‘Would a viper have stung her if she had only had one name?’: Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights

Abstract

‘[I]n a kind of a way novels are still a puzzle to me’,¹ Gertrude Stein explained as she began Ida A Novel. The puzzle proved difficult. Between mid-May and December 1937 she wrote at least three brief and unsatisfactory drafts of an opening for Ida.² By early December she thought that a conversation with Thornton Wilder had given her ‘a scheme for Ida which [would] pull it together’.³ But when, after Christmas festivities and a move to a new apartment, she resumed work in the beginning of February 1938, it was not Ida but Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights that occupied her (GS—CVV, ii, p. 590): ‘Ida has become an opera, and it is a beauty, really is, an opera about Faust’, she would report.⁴