Stop the world, I want to get off! Identity and circularity in Gertrude Stein's The World Is Round

Style, Spring, 1996 by Martha Dana Rust

In his biography of Margaret Wise Brown, Awakened by the Moon, Leonard Marcus explains that Gertrude Stein wrote her first children's book, The World is Round, at Brown's suggestion (2).(1) Having found immense personal satisfaction with her own work in the picture book genre, Brown sensed that, given some nudging, other writers might also find the field of children's literature rewarding. Thus, during the summer of 1938, Brown - then editor of Scott publishing company - sent letters to Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and John Steinbeck, inviting them to write children's books for the firm. Gertrude Stein replied to Brown's offer with "an enthusiastic affirmative" (Marcus 99).

When the finished manuscript of Stein's story arrived from France that November, Brown and several friends from Scott gathered at her apartment. Marcus describes the event:

In the happy confusion, everyone forgot about supper and Margaret had not thought to pick up refreshments. The only food in the house was an amusing cake in the shape of a boat, which she had ordered for a friend's going-away party and which the two now appropriated in the name of experimental literature. They sat around the kitchen table and took turns reading the manuscript aloud: "Once upon a time the world was round and you could go on it around and around." (100)

This giddy occasion - in which dinner was dessert and dessert was a cake and the cake was a boat - provided a peculiarly appropriate incident for a first reading of a book that humorously yet relentlessly asserts Stein's belief that identity is neither stable nor useful.

In her lecture "What are Master-Pieces and why are there so few of them," Stein asserts that a sense of personal identity brings creation to a halt because it sets in motion a process of abstraction: quips Stein, "I am I because my little dog knows me but, creatively speaking the little dog knowing that you are you and your recognising that he knows, that is what destroys creation" (146-47). James E. Breslin explains that for Stein, identity is merely an "artificial construct," a means of "familiarizing the strangeness, the mysterious being, of others" (150). In accordance with her interest in the effervescent being that shimmers outside the boundaries of identity, Stein's The World is Round depicts the abounding mystery of existence in a round world as it chronicles the frustrated attempts made by nine-year-old Rose to construct a personal identity, to familiarize the strangeness of her own existence on a spinning planet.

Having learned at school that the world, the sun, the moon, and the stars are all round and "that they were all going around and around," Rose wonders, "Oh dear oh dear was everything just to be round and go around and round" (21). Rose's question suggests that the essence of her distress with roundness is that it devours individuality: in a world where "everything" is "just to be round and go around and round," boundaries that mark the beginnings and endings of years, of places - even of "you" and "me" - become hopelessly blurred. In a round world, Richard Bridgman observes, "the individual self loses meaning, its uniqueness swallowed in a sea of eternal return" (300). Rose finds that the swirling sea of language is particularly devouring of personal identity, for as she searches for a secure sense of self, she cannot help wondering if "she [would] have been Rose if her name had not been Rose." Seeking herself along such fretfully circuitous semantic byways, Rose is unable to penetrate this existential dilemma; instead, words tend only to draw her into circle dances of more words like "Rose is a Rose is a Rose" (77).(2) On one level, then, The World is Round portrays Rose's struggle with circularity in the world around her; on another level, it dramatizes her struggle to define herself within the treacherously slippery medium of language itself.

While Rose attempts to master the turning worlds within and around her, a parallel tussle occurs between linear and circular elements in the story's style. On the one hand, Stein's play with syntax creates a prose that swallows up individual sentence "identities"; on the other hand, the multiple lists of nouns that are so characteristic of Stein's poetics, coupled with the linear discourse of narrative itself, seem to form a wedge against the story's almost overwhelmingly circular syntax. Tellingly, though, The World is Round concludes with the words "and the world just kept on being round," and circularity does have the "last" word in this story. Rose's quest for stability in her round world leads only to the discovery of new horizons of roundness; the lists of nouns that seemed to interrupt the story's spinning syntax only give rise to dizzying spirals of repetition and rhyme; even the supposedly stable identities produced by the linear narrative mode are eventually proven subject to flux. Stein thus gives her playful tale a subversive message: because our world does keep going around and around, we may never know exactly "who" we are.