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

Notes

1 In his introduction to Alphabets and Birthdays, Donald C. Gallup discusses Stein's works for children. They include The World is Round (1939), The Gertrude Stein First Reader and Three Plays (1946), and Alphabets and Birthdays (1957). The World is Round was illustrated by Clement Hurd; its first edition was printed on rose-colored paper with blue typescript.

2 The text of The World is Round is arranged in a variety of graphic forms. Some sections are arranged in "poetic" form; that is, the text has specific line breaks and lines do not extend all the way to the right margin. Other sections of the text are completely italicized. In quoting from The World is Round, I have reproduced Stein's textual forms: all italics are her italics, and I have indicated poetic line breaks.

3 In his recent article in Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Peter Schwenger also asserts that Rose's adventures demonstrate the paradoxes that inhere in the project of constructing an identity in language. Schwenger suggests that Rose's difficulties reflect the psychoanalytic notion that "the subject" is inevitably circular. Schwenger quotes Jacques Lacan: "it is necessary to define [the subject] in a circle, what I call the otherness, of the sphere of language" (120). According to Lacan, then, language is at once the medium in which the self is constituted and the "chain of signifiers" along which identity continuously recedes. Thus Schwenger argues that Rose's ultimate inability to define a stable personal identity aptly portrays the fact that "[o]ur only unity is one of constant movement in the preexisting sphere of language" (120).

Works Cited

Bridgman, Richard. Gertrude Stein in Pieces. New York: Oxford UP, 1970.

Gallup, Donald C. "Introduction." Gertrude Stein, Alphabets and Birthdays. 1957. Vol. 7 of The Yale Edition of the Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein. Ed. Carl Van Vechten. 8 vols. Freeport: Books for Libraries, 1969.

Hoffeld, Laura. "Gertrude Stein's Unmentionables." The Lion and the Unicorn 2 (1978): 48-55.

Hunter, Peter. Criticism, Theory, and Children's Literature. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991.

Kerby, Anthony Paul. Narrative and the Self. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.

Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. New York: Oxford UP, 1967.

Marcus, Leonard S. Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon. Boston: Beacon, 1992.

Radford, Andrew. Transformational Grammar: A First Course. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988.

Schwenger, Peter. "Gertrude Writing Rose Writing Rose." Children's Literature Association Quarterly 19 (1994): 118-21.

Stein, Gertrude. "Composition as Explanation." 1926. Gertrude Stein: Writings and Lectures 1911-1945. Ed. Patricia Meyerowitz. London: Peter Owen, 1967. 21-30.

-----. The World is Round. 1939. New York: Young Scott, 1967.

-----. "What are Masterpieces and why are there so few of them." 1940. Gertrude Stein: Writings and Lectures 1911-1945. Ed. Patricia Meyerowitz. London: Peter Owen, 1967. 146-54.

Stewart, Susan. Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979.