This article was written by Lauren Owen
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| Gertrude Stein by Pablo Picasso |
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In 1874 the ground was fertile for Gertrude Stein to become a woman of virile thoughts even in her youth. After having been born in a small industrial town near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, little Gertrude Stein took to a life abroad at age one--crawling, then walking in Vienna, America, and elsewhere in Europe, under the care of her capricious, travel-happy father, her mother, and her four siblings.
Her first language was German. Then she learned French. In Baltimore at the age of five, she began to speak English, which was the language she favored in regards to writing or reading. It was the language in which "emotions began to feel themselves." Thus commenced the stubborn sense of "Americanism" which stayed with her no matter how long she inhabited another country. She carried American English in her blood. As Rene Stenal, editor of Gertrude Stein in Words and Pictures put it:
From that time on, and for the rest of her life, she knew how to remain the five-year-old child who discovers the English language for the first time, tries it out without prejudice, endlessly repeating, wantonly changing, destroying, and recreating it.
But she was a quiet, introspective child, who grew into a young woman lacking the confidence or experience to really speak out. She explored philosophy and psychology at Radcliff, the women's annex at Harvard, studying under such people as William James, brother of Henry James, who would inspire her with his "stream of consciousness" ideas. "Never reject anything," William once said. "Nothing has been proved. If you reject anything, that is the beginning of the end of your life as an intellectual." She began to break up traditional literary writing by her own structure, jumbling interesting subjects together, while remaining focused, like a meditation. She created fiction that was poetry, and poetry that fractured reality; a broken mirror repeating each piece of human nature in a new infinitely strange way. Or she could be disarmingly simple and brilliant: she had a flair for the staccato dropped lines that would be quoted around the world. For instance, "There is no there there," she later said when she realized her one-time-hometown, Oakland, was no longer what is used to be. Or, "A rose is a rose is a rose." she said, when she courageously "caressed and addressed a noun," attempting to bring meaning back to a word squandered by over-use.
According to Stein, she quit medical school though only a class away from a Ph.D., due to her boredom with technical science. After a torturous and fruitless affair with beautiful New Englander, May Bookstaver, her college companion (who influenced her first novel, Q.E.D., and many of her other stories) Stein moved to Britain to be with her brother. She found her time in London dark and laborious: disillusioned with her first love, she desperately strived to devour as much as she could of the English canon. Surprisingly, in her journals she doesn't mention trying out the styles or conventions of other authors; her focus was on inner natures, not styles. She made brief forays into formal, Victorian-style writing, but soon abandoned this to address the reader with her intimate sensibility. She delved into deep psychological explorations of her characters, as she began writing the source material for The Making of Americans:
Some feel some kinds of things others feel other kinds of things. Mostly everyone feels some kinds of things. The way some things touch some and do not touch other ones and kinds in men and women then I will now begin to think a little bit about describing.
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