Most literary fiction develops setting—the time and place of the action—through description, often with references to contemporary culture or events, as well as geographical locations, recognizable or fictionalized. But setting in Gertrude Stein’s story “Melanctha” is minimal, hardly portrayed at all through the conventional means of description. The town is named Bridgepoint, usually assumed to be based on Baltimore because of various clues related to the author’s biography; however, beyond a few references to “the South” and some of the characters’ homes and local locations, the setting recedes almost entirely from the text, which is made up primarily of dialogue and indirect discourse focalized around the two main characters. In fact, in the virtual absence of setting, I argue that the “place” of “Melanctha” is congealed around the characters. The distinction between the literary term “setting” and the geographical term “place” is central to my analysis. The geographer Doreen Massey describes place as “particular moments in ... intersecting social relations, nets of which have over time been constructed, laid down, interacted with one another, decayed and renewed. Some of these relations will be, as it were, contained within the place; others will stretch beyond it, tying any particular locality into the wider relations and processes in which other places are implicated too” (120). Rather than approaching setting in its conventional literary meaning, to try to pinpoint the location in which the story occurs, this essay will examine the “place” generated through the text as “not so much bounded areas but open and porous networks of social relations” (Massey 121).
In this sense, the setting of a novel might be Eunice, Louisiana, or Tokyo, but the place cannot be described simply by pointing it out on a map because it is an effect of the text itself, a product of the language, characterization, and spatial relations constructed by the novel. Given this distinction, then, it is precisely because this story can barely be said to have a setting, that it is an ideal text with which to explore the concept of place. As Sheila Hones argues, literary scholarship can only benefit by moving “the discussion of literary setting away from the relatively simple question ‘where is the action located?’ and towards the more geographically interesting question ‘what would a more complex understanding of space make it possible for us to see in this text?’” (Hones n.p.). In the spirit of that question, this essay will adopt a term from geography, Massey’s “place” as defined above, to explain and illustrate how “Melanctha” constructs place—despite the near absence of setting, which is evoked only by the repetition of clichés in the narration—through the meanings it congeals around its characters. In the next section, I examine the text’s use of cliché in the underdeveloped setting and the contradictions between character and caricature, before moving on to an analysis of the production of place through the trope of mobility (section 2) and relations of proximity and distance established in the characters’ spoken and indirect discourse (section 3).[1]
I. “Negro Sunshine”: Cliché in Characterization
Stein’s narrator in “Melanctha” uses cliché and caricature, along with repetition, to reinvent what we usually understand as character and setting; it is in part through the process of repeating these clichés and caricatures that the text constructs place. The narrator in “Melanctha” has often been called “obtuse” and artless, in part because of the reliance on commonplaces and caricatures instead of perceptive observation or description, particularly of characters (DeKoven 32). I would add that this absence of description applies not only to characters but also to setting, which is generated through the same kinds of caricatures as the people in the text: the South is only referenced in the narration through allusions to lazy, happy scenes echoing the clichés of popular old plantation stories. Other than repeating these generalities about the South, the story offers no elaboration of setting whatsoever in the conventional literary sense. Indeed, I argue that place in the text is constructed in part through the characters and their relations, often out of their contrast with the caricatures repeated by the narrator.
Much critical debate has been devoted to the caricatures in the narration, particularly in terms of racism. To consider the way that these caricatures of African American people, as well as clichés of setting, constitute the place of the text, I begin with the important question of their racializing implications. As Toni Morrison rightly observes, “It is hard to think of any aspect of Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives that has not been covered, except the exploratory and explanatory uses to which she puts the black woman who holds center stage in that work” (14). Indeed, the narrator in “Melanctha” repeats caricatures of African Americans and the South that appear not merely obtuse but offensive to contemporary readers. Many of these caricatures reproduce racist stereotypes, a point upon which Stein scholars today agree; not so clear-cut is the question of whether these caricatures can be seen as reflections of the author’s own racism. And as Morrison suggests, earlier critical works on Three Lives seem to go to extravagant lengths to avoid the uncomfortable questions about race and representation that now seem to scream from its pages; this lacuna has been remedied by scholars such as Aldon Nielsen, Milton Cohen, Debra Silverman, Sonia Saldivar-Hull, and Carla Peterson, to name only a few. To debate Stein’s own racism seems to me close to succumbing to the intentional fallacy and in some sense beside the point; rather than speculate about what the author meant to say in the text or what she herself believed to be true about race, I prefer to focus on a close reading of the text and how it creates spatialized meanings in its caricatured representations of African Americans and the South, as well as other kinds of cliché in descriptions of setting.
One expression that appears repeatedly throughout “Melanctha” with subtle variation has been particularly visible in the criticism: “the wide, abandoned laughter that makes the warm broad glow of negro sunshine” (47; see also Saldivar-Hull; Cohen). Many characters are described in terms of whether or not this applies to them; for example, Melanctha’s lover Jeff has “the free abandoned laughter that gives the warm broad glow to negro sunshine” (63) but Melanctha has not. Some critics have interpreted this expression of racist caricature as a direct reflection of Stein’s own attitude, a perilous assumption.[2] No doubt it is possible that Gertrude Stein held racist views of African Americans, and it is possible to read her story as an example of this; certainly, the volumes of biographical and archival data about Stein makes this approach a possible avenue of inquiry. However, several factors lead me to believe there is more afoot than authorial boorishness. First, the story may be the first fictional text by a white American author to ascribe powers of philosophical abstraction to black characters, evident in the prolonged debates between Melanctha and Jeff, which I will consider at length below. Second, and related to this first point, these philosophical debates are in stark contrast with the vapid stereotypes repeated throughout the narration, creating a kind of tension or instability within the text. Third, this is not a text written in a realist mode: very little actually happens and very little is described in detail. Rather, it is a highly experimental text that radically reconfigures our experience of fiction, particularly time and space in fiction. Because of this, I propose to read the racism in the wider context of other textual strategies of cliché and caricature that interweave the racial and spatial to produce the place of “Melanctha.”
I agree with Laura Doyle’s assessment in her essay “The Flat, the Round, and Gertrude Stein: Race and the Shape of Modern(ist) History,” that the narrator’s characterizations of African Americans are “calculated to offend,” given Stein’s awareness of the racist stereotypes that would have been familiar to the primarily white audience for whom the story is composed (263). Doyle further points out that “Stein had an ear for cliché, for cultural trope . . . . She regularly picked up on such overdetermined phrases and imitated the culture’s repetition of them so as to pound the meaning out of them and alert us to their inculcative power” (263). By repeating such blatantly racist tropes, Stein’s narrator makes the reader flinch with recognition; the plot of “Melanctha,” which conforms in many ways to the tragic mulatto story whose adventurous heroine dies alone and misunderstood, actually creates an ironic distance from stereotypes like the happy laughing “negro sunshine” that the narrator repeats so often. Granted, the tragic mulatto is another kind of stereotype, but by combining contradictory clichés, the text refuses to authorize either. Furthermore, “Melanctha” bears a curious resemblance to certain other narratives by white authors set in the South and featuring African American main characters, in popular music.
In her provocative interpretation of “Melanctha,” Carla Peterson argues that popular music probably influenced Stein’s creative process, including her use of language, characterization, and plot: specifically, the coon song, the ragtime tradition, and folk-blues idioms. These popular vernacular forms, widely performed in cities across the US, including Stein’s university town of Baltimore, are important in my argument because they give me a way to theorize the seemingly racist tropes used by the narrator throughout the story. Peterson points out that the coon song of the American minstrel tradition, performed by whites wearing blackface, “relied on caricature and racist stereotyping in order to ridicule and lampoon blacks as uncivilized and primitive people” (146).[3] But when African Americans performed these songs, they “did not simply adapt themselves unthinkingly to the coon song tradition but subverted it” by repeating the white performers’ imitations of coons, thus pointing to the nonsensical and inauthentic nature of the hyperbolic blackface performance itself (Peterson 147). As other critics such as Doyle suggest, Peterson argues that the caricaturing of African Americans in “Melanctha,” while it surely strikes most readers today as offensive, is in fact a strategic reiteration of popular American racism, referencing the coon song of the minstrel shows, designed to make readers uncomfortable as they weave and wander through the plot, detailing the life and death of the main character, the “complex, desiring” Melanctha. Peterson’s essay describes the narrator’s caricaturing as a form of syncopation, stressing, through the repetition of stereotypes, normally unstressed notes in American assumptions about African Americans (148-49). I would also suggest that Peterson’s argument about caricatures could be extended to a discussion of setting, to which I turn now.
II. “Little Red Brick Houses”: Caricatures of Setting
“Melanctha” is set in a fictional Southern town called Bridgepoint. Rather than create a conventional literary setting that formulates a sense of place by describing the town, “Melanctha” omits this kind of specificity of setting almost entirely. Rather than describe the landscape, the homes of the characters, the town, and so on, the narrator gives only abbreviated hints. For example, Melanctha’s parents lived in a “little red brick, two story house” (66) and her friend Rose Johnson has a “little red brick house” (49). Rose’s husband Sam is a hard-working man, characterized by his desire for a little house: “all Sam ever wanted was to have a little house and to live regular” (137). The passage describing Sam’s ambition to have a little house also employs a phrase that Jeff later uses, “living regular,” that sums up the kind of married, respectable, middle-class existence that Jeff and Sam and Rose desire (98). Melanctha, however, never has her own little red brick house; she has lived in one with her mother, and visited her friend Rose, but the little red brick house is often off-limits to Melanctha, as when, ending their friendship, Rose explains that she “don’t never want you no more to come here just to see me” and finished, “went into her house and closed the door behind her” (138-39). Shut out of her friend’s house, and having moved out of her mother’s house after her death, Melanctha is symbolically excluded from the domestic comfort of the allegedly respectable family home, as caricatured by the text as a “little red brick house.”
The little red brick house is reminiscent of a children’s story or a fairy tale in its simple, unadorned implication of universality. Like the forest cottage in the Grimm fairy stories, or the third pig’s house in the nursery rhyme “The Three Little Pigs” (which was retold as “The Story of the Pigs” in Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories in the late nineteenth century), this diminutive house is anonymous and unremarkable but also reads like a cliché of small-town America, of the home and the family, from which Melanctha is banished. In this sense I argue that the recurring, minimalist descriptions of setting in “Melanctha” are, like the oft-repeated coon-song descriptions of African Americans, though not always racialized, caricatures. The text produces place through these repetitive clichés and caricatures, which contrast with the complex relationships and characterizations of the story: not through descriptions of the actual architecture of Bridgepoint, but out of the networks of meanings and symbolic structures that make up Melanctha’s experiences.
The only thing we know about fictional Bridgepoint is that it is in the South, a place the narrator describes as a kind of delirious paradise, complete with contented, child-like African Americans, a familiar trope in white supremacist literature. An example of this cliché of the South is clear in a description of the coming of spring in Bridgepoint:
It was very early now in the southern springtime. The trees were just beginning to get the little zigzag crinkles in them, which the young buds always give them. The air was soft and moist and pleasant to them. The earth was wet and rich and smelling for them. The birds were making sharp fresh noises all around them. The wind was very gentle and yet urgent to them. And the buds and the long earthworms, and the negroes, and all the kinds of children, were coming out every minute farther into the new spring, watery, southern sunshine. (115)
The narrator here uses simple, monosyllabic words, being verbs, and parallel constructions: “The trees were,” “the air was,” “the birds were,” “the wind was.” The happy images of birds and buds and earthworms and “the negroes” all warming in the southern springtime creates an impression of well-being and harmony with nature, albeit with the racist connotation that “negroes” are closer to children and the natural world (and, disconcertingly, to earthworms). The pastoral image of the joyous African Americans in this passage recalls that other recurring expression, “free abandoned laughter that gives the warm broad glow to negro sunshine” (63), and echoes the popular coon-song cliché of jovial slaves at home on the plantation.
On the other hand, this passage also contributes to the text’s recurring strategy of juxtaposing caricatured representations with complex representations, which follows in the very next paragraph:
Jeff Campbell too began to feel a little his old joy inside him. The sodden quiet began to break up in him. He leaned far out of the window to mix it all up with him. His heart went sharp and then it almost stopped inside him. Was it Melanctha Herbert he had just seen passing? Was it Melanctha, or was it just some other girl, who made him feel so bad inside him? Well, it was no matter, Melanctha was there in the world around him, he did certainly always know that in him. Melanctha Herbert was always in the same town with him, and he could never any more feel her near him. What a fool he was to throw her from him. (115)
After the caricatured southern spring scene, we encounter Jeff’s anxiety and regret when he thinks he sees Melanctha through his window. In contrast to the infantile pleasures of worms and sunshine, Jeff’s heart almost stops in a stab of pain caused by lovesickness. The narrator has opened up a naïve southern world of jolly “negroes” and then, immediately following that paragraph, we are confronted with the stark image of a young man, stirred by the spring but suffering from heartbreak. The town is portrayed here through the fact that although Jeff and Melanctha both live there, he “could never any more feel her near him”—Jeff’s desolation is ironic in that he is a “negro” in the “southern sunshine” yet he is melancholy because he misses Melanctha.
Based on a close reading of these passages, I argue that, just as the caricatured joyful African American people—who possess the “free abandoned laughter that gives the warm broad glow to negro sunshine” (63)—are only legible in their juxtaposition with the complex characterizations of Jeff and Melanctha, so these descriptions of the little red brick houses and the South in springtime are childlike and racist caricatures of setting, can only be fully understood when read in contrast with the passage describing through indirect discourse Jeff’s feelings of heartbreak, despite the glories of spring, as he wonders if he has just glimpsed his former lover.
III. “Wandering” and “Running Around”: Mobility and Immobility
Melanctha is characterized constantly in the story as “wandering,” an expression that the narration uses to describe literal walks around the town and also metaphorical explorations of sexuality with men and women (see also Ruddick 33-35; Silverman 602-04; Peterson 150-52). In her teens, she learns how to flirt and interact with men by associating with them where they work, including sites of travel, of arrivals and departures: “sometimes by railroad yards, sometimes on the docks or around new buildings where many men were working” (54). Flirting with and watching the workmen, Melanctha sees the rail yard as a site that represents male sexuality and freedom, “full of the excitement of many men, and perhaps a free and whirling future” (55). The association of wandering with freedom remains a problem for her in her later relationship with Jeff, who disapproves of wandering (and possibly of freedom, at least for women). She listens to tales of adventure from men who work on trains as porters, about how “sometimes cars and sometimes whole trains fell from the narrow bridges” (56). The young woman yearning for “wisdom” and a free future senses the sexual tension in her interactions with men, but doesn’t yet fully grasp “what it was that she so badly wanted” (56). Still “wander[ing] on the edge of wisdom,” Melanctha learns about the geographies of racism and mobility in the “far South” from the porters, a group of men who would later form the vanguard of the African American labor movement and the civil rights movement (57; 56).
Some of the railroad men are described in the coon-song caricatures: “their round, black, shining faces would grow solemn … and their eyes would roll white” as they told her the suspenseful stories of train accidents and disasters (56). Yet again, as in the previous examples of caricatures followed by more complex representations, this anecdote of stereotyped eye-rolling, shiny black men is followed by that of a “serious, melancholy, light brown porter” who tells of an incident in which “white men in the far South tried to kill him because he made one of them who was drunk and called him a damned nigger, and who refused to pay money for his chair to a nigger, get off the train between stations” (56). The tension between the coon-song caricatures and the frightening story of uneven power relations and the porter’s resistance to racism complicate any simplistic reading of the caricature as simply obtuse or offensive. Rather, the risk the porter took in expelling a white man from a train between stations in the “far south” inspires admiration in Melanctha—his mobility different from her “wandering” in its wider geographical parameters as well as its relative power, in his capacity as railroad employee, to resist and punish white supremacy. Melanctha longs for freedom and adventure, in the form of “wandering,” which takes her around town to “dark and smelly places” (57).
Her wanderings also take her to the docks where she meets more well-traveled men and listens to their stories:
the serious foreign sailors who told her all sorts of wonders, and a cook would sometimes take her and her friends over a ship and show where he made his messes and where the men slept, and where the shops were, and how everything was made by themselves, right there, on ship board. (57)
Wandering and single, Melanctha is energetic, searching for “wisdom” and excitement and her fascination with travel and mobility leads her to cross class, sexual, and gendered boundaries. She cultivates relationships with the “for her, gentlemanly classes” and later a longer, two-year affair with an older woman, Jane Harden (56; 58-60). Through these relations with men and women, Melanctha’s “wandering” is more than a metaphor for her sexual experimentation: she is literally wandering the streets and also wandering the moral and epistemological margins of her world. Melanctha’s “wisdom” comes through her wandering, through her relations with other characters. The place of the text are made up of these relations: the streets, rail yards, docks, and even Jane’s room are generated as products of wandering, not as simply “settings” in the story.
In contrast to the inquisitive, adventurous connotations of Melanctha’s “wandering,” Jeff often refers to “running around” as a selfish, irresponsible activity that “some kind of colored men” and also “girls like you Melanctha, and Jane Harden” are guilty of (98). In Jeff’s estimation, people who spend their time and money running around ought to be “just living regular and not having new ways all the time just to get excitements, the way I hate to see it in all the colored people” (98). A kind of conservative racial uplift theory that reduces “wandering” to simply thrill-seeking, Jeff’s expression “running around” recurs often in their discussions about the best way to live one’s life. Melanctha’s reverence for people who are “game in any kind of trouble” and do “not care nothing about what happens” clashes with his middle-class aversion to the rougher pursuits that thrill her: for him, it means to “run around where you ain’t got any business” (98; 99). Although both ideas are expressed in terms of mobility, wandering and running around carry quite different connotations within the text; wandering sounds more thoughtful or preoccupied, while running around sounds childish, like a waste of time and energy.
In contrast to these expressions of mobility, the text also describes Jeff and Melanctha as stationary and immobile at certain points. Often when they are arguing or debating strenuously, Jeff and Melanctha don’t move at all. After an upsetting discussion, Melanctha “was lying very still by him,” and they “lay there very quiet now a long time” (92). In a later disagreement, they “sat there together, quiet by the fire,” though Jeff then “walked a little up and down the room” and returns and “sat very still and dark” (99). During this phase of their relationship, Jeff “would often sit a long time with Melanctha without moving” (101). Lying still and quiet, sitting without moving, sitting quiet, sitting very still and dark: far from wandering or running around, which Jeff frowns upon, the lovers at times stop moving entirely. Immobilized physically, Jeff and Melanctha are also “stuck” in a sense in the development of their relationship, which ultimately ends primarily because of their disagreements over whether it is better to “live regular” or “always in excitements.”
IV. “On the Steps”: Proximity and Distance
The other way the text produces place is through the characters’ own words: through dialogue and indirect discourse. Unlike the caricatures in the narration, the characters’ own discourse reveals “complex and desiring” women and men who occupy different points on a continuum of philosophical beliefs. These characters, especially Melanctha and Jeff, don’t resemble the caricatures in the narration at all but rather their opposite; instead of defining them superficially through an exaggeration of their appearance or by reference to caricatures by the narrator, these characters achieve depth through their own discourse, often in conversations with one another.
The dialogue spoken by Melanctha and Jeff shows none of the heavy-handed clownish attempts at African American vernacular English that white authors often inflicted on their readers, although perhaps this is what one would expect if taking at face value the caricatures used by the narrator. Occasional markers such as double negatives and usages such as “ain’t” are subtle, in counterpoint to the minstrel-song images repeated in the narrator’s discourse. On the contrary, Jeff and Melanctha’s level of discourse is abstract and philosophical and at the same time extremely unrealistic and incantatory. As David Lyons explains, “This rhetoric—which, it is important to see, is neither Stein’s naturalistic appropriation of black idiom nor any sort of attempt to render speech—is a sort of beautiful verbal surfing above the depths and pulls of emotion.” Their debate produces a strange, hypnotic rhythm through constant repetition and unusual phrasing, often in the form of spoken dialogue and internal monologue. I argue that character in “Melanctha” is created spatially through distance and proximity: Jeff’s and Melanctha’s characters are only developed in comparison to one another, in their physical and philosophical positioning.
The emphasis of the text is almost exclusively on the verbal relationships between Melanctha and several characters close to her, primarily Jeff. Their long conversations cover serious topics, as Corinne Blackmer reminds us: “In the process of debating the relative values of sensation and direct experience, on the one hand, and reason and deliberation on the other, their positions become to some extent enmeshed” (249). The setting recedes almost completely for long stretches of the text, as the intimate personal discussions spiral around the philosophical differences between Jeff and Melanctha that lead to the failure of the relationship. The distances between them, the closeness they both seek but cannot sustain, finally cause their breakup. My choice of language here is intentional: although expressing abstractions, I am resorting to spatial language in which each character can be seen to have a “place” or “position” in relation to the other.
The text creates its own geography in the way it constructs setting as well: the narrator creates a fictional location somewhere in the stereotyped South, but “Melanctha” also constructs its meanings out of distance and proximity, taking place in this fictional town, Bridgepoint, whose name suggests a bridge connecting two points. Given the story’s reliance on the polarity between Jeff and Melanctha, this name appears appropriate in that the lovers seek, through their long discussions, a way to bridge the distance between their philosophies. An example that supports this interpretation is a passage describing the beginning of their relationship, when Jeff comes to Melanctha’s mother’s house to treat Mrs. Herbert’s terminal illness.
Melanctha’s mother was in bed in a room upstairs, and the steps from below led right up into it. There were just two rooms on this upstairs floor. Melanctha and Dr. Campbell sat down on the steps, that night they watched together, so that they could hear and see Melanctha’s mother (66)
In this arrangement sitting on the steps, which is repeated later in the story (73), they have their first serious conversation about life, in which Jeff scorns African Americans who seek sensation in life: “No I ain’t got any use for all the time being in excitements and wanting to have all kinds of experience all the time. . . . I want to see the colored people like what is good and what I want them to have, and that’s to live regular and work hard and understand things, and that’s enough to keep any decent man excited” (67). Jeff continues to repeat this ethic of hard work and respectability throughout the story, even when he begins to understand the chaotic excitement of love and passion in his relationship with Melanctha.
Arguing for the importance of experiencing passion in life, Melanctha counters his self-righteousness by asking him about his friendship with her alcoholic former lover: “But how about Jane Harden?” (67). She points out that although he may not chase excitement himself, he experiences it vicariously through his conversations with Jane and other “queer folks” who do wander or run around: “seems to me Dr. Campbell you find her to have something in her, and you go there very often, and you talk to her much more than you do to the nice girls that stay at home with their people, the kind you say you are really wanting” (67). Jeff chuckles at her suggestion that he is hypocritical, although later he must confront his conflicting impulses.
The location of this conversation, in Bridgepoint, in the little red brick house, on the steps between floors, represents the attempt—documented in their own words—of Melanctha and Jeff to find a middle ground, to meet one another halfway, so as to foster their growing attraction. Their physical location on the steps echoes their conversational topic: their extremely different philosophies of life and the compatibility problems this presents. Sitting on the steps is only a temporary location, as their relationship proves to be ultimately doomed.
This sense of nearness or proximity of one to the other is also embedded in the speech of the characters themselves. In this way, too, proximity and distance figure importantly in “Melanctha”: nearness and distance are one of the most prominent ways the characters describe relationships of friendship and love. In the springtime passage cited earlier, Jeff misses Melanctha’s presence near him: “Melanctha was there in the world around him, he did certainly always know that in him. Melanctha Herbert was always in the same town with him, and he could never any more feel her near him. What a fool he was to throw her from him.” (115) He can sense her presence in the town, yet she isn’t close enough for him to “feel her near him.” Jeff’s own admission that breaking up with her—”throw[ing] her from him”—was foolish, uses the spatialized language of distance and proximity to explain his own actions ending the relationship.
In this scene, too, the dialogue between the characters belies the simplistic caricatures of the narrator. The two lovers seems miles away from the stereotypes of African Americans enjoying the southern springtime. Moreover, the female characters such as Melanctha and Jane Harden are associated with the pursuit of sexual and worldly experience, emphasizing their distance from the childish coon characters of minstrel songs. In fact, as Peterson argues, Melanctha and Jane resemble the wild women of the blues tradition, who drink as much as they want and move from one lover to the next, loving both men and women (150-52). Unlike the clownish figures of the coon-songs, these characters are intelligent, serious, and complicated; their appeal lies in part in their challenge to the conventional patriarchal norms that Jeff constantly espouses but has difficulty conforming to. Indeed, the fact that the character of Jeff seems so rigid, hypocritical, and, in fact, boring, enables readers to sympathize with Melanctha and her pursuit of excitement; her distance from the coon-song caricatures of the narration makes her story more compelling, even as it suggests through her name and her persona that she is a melancholy blues woman, just as Jane Harden’s name makes her sound hardened through experience (Peterson 151).
The complexity of the characters, as expressed through their own discourse, in a sense invalidates the caricatures—indeed, it is through their distance from the narrator’s caricatures that the African American characters in “Melanctha” achieve their power and distinction. Place in “Melanctha” is constructed out of these characters’ complex relationships and bridgepoints rather than essential locations or meanings. In this story, the idea of truth and meaning are destabilized by the constant repetition of words that themselves baldly assert truth: “certainly” and “really” for example, are repeated the most in situations where the character is anything but certain (see also Doyle 268). As Paul Peppis argues, “the repetition of ‘certainly’ works at once to call the certainty of characters’ utterances into question, to signal the intensity of their desire to achieve that certainty, and the ultimate impossibility of doing so” (389). Through the use of repetitive caricatures on the one hand, and complex and relational representations on the other, “Melanctha” generates place not as simply a literary setting, a point on a map, but as a product of its characters. Place in the text is “constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus” (Massey 154). This production of place through contradictions and characterization forces the reader to question the received truths and clichés that surround the representation of African Americans in American literature and culture, destabilizing what many readers in 1909 might not have otherwise questioned.
Works Cited
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Rogin, Michael. Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996.
Ruddick, Lisa. “Melanctha: The Costs of Mind-Wandering.” Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1990. 12-54.
Saldivar-Hull, Sonia. “Wrestling Your Ally: Stein, Racism, and Feminist Critical Practice.” Women’s Writing in Exile. Eds. Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1989. 181-98.
Silverman, Debra. “Nella Larsen’s Quicksand: Untangling the Webs of Exoticism.” African American Review 27 (1993): 599-614.
[1] This essay is an expanded and revised version of a paper presented at the American Literature Society of Japan Tokyo Chapter Meeting at Keio University, Tokyo, on December 14, 2002. That earlier version was also published in the Chiba Review (see works cited).
[2] On the other hand, however, calling attention to the problematic representations of African Americans in “Melanctha” quite rightly pointed out an enormous lacuna in the work of, particularly, feminist Stein scholars who focused exclusively on the issues of gender and sexuality in the piece (Saldivar-Hull). DeKoven and many others consider “Melanctha” at great length without so much as mentioning the issue of race at all—a gross oversight to be sure, but in the same way a complete dismissal of the text as “racist” also overlooks the more intricate creations of meaning that I’m trying to suggest here.
[3] For more on the minstrel tradition, see also Rogin and North.
