The politics of make-believe: Gertrude Stein and the Second World War (William James)

In recent years, as literary scholars in all fields have begun to locate writers and their works in specific historical and cultural contexts, the question of Gertrude Stein's political beliefs and allegiances during the Second World War has emerged as the central question of Stein scholarship. Virtually all of the most recent articles on Stein have engaged this question. Was the wartime Stein really “cozying up” to the Vichy regime?; This dissertation attempts to answer that question. This project began as a study of Stein's children's books of the World War II period. In 1938, when the nightmare of a Second World War became a reality, Stein wrote The World Is Round, her first children's book. In the years that followed, as Stein remained in Occupied France, she would continue to cultivate this new “occupation,” writing two more books for children, three plays for children, and a series of “adult” war narratives dominated by child-like figures. When I studied these children's books next to Stein's other representations of the war years, I discovered one theme running through both sets of works: a methodical, distinctly scientific study of the psychology and epistemology of beliefs. In both sets of works I located a series of specific references to works by William James, Stein's teacher and mentor. As I assembled and analyzed these various references, I found that Stein was borrowing James's paradigms to conduct her own study of the psychology and philosophy of wartime beliefs in France.; Why is Stein's study of beliefs so important? In my analysis of Stein's wartime “make-believe,” I show not only that Stein was aware of the forces that were distorting her beliefs during the Second World War, but that this distortion was, in fact, the central concern of every work she wrote during this period. In one text after another, Stein would represent herself and her fellow civilians as “children of wartime,” children whose beliefs were being shaped or “made” by their world. Most important, I discovered that Stein devoted her works of this period not only to studying and understanding the transformation of her beliefs, but to resisting this transformation. During the Second World War, Stein began writing for and about children in an effort to learn to make herself believe, much as children do. More specifically, I will show that in her children's books Stein developed a set of cognitive and aesthetic practices that would shape both the form and content of every narrative she wrote during the Second World War.