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

Identity in Gertrude steins The making of AmericansThroughout her career, Gertrude Stein was fascinated by the possibility of revolution in the sense of a complete or drastic change, especially in relation to her ideas of personal individuality and agency. But critics disagree about her conclusions. For example, Bruce Goebel actualizes her early texts as embracing a deterministic stead about the formation of identity (238) that conceives of identity as locked within historic and biological contexts. At the other extreme, many critics such as carry onn Kaplan post Steins work within the context of expatriate modernism and so see it within the discourses which celebrate the rootless traveler (7), cut loose from nation and chronicle and thus free to create a self of her own choosing. I believe this contradiction arises because Steins texts are themselves often contradictory, with one passage exploring the inescapable weight of history and heredity on her characters, while the ne xt admires her characters capacitance to resist cultural prescriptions, to exercise agency, to transform themselves, to be singular. Identity in many Stein texts, especially in The Making of Americans, is, then, a dialogue between cultural prescriptions, biological and historical determinants on the one authorize 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 Practice of Freedom Foucault begins to define what he calls the practices of the self I am interested . . . 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 Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Durham Duke UP, 1996. Spencer, Benjamin. Gertrude Stein Non-Expatriate. lit 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. dinero U of Chicago P, 1935. Wald, Patricia. Constituting Americans Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form. Durham Duke UP, 1995.