Naming What Is Inside: Gertrude Stein's Use of Names in Three Lives

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Spring 2003 by Rowe, John Carlos

People if you like to believe it can be made by their names ... generally speaking, things once they are named the name does not go on doing anything to them and so why write in nouns.... As I say a noun is a name of a thing, and therefore slowly if you feel what is inside that thing you do not call it by the name by which it is known.

Gertrude Stein, "Poetry and Grammar" (1934)

As far as I know, the curious first name Gertrude Stein gives her protagonist, Melanctha Herbert, has attracted little comment, despite the prominence of this name in the title of "Melanctha: Each One as She May," the second and arguably central narrative in Three Lives (1909).1 The critical neglect of this character's name is not surprising, considering Stein's criticism of given names, along with other proper nouns, as conventional uses of language and her insistence that "more and more one does not use nouns" (210). A traditional onomastic study of Gertrude Stein's use of characters' names would thus appear to be a quixotic project, based on an assumption about the symbolic significance of proper nouns antithetical to Stein's avant-garde use of language and its special emphasis on verbal action and stylistic performance.

Yet as I shall argue in this essay, the significance of the name "Melanctha" offers one part of the solution to the intellectual puzzle concerning Stein's literary representation of race, ethnicity, and sexual identity in Three Lives. Was Stein merely adopting the persona of her African-American protagonist, Melanctha Herbert, for purely aesthetic purposes, thus implicating her version of modernism in other forms of popular black-face minstrelsy? Was Stein exposing the social construction of racial and ethnic identities, perhaps of all identities, and thereby deconstructing avant le lettre "race" and "ethnicity" as essential categories? Was Stein equating her own social marginality as a lesbian with that of German immigrants and African Americans, and was this imaginative identification sympathetic or manipulative? The larger issue, of course, is Stein's relationship to other avant-garde modernists, including the high moderns (Yeats, Pound, Joyce, Eliot, Stevens, for example) and artists of the Harlem Renaissance (Du Bois, Johnson, Cullen, Toomer, and Hurston, for example).2

Among the literary modernists at the beginning of the twentieth century, Stein is notable for her rejection of the "surface" versus " depth" relationship often typical of high modernism. James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and Ezra Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, for example, offer quasi-naturalistic representations of the modern alienation and fragmentation of Dublin and London, in order to suggest the "deeper meanings" organized by their aesthetic forms and language. Names are connotatively rich in these works-Stephen Dedalus, Tiresias, the Fisher King, Mauberley-and have attracted extensive commentary. While sharing many characteristics of these moderns, Stein consistently stresses writing as a surface without depth. Verbal complexity for Stein is the result not of deep, unconscious, symbolic, or otherwise "hidden" meanings but of the "natural" tendency of language to proliferate, refuse control and form, and exceed the intention of a discrete sender (author) or receiver (reader).3 Indeed, much of Stein's recent critical reputation as one of the modernists who best anticipates the central concerns of postmodern writing depends on her fundamentally poststructuralist understanding and use of language.4 Thus the literary symbolism such post-World War II scholars as William York Tindall and Charles Feidelson, Jr. celebrated as a distinctive aesthetic feature of modernism is usually absent from Stein's practice and often rejected in her theoretical statements (Tindall 3-27; Feidelson 47-74).

Rather than imply a "secret" or "hidden" meaning, then, Stein's literary use of Melanctha's given name establishes relationships between otherwise discrete "universes of discourse" and, by transgressing their boundaries, produces new meanings and new ways of understanding. As Stein suggests in "Poetry and Grammar," people's "names ... generally speaking" do "not go on doing anything to them," so that people are imprisoned or caricatured by such names. When she continues by asking rhetorically, "so why write in nouns," she means that poetic writing should use "names" differently and more in the manner of verbs, as if they were actions capable of producing new results, rather than commodifying existing meanings (210-11).5 Stein approximates this idea when she recalls in "Poetry and Grammar" how much she enjoyed "diagraming sentences" when she was in school-a startling, if not preposterous, claim for the reader recalling his or her own agonizing experiences with this mind-deadening school exercise. What Stein means, of course, is that poetry offers a radically different way of "diagraming sentences" and thereby "learning grammar" by embodying language, which leads ultimately to what Stein suggests is a "way one is completely possessing something and incidentally one's self" (211). In Stein's linguistic universe, the "self" becomes visible in and through the acts of expressive language, not by way of a "name" parentally or legally assigned to a "body." The latter is a noun, a proper noun, and "nouns are not really interesting" (211).