to carry its full weight by printing it in italics or putting it in quotes, or dislocating it from its more usual place in the word order, or repeating it. Gertrude Stein uses repetition and dislocation to make the word bear all the meaning it has but actually one has to give her work word by word the deliberate attention one gives to something written in italics. It has been said that her work means more when one reads it in proof or very slowly, and that is certainly true, the work has to be read word by word, as a succession of single meanings accumulating into a larger meaning, as for example the words in the stanza of a song being sung. Unhappily all our training and most of our reasons for reading are against this. Very likely the desire for simplicity in style is most often a desire that the words and ideas along the way to the formulated conclusion, the point, be perfectly negligible and that we have no anxious feeling we are missing anything as we rush by. But as an example of how Gertrude Stein forces the simplest negligible words to stay there in a full meaning:

‘‘Can’t you understand Melanctha, ever, how no man certainly ever really can hold your love for long times together. You certainly Melanctha, you ain’t got down deep loyal feeling, true inside you, and when you ain’t just that moment quick with feeling, then you certainly ain’t ever got anything more there to keep you. You see Melanctha, it certainly is this way with you, it is, that you ain’t ever got any way to remember right what you been doing, or anybody else that has been feeling with you. You certainly Melanctha, never can remember right, when it comes what you have done and what you think happens to you.’’ ‘‘It certainly is all easy for you Jeff Campbell to be talking. You remember right, because you don’t remember nothing till you get home with your thinking everything all over, but I certainly don’t think much ever of that kind of way of remembering right, Jeff Campbell. 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. . . .’’

The passage is, if one likes, about the synchronization of feeling upon the present activity. Anyone can see what is meant by the argument if the feeling discussed is understood to be sexual feeling. But the thing which makes this passage absolutely accurate and not euphemistic is that the subject is literally feeling, all feeling, inasmuch as all the passions are one. In brief, making abstraction of objects and situations, sexual feeling behaves no differently from other feelings. The readiness, slowness, concentration or absent-mindedness, domination or dependence in sexual feeling are about the same as in all the other activities of a character. So that we have here a perfect propriety and fullness of diction.

The relatively simple dislocations of ‘‘you ain’t got down deep loyal feeling, true inside you,’’ from the more commonplace order ‘‘you have no true feeling of loyalty deep down inside you,’’ not only jar the words awake into their full meaning but follow with much greater exactitude the slow, passionate, clumsy emphasis of Jeff Campbell’s feeling.

The phrase ‘‘remembering right’’ could be replaced by a more familiar cliche, ‘‘profiting aptly by past experience,’’ or by scientific gabble like ‘‘the coordination of habitual reflexes upon the present object,’’ but the advantage of the simpler new phrase is that it expresses the matter in terms of the fundamental and final activities and categories of the mind. It is part of the ‘‘impulse to elemental abstraction,’’ the description in terms of the final and generic as against description by context and association. It is like the generically round and sitting apple of Cezanne as against a delicately compromised and contextuated and reverberating apple of the impressionists. The propriety of the simple popular abstraction used in ‘‘Melanctha’’ is in this, that the two subjectivities at odds are seen, and so to be described, directly—directly from common knowledge, and not, as with Madame Bovary, seen refracted and described indirectly through an exterior context embodying considerM able special knowledge. The immediate terms of Madame Bovary are saturated with French history, the immediate terms of ‘‘Melanctha’’ are the final categories of mental process—to know, to see, to hear, to wish, to remember, to suffer, and the like.

However, ‘‘Melanctha’’ is more than an exact chart of the passions. The conjugation or play of the abstractions proceeds according to the vital rhythm or tempo of the characters. In this way the essential quality of the characters is not only described but presented immediately. As Emma Bovary is seen against the rake Rodolphe and then against the pusillanimous Leon, and is thereby defined, so Melanctha is, in her quick tempo, played against the slow Jeff Campbell and then against the very fast ‘‘dashing’’ Jem Richards.

Gertrude Stein later made some remarks about Three Lives in the light of her later problems of expression. In Composition as Explanation she said:

In beginning writing I wrote a book called Three Lives this was written in 1905. I wrote a negro story called ‘‘Melanctha.’’ In that there was a constant recurring and beginning there was a marked direction in the direction of being in the present although naturally I had been accustomed to past present and future, and why, because the composition forming around me was a prolonged present. A composition of a prolonged present is a natural composition in the world as it has been these thirty years [1926] it was more and more a prolonged present. I created then a prolonged present naturally I knew nothing of a continuous present but it came naturally to me to make one, it was simple it was clear to me and nobody knew why it was done like that, I did not myself although naturally to me it was natural. . . . In the first book [Three Lives] there was a groping for a continuous present and for using everything by beginning again and again.

The difference between a prolonged and a continuous present may be defined as this, that a prolonged present assumes a situation or a theme and dwells on it and develops it or keeps it recurring, as in much opera, and Bach, for example. The continuous present would take each successive moment or passage as a completely new thing essentially, as with Mozart or Scarlatti or, later, Satie. This Gertrude Stein calls beginning again. But the problem is really one of the dimensions of the present as much as of the artist’s way with it. The ‘‘specious’’ present which occupied William James is an arbitrary distinction between past and future as they flow together in time. But for purposes of action and art it has to be assumed as an operable space of time. For the composer this space of time can be the measure, or whatever unit can be made to express something without dependence on succession as the condition of its interest. For the writer it can be the sentence or the paragraph or the chapter or the scene or the page or the stanza or whatever. Gertrude Stein experimented with all these units in the course of her work, but in the early work the struggle was mainly with the sentence and the paragraph.

Source: Donald Sutherland, ‘‘‘Three Lives’ and ‘The Making of Americans’,’’ in Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work, Yale University Press, 1951 , pp. 44–52.