Gertrude Stein, postcolonialist: The English language, American literature, and geocultural authenticity

Beginning with the essays and lectures Gertrude Stein wrote for her 1934–35 tour of the United States, she retrospectively construed the significance of her literary works in terms that I establish are postcolonial in nature. Abandoning the temporal terms “prolonged present” and “continuous present,” which she originally coined in “Composition as Explanation” (1926) to discuss her work, Stein reinterpreted the transitions in her writing as the gradual—and geographical—American appropriation of the English language. While “English literature,” she argues, has been “determined by the fact that England is an island,” authentic American literature (such as hers) takes this transplanted language and makes it representative of a “continent” (“Narration” 3). More generally, Stein maintains that geography serves as an organic, essentializing force because its influence on language and literature indigenizes individuals to their place.; Stein identifies “Melanctha” as the “beginning of her revolutionary work” because it initiated her supposedly inevitable emphasis on participial verbs, which gave rise to her geoculturally American approach to literature (Autobiography 82). Although Stein reifies racial stereotypes in “Melanctha,” which belies an ambivalence I address, this story significantly interrupted Stein's writing of The Making of Americans and enabled her to perceive that the literary legacy the United States had inherited from England was inadequate for representing the hybridity of American culture. Ultimately, Stein came to identify The Making of Americans as an “essentially American book” because it advances the “essentially American thing,” which is “a space of time that is filled always filled with moving” indicative of the continent (Lectures 160). I argue that the formal transformations in The Making of Americans gradually privilege space as the ordering element of the narrative. Stein's systematic approach to writing led her to investigate whether she could make the nouns of her poetry and her “landscape” plays “move” as do the verbs of her prose, which I examine at length. In Stein's last few works, she ruminates as to what America's identity has become, and she surmises with optimism, I argue, that the movement her writing embodies has facilitated an increasingly pluralistic America.