Identity in Gertrude Steins The Making of Americans Essay -- Gertrude

Identity in Gertrude Steins The qualification of AmericansThroughout her career, Gertrude Stein was fascinated by the possibility of revolution in the sense of a complete or drastic change, curiously in relation to her ideas of individualism and agency. But critics disagree about her conclusions. For example, Bruce Goebel sees her betimes texts as embracing a deterministic attitude about the formation of identity (238) that conceives of identity as locked within historical and biological contexts. At the other extreme, umpteen critics such as Caren Kaplan locate Steins work within the context of ban modernism and so see it within the discourses which celebrate the rootless traveler (7), thin loose from nation and history and thus free to create a self of her own choosing. I believe this contradiction arises because Steins texts are themselves very much contradictory, with one passage exploring the inescapable weight of history and heredity on her characters, while the next admires her characters capacity to resist cultural prescriptions, to exercise agency, to transmogrify themselves, to be singular. Identity in many Stein texts, especially in The Making of Americans, is, then, a negotiation between cultural prescriptions, biological and historical determinants on the one hand and self-definition, change and agency on the other. In this sense, Steins work anticipates Foucaults later theories of identity in which he explores possibilities for freedom or agency. In The Ethic of Care for the Self as a radiation pattern of Freedom Foucault begins to define what he calls the practices of the self I am evoke . . . in the way in which the subject constitutes himself in an active fashion, by the practices of the self, these ... ...ad to Die The Problem of Mortality in Gertrude Steins The Geographical History of America. Philological quarterly 70.2 (1991) 237-252. Hovey, Jaime. Sapphic Primitivism in Gertrude Steins Q.E.D. Modern Fiction Studies 42.3 (199 6) 547-568. Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel postmodernist Discourses of Displacement. Durham Duke UP, 1996. Spencer, Benjamin. Gertrude Stein Non-Expatriate. Literature and Ideas in America. Robert Falk, ed., Ohio UP, 1975. Stein, Gertrude. The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans. Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. New York Vintage, 1990. -----. The Making of Americans Being a History of a Familys Progress. Normal Dalkey Archive Press, 1995. -----. Narration. Chicago U of Chicago P, 1935. Wald, Patricia. Constituting Americans Cultural dread and Narrative Form. Durham Duke UP, 1995.