Abstract
At first glance, the title of this chapter seems to repeat itself, and my reader may conclude that I have acquired a habit of repetition from my subject, the writer whose signature phrase is ‘rose is a rose is a rose’. However, with my phrase ‘Gertrude Stein’s writing’, I mean to suggest two very different kinds of writing and two very different ways of looking at Gertrude Stein’s writing, and so I have said the same thing twice — or have I? Looked at one way, ‘Stein’s writing’ is a possessive noun and a gerund, and looked at in that way, Stein’s writing is a static literary product which will stay put while we analyse it in terms of style and content, structure and meaning, intention and excecution. Looked at another way, ‘Stein’s writing’ is a contraction of a subject and a helping verb followed by the present participle of the verb ‘to write’, and it means ‘Stein is writing’. In that way of looking, you are asked to shift your attention from the product to the process of making that product. In this and the next chapter, then, we will look at Gertrude Stein’s writing, and we will also see Gertrude Stein writing.
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Notes
For a brilliant discussion of Stein’s indeterminate (enigmatic) poetry in the context of similar twentieth-century poetry, see Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Princeton University Press, 1981).
Mary Field Belenky et al., Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind (Basic Books, 1986), p. 144.
Belenky argues that ‘really talking’ is more characteristic of female conversation and’ ‘didactic talking’ of male, but Carol Gilligan cautions that such an ‘association [between perceptual and communicative mode and gender] is not absolute’ and that ‘contrasts between male and female voices … highlight a distinction between two modes of thought … rather than … represent a generalization about either sex’ (Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development [Harvard University Press, 1982], p. 2). A similar caution is in order here. For Stein, neither style of talk represented in Three Lives is gender-related. Admittedly, Melanctha is, most of the time, a real talker, but Anna, Mrs. Kreder and Mrs. Haydon, all women, are all didactic talkers. Even Melanctha is sometimes a didactic talker. Both Lena and Herman are quiet listeners, despite their gender difference. Jeff, who is clearly a didactic talker, learns to become better at really talking. Moreover, Jeff is the reincarnation of Q.E.D. ‘s Adele, a woman and a didactic talker, who is in turn a surrogate for Stein, a didactic talker in some circumstances, a real talker in others and a quiet listener in still others.
There are clear parallels between the two styles of talk (didactic talking and really talking) and the two styles of writing which Stein described as ‘writing what you intended to write’ and ‘writing what you are writing’. The latter type of writing requires a ‘listening’ to one’s inner voice and an openness to exploration and discovery. Though some have argued that the new style of writing Stein was discovering was a female or feminist syle (see Harriet Scott Chessman, The Public Is Invited to Dance: Representation, the Body, and Dialogue in Gertrude Stein [Stanford University Press, 1989],
Marianne DeKoven, A Different Language: Gertrude Stein’s Experimental Writing [University of Wisconsin Press, 1983], and Lisa Ruddick, Reading Gertrude Stein), I do not believe that the two styles of writing are necessarily gender-related, any more than the two styles of talking, and I would urge the same caution against genderizing Stein’s writing style that I urged against genderizing the conversational styles of her characters.
For an excellent discussion of the influence of Cézanne and Picasso on Stein see Jayne Walker, The Making of a Modernist. See also Charles Altieri, Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 1989), chapters 6 and 7;
Stephen Scobie, ‘The Allure of Multiplicity: Metaphor and Metonymy in Cubism and Gertrude Stein’, in Gertrude Stein and the Making of Literature, ed. Shirley Neuman and Ira B. Nadel (Northeastern University Press, 1988), pp. 98–111; and Wendy Steiner, Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance.
It is likely that the portrait of Mme. Cézanne was painted, as was the Stein portrait, over a long period of time and that the head was completed after a hiatus, as was the Stein head. According to John Rewald, the design of the wallpaper in the Cézanne portrait ‘can be identified with lodgings Cézanne occupied in 1879–80, but the … head of the sitter appears to have been painted several years later’ (Cézanne, the Steins and Their Circle [Thames and Hudson, 1986], p. 38). Of course, neither Picasso nor Stein would necessarily have known this history of the Cézanne portrait. However, they would certainly have heard the story of Cézanne’s portrait of Ambroise Vollard for which Vollard sat 115 times; after this ordeal, Cézanne ‘abruptly abandoned the project, saying “the front of the shirt is not bad”’ (Ian Dunlop, Introduction to The Complete Paintings of Cézanne [Penguin, 1985], p. 5).
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© 1993 Jane Palatini Bowers
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Bowers, J.P. (1993). Gertrude Stein’s Writing/Gertrude Stein’s Writing. In: Gertrude Stein. Women Writers. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23004-4_3
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