by Lucy Daniel
While rejecting B. F. Skinner’s analysis of her methods in relation to automatic writing, Stein did claim that the report ‘Cultivated Motor Automatism’ showed the first appearance of the style that she would develop in Three Lives and The Making of Americans. By this perhaps she meant the classification of types, the empirical method, the analytical approach, her view of character as a system of antagonisms (attacking and resisting, or various permutations of dependence and independence), and indeed the basis of these types in classifications ruled by sexuality. Sometimes in The Making of Americans she envisions character as a literal substance which moves and mutates:
not … an earthy kind of substance but as a pulpy not dust not dirt but a more mixed up substance, it can be slimy, gelatinous, gluey, white opaquy kind of thing and it can be white and vibrant, and clear and heated.36
This is part of an ongoing sexual metaphor in the novel, an attempt to describe a polymorphous sexuality as the basis of character. Perhaps in response to her feelings about her own sexuality at this time, she was, like so many scientists, pseudo-scientists, and novelists of her era, querying to what extent such binary oppositions as male and female, masculine and feminine, are useful, or even possible.
Her taxonomic approach to character was also strengthened by her other major area of study at Radcliffe: zoology. At the end of her time at Radcliffe, Gertrude was preparing for admittance to Johns Hopkins Medical School, where she was to receive the physiological training to allow her to continue work in psychology. Before gaining admittance to Johns Hopkins, she was obliged to pass a Latin exam that was presenting her with interminable difficulties. Nevertheless in 1897, the summer before Johns Hopkins, she could not resist pressing ahead with an advanced course in embryology at the renowned Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, collecting ctenophores and studying marine taxonomy. This was where her heart lay, in research, observation and classification. Her career seemed to have veered as far from literary creativity as could be possible; it would take a giant change of heart to effect the turnaround that took place — either that, or a giant redefinition of what she believed literature could be and do. It meant a deliberate turning away from ‘sentimental’ idioms, an absorption of the role of the scientist into that of the creative writer.
Anatomy, physiology, pathology and bacteriology, pharmacology and neurology: these were the new areas of study for Stein, the prospective doctor, when she entered Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore, having finally nailed the Latin exam. She would remain there for more than four years, following up her time at the country’s top psychology laboratory with a degree course at the country’s top medical school. Gertrude (and Leo, who had come to live with her) moved into a house in Baltimore, where they were accompanied by another of those servants whose lives so fascinated her, a German housekeeper called Lena who indulged Gertrude’s every whim, for which she would later be rewarded by being enshrined in two of Stein’s stories: her name in ‘The Gentle Lena’ and her character in ‘The Good Anna.’
At Johns Hopkins Stein specialized, as she described it, in ‘the anatomy of the brain and the direction of brain tracts’;37 she was one of the first students of modern neurological technique. The idea of the synapse was introduced to the world during her first year at medical school.38 Studying brain sections, slices from the brain of a baby aged a few weeks, her work was good enough to be published in Lewellys F. Barker’s The Nervous System and Its Constituent Neurones (1899).
Here is part of her description, taken from that work, of the topography of the brain — a description of the nucleus of Darkschewitsch:
The nucleus is more or less conical in shape … the commissura posterior cerebri … appears as a dorso-ventral bundle, solid in the middle, subdivided dorsally into an anterior (proximal) portion and a posterior (distal) portion, while ventrically it expands in the form of a hollow pyramid, which rests directly upon the nucleus.39
Compare this with the procedural attitude, the diagrammatic approach in her descriptions of character in The Making of Americans:
A mass of being of the resisting substance very active at the surface and active inside toward the center only here and there … isolated spots in the central resisting mass … Of this last I am not yet absolutely certain.40
In later years Barker ‘often wondered whether my attempts to teach her the intricacies of the medulla oblongata had anything to do with the strange literary forms with which she was later to perplex the world.’41 The answer was that, of course, they did.
Stein’s decision to study medicine was a bold one for the time, given that women doctors were very few, and this was a time of general debate over whether women were even fit to be doctors, which was also being played out in the work of the most prominent American novelists.42 Stein had been discouraged from pursuing the profession by her own friends and family, who wanted her to settle down and start having babies instead. That was never on the cards.
Her first two years at Johns Hopkins were mainly occupied with laboratory research, in which she attained reasonably good marks.43 But before the end of her third year her work began to slip. While in Baltimore, as part of her course in obstetrics, Stein was expected to fulfil a quota of attendance at births, and visited patients at home, for which she visited the city’s poor quarters. These first glimpses of life among Baltimore’s poor black inhabitants would surface in the emulation of black voices and experiences in the story ‘Melanctha’.44 But Stein did not take to the delivery wards; the realities of childbirth made her nervous. Her plan had been to specialize in nervous diseases in women while at Johns Hopkins, following on from her interest in hysteria at Radcliffe. But when she was given practical experience in a hospital for insane women, her reaction was, according to Alice Toklas, that she could not stand being around them.45 Stein later claimed to have lost interest in the abnormal at medical school, saying she found normality far more interesting.46 But she also wrote: ‘I did not like anything abnormal or frightening.’47 She had an aversion to being around disease that did not befit an apprentice doctor. She consequently seems to have developed mild hypochondria, and became so worried about her health — specifically, that there was something wrong with her blood — that she took the unusual step of hiring a welterweight to box with her. Sickening women in particular seemed to trouble her, most likely bringing to mind the unhappy days of her mother’s illness. Her fantasies of normality, and her attraction to the bourgeois family of good breeding, held an unspoken horror of a link between maternity or reproduction and illness, particularly nervous illness, which with a twisted logic provided further proof to her of femininity as a stumbling block to creativity. She claimed, when she said that remembering oneself as a child ruptured the world, that one way to regain that feeling of ‘the everlasting’, of the permanence of one’s identity, was to make babies, to procreate.48 The other way of course, if that option was not open to her, was to write, to create. To be a genius. In Lectures in America she spoke about the ‘everlasting feeling’ that composing sentences gave her. It was her hold on the world, and on herself.
In 1900 Gertrude and Leo sailed again to Europe, this time taking in Italy and Paris, where they attended the Grand Exposition. This was the very time and place at which Henry Adams’s mind was famously boggled by new technologies, leading him to define the spirit of the modern, mechanistic age in ‘The Dynamo and the Virgin’. The young Stein left no such prescient record of her visit, and it would be another few years before she had her own Parisian epiphany.
In Stein’s final year at Johns Hopkins, she failed her course in obstetrics. It was to prove the stumbling block that meant she was never awarded her medical degree. On her return from the European trip, all Stein’s experience in obstetrics and with nervous and reproductive diseases, as well as her peculiar animus against the American college woman, came together in a remarkable and perplexing essay she wrote on ‘Degeneration in American Women’.49 Here Stein addressed the problem of the declining
birth rate in America with nationalistic zeal, as if the progress of America were literally a race against the old world. She placed the onus of responsibility with women, particularly educated women, who, she suggested, were neglecting their womanly duties and unpatriotically contributing to the downfall of American civilization by pursuing education instead of following their duty to reproduce.50 In a remarkably reactionary declamation for someone in her position, it was as if she felt women’s education were somehow a decadent pursuit. She employed threatening language about the weakness and degeneration of the individual bodies of such educated women, threatening in turn the constitution of America, as she saw it. Her argument was that women should stop attending to their own education and attend to the future of America. Anything else was ‘degenerate’.
It can’t have been straightforward for Stein to make these claims, given the struggles she herself had faced to reach the stage she was now at. Classes at the medical school were mixed, though the majority of students were male. The recollections of her male classmates tend towards unflattering accounts of her physical appearance. Stein, they also remembered with some disbelief, stood up to one of her professors, who enjoyed telling lewd stories and upsetting the female students. She also insisted that if she was being considered on an equal footing with her male colleagues, she had the right to examine men with venereal disease, something usually denied the female students.51 She always enjoyed a fight.
She was in a position of conflict. Stein wanted to be a genius. She seemed to think that she could become one by an act of will. But all the evidence around her convinced her that genius was the province of maleness. Rather than pressing on with female solidarity, she found a convoluted and idiosyncratic way of solving the problem for herself, by setting herself apart, and at the same time justifying her own lack of a maternal instinct. Femininity, she baldly stated, was to concern itself with increasing the birthrate. (She made a point of noting that there would, of course, be a handful of women in each generation who proved the exception to the rule.52 ) Other college women, those whose ‘natural’ destiny was to reproduce, were by definition not capable of genius. But Gertrude already knew that she was not destined to be a mother. She had begun mixing with sophisticated women from Bryn Mawr College, women who could show her aspects of her own personality, and sexuality, that she had not confronted before. This seems to be the time when Stein first became sexually active in her affairs with other women, though there is no record of individual early dalliances.53 As a lesbian, she was implicitly raising her own status, making way for her own exceptionality. Just as she saw herself as both bourgeois and outré, normal and unique, she was the exception that proved the rule: a woman and a genius. A woman, as she characterized herself, with the attributes of maleness. Among these strained contortions of logic, this was hardly a very assertive attitude to her own lesbian identity, but it is the one that suited her for the time being. This was a time when the woman suffrage debate was at its most heated, and Stein was, essentially, expressing a wish to be like a man,54 rebuilding herself in a more ideal version as she would throughout her life.
But she was scared of her own morbidity and the hysterical sort of distractedness that had infused the autobiographical characters in her college themes. She had also had a glimpse of the world of art that was luring her towards another future. Leo, the family’s artist manqué, was by this time planning on settling in Europe. Gertrude’s work began to suffer. For whatever reason, Stein did not complete her medical degree. Her planned internship at the Massachusetts State Hospital for the Insane was not to be. Apparently she told friends at the time she didn’t care about the degree, but these other women students felt badly for her and for feminism.55 Nearly forty years after the event, in The Autobiography she tells the story of quitting medical school. When the more progressive of her friends upbraid her in the name of ‘the cause of women’, she languidly retorts: ‘you don’t know what it is to be bored’.56 Here Stein painted herself once again as above her peers, the egregious, somewhat supercilious possessor of a manifest destiny. In reality she was far less certain that such a destiny awaited her. She had, purely and simply, failed to get her medical degree; eight years of training at Radcliffe and Johns Hopkins had been for nothing. Her fear of future failure was understandably vivid and intense.
In July 1901 Gertrude was again in Europe. Joyfully reunited with Leo, she travelled with him to Spain and North Africa, and then again to Paris in August. By autumn she was back in Baltimore. Leo stayed on in Florence, where he planned to live. Gertrude, his little sister, had been his avid companion through childhood, adolescence and adulthood. He had once led Gertrude to Harvard; he would now lead her, through various stops and starts before a permanent rooting took place, to Europe and to their mutual discovery of modern art.
When one of her professors offered her the chance of a retake, this is how she claimed to have snubbed it:
You have no idea how grateful I am to you. I have so much inertia and so little initiative that very possibly if you had not kept me from taking my degree I would have, well, not taken to the practice of medicine, but at any rate to pathological psychology, and you don’t know how little I like pathological psychology, and how all medicine bores me.57
But this was another retrospective fantasy; in reality she did want her degree enough to return to Johns Hopkins and attempt to complete some extra research so that it could be awarded. But feeling the pull of other influences, eventually she presented a model of a brain that was so intricate and bizarre in its wrongness that it seemed a deliberate, final throwing over of her medical career. On seeing it, the world’s greatest anatomist of the time, Dr Franklin Mall, remarked: ‘Either I am crazy or Miss Stein is.’58
As this was also the time when Stein was experiencing her first sexual relationships with other women, and developing confidence in her own sexuality, this multitude of new excitements and anxieties found a way into her fiction. For this was also the period when she began to write in earnest. She dashed off a final article on the brain stem which was sent to the American Journal of Anatomy, and then abandoned her scientific career forever, in the same fell swoop that she abandoned America itself. The crossover with her literary career would be evident in the analytical title of her first sustained piece of fiction, Quod Erat Demonstrandum (QED).
Because for now, Gertrude had a more pressing concern. What she was discovering among these transatlantic sojourns was first love. Unwittingly she had become involved in a love triangle when she fell for May Bookstaver, a feminist and a femme fatale of Bryn Mawr. May was already entangled in an unspecific way with another young woman of Stein’s acquaintance, Mabel Haynes. Gertrude was infatuated with May and suspicious of Mabel. Mabel was wary of Gertrude, and knew something was going on with May. May seemed to want to have her cake and eat it too. It was hopeless and passionate, and fraught with regret almost from the start. In QED, the roman-à-clef Stein wrote about the affair, there is a rapturous record of a kiss that ‘seemed to scale the very walls of chastity’.59 Stein was due to be disappointed in May’s unwillingness to show her the same devotion.
Safe to say Stein’s infatuation caused a rift with another friend, Emma Lootz, who heartily disapproved of the relationship and chastised Gertrude for it, though whether on grounds of its lesbian nature or on the grounds of a personal dislike of May is unclear. In Lootz’s mind, as in the minds of many at the time, there was a confusion between the terms of a passionate friendship or unconsummated crush, and recognition of love between women as a serious thing deserving of respect. It was a confusion that was widespread, and such confusion partly allowed lesbian relationships to go unremarked upon, taken, at least on the surface, by the world at large as close friendships, if perhaps tacitly acknowledged as sexual relationships. But such confusion also makes Stein’s attempt to describe it more complex and tortuous.
By this time Stein had apparently already had romantic relations with other women, and there was a rela
tive openness about homosexuality within her circle. But the enforced secrecy (because of Mabel, the third member of the triangle, as well as May’s parents) and the fervour of Gertrude’s attachment to May, despite the cruelties that the latter seemed able to inflict, found its way into furious love letters, fragments of which survive in the original, and some of which were transcribed directly into QED. The plot of QED is melodramatic, and its style discursive, faux-Jamesian; much of it consists of painful, convoluted, self-justifying conversations between Adele (Gertrude) and Helen (May). Stein/Adele operates under a rather melancholy lesbian persona, aware of the hopelessness of the situation but unable to stop herself from feeling the way she does.
Loving May had driven her to despair, and plunged her back into the depression she had seemed to have overcome. Writing it was a catharsis. Shortly after she completed the novella, both May and Mabel married themselves into conventional respectability. The manuscript then sat in Stein’s cupboard for nearly 30 years. Just as a work like Hilda Doolittle’s HERmione could not be published during her lifetime, and other lesbian coming of age stories also failed to see the light of day at the time of their composition, QED is a record of lesbian love at a time when such records, and such feelings, could not be made public. Even when, in 1930 or 1931, Stein ‘found’ it (claiming she had completely forgotten ever having written it), she shyly presented it to a friend to be read, and shyly asked if it might be publishable. QED looks tame now, but the answer was probably not — because of its subject matter, a lesbian romance — and in fact the book was not published until another twenty years had passed, in 1950, four years after Stein’s death.
QED also offers evidence of Stein’s self-perception as a young adult. ‘I always did thank God I wasn’t born a woman’; this is more masculine posturing, although also a reference to Jewish prayer.60 The adversarial nature of the triangular relationship in QED would be repeated over and over again in Stein’s early fiction. But never again would she write in such a straightforward, open and representational way about her own lesbian experiences. Later, perhaps with a savvier eye to publication, a more worldly-wise understanding of how the public viewed female homosexuality, and a happier sex life, she would make her lesbian content far more oblique, and express distaste for any writing that was overtly sexual. She had, however, established a pattern of discerning personality based on the way that people reacted with one another, and specifically based on sexual relationships.
