Gertrude Stein was a large, generous American woman who was a writer and a great lover of the good, warm, echoing-round sunshine of her own rosy prose. Gertrude Stein lived in Paris for many years and while she lived in Paris Gertrude Stein did write about serious, good, innocent women who were always unfortunate and who always did come to bad ends. Gertrude Stein wrote a novel in her own most ambitious rosy style, about innocent women who came to bad ends, that was very plain and true and full of the warm, intelligent, echoing-round sunshine of her own rosy prose, and she called the novel Three Lives. tWilliam James had met Gertrude Stein when he was her teacher in America, and he had taught her the idea of the “Stream of Consciousness” when she was living in America, before she moved to Paris and before Gertrude Stein ever known much about exactly how she was going to do, in her rosy, echoing-round prose. William James had taught Gertrude Stein in his field of Psychology, but William was a philosopher in his heart who loved to think and to think about thinking. William James had always tried to teach Gertrude Stein something that was important in the way she would later learn to do. William was a philosopher in his heart, and American, and intelligent, and always knew what the best way was for Gertrude Stein to do, and taught her very well in his good, intelligent, philosophical way. tWilliam James in his good philosophical way did help Gertrude Stein to write serious, good Stream of Consciousness writing, because she listened to what he said and studied his studies and thought about it and took it in very deeply. Always when Gertrude Stein learned from Will she heard in his intelligent, careful prose his good, serious ideas about thinking and the way he thought about thinking. And always she thought about how she could with these ideas about thinking and thinking about writing put them into her work, and how she could write about serious, good, innocent women who came to bad ends, in a Stream of Consciousness kind of style. The way Gertrude Stein came to do was not Stream of Consciousness the way William James wrote about Stream of Consciousness because William James was a philosopher in his heart and always knew that the best way to do was to be serious and intelligent and to think, and to think about thinking, and to write about thinking about thinking, and in this way to know how to do. Gertrude Stein was not a philosopher, but was a serious, intelligent writer and considered the things he taught her and tried her best in her generous, ambitious way to do as she believed she could do, and to write in a style that showed her good knowledge of thinking about thinking the way William had always taught her to do. With Will’s teaching Gertrude Stein always knew what was the right way for her to do as she was writing her rosy, echoing-round prose that was so ambitious and that she loved. tGertrude Stein really admired so much and praised in the sunshine of her echoing-round, rosy prose the people she wrote for and tried to help them with her Stream of Consciousness writing in her large, generous way, but it was not known to the readers of her ambitious novel Three Lives what she did think in her writing about thinking about thinking, about the good, innocent women who came to bad ends in her novel Three Lives. Gertrude Stein always did try to persuade by her writings the readers of the novel about women who came to bad ends, of the thoughts that the women who came to bad ends were all the time thinking in her Stream of Consciousness writings in her novel Three Lives, but Gertrude Stein did never give a simple answer.
Technically I didn't read all of this, but I have decided will never finish Getrude Stein’s Three Lives - my life is just too damn short.The book consists of three short stories/novellas about three women. The first, which I read in its entirety was titled “The Good Anna” and was about a German woman who lived her life as a servant to a number of wealthy Americans. It was ok – I thought that Stein was somewhat condescending to her character, since she kept repeating how “good” and “simple” she was, and the text was ridiculously repetitive, which I guess is Stein’s style, but overlooking that I could see how it was conscious effort to use a certain affected style to capture (what Stein perceived as) a simple life. It wasn’t my kind of story, by any stretch of the imagination, but I understood what she was trying to do, and I could appreciate it as the product of its time. As an early attempt at modernism it had academic interest, at least.The second story is called “Melanctha.” It tells the tale of a young black woman trying to make her way in the world, and eventually (since I peeked at the ending) coming to no good. I could not finish this story. First of all, I found it to be uncomfortably racist. I have done some internet research on this point, and found this story should be lauded as one of the first books written by a white person that took a black character seriously as a human being, warts and all, and that Stein treats Melanctha with respect. That may be so, but I found the way she talked about black people in general to be so demeaning that I had a hard time turning the page. Maybe this was one of the first stories to take a black character seriously, but it is clear that Stein thinks white people are superior. For example, one character is mixed race, and Stein says, “… she had white blood, and that made her see clear… Her white blood was strong in her and she had grit and endurance and a vital courage.” Yuck. On top of that, the whole center of the story is a long, difficult to follow between Melanctha and her quasi-boyfriend, Dr. Campbell. Extremely repetitive and difficult to follow, I tried forever to get through and I finally just gave up. I tried to read a few pages of the third story, “The Gentle Lena,” but I ran out of steam. Sorry, Getrude.Sorry to go on at such length, but I hate giving up on books. I read this book forever – it was my commuting book and I do like to finish them, but after a week of listening to my ipod rather than reading, I decided that it was time to call it quits.
What do You think about Three Lives (2011)?
This book of three stories is an interesting piece. It was written by the first significant female writer of the modernist movement and the 20th century at large. Three Lives contains three different stories about women, with the second story, Melanctha, being the highlight and the size of a standard novella. The protagonist of the story was unusual in its time as she was a Black proto-feminist in some respects. Now this book has a habit of turning some people off because of its style. The oral story-telling style that Stein seems to be trying to transcribe to the page in this work still shocks readers over 100 years later. This is a very early example of the type of literature that would be championed by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Many of the "lost generation" writers gathered at Gertrude Stein's home after WWI and it became the literary hot-spot of the inter-war years. I felt I had to read this book in order to better appreciate Woolf, who is the more read female modernist writer, and to see where modernist literature emerged from following the example of Marcel Proust. This book is a good, but not easy read of what experimental literature was looking to at the turn of the century.
—Ken Moten
Stein wrote this as she was still struggling to find her voice. As a racist, sexist, anti-Semite Jewish lesbian, finding her voice proved to be a challenging task. The most intriguing story is Melanctha--a heterosexual, racist re-telling of her own first love triangle, captured less eloquently in QED. Stein was in constant conflict: her need to express everything was always truncated by her fear-based need to hide. While in her later works she finds brilliant ways to balance these needs, Three Lives gives us some insight into the awkwardness of her early struggle.
—Jennifer Richardson
Hmm...Three Lives? Classic. Moving. Brilliant. Ground breaking....How about lousy?In literary studies, Gertrude Stein is always discussed with such reverential deference that to criticize her work is deemed anti-intellectual and absurd. Nevertheless, I feel I can say with great confidence that Three Lives is one of the worst books I have ever read. While reading "Melanctha" for a Modernist American literature course, I struggled with the baby language and ceaseless repetition. I get that she's trying to comment on the act of storytelling and make a point about the cyclical nature of life; I get it. However, my understanding of the goals Stein was striving for does not render this collection enjoyable--or even readable--for me at all. The repetitious baby language made me yearn to burn this collection, not read it and certainly never wish to study it. This story is actually the one that made me begin to hate Modernism and focus my degree on the nineteenth century, which was a wise and pleasing choice. So, I guess I have some respect for this book.Secondly, "Melanctha" really is one of the most racist stories I've ever read. And the caricatures are not the main problem, either; one can find offensive racist caricatures in countless novels and stories from Stein's era. "Melanctha" is so much more offensive than other caricatures, such as Rosedale in The House of Mirth or Mammy in Gone with the Wind, because not only are they racist images in themselves, but Stein is presenting them from the black characters' perspectives! In other words, "Melanctha" is Stein's idea of how black people think and act. The repetitious expressions are part of this portrayal, too. If I had to read "the warm laughter of Negro sunshine" one more time, I probably would have tossed my copy into a recycling bin. I find it almost comical how scholars (at least people I know) will excuse the social flaws of the collection in order to praise its supposed innovations, yet these same people strive to ban novels like Huck Finn. It exhausts me.
—Lara
