The Mother of Us All and American History

Abstract

Critical appreciation of Gertrude Stein’s last major work, the opera The Mother of Us All, has been hindered by a simplistic view of it as barely disguised autobiography. The work convinces any reader or listener of Stein’s deep sympathy for her principal character, Susan B. Anthony, and its place at the end of her career encourages a reading of the text as Stein’s ‘valedictory’.¹ None the less, to read the opera as a work about Stein herself, in which Anthony is simply ‘equivalent to Gertrude Stein’,² is to rob the text of its rich historical allusiveness and to diminish Stein’s attempt at a commentary on American history. A careful reading of the opera makes it clear that this work is a part of Stein’s last creative stage, in which she moved beyond her modernism to an art that was both representational and firmly situated in historical space.