Homes away from home: The intimate geographies of Pearl Buck, Elizabeth Bishop and Gertrude Stein

In this paper I try to take issues of American homemaking beyond discussion of "separate spheres" into a new sphere entirely---beyond our national borders. In this project I address the question of how home is made, and remade, out in the world, by American writers Pearl Buck, Elizabeth Bishop and Gertrude Stein. Although they were far-ranging figures who differed greatly in their motives for leaving their original homes, in the places they came to inhabit, the genres they worked in, and the reputation each enjoyed, all three responded deeply to the notion of home, producing textual "homes" that reflected the challenges they met out in the world and the adjustments they made in order to live productively.; Of my subjects, Pearl Buck was the most deeply involved in issues of cross-cultural contact. In her long experience in China and intimate access to a culture and language alien to most Westerners, Buck is indeed a hybrid of Chinese and American cultural traditions. Yet for all her strengths, Buck also demonstrates the difficulties inherent in the expression of this double perspective, particularly when one tradition overcomes the other and balance is lost.; In my second chapter on Elizabeth Bishop, the home dynamic changes. More the rootless sojourner than Buck or Stein, Bishop offers a poetic perspective that is frequently that of the outsider, as a traveler or exile in another culture, or the marginalized character "at home," looking at the native land with the eyes of a stranger. In my readings, I also consider poems in which Bishop reconstructs home from scenes of childhood in which death, absence and alienation figure heavily. Her narrators often seem caught between the desire to settle in a safe and welcoming place and a restless distrust of fixity and lack of confidence in the stability of relationships.; My third chapter explores a third aspect of homemaking away from home in the skillful and productive use Gertrude Stein makes of resources in her French home. Like Buck a product of two worlds, Stein credits France with allowing her to "make what she made." Her expatriation was more carefully crafted---home-made, self-conscious---than that of Bishop or Buck; moreover, it grew through discernible stages, from a well-guarded interior space to the spectacle and stage of her salon, into a more mature relationship with her adopted country that would be tested by the upheavals of war over the decades of her residence in Europe.