“Melanctha Was Too Many for Him”: Gertrude Stein's Challenges to Essentialism inThree Lives

Abstract

Modernist author Gertrude Stein attended medical school and conducted research when the now discredited theory that humanity was easily divisible into a small number of biological races and two genders reigned supreme. Stein's education connects her to scientists working to maintain the hierarchy of races, primarily in the field of medicine. Although she is better known for her formal experimentation that breaks with the literary traditions of the nineteenth century, Stein's nonfiction writing before she abandoned medicine and moved to Paris demonstrates her antagonism to the rigid evaluations made by theorists of human difference. This connection to the history of medicine is an important background for Stein's first published work, Three Lives. Stein's contemporaries praised this collection of novellas for providing an alternative to the dialect style of rendering African American speech. With Stein's scientific training in mind, this article shows how more of Stein's aesthetic choices in Three Lives can be seen as a pointed satire of scientific racism based on deductive logic. Stein's challenge to the prevailing paradigms of race and gender is evident when the narrator's original, biologically deterministic point of view gives way to a nuanced understanding of difference. Accepting that this narrator is unreliable shows that Stein's first fictional work was written in continuity with her academic nonfiction, challenging contemporary assumptions about the nature of humanity. This article also demonstrates how fiction leaves behind traces of intellectual debates that now can provide insight into the impact of scientific theory: Three Lives demonstrates that the acceptance of and challenges to scientific paradigms are not immediate and exemplifies how the literary sphere has been used to test the consequences of prevailing patterns of scientific analysis and challenge their acceptance.