1. Riding, Laura, “T. E. Hulme, the New Barbarism, & Gertrude Stein,” in Contemporaries and Snobs (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1928), p. 183Google Scholar. Subsequent references appear in the text.

2. In “Gertrude Stein,” Mina Loy calls Stein “Curie/of the laboratory/of vocabulary” (Loy, , “Gertrude Stein,” in The Last Lunar Baedeker [Exeter, England: Jargon Society, 1982], p. 26.Google Scholar

3. Stein, Gertrude, The Making of Americans, being a history of a family's progress (New York: Something Else Press, 1966), p. 38Google Scholar. Italics added. Subsequent references appear in the text.

4. DeKoven, Marianne views Stein's project as the creation of a “culturally alternative language” in A Different Language: Gertrude Stein's Experimental Writing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), p. xiiiGoogle Scholar. She takes Stein's writing “as already deconstructed … the indeterminate, anti-patriarchal (antilogocentric, anti-phallogocentric, presymbolic, pluridimensional) writing which deconstruction, alias Jacques Derrida, proposes as an antidote to Western culture, and which Julia Kristeva proposes as an antidote to patriarchy” (p. xvii).

5. Dowries v. Bidwell, 45Google Scholar Lawyer's Edition, U.S. 179–82: 1089, 1106. Subsequent references appear in the text.

6. Hazel Carby describes Anna Julia Cooper's understanding of “the imperialist or expansionist impulse, with its ideology of racial categorization, as a supreme manifestation of patriarchal power” (“On the Threshold of Woman's Era: Lynching, Empire and Sexuality in Black Feminist Theory,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 [1985]: 262–77, 265)Google Scholar. But, as Walter Benn Michaels has noted, racism also inhibits imperialism, both the benefits of the empire and the threats of difference being thought too great to admit the alter (see “The Souls of White Folk,” Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons, ed. Scarry, Elaine [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988], pp. 185–210)Google Scholar. However, the analogy I offer here grows out of the categorization through which difference is “comprehended” in both imperial and social scientific terms.

7. Cited in Haskell, Thomas L., The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), p. 154.Google Scholar

8. Titles include Smith, William Carlson's Americans in the Making (1939; rept. New York: Arno Press, 1970)Google Scholar; Gans, Herbert J., ed., On the Making of Americans: Essays in Honor of David Riesman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979)Google Scholar; and Moore, R. Laurence's Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar. More recently, cultural studies have appropriated the title more ironically (in the spirit of Stein) to suggest aspects of cultural imperialism. See, for example, the last section of Michaels's “The Souls of White Folk” (cited above) and Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty's recent essay “The Making of Americans, the Teaching of English, and the Future of Culture Studies,” New Literary History 21, no. 4 (Autumn 1990): 781–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Spivak argues “that, if one is going to speak for or plan for that complicated thing called an 'American,' one must think of his or her relationship to the Constitution” (p. 781). Like Stein, Spivak finds a complication of the notion of disciplines crucial to her project.

9. Many theorists and historians of the novel have built on Watt, Ian's The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957)Google Scholar, which explicitly makes this claim. During the decade in which Stein completed The Making of Americans, however, Georg Lukacs worked on The Theory of the Novel, which similarly locates the novel's development in the privileging of interiority.

10. Consider the appellation “undesirable” so frequently conferred upon the imprisoned or exiled.

11. Ruddick, Lisa remarks somewhat similarly on this moment in Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990)Google Scholar. Subsequent references appear in the text. Ruddick, who argues for Stein, 's “hidden debt to Freud in this novel” (p. 57)Google Scholar in which Freud's “idea of the unconscious confirmed the value of what was happening in [Stein's] artistic practice” (p. 2), sees “patricidal rage. … [as] the prelude … to the emergence of a passionate persona” (p. 58). While I am indebted to Ruddick's reading, I am less concerned with Stein's psychological struggle for self-acceptance in this essay than in her cultural observations. I am accordingly more interested in Freud's cultural rather than clinical work and in the implications of Freud's work to which, for example, Derrida alludes in “Before the Law” (Derrida, , “Before the Law,” trans. Ronell, Avital, in Kafka and the Contemporary Critical Performance: Centenary Readings, ed. Udoff, Alan [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987], pp. 128–49).Google Scholar

12. Hurston introduces this phrase in “Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals,” The Sanctified Church (Berkeley: Turtle Island Foundation, 1981)Google Scholar. The proliferation of orchestra/harmony metaphors to depict assimilation during this period underscores the aptness of Hurston's expression. David Quixano's symphony in Zangwill, Israel's The Melting Pot (New York: Macmillan, 1909)Google Scholar was perhaps the best-known example. But even Horace Kallen, celebrated advocate of “cultural pluralism,” betrayed his own claims by his attachment to the figure of harmony.

13. Although I risk confusion with the Lacanian phrase, I use it to elucidate a powerful connection between the “self and culture at the site of the unconscious. Lacan's figuring the law in/as the Name of the Father explains the psychosocial dimensions of patriarchy. In Stein's passage, a father/son conflict brings the psychological struggle into focus over the issue of inheritance. Since inheritance is governed by patriarchal discourse (literally, the father's name), the social and psychological are aligned. As a trope, the Name of the Father allows Lacan to demonstrate the cultural dimensions of the unconscious through which he rereads (and revises) Freud.

The law is much more than a metaphor. The law and the unconscious are variously the external and internal sites of the “self s” capitulation to the social order. Within the law, the name of the father has literally determined inheritance. Lacan's metaphor asks why we have agreed to capitulate to these constructed terms.

For a compelling use of this concept in understanding experimental language, see DeKoven, , A Different Language, esp. pp. 19–22.Google Scholar

14. Italics added. Frost recited “The Gift Outright” at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961. His poem interestingly figures (and seems to celebrate) precisely the “possessive collectivism” (to paraphrase C. B. Macpherson) that roots United States nationalism. My verb choice here is deliberate. This notion of collectivity grows out of the principle of discovery through which European nations established claims in the New World. Its particular importance in the early Republic inheres in its substituting for the unifying traditions that had elsewhere evolved more gradually and had actually become associated with the landscape itself. The concept takes on an added significance in a Cold War context.

In a brilliant discussion of “the welding of the meaning of America and the continent” (p. 25), Myra Jehlen notes Henry Steele Commager and Richard Morris's use of Frost's line to represent “‘[t]he whole process of discovery’” (p. 24). Jehlen offers important insight into how “the self-possessive ideal individual repossesses the material universe; he appropriates them as not only his but him” (American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation, and the Continent [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986], p. 13.Google Scholar

15. The obvious anxiety provoked by the unincorporated territories that become the subject of legislation in Downes v. Bidwell grows out of a similar threat of insight into the nation's putative genesis in a collective subject. Justice White raises more than once the specter of incorporating a “people utterly unfit for American citizenship and totally incapable of bearing their proportionate burden of the national expense” (p. 1116), which would “degrade the whole body of American citizenship” (p. 1117). “Unfit for American citizenship,” or “uncivilized,” glosses as having alternative property relations (the name of a different father). The question of translating (geographically and rhetorically) the inhabitants of these territories into “Americans” recalls the project of Article 1, Section 8, of the United States Constitution that turns a treaty into a founding text by uniformizing the terms of citizenship, commerce, and currency. The law is thus caught in the act of creating its supposed author, “We the People”; the collective subject, in its alternative incarnation of imperial subject.

16. In the July, 1898 issue of Psychological Review, following the May issue in which Stein had published “Cultivated Motor Automatism,” Gustavo Tosti cites J. M. Baldwin's speculations about “‘the real self [as] the bipolar self, the social self, the socius’” (“Social Psychology and Sociology,” Psychological Review [07 1898]: 352).Google Scholar

17. Yezierska, Anzia, Bread Givers: A struggle between a father of the Old World and a daughter of the New (New York: Persea Books, 1925), p. 159.Google Scholar

18. I have taken this formulation from Forgie, George B.'s intriguing psychohistorical analysis in Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age (New York: Norton, 1961)Google Scholar. Forgie explores how the heroic patricide of the founding fathers was written into American historical consciousness to the extent that it became, paradoxically, both a threat to and the source of national cohesion.

19. See, for example, Zukofsky, Louis's A-12, in A-12 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 168Google Scholar; Dearborn, Mary's Pocahontas's Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Bridgman, Richard's Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 66–67Google Scholar; and Doane, Janice's Silence and Narrative: The Early Novels of Gertrude Stein (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986), pp. 92–93Google Scholar. Both Bridgman and Doane view Stein's departure from Aristotle's theme as largely unintentional. See also Miller, Rosalind S., Gertrude Stein: Form and IntelligibilityGoogle Scholar, for another source of this passage in a Radcliffe writing assignment (The Radcliffe Manuscripts, p. 120)Google Scholar. On Stein's December 4, 1894 submission, “There is nothing we are more intolerant of than our own sins writ large in others,” an instructor has written, “Montaigne or Confucius.” Elsewhere in The Radcliffe Manuscripts, however, Stein is explicit about her debt to “Professor James.”

20. Chessman, Harriet, The Public Is Invited to Dance: Representation, the Body, and Dialogue in Gertrude Stein (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989), p. 116.Google Scholar

21. A notable exception is the celebrated passage of Everybody's Autobiography (1937; rept. New York: Random House, 1959)Google Scholar: “There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing. Everybody nowadays is a father, there is father Mussolini and father Hitler and father Roosevelt and father Stalin and father Lewis and father Blum and father Franco is just commencing now and there are ever so many more ready to be one” (p. 133). Patriarchy, it seems, transcends national boundaries but is also intimately figured in them.

22. Loy, Mina, “Apology of Genius,” in Last Lunar Baedeker, pp. 4–5.Google Scholar

23. William James on Exceptional Mental States: The 1896 Lowell Lectures, reconstructed by Taylor, Eugene (New York: Scribner's, 1983), p. 5Google Scholar.

While Stein used James's Psychology (Briefer Course) as a text, I have used Principles of Psychology because I am less concerned with what she may or may not have read than with the tenor of the ideas that James was articulating in his classes.

Of the many excellent studies of James's influence on Stein, Lisa Ruddick's is the most extensive. My own reading differs from hers in its largely stylistic and rhetorical focus. The imperialistic traces that, unlike Frank Lentricchia, I see in James inhere mainly in how he writes rather than in what he explicitly professes.

24. Michaels, Walter Benn, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 9Google Scholar. Subsequent references appear in the text.

25. James, William, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 279Google Scholar. Subsequent references appear in the text.

26. Emerson's famous transparent eyeball passage in “Nature” betrays a similar (transcendental) logic: “Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God” (Emerson: Essays and Lectures [New York: Library of America, 1983], p. 10)Google Scholar. Grammatically, “all mean egotism” replaces “I”; subjectivity is the egotism that an apparently religious transcendence erases. Emerson underscores the paradox of an American Puritan notion of self-realization in what is arguably an ironic dismantling. Lincoln, however, appropriates the logic of Christian transcendence in the service of national reconstruction; the anxiety it evokes is salved by national allegiance.

27. I am indebted to Walter Benn Michaels's brilliant elucidation of this metaphor in the introduction to The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism. Amidst an intriguing discussion of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper” as “a story of the origin of property and, by the same token, of the origin of the self” (p. 10), Michaels uses this metaphor to define a “Jamesian economy of selfhood” (“the notion of an inherited title that never lapses”) (p. 9). I depart from Michaels in emphasizing the ideological rather than economic significance of this metaphor. While Michaels historicizes the “Jamesian economy of selfhood” within the context of the late-19th-Century market economy, I am interested in its manifesting the patriarchal discourse of imperialism. Of course, these terms are largely inseparable, but they are not quite equivalent. And it is in the slippage between them, however slight, that I locate Stein's project. It is precisely Stein's genius that enables her to represent — and historicize — the common origins of property and the “self.” James's immediate importance for Stein, as well as his more general cultural significance, necessitates my developing the sociopolitical implications of his “self” paradigm at some length.

28. I intend to note a rhetorical contiguity rather than a historical continuity here.

29. Renan, Ernest, “What is a nation?” trans. Thorn, Martin, Nation and Narration, ed. Bhabha, Homi (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 19Google Scholar. Subsequent references appear in the text.

30. See Leary, David E., “William James on the Self and Personality: Clearing the Ground for Subsequent Theorists, Researchers, and Practitioners,” in Reflections on The Principles of Psychology: William James After a Century, ed. Johnson, Michael G. and Henley, Tracy B. (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1990)Google Scholar.

Although I come to very different conclusions, Frank Lentricchia offers a reading of James that most fully captures the relationship between property and the self with which I am working here (“On the Ideologies of Poetic Modernism: The Example of William James, 1890–1913,” in Reconstructing American Literary History, ed. Bercovitch, Sacvan [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986], pp. 220–49).Google Scholar

31. Kerber, Linda, “From the Declaration of Independence to the Declaration of Sentiments: The Legal Status of Women in the Early Republic, 1776–1848,” in Women, the Law, and the Constitution: Major Historical Interpretations, ed. Hall, Kermit L. (New York: Garland, 1987), p. 400.Google Scholar

32. “No matter how often what happened had happened any time any one told anything there was no repetition. This is what William James calls the Will to Live. If not nobody would live” (Stein, , “Portraits and Repetition,” in Lectures in America [1935; rept. Boston: Beacon, 1985], p. 169).Google Scholar

33. Stein, Gertrude, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Van Vechten, Carl (1945; rept. New York: Vintage, 1962), p. 66.Google Scholar

34. Bhabha, Homi, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” October 28 (Spring 1984): 125–33, 127CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Irigaray, Luce, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Porter, Catherine (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 76Google Scholar. Where Irigaray speaks mainly to woman's “mimicking” her own cultural role, Bhabha refers to the colonized's “mimicking” the colonizer as well (often enforced, and often not by intention). Where Bhabha claims that “mimicry repeats rather than re-presents” (p. 128), a reader of Irigaray is likely to make the opposite claim. Both, however, agree on the “slippage” (whatever the intention of the mimic), which allows mimicry to participate in a critique.

35. Gertrude Stein to Mabel Weeks, cited in Brinnon, John Malcolm, The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and Her World (Boston: Little, Brown, 1959), pp. 99–100.Google Scholar

36. I do not wish to mitigate Stein's racism or elitism, however. My project, at this point, risks falling into the theory trap that Sonia Saldivar-Hull elucidates in her important intervention, “Wrestling your Ally: Stein, Racism, and Feminist Critical Practice,” in Women's Writing in Exile, ed. Broe, Mary Lynn and Ingram, Angela (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989)Google Scholar. It is therefore important to distinguish between this evident analysis/critique of racism and elitism and the racism and elitism that Stein displays elsewhere. In her Radcliffe theme of March 23, 1895, Stein puts the word “niggers” in the mouth of a “Southern gentleman” whom she vilifies, but the “courageous porter” who is the hero of the theme nevertheless “seemed more intelligent than most of the men in his class” (Miller, , ed., The Radcliffe Manuscripts, p. 143Google Scholar; italics added). At least at this time in her life, Stein's understanding of the rhetoric of racism does not extend to a more sophisticated analysis of its socioeconomic subtleties.

Similarly, in Three Lives, characterological stereotypes govern Stein's portrait of African-American and working-class women. I cannot, however, dismiss the irony of Stein's narrative voice this time quite as easily as Saldivar-Hull does. She had by now begun to problematize the psychologist's and sociologist's stance with the dictum that to observe is to create. I therefore have trouble taking statements such as Rose Johnson's “white training had only made for habits, not for nature” or Melanctha Herbert “had been made with real white blood” at face value (“Melanctha,” Three Lives, in Selected Writings, pp. 337–457, 340)Google Scholar.

I do agree with Saldivar-Hull, however, that Stein has not even remotely captured the voice of her subjects. Her letter to Weeks explains why as it problematizes Stein's project. With a focus on the discourse of alterity (that is, on her identification with “niggers and servant girls and the foreign population generally”), Stein overlooks the integrity of her subjects. In other words, while writing about the difficulties of representing difference, Stein erases the distinctions among the marginalized. It becomes almost impossible during Three Lives to tease apart the ironic treatment of racism and classism and their actual manifestations. Stein's inattentiveness allows her inherent cultural biases to intrude. I read The Making of Americans as a treatment, at least in part, of some of the difficulties she encounters in Three Lives – hence the genuine uncertainty of the narrative voices.

Finally, of course, Stein did not escape her culture. Her work continually betrays her racism and classism-as well as sexism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia. It is one of the ironies of her work, however, that that work enables us to see precisely those shortcomings. Saldivar-Hull is right that Stein must not be canonized into unobviated greatness. Her shortcomings are indeed at least as instructive as her achievements. But neither should we allow those shortcomings to obscure precisely those achievements that make them so apparent.

37. Green burlap appears in The Making of Americans in the context of fashion: “I say again, this was all twenty years ago before the passion for the simple line and toned green burlap on the wall and wooden panelling all classic and severe” (p. 31).

38. Marjorie Perloff offers an excellent reading of Stein's “indeterminacy” in her chapter on Stein in The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981)Google Scholar. For Perloff, the proliferation of meanings in Stein's work countermands conventional referentiality, involving the reader in the text's creation. As Perloff notes in a subsequent essay, Stein's “permutating counters make up a dense network of possibilities without ever coalescing into a definable story line. But indeterminacy does not imply, as readers often assume, that Stein's story has no meaning. On the contrary, its meanings are multiple” (“Six Stein Styles in Search of a Reader,” A Gertrude Stein Companion: Content With the Example, ed. Kellner, Bruce [New York: Greenwood Press, 1988], p. 103)Google Scholar.

Perloff's indeterminacies, DeKoven's “culturally alternative language,” and Catharine Stimpson's intriguing lesbian encodings (“The Mind, the Body, and Gertrude Stein,” Critical Inquiry 3, no. 3 [Spring 1977]: 489)Google Scholar come together in interesting, although not immediately apparent, ways. Stein's sense of alienation from the language, from the terms in which meanings are constructed, motivated an alternative form of communicating. Stein's stylistic indirection may well have begun as lesbian encoding, and the idea of an alternative system of communication rooted in secrecy (not unlike Pynchon's Trystero) gave rise to a radically experimental poetics of secrecy. What Stein may have discovered is that secrecy mimics meaning and, conversely, that all meaning is a kind of encoding, a way of denning an inside and outside that is not unrelated to the machinations of secrecy. Indeterminacy, on the other hand, is the outsiders' experience of secrecy. (The code could have any number of meanings and therefore verges on-but isn't – meaninglessness.) Indeterminacy is, then, the poetics of the outsiders, those who, finally, refuse the “secrecy” of meaning. On the poetics of secrecy, see also Fifer, Elizabeth, “Is Flesh Advisable? The Interior Theater of Gertrude Stein,” Signs 4, no. 3 (Spring 1979): 472.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39. Bhabha, , “Of Mimicry and Man,” p. 127.Google Scholar

40. Pease, Donald, Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987)Google Scholar. According to Pease, “[t]he threat of secession proved to be one of the consequences when the Revolutionary mythos was turned into a means of cultural association, and made it necessary for Americans to reflect upon cultural principles they could agree upon. … the Revolutionary mythos sanctioned a notion of negative freedom keeping the nation's individuals separate from one another” (p. x).

41. Doane, Janice, Silence and Narrative: The Early Novels of Gertrude Stein (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986), p. 92Google Scholar. Subsequent references appear in the text.

42. Sollors, Werner, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar. Sollors observes that a “tension between the rejection of hereditary old-world hierarchies (embodied by the European nobility) and the vision of a new people of diverse nativities united in the fair pursuit of happiness marks the course that American ideology has steered between descent and consent. It is this conflict which is at the root of the ambiguity surrounding the very terminology of American ethnic interaction” (pp. 4–5). For Sollors, the “contrastive strategies – naming and name-calling among them – [that] become the most important thing about ethnicity” (p. 28) mark attempts to negotiate the conflicts between organicist and conventional conceptions of personhood.

43. This legislation significantly recalls and reconfigures the 1856 Republican Party platform that held slavery and polygamy to be the “twin relics of barbarism” (Foner, Eric, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War [New York: Oxford University Press, 1970], p. 130).Google Scholar

44. Fanon spells out his use of Lacan in “The Negro and Psychopathology,” in Black Skins, White Masks, trans. Markmann, Charles Lam (New York: Grove Press, 1967), pp. 161–64 n. 25.Google Scholar

45. Cited in Lane, Ann J.'s introduction to Herland (New York: Pantheon, 1979), p. xviiiGoogle Scholar. Doane, Janice, however, reads “Hersland”Google Scholar as “suggesting] both ‘her land’ (a strong matriarchy), and the German word ‘herz,’ meaning heart or courage …” (Silence and Narrative, p. 133)Google Scholar, the latter of which she sees becoming increasingly ironic.

46. Freud, Sigmund, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. Strachey, James (New York: Norton, 1961), p. 92.Google Scholar

47. See Turner, Victor's discussion of liminality in The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu RitualGoogle Scholar, especially chapter 4, “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage” (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967).Google Scholar

48. There is considerable disagreement surrounding this date. Many critics have accepted Stein's own claim, on the title page of the Something Else edition as well as in the Lectures in America, that she composed the work from 1906 to 1908. I am following Leon Katz in dating the project from 1902. According to Katz, Stein began the final draft in 1908. It is interesting to note that she dates the end of her composition in 1908 as though, as she might say, beginning writing is an ending. See Katz, Leon, “The First Making of The Making of Americans: A Study Based on Gertrude Stein's Notebooks and Early Versions of her Novel (1902–1908)” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1963).Google Scholar

49. Stein, , Lectures in America, p. 137Google Scholar. Subsequent references appear in the text.

50. I have found Wendy Steiner's discussions of Stein's laboratory work especially useful. In “The Steinian Portrait: The History of a Theory,” Steiner is interested in the relationship of Stein's evolving theory of identity to her portraiture. See Steiner, Wendy, Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978)Google Scholar. See also “Gertrude Stein in the Psychological Laboratory,” appended to Hoffman, Michael's The Development of Abstractionism in the Writings of Gertrude Stein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hoffman, and to a lesser extent, Steiner, take Stein's explanations of her categories in The Making of Americans more literally than I do.

51. Stein, Gertrude and Solomons, Leon M., “Normal Motor Automatism,” Psychological Review (1896): 492–572, 493Google Scholar. Subsequent references appear in the text.

52. Stein, Gertrude, “Cultivated Motor Automatism; A Study of Character in its Relation to Attention,” Psychological Review (1898): 299–306.Google Scholar

53. Stein cites a common expression here, one that was especially important to Henry James, whose journal entries several times record his injunctions to himself to learn to let himself go and whose Lambert Strether frequently echoes this concern. Stein considered herself, alternately, southern and western; New England was certainly not her home. Donald Sutherland suggests that her “disconnect[ion] from any native or local context is … partly a Jewish situation and partly the. accident of being born in Pennsylvania, traveling in France and Austria, and living in California and Baltimore, all before turning up for college work at Radcliffe, in the deliquescence of New England and the Puritan tradition” (see Sutherland, Donald, Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1951], p. 8)Google Scholar. Perhaps what Sutherland calls her general “delocalization” was in fact a distance from New England and from the New English tendency to claim an equation with “America.”

54. Knight, Arthur, The Liveliest Art: A Panoramic History of the Movies (New York: New American Library, 1957).Google Scholar

55. Stein, Gertrude, “Portraits and Repetition,” in Lectures in America (1935; rept. Boston: Beacon, 1985), p. 177Google Scholar. Subsequent references appear in the text.

56. Stein, , “Portraits and Repetition,” p. 166.Google Scholar

57. As the growth of advertising demonstrates, the United States in the late 19th Century witnessed an increase in consciousness of and concern with marketing strategies. The need to elicit desire is recognized as the citizen (cultural subject) becomes more explicitly a consumer of culture and possession becomes more explicitly the object of desire. Comprehension and possession are thus dual ends of desire in late-19th-Century America. Stein finds, in that connection, an explanation of the limitations entailed in ownership and the desire it generates.

58. Freud, Sigmund, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. Strachey, James (New York: Norton, 1961), p. 12.Google Scholar

59. Brooks, Peter, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Knopf, 1984), p. 109.Google Scholar

60. Stein, Gertrude, What Are Masterpieces (1940; rept. New York: Pitman, 1970), p. 63.Google Scholar

61. Stein, , What Are Masterpieces, p. 62.Google Scholar