The Imprint of Williams James on Gertrude Stein in Three Lives

LIU Ying

（School of Foreign Language,Mianyang Normal University，Mianyang Sichuan， 621000）

Gertrude Stein is regarded as one of the most remarkable writers of the twentieth century.Reacting against the naturalistic conventions of nineteenth-centuryfiction,shedeveloped an abstractmannerof expression that was a counterpart in language to the work of the Postimpressionists.Her radical approach was admired and emulated by other authors of her era,including Ernest Hemingway,Thornton Wilder and Sherwood Anderson,and served as a key inspiration for many modernist writers.

Three Lives is described as Gertrude Stein’s first experimental work.The publication of this first of Stein’s works established her position as a master of the English language and expositor of the twentieth-century woman.But most often than not,the first touch of the novel will make reader hard to go on with it,for the various kinds of experimenting writings are used in this not-long novel.As a result,Stein is regarded eccentric.Stein tries many innovative ways of writing in Three Lives,including episodic structure,the motivated repetition,the famous prolonged present,etc.The present paper will focus on the experimental writing techniques in Three Lives under the influence of Williams James.

Three Lives and Williams James

Gertrude Stein met William James in 1893,when she took his introductory philosophy course at Harvard.James shared the lecturing with two other professors.He led the unit on psychology,assigning a newlycondensed version ofhisPrinciplesofPsychology.Before graduating,Stein enrolled in seven more psychology courses,two of them lectured by James.Later she went to medical school at James’s urging,with a view toward a career in psychology.Although she ultimately dropped out of medical school,Stein and her mentor remained irregularly in touch even after her expatriation.She entertained him in Paris,and in 1910,shortly before his death,James warmly acknowledged the copy of Three Lives she had sent him.

Stein owed much to William James for her stylistic innovations.She describes him as “the important person in[her]Radcliffe life” and one of“the strongest scientific influences that I had.” (Stein,1990:96)James’s science pervades her early writing. “Melanctha”,in particular,is so close,in its characterizations,to James’s theory of the mind as to approach psychological allegory.Stein describes her heroine as“always wanting new things just to get excited” (Stein,2006:73).In James’s phrase,Melanctha likes what is “exciting or interesting per se” (James,90).James uses the term mind-wandering,or wandering attention to describe such a receptiveness to sensation—and wandering is what Stein uses for her heroine.

The significant way to bring out William James’s importance for Stein is to place Jeff,her purest Jamesian creation.James sees a duality in human nature,one that traps a person between eagerness and selfcontrol.But in his view,the self-division signifies not deviance but mental health.Jeff is romantically cautious and also incapable of focusing his senses on “new things”.These qualities make him attractive to the heroine of the story.Indeed,the very struggle between yielding and selfcontrol that immobilizes the characters of the “Radcliffe Themes” comes,with an infusion of James’s psychology,to seem a creative part of consciousness.Jeff’s competing impulses make him a more sensitive person and a better doctor.His one excursion into forbidden“excitements” only helps him to know himself better and to do more for others.James’s ideas help Stein to create an idealized character who resolved and benefited from internal struggle.

The Prolonged Present

Stein is labeled as a modernist writer stems from her stylistic innovations,from her efforts to rework narrative structure in order to represent the world in new ways,thus possibly portraying a reality not accessible to conventional forms.The important one in “Melanctha” is the “prolonged present” she defined in her essay “Composition as Explanation”: “a constant recurring and beginning there was a marked direction in the direction of being in the present although naturally I had been accustomed to past present and future,and why,because the composition forming around me was a prolonged present.” (Stein,1926:21)The idea for a prolonged present originated in the theories of William James,particularly in his idea of a human perception,which also stressed the “stream of consciousness” that Stein employs.In a sense,this rush of sensual perception and emotional experience is the reality in which Jeff learns to live and in which Melanctha seems naturally to exist.Prolonged present exchanges conventional notions of past and future,as well as causality,for time made up distinct but aggregate “now”s.These two notions of time also have their place in the content of the story:Jeff understands it as a consistent image of the past and Melanctha understands it as rewritten in each moment.

For example,Jeff says,“Yes Miss Melanctha,I certainly do like everything to be good,and quiet,and I certainly do think that is the best way for all us colored people.No,Miss Melanctha too,I don’t mean this except only just the way I say it.I ain’t got any other meaning Miss Melanctha,and it’s that what I mean when I am saying about being really good.” (Stein,2006:76)Stein wantstocapturesomething rudimentary but vivid in the character.His meaning,as he put it,is not a function of permanent beliefs—behind and out of the reach of all action.His beliefs are more like proclivities and tendencies that help conduct him through present circumstances.In Jeff’s strange utterance,part ellipsis,part solecism,the present progressive, “it’s what I mean when I am saying”replacing the more typical use of the habitual present tense,“it’s what I mean when I say” suggests that Jeff’s conviction comes not from what he tends to accept as true in general,abstracted from the present,but from what his routines allow him to state in this particular moment.Nothing can be separated from the context in which Jeff makes his assertions—his particular challenge to Melanctha’s way of living.

In addition,Stein develops a self-conscious use of the present participle,a stylistic facet about which most critics have commented.This grammatical form expresses the continuous present by its very existence.To say,for instance,that a man“was doing” something is not the same as saying that he “did” something,for in the very morphology of-ing we are told that,even though the action took place in past time,it was an action that occurred progressively,as all actions must.To make clear the extent to which Stein began to use the present participle,we can quote a paragraph of descriptive narration from “Melanctha”:

Jeff Campbell then began again on the old papers.He sat there on the steps just about where Melanctha was sitting,and he went on with his reading,and his head went moving up and down,and sometimes he was reading,and sometimes he was thinking about all the things he wanted to be doing,and then he would rub the back of his dark hand over his mouth,and in between he would be frowning with his thinking,and sometimes he would be rubbing his head hard to help his thinking.And Melanctha just sat still and watched the lamp burning,and sometimes she turned it down a little,when the wind caught it and it would begin to get to smoking.(Stein,2006:119)

Thislong reflective momenttakesplace when Dr.Jefferson Campbell comes to watch over the final illness of “Mis” Herbert,Melanctha’s mother.The two lovers are having the first of many conversations during which they try to justify their respective life styles.Since each one represents to the different polar concept of how to live,the relationship of Jeff and Melanctha is doomed to repeat itself fruitlessly again and again.

The difference made by the present participles is quite important;for this is not simply the relation of a past incident.The grammatical form that embodies the ongoing process gives us a sense of the continuous changes that take place in Jeff’s consciousness from moment to moment as he broods.This marriage of language and theme works beautifully if the reader accepts the repetitive nature of Stein’s concept of human personality.It is a process within a moment rather than a process from moment to moment that is at the core of “Melanctha”’s structure,for the totality of the story consists of an accretion of such moments within which the continuous present is exhibited in the process of its development.

Melding the knowledge Stein had acquired from her studies of philosophy and psychology at Radcliffe College after Williams James and her understandings of Cubist art,Stein creates Three Lives.The innovation in the novel makes Stein undeniably unorthodox.

[1]James,Williams,Psychology:The Briefer Course,ed.Gordon Allport[M].New York:Harper and Row,1961.

[2]Stein,Gertrude. “Composition as Explanation.” 1926,in Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein,ed.Carl Van Vechten[M].New York:Random House,1926.

[3]Stein,Gertrude.Three Lives and Q.E.D.DeKoven Marianne,ed[Z].New York&London:w.w.Norton&Company,2006.

[4]Stein,Gertrude.The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas[M].New York:Vintage Books,1990.