Iteration as a Form of Narrative Control in Gertrude Stein's "The Good Anna" - Critical Essay

Style, Spring, 2000 by Thomas Fahy

"You say I am repeating

Something I have said before. I shall say it again.

Shall I say it again?"

-T.S. Eliot, "East Coker"

In Three Lives Gertrude Stein explores the heterosexual and lesbian relationships of three ordinary women--Anna, Melanctha, and Lena. In "The Good Anna," the first of these three stories, Stein uses repetition to criticize the cultural norms that have tried to shape women's sexual identity through repression. As particular phrases and sentences recur; a caustic irony emerges within the narrative that exposes Anna's absurd and usually futile attempts to repress not only the sexual behavior of young heterosexual men and women, but also Anna's own homoerotic impulses. [1]

Since its publication in 1909, the stylistic innovations of this work, such as Stein's use of repetition and colloquial diction, have been discussed in great detail. In A Different Language: Gertrude Stein's Experimental Writing, Marianne DeKoven explains how Stein's use of language

is the beginning of a shift from conventional, patriarchal to ex-perimental, anti-patriarchal modes of articulating meaning. [...] The limitations of vocabulary, the condensation, the repetition, the surprising diction, and the unconventional word order are crucial discoveries for Stein. They are points of departure, from which many characteristic features of her experimental styles evolve. The most noticeable feature of Stein's writing between 1906 and 1911 is its repetitiveness. It is undoubtedly safe to assert that no other writer has ever used repetition as extensively as Stein did in this period. (28, 40)

Throughout Three Lives, Stein specifically uses repetition or, to use her term, "insistence" to expose and undermine culturally reinforced biases against women's sexuality, especially lesbian sexuality. Her repetitions in "The Good Anna" and the long descriptions of the protagonist's pained relationship with her own sexuality begin to break down the binary between heterosexual and homosexual. Though Anna struggles with this dichotomy both internally (suppressing her own lesbian desires) and externally (in her relationships with men), she resists both categories; she seems unable to envision a system of homosocial desire [2] that includes same-sex erotic relationships. Instead, by the end of the story, she perceives sexual desire of any kind as so abhorrent that she becomes an asexual figure. Stein's mission in "The Good Anna" is germane to 1990s queer theory, which attempts to deconstruct these categories as it argues, in part, that bisexuality is a primal condition. As Eve Sedgwick explains about her book, " [T]he analytic move [Epistemology of the Closet] makes is to demonstrate that categories presented in a culture as symmetrical binary oppositions--heterosexual/homosexual, in this case, actually subsist in a more unsettled and dynamic tacit relation" (9-10). Similarly, Stein, through her use of repetition, shakes up this binary and makes her audience consider the ramifications of such a dichotomy between self and other. As a result, we can examine the ways "The Good Anna" points to early twentieth-century anxieties about homosexuality in America and reread this text as prefiguring some of the cultural work of queer theory.

Stein criticizes nineteenth-century attitudes about sexuality and domesticity through her portrayal of Anna's social and personal commitment to work. Expatriate life in Paris had given Stein the freedom to live as a lesbian woman and to resist the conventional roles imposed on most women. In "Paris Lesbianism and the Politics of Reaction, 1900-1940," Shari Benstock explains that "expatriate lesbians could act upon their sexual preferences, no longer finding it necessary to submerge their sexuality in the late nineteenth-century ideology of 'ennobling commitment' to community service or self-discipline" (334). Stein fights this ideology through her representation of Anna, who uses work both to suppress her own sexual desires and to control the morality of others. Anna's desire to be "unfeeling, self righteous, and suppressed" (35) subverts her attempts for emotional and moral control over other men and women, preventing the fulfillment of her own emotional needs and leaving her "bitter with the world [. . .] for its sadness and its wicked ways of doing" (65, 69). The text also undermines Anna's ability to "[put] things to rights" (39) by preventing the reader's taking her seriously through the reiteration of certain sentences: "Anna led an arduous and troubled life" (11), "Mrs. Lehntman was the only romance Anna ever knew" (52), and "These days were happy days with Anna" (37). These iterations, which become clearly ironic in the context of the story, raise questions of power in the relationship among author, reader, and subject. By making Anna the unwitting victim of her own attempts to stifle sexuality and create emotional dependency, these repetitions deride her "control." As one reads and becomes increasingly critical of Anna's behavior, one must revaluate what Anna represents--mainstream patriarchal beliefs that subordinate women to men, privilege heterosexuality, disavow lesbianism, and morally oppose premarital sex.