PREVINIENDO SITUACIONES PARA LA CONSTRUCCIÓN DE PROCESOS FORMATIVOS

In her autobiographies, Stein made several statements recognizing Darwinism as a shift in world consciousness and the primary influence over her formative years Taking her at her word, one could examine the use of Darwinistic comparison and classification in MA. However, the post-Darwinian writers I have included in this thesis, all of whom were writing at the turn of the century, have seemed to me to be more directly fruitful for a study of MA. The subjects I discuss also represent areas of Stein’s thinking which I consider to have been undervalued. Nevertheless, each of these authors was clearly influenced by Darwin, and it will be useful to set out here some of the areas of Darwinian concern in MA itself.

The dissemination of Darwin’s theory inevitably had a huge impact on people’s imaging of their own d e s tin ie s .O ld ro y d has summarized the situation:

If evolution theory were true, essentialism would be false and natural kinds might slide around ... No kind would be marked off clearly from all other kinds ... knowledge itself would seemingly be impossible or at least would lack all certainty. One would be left with a disquieting relativism, it would be impossible to gain a firm epistemological purchase on the world.

The consequences of this for narration are, as MA demonstrates, enormous. Without belief in a higher omniscience, the omniscience of the novelist ( ‘the characteristially Victorian form of realism’) breaks down.^^^ The speaker is often left looking for a direction in which to move, and a reason for doing so. MA indeed leaves us with a ‘disquieting relativism ’.

Darwinism was research into beginnings, and MA presents us with multiple b e g in n in g s .S te i n ’s concern with degeneration is also evident in MA, related to the question of whether breeding or social pressure is the key to the maintenance of normality. Representative men, the middle class, are, at the outset, extolled, and however complex the fate of these concepts is in the novel, they are never entirely overturned as its true standard.

Darwin’s model was of the slow emergence of laws from a steadily increasing number of examples. Two essential concepts were the expansion of species by

For example. Wars I Have Seen, op. cit., 17, 144; Everybody’s Autobiography, op. cit., 242-3, and GS to Robert Bartlett Haas, 23(?) Jan 1938 (YCAL).

Darwinism has been seen to establish a trend, in literature, o f considering individual destinies as functions of the species, in relation to both natural selection and sexual selection; see Beer, op. cit., and Bender, op. cit., respectively.

Oldroyd, Darwinian Impacts (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1980), 263. Keating, 160.

diversification and the provision of a directional effect by restriction. So two divergent movements were established: reliance on family and resemblance, and the urge towards deviation, difference, and breaking away. ‘Difference’ and ‘resem blance’ are essential to MA’s narration (e.g. 336-37). Stein’s use of the typology which involves her ‘grouping’ men and women (e.g. MA 343-344), and ‘making kinds’ (e.g. 337) is an attempt both to mimic D arw in’s focus on profusion of individuals, and to impose new restrictions and new certainties, to allow new laws to emerge as a means of establishing permanence where it had been so drastically eroded.

A further related context, which critics have not pursued, is the work of Herbert Spencer, the leading English-speaking exponent of social Darwinism. Stein had a demonstrable interest in him.^^^ She used Spencer as a character in MA; he reappears at various s t a g e s . S p e n c e r investigated evolution as a movement from simple to complex formations in every possible configuration of life. The natural movement of structural changes was, he contended, from ‘an abundance and confusion of m otion’ to a ‘regimentation and loss of m o t i o n I n Man Versus the State (1884) he elaborated this principle with the belief that ‘above all, there must be gained the ability to sacrifice a small immediate gratification for a future great one’.^^^ This concept of ‘equilibration’ alleviates the fear which springs from the disturbance of certainty, the recognition that minute random mutations are continually yielding results which can neither be foreseen nor provided for.

This disturbance of certainty is equally applicable to literary form in the period, and Spencer’s grand vision applies as much to composition as to daily life; for the writer it suggests a principle of narrative delay, of gradual elaboration and unfolding with an eye to the completed project. Many of Stein’s strategies in MA, including the ‘continuous present’, her use of the present participle, her elongated sentences and her use of the paragraph as the unit of meaning impose a consciousness of the passing of time in the narrative, and particularly emphasize narrative delay on a grand scale.

ibid.

134

Debates with Spencer, rather than Darwin, were particularly prevalent in American fiction, e.g. 365; 519. Spencer is also mentioned in Stein’s notebooks for MA\ 6-12, B-29; J-1. Medawar, The Art o f the Soluble (London: Methuen, 1967), 44.

The Man Versus the State: With Four Essays on Politics and Society [1884] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 140.

The ‘continuous present’ is the term Stein used for her method in MA, ‘The Gradual Making of The Making o f Americans’, Selected Writings o f Gertrude Stein (New York: Random House, 1962), 250.

Spencer believed in the final end of evolution; his ‘equilibration’ adds an idealistic dim ension to social D a r w i n i s m . T h e idea can be applied to plotting, the gradual revelation of order among superabundance of example and response. An event, or in com position a statement, disturbs a state of contentment which must be retrieved, creates disorder which must be corrected or counterbalanced by explanation and by the perfection of the grand design. The concept of equilibration helps Stein to insist on the long view of MA’s history, and suggests that the final product will be good. She uses the w ord ‘equilibration’ to mean the balance of natures in the individual (e.g. MA 377), part o f her vision of character which depends on the importance of habit in creating a com plete individual.

Spencer also produced a notable autobiography. The first chapter of An

Autobiography (written just astride the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and

posthumously published in 1904) is called ‘Extraction’, and this and the ensuing few chapters take genealogy in autobiography to a new dimension. Part one is entirely taken up by his forefathers, rather than Spencer himself. In MA Stein, like Spencer, was to take traditional genealogical interests to the extreme, introducing most of her characters in terms of who their parents and grandparents are. Unlike many self-made people inhabiting the fiction of the time, Stein’s characters are not autonomous. There is no confusion about their origins; they have very firmly established maternity and paternity.

In 1926, soon after the first publication of MA, Stein claimed: ‘When I was younger and determined to write I knew nothing of the ancient Greek curse on us all, heredity; now I have seen, I have weighed, I have reflected, I know, and my ‘Americans’ is the outcome.’ The opening pages of MA demonstrate Stein’s acknowledged huge concern with heredity. This interest is not mainly derived from her knowledge of ‘ancient G reece’; it has numerous counterparts in the period’s scientific discourse, in which there was an implicit urge to social engineering through the elucidation of the processes of h e r e d i t y . S p e n c e r ’s narrative, as well as stressing the importance of inheritance, is concerned, like MA, with ‘living down the tempers we are bom w ith’ (MA 3).

See Oldroyd, op. cit., 207.

Stein quoted in Willis Steell, ‘An American Novel That Paris Is Talking About’, The Literary Digest International Book Review, 4 (February 1926), 172-3.

Francis Gal ton, for example, tried to measure development by his law o f ancestral regression, a formula for discovering how much a trait gets lost in its transmission to each new generation. Stein’s idea of three stages converging to make the generation now alive also betrays a typically nineteenth-century priveleging of the present. See Beer, 13.

Space only permits a look at one autobiographical paradigm which Spencer exemplifies, and which has connections with MA. Several of his memories focus on first experiences of coping with solitude. His ‘most vivid recollection’ is of ‘being left alone for the first tim e.’ He is clearly charmed at his own childhood self when he quotes from his father’s account of his first realization of young Herbert as an individual intelligence: “ ‘One day when a very little child, I noticed as he was sitting quietly by the fire side, a sudden titter. On saying Herbert what are you laughing at, he said ‘I was thinking how it would have been if there had been nothing besides m y s e l f I n MA

there is a similar instance of the realization of solitude:

It is a very hard thing then knowing what any one ever is seeing, feeling, thinking, I am all alone now and I have then an unreal lonesome feeling, it is like a little boy who was howling and they all rushed out to help him, I am all alone, he said, and all of a sudden it had scared him {MA 519).

Stein’s use of a familiar autobiographical moment of being left alone to express her own authorial solitude has a much more disconcerting effect. The community all rush out to help the little boy, but this comforting resolution is rarely repeated in MA. Aloneness and self-reliance, in the absence of secure knowledge, are here employed in a metaphor for the author’s own state of mind; all certainties are eroded, and one is left alone, but this also leads the writer to a fearful sense that ‘Perhaps every one is in pieces inside them and perhaps every one has not completely inside them their own being inside them ’ (519). Like Spencer, Stein recognizes the importance of solitude, but also notices, like Spencer - ‘I was thinking how it would have been if there had been nothing besides myself’ - how childish knowledge of solitude can resound with suggestions of more mature concerns about individual and collective life.^"^

Although in MA Stein rejects the possibility of a selective autobiography, most of the material is autobiographical; it is a ‘history of me and the kind of suffering I can have in m e’ (573). ‘I am writing for myself and strangers’ {MA 289) is an autobiographical claim in a long tradition of disclaimers and justifications which address the fittingness of the author as subject of autobiography. However, it may be useful to read MA as one of those autobiographical stories positioned by Marcus

An Autobiography (London: Williams and Norgate, 1904), 65; 68. Anna Robeson Burr identifies this sudden consciousness of selfhood as a typically ‘modern’ trope in autobiography; The Autobiography: A Critical and Comparative Study (London: Constable, 1909), 220.

Compare these moments with Fitzgerald’s sense, in The Crack-Up, o f being without a ‘self ... like a little boy left alone in a big house’ (New York: James Laughlin, 1945), 79.

‘between literature and science’. Stein came to her long novel as a scientist, trying to objectify her gaze in the way that Spencer

A letter from Stein’s friend, collaborator, and mentor in the psychology labs, Leon Solomons, advises her, in 1898: ‘By and by you will attain the breadth and intellectual perspective of the scientist, which includes details by systematizing them, but which never “abstracts” from them as the philosopher does.’^"^^ Whereas normally repetition, as a facet of experimentation, is what sets ‘scientific method’ apart from ‘the procedures of fiction’, S t e i n flouts such distinctions and describes the forming of habits in both author and subjects by repetition of traits (e.g. 519). The emphasis on the present, on observation, lies behind M A ’s goal, to represent ‘every kind of human being that ever was or is or would be living’.

At the beginning of the original 1903 outline of ‘The M aking of Americans’, Stein writes like an experienced physiognomist. She implies that certain aspects of appearance and demeanour which have become fictional stereotypes for the indication of character now determine our preconceptions even in life itself. But, Stein warns, ‘this is not the whole of the story’; her characters may be true to that tradition, ‘or they may try to prove the story-books all wrong. Only keep in mind that futures are u n c e r t a i n T h i s is doubly prophetic concerning the fate of her characters and of her book itself.

In the notebooks Stein categorizes people according to fairness or darkness (#97; A-6), or particular kinds of eyes (D-25), hands (D-17), chin (D-17), jaw (D-25) or lower lip (B-19).^^^ W ith concern she notices her sister-in-law Sally’s ‘light blue eyes’, which indicate ‘a certain lack of profundity of passion’, and lists other acquaintances who share the trait; ‘must remember to look’, she avidly notes (F-12). By the final version these plans have already gone through some ironic revision, but will be further overturned in the course of the novel. The inclusion of the original style and original

The issue o f whether autobiographies ought to be classed as art or science was being contested at this time. Marcus has traced the idea o f the ‘scientific’ objectivity o f the autobiographer, Auto/biographical Discourses (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 56-85.

Solomons to Stein, 27 February 1898, YCAL. See Beer, 160.

‘The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans’, op. cit., 246. ‘The Making o f Americans’, op. cit., 147-48.

For reference to Stein’s notebooks throughout the thesis, I have followed the numbering system employed by Katz in his typed transcript, available at YCAL.

interest in physiognomy before the transition to the new style displays the projected obsolescence, for Stein, of both the form and the subject of the family novel.

MA’s catalogues have a statistical urge. Stein’s presentation of the process of professionalization within one family in MA draws on what she calls ‘middle class’ values and on all its attendant p h i l o s o p h i e s . S t e i n claimed to have lost interest in the abnormal at medical s c h o o l . H e r fantasies of normality, like those of the eugenicists, hold a horror of and an attraction to the bourgeois family of good breeding. Family sagas, novels about ‘descent’, frequently enact that w ord’s other meaning of degeneration and d e c l i n e ; M a n n ’s Buddenbrooks is a relevant parallel for MA’s plot design.

In MA, a form of social Darwinism is in action; ‘unsatisfactory males’ are made extinct, and life and death are seen in terms of success and failure; the women are very often small and helpless (e.g. 276). Mrs Hersland’s ‘weakening’ (133-34) marks her as one who will soon have ‘died out’, and is contrasted with the ‘domineering, fighting’ and ‘hearty’ strength of Mr Hersland, who is the image of ‘success’ (138). If m en’s power comes through physical struggle, women’s comes from seduction, ‘if a woman held her power with [Mr Hersland] it was because of brilliant seductive managing, and so there would not be aroused in him any desire of fighting’.

Stein’s description of the Hersland family home draws partly on the Montesquieuan or Jeffersonian ideal of the American farm house, but the relation between father and children within its grounds draws on a different archetype, which involves ‘mostly fighting’ (125). As Keating points out, ‘murderous relationships between fathers and children ... were becoming the norm in fiction’ at this time,^^^ expressing intense feelings of conflict between past and present. MA has no shortage of psychologically

See Gygax, op. cit., 13. The final result is a large scale rejection of former literary principles which are also included within the novel.

The theories, for example, of Émile Durkheim, who ascribed normality to middle-class values (in, e.g..

The Division o f Labour, 1893), or Belgian typologist Adolphe Quetelet’s 'hommes moyens', whom he elevated to the status of arbiters of all humanity (e.g. A Treatise on Man, 1835).

Draft of letter to Lennard Gandolac, YCAL.

Higham identifies a surge of optimism in America’s literature o f the period. Strangers in the Land, op. cit., 110. This seems an over-simplification if we consider such novels as Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) or Howells’s earlier The Rise o f Silas Lapham (1885), which deal with the down side o f success.

Bender, 22.

Here Stein enters a contentious debate of her time, the question of female choice in sexual selection having infiltrated New Woman fiction and the responses to it. See Bender, 13-14.

*^^Keating, 232. See also Toews, ‘Refashioning the Masculine Subject in Early Modernism,’

violent fathers, who seem to authorize the discord involved in progress which Freud laid out in ‘Family R o m a n c e s ' T h e Hersland father is angry, violent and overbearing. The children are referred to as ‘three big struggling children’, with Darwinian significance, while the ‘little gentle mother’ (45) is one of the casualties of evolution.

We might refer also to two stories which unfold next to each other in MA, both of which use archetypal scenarios to express the characteristic late Victorian theme of ‘intergenerational conflict’ the family by the fireside for a story of feminine domesticity disrupted by incest between father and daughter (489),^^^ and the popular figure of the amateur naturalist, who collects moths despite telling his son it is cruel, for the story of the inheritance of masculine aggression (489-90).^^^

Bender has argued that images of the garden are often used to explore the Darwinian implication of violence within the family itself - ‘and even within the individual m ind’.^^^ These observations give new nuances to the first lines of MA\

‘Once an angry young man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree’” {MA 3). There is a sense that this cyclical movement eventually will provide variation, direction, change and order, that it is necessary for growth into