Jessica Rabin - Surviving The Crossing - (Im) Migration, Ethnicity, and Gender in Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory) (2004) PDF

LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL
THEORY
Edited by
William E.Cain
Professor of English
Wellesley College
A ROUTLEDGE SERIES
LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL
THEORY
WILLIAM E.CAIN, General Editor
BEYOND THE SOUND BARRIER

The Jazz Controversy in TwentiethCentury American Fiction
Kristin K.Henson
SEGREGATED MISCEGENATION
On the Treatment of Racial Hybridity in the U.S. and Latin America Literary Traditions
Carlos Hiraldo
DEATH, MEN, AND MODERNISM

Trauma and Narrative in British Fiction from Hardy to Woolf
Ariela Freedman
THE SELF IN THE CELL

Narrating the Victorian Prisoner
Sean Grass
REGENERATING THE NOVEL

Gender and Genre in Woolf, Forster, Sinclair, and Lawrence
James J.Miracky
SATIRE AND THE POSTCOLONIAL NOVEL

V.S.Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie
John Clement Ball
THROUGH THE NEGATIVE

The Photographic Image and the Written Word in Nineteenth-Century American
Literature
Megan Williams
LOVE AMERICAN STYLE

Divorce and the American Novel, 1881–1976
Kimberly Freeman
FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS OF THE 1970s

Joanna Russ and Dorothy Bryant
Tatiana Teslenko
DEAD LETTERS TO THE NEW WORLD
Melville, Emerson, and American Transcendentalism
Michael McLoughlin
THE OTHER ORPHEUS

A Poetics of Modern Homosexuality
Merrill Cole
THE OTHER EMPIRE

British Romantic Writings about the Ottoman Empire
Filiz Turhan
THE “DANGEROUS” POTENTIAL OF READING

Readers and the Negotiation of Power in Nineteenth-Century Narratives
Ana-Isabel Aliaga-Buchenau
INTIMATE AND AUTHENTIC ECONOMIES

The American Self-Made Man from Douglass to Chaplin
Thomas Nissley
REVISED LIVES
Walt Whitman and Nineteenth-Century Authorship
William Pannapacker
LABOR PAINS
Emerson, Hawthorne, and Alcott on Work and the Woman Question
Carolyn Maibor
NARRATIVE IN THE PROFESSIONAL AGE

Transatlantic Readings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Stuart
Phelps
Jennifer Cognard-Black
PROTEST AND THE BODY IN MELVILLE, DOS PASSOS, AND HURSTON

Tom McGlamery
SURVIVING THE CROSSING
(Im)migration, Ethnicity, and Gender in Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, and
Nella Larsen
Jessica G.Rabin
Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rabin, Jessica G., 1973
Surviving the crossing: (im)migration, ethnicity, and gender in Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, and
Nella Larsen/Jessica G.Rabin. p. cm.—(Literary criticism and cultural theory) Includes
bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-415-97118-7 (hardback: alk. paper)
1. American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Emigration and immigration in
literature. 3. Women and literature—United States—History—20th century. 4. American
literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 5. Stein, Gertrude, 1874–1946—Criticism and
interpretation. 6. Cather, Willa, 1873–1947—Criticism and interpretation. 7. Larsen, Nella—
Criticism and interpretation. 8. Immigrants in literature. 9. Ethnicity in literature. 10. Sex role in
literature. I. Title. II. Series.
PS228.E55R33 2004
813.’52093552—dc22 2004014245
ISBN 0-203-50139-X Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-58091-5 (Adobe eReader Format)

ISBN 0-415-97118-7 (Print Edition)
To Toby
And in memory of my grandparents who made the crossing: Robert Rabin Susan and
Henry Schurenstedt
Contents
Acknowledgments x
Chapter One Introduction: A Sense of Selves 1

Chapter Two “The Peculiar Combination of Elements Long Familiar”: 22
Willa Cather
Chapter Three “Fiction Was Another Way of Telling the Truth”: 64
Gertrude Stein
Chapter Four “The Mixedness of Things”: 105
Nella Larsen
Chapter Five Conclusion: Other Countries, Other Romances 141
Afterword “A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven” 149
Notes 152
Bibliography 168
Index 176
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Paul Foster Johnson, William Cain, and Routledge for giving me the
opportunity to revisit, revise, and revitalize this text.
The insights and scholarship of Walter Kalaidjian, Julie Abraham, and Martine
Brownley help set the foundations of this project; I appreciate the time and effort that
they contributed in order to bring it to fruition. I am indebted, as well, to my mentor
Merrill Skaggs who introduced me to the great (literary) love of my life and encouraged
me in all my academic pursuits. I am also grateful for the support and enthusiasm of my
other friends in Cather Studies, especially Marilee Lindemann, Susan Rosowski, and
Joseph Urgo.
My family, like Vickie Templeton’s friends the Rosens, set me on the path that “led
toward the moon,” by serving as a source of academic and personal inspiration. I’ve
always been proud of my family, and I am grateful for the way they prepared me for the
world and then welcomed me back to the parish—and will no doubt send me forth again
with glad hearts when the time comes. Many thanks to my parents, Bernard and Debbie
Rabin, and Joan Rabin and Barbara Slater; my grandmother, Rose Rabin; and my brother,
Dan Rabin.
Thank you to my friends who listened, laughed, and reminded me to breathe,
especially Pam Garrettson and Pierrette Stukes. I also appreciate my soccer teammates
who helped me channel my excess energies and occasional frustrations into a socially
acceptable and (relatively) non-destructive format.
For permission to reprint here a portion of an essay I first published in the collection
Willa Cather’s New York, I would like to thank the volume’s editor, Merrill Skaggs, and
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Chapter One
Introduction: A Sense of Selves
Binarisms permeate the foundations of our western cultural and intellectual framework—
native/foreign, black/white, man/woman, heterosexual/homosexual—but are the fixed
essentialisms implicit in such models truly reflective of the reality of human experience
(actual and literary)? It is my goal to join the ongoing scholarly complication of binaries
by offering a more fluid conception of boundaries. In place of essentializing categories of
identity, I explore the ramifications of using multiple subject positioning as a means of
conceptualizing and representing identity. By examining the literature of three women
modernists, I show how the dispersal of fixed identity is facilitated through language. In
other words, I focus on the ways in which fiction unhinges identity, along with the
consequences of such a process—both liberating and dislocating. Such a process does not
take place in a vacuum. The transnational atmosphere of the interwar period in the United
States facilitated a loosening of identity categories which was both created by and
reflected in the literature of the period. Writers who had a complicated relationship to
identity categories and who created characters whose lives could not be neatly
compartmentalized found in this cultural climate the psychological space prerequisite to
writing and the possibility of communicating with an audience. In my quest for a fuller,
more useful paradigm of identity formation and perpetuation, I examine issues of
ethnicity and race, nationality and geography, and gender and sexuality in the fiction of
Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein and Nella Larsen.
The emphasis I place on how language facilitates the dispersal of fixed identity has its
roots in post-structuralist philosophy. In particular, Derridian and post-structuralist
critique of binarisms provides an important underpinning for my study. By emphasizing
the instability of language, Derrida interrogates the idea of the unitary subject itself, as
Terry Eagleton explains: “to use signs at all entails that my meaning is always somehow
dispersed, divided and never quite at one with itself. Not only my meaning, indeed, but
me: since language is something I am made out of, rather than merely a convenient tool I
use, the whole idea that I am a stable, unified entity must also be a fiction” (130). In
addition, Derrida uses the term “deconstruction” to describe “the critical operation by
which [binary] oppositions can be partly undermined, or by which they can be shown
partly to undermine each other in the process of textual meaning” (Eagleton 132).
Although deconstruction is not my goal, I take up Derrida’s dissatisfaction with binary
paradigms in my approach to the texts under consideration.
By offering a critique of binary models, I participate in a series of ongoing
explorations in literary and cultural studies. Eagleton points out, for example, that
feminism and post-structuralism share some important goals and preoccupations: “for all
the binary oppositions which post-structuralism sought to undo, the hierarchical
opposition between men and women was perhaps the most virulent” (149). In addition to
feminist critics, gender, queer, and race theorists have subjected binary models to intense
Surviving the crossing 2
scrutiny over the past fifteen years. Diana Fuss argued in 1989 that “the binary
articulation of essentialism and difference can…be restrictive, even obfuscating, in that it
allows us to ignore or to deny the differences within essentialisms” (xii). The following
year, Eve Sedgwick suggested that binarisms in sexual orientation should be more fluid
than the homo/heterosexual division implemented in the late nineteenth century (9–10),
while Judith Butler urged feminists to avoid “totalizing gestures” (Gender 13) and noted
that heterosexuality needs and creates “an oppositional, binary gender system” (Gender
22). In 1991, Jonathan Dollimore proposed that “the essentialist/anti-essentialist
opposition is rather less stable than is often supposed in theoretical discourse” (26). Three
years later, Lee Edelman opposed his own work to prior inquiries which looked for
“‘homosexual difference’ as a determinate entity rather than as an unstable differential
relation” (3), suggesting that he, too, disagreed with the notion of gay identity as
coherent, totalizing, and completely separate from that of straight identity. In the 1995
collection Social Postmodernism, Anthony Appiah and Ali Rattansi offer race-oriented
critiques of binarisms. Appiah, “the son of an African father and a European mother,”
argues that “identities are complex and multiple” (Nicholson and Seidman 14, Appiah
110). For his part, Rattansi works to complicate paradigms of race and ethnicity so that
these terms might reflect multiplicity and complexity rather than simple binaries (256–
58). To summarize, post-structuralist philosophy and the deconstruction of language have
emphasized how language constructs the subject and how language is itself slippery. The
flexibility thus offered to the concept of the subject has been particularly useful for
members of so-called minority groups who have been traditionally and unfairly
demarcated as inferior.1 Hence, recent feminist, African-American, gender, and
gay/lesbian theorists have used post-structuralism’s tenets and adapted them for their own
ends. I intend to do the same.
I have chosen to focus on three women writers whose best-known works were
published during the interwar period in part because the issues that interest me, such as
race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, all interact with gender in complex ways (as black
feminists like Patricia Hill Collins have proposed vis-a-vis matrices of oppression).2 I am
interested in women’s writing because of its formative influence on modernist sensibility.
As both Norman Cantor and Elizabeth Ammons have asserted, the early twentiethcentury
women’s movement played a key role in the modernist movement (Cantor 122; Ammons
4). While I do not wish to imply that all women writers—or the three in my study, in
particular—are feminists,3 the concomitant development of early twentieth-century
feminism and woman-authored modernist texts is compelling. The experience of being
women writers during this time and writing provocative and multivalent texts constitutes
a significant axis of comparison. Looking at these three writers in light of one another
provides both a deeper understanding of individual accomplishment and a broader view
of their participation in larger trends.
In arranging and discussing these three writers, I also draw on Iris Young’s adaptation
of Sartre’s concept of seriality. In attempting to talk about “woman” as a category
without resorting to essentialism, Young proposes “a way of thinking about women as a
social collective without requiring that all women have common attributes or a common
situation…[and one which] does not rely on identity or self-identity for understanding the
social production and meaning of membership in collectives” (188, 197–8). A series,
Young explains, stands in contrast to a self-conscious group, and “membership is
Introduction: a sense of selves 3
defined…by the fact that in their diverse existences and actions [members of a series] are
oriented around the same objects or practico-inert structures” (203). For the writers under
consideration, “practico-inert structures” might include publication politics, societal
expectations for women writers in the realm of genre or subject-matter, or residual
Victorian standards of gender-appropriate behavior. Cather, Stein and Larsen have
traditionally been studied within the framework of ostensibly non-overlapping literary
movements (e.g., pioneer literature, avant-garde modernism, Harlem Renaissance),
suggesting the inadvisability of arguing for a conscious communal relationship. At the
same time, however, similarities in biography, commonalities in themes, and indirect
contacts via reading and mutual friends meant that these three women were, to say the
least, coming into contact with a similar set of cultural and social “objects.” Hence these
writers, who were not part of a movement or a community, clearly have much more in
common than a group of people waiting for a bus (one of Sartre’s examples of a
seriality).
In acknowledging both similarities and differences in experience and art, I move
towards a paradigm that eases away from the polarities that require us to see literary
movements and contextual constructivism as opposed. I also implement Young’s
suggestion that seriality can be usefully applied to race and nationality, as well as to
gender (206). Ethnicity and nationality are central concerns in all three writers, and each
offers novel conceptions about the relationship between identity categories and identity.
The problem Young addresses in her essay, how to talk about “woman” without resorting
to essentialism (188), has clear parallels with my goals here. Where I differ from Young,
however, is in my ends. Young rejects “the attempt to theorize gender identity as multiple
rather than binary” (193) and sees seriality as a way to “disconnect…gender from
identity” (209). The iconoclastic modernists whom I am studying, on the other hand,
seem to stop short of Young’s postmodern dispersal. Although they destabilize categories
and emphasize fluidity, gender is still a significant dimension of identity (as are ethnicity
and nationality) for Cather, Stein and Larsen. When I look at the three women together, I
do not consider them a strict seriality, “individuals [who] pursue their own ends with
respect to the same objects conditioned by a continuous material environment …[and
who] have nothing necessarily in common in their histories, experiences, or identity”
(Young 199). Nor do I argue that these writers constitute a conscious community of
purpose (a group). Rather, I interrogate patterns and analyze the presence of multiple
solutions to similar problems.
COMING OF AGE IN TRANS-NATIONAL AMERICA
One major reason I see Cather, Stein and Larsen as participating in a seriality with
important ramifications for the study of their work is the salience of the cultural climate
constituting the backdrop for their literary emergence or coming of age. For all three, the
time and place Randolph Bourne invokes with the appellation “Trans-National America”
was formative in terms of personal and professional development. At the same time that
Bourne’s essay expresses a vision of multiculturalism which “looked forward to our own
social diversity in the post-Vietnam era” (Kalaidjian 19), it provides a reflection of
contemporary trends and strivings. The high point of the Modernist period, which Cantor
identifies as 1900–1940, fostered trans-continental exchange, the movement of both ideas

and of people across the ocean—immigrants and expatriates (1, 123). Furthermore, travel
within America became easier around the turn of the century, and many intellectuals
moved to the cities. This demographic trend had important ramifications for the
development of new modernist forms. Raymond Williams explains: “the most important
general element of the innovations in form is the fact of immigration to the metropolis,
and it cannot too often be emphasized how many of the major innovators were, in this
precise sense, immigrants…. [T]he crucible of the metropolis [was]…no mere melting
pot but an intense and visually and linguistically exciting process in its own right” (45–
46). Cather, Stein and Larsen participated in both the transcontinental movement and the
gravitation towards American urban centers characteristic of the early twentieth century.4
With more frequent physical and intellectual contact between America and Europe,
political conditions in Europe became increasingly important for the United States. World
War I precipitated Bourne’s trans-national thesis, and it also clarified the need for
emergent models of identity and identification. Noting that the war in Europe seemed to
intensify nationalist feeling among immigrants rather than edifying their sense of
themselves as Americans, Bourne offers the following explanation: “In our loose, free
country, no constraining national purpose, no tenacious folk-tradition and folkstyle hold
the people to a line. The war has shown us that not in any magical formula will this
purpose be found” (271). Rather, Bourne suggests, the idea of being or belonging to any
cause or group exclusively was not a realistic way to view affiliations.
If the Great War highlighted the presence of nationalistic immigrant “movements
[that] had been making great headway before the war even began” (Bourne 261), it also
made a lasting impression on all three women writers under consideration. Cather
engaged in much soul-searching and uncharacteristic struggle to write a war novel, the
text she would always consider her favorite. One of Ours won a Pulitzer Prize, but its
hostile reception by men who resented a woman’s foray into male literary turf in some
measure precipitated Cather’s sense that “the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts”
(Skaggs 6, NUF v). Stein did not write about World War I in its immediate aftermath, but
her wartime experiences in France would become the basis for a significant portion of the
novel which made her a household name in America, The Autobiography of Alice
B.Toklas. Ten years after it ended, “the war” (P 154) additionally provides an important
backdrop for both of Larsen’s novels, though it is rarely mentioned explicitly. It
conveniently disposes of Anne Grey’s first husband in Quicksand, while in Passing, it
provides a defining framework for Clare’s European sojourn, as she relates tales of
“wartime in France, of after-the-wartime in Germany” (170) for friends she has not seen
in fifteen years. During the war years, Larsen herself was engaged in the crucial task of
“finding a home,” a prelude to “working for an education” and “becoming a writer”
(Davis 110, 137, 154). World War I thus captured the imagination of all three writers.
One reason World War I had such an impact on contemporary artists and thinkers is
that it raised questions about the future of an American nationality and led to the
popularization of one of the most pervasive and longstanding symbols in American
culture, the melting pot. Indeed, although the response of native-born Americans to
immigrant loyalties during the war precipitated Bourne’s essay, he takes the future as his
main topic, exploring the question of national identity in a multi-national or international
country. Bourne focuses on immigration and how it has changed (or should change) the
definition of American selfhood. The great fact of immigration, the most important
influence in turn-of-the-century American culture (R.Williams, qtd. in Ferraro 111),
permeated literary and cultural discourse throughout the interwar period, additionally
precipitating a cultural crisis about the nature of the American character or nationality.
Bourne begins his essay by noting that “no reverberatory effect of the great war has
caused American public opinion more solicitude than the failure of the ‘melting-pot’”
(260). And yet, despite being one of the concepts detractors himself, Bourne nevertheless
unwittingly employs its rhetoric, suggesting the ubiquity of melting pot ideology. Indeed,
Werner Sollors observes that “Bourne attacked the melting pot from the left, whereas
Henry Pratt Fairchild did it from the right,” pointing out the irony by which “the
cosmopolitan dual citizens Bourne envisioned were described in clear melting pot
language: ‘America has burned most of the baser metal from them’” (Beyond 97). The
metaphor initially seems pluralistic, but Philip Gleason similarly acknowledges that “with
all its liberality and tolerance, the cosmopolitan version of the melting pot was still a
theory of assimilation. The idea that the immigrants must change was basic; they were to
become new people” (Concepts 82). On the other end of the political spectrum from
Bourne, Henry Pratt Fairchild offers a substitute for the melting pot: “if we must have a
symbol for race mixture, much more accurate than the figure of the melting pot is the
figure of the village pound” (125). Fairchild further contends that “Unrestricted
immigration…was slowly, insidiously, irresistibly eating away the very heart of the
United States. What was being melted in the great Melting Pot, losing all form and
symmetry, all beauty and character, all nobility and usefulness, was the American
nationality itself” (261).5 More recent theorists have proposed symbols of their own: John
Blair announces that “the venerable Melting Pot has given way to images legitimizing
multiethnic diversity as in the homely salad bowl or the more elegant mosaic” (142),
while Lawrence Fuchs offers the image of the kaleidoscope. Gleason, however, insists
that the melting pot is an imperfect symbol, but the best of the alternatives (Speaking 24).
Whether or not the Melting Pot was or is an accurate symbol for the creation and
sustenance of an American nationality, it has been a persistent one for the past ninety-five
years.
The subjects of my study could not help but be exposed to this symbol, and they
personally encountered the realities of (im)migration, as well. Although none was a first-
generation immigrant, each had split European and American alliances. Cather “many
times longed to be a European” (Lilienfeld 48), while Stein spent her entire adult life in
France, and Larsen was of mixed race and mixed nationality (her father was African-
American and her mother was Danish). As children, all came into close contact with
immigrants and European culture. Cather spent many Nebraskan childhood days riding
her pony from homestead to homestead, seeking out the “old farmwomen, Bohemian and
Scandinavian, [who] moved her imagination” (Brown, Critical 26); she would draw
heavily on those memories in her Nebraska stories and novels. Stein was exposed to
European languages and customs at an even earlier age, as her family moved to Austria
when she was an infant, returning to the United States when Stein was four. Larsen did
not travel abroad as a child, but she grew up in an ethnically and racially diverse
neighborhood with a large number of European immigrants (Davis 33). In addition to
growing up in the midst of European society (in Europe or in America), Cather, Stein and
Larsen all took significant geographical journeys themselves. When Cather’s family
moved from Virginia to Nebraska, “she felt the break cruelly” (E.Lewis 12). Later, her
journeys from Red Cloud to Lincoln, from Lincoln to Pittsburgh, and from Pittsburgh to
New York heralded important changes in her life. Stein was even more of a wanderer
than Cather, living in Europe, Baltimore, San Francisco, and East Oakland before
attending the Harvard Annex, returning to Baltimore, and then joining her brother Leo in
France. Larsen journeyed within the United States,6 but her writing suggests that she
perceived movement between North and South as going between different worlds or
different countries. She grew up during the Great Migration, the cultural backdrop which
also serves as the context for her texts (Yohe 3). Born in Chicago, she attended Fisk in
Nashville and nursing school in New York, the city she made her home for most of her
adult life.
Cather, Stein and Larsen engaged with European culture, knew immigrants, and
experienced migration themselves. None of them espoused melting pot ideology,7 and
none wanted to be melted herself. Cather believed it unforgivable to deny immigrants
their native language (Pers 24) and never tried to assimilate to the mores and standards of
the small prairie town that became her home at age ten. Jane Lilienfeld observes that “as
a teenager, Cather shocked the Red Cloud townspeople by her absolute self-possession,
the conviction of her genius, and her flamboyant cross-dressing” (46). Nor had she shown
any signs of becoming a proper Southern lady as a small child in Virginia.8 Although
Stein did not make such explicit displays of her sense of her own difference as a child,
she was determined to meet the world on her own terms. Like Cather, she “had immense
strength of ego,” and she cultivated an “appreciation of difference” from a young age
(Wagner-Martin, Favored 13–14). As an adult, Stein was interested in and amused by
variation among Americans (particularly according to geography) and believed that
neither her genius nor her de-facto expatriation rendered her less of an American. Larsen
also engaged in a delicate balancing act, both seeking membership in elite African-
American circles and trying to differentiate herself from such groups. Michael Kammen
notes that “the melting pot is an inept metaphor, but it did work for the blacks in the
sense that it turned many different kinds of Africans into one kind of African American”
(qtd. in Gleason, Speaking 36). Larsen, however, did not want to be considered an
ordinary member of a unitary group. Rebelling against such a blurring of individuality,
Larsen continually emphasized her Scandinavian roots. Like her character Helga Crane,
Larsen “position[ed] herself very strongly by asserting her difference” and needed to be
thought unique (Clemmen 462).
At the same time that these writers held themselves apart and validated a view of a
diverse, rather than a homogenous, body of Americans, all wanted to fit in: to be
accepted, to achieve financial success, and to win critical acclaim. Although her
overarching goal was to produce critically acknowledged great art, Cather did not disdain
her paying audience (Lilienfeld 50). She was savvy about publishing and marketing, and
switched publishers when she felt that her current firm was not doing its best to promote
her work. Stein was famous for her propensity for self-promotion. She wanted to have her
works published, though she spent years writing texts that most people did not
understand, and when celebrity finally came, she thoroughly enjoyed it. Similarly, it was
common knowledge that Larsen sought recognition (B. Williams 48). She wanted both
her fame and her income to spring from her career as a novelist (Davis 2). For each
woman, being an American writer constituted a key axis of identification and represented
the road to success.
YOUR NATIVE LAND, YOUR LIFE9
Since Cather, Stein and Larsen all retained an American identity as a key aspect in their
sense of self, it is important to understand the meaning of an American identity (race,
culture, nationality, etc.) and to contextualize it among other identity categories—those
which are imposed as well as those which are chosen.10 Here I am specifically invoking
Sollors’s framework of “consent and descent” (Beyond 5–6), although modifying his
approach because it, too, rests on an either/or distinction. Nevertheless, it is useful to take
from Sollors—and others writing from a sociological or historical position—the point
that the turn of the century through the 1920s constituted a crucial period in explorations
of race, ethnicity, and American identity.11 Writers of literature during the interwar period
shared this preoccupation, and thus it is not surprising that the age of high modernism,
with its paradoxical coupling of immigration and expatriation, contributes to the
discourse of identity formation and perpetuation. Discussions of whether a so-called
“American race” exists or whether Americanism is best conceptualized as a philosophy
(Munsterberg), a way of life or a culture (Blair, Fuchs), or a nationality (Commons,
Fairchild) also contribute to the difficulty of understanding the place of ethnicity in
American life and letters. The ambiguous standing of African-Americans in most theories
of Americanism leads to both dilemmas of definition and further entrenchment in
binarisms, and the problem of “furnishing uncontentious definitions of ethnicity and
racism” (Rattansi 252) and relating these terms to Americanism remains unsolved.
While only Larsen had a defining identification with a stigmatized group,12 all
experienced what it means to be “nonstandard, or, in America,… not fully American”
(Sollors, Beyond 25). Although Cather was socially conservative and seemed to accept at
least some Victorian views on sex and sexuality (Shaw, “Victorian” 25), critics have
argued “that ‘lesbian’ did in fact capture Cather’s self-definition” (O’Brien, EV 6).
Furthermore, at the time Cather was publishing her first Nebraska novels, “‘immigration
and ethnicity must have struck writers as controversial subjects which had better be
avoided in literature for fear of antagonizing important groups in society’” (Fryckstedt,
qtd. in Pers 16). Even after years in cultured company, Cather retained a sense of being a
country bumpkin in comparison to blue bloods who had the good fortune to be born in
the northeast: “Years later, when Cather was traveling in sophisticated Eastern cultural
circles, she still felt insecure because of her prairie background” (O’Brien, EV 117). Stein
was not embarrassed by her background, but she had to continually fight the label
“expatriate” which was invariably applied to her. She was also a Jew living in anti-
Semitic times and a lesbian trying to establish herself in patriarchal circles. In addition to
being black, Larsen was of mixed national origin, further complicating her American
identity.13
In addition to occupying marginalized subject positions, all employed minority
difference in their texts: Cather’s characters include European immigrants, African-
Americans, people with disabilities, and Jews; Stein writes about working-class
immigrants and African-Americans, and she often speaks of Jews as if she were not one
herself; Larsen’s texts make distinctions between different classes of African-Americans,

and her characters refer to Jews, as well. In the cases of Cather and Stein, however, use of
ethnically or racially diverse subjects has garnered charges of appropriation and
ethnocentrism. Ammons, for example, criticizes Cather’s representations of the Cliff
Dwellers in The Song of the Lark and The Professor’s House and of African-Americans
in Sapphira and the Slave Girl. Her unflattering assessment is that “when it comes to
women of color, whether Indian women in Arizona or black women in Virginia, Cather
does not subvert but instead becomes Jim Burden and Niel Herbert” (136). She passes a
similar judgment on Stein, observing of “Melanctha” that “black people in this work are
stupid, hypersexual, immature, and fundamentally Other in their feelings about human
life” (103). Corinne Blackmer explains how subject position constitutes a crucial
difference between Stein (and, by extension, Cather) and Larsen: “whereas for Stein
racial identity was primarily, in the case of ‘Melanctha,’ a metaphor, for Larsen race was
ontologically inseparable from day-to-day existence and, by extension, from literary
aesthetics” (70). She concludes that such positioning had ramifications for each author’s
respective success, as she notes that “because Larsen, as both a woman and an African-
American author, literally inhabits the mask of racial difference, while Stein employs the
African mask as an artistic vehicle, their fates on the literary marketplace replicated the
politics of racial inequality, and were radically different and unequal” (86).
Although Cather, Stein and Larsen occupied different social and political spaces in
part due to their racial and ethnic backgrounds, all wrote both about people like
themselves and about people who were somehow on the margins. In some cases,
marginal figures are also the ones identified with the author. Hermione Lee observes that
Cather, for example, often creates male narrators who conform to Robert Park’s
definition of “marginal man” (“Bridge” 40). She explains that such characters as Jim
Burden and Godfrey St.Peter (both of whom have been read as Cather figures) “feel
alienated and separate from their ‘cultural milieu,’ and that alienation has a great deal to
do with an internalized conflict between different, opposing kinds of Americanness” (41).
The same might be said of Stein’s Melanctha Herbert and of Larsen’s Helga Crane.
Sollors connects this experience of marginality to national identity, noting that “in
American, casting oneself as an outsider may in fact be considered a dominant cultural
trait” (Beyond 31).
Indeed, these writers did not consider themselves completely outside or inside of any
given identity category. Rather, their affiliations are complex and shifting. In addition to
depicting category-defying characters in their work, Stein, Cather, and Larsen were
themselves cosmopolitans and world-travelers. Further, all were aware of the major
movements and preoccupations of their time in a wide variety of fields—history,
sociology, psychology, art, and science. Because of their broad knowledge and varied
experiences, all can be considered (at some level) insider/outsiders in accordance with
Alice Gambrell’s paradigm, in which “insider-outsider intellectuals, whose value
consisted in their simultaneous distance from and intimacy with the subjects of their own
inquiry…performed their work atop one of the most volatile philosophical faultlines
within present-day remappings of the field of ‘modernism’” (4–5). Gambrell sees
“affiliative issues” (22) as key to the subjects in her study, and notes “a strong impulse
towards self-revision” (32) in their texts. Like the women modernists in Gambrell’s
study, Cather, Stein and Larsen retained privileged positions in social groups and had a
pronounced strain of elitism. For example, Cather became a local celebrity to the people
of the state of Nebraska, who commissioned a portrait of her for the Omaha public
library. Stein, for her part, occupied her selfassigned position as the only woman in a
community of male geniuses from her undergraduate days until the end of her life, while
Larsen both enjoyed her status as a member of the black elite and tried to emphasize the
uniqueness conferred on her by her Scandinavian roots. Also in line with Gambrell’s
theories, Cather, Stein and Larsen all offered several versions of themselves and their
subjects, engaging in a process of “self-revision.”
Where I differ most crucially from Gambrell, however, is in the nature of this
recasting which she sees as a “double revision—directed both inward and outward,” i.e.,
revising the self and the institution in which it functioned (32). Here Gambrell establishes
yet another set of opposed binaries, and applies an anthropological term in a broader
context. I hesitate to adopt this strategy because of the danger of attributing
insider/outsider status to Cather, for example, and conflating such “native ethnographers”
as Zora Neale Hurston with a strictly fictional writer. Cather has been praised for her
sympathetic, detailed and realistic portraits of immigrants, but she has made no claims to
scientific accuracy or even to realism as it is usually defined.14 Cather did not set out to
act as an intermediary between misunderstood Swedes and the outside world, and thus it
would be inappropriate to view Cather’s interest in immigrant farm wives as a form of
self-nativism.
While I reject the essentialism and binarisms implicit in the insider/outsider paradigm,
I do think such a framework provides an example of how models of identity can be
loosened up to facilitate the transition to a discourse of both/and as opposed to either/or.
Gambrell emphasizes the positive aspects of the insider/outsider’s potential for inter-
group mobility, and yet Cather, Stein and Larsen experienced the fluidity of permeable
boundaries as sometimes liberating but sometimes dislocating. For example, Cather
fluctuated between affirming and devaluing same-sex attraction (in herself and others),
immigrant contributions, and ethnic stereotypes. As Robert Nelson has pointed out,
Cather occupied an “ambiguous situation as a deeply spiritual offspring of the Virginia
gentry transported to the harsh plains of the Midwest, as a woman artist with a
cosmopolitan outlook, and as a lesbian” (21). She paradoxically provides some of the
more sympathetic portraits of immigrants written by a non-ethnic American modernist,
while retaining her status as a champion of American nostalgia. Thus she is inside and
outside of multiple categories simultaneously. Similarly, Stein variously chose to
emphasize and de-emphasize such aspects of herself as her lesbianism, her womanhood,
her Jewishness, and her status as an American citizen. She did not consider herself
coherent, consistent, and unitary like a chemical equation. All water consists of two
atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen at all times—the proportions remain constant. It
would be impossible, however, to write out a comparable equation for identity categories
in a hypothetical, monolithic Gertrude Stein. Finally, wanting both acceptance and
uniqueness, Larsen and her heroines moved uneasily between bohemianism and social
propriety (in both black and white circles). Her ambivalence about both her sense of her
place and her goals or aspirations makes it difficult to assign strict inside/outside
demarcations to her social milieu either.
All were variously inside and outside an American identity, as well. Cather’s sense of
herself as an American remained crucial to her self-image, as she refused expatriation to
resolve her feelings of not belonging (Shaw, “Victorian” 23–25). Furthermore, since
critics such as Mona Pers (20), Nelson (56–7), and Lilienfeld (48) have suggested that
Cather valorized Europeans at the expense of Americans, it is particularly significant that
Cather chose to stay in America. At the same time that Cather identified with Americans
as a group (whatever that might mean), her identity was regionally-based. Trying to
establish a link with her southern past, Cather insisted that she was named for her soldier
uncle who died fighting for the Confederacy (a fancy that Lewis perpetuated in her
memoirs). She also returns to her Virginia roots in her later stories and last novel. Cather
simultaneously maintains her connections with Nebraska, in spite of having moved east
at the earliest possible opportunity. Cather lived most of her life in New York City, the
consummate city and the epitome of otherness for many southerners and mid-westerners
alike. Yet she never felt completely at home among the sophisticated New York and
Boston sets, and she is certainly never identified with New York. But she liked good
clothes and good food, and was quite cosmopolitan in her way, keeping abreast of the
latest trends in literature and art.
Having lived in several different countries and regions, Stein had a special relationship
to the English language, almost like that of a non-native speaker. She preferred to live
where English was not spoken in order to have the English language all to herself
(Marren 174). In this way, Stein shared an attitude towards language which Williams
connects with immigrants: “to the immigrants especially, with their new second common
language, language was more evident as a medium—a medium that could be shaped and
reshaped—than as a social custom” (R.Williams 46). Ammons adds that Stein’s
propensity for linguistic dislocations “makes us start over” (88)—in other words, she puts
her readers in the subject position of immigrants. In spite of her expatriate lifestyle and
her immigrant relationship to language, Stein remained “convinced of the ineluctable
impress of one’s native land, [and] she happily affirmed her own American heritage”
(Spencer 210). Indeed Susan Marren takes this observation one step further, noting of
The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas that “Stein reconstitutes herself as the quintessence
of Americanness—a reconstitution that could not, the text suggests, have been
accomplished on American land” (170). Hence Stein’s world view affirms both her
identification as an American and her cosmopolitan lifestyle.
Larsen similarly experienced the challenge of trans-nationalism throughout her life.
Growing up in a mixed neighborhood and being the product of a multi-racial, multi-
national marriage, Larsen came into intimate contact with different ways of being
American. Furthermore, her novels suggest that she considered the rural South an entirely
different country than the urban centers of the North in which she grew up (Yohe 21,
Davis 4). David Lewis corroborates this view with his terminology when observes that
southern migrants brought “religious fundamentalism and fervor to Harlem… [like] other
immigrant groups, which gained psychological comfort and social stability from various
orthodoxies and customs” (221). Beyond her views on regional or demographic
affiliations, Larsen knew firsthand that “striving to be both European and black requires
some specific forms of double consciousness” (Gilroy 1). Like other ethnic American
writers, she faced the dilemma of “the double audience” (Sollors, Beyond 249), and she
found herself pulled both by Africa and by white America (Huggins 8). Larsen did not
want to be pigeonholed as a Negro novelist (Davis 282), and yet she sought recognition
from African-American arbiters of culture as well as white critics. At the same time that
she valued Carl Van Vechten’s opinions on her work, she was thrilled when the
Woman’s Auxiliary of the NAACP gave a tea in honor of Quicksand’s publication.
While W.E.B.DuBois spoke of a “dual consciousness” and James Weldon Johnson
described a “dual personality” (Gilroy 131), Larsen offers Clare Kendry, whom Kristine
Yohe has identified as a character with “dual status” (63). Hence Larsen’s sense of
herself as an American was complicated both by her ties to Europe and her status as an
African-American woman.
Dual or multiple citizenship, a notion consistent with the insider/outsider concept, also
appears as an important idea in Bourne’s essay: “we may have to accept some form of
that dual citizenship which meets with so much articulate horror among us. Dual
citizenship we may have to recognize as the rudimentary form of that international
citizenship to which, if our words mean anything, we aspire” (280). Bourne offers further
endorsement for Cather’s and Larsen’s travels and Stein’s residence abroad as compatible
with an established American identity:
Indeed, does not the cultivated American who goes to Europe practice a
dual citizenship, which, if not formal, is no less real? The American who
lives abroad may be the least expatriate of men. If he falls in love with
French ways and French thinking and French democracy and seeks to
saturate himself with the new spirit, he is guilty of at least a dual spiritual
citizenship. He may be still American, yet he feels himself through
sympathy also a Frenchman. And he finds that this expansion involves no
shameful conflict within him, no surrender of his native attitude. He has
rather for the first time caught a glimpse of the cosmopolitan spirit. (281)
Through their sojourns abroad and their engagement with European culture, Cather, Stein
and Larsen all engaged with dual (if not triple or quadruple) citizenship.
IDENTITIES POLITICS
Such cosmopolitanism allowed these authors to create textured, nuanced, and

sophisticated texts. And yet their cultivation and their engagement with multiple subject
positions had a negative facet as well: “whoever is not [normative] has to be segregated
or repressed or excluded, or to hide himself, or to play a double game one way or another.
This is the latent condition which allows otherness or difference to become integrated
within a ‘total’ ideology or hegemony” (Balibar 63). All had to variously submerge and
accentuate parts of themselves to negotiate the social and professional turfs they wished
to occupy, and all encountered resistance to the kind of work they were producing. When
Bourne comments that “these people were not mere arrivals from the same family, to be
welcomed as understood and long-loved, but strangers to the neighborhood, with whom a
long process of settling down had to take place” (262), he is referring to non-Anglo-
Saxon immigrants. His words are equally applicable, however, to African-American and
women writers in the early twentieth century.15 These writers had a problematic relation
to modernism and canon formation. Much of Cather’s later work was dismissed as
nostalgic and anti-modern, a notion she helped to perpetuate with comments like the one
she offers in the prefatory note to Not Under Forty: “it is for the backward, and by one of
their number, that these sketches were written” (v).16 Marianne DeKoven contends that
the bulk of Stein’s writing was not modernist for the opposite reason. While Cather’s
work seemed too simple in form and too sentimental in theme to qualify as modernist,
Stein quickly moved beyond modernism (as seen in “Melanctha”) to avant-garde
experimentalism and its attendant incomprehensibility (Rich 68). Like Cather, Larsen was
regarded by some as rearguard because her themes and subject matter did not coincide
with critical expectations: “black women novelists, for example, whose settings are the
urban North and whose subjects are middle-class black women are not only dismissed in
the name of the vernacular; they are condemned…for ‘historical conservativism’” and
considered “less than authentically black” (DuCille 195, 198). In this way, Larsen’s
status as a Harlem Renaissance writer kept her work from being studied under the rubric
of modernism, while her choice of cities as settings and middle-class women as
characters pushed her out of some definitions of New Negro writing, as well.17 Like
Cather, who came to be considered rearguard, and Stein, who seemed postmodern before
her time, Larsen had trouble fitting into pre-ordained literary critical categories.
All three writers faced resistance to their work because of gender as well as formal
issues, and in this area they seemed more willing to appear to conform to expectations as
a means of gaining critical acceptance. In response to high modernism’s denigration of
women’s work, Cather, Stein, and Larsen deemed themselves exceptional women and
sought approval from male arbiters of art and culture, acceding to male standards. Indeed,
Frances Kaye argues that Cather was not alone in “scorning ‘ordinary’ women and seeing
them as ‘other’ and inferior” and in seeing herself as “qualitatively different from other
women” (186). Butler mitigates the sting of Kaye’s indictment: “if Cather’s texts often
appear to idealize masculine authorship through a displaced identification, it may be that
the displacement of identification is the very condition for the possibility of her fiction”
(Bodies 148–9). Deborah Carlin similarly acknowledges “Cather’s subversive feminism,”
which she identifies as “elements of female power that function as red herrings” in
Cather’s works (40). Stein’s and Larsen’s texts contain powerful female characters as
well, though Stein “often emerges as male-identified,” a stance which helped her “enter
the male world of culture and genius” (Chessman 7). Although Larsen did not divide the
artistic world into “geniuses” and “wives” as Stein did, she identified artistic success with
men and considered women rivals more than friends: “seeking approval from male
power-brokers as an exceptional female, she saw herself as being in competition with
other women for finite rewards” (Davis 14). Hence all three writers needed to selectively
emphasize and consciously construct aspects of their identities in order to achieve their
professional and personal aims. It is worth noting, however, that Cather, at least, never
lost track of what she was doing: “the construction of any identity—sexual, cultural,
authorial—requires the forging and sustaining of numerous illusions. Cather makes us
perceive how perilous and fragile this process is, for those who do not feel they have a
cultural identity ready-made, or are not at home with the one on offer” (Lee, “Bridge”
54).
Cather, Stein and Larsen were each, in at least one way, outside of the ready-made
identities available to them. As women artists—a lesbian, a Jew, a woman of color—
these writers were fully aware that identity formation and perpetuation is a continual
process. Furthermore, “identity is necessarily unstable,” as Dollimore remarks of Freud’s
great contribution to the understanding of the human psyche (183). Appiah elaborates:
“identities…grow out of a history of changing responses to economic, political and
cultural forces, almost always in opposition to other identities…. They flourish despite…
their roots in myths and in lies…. There is…no large place for reason in the construction
of [identities]” (110). Emphasizing both fluidity and performativity, Butler asks: “to what
extent is ‘identity’ a normative ideal rather than a descriptive feature of experience?”
(Gender 16). Speaking of a postmodern theory of identification, Rattansi argues that
“terms are permanently in between, caught in the impossibility of fixity and
essentialization,” and proposes a view of “ethnicity as part of a cultural politics of
representation, involving processes of ‘self-identification’ as well as formation by
disciplinary agencies” (253, 257). Perhaps by necessity as much as precocity, all three
writers seem to have been ahead of their time in terms of offering innovative
conceptualizations of identity.
As writers, Cather, Stein and Larsen used the medium of language to establish
identities and as a means of identification.18 The idea that language actually constitutes,
and not merely expresses, the subject is a key post-structuralist tenet, and these women
certainly demonstrated it in their texts. Furthermore, Gillian Bottomley comments that
“language is obviously crucial to the process of identity formation…. Many of the
struggles over adjustment in a new society are struggles over language, sometimes for
basic understanding, sometimes for recognition” (124–5). Although she speaks mainly
about immigrants who need to learn a new language, her words also apply to writers who
are trying to find an audience and to achieve critical attention. Benedict Anderson and
Horace Kallen similarly emphasize the cohesive quality of language. Anderson notes that
“from the start the nation was conceived in language, not in blood” (145), while Kallen
states: “of the linkages [that bond people together], the most pervasive and important is,
of course, language. Language…functions both as a shaper and sustainer of a culture;
embodies indeed its traditions regarding the human enterprise in the modes that the group
whose language it is images the enterprise and transmits the image from generation to
generation” (28). The relationship between language and identity has also been
considered a particularly American issue. Thus John Commons proposed in 1920 that
American unity derives from having a single dominant language: “this is essential, for it
is not physical amalgamation that unites mankind; it is mental community” (20). Nearly
seventy-five years later, Ann Massa and Alistair Stead argue that American identity has
been historically more dependent on language than the forging of identity for residents of
England (4). As American writers, Cather, Stein and Larsen all used language to create,
interweave, sustain, and exchange identities.
SURVIVING THE CROSSING
For the women in this study, writing was a crucial strategy for identification and
survival.19 Stein’s assessment of the relationship between writing and identity could
easily be applied to Cather and Larsen, as well:
And I was not writing. I began to worry about identity. I had always been
I because I had words that had to be written inside me and now any word I
had inside could be spoken it did not need to be written…. But was I I
when I had no written word inside me. It was very bothersome. I
sometimes thought I would try but to try is to die and so I did not really
try. I was not doing any writing. (EA 66)
Reality, as Derrida and others would later argue, is “constructed by our discourse rather
than reflected by it” (Eagleton 143–44). Language constitutes experience, and so the
absence of language produces an aporia of identity. While not writing could be “very
bothersome,” the act of writing was a powerful tool: it allowed these women to break free
of the discourse that treats identity as singular, consistent, and unchanging, assuming
“that partial ancestry may have the power to become totally defining” (Sollors, Neither
249). Cather could be both Godfrey St.Peter and Louie Marsellus; Stein could be herself
and Alice simultaneously; Larsen could be both Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry. At the
same time, the characters they created were always both more and less than the authors
themselves.
The creation, re-creation and representation of reality, identity, and experience
produce a pattern that is more a cross-hatch than a circle or a line. In offering fictional
representation of possible selves, these writers go over the same ground repeatedly, but
always to a different end. For example, Cather writes a novel about a successful artist
(Thea Kronberg of Song of the Lark) twenty years before she writes about an avatar of
herself who fails to become great and dies young (the eponymous Lucy Gayheart). Along
similar lines, Stein’s Q.E.D., “Melanctha,” and The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas
have all been read as aiming towards resolving the problematic relationship between
Stein and May Bookstaver (Will 220). In their representations of individual characters
and in the shape of their respective oeuvres as well, Cather, Stein and Larsen employ
fluid identity categories. For this reason, the motif of crossing more accurately reflects
how these writers perceived identity than “being,” since the former term connotes
adaptability, movement, and the possibility of having to retrace one’s steps.20 Indeed, the
title of this study deliberately invokes the rhetoric of specific significant crossings in
American history—from the voyage of the Mayflower to the Middle Passage, from the
western-bound settlers’ crossing of the Great Divide to the largely steeragerate ship
passages taken by European immigrants and the steamer trips which carried American
expatriates back to Europe, to name a few. “Surviving the crossing” (as opposed to
“making the crossing”) calls particular attention to the machinations and compromises
required for pilgrims to achieve both physical and psychological/emotional success on
such journeys; it also emphasizes that crossing is an ongoing process as opposed to a
single defining moment. Lee observes that Cather was “always writing about cultural
confrontations and crossovers” (“Bridge” 39; emphasis added), while Paul Gilroy
includes Larsen in his list of “black intellectuals” whose lives “crisscrossed the Atlantic
Ocean” (6; emphasis added). Crossing also brings up other issues important to my work,
including rebellion/subversion, gender crossing (crossdressing, male pseudonyms and
narrators, etc.), ethnic hybridity, and crossing the color line. Dollimore enumerates
several other important connotations: “we might also usefully recall that to cross is not
only to traverse, but to mix (as in cross-breed) and to contradict (as in to cross someone);
also that crossdressing involves both inversion and displacement of gender binaries”
(288). Cather, Stein and Larsen moved back and forth across continents and oceans,
employing identities fluidly—national, ethnic, and gender; personal and professional—

both in their lives and in the worlds they created.
Furthermore, crossing is closely linked to passing, a discourse entrenched in binaristic,
totalitarian models: to pass for something ones not implies that one is something else
(Ginsberg 3).21 Although the term “passing” had at one point referred “to the crossing of
any line that divides social groups,” by the 1920s it was used mainly “as if it were short
for ‘passing for white’” (Sollors, Neither 247). Recent theorists have contended that
“passing” can apply to “class, ethnicity, and sexuality, as well as gender,” in addition to
race (Ginsberg 3), and it would seem that this was equally true seventy years ago. Indeed,
Cather, Stein and Larsen all depicted and lived out different types of passing. Butler
makes this connection between Cather’s life, texts, and time period: “considering the
historical importance of ‘crossing’ or ‘passing’ for lesbians at the turn of the century—
and Cather’s own early penchant for pseudononymous writing—it may be that what we
find in Cather is a narrative specification of that social practice, an authorial ‘passing’
that succeeds only by producing the final indecipherability or irreducibility of the
fictional directions that it mobilizes and sustains” (Bodies 163). Lauren Berlant offers the
term “paper transvestitism” to describe the phenomenon whereby some female writers
(like Cather and Larsen) published texts under male pseudonyms (“National” 119). If
pseudonymy can be taken as a form of cross-dressing, then the decision to remain
closeted might also be taken as an attempt at passing (Edelman 4). From Godfrey
St.Peter, who declares that “more than anything else, I like my closets” (Cather, PH 34),
to “Alice Toklas,” who, at the end of her “autobiography,” is unveiled as Gertrude Stein,
to Clare Kendry, whose “color [is] ‘outed’” when her white husband sees her at a Harlem
party (Butler, Bodies 170), instances of crossing, passing, being closeted, and coming out
abound.
None of the writers under consideration passed for white, and yet all engaged in some
form of passing themselves.22 Recent critics have taken steps towards problematizing and
reconstructing the notion of passing. For example, Mary Helen Washington emphasizes
the metaphorical quality of passing (163–64), while Marren employs Peter Rabinowitz’s
distinction between social and rhetorical strategy in racial passing (114–17). Sollors
analyzes the moral condemnation our society places on racial passing and begins to make
connections between different kinds of passing by noting that racial passing is sometimes
accompanied by sexual cross-dressing (Neither 247–50). Crossdressing is one
manifestation of gender passing, which, according to Sherri Helvie, can provoke as much
murderous rage as racial passing. Instead of seeing passing as basically conservative (i.e.
assimilationist, attempting to move from one firmly established category to another),
Helvie suggests that passing can be an attempt to transcend categories entirely or at least
a representation of slippage between absolutes (39). Cather, Stein and Larsen provide
examples of different kinds of passing in both their lives and their creative work. Taking
a broad approach to crossing and passing is crucial to understanding the role these
concepts play in modernist representations of identity.
PASSING FOR MODERNISM
Perhaps because of the slippery quality of their affiliations, Cather, Stein and Larsen all
wrote multivalent and provocative texts that have traditionally been read as coded.23 The
discourse which insists on reading “polysemous” texts (to borrow Lisa Ruddick’s term
[Reading 7]) as coded represents a retreat into the strict binarisms that belie the texts and
biographies of the writers under consideration. Julie Abraham has already suggested the
tenuousness of viewing works by homosexual authors, or those containing homosexual
subtexts, as coded (25). Furthermore, terms such as “passing,” “masking,” and “coding”
assert a hierarchical relationship between different aspects of a character’s personality,
different layers of meaning, or different levels of textual interpretation. In other words,
coded texts are ones that lend themselves to binary readings of surface vs. depth. This
model for reading brings with it a set of power relations which subvert the more complex
representations across categories that allow for mobile deployments of versions of
identity. Instead of using a discourse that opposes surface and depth, it is possible to
affirm a cubist play of surfaces, privileging no single meaning above any other.24 For
example, instead of saying that ethnicity is a mask for homosexuality in Cather (Irving,
qtd. in Pers 29), we can say that ethnicity and homosexuality are both key concerns of the
text; instead of saying that Passing is about race, or about gender, or about repression, we
can validate the multiplicity of readings the text sustains.
Close readings that avoid binary approaches to identity and authorship facilitate a
breaking down of oppositions in literary classifications: realism vs. romance/nostalgia
(Cather), experimental vs. money-making writing (Stein) and radical vs. rearguard
(Larsen). Indeed, it is unnecessary to have to choose between such terms as pioneer
literature, modernism, and Harlem Renaissance in examining these writers and their art.
Boundaries between non-fiction, autobiographical writing and fictional, or wholly created
writing become more fluid as well. Cather, Stein and Larsen all blur the line in their texts
(and in some instances, in their lives) between autobiography and fiction. Genre studies
have examined autobiography and moved towards a genderized theory (see, for example,
Janice Morgan), but modernist autobiographies constitute their own category.
Furthermore, personal experience plays a key role in the work of ethnic writers (Burch
58), and so the rubric of ethnic autobiography also facilitates an understanding of what
these writers attempted and achieved.
While the texts under consideration defy literary categories such as fiction/non-fiction
and realism/romance, they also resist neat identification as novels. My Antonia and The
Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas, for example, might be more fruitfully conceived of as
stories in Walter Benjamins sense. Identifying storytelling as a pre-war (i.e., pre-1914)
phenomenon, Benjamin credits the storyteller with providing people with “the ability to
exchange experiences,” emphasizing that stories—even written stories—are interactive
and social, whereas novels are predicated on book form and are ultimately bound up with
death (83, 87, 101). My Antonia and The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas both elide time
(and thereby elide death?) in what is perhaps an authorial attempt to reconcile a need for
tradition with a recognition of change. It is also problematic to consider Larsen’s works
as uncomplicated realist novels because her endings are poor, puzzling, or complex by
such standards; we either need to apply a different paradigm or accept that Larsen was
not a very good writer (cf. Kaplan 159–60).
Narrative form provides a further illustration of how these writers use language to
unhinge fixed conceptions of identity. While Stein is known for her narrative
experimentalism, Cather and Larsen also use innovative narrative forms despite seeming
to be classic and simple. For example, Lilienfeld argues that “Cather…craft[s] her own
female modernism which encodes women’s complicated economic, social, and sexual
relations by subverting that most traditional of genres, seemingly realistic American
fiction” (52). Suggesting that Cather’s work not only subverts but combines genres, John
Swift identifies My Antonia as “simultaneously bildungsroman and social history” (115).
With regard to narrators and narrative style, Carlin points out that Cather manages to
present several conflicting viewpoints simultaneously and sympathetically in “Old Mrs.
Harris” (101). Like Cather, Larsen manipulates point of view, as Sollors’s analysis of
“the eroticized gaze” between the two mixed-race protagonists in Passing suggests
(Neither 276). Beth McCoy’s reading of Passing identifies the narrative form of the
novel’s second half as a “roman a clef” (78), while Yves Clemmen argues that Quicksand
possesses a “multidirectional plot” (459) and notes that “instead of a bildungsroman that
feeds on experience, we have…a narrative that feeds on difference” (460). Clearly all the
writers in this study manipulate language, narrative form, and genre in their attempts to
represent more fluid conceptualizations of identity.
TRANS-NATIONAL AMERICA REVISITED
My project is, in part, an attempt to take up the challenge implied in Ammons’s

description of her broad study of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women
writers as “suggestive, a beginning” (19). I provide closer readings of three of Ammons’s
subjects, accepting both her contention that these women were not a coherent group and
her belief that it is worthwhile to study them together. Thus, although I am not positing
that Cather, Stein and Larsen were members of a close-knit community, the
preponderance of real-life contacts and mutual friends suggests that they can profitably
be examined in light of one another. Tuzyline Jita Allan provides a model by offering a
comparative analysis of Larsen and Virginia Woolf, who has been included in studies of
Cather and Stein, as well.25 The existence of a personal relationship between Larsen and
Stein is documented in Larsen’s praise of “Melanctha” (Larsen, Gallup 216), while
Stein’s agreement with Carl Van Vechten that the innovative writing coming out of post-
war America comes from the Harlem Renaissance suggests that the awareness—if not the
influence—went in both directions (Simon 39). Van Vechten provides another important
link between the three. Stein’s literary agent and Larsen’s foremost promoter, Van
Vechten also knew (and photographed) Cather. If Walter White, one of Larsen’s most
outspoken advocates, compared her to Cather on several occasions (Davis 217, 295), it
seems logical that Larsen would have read Cather’s work, as well as Stein’s. Europe
provides another commonality of experience. Larsen’s interest in Europe was deep and
abiding, Stein lived in France for most of her adult life, and Cather visited numerous
times and demonstrated a sustained interest in modern European art. Both Stein and
Cather have been compared to Cezanne. Further, Cather and Stein were both influenced
by William James, and all three writers possessed eclectic knowledge that extended well
beyond literature. Stein was well-versed in art, music, and philosophy; Cather had a
strong background in art, music, religion, and history; Larsen was familiar with the
intricacies of modern science, particularly of physics. Given three voracious and eclectic
readers—all of whom were popular during each other’s lifetime—we can only conclude
that they were aware of each other.
Similarities in biography are marked, as well. Both Cather and Larsen persistently
moved forward their date of birth, and both changed their names, wrote under
pseudonyms, and claimed questionable heritages; Stein’s various “autobiographies” call
into continuous question the concept of the authorial self. All three women experienced a
long apprenticeship before achieving critical and popular acclaim for their writing—
Cather was thirty-nine and forty when she wrote her two “first novels,” forty-five when
she wrote the one many consider her best (My Antonia); Stein was thirty-five at the
publication of “Melanctha,” fifty-nine before she achieved popular success with The
Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas; Larsen’s first novel was published when she was thirty-
seven. As children, all three experienced displacement and maintained a complicated
relationship to places. Stein’s assessment of East Oakland—”‘there is no there there’”
(EA 298)—echoes Cather’s reflections on first moving to Nebraska (spoken through the
voice of Jim Burden): “there was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material
out of which countries are made. No, there was nothing but land” (MA 7–8). All were
influenced by Europeans and their culture, and throughout their lives all evidenced a
desire to set themselves apart, continually inventing and reinventing themselves.
In chapter two, the analysis of Cather’s use of multiple subject positions as a technique
for finding and adequately representing fluid fictional and personal selves concentrates
on representations of identity categories such as gender, nationality, and ethnicity in three
texts: My Antonia, The Professor’s House, and “Old Mrs. Harris.” My Antonia, an early,
prototypical pioneer text, provides a means of framing some of the significant issues
throughout Cather’s career. This novel provides an essential foundation for any study
exploring issues of ethnicity, identity and narrative in Cather, and it was also enormously
popular, influencing her career track, other writers, and her later work. Next, I focus on
The Professor’s House, a classic text from Cather’s middle period (after the world had
broken in two but before disillusion and reclusiveness had taken a firm hold). More
reflective and philosophical than the stories of heroic pioneers which made Cather
famous, this novel uses the medium of ideas and contrasts to address “the hardest human
questions” (Skaggs 64), many of which involve issues of identity and identification.
Finally, “Old Mrs. Harris” constitutes a return to fictionalized autobiography, female
identification, and early roots. Coming near the end of Cather’s career, it demonstrates
both the consistency of her views over time and her ability to offer new insights into old
stories as she reaches a different place in her life.
My third chapter explores how Stein enacted transitivity, the loosening of inherited
forms and definitions, and the blurring and blending of boundaries in her writings. In her
literary representations of group affiliations, Stein unhinged words from their meanings
(see Jackson 248), but she also used her fiction to promote the dispersal of fixed
identity—personal identity (her status as woman, lesbian, and Jew), professional identity
(“becoming the man that being a genius required her to be” [Pierpont 84] and
simultaneously serving as the “grandmother of the modernist movement” [qtd. in
WagnerMartin, Favored 154]) and national identity (living out expatriation while
espousing American pride). “Melanctha,” which came out in 1909 as part of Stein’s first
published collection (Three Lives), provides a baseline for how Stein will employ
multiple subject positions across time and categories. In this text, which she considered
the dawn of the twentieth century, Stein explores the nature of the self, both in
relationships and on its own. In The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas, which came after
more than twenty years of immersion in avant-garde experimentalism, Stein returns to
narrative, following up the bifurcation she uses in “Melanctha” with projection and
identification. Using the voice of Alice, Stein speaks for both her beloved and herself
simultaneously in a triumph of communication, a recognition of the limitations of
mimesis within so-called non-fictional texts, and a reworking of spiritual autobiography.
Everybody’s Autobiography takes the notion of identification one step further, proposing
that Stein’s experiences in America qualify as everyone’s life story. Whereas Stein’s first
autobiography was filled with tales of artists, their successes and their scandals, her
second autobiography offers much more prosaic details, such as menus and travel
schedules. If The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas was about the world of art,
Everybody’s Autobiography tries to integrate art (the spirit) with life (money). Stein’s
awareness that she will not be able to churn out another Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
extends to an acknowledgment of the impossibility of repetition, a prominent theme in
both Everybody’s Autobiography and The Geographical History of America. The latter is
an abstract philosophical work that nevertheless returns to some early preoccupations.
Tracing Stein’s literary and philosophical movements through these texts, it is also
possible to see the convergence of national identity, sexual orientation, ethnic identity in
each. Furthermore, the migrations and crossings which marked Stein’s art and life are
replicated in her texts as well: Baltimore (“Melanctha”), to Paris (The Autobiography of
Alice B.Toklas), to America (Everybody’s Autobiography), and finally, back to France
(The Geographical History of America).
Chapter four looks at how Larsen, a “woman writer during the maledominated Harlem
Renaissance” (McDowell xii), struggled with issues of gender, as well as race. Thadious
Davis observes that “in a field dominated by men, she was a woman who had the courage
and the conviction not only to pursue her writing but to bring attention to it as well” (8).
Her competitive streak and lack of friendliness with other women echo Stein’s position as
self-appointed queen of a kingdom of male geniuses (and disdain for women’s groups),
along with Cather’s adoption of male modes (epic, pastoral, etc.) and seemingly
misogynistic tendencies (Ammons 127). Arguably Larsen’s behavior has its roots in
generational conflict, complicated by racial issues. Ammons observes that the subjects of
her study “were full members neither of their mothers’ world, at the one extreme, nor of
that of the privileged white male artist, at the other” (10). Furthermore, like other women
and particularly like other women of color, Larsen felt constrained to deny key
components of her identity (Ammons 11). Larsen wanted to be considered a novelist—
not a black novelist, and certainly not a black woman novelist. She clearly tried to use
fiction in the way that many of her contemporaries in Ammons’s study did: “to create a
public image of themselves as independent, self-directed creators emphatically not bound
by historical assumptions based on gender and, for women of color, on race as well”
(123). This striving is also peculiarly American, according to Hugo Munsterberg, who
identifies the key aspect of the American character as “yearning…after self-direction”
(3). Quicksand provides an in-depth character study of a mixed-race, mixed-nationality

protagonist (much like Larsen), while Passing projects the internal bifurcation of
Quicksand’s Helga Crane onto two separate people, examining how identities form in
relationships. Taken together, they provide an incisive look at how race, class,
geography, and nationality interact in the imposition and adoption of identities.
In my final chapter, I look briefly at how the salient issues continue to play out in
todays society. This project addresses the cultural moment at which Willa Cather,
Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen were conceiving literary explorations of identity in a
trans-national context (1909–1937). It complicates binary paradigms of national, ethnic,
and gender identities by showing how these writers bring language to bear on the fixity of
identity, thereby loosening categorical boundaries and creating a uniquely modernist self.
Accepting that Cather, Stein and Larsen all had a lifelong involvement with the culture of
Europe and yet retained a sense of American identity, this study asks the timely question
(then and now) of how the experience of transnationalism facilitates the possibilities for
an American subjectivity.
Chapter Two
“The Peculiar Combination of Elements Long
Familiar”: Willa Cather
“If there is anything unique in American literature, it is perhaps the peculiar combination
of elements long familiar” (Munsterberg 458). Hugo Munsterberg made this
pronouncement in 1904; Cather independently came to the same conclusion and made it
one of her guiding principles in art. Cather did not publish her “first novels” until she was
thirty-nine and forty, respectively, and My Antonia, the novel she later called “the best
thing I’ve done[, my]…contribution to American letters” (qtd. in Bennett 203), did not
appear until she was forty-five. In light of her oft-quoted pronouncement that an author’s
most important material is gathered before the age of fifteen (Woodress, Literary 40), we
can conclude that Cather’s material had (and required) plenty of time to incubate before
emerging in mature art.1 In addition to working with stories and experiences gleaned
from her early days, Cather combined and recombined these components in distinctive
and experimental ways. She both practiced and preached fidelity to using traditional
materials as the basis for modern literature. In her essay on Thomas Mann, Cather
expresses disdain for the “reckless improviser,” arguing instead that “what we most love
is not bizarre invention, but to have the old story brought home to us closer than ever
before, enriched by all that the right man could draw from it and, by sympathetic insight,
put into it” (NUF 119). Cather’s own work consists largely of the reworking of “the old
story,” and each new configuration thereof brings a different angle to light.
Cather includes autobiographical elements—her old story—in most of her fiction, and
provides an example of what Morgan observes of twentiethcentury women writers who
wrote autobiographical fiction, namely that they “retain a sense of the self as
plural…[and of] roles/identities as multiple” (8). In the process of trying to make sense of
herself and her experiences through her art, Cather continually re-envisions herself, often
putting seemingly mutually exclusive terms into simultaneous play. She is both Jim
Burden, who moved from Virginia to Nebraska as a child, and Antonia, who wears men’s
clothing; she is both Thea Kronborg, the successful artist, and Lucy Gayheart, the
mediocre one who fails; she is both Godfrey St.Peter, the professional historian, and
Lesley Ferguesson, the underage schoolteacher. Like the subjects of Gambrell’s study of
women modernist insider/outsiders, Cather “refused ever to let a subject go” (184).
Continually re-envisioning herself throughout her career, Cather showed an attitude
towards identity which can only be described as modern. Her characters are multi-faceted
and complex, and we never see a case in which “partial ancestry…[has] the power to
become totally defining” (Sollors, Neither 249). Many of them, like their creator, have
cosmopolitan aspects. In exploring and evaluating cosmopolitanism in Cather, I find it
useful to think of the term’s adjectival and noun forms separately. For example, we can
say that someone has a cosmopolitan outlook without arguing that he or she is a
cosmopolitan. This distinction is important in part because of a tendency to conflate the
“The peculiar combination of elements long familiar”: willa cather 23
cosmopolite with metropolitan man.2 Certainly the “crucible of the [early twentieth-
century] metropolis” (R.Williams 46), to which many immigrants and intellectuals alike
were drawn, played a key role in the emergence of a modernist sensibility. Even while
discussing the importance of the metropolis, however, Williams warns of “the
metropolitan interpretation of its own processes as universals…only in history but as it
were above and beyond it” (R. Williams 47). Cather provides a good illustration of the
need for such skepticism. In spite of a lifetime spent crossing the country and the Atlantic
and years with a New York City address, she retained “her sense of being a Nebraskan
rather than a New Yorker” (Lindemann, “Fear” 30). Further, Cather’s cosmopolitanism
does not translate to the political liberalism which Michael Novak seems to assume in his
contention that “the true liberal spirit is cosmopolitan rather than universalist. The
connotations of these two words suggest the difference between a liberalism that expects,
and desires, a certain homogenization and a liberalism that expects, and delights in,
variety. Cosmopolitan liberalism is surely closer to the heart of the authentic liberal
spirit” (39). Novak sees “cosmopolitan liberalism” as a single term, but Cather would not
fit so neatly into such a paradigm. Cather disdained assimilationist calls for immigrants to
forget their native tongues and traditions, and yet while she has been connected with
cosmopolitanism by many sources, she is never considered a liberal. Thus, Nelson sees
Cather as “a woman artist with a cosmopolitan outlook” but concludes that her status is
fundamentally “ambiguous” (21), while Carlin characterizes her as “a cosmopolitan
Midwesterner [and] a conservative Republican” (6) in the same breath. Cather’s
representations of cosmopolitan characters show a similarly complicated and fluid
positionality.
It is difficult to fit Cather into neat social or political categories in part because her
sense of herself changed throughout her lifetime. Cather’s many fictional cosmopolitan
avatars are indicative of the fact that her pronounced revisionist streak had both creative
and ambivalent facets, extending from textual representations of herself to basic attitudes
towards her life, letters and legacy. She extensively revised her collections and works
before they underwent subsequent publications, actually seeming to harbor real regret for
works and passages she later came to be ashamed of. In fact, the phrase that recurs most
often in E.K.Brown’s passages describing Cather’s assessments of her work is “in later
years” (Critical Biography 145, 160, 189). This phrase usually introduces a change of
positions and a wish that things had been otherwise. “Later” is, of course, opposed to
“earlier,” suggesting a binary view of Cather’s life. Her own comment that “the world
broke in two in 1922 or thereabout” (NUF v) is a binarism that has led scholars to discuss
her novels within a distinct two-phase paradigm. Morton Zabel considers Cather’s
statement both preposterous and conceited: “the space of seventy years is too short in
human history, even in modern history, to permit anyone to claim that he saw the world
break in two during it” (226). Taking a less literal approach, Merrill Skaggs characterizes
Cather as a writer who “formulated her ideas through oppositions” and explains that 1922
“became Cather’s personal symbol for a time of disruption, discontinuity, fragmentation,
and loss” (183–84). While the phase theory is useful for the purposes of literary criticism
(and some excellent work has been done on the differences between early and late Cather
texts), it does not adequately account for the complexities and the ambiguities inherent in
Cather’s individual texts. The phase theory also overlooks the fact that many themes and
methods recur throughout her oeuvre, independent of period.3 Willa Cather was a
perfectionist who never rested on her laurels or claimed to have found ultimate answers,
and so her works tend to defy categories rather than to fall into neat groupings.
Cather’s penchant for revision might well have been related to her equally salient
desire to keep the upper hand in all relations between herself and the world. In both her
work and her personal relations, Cather seemed almost “neurotically controlling and self-
conscious” (Skaggs 187). She cared deeply about the kind of print selected for each of
her novels, and one of the reasons that she wanted Knopf to publish her works was her
dissatisfaction with the drab bindings provided by Houghton Mifflin (E.Lewis 108–112).
Following a disastrous screen rendition of A Lost Lady, Cather denied Hollywood further
right to adapt her works. Wanting to keep her personal life equally under wraps, even
after her death, Cather burned most of her correspondence and forbade verbatim
quotation from any of her remaining letters. In light of this history of care and control, it
is not surprising that possession is a key theme in her novels and stories. While Cather
became more reclusive and less giving of herself in many ways as she aged,4 her texts
move towards a gradual acknowledgment of the ultimate impossibility and undesirability
of complete possession. Certainly Cather had to come to terms with relinquishment—
through marriage (Isabel McClung’s 1916 marriage to Jan Hambourg) and through death
(her father in 1928, her mother in 1931, her brother Douglass and McClung in 1938, her
brother Roscoe in 1944). It is equally viable to read Cather’s evolving attitude toward
possession as an expansion in definitional possibilities.
Like so many terms important in Cather, possession has multiple meanings, including
ownership, domination, self-control, and the psychological state of having one’s
personality replaced by another. These terms encompass a full range of valences, and
Cather manipulates them in sometimes surprising ways. In My Antonia, for example, the
self-possessed businesswoman (in the figure of Lena Lingard, Lincoln dressmaker)
appeals to Jim. Middle-aged Tiny, on the other hand, receives a harsh judgment and an
unflattering portrayal from Jim for many of the same qualities. Along similar lines, Jim
considers it a terrible waste for Antonia to join the rest of her family in deferring to her
older brother (“Antonia often quoted his opinions to me, and she let me see that she
admired him” [82]), but the prospect of losing one’s personal identity and being absorbed
into a larger unit has its place in his universe as well: “that is happiness; to be dissolved
into something complete and great” (14). In the latter case, the narrative voice of a
retrospective Jim, or perhaps even an authorial intrusion, declares the ultimate
desirability of an erasure of personality.
Historically and theoretically, the concept of possession interacts with representations
of ethnicity and gender in complex ways; it also plays an important role in rootedness, a
key concern of (im)migrants. Social scientists, African-American scholars, feminists, and
queer theorists alike have understood that possession has ramifications for identity and
have taken up this question of how to formulate the relationship, participating in an
ongoing debate about whether identity categories such as ethnicity, race, gender and
sexual orientation represent something that a person has or what a person is. Roughly
speaking, the has perspective generally falls along social constructivist lines, while the is
view represents a more essentialist approach. Bottomley argues for the advisability of
adopting a constructivist view of ethnicity as “‘a consciousness of kind,’…constructed
and reconstituted in relation to specific political and economic circumstances” (57).
David Salvaterra agrees that “ethnicity is now understood to be a multifaceted, dynamic
phenomenon. It emerges under certain circumstances and recedes or virtually disappears

under others” (39). And yet when we speak of identity, most of us would concur with
Gleason’s baseline assertion that “identity is what a thing is” (Speaking 124). Novak sees
both the constructivist and the essentialist side of the coin: on the one hand, “each of us is
responsible for creating his or her own identity” (54), but “each person is also influenced
by social factors over which he or she has had no control…. We do not choose (entirely)
how others will regard us or what, even despite our best intentions, they may ascribe to
us” (41). Sollors sees this tension between chosen and imposed identities as crucial to the
American experience. His study “takes the conflict between contractual and hereditary,
self-made and ancestral, definitions of American identity—between consent and
descent—as the central drama in American culture” (Beyond 5–6).
Applying the terms of this debate to specific groups, other scholars have shown how
different American sub-populations have tried to deal with the concept of identity.
Writing of Asian-American experiences, Lisa Lowe calls attention to the potential
fluidity of identity, and she suggests that “rather than considering…[‘ethnic] identity as a
fixed, established ‘given,’ perhaps we can consider instead…[‘ethnic] cultural practices’
that produce identity” (64). Similarly, Appiah, a multi-racial person “who grew up in
both Ghana and Britain and who now lives in the United States” (Nicholson and Seidman
14), argues that “identities are complex and multiple and grow out of a history of
changing responses to economic, political and cultural forces, almost always in
opposition to other identities” (110). In the realm of gender theory, Butler urges us to
think of gender as performative (Gender 25) and to consider how identity might be
prescriptive rather than descriptive (16). Taking the “ultimate unknowability of
sexuality” (xv) as axiomatic, Edelman opposes his work to earlier gay and lesbian
studies, which looked for qualitative “‘homosexual difference’” rather than seeing
variations as relative and fluctuating, depending on context (3). These writers agree in
their desire to suspend essentializing concepts of identity, and yet they all recognize that
the notion of identity is not one that we cannot discard entirely.Thus we see that the
attempt to pinpoint how identity devolves or is attributed has not yielded any conclusive
information. Furthermore the polarization of essentialism and anti-essentialism has
become value laden in a way that might not be useful or even accurate, as Fuss has
pointed out: “in and of itself, essentialism is neither good nor bad, progressive nor
reactionary, beneficial nor dangerous” (xi). For this reason, I would like to displace the
constructivist/essentialist debate by refiguring these categories in terms of possessing
identity (having identity) versus being possessed by identity (being identified). Such a
displacement is particularly useful for examinations of Cather because she herself takes a
both/and approach to almost every binary she encounters or portrays. Rather than coming
down on one side or the other of the constructivist/essentialist debate, Cather puts the
terms in motion and lets them land where they will.
PRECIOUS BUT INCOMMUNICABLE: MY ANTONIA
The motif of possession provides a useful approach to the larger issues of identity in My
Antonia. In this text, the weight of possession or ownership falls with the preface, when
Jim affixes the possessive “my” to the manuscript he has brought. Butler points out that
Lawyer Jim’s act of bringing Antonia’s story in legal cover gives him “the weight of
legitimation” (Bodies 148). Rather than seeing Jim’s “my” as a mark of possession,
however, Harold Bloom contends that “we say ‘my’ precisely where we have lost what
we could never hope to have possessed, so that ‘my’ in such a context is a metaphor or
fiction, a verbal figure substituting for a desired but unlikely possession” (1). Viewing
Jim more in the vein of a Niel Herbert peephole as opposed to the Cather standin Bloom
posits, Susan Rosowski observes that Jim “writes possessively about his Antonia as the
archetypal woman who provides an anchorage for his travels and a muse for his
imagination…. [H]owever, Cather contradicts these assumptions by creating a woman
who works out her individual destiny in defiance of her narrators expectations” (88). In
context, Jim’s addition of “my” to the title of his manuscript has multiple meanings. On
the one hand, Jim’s act could be seen as a patriarchal attempt at ownership; by the same
token, “my” could be an acknowledgment that this version is only one of many possible
ones. Since Mr. Shimerda’s “te-e-ach, te-e-ach my An-tonia” (20) stays with Jim for
years afterwards, he could be honoring the older mans memory by using his term, or he
could be trying to put himself in a paternal relation to Antonia (who is actually four years
his senior). Finally, Jim could be applying “teach my Antonia” not as “give lessons to my
daughter, Antonia,” but rather as “tell other people about the Antonia I know and love.”5
At any rate, the Cather/author figure makes no interpretation, noting only that the
addition “seemed to satisfy” Jim (2).
The text thus paves the way for a hands-off approach to Jim’s material. Indeed, by the
end of the text we hardly recall that the Cather/author figure ever made an appearance.
When the introduction concludes and the novel begins a second time (with the first actual
body chapter), we are taken back to Jim’s boyhood. The first section of My Antonia, “The
Shimerdas,” relates the (im)migration experiences of Jim Burden and his Bohemian
neighbors. Set in the country during Jim’s and Antonia’s childhood, this section could
well have been called “The Wild Land” along with the first book of O Pioneers!. In
Cather’s earlier novel, however, Alexandra Bergson considers the land her benefactress
and retains a sense of herself as custodian of the land rather than landowner. She
“belong[s] to the land” (229) and looks across her productive acres only to affirm that
“the land belongs to the future” (229). Conversely, My Antonia offers talk of “your
country” and “my country,” the “Old Country” and “my old country.” Physical land and
abstract nation alike are staked and claimed, and possession is continually
foregrounded—Lena Lingard’s insistent, “I can’t order [Ole Benson] off. It ain’t my
prairie” (109), not withstanding. The Shimerdas, for example, face real poverty and
difficulties, but they own their land and recognize that working it will bring them what
they want. The entire family participates in the farm work (even the developmentally
disabled brother, Marek), and Antonia and Ambrosch compete over who can break more
sod each day. Although the Burdens are of a higher socio-economic class than their
European neighbors, they also seem to recognize the importance of possessing land.
When Grandfather Burden decides to move the family to Black Hawk, he chooses to
retain ownership of the old homestead, renting it to the Widow Steavens and her brother.
While Rosowski sees the setting of Book I as “a pastoral, Edenic world” in which “nature
ministers to the child” (77, 81), the land requires human attention to have meaning.
Riding out to his grandfather’s farm on that first night, Jim remarks, “there seemed to be
nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or tree, no hills or fields…. There was nothing but
land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made” (7). The
settlers possess the land by making it into a country—planting fields, building roads,
watering trees. By the same process, they become a part of the country they create.
In the second section, the eponymous hired girls play out the sociological transition
from an agricultural system to a money-exchange economy. Antonia, Lena, Tiny, the
three Bohemian Marys, and the Danish laundry girls sell their labor (and sometimes their
love) for the money that will help their parents and their younger siblings to get ahead.
These young women are not mere cogs in a great mechanical wheel because their
individuality is honored, or at least recognized, but they have certainly left behind the
direct and tangible relationship between work and product. The Harling family essentially
embraces Antonia, while Tiny enjoys the social perks of working at the hotel and Lena is
apprenticed to learn a valuable skill. Nevertheless, the mobility provided by town life
(Antonia can leave and find another job when Mr. Harling’s rules become too
constraining) suggests that possession has been modified to mean ownership of one’s
labor alone as opposed to the more concrete ownership of land and farm implements, the
means of production. Antonia has nothing to rely on for sustenance except the services
she can render. She “take[s] her good times when she can” (133), dancing, wearing pretty
clothes, and dating whom she pleases, but Cather seems to suggest that Antonia did better
as “a ward of the Harlings than as one of the ‘hired girls’” (131). As a hired girl, Antonia
becomes “‘the Harlings’ Tony’…[like] ‘the Marshalls’ Anna’ or ‘the Gardeners’ Tiny’”
(131). As much as she possesses freedom, Antonia is also owned. Antonia’s eventual
return to relative poverty as a land-owner suggests that Cather believes advancement
should not necessarily be evaluated in terms of income alone.
The tension between freedom and compromise plays a major role in Book II. While
the first section chronicles Jim’s and Antonia’s experience of the country itself and the
Shimerdas’s fight to tame “The Wild Land,” the second section might analogously be
considered Black Hawk’s attempt to domesticate “The Wild Girls.” The young women
who come to town from their various European enclaves in the country have a “freedom
of movement” (127) and a freedom from inhibition which the town-dwellers find
distasteful and even potentially threatening. While “the daughters of Black Hawk
merchants had a confident, unenquiring belief that they were ‘refined,’ and that the
country girls, who ‘worked out,’ were not” (128), their elders tended to view the hired
girls with less equanimity. As John Murphy points out, the hired girls represent a threat
“to the social order maintained by Pennsylvanians, Virginians, and other established
settlers” (Bloom 50). These young women serve the families they “belong” to, and they
are also seemingly for hire. Cather was aware of this double entendre and refused to
clarify it, perhaps because she found both connotations viable.6 At any rate, the girls’
wildness is in some ways contained by the men who harness or otherwise take advantage
of it. Wick Cutter, for example, demands sexual favors of at least two of the Swedish
girls he employs and then serves as a pimp: “one of them he had taken to Omaha and
established in the business for which he had fitted her. He still visited her” (135). While
they are not treated like prostitutes, the “scandalous” (130) three Bohemian Marys run
into trouble as well, having to “retire from the world for a short time” (130) every so
often, and yet they never lack for a job. They “were considered as dangerous as high
explosives to have about the kitchen, yet they were such good cooks and such admirable
housekeepers that they never had to look for a place” (130). These women have skills and
a vitality which are always in demand. Even the seemingly asexual Jim reacts to the
sexual energy of the hired girls, having a recurrent dream of being possessed by Lena, a
pronounced instance of gender inversion. In this dream, Jim imagines that Lena meets
him in a harvest field and “with a soft sigh…[says], ‘Now they are all gone, and I can
kiss you as much as I like’” (144). Jim kisses Lena and has tried unsuccessfully to kiss
Antonia; he accepts her rebuff good-naturedly. He wishes that Antonia would want to
possess him, but he never has “this flattering dream about Antonia” (144).
Jim’s fantasies about Antonia are seemingly suspended in Book III, in which the other
hired girls are gone and Lena can kiss Jim all she likes. Most notably, Antonia has no
place in Jim’s college life in Lincoln, and it is Lena Lingard who gives the section its
name. Further, the transition from town to city represents a yet another remove from the
secure sense of place that marked Jim’s childhood days in “nature’s womb” (Rosowski
77). Cather’s caricature of boarding house life shows the discomfort and lack of privacy
inherent in such situations. Jim’s rooms are small, cold, and “inconveniently situated for
students” (166), while Lena is continuously interrupted by her landlord and her neighbor
offering their assistance. As three men (Jim, the college student; Ordinsky, the Polish
violin teacher; and Colonel Raleigh, Lena’s transported Southern landlord) vie for the
right to offer paternal and chivalric protection to Lena, it becomes increasingly clear that
this independent businesswoman is the most self-possessed of the group. In spite of her
mock courtship with Jim, Lena already knows that she will not marry. She expresses
surprise at Jim’s naiveté, exclaiming, “Why, I’m not going to marry anybody. Didn’t you
know that?” (186). Jim’s platitudes about future loneliness do not swerve Lena’s
steadfastness: “You can’t tell me anything about family life. I’ve had plenty to last me….
It’s all being under somebody’s thumb” (187). Lena does eventually form some
semblance of a family life, but it is one based on independence and equality. When Lena
agrees to move to San Francisco with Tiny Soderball, she does so as a self-sufficient
professional. For his part, Jim’s heart belongs to Virgil and his representative on earth,
Gaston Cleric. When Cleric and Harvard beckon, Jim gives up his flirtation for academic
immersion. Jim’s years at Harvard are not eventful in retrospect, and he leaves them out
of his narrative entirely. Jim picks up his story again two years later, when he returns to
Black Hawk for the summer vacation before law school and learns what Antonia has
been doing. At this point, the novel takes a step back to tell “The Pioneer Woman’s
Story,” Book IV. Antonia’s story is narrated even less directly than Jim’s reminiscences
in the first two books, as it is the Widow Steavens who tells the story of Antonia’s
seduction and abandonment. Antonia has learned the hard way that she cannot hold a
dishonest man simply by being a good housekeeper. After giving birth to Larry
Donovan’s child, she nearly loses her maternal rights as well as her fiancé, but for the
Widow Steavens’s timely intercession with Ambrosch, who wanted “‘it put out in the
rain-barrel’” (204). Importantly, “poor” (201) Antonia refuses to become the lost lady
that Jim and the Widow Steavens try to construct her as.7 It is true enough that Antonia is
meek with the townspeople, who therefore extend pity in place of condemnation: “folks
respected her industry and tried to treat her as if nothing had happened…. She was so
crushed and quiet that nobody seemed to want to humble her” (202). But although she is
disappointed and ashamed, Antonia needs neither sympathy nor hand-outs. She continues
with her masculine farm work, wearing “a man’s long overcoat and boots, and a man’s
felt hat with a wide brim” (203) and herding cattle right up until the time she gives birth.
Antonia has returned to her family in shame and presumably to become “Ambrosch’s
drudge” (191), yet she does not become the proverbial doormat. She treasures her child
and indulges in all of the rites of pride of first-time motherhood, as the Widow Steavens
tells Jim: “she loved [her baby] from the first as dearly as if she’d had a ring on her
finger, and was never ashamed of it… no baby was ever better cared-for” (204). As long
as the farm remains in the family, Antonia will not be rootless or without a place, and it is
the country that gives Antonia a sense of herself: “I’d always be miserable in a city. I’d
die of lonesomeness. I like to be where I know every stack and tree, and where all the
ground is friendly” (206).
In Book V, Jim returns to the Shimerda farm twenty years later to find a“battered but
not diminished” Antonia (214). Once again, issues of ownership play a prominent role in
Jim’s conceptualization of his childhood friend. Mrs. Cuzak (significantly not Jim’s
Antonia) lives what Tiny considers a miserable life but one that Lena concedes suits her.
At any rate, Antonia’s current lifestyle is far removed from Jim’s experience,
cosmopolitan though it has been. And yet as Mrs. Cuzak, Antonia has the legal
legitimation that arguably places her on the same plane as Lawyer Jim. Although she
lives in relative poverty, we see her as immeasurably richer than Jim, who has pursued a
remunerative career and married an heiress. Surrounded by her children and her
productive fields—”big and little, tow heads and gold heads and brown, and flashing
little naked legs; a veritable explosion of life” (218)—Antonia has clearly “dissolved into
something complete and great” (14). Jim, on the other hand, has only his memories and
his plans, a past and a future vitiated by the complete absence of a viable present.
Perhaps part of Jim’s failure derives from the fact that by the end of the novel he has
no place he can call home. Whereas Antonia and her husband own their homestead, a
crucial aspect of the American Dream, Jim lives in a rented apartment in New York City.
Arguably he has nothing to hold onto except the past as epitomized by his (version of)
Antonia. Further, Jim spends most of his time traveling back and forth across the country.
Although he travels on important and respectable business, the frequency of his trips
suggests not progress but circularity. While circularity can create the beautiful closure of
seeing Antonia again, “the sense of coming home to [oneself], and of having found out
what a little circle man’s experience is” (238), it also suggests the kind of meaningless
motion of the “successful” Sister Carrie in her rocking chair.8 Through repetition, Jim’s
later trips become almost a parody of his first momentous train journey across the
country. Whereas on that first trip he and Jake were innocents abroad, “becoming more
sticky and grimy with each stage of the journey…[, buying] everything the newsboys
offered” (5), the mature Jim has become a jaded cosmopolitan. Sitting in the isolated
comfort of his own stateroom, Jim tries to “amuse” (2) himself by remembering his
childhood with Antonia. It is important that Jim maintains his sense of identification with
the west, “lov[ing] with a personal passion the great country through which his railway
runs and branches” (2), but his capacity for rootedness is limited by changes (he
recognizes no one in Black Hawk) and fear (he avoids Antonia for years to shield himself
from the sight of diminishment). Still, in spite of having experienced “disappointments,”
he retains the “romantic disposition” (2) that characterized him as a child and seems to us
to have remained a Nebraska boy at heart. In any case, Jim clings to his identity as a
country boy and as Antonia’s friend. The final image Jim offers in his narrative is one of
possession, a shared stake in “the precious, the incommunicable past” (238).
This ending is curious in part because Cather denies her novel a symmetrical frame.
Instead of calling attention to the fact that this is Jim’s memoir by having a return to the
“author” and Jim in New York, Cather leaves Jim’s words as the novel’s final ones. His
words raise questions about the ramifications of telling a story that ultimately derives its
force from the incommunicable. Is My Antonia, like Toni Morrison’s Beloved, “not a
story to pass on” (Morrison 274)? If it is not meant to be passed on, why tell it? If it is
meant to be passed on, to whom? Jim has no children and Antonia’s children live the
story—they do not need to read about it. The “author” of the introduction accepts Jim’s
manuscript with interest but has her own memories; her conspio uous absence from the
ending suggests that the story was not told for her benefit either. Further, the last line,
“whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past”
(238), does not pose the expected binary pair: it should read, “whatever we had lost, we
possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.” Cather chooses every word
with care, particularly the words which comprise her beginnings and endings, and so the
diction here—”whatever we had missed”—demands interrogation. “Missed” could be
interpreted in the sense of “missed out on” together, and yet there is no feeling that the
many things that Antonia and Jim were not (siblings, sweethearts, parent and child, etc.)
were ever really attainable. Here Bloom’s contention that the “my” in the preface is not
really about actual possession could be useful. Indeed I might extrapolate from his
analysis by proposing that we say missed “where we have lost what we could never hope
to have possessed” (Bloom 1). In this light, Cather’s ending would seem to suggest that
the winning vs. losing (or having/possessing vs. losing/relinquishing) paradigm is not the
appropriate one here. Given that Cather’s writing seems to indicate that complete
possession is neither possible nor desirable, this unexpected pairing successfully
displaces the win/lose (or have/lose) binarism to affirm the impossibility of resolving the
ownership issue. So we see that the framework of possession, while related intricately to
identity, does not produce an uncomplicated reading of My Antonia. The subject matter
and form of My Antonia also raise several important questions about the relationship
between Cather’s sense of herself and the characters she portrays, many of which have
already been addressed by critics (Rosowski 76). First of all, why is Cather, who comes
from old Virginian stock, writing about European immigrants? Pers offers several
hypotheses: those were her childhood friends, and she is merely writing out of her own
experience; Cather wanted to be a European so she writes about them as the next best
thing; Cather is really writing about herself as a migrant (or a lesbian) and using
European immigrants as a mask (29). Given that Cather is going to write a story in which
European immigrants play a central role, why does Cather introduce Jim? (Why the
preface? Why the 1926 revisions of the preface? Why is Jim male? Is this Jim’s story,
Antonia’s story, or Jim’s story about Antonia?) Finally, what does Cather want us to take
from the story? Is this a circular exercise in nostalgia or does it have some transcendent
and lasting meaning? Any attempt to answer this array of questions must accept what
seem to be contradictions in Cather’s work. Sharon O’Brien’s observation that “at times
Jim is Cather’s mask and spokesman, whereas at others she is ironically detached from
him” (Bloom 53) hints that Cather will not allow any character who shares so many
biographical details with her own younger self to be a simple or straightforward one.
Along similar lines, Cather’s espoused goal in writing the novel was to present a single
object from multiple views (Sergeant 13), a strategy that recurs in later works. Thus from
the beginning, Cather intended to utilize a unitary subject that is fragmented into a
multiplicity of faces or aspects. Images of doubleness permeate the text, but instead of
reinforcing a world that is completely black and white, they paradoxically facilitate the
representation of gradations, loosening up the categories the text ostensibly poses.Gender
roles, for example, are continually inverted and blended, as Helvie has observed:
“Antonia’s identity, like Cather’s, is not explainable in terms of our traditional categories
of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine,’ ‘male’ and ‘female’; our binary categories begin to
collapse” (36). Antonia has manly aspects, while Jim has effeminate ones, but other
characters also participate in this gender-crossing. Russian Peter, for instance, keeps a
house that is unusually “comfortable for two men who were ‘batching’” (25). When
Antonia and Jim first come to visit, Peter takes a break from doing laundry to show them
his cow, of which he “was very fond” (25). Peter particularly likes having the cow
because the milk is good for Pavel, “his companion” (24).9 While Peter and Pavel are
described in terms that might well refer to a gay couple, Otto Fuchs displays a different
form of gender complexity or deviance. “[O]ne of those drifting, case-hardened labourers
who never marry or have children of their own,” Otto invariably treats Jim with
gentleness. “[H]e was so fond of children!” (55), Jim observes. Along with nurturing
men, the novel presents independent women like Frances Harling who would talk with
her father “about graincars and cattle, like two men” (97); Tiny Soderball similarly
becomes a shrewd manager in the economic world.Cather herself showed enough
androgynous traits for critics to surmise that she puts parts of herself into both Jim and
Antonia. Patrick Shaw, for example, argues that “in the Jim-Antonia juxtaposition we see
the twin selves that were suppressed within Cather” (“MA: Emergence” 127), while Clara
Cooper adds to the picture by identifying Jim and Antonia as “a woman-in-man narrator”
and a “man-in-woman heroine” (32), respectively. Taken as two parts of Willa Cather—
or at least as two parts of a larger unit—Antonia and Jim also fulfill the roles of both
types of storytellers delineated by Benjamin, namely the man “who has come from afar…
[and] the man who has stayed at home, making an honest living, and who knows the local
tales and traditions” (84). Evelyn Hively makes a similar observation, but without
relating it to Benjamin, as she notes, “the woman remains rooted in her country, while the
man travels; the woman is content with things of the earth, while the man seeks
intellectual activity; the woman finds spiritual fulfillment, while the man fails spiritually”
(73). In her binary conceptualization, however, Hively neglects to take into account that
Antonia too has “come from afar.” She knows both the local Nebraskan tales and the
local Bohemian tales, and she maintains traditions from both places. Antonia keeps one
foot in the Old World, remembering it in all its details and keeping these memories alive
for the next generation; her children will not even learn English until they go to school,
and she will come to forget much of what Jim taught her. For his part, Jim has remained
connected to his Nebraskan home—his heart “remains rooted in [his] country,” and he
tries to sustain his connection to “things of the earth” by planning a hunting trip with
Antonia’s older boys. Even in middle age, Jim is romantic and idealistic, and he seems
successful in convincing himself, at least, that “the precious, the incommunicable past”
(238) serves as a well from which he can draw spiritual strength.
Cather’s use of Jim and Antonia as essentially co-protagonists signals a broader
attempt on her part to move beyond the classic realist novel. Another formal strategy that
Cather employs towards this end is the use of an un-story, what she herself called “the
other side of the rug” (IP 77), punctuated with numerous side-stories. “Un-story” is not
meant to suggest encoding (subtext) or subversion (anti-story), but rather a departure
from expectations about what a novel should include. Mildred Bennett explains some
anomalies in Cather’s style by noting that “her method of writing was to suspend the
immediate thread of a narrative and insert a colorful, if unrelated, tale of the past. Critics
have said that she used this device to give her stories depth, but it is more likely that she
wrote her material in the way in which she had acquired it [i.e. through oral storytelling]”
(109). Certainly for Cather the stories heard in rural Nebraskan kitchens “tease[d] the
mind over and over again for years,” but they underwent conscious and meticulous
transformations before they got “put down rightly on paper” in Cather’s mature work
(NUF 76). Therefore I would contend that Cather is trying to replicate neither the oral
tales passed down to her nor the traditional realistic novel. Rather she is using narrative to
accomplish something qualitatively different. Indeed, Brown states that Cather “always
showed impatience at the complaint that My Antonia is not precisely a novel. Why should
it be?” (Critical Biography 199). If we want to accept Cather’s defensive stance that My
Antonia was not intended to be a novel, we might classify it as a story. This is certainly
what Brown seems to be suggesting when he continues: “in this book she was gathering
her memories of some persons and places very dear to her, and as she was a writer of
stories, the memories had taken a narrative form” (Critical Biography 199). Brown uses
the term “story” loosely to denote narrative, but Benjamin offers a more specific
definition and one which can usefully be applied to Cather’s techniques and goals in My
Antonia. Hannah Arendt suggests that in Benjamins conceptualization, “insofar as the
past has been transmitted as tradition, it possesses authority; insofar as authority presents
itself historically, it becomes tradition” (38). Memory, a key motif in My Antonia, is also
central to identity. Jim faithfully records everything that Antonia’s name recalls to him,
and Antonia passes on the tales of their childish exploits to her own children. If Jim’s
narrative and Cather’s novel share some characteristics with the traditional story (as
Benjamin conceptualizes it), they are a far cry from the realistic novels many of Cather’s
contemporaries were writing. By dispensing with some of the conventions of realism
(such as linear organization, meticulous recitation of detail, and a story with a well-
developed plot), Cather signals that her goal is not mimesis. Rather, Cather and Jim
repeatedly excuse My Antonia for its lack of story-ness, reminding us that it has not been
organized properly and that nothing much really happens, in order to direct our attention
beyond the paradigm of the classic realist novel.
Cather’s decision to show “the pattern that is supposed not to count in a story” (IP 77)
links her to other modernists who employed palimpsest, including H.D., Gertrude Stein,
and Nella Larsen. As Shari Benstock explains, “the palimpsest simultaneously documents
and destroys its own history, preserving earlier forms in the remnants of imperfectly
erased portions of its continuous text while ‘writing over’—rewriting—the earlier
record…. Indeed, a palimpsest possesses no single, identifiable source but rather raises
various, often conflicting—images that present themselves as origins of the meanings the
text provides” (350).10 In My Antonia “there is no love affair, no courtship, no marriage,
no broken heart, no struggle for success” (IP 77). Rather, Cather presents us with “a
series of dramatic or elegiac episodes” (Grumbach xxiv), which lend themselves to
multiple interpretations. Further, Benstock’s observations on women’s uses of the
palimpsest suggest that the emphasis of recent Cather scholarship on coding may be
misplaced: “the creation of a palimpsest that would counter predominant male myths is
not produced by ‘encod[ing] revisions of male myths’ [Gubar 197]. Rather the palimpsest
exposes through the layers of its compositions the feminine countersign of the male myth
already present in the culture” (350). In this light we can argue that the other side of the
rug is not necessarily a code; we do not need to see Jim as merely as mask for a lesbian
author or as a peephole through which to show another character.11 In writing My
Antonia, Cather certainly uses male forms like the epic and the pastoral, but she adapts
and appropriates these forms to tell stories which would not have been considered
suitable subjects for these classical forms by their earlier practitioners.
Another important appropriation Cather performs is a re-writing of the ethnic novel.
Although Cather, like Jim, carries the legitimating force of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant
upbringing, we might remember that WASP is an ethnicity (Sollors, Beyond 25), as is,
Cather might argue “southern.” (This possibility will be explored further in the section
about “Old Mrs. Harris.”) Indeed, Betty Ann Burch includes My Antonia in her study of
women’s ethnic novels, although she notes that Cather’s text is an anomaly. While most
immigrant literature is told by the ethnic writer through the immigrant’s viewpoint, My
Antonia “portrays the vitality of Antonia through the eyes of Jim, a boy of colonial
Virginian ancestry” (60). Regardless of his place of origin, Jim has many of the
characteristics of the typical ethnic hero, who “carries the burden of identity: what does it
mean to be an American? Am I an American? Where do I fit in American society?”
(Burch 56). Jim’s closest friends and associates are immigrants and he is himself a
migrant from an “old country” (54) to a “new world” (5).12 Thomas Ferraro also offers a
definition of ethnic group that would include Jim Burden, arguing that such “include[s]
not only socially marginal peoples but any group that uses symbols of common descent
and tradition to create or maintain power” (21). In this light, Jim’s legal-bound
manuscript, his “incommunicable past,” can be read as a manipulation of common
experience for power. Gleason finds further substantiation for the immigrant/migrant
comparison in the work of early twentieth century anthropologists: “For Mead and Gorer,
then, the ‘ethnic’—that is, the immigrant or person of immigrant derivation—is a
prototypically American figure, not because of any distinctiveness of cultural heritage but
for exactly the opposite reason, namely, because he or she exhibits in extreme degree the
‘character structure’ produced by the American experience of change, mobility, and loss
of contact with the past” (Speaking 169). Surely the Shimerdas cannot feel any further
from civilization than Jim does on that first wagon ride out to their respective
homesteads. And yet Jim has the legitimating forces of white, male, middle-class
respectability behind him. Although Burch sees Jim’s portrayal of his European
neighbors as basically sympathetic, it is worth noting that on multiple occasions, both
implicitly and explicitly, Jim asks the quintessential question of native-born Americans:
“‘why can’t they be more like us?’” (Burch 61). The novel begins before the turn of the
century, but Cather writes it from the context of the World War I backlash, during which
time “the goal of the education of immigrants was not to teach them about America but to
teach them to behave as Americans” (Dearborn 85). Jim even loses patience with Mr.
Shimerda, for whom he usually has only respect bordering on reverence. When Antonia
tells Jim of her father’s unhappiness, he lashes out, “‘People who don’t like this country
ought to stay at home…. We don’t make them come here’” (59). Jim, like his creator,
vacillates between an acceptance of diversity and a more reactionary nativism.
A social conservative, Cather is sometimes considered an anti-modern writer who uses

simple (even simplistic) vocabulary and techniques, when compared to her avant-garde
contemporaries.13 Modern physics, however, appears to have freed up space for Cather’s
use of time in non-linear ways (Shaw, “MA: Emergence” 130). This attitude towards time
also marks My Antonia as less novelistic. As Benjamin explains, “according to Lukacs [in
Theory of the Novel], the novel is…the only art form which includes time among its
constitutive principles…. [O]ne can almost say that the whole inner action of a novel is
nothing else but a struggle against the power of time” (99). Cather’s text neither tries to
mimic the deployment of time found in realistic novels nor shares modernism’s attempt
to capture each fleeting moment as it happens. Cather acknowledges the past as well as
the present, but the past never exerts a controlling influence on the present. Thus,
although Cather avoided stream of consciousness and the avant-garde search for a
continuous present which so occupied Stein, she did not accept the “sins of the fathers”
view of the past’s influence on the present as espoused by contemporaries like Porter and
Fitzgerald: “she could not readily conceive of the ‘me’ of the present forever fleeing
some ‘me’ of the past down an inescapable tract of time” (Shaw, “MA: Emergence” 130).
Time is both less important and more fluid in Cather’s work than in that of many of her
literary peers. Cather might not have agreed with William Faulkner’s insistence that “the
past is never dead; it’s not even past” (Requiem 80), but she certainly saw her characters
as shaped by their heritage. Heritage, moreover, is sometimes conveyed by names.
Although “symbolic or meaning-full names” (Skaggs 14) are a trademark in Cather, few
critics have explored the ramifications of names in My Antonia. The Burdens, for
example, call up images of the white man’s burden, consistent with the family’s
caretaking of and sometimes condescending attitude towards their Bohemian neighbors.
White/black relations play a submerged, but significant role in the text, as well.
Grotesque and racist though the caricature of Blind D’Arnault might seem, the mulatto
pianist is depicted as typically American, at least according to Munsterberg’s criterion:
“the American is supposed to be quite destitute of any sense for form or measure, and to
be in every way inartistic; and if any true poet were to be granted to the New World, he
would be expected to be noisy like Niagara” (458). Further, Ammons suggests that Blind
D’Arnault shares his status as non-western/nonwhite artist figure with Mr. Shimerda
(132). Although the seemingly tangential episode of Blind D’Arnault constitutes the only
appearance of African-Americans in the text, race is present from its earliest pages. Some
of the dynamics between “native” Black Hawk citizens and their immigrant neighbors do
in fact parallel certain aspects of traditional representations of black/white relations.
Young women such as Antonia, Lena, Tiny and the three Marys hire themselves out as
domestic servants, something that the girls in even the poorest white families will not
consider. If Black Hawk boys marry not Black Hawk girls but hired girls, the danger of
mongrelization becomes immediately present.14 Judith Fetterley picks up racial overtones
in Cather’s satirical portrait of town life as well: “the anemia, paralysis and unlived lives
of the ‘white,’ middle-class town girls must also be laid in part at the door of a sexuality
which requires ‘purity’ in wives and mothers and vents its lust on the bodies of servants”
(138). The would-be rape of Antonia by the nefarious Wick Cutter also suggests the
sexual violence imposed on female slaves by the men who owned them, while the
offspring of hired girls and their American employers (in the case of the Bohemian
Marys) or boyfriends (in the case of Larry Donovan and Antonia) constitute the
beginnings of an indigenous mulatto population.
Cather’s characterizations immediately force us to see beyond black and white,
however, as Otto Fuchs states early in the novel that “Bohemians has a natural distrust of
Austrians…. [I]t’s politics. It would take me a long while to explain” (16). While
mainstream Black Hawk applies the totalizing term “foreigner” to anyone from another
country, Cather repeatedly underscores racial/national difference among the various
European immigrant groups. It is amusing to read Cather in light of Professor William
Graham Sumner’s comment about the impossibility of nationhood in America: “Sumner
used to tell his students at Yale that the United States had no claim to the name of nation
because of the presence of so large a negro population, the implication being that
between the white and colored races there exist such lively recognitions of dissimilarity
that they can never establish the degree of common feeling necessary to true nationality”
(Fairchild 54). Cather would seem to be saying that if people from two central European
countries have grudges against each other, then it is not the white/black division alone
that will stand in the way of nationhood for the United States—Austrians and Bohemians
(among others) will not be melted in the same pot. Yet all the Black Hawk citizens can
see is foreigners, or maybe Europeans. Jim explains the town’s view that “all foreigners
were ignorant people who couldn’t speak English,” clarifying that “There was not a man
in Black Hawk who had the intelligence or cultivation, much less the personal distinction,
of Antonia’s father. Yet people saw no difference between her and the three Marys; they
were all Bohemians, all ‘hired girls’” (129). At least one critic makes the same mistake as
the townspeople: writing in a 1924 collection on contemporary authors, Percy H.
Boynton identifies Antonia as “a Bohemian immigrant child of less than mediocre
parentage” (7).
The Burdens get to see the enduring strength of Old World national prejudices
firsthand when the problem of burying Mr. Shimerda’s body arises. Upon learning that
“the Norwegian graveyard could not extend its hospitality to Mr. Shimerda,”
Grandmother Burden indignantly replies, “‘If these foreigners are so clannish…we’ll
have to have an American graveyard that will be more liberal-minded’” (73). The irony,
of course, is that the nativists with backgrounds like the Burdens are the most clannish.
Grandmother Burden tries to emphasize the similarities between herself and her “foreign”
neighbors, but through an elision of differences which Cather herself does not seem to
support. Time and again Grandmother Burden compares her own experience to the
Shimerdas,’ as if to say “I worked my way up and you can too, if you’ll be diligent” (or
plucky, lucky, and hard-working). Further, she pushes everything painful or difficult
from her mind. Visiting the Shimerdas during their first starving winter, Grandmother
Burden responds to Mrs. Shimerda’s scornful laugh and vindictive looks by “talking in
her polite Virginia way, not admitting their stark need or her own remissness” (49). Her
interactions with her foreign neighbors, to whom “she always spoke in a very loud
tone…as if they were deaf” (17) sometimes takes the form of translation, as she “mirrors”
back a completely different message from the one she has received. Thus when Mrs.
Shimerda informs the Burdens, “house no good, house no good!” Grandmother replies,
“you’ll get fixed up comfortable after while, Mrs. Shimerda; make good house” (17).
Linda Wagner-Martin notices the same tendency in Jim, who “has never worked that
countryside” and tells “happyending placebos” (Bloom 62); Rosowski concurs that
“Jim’s allegiance is consistently to ideas; when they conflict with reality, he denies the
reality” (89).
Cather is not Jim, however, and while she creates characters who represent a range of
social and political positions, she does not validate any single view. Along these lines, it
is also interesting to note that the tramp who commits suicide by jumping into the
threshing machine leaves a nativist eulogy for America as his last words: “‘My
God!…[S]o it’s Norwegians now, is it? I thought this was Americy’” (114). Cather could
not state any more definitively that this version of “Americy” has met its end. If we view
the tramp as symbolic—and there is no reason to insist that this inset is a meaningless
tangent in such a deeply symbolic novel—he represents the “race suicide” theory of
American identity. Foreign vs. native-born, assimilationist vs. nativist, clannishness vs.
liberalism—none of these binarisms withstands Cather’s scrutiny. In this way, she
provides an insider/outsider paradigm that is consciously refigured and blended to the
point where any dichotomy is impossible to sustain. Thus we can argue the doubleness
that pervades Cather—and this novel in particular—is not binaristic. Or, more accurately,
Cather transforms binary categories by refusing to endorse one totalizing category over
its mutually exclusive counterpart. The sun and the moon face each other, and, at least for
a moment, neither gives way: “for five, perhaps ten minutes, the two luminaries
confronted each other across the level land, resting on opposite edges of the world” (206).
Cather endorsed neither nativism nor melting pot ideology (Pers 40; Lee, “Bridge”
40), and yet she was very much aware of the preoccupations and controversies of her
time. Fuchs identifies 1880–1920 (roughly the period between Cather’s coming to
Nebraska and her writing My Antonia) as a time in which “concerns about class, culture,
and race” (56–7) were everywhere manifest. Throughout these years, the
Americanization of immigrants was a major concern. One index of Americanization
which Cather highlights in her novel is language.15 For example, Jim’s relationship with
the Shimerdas is at first predicated on his ability to speak English and his willingness to
transmit this knowledge to Antonia (and later to Yulka). In acting as a teacher of
language, Jim occupies a powerful position, as Arendt explains, “for Benjamin to quote is
to name, and naming rather than speaking, the word rather than the sentence, brings truth
to light…. Benjamin regarded truth as an exclusively acoustical phenomenon: ‘Not Plato
but Adam,’ who gave things their names, was to him the ‘father of philosophy’” (49). Jim
truly is Adam, the name-giver, as he teaches Antonia the keys to the world around her:
“blue sky, blue eyes” (19). The need to learn the language is essential on a practical level
(e.g., to prevent opportunist like Kraijiek from profiting from one’s ignorance), but it is
also important symbolically. Anderson argues that language creates and enables the
solidarity of a nation (154, 145), while Cather’s contemporary, Commons, similarly
contends that a single dominant language is a prerequisite for true nationhood (20),
anticipating Anderson’s “imagined communities” thesis by seventy years. When the
Shimerdas first arrive, only Antonia can speak any English at all, as the train conductor
informs Jim: “‘They can’t any of them speak English, except one little girl, and all she
can say is “We go Black Hawk, Nebraska”‘” (6). Antonia’s father wishes her to learn
English, illustrating what Mary Dearborn has observed throughout ethnic novels, namely
that education is the path to Americanization and success for the ethnic heroine (80). We
immediately see that she is an intelligent, motivated pupil and yet her skills never
progress very far. While Tiny and Lena eventually come to travel widely, speak with the
local idiom, and become polished American citizens, Antonia raises children who do not
even learn English until they go to school, and she forgets almost all of what she learned.
As a young woman, Antonia claims that she has become too busy to continue with her
lessons, as she explains: “‘I ain’t got time to learn. I can work like mans now…. School is
all right for little boys. I help make this land one good farm’” (80). However, she
immediately asks Jim to “tell [her] all the nice things [he] learn[s] at the school” (80).
Functional fluency is a necessity, but learning for its own sake is a luxury.
While Jim’s family can afford for him to spend his days in school, Antonia’s requires
her assistance. The rubric of the family acts as a crucial framing device in all of Cather’s
novels, and particularly in My Antonia. The Shimerdas arrive not only in a family group
(in contrast to immigrant groups in which the man usually preceded the women and
children) but as a Family of Man: a suicide (Mr. Shimerda), a complaining old woman
(Mrs. Shimerda), a shrewd and ruthless older brother (Ambrosch), an attractive and
sexually charged sister (Antonia), and a “crazy boy” (51, 67).16 They arrive as a unit and
their Americanization (or lack thereof) will take place as a unit. As Priscilla Wald
explains, during the time period that saw the arrival of large numbers of European
immigrants, “assimilation efforts used the traditional American family as both metaphor
and medium to Americanize immigrants” (246). In Cather’s own experience of
migration, an enterprising father dragged a reluctant mother and heartbroken children
(along with a resigned grandmother) from Virginia to Nebraska, but in Cather’s novel
Mrs. Shimerda provides the impetus for her family’s relocation. Mr. Shimerda will not
Americanize—he does not want to be an American, and, as Fairchild insisted, the
immigrant “must devoutly wish to be Americanized” (222) for the process to take place.
Grandmother Burden observes to Mrs. Harling that “things would have been very
different with poor Antonia if her father had lived” (100), but the nature of that difference
is never explored. If Mr. Shimerda had lived, Antonia would have kept her nice ways,
and then what? She would not have been Jim’s Antonia. In order for this ethnic heroine
to move forward, she has to lose her only real parent, “find[ing] herself alone” (Dearborn
76). Antonia must separate from her Old World biological father in order to adopt the
American Founding Fathers as her own (Dearborn 89).While the suicide of Mr. Shimerda
has a prominent place in the text, the death of both of Jim’s parents predates the first
chapter and receives only a passing reference. Jim expresses no homesickness, no sadness
for his loss. It is interesting to note that the recent movie version of My Antonia adds a
scene in which Jim attends his parents’ burial.17 Apparently the screenwriters found this
omission odd, as well. The second sentence of Cather’s text’s second beginning
introduces Jim as an orphan, a key figure in both the bildungsroman—especially the
female bildungsroman—and in the novel of the American dream. Not only has Jim lost
his parents, but, and perhaps equally devastating in Cather, he has lost his place. For
reasons the text never explains, Jim’s “Virginia relatives were sending [him]…to [his]
grandparents, who lived in Nebraska” (5). Thus we see Jim as bereft of his heritage and,
presumably, his inheritance. In both the preface and the text’s end, we are reminded that
Jim has no family. His wife is a relative in name only: “she has her own fortune and lives
her own life. For some reason she wishes to remain Mrs. James Burden” (2). Jim has no
children, and, if the “author” is any indication, few close friends whom he sees regularly.
At the end of the novel, Antonia has seemingly left the Founding Fathers behind to
marry a fellow countryman, Anton Cuzak. Cuzak is not unlike Mr. Shimerda, a
“philosopher” (229) and “a city man” (235), not cut out for a farmer’s life. But whereas
Mrs. Shimerda drives her husband to an early grave, Antonia offers her husband support,
freedom, and companionship. As much as Jim would like to become part of this family
unit, his plans to play “Uncle Jim” to Cuzak’s boys ring hollow; we don’t believe that the
hunting trip will ever come to pass. Further, Jim’s slightly condescending intention “to
tramp along a few miles of lighted streets with Cuzak” (237) seems equally far-fetched.
Why should Cuzak want to go tramping with Jim? This imagined family is an add-on, not
something organic, and therefore it remains shallow and implausible. Here again we see
possibilities for reading Jim as a gay man or a lesbian. Like Otto Fuchs and Roddy Blake,
Jim deserves boys of his own. His section heading completely elides Antonia’s girls in
favor of Cuzak’s boys, and the result is that his “plans seem curiously empty, irrelevant
to the center of life represented by the female world of Antonia” (Rosowski 91).
We also find out by the end of the book that, unlike Jim, Lena and Tiny have
successfully formed a family unit of a sort: “Tiny lives in a house of her own, and Lena’s
shop is an apartment house just around the corner…. Tiny audits Lena’s accounts
occasionally, and invests her money for her; and Lena, apparently, takes care that Tiny
doesn’t grow too miserly” (212). The women are comfortable with their differences and
have a joking, but respectful manner with each other. I will not insist that Tiny and Lena
constitute a lesbian couple, since Cather portrays Lena as radiating heterosexual energy
and Tiny as increasingly asexual.18 The qualities of the relationship, however, certainly
suggest the mutuality and liberating aspects of some lesbian partnerships. It is also worth
noting a remarkable similarity between the description of Jim’s wife offered by the
“author” and the characterization Jim provides of middleaged Tiny Soderball. The
“author” does not care for Mrs. Burden: “she is handsome, energetic, executive, but to me
she seems unimpressionable and temperamentally incapable of enthusiasm” (1). When
Jim runs into Tiny in Salt Lake City in 1908, he observes that “she was a thin, hard-faced
woman, very well-dressed, very reserved in manner…. She was like someone in whom
the faculty of becoming interested is worn out” (194). His description is neither
sympathetic with Tiny’s basic loneliness nor admiring of her accomplishments. It would
seem that Jim is hurt or puzzled by a woman who is not matronly, expressive, and easily
impressed. Or perhaps he faults Tiny for not Americanizing by becoming part of a
normative heterosexual family. For Jim, married life is unpleasant and relatively
unimportant—nothing to dwell upon. Antonia eventually creates a good marriage, but
only after she falls and then accepts the necessary compromises. Whatever the nature of
their arrangements, Lena and Tiny clearly participate in a feminine friendship that is not
condemned as unnatural.19
Bound up with discussions of attitudes towards immigrants and ethnicity is the larger
notion of difference. Critics have discussed ethnicity and gender at length, but the
difference Marek brings into the text has been largely overlooked.20 Marek provides an
overt example of abnormality, a motif that recurs more subtly across the novel. On a
physical level, Marek stands out because of his fingers, “which were webbed to the first
knuckle, like a duck’s foot” (18), and because of his resistance to the cold and to other
hardships: “he’s terrible strong and can stand anything” (47). Marek is an object of pity
(“poor Marek!” [67, 202]) and potentially one of fear (“he won’t hurt nobody” [18]). He
makes animal noises, “crow[ing]…like a rooster” (18), “bark[ing] like a dog [and]
whinny[ing] like a horse” (51), and he embarrasses his family. Mrs. Shimerda rushes to
assure her new neighbors that Marek “was born like that,” immediately adding, “the
others are smart” (18). Marek’s difference is something to be explained away and pushed
to the side.
Without reading too deeply into his characterization, it is easy to dismiss Marek as a
minor player, the token idiot in a Family of Man. We learn a few things about him during
the course of the first book, none of which is partio ularly incriminating: “he was always
coveting distinction” (67); “Marek was always trying to be agreeable” (51); and “he
could never…[learn] to cultivate corn…[because] he always bore down on the handles of
the cultivator and drove the blades so deep into the earth that the horses were soon
exhausted” (85). Throughout Books II and III, we hear nothing of Marek, until in the
course of telling Antonia’s story, the Widow Steavens mentions off-hand to Jim that
“Poor Marek had got violent and been sent away to an institution a good while back”
(202). This is particularly surprising because we see no prior indication of Marek’s
aggressive tendencies. According to Shaw, Marek’s attributes suggest a geneti1c disorder
called syndactyly, and people with this condition rarely behave violently (“Marek” 30–
31).21 His unexpected fate, which Cather bothers to make known to us, suggests that it
would be a mistake to consider him merely a token idiot, and yet the text leaves a
disturbing explanatory gap regarding his sudden turn to violence and his family’s
subsequent disposal of him. Cather does not tell us of Yulka’s future and it would have
been just as easy for her to omit Marek’s as well, but instead she teases us with enough
information to make us curious but provides no further insights.22
In trying to untangle this half-told tale, I would like to start by pointing out that Marek
is unnatural, not-quite-human, as perhaps is everyone who does not conform to societal
standards. He defies categories—part human, part animal. His brute strength, resistance
to cold, and seeming inability to learn finer skills makes him a caricature, the barbarian
foreigner carried to the extreme. While Cather was always interested in the maimed and
the monstrous, beginning with her teenager experiments in vivisection (O’Brien, EV 89),
it would seem that Marek represents a fear as well as an avocation. Cather felt herself
unnatural, an anxiety-producing state, and Lindemann notes a “tension in Cather’s letters
of the 1890s between fears of looking and feeling queer and her protests against the
supposed unnaturalness of female same-sex love” (Queering 65). Nevertheless, Shaw has
concluded that Cather basically agreed with the Victorian condemnation of lesbianism
and its insistence that sex was dangerous (“Victorian” 25). Thus we could argue that
Marek is an externalization of a fear of legibility, of having one’s difference recognized
and of being punished for it without cause. As Ralph Waldo Emerson famously said, “For
nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure” (1516). Marek is born like that,
treated like that, and excised for that. He is different, and he is doomed.
Whether or not we wish to read Marek as the projection of a part of Cather, we should
remember that Cather was considered a bohemian by the time she arrived in Pittsburgh
(Brown, Critical Biography 77), suggesting a provocative link between herself and her
Bohemian characters. My Antonia has its basis in the historical experiences of Annie
Sadilek Pavelka, so I will not argue that Cather’s Bohemians are a mask for her
bohemianism. Given that Cather always picks her words carefully, however, it can be no
coincidence that the Shimerdas are Bohemians, a term loaded with double meanings. It is
true enough that the Shimerdas are from Bohemia, but had Cather only aimed to identify
their country of origin, the term Czechs would have worked just as well. Otto Fuchs
refers to the Shimerdas as Czechs on one occasion, but to the Burdens, the Shimerdas
remain “Bohemian” (15). They are wanderers and vagabonds, people who seem in many
ways strange and unconventional to their American neighbors. Jim’s first glimpse of the
Shimerdas suggests that he does in fact perceive them as gypsies of some sort: “the
woman wore a fringed shawl tied over her head, and she carried a little tin trunk in her
arms…. Two half-grown boys and a girl stood holding oilcloth bundles, and a little girl
clung to her mother’s skirts” (6–7). Similarly, Jim immediately notices the difference
between his grandfather’s house—”the only wooden house west of Black Hawk” (11)—
and the Shimerdas’ “ugly cave” (43), while his grandmother “drew back” (50) in shock
upon learning that Antonia and Yulka slept in “a round hole, not much bigger than an oil
barrel, scooped out in the black earth” (50).
The Bohemians also have strange customs, manners, and behaviors, in the eyes of the
Burdens (though the Shimerdas consider themselves perfectly normal, if not superior).
Although Jim and Antonia have a “wonderfully pleasant” (19) time playing together
during his first visit to her family’s farm, the mood changes abruptly when Antonia tries
to give Jim her ring. Jim explains: “I felt there was something reckless and extravagant
about her wishing to give it away to a boy she had never seen before” (19–20). He later
notes that “there never were such people as the Shimerdas for wanting to give away
everything they had” (29), a propensity that makes Jim feel uncomfortable. In addition,
Jim and his family are “horrified…at the sour, ashy-grey bread [Mrs. Shimerda] gave her
family to eat,” (22) though Mrs. Shimerda seems to think her own culinary techniques
superior. She boasts: “You got many things for cook. If I got all things like you, I make
much better” (58). Because of certain “untranslatable[s]” (Lee, “Road” 163), the most
generous gift Mrs. Shimerda ever bestows on the Burdens, the packet of mushrooms,
goes to waste—uncomprehended and unappreciated. Furthermore, Antonia’s refusal to
admit that Jim’s family’s way is better causes him much chagrin. William J. Stuckey
notes that, “as Jim gets to know Antonia better, his difficulty with her reduces to the
unpleasant fact that she prefers to be more like her family than like his” (100). And yet
this same quality appears in Vickie Templeton (OMH 275), the closest portrait of her
teenage self that Cather would ever provide in her fiction (Woodress, Life and Art 39).
In spite of obstacles, Jim and Antonia largely transcend their difference to form a close
and lifelong friendship, albeit a limited one. They eventually learn to respect each other
and to appreciate each other’s strengths, but their own identities remain distinct. This
possibility is prefigured by a scene at the end of the first section in which Jim and
Antonia are lying together in perfect companionship, just on the verge of entering a new
phase of their lives (i.e., adolescence), a scene that clearly echoes their first meeting.
When Jim first visited the Shimerdas’ farm, he recalls: “we were so deep in the grass that
we could see nothing but the blue sky over us and the gold tree in front of us” (19).
Similarly, in these closing images of Book I, Jim reports: “Antonia and I climbed up on
the slanting roof of the chicken-house to watch the clouds. The thunder was loud and
metallic…and the lightning broke in great zigzags across the heavens, making everything
stand out and come close to us for a moment” (89). In both cases Jim and Antonia feel a
close camaraderie with each other and with nature, yet just as Jim feels distanced by
Antonia’s desire to give away her ring in the beginning of Book I, so in the end Antonia
explains why the two of them will always be different: “‘If I live here, like you, that is
different. Things will be easy for you. But they will be hard for us’” (90). Antonia cannot
explain why this should be so, but Jim can make no response to the contrary. Sometimes
language cannot fill the gap. Some things are incommunicable.
“A DIMINISHED THING”: THE PROFESSOR’S HOUSE
After “the world broke in two” (NUF v), Cather moved from novels about pioneer
heroines to more philosophical and reflective texts. Granville Hicks considers this shift
the beginning of the end for Cather’s art, contending that because she fails “to see
contemporary life as it is…she has been barred from the task that has occupied most of
the world’s greatest artists, the expression of what is central and fundamental in her own
age” (144). Although critical opinion has moved since Hicks, Cather is still largely
known by her early Nebraska novels (e.g., O Pioneers! and My Antonia). As Carlin noted
in 1992, only Cather’s early novels are unanimously considered cannonical (7). Cather
has in some ways perpetuated the assumption that she is more interested in an idealized
past than in “contemporary life as it is” (Hicks 144), affirming her membership among
“the backward” (NUF v). At the same time, however, she was very much aware of what
was happening in the world around her and what her contemporaries and peers were
producing. She did not try to hide from the present or to deny its existence, but sought to
engage it on different levels and through different experiments. While form and time
period are among the most obvious of these manipulations,23 representations of otherness
also play an important role in Cather’s later novels.
One such example is Cather’s use of the Jewish cosmopolitan as a more prominent
character in her fiction. Cather lived and wrote in a time in which Jews were marginal yet
ubiquitous, demonized yet responsible for major innovations and positive changes.24
Thus it is not surprising that Cather’s literary treatment of Jews is both ambivalent and
inconsistent. On the one hand, it is true enough that “the Jews Willa Cather…represent[s]
in her fiction are not viewed from the same angle as her Bohemians, Scandinavians,
Germans, and French” (Schroeter 365), but nor does she offer a monolithically negative
image of Jews. Indeed, Cather’s German Jews are among her most sympathetic
characters (Pers 80). Absent from her early prairie novels or occupying only minor
roles,25 Jews nevertheless had a formative impact on Cather’s life—both positive (the
Weiners and their library) and negative (the loss of Isabel McClung to Jan Hambourg).
Cather’s inscription of Jewish identity evolves from the unsavory (and stereotype-laden)
portrayals she offers in her early stories to a more rounded look at the Jewish
cosmopolitan, a figure who is remembered and reworked in Louie Marsellus in The
Professor’s House and Mr. and Mrs. David Rosen in “Old Mrs. Harris.” Aside from any
biographical ties, these Jewish cosmopolitans offer Cather another way to explore
multiple subject positions. In exploring these figures, Cather does not depart completely
from her earlier preoccupations and techniques. Rather, boundaries which seem firmly
laid and impermeable loosen up to offer greater possibilities for representation.26
My Antonia was one of Cather’s most successful and renowned novels, and it seems to
epitomize her earlier writings in many ways. The Professor’s House, which is also
sometimes called Cather’s finest text, clearly belongs to her later period. Diminishment,
diminution and disillusion abound, and the novel’s protagonist is an “immensely complex
and tired male autobiographical figure” who “ask[s] Cather’s distressed questions and
illustrate[s] her knotted concerns” (Skaggs 185). And yet seven years and a world
removed from My Antonia, there are a surprising number of holdovers in theme,
structure, and characterization. To begin with, My Antonia’s “Optima dies…prima fugit”
could serve as the epigraph for The Professor’s House as well, given the amount of time
the Professor spends reminiscing about the past and feeling dissatisfied with the present.
Although he now has both honor and money as a result of his scholarly series, The
Spanish Adventurers in North America, the Professor wishes that he could write his life’s
work over again and return to “those golden days” when he felt “simple, natural, and
happy” (32). He similarly believes that his protégé, Tom Outland, did well to die in the
Great War. Indeed, St. Peter feels almost envious of Tom for honorably exiting the scene
before he would “have had to ‘manage’ a great deal of money, to be the instrument of a
woman who would grow always more exacting. He had escaped all that. He had made
something new in the world—and the rewards, the meaningless conventional gestures, he
had left to others” (261). Furthermore, St. Peter hearkens all the way back to Tom’s
student days as his best, reflecting “that those first years, before Outland had done
anything remarkable, were really the best of all” (125).
St. Peter longs for earlier days not only professionally but in his personal life. “[H]e
was very much in love” (31) when he married his wife, but he now believes “he could not
live with his family again—not even with Lillian. Especially not with Lillian!” (274).
Thinking back to when his children were young, the Professor asks rhetorically, “when a
man had lovely children in his house, fragrant and happy, full of pretty fancies and
generous impulses, why couldn’t he keep them?” (126). The follow-up St. Peter offers,
“was there no way but Medea’s?” (126), actually prefigures the direction that he is
headedtowards death. Throughout the book, the enervated Professor drifts closer to death
himself, and yet the final section of the novel includes a paradoxical yearning for a return
to youth. While Harvard-bound Jim Burden “wishe[s] [he] could be a little boy again”
(MA 207), the depressed Professor is actually reunited with an earlier avatar, the “Kansas
boy,” who returns to him as “a primitive” (PH 265). Instead of seeing his life over again
as he approaches death, the Professor negates his life: “he had never married, never been
a father” (265). Clearly the Professor envisions disruption as opposed to continuity
between his boyhood and his mature life.
Along with the abrupt break between childhood and adulthood which The Professor’s
House posits, the novel shares My Antonia’s saturation with images of doubleness.
Hively suggests several: Tom is the Professor’s second self (120); the Professor lives two
lives and has two daughters and two romances (124); and Scott McGregor observes that
the country is split in two socially (124). Further, Cather suggests another underpinning
of doubleness in her discussions of the novel’s structure, explaining that she tried “two
experiments in form[,]…inserting the Nouvelle into the Roman” (OW 30) and using the
framing technique of “old and modern Dutch paintings” (OW 31). This seems to be a
very different approach from Cather’s “set[ing] an old Sicilian apothecary jar[,]…filled
with orange-brown flowers of scented stock, in the middle of a bare, round, antique
table” (Sergeant 13) to serve as a framing image for My Antonia. Nevertheless, we might
recall that the middle section of My Antonia bore another character’s name (Lena
Lingard) just as The Professor’s House includes “Tom Outland’s Story.” “Lena Lingard”
does not have the autonomy of “Tom Outland’s Story” (which was in fact published
separately) and the absence of Antonia in that section does not carry the same disruptive
force as the “‘massive dislocation’ achieved by Cather in introducing [Tom’s Story]

…into the professor’s” (Murphy, “Modernist” 59). Still, it is worth noting that Tom’s
story requires mediation in order to reach fruition. Although the firstperson narrative is
ostensibly written by Tom, the task falls to the Professor to edit it, to frame it with an
introduction, and to make it public. Skaggs indirectly questions the Professor’s fitness for
this task. When St. Peter prefaces Tom’s story with the remark, “it was nothing very
incriminating, nothing very remarkable; a story of youthful defeat, the sort of thing a boy
is sensitive about—until he grows older” (176), Skaggs concludes “that we cannot
entirely or naively trust any sentence from the narrator who largely speaks from the
professors point of view” (67). Just as we come to distrust Jim’s reliability as narrator, we
see that the Professor’s assessments are not necessarily safe to accept at face value.
Skaggs also points out that “both [the Professor and Scott McGregor] make [Tom] into an
abstraction” (79), much like Jim does to Antonia. Thus doubleness, mediation, and issues
of representation are stylistic and thematic holdovers from My Antonia to The Professor’s
House.
Also like Jim, St. Peter experiences a childhood dislocation from a lush landscape to a
monotonous one: “when he was eight years old, his parents sold the lakeside farm and
dragged him and his brothers and sisters out to the wheat lands of central Kansas” (30).
Like Willa Cather, “St. Peter nearly died of it” (30). Seemingly a born cosmopolitan, the
Professor feels claustrophobic away from the changeable water. Indeed, St. Peter
considers Lake Michigan itself to be his real family of origin, “the great fact in life, the
always possible escape from dullness” (30).27 This landscape finds no analog in any of
his many travels to beautiful and exotic countries, and St. Peter feels inadequate to
describe it in terms of any other. When the French boys for whom St. Peter serves as a
tutor ask about “le Michigan,” he responds, “It is a sea, and yet it is not salt. It is blue,
but quite another blue. Yes, there are clouds and mists and sea-gulls, but—I don’t know,
il est toujours plus naif (31). The fact that he finishes up in French suggests that Cather
wants us to share in the experience of the untranslatable. Not logic but feeling guides the
Professor in his decision to return to Lake Michigan when the opportunity arises. He
accepts a teaching position in Hamilton, “not because it was the best, but because it
seemed to him that any place near the lake was a place where one could live” (31). Like
Virgil and Jim Burden, St. Peter strives to bring the muse to his patria, his little corner of
land. But while Jim can return to the scenes of his youth, even finding the original road
out to his grandfather’s homestead, St. Peter’s world changes rapidly and irreversibly.
For Jim “memories are realities” (MA 211), and he dwells in a world with no present and
little future, taking comfort only in his version of the past. The dilemma of The
Professor’s House, on the other hand, is how to “go on living” (PH 94), even with the
knowledge that ones life will henceforth be “without delight” (282).
While the adult Jim finds Antonia “battered but not diminished” (MA 214), St. Peter
feels a “diminution of ardour” (PH 13) from the first pages of the book. Within this
context, the task of Cather’s novel becomes to offer its own answer to the question posed
by Robert Frost’s 1916 poem, “The Oven Bird,” namely, “what to make of a diminished
thing” (l. 14). Bennett hypothesizes that Cather purposefully avoided having to grapple
with this question firsthand by never marrying. If Cather had married, Bennett reasons,
she would have run the risk of falling out of love the way that her Professor does: “could
it be that she avoided reaching out to grasp anything that might conceivably have
vanished for her in the grasping?” (221). More recent biographers, however, have
contended that Cather knew diminishment and renunciation well, particularly in the guise
of losing Isabel McClung to Jan Hambourg. Critics vary in their assessment of Cather’s
relationship to Hambourg, some seeing the dedication of The Professor’s House as a
mark of reconciliation or friendship (Woodress Literary, 284–85) and some seeing it as
ironic and incisive (Schroeter 376). Similarly, enough critics have conflated Louie with
Jan to trigger a backlash (Murphy, “Modernist” 72). At any rate, the Professor shares
many characteristics with Cather. What Lillian observes of her husband might well be
said of Cather at the same age: “you’re naturally warm and affectionate; all at once you
begin shutting yourself away from everybody” (162). Further, Skaggs contends that “both
the Professor and his creator would prefer to be back in preadolescent youth” (76). Both
long for a less complicated time, when roles and personas were more unitary and
responsibilities to other people were fewer. Whether or not McClung and Cather were
lovers (or whether Cather wished for that to be the case), McClung was an old friend and
one whose father’s house was Cather’s home away from home. Losing the home in 1915
and the exclusive relationship with a “lover whose love and company were always
available” in 1916 brought about “irrevocable” changes and constituted an
“overwhelming” loss (O’Brien, EV 239). Cather’s ambivalence towards Hambourg and
her sense of loss in her personal relationship with McClung peaked again during a
“disastrous 1923 visit” (O’Brien, EV 240) to the Hambourgs’s home in France; O’Brien
contends that, among other things, “the emotional impact the visit had on Cather can be
glimpsed in…the profound spiritual and emotional crisis reflected in The Professor’s
House” (EV 240). It is clear that Cather was struggling with the issue of knowing oneself
when the supporting structures which have sustained that self (both physical and human)
are no longer available. Without jumping into the critical fray, I would like to suggest
that whatever the personal relations behind the novel, The Professor’s House is, perhaps
above all, a novel about identity.
In what scholars have called her most modernist novel in both form and subject
matter, Cather approaches identity issues via a profoundly anti-modernist motif, history.
Cantor argues that modernism “emphasized ahistorical …ways of thinking” (6) and that
the movement was characterized by “antihistoricism” (35). Cather’s historian provides a
different approach to modernism. While Abraham identifies the central histories explored
in The Professor’s House as “the European-oriented history of great men[,]…a native
history of cliff-dwelling people…[and an] international, contemporary, political history”
(47), provocative aspects of the personal history of the Professor himself are especially
relevant to questions of cosmopolitanism. St. Peter presents an interesting paradigm of
ethnic identity: “though he was born on Lake Michigan, of mixed stock (Canadian French
on one side, and American farmers on the other), St. Peter was commonly said to look
like a Spaniard” (12). Apparently the experiences and the scholarship have become
conflated with the man, as this Spanish identity has been attributed to him because “he
had been in Spain a good deal, and was an authority on certain phases of Spanish history”
(13). Furthermore, while Professor St. Peter’s name sounds Catholic, his mother’s
staunch Methodist people are the religious ones in his family. Taking Commons’s 1920
pronouncement that “religious differences in America are not so much theological as
racial in character” (186), we see that St. Peter is very much the product of a “mixed
marriage” (100). Thus we could argue that the Professor himself embodies the melting
pot, and that he is a product of both amalgamation, “a blending of races,” and

assimilation, “a blending of civilizations” (Commons 209). St. Peter’s family will only
become more complex, as his older daughter’s marriage to a Jew culminates in the
imminent arrival of “a young Marsellus” (273). This child will not be Jewish by orthodox
law, which holds that the child follows the status of the mother, and yet it will clearly be
considered of Jewish descent by its non-Jewish relatives.
To add to the ethnic mix present within the Professor himself, St. Peter’s greatest non-
professional achievement is arguably the fact that he “had succeeded in making a French
garden in Hamilton” (14)—on land owned by his German landlord, no less.28 The French
garden plays a crucial role in St. Peter’s sense of himself. Indeed, “his walled-in garden
had been the comfort of his life” (14), providing a space in which he might keep himself
together by rigidly controlling his surroundings. Compared to heroic pioneers like
Alexandra Bergson and Antonia who struggled to make unbroken soil into productive
farmland, however, St. Peter’s efforts seem meager or pitiful: “St. Peter had tended this
bit of ground for over twenty years, and had got the upper hand of it” (15). His victory
does not make him seem like a robust American, but rather an effeminate aesthete. Along
similar lines, only a few pages later we see the Professor having a panic attack over the
impending removal of the family sewing lady’s forms. With perhaps the greatest fervor
we ever see him muster, the Professor insists, “they shan’t be wheeled. They stay right
there in their own place. You shan’t take away my ladies…you can’t have my women.
That’s final” (21–22). What better indication of diminution than the Professor’s
passionate speech on behalf of his ladies? St. Peter is clearly not a pioneer or a hero. He
sounds like a cross between a fashion designer and a pimp.
The Professor wants to control his surroundings and the “women” in his life to
maintain a past that is no longer viable. While My Antonia traces Jim’s attempt to connect
with a classical past (Swift 111), The Professor’s House starts from the premise that the
past is irrecoverable and takes a caustic look at what the world has become. Thus
possession reappears in the later novel, but in a different guise. The title could refer to
any of several literal and figurative edifices, including the house St. Peter raised his
children in, the new house his wife has bought with the book award money, Rosamund’s
and Louie’s “Outland,” the womb, and the grave. Further, the Professor repeatedly
bemoans the problems of wealth and offers an indictment of modern materialism. Many
critics have dealt at length with the symbolism and significance of houses along with the
problems of money, and so I am more interested in looking at the ways in which the
characters in the novel are possessed as opposed to dwelling on their problematic
possessions.
The Professor, for one, is thoroughly possessed. He does not feel like himself
anymore, and he no longer believes that he ever really had control over his life. For
example, the Professor retrospectively observes that “all the most important things in his
life…had been determined by chance. His education in France had been an accident. His
married life had been happy largely through a circumstance with which neither he nor his
wife had anything to do…. Tom Outland had been a stroke of chance he couldn’t
possibly have imagined” (257). We do not know if Rosamund and Kathleen had been
planned pregnancies, but St. Peter certainly does not seem to think that any of his plans
panned out. He reflects that “all the years between [childhood and the present] had been
accidental and ordered from the outside. His career, his wife, his family, were not his life
at all, but a chain of events which had happened to him” (264). The Professor is
possessed because he is manipulated by forces beyond his control; he is also the Devil.
Godfrey St. Peter is “God-free[,]…as arbitrary as God or Devil” (Skaggs 76–77). His
“wickedlooking eyebrows” and his fiery eyes lead his students to nickname him
Mephistopheles (13), and he plays the part with evident pleasure. His nemeses, Crane and
Langtry, the one who wants financial rewards and the other who craves status, have the
character of Faustian strivers, and St. Peter all but tells them, “this is Hell, and nor am I
out of it.”
The Professor’s double (Kaye 146) and protégé, Tom Outland, is possessed, as well.
Although he might not recognize it to the same extent that St. Peter does, Tom also
exercises little control over his formative experiences, as Skaggs notes: “Tom’s whole
life seems shaped by random luck and accident” (68). Tom’s story also shares the motif
of possession with his mentor’s. Money and the question of ownership taint Cliff City
and precipitate Tom’s break with Roddy Blake. And like Jim Burden in his
grandmother’s garden, Tom reaches a pinnacle when he relinquishes control and becomes
one with something outside himself. Spending a night alone on the mesa for the first
time, Tom feels “a great happiness. It was possession…a religious emotion… happiness
unalloyed” (251). Here Skaggs points out that Tom both “possessed and was possessed
by this object of his desire, the Blue Mesa” (70).
Tom’s account of his days in New Mexico, “Tom Outlands Story,” is itself engulfed
or possessed by a larger body—namely The Professor’s House. On a literal level, the
manuscript sits in the attic study of St. Peter’s house awaiting annotation and
introduction. The Professor considers Tom’s story a fairly typical boy’s tale, “nothing
very remarkable” (176), and the narrative is certainly tangential compared to the main
plot line in the novel. At the same time, “Tom Outland’s Story” is literally central.
Comprising the middle book of the novel, it comes between “The Professor” and “[His]
Family.” Tom precipitated the Professor’s alienation from his wife and daughters, and
even after Tom’s death the manuscript exerts an almost hypnotic power over St. Peter,
who stays back from a family trip to Europe to “pleasantly trifle…away nearly two
months at a task which should have taken little more than a week” (263). Situated
between the two parts of the Professor’s narrative, Tom’s story is also the “turquoise set
in dull silver” of the novel’s epigraph, as Schroeter explains: “the point is that Book II is
the ‘turquoise’ and Books I and III are the ‘dull silver’” (370). However, the turquoise
does not sit neatly in its dull silver, since it is both the epigraph and the text itself.
Furthermore, the turquoise and the silver interact, melting into one another as opposed to
remaining discrete entities. Silver is malleable—a “turquoise set in dull silver” is not set
in stone.
As an alternative to readings that consider the insertion of Tom’s narrative into the
Professor’s a bold but ultimately unsuccessful experiment,29 I would point out that the
inclusion of Tom’s story, while atypical in the novel genre, makes more sense if one
considers St. Peter and Tom co-storytellers in Benjamins sense. Just as Jim and Antonia
jointly fulfilled the role of “The Storyteller” as Benjamin conceptualizes it, St. Peter and
Tom together, sometimes through cooperation and sometimes through tension, give
Cather’s text a greater fullness and complexity than either’s tale would provide alone. St.
Peter provides an introductory “presentation of the circumstances in which …[he has]
learned what is to follow” (Benjamin 92), adding credibility to Tom’s narrative. The
story receives further validation from the fact that Tom has been dead for ten years by the
time we hear his story: “death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell”
(Benjamin 94). However, Tom, a former call-boy and cow hand, makes a better
storyteller. “Rooted in the people” (Benjamin 101) in a way that the Professor never was,
Tom has also mastered the “art of…keep[ing] a story free from explanation as one
reproduces it” (Benjamin 89).30 Furthermore, untrustworthy though St. Peter’s dismissal
of Tom’s story might be, it does signal to us that plot or transference of information is not
the most important part of the narrative. Clearly Tom’s story retains its value and its
power over time, unlike “information [which] does not survive the moment in which it
was new” (Benjamin 90). St. Peter’s ability to live again through Tom’s manuscript also
demonstrates Benjamin’s contention that “a man listening to a story is in the company of
the storyteller; even a man reading one shares this companionship” (92). Working on
Tom’s manuscript brings back many memories of Tom, but it also reincarnates “the
original, unmodified Godfrey St. Peter” (PH 263).
Tom, like Benjamin’s storyteller, is gone. Contemporary society has lost its storyteller
(Benjamin 83), and St. Peter has lost his protégé, his youth, and his second self. In spite
of the unmistakable doubling that occurs in Cather’s characterization of Tom and the
Professor (Hively points out that “Thomas” means “twin” [120]), Tom represents
something quintessentially American, but St. Peter is only nominally so. It is interesting
to note that while St. Peter seems to offer unmitigated, even mythologizing approval for
Tom, he displays varying attitudes towards Americans and the United States in general.
For example, Lillian achieves only limited success by appealing to St. Peter’s sense of
patriotism or national pride in arguing for installing an attractive bathroom in the new
house: “‘If your country has contributed one thing, at least, to civilization, why not have
it’” (12, emphasis added). Lillian’s use of “your” to refer to both her husband’s country
and her own is curious. It would almost seem as if Lillian is trying to remind her
cosmopolitan husband that he does, in fact, have a country—that he is, in fact, an
American. The Professor’s relationship to the American landscape is also complex.
Although being torn from Lake Michigan as a child was traumatic for St. Peter, he
subsequently identifies his truest self as the “Kansas boy” (265). Further, St. Peter
considers the southwest “Outland’s country” (270) and plans to visit because it
epitomizes Americanness. He does not really believe that he will live to see the fall term,
but he decides that if he travels the following summer, he will go “to look off at those
long, rugged, untamed vistas dear to the American heart. Dear to all hearts, probably—at
least calling to all” (270). At this point the Professor makes an unlikely leap: “Else why
had his grandfather’s grandfather, who had tramped so many miles across Europe into
Russia with the Grande Armee, come out to the Canadian wilderness to forget the chagrin
of his Emperor’s defeat?” (270). Although St. Peter’s ruminations on his great-
greatgrandfather’s trans-Atlantic journey seem out of place here, they signify the
importance of journeys and crossings within the novel.
Crossing recurs as a motif throughout. In terms of geography, we hear about many
crossings of the Atlantic ocean: the original immigrant St. Peter comes from France to
Canada; Sir Edgar, “the English scholar…come[s] all the way to Hamilton…to enquire
about some of Doctor St. Peter’s ‘sources’” (36); Lillian and Godfrey meet while both are
overseas; St. Peter plans to travel to Paris with Tom, but the war interferes; and the
Marselluses take Lillian on a European vacation. On a more metaphorical level, the
Catholic overtones of the novel, as embodied by Augusta, also call up images of the cross
and of crossing oneself. Further, mixed marriages suggest cross-breeding and
hybridization. In the realm of gender, several critics have noted that Louie, marginal for
his ethnic identity, also has many characteristics of a gay man. As Abraham observes,
“Louie is sensitive, emotional, and flamboyant, knowledgeable about aesthetics, objects,
and women’s clothes” (51; see also 188, n. 15). Louie is a married man and a father-to-
be, so these characteristics and predilections suggest a certain gender transitivity. He
continually crosses the line between masculinity and femininity. Tom, Louie’s
predecessor, is ruggedly masculine, but he stands out for his apparent lack of interest in
women (his engagement to Rosamund notwithstanding). Indeed, Cather leaves plenty of
room for us to conclude that Tom was gay, or at least bisexual. Tom’s primary emotional
attachments were to other men, and he and Roddy might well have been lovers. It is also
doubtful that the Professor’s romance with Tom was strictly platonic, “of the mind—of
the imagination” (258). Tom’s questionable sexual orientation—like Louie’s gender
transitivity, Augusta’s religious fervor, and St. Peter’s trans-continental travels—serves
to remind us of the importance of crossing within Cather’s novel.31
Crossing plays a prominent role in class and racial issues in the text, as well, although
African-Americans are curiously absent from this novel in which American identity is so
central. In fact, the only people of color who receive any mention are the dead native-
Americans, the Cliff Dwellers. Cather’s use and representations of the Cliff Dwellers has
garnered her charges of ethnocentrism (Ammons 133–36). Nevertheless, I would argue
that Cather does more than perpetuate and reproduce “inherited, conventional, white
western narrative tradition” (Ammons 134). The ways in which ethnic and racial issues
suffuse The Professor’s House show that Cather had an awareness of the complicated
interactions between, for example, class and ethnicity. For instance, Augusta, the St.
Peter family’s German seamstress is presented sympathetically, even when such a
portrayal places St. Peter in an unfavorable light. The Professor teases Augusta about
religion, which is no joking matter to a devout Catholic, and it is clear that his words are
tinged with a not completely good-natured irony. Augusta tries to meet him in his
bantering, but the two do not stand on equal intellectual footing. The passage in which
Augusta makes a rare reference to her own hopes and goals is representative of the way
in which St. Peter views her. Augusta confides to St. Peter: “‘When I first came to sew
for Mrs. St. Peter, I never thought I should grow grey in her service.’ [St. Peter] started.
What other future could Augusta possibly have expected? This disclosure amazed him”
(23). Even after Augusta has saved him from asphyxiation, the greatest praise St. Peter
can heap on her character is that she is “kind and loyal” (281), typical servant material.
His “sense of obligation to her” (281) suggests no more than paternalism, certainly not
admiration, humility, or a recognition of Augusta’s individual humanity. In this way, the
Professor’s epiphany that he will henceforth live in “a world full of Augustas, with whom
one was outward bound” (281) does not differ greatly from his early characterization of
her as “the sewing-woman, niece of his old landlord, a reliable, methodical spinster, a
German Catholic and very devout” (16). The future life he envisions will be “without
delight” (282), a death-in-life in which St. Peter will be surrounded by zombie-like
Augustas and dead Mother Eves. In this case, Cather is not glorifying her protagonist, but
showing his weaknesses. She does not become a Jim Burden or a Niel Herbert, as
Ammons argued (136), but rather, she shows that she is not, despite similarities, Godfrey
St. Peter.
The character who most clearly embodies racial/ethnic difference is not at all devout.
Louie Marsellus, an assimilated Jewish electrical engineer, has entered the Professor’s
family by marrying Rosamund, St. Peter’s older daughter and Tom Outland’s “virtual
widow” (45). Some critics see Cather’s portrayals of Jewish characters as virulently anti-
Semitic (Schroeter 365–68), while others contend that Cather merely reflects the
conventions of her time: “no [contemporary] reviewer saw anything objectionable in the
characterization of Louis Marsellus” (Woodress, Literary 377). Finally, other critics say
that positive aspects in Cather’s portrayals outweigh any negatives. Nelson, for example,
counters charges that Cather employs negative stereotypes of Jews by offering a positive
stereotype of his own, arguing that unsavory images of Jews are “relegated to the point of
irrelevancy in the face of the erotic energy of Jews and their capacity, generally, to
appreciate in others the lost language” (90). At any rate, Louie’s difference is certainly
racialized and essentialized. Louie is unlike the St. Peters, unlike Scott McGregor, unlike
Tom Outland because Louie is a Jew. If Cather had difficulty conceptualizing Jewish
identity, she shares that challenge with contemporaries, later social scientists, and
statisticians in other countries. In underscoring the distinction between race and
nationality, even Cather’s conservative contemporary, Fairchild, finds the place of Jews
ambiguous: “to just what extent the Hebrews are to be considered a race it is impossible
to say” (111). Gleason similarly explains that “Judaism is an ‘ethnic religion’ in a way
quite different from the manner in which Catholicism was an ethnic religion for Irish, or
Polish, or Italian immigrants…[because] the theoretical distinction between being
Catholic and being Irish—or Polish, or Italian, or whatever—could always be clearly
drawn” (Speaking 242). Anderson further notes as “census categories became more
exclusively racial” (164), Asian “census-makers [became] visibly uneasy about where to
place those they marked as ‘Jews’” (165, n. 3). Although Louie’s difference is difficult to
pinpoint, it is palpable throughout the novel. Whatever the implications, Cather, like
Kathleen St. Peter, “calls [Louie] a Jew” (85). Even with the difficulty in defining Jews
ethnically and racially, the term calls up stereotypes and carries political overtones which
Cather manipulates strategically. Louie is different, foreign, and yet familiar.
Cather gives us no reason to believe that the Marsellus family has not lived in the
United States for generations, but Louie remains marginal when compared to old-timers
like the St. Peters. American-born or not, the Jewish Marsellus incontrovertibly
constitutes what Fairchild derogatorily terms “new immigration” (112). Further, the
historian’s son-in-law stands out for being almost completely without a history. We do
not know where Louie is from, whether his parents are still alive, where he went to
college, or how he and Rosamund met. He has a brother living in China, “engaged in the
silk trade” (36), but otherwise Louie seems to have neither roots nor relations. He is the
perennial outsider, but he is also excellent raw material for shaping into whatever
Rosamund and Lillian wish to make of him. The Professor expresses surprise at the ease
with which Lillian integrates Louie into the family, as he reflects: “He would have said
that she would feel about Louie just as he did; would have cultivated him as a stranger in
the town, because he was so unusual and exotic, but without in the least wishing to adopt
anyone so foreign into the family circle” (78).
Louie seems “foreign” to the Professor but not wholly so. He is American-educated,
he uses American idioms and presumably speaks without an accent, and his appearance is
for the most part nondescript. Indeed, Louie might be fruitfully conceptualized as a
person of mixed ancestry, as Commons explains, “it should not be inferred the Jews are a
race of pure descent…. In the course of centuries, their physical characteristics have
departed from those of their Semitic cousins in the East, and they have become
assimilated in blood with their European neighbors” (93). Thinking of Louie this way, we
might observe that St. Peter expects his wife to see Louie just as Larsen’s Scandinavian
Axel Olsen sees the American mulatta, Helga Crane—exotic, foreign, and not for formal
marital relationships. Instead, Louie is the stimulus for Lillian’s beginning “the game of
being a woman all over again” (79). Louie fills the gap created “when husbands ceased to
be lovers…[by] never forg[etting] one of the hundred foolish attentions that Lillian
loved” (160). The comparison of Louie to Helga highlights the crucial role the mixed-
race or ambiguous-race figure plays in The Professor’s House. When Judith Berzon
observes that “the mulatto has been the central character in the works of some of
Americas most influential white writers[, including]… Gertrude Stein…and Willa
Cather” (14), she is probably thinking of Melanctha (Stein) and Nancy Till (Cather). But
the identity politics of the mulatto apply to other Cather characters of mixed or
ambiguous race as well, including the Professor and Louie.32
Although not centrally about race, The Professor’s House can be considered a passing
novel, particularly if we draw on older definitions of the term which more broadly
encompass any type of social boundary crossings (Sollors, Neither 247). The Professor’s
socio-economic status is assured and his racial heritage is never called into question, but
he passes in other ways. Wall contends that the use of a pseudonym constitutes “a form
of passing” (120), and while St. Peter does not give himself a new name, he does deny a
part of his name: “Godfrey had abbreviated his name in Kansas, and even his daughters
didn’t know what it had been originally” (163). Since he has no sons to burden with the
tradition, it seems likely that the secret will die with him. By dropping the “Napoleon,”
St. Peter severs himself from his roots, as “there had always been a Napoleon in the
family, since a remote grandfather got his discharge from the Grande Armee” (163);
Berzon defines passing as “reject[ing] …roots” (6). Furthermore, Washington points out
that the term passing “can also connote death” (164), a direction that Cather’s protagonist
moves towards, while Brown summarizes The Professor’s House as “a study of the
passing, prematurely, from middle to old age” (Critical Biography 239, emphasis added).
Finally, the professor’s attachment to his mannequin “ladies” and his obsession with
closets should set off a warning bell, to say the least.
Cather plays with the concept of the closet by employing multiple levels of figurative
significance. The professor likes his closets at the new house, but he cannot relinquish his
sewing room closet at the old house. He treasures his privacy, his ability to closet
himself, and the art he creates in his private cell takes on the form of a religious
emotion/devotion. St. Peter has skeletons in his closets, things that not even the people
closest to him know, and he has also spent an adulthood closeted and trying to pass—for
husband, for father, for professor, for American citizen.33 Along these lines Doris
Grumbach sees the Professor’s mid-life crisis as “his late and blinding realization that the
life he has been leading, the life of father and husband is no longer bearable and that
death is preferable to living any longer in the stifling, elaborately furnished and false (for
him) house of women and marriage” (qtd. in Woodress, Literary 371). Further,
disillusioned as he has become with teaching, it would seem that the role of professor
does not sit well with St. Peter either. Sedgwick’s assessment of James’s Marcher might
also serve to explain St. Peter’s situation: “the secret of having a
secret…functions…precisely as the closet” (205, emphasis in original). In the opening
pages of the novel, St. Peter struggles to “evade the unpleasant effects of change” (15).
“[H]e had burned his candle at both ends to some purpose—he had got what he wanted”
(28–29), but the Professor finds the goal less satisfying than the striving. When he finally
visits the family doctor, he does not reveal “the real reason for his asking for a medical
examination. One doesn’t mention such things. The feeling that he was near the
conclusion of his life was an instinctive conviction, such as we have when we waken in
the dark and know at once that it is near morning; or when we are walking across the
country and suddenly know that we are near the sea” (269). St. Peter’s secret could be
conceptualized in any number of ways: he is clinically depressed, he fell in love with his
male student, he no longer shares his family’s preoccupations or interests, or he just
considers himself generally misunderstood. Even at the very end of the novel, and after
surviving a near brush with death, the Professor remains closeted. He is not the person his
loved ones believe him to be: “he doubted whether his family would ever realize that he
was not the same man they had said good-bye to” (282–83).34
The Professor has passed successfully for years and will, in all likelihood, continue to
do so, but Louie Marsellus cannot stake a similar claim. Louie tries both to cross social
lines (by applying to the Arts and Letters) and to achieve WASP status (by marrying
Rosamund), but his Jewishness keeps him from the ranks of “those who can pass for
members of the core society” (Berlant, Queen 192). Although intermarriage has typically
provided a fasttrack to Americanization (Dearborn 100), the more typical case is that in
which a white man marries an ethnic woman (Dearborn 99). Indeed American
immigration policy operated on a double standard that structurally underscored such a
process. As Virginia Sapiro notes, between the 1880s and the 1930s the laws were such
that “if a foreign woman married an American citizen, she automatically became an
American. If an American woman married a foreign man, she automatically lost her
citizenship and became an alien, even if no other country in the world claimed her as a
citizen” (289–90). In Louie’s and Rosamund’s case, it is the man who marries above his
own social class and seeks entrance into his wife’s milieu.35 Berlant observes that “when
a human morphs himself…through interracial marriage to a more racially and class-
privileged person, that identification and that passing makes him more likely to be a
member of the core national culture” (Queen 217), but Louie cannot seem to blend into
the St. Peter family. A negative reading of Louie’s difference might say that he is
flamboyant and showy, that he parasitically gets rich off the genius and hard work of
others, that he monopolizes conversations and charges ahead without giving a moment’s
thought to the effect his words might have on his listeners. There is some truth behind
such accusations, but at the same time, Cather does not seem to suggest that Louie should
change. Cather’s opposition to melting pot ideology (Pers 40) manifests itself in a tacit
support for Louie’s refusal or inability to be melted. Ultimately, the Professor can only
accept Louie’s difference and thereby accept defeat: “‘Louie, you are magnanimous and
magnificent!’ murmured his vanquished father-in-law” (170). As Skaggs explains it, “one
of the bad guys…turns into a good guy” (78).
Although James Woodress declares that “the Professor…is a self-portrait of Willa

Cather” (Slote 59), there is also a good bit of Cather in Louie. For one thing, Cather knew
the feeling of being new immigration herself compared to blue bloods like Annie Fields
(O’Brien, EV 117). Furthermore, Louie’s status as a Jew provides a close analog to
Cather’s as a woman whose primary emotional relationships were with other women,
even more so than would be the case if Louie were black. Sedgwick lays the groundwork
for such a comparison when she notes that “racism…is based on a stigma that is visible in
all but exceptional cases…[while] ethnic/cultural/religious oppressions such as anti-
Semitism are more analogous” to homophobia (75). Growing up in a southern, Christian,
Victorian household in a small town filled with “stupid faces” (SL 215), Cather felt her
difference acutely. Taking Wald’s contention the traditional American family (especially
as related to marriage) constitutes a key site of Americanization (246, 279), we can argue
that Cather has occupied a similar place to Louie’s—an outsider, an inassimilable
foreigner. The “young Marsellus” (273) will be the product of a mixed marriage, and
“miscegenation disrupt[s] the idea of family” (Dearborn 139, emphasis in the original),
but, I might add, so does homosexuality. If Cather sometimes judges Louie harshly, she is
certainly no harder on him than she is on herself.36 We clearly need to move beyond the
“Willa Cather equals Godfrey St. Peter/Jan Hambourg equals Louie Marsellus” binarism
in order to do this text justice. Indeed, instead of identifying St. Peter with Cather and
seeing Louie as an outsider or enemy, we might fruitfully conceive of St. Peter and Louie
as vessels for different parts of Cather’s psyche. Things have changed, and instead of
wallowing in nostalgia and bemoaning her losses as some critics suggest, Cather moves
beyond one-to-one correspondences to try to conceptualize and place herself in a new
world.
From the past-heavy and possessive story of Jim’s Antonia, we approach the
before/after paradigm of The Professor’s House. Ultimately Cather’s answer to the
question of what to make of a diminished thing is much like Frost’s—to go on living,
albeit without song. St. Peter’s epiphany is that mediocrity is liveable, as he realizes “that
life is possible, may be even pleasant without joy, without passionate griefs” (282). He is
past middle age, but he too can learn new tricks: “he had never learned to live without
delight. And he would have to learn to, just as, in a Prohibition country, he supposed he
would have to learn to live without sherry” (282). As the Professor ceases in his role of
Mephistopheles and returns to the religion of his fathers, “outward bound… [with] a
world full of Augustas” (281), he also makes a transition from binary paradigms
(heaven/hell, childhood/adulthood, passion/death) to a tertiary one (faith).37 Death and
rebirth, a prominent motif in the novel (Hively 130), makes way for life with a difference.
Where My Antonia ends with Jim’s sense of possession, the Professor returns to himself
with the knowledge that “he had let something go—and it was gone: something very
precious, that he could not consciously have relinquished, probably” (282). And although
this is not the triumphant feeling of a man coming home to himself, “[St. Peter] felt the
ground under his feet. He thought he knew where he was, and that he could face with
fortitude the Berengaria and the future” (283). The many transitions in this novel do not
reach resolution; Cather leaves us with an open-ended state of affairs. St. Peter thinks he
is stable and ready to go on with life, but he is not certain. Still, the Professor has realized
that a diminished life is nevertheless a life worth living.
(CATHER’S) THREE LIVES: “OLD MRS. HARRIS”
In examining the ending of The Professor’s House, Skaggs suggests, “Cather

acknowledges the miracles possible in youth, but also in age” (83). This realization forms
the crux of “Old Mrs. Harris,” as well. While Brown sees in this novella Cather’s “vision
of the aged, defeated, lonely, and unhappy” (Schroeter 84), Woodress’s assessment that
“Old Mrs. Harris” ultimately “affirm[s] life” is more compelling (Literary 444).
Although the title character works hard her entire life and then dies, and the narrator
predicts that neither Mrs. Harris’s daughter nor her granddaughter will do much better,
the story does not seem like a depressing narrative about drudgery and death. Woodress
points out that Cather, herself nearing sixty, realized at this time that along with physical
degeneration, “something rather nice happens in the mind as one grows older. A kind of
golden light comes as a compensation for many losses” (Literary 444). This is the
backdrop for “Old Mrs. Harris,” a story about generations and also about regeneration.
Although family relations play a significant role in My Antonia and The Professor’s
House, these issues take center stage in “Old Mrs. Harris,” which posits both “‘Vertical
generational model[s]’” and “‘horizontal relationship[s]’” (Lowe 63). Lowe employs
these terms as an alternative to “a traditional anthropological model of ‘culture’” (64),
which views transmission as “exclusively hierarchical and familial” (63). Cather portrays
vertical relations in the three generations of women in the Harris/Templeton family—plus
assorted male accessories—but she also explores the more horizontal relationships that
these women have with other significant people. These relationships form an intricate
web in which it is sometimes not altogether clear exactly how the various players are
related to one another. For example, although Mrs. Rosen is Victoria’s age, she might be
mistaken for an older woman, Mrs. Harris’s contemporary, because her primary
relationship seems to be with Mrs. Harris and she seems so much more sophisticated than
Victoria. And yet Mrs. Rosen consistently calls Mrs. Harris “Grandma” (263–67, 271,
285, 295, 304) thereby aligning herself more with Vickie. Mr. Rosen’s courtliness and
predilection for reading philosophy also make him seem older than he is.
Significantly, the story was originally titled, “Three Women.” Not only have we
moved from the binaries with which The Professor’s House begins to the tertiaries with
which it ends, but the most prominent threesome is itself ambiguous. The title could refer
to the three generations of Templeton women—Grandmother Harris, Victoria and
Vickie—but it could also include Mrs. Rosen. Other critics have suggested that Mrs.
Rosen might be substituted for Vickie (leaving us with an elderly mother and two
“daughters” with competing notions of filial piety), but I think she could also stand in for
Mrs. Harris (a daughter and two “mothers”) or for Victoria (two women who respect the
third’s desire to escape the path of her mother). Woodress has noted that the story “might
have been subtitled ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Teen-ager’” (Life and Art 39), suggesting
that Cather’s sympathies should naturally rest with Vickie. Yet in writing this story, an
older Cather seems to put herself in her mother’s and her grandmother’s place as well—
by age sixty, she has crossed over to the side of those who “know” (314). The web of
relations that the story puts into play finds an analog in the narrative style, in which “to
posit one line of sight…necessitates an intersecting line that either crosses, doubles, or
double-crosses it” (Carlin 92). “Old Mrs. Harris” does not privilege a single voice the
way My Antonia privileges Jim’s and The Professor’s House privileges the Professor’s.
Nor does it include interpolated narratives which do “not [seem to be] a part of [the
novel’s] organic structure” (Brown, Critical Biography 259), such as the wedding party
in My Antonia or Tom’s story in The Professor’s House. Instead we have a narrative that
moves fluidly across time, employing flashback while maintaining several threads of
ongoing action, including Mrs. Rosen’s friendship with Mrs. Harris, Victoria’s social and
domestic difficulties, and Vickie’s desire to go to college.
Within this tertiary paradigm, possession as ownership fades from view. The
Templetons are not well-off, living in “a little rented house [that] was much too small for
the family” (272), but neither is anyone else. Even Mr. Rosen, who seems relatively
wealthy in comparison to his neighbors, is described as “the only unsuccessful member of
a large, rich Jewish family” (274). As a result of the Templetons’s move from Mrs.
Harris’s “comfortable rambling old house in Tennessee” (271) to reduced and cramped
circumstances, “Mrs. Harris and her ‘things’ were almost required to be invisible” (272).
These “‘things’” are of the meagerest sort: a comb, night clothes, soap and a towel, and
“her little comforter[,]…the dearest of [her] few possessions” (270–71), which is no more
than a torn sweater left behind by one of Mrs. Rosen’s nephews. As ownership decreases
in importance, the value of “be[ing] dissolved into something complete and great” (MA
14) receives greater emphasis. All of the main characters are possessed by the Templeton
family, or stitched into it, to use the primary metaphor of this story.38 Grandma Harris
sometimes feels “a little low” (289) in the predawn hours, but her depression never
continues past her grandchildren’s wake-up time: “the moment she heard the children
running down the uncarpeted back stairs, she forgot to be low. Indeed, she ceased to be
an individual, an old woman with aching feet; she became part of a group, became a
relationship” (290). Victoria greets her children with “a real smile, she was glad to see
them” (267), and even self-absorbed Vickie is “right good about minding” (267) the baby
and obliging about reading to the little boys. Mrs. Rosen is stitched into the web of the
family as well—sometimes willingly, sometimes less so.
David Stouck sees Cather’s last works, including “Old Mrs. Harris,” as a radical
departure from her earlier preoccupations and themes: “the subject matter of her fiction
now changed; it was important to her to write about human relationships and about life
and death, rather than art” (208).39 However, I disagree with his binary approach to
Cather’s themes. Although My Antonia is a pioneer novel and The Professor’s House is a
novel about intellect, both are also about people—My Antonia is about what Antonia
means to Jim, The Professor’s House is most certainly about life and death, and family is
always important. Furthermore, Stouck’s reading of “Old Mrs. Harris,” while valuable,
entirely omits Mrs. Rosen. He usefully observes that “the effectiveness of the story
derives from the subtlety with which point of view is managed…. The story is narrated so
that the three women in the family, while not understanding each other, emerge
nonetheless as sympathetic individuals to the reader” (209), but he does not even consider
that Mrs. Rosen might be one of the three women in question. Similarly, he observes that
“the interweaving of multiple viewpoints renders movingly the imaginative tension at the
heart of the story: while the memories of hidden longings and isolation are powerfully
recreated through Vickie’s viewpoint, the narrative overview creates the mother and
grandmother with sympathy and compassion” (211). It does not seem like a dramatic leap
to go from “interweaving” to “cross-stitch,” but Stouck leaves out the master cross-
stitcher herself. Thus it seems particularly important to demonstrate how Cather’s
evolving views on ethnicity and identity can be seen through a close reading of the
Rosens.
Mr. and Mrs. David Rosen stand in a paradoxical relation to mainstream Skyline.
These genteel immigrants have managed to make a good life for themselves in a small
Western town, but while they function comfortably within its society, they remain
noticeably above it—economically, educationally, and therefore socially. Still, they do
not antagonize their less privileged neighbors, as Marilyn Arnold notes: “Mrs. Rosen
holds a superior position among the local women, but she never pushes her advantage”
(142). Further, the Rosens do not seem to encounter anti-Semitism, perhaps in part
because they are not stereotypically pushy Jews and because they do not call attention to
the fact that they are Jewish. Indeed, Mrs. Rosen’s “slight accent—it affected only her
th’s and, occasionally, the letter v” (262), constitutes the only flaw her neighbors can
discern: “people in Skyline thought this unfortunate, in a woman whose superiority they
recognized” (262). Her husband, while considered an underachieving black sheep by his
relatives, is nevertheless one of the more well-to-do businessmen in the town. In fact, the
Rosens’s relatively high standard of living might serve to counterbalance the potentially
negative ramifications of their minority status as Jews. In discussing what she terms the
“politics of ethnicity” (63), Bottomley explains that financial achievements can bring
societal acceptance for marginalized groups: “ethnics are devalued minorities, not a
central part of the nation. Those who are accorded centrality…are the economically
successful” (63). The Rosens have enough money and class to place them in the upper
echelons of Skyline society, but without the showiness of a Louie Marsellus or the
physical and social unattractiveness of a Miletus Poppas.40
Thus Cather presents the Rosens as reasonable and admirable people. They retain
traditional Jewish values, such as respect for the elderly and love of children, but they
dismiss the letter of the law and fit comfortably into their adoptive society. Using their
outsider status as a way to transcend provincial divisions (and their money to ensure not
just acceptance but appreciation), the Rosens “belon[g] to no church, [and] contribut[e] to
the support of all[, attending]…the church suppers in winter and the socials in summer”
(282). These are upper-class, educated German Jews, not kerchief- and sidelock-wearing
Russian shetl-dwellers.41 Germany, traditionally considered a cultural and educational
center, served as the birthplace of the Jewish enlightenment and the Reform movement, a
shift towards cultural assimilation and secular education which began in the late
nineteenth century. As exemplars of these trends, the Rosens are learned and culturally
refined. Further, the Rosens employ their liminality, demonstrating the permeable and
continually shifting boundaries that Kallen describes: “individuals keep disregarding
boundaries, whether geographical or cultural. They keep passing into some other group
they are out of. Actually, the more ‘culture’ any of them has acquired, the more liberal or
general his education has been, the fuller is his awareness of the values of the Out-
groups, the freer are his powers to avail himself of them, and the more abundant are his
means wherewith to comprehend and enjoy them” (53). The Rosens are everyone’s rose
garden, the thorn in no one’s side.
In spite of their assimilationist tendencies, the Rosens remain noticeably Jewish and
even Biblical in their basic affinities. Many Biblical foremothers (e.g., Sarah, Rebecca,
Rachel, and Hannah) experience an extended period of childlessness, and Mrs. Rosen
similarly grieves over her barrenness: “it was a bitter sorrow to Mrs. Rosen that she had
no children. There was nothing else in the world she wanted so much” (273). Mr. Rosen
patiently listens to his wife’s running commentary about the comings and goings of the
Templetons because he realizes that this house full of children serves at least on some
level as a surrogate family for his wife, who compares them favorably to their own
thankless and self-centered nieces and nephews. At the same time, Mrs. Rosen’s interest
in the seemingly overlooked Grandma Harris reflects the respect for older people which
marks Biblical stories from Noah to Moses.42 Without preaching or even articulating her
beliefs outright, Mrs. Rosen communicates a reverence for the elderly which is a
hallmark of Jewish culture. Although Mrs. Harris accepts her position as an old woman
as one of relative powerlessness, she deduces that “Jewish people had an altogether
different attitude toward their old folks” (272). The Rosens are assimilated Jews, but
Jewishness remains an integral part of their identity.
Otherness can easily be cause for condemnation in a small town, but not for the
Rosens, whose distinctly Jewish name is also a tag for a central image in the medieval
symbol system of courtly love.43 Medieval romance places the rose image beyond the
confines of time and natural decay, creating a world in which “roses do not die, [and]
dreams become reality” (Kelly 178). As perhaps the only Jews in Skyline, the Rosens
represent an ancient nation still alive today; as the friends and neighbors of the
Templetons, the Rosens introduce new and limitless possibilities, a world in which “if
you want [something] without any purpose at all, you will not be disappointed” (299).
The Rosens show Vickie an alternative to her family’s example—a father “too delicate to
collect his just debts” (279) who cannot keep his family comfortable, a mother who “had
had babies enough” (308) and yet gets pregnant again, a grandmother who receives
visitors in “a hideous, cluttered room, furnished with a rocking-horse, a sewingmachine,
an empty baby-buggy” (264). Although the hours spent reading in “the deep shadow and
quiet” of the Rosen’s well-stocked library “never made her dissatisfied with her own”
house (275), Vickie’s future success is predicated on this kind of exposure to another way
of life. In this way, the Rosens model both tradition and modernity. Furthermore,
Douglas Kelly explains that the rose derives figurative significance from the contrast
“between its appearance and the configuration in which it is placed” (93). The Rosens,
whose house provides “the nearest thing to an art gallery and a museum that the
Templetons had ever seen” (274), join the symbolism of medieval Europe to that of
Jewish mysticism: “like a [rose] among thorns, so is my love among the daughters”
(Jerusalem Bible, Song of Songs 2.1).44 Jewish tradition interprets this verse in
Solomon’s “Song of Songs” as an allegory in which the rose symbolizes the Jewish
people, while the thorns represent the other nations of the world. Mr. and Mrs. David
Rosen, whose name also invokes that of King David, shine out from their surroundings.
Their name is regal, and their neighbors seem to appreciate their worth.
If the Rosens use the otherness of their ethnicity towards positive ends, they also
benefit from a cosmopolitan and international background, which once again
differentiates them from their fellow residents. Accepting Bruce Robbins’s contention
that the cosmopolitan or international position tends to be considered as core in our
culture (172), we then see that the Rosens occupy yet another privileged position. Even
though they have presumably resided in Skyline for some time, the Rosens retain a
metropolitan ethos, corroborating sociologist and urban theorist Park’s claim that the city
is “a state of mind, a body of customs and traditions, and of the organized attitudes and
sentiments that inhere in these customs and are transmitted with this tradition” (91). The
Rosens can be taken out of the city, but the city cannot be taken out of the Rosens. Park
also points out that this ethos is often found in Jews, who “are, before all else, a city folk”
(106). Jews are always cosmopolitans with a difference, however. They are free from
provincial paradigms, but their position is not necessarily one arrived at wholly by free
will. For the Jewish Rosens, the line between mobility and homelessness is a thin one.
Thus it is no surprise that Rosens’ insider/outsider status in Skyline also suggests the
prototype of the Wandering Jew, a figure who retains a detachment from people and
places which promotes transcendence of petty preoccupations. Mr. Rosen is a paragon of
this type: “all countries were beautiful to Mr. Rosen. He carried a country of his own in
his mind, and was able to unfold it like a tent in any wilderness” (282–3). As Park would
say, he has clearly “acquire[d] [the] abstract terms with which to describe the various
scenes he visits” (106). For her part, Mrs. Rosen has all the sensibilities and tendencies
required of metropolitan life, as delineated by Park’s mentor, Georg Simmel:
“punctuality, calculability, [and] exactness” (51). From her “symmetrically plaited
coffee-cake, beautifully browned, delicately peppered over with poppy seeds, with sugary
margins about the twists” (262) to “her kitchen [left] in a state of such perfection as the
Templetons were unable to sense or admire” (275), Mrs. Rosen is clearly a person who
values “order and comeliness” (264). The Rosens’s ability to transplant themselves and
thrive in a very different cultural climate from that of European capitals and fine opera
suggests that they possess “cosmopolitan mobility” (Robbins 172).
Although we are never actually told where the Rosens lived before Skyline, we can
infer that they have connections to New York. First of all, we have the popular myth that
all American Jews are former New Yorkers (and Brooklyners, to be specific).45 Beyond
this folk wisdom, Cather’s text provides more tangible evidence through Mrs. Rosen’s
associations. The moon in Skyline prompts Mrs. Rosen to think about “the Adirondacks,
for which she was always secretly homesick in summer” (282), allowing us to reasonably
conclude that she and her husband had spent the winters in New York City and the
summers upstate. In any case, it is a combination of the Rosens’ different identities—
Jewish, European, and cosmopolitan—that makes them so important to the Templetons
and to the text. These cultured immigrants serve as a counterpoint or foil to the equally
displaced and in many ways equally foreign Templetons. In this position, they can serve
as validators, bridge-builders, and enablers.
Mrs. Rosen’s traditional Jewish enjoyment of children, respect for the elderly, and
belief in education forge a bond between herself and all three generations of Templeton
women. Yet not one of these relationships is uncomplicated, a truth embodied by the
cross-stitch, Mrs. Rosen’s avocation and her method of relating to those she values. In
Cather’s always-significant opening line (Arnold 141), “Mrs. David Rosen, cross-stitch
in hand, [sits] looking out of the window across her own green lawn to the sunburned
yard of her neighbours on the right” (262), crossly waiting for an opportune time to run
“across the alley-way” (270) to see Mrs. Harris. This scene provides an early intimation
of the cross-purposes which will characterize neighborly relations, as Mrs. Rosen
continually crosses or criticizes Grandma Harris, Victoria, and Vickie.
Watching baby Hughie nurse on her first visit to her neighbor’s house, Mrs. Rosen
“could not help admiring him and his mother. They were so comfortable and complete”
(280). This Madonna-like depiction constitutes perhaps the most powerfully positive
image of Victoria in the story, and Cather accomplishes several aims by including this
imagery. First of all, the fact that Mrs. Rosen, a Jew, can appreciate the mother and child
suggests the potential for bridging the gaps created by ethnicity and religion. Secondly,
Mrs. Rosen’s aesthetic appreciation for an image which has so frequently been the
subject of art testifies to her cosmopolitan cultivation. Finally, Mrs. Rosen is a person
who “gave credit where credit was due” (295); her own disappointing childlessness does
not keep her from admiring a mother of many beautiful children. Thus Mrs. Rosen’s first
impression of Victoria serves to somewhat counterbalance her clear disapproval of her
neighbor’s mothering techniques: “‘dat woman takes no more responsibility for her
children than a cat takes for her kittens’” (273). As she gets to know the family better,
Mrs. Rosen finds herself wanting desperately to “for once…get past the others to the real
grandmother” (265) and pays court to Mrs. Harris with coffee cakes, cookies, and
sweaters. Always “on her guard” (265), Mrs. Harris exasperates Mrs. Rosen with her
continual deference to her daughter and grandchildren and her willingness to carry their
burdens. Mrs. Harris claims not to mind working for the younger generations, but Mrs.
Rosen resists “the chain of responsibility…the irritating sense of being somehow
responsible for Vickie” (277). Nevertheless, although she “hated the girl’s bringing-up so
much that she sometimes almost hated the girl” (274), Mrs. Rosen’s appreciation for
scholarship makes her a patient listener to Vickie’s Latin translations and a fervent
advocate for Vickie’s ambitions to attend college.
The Rosens encounter a culture clash when they encourage Vickie to try for a college
scholarship, however. When Mrs. Rosen reminds Mr. Templeton that his daughter “‘has
finished de school here, and she should be getting training of some sort’” (277), he
merely laughs. Later, the dogged Mrs. Rosen brings up Vickie’s studying over tea with
Victoria and Mrs. Harris and is politely informed that “none of our people, or Mr.
Templeton’s either, ever went to college” (295)—the implication here being, “you are
foreign and other, and we do things our way.” Education may be second nature to these
multilingual Europeans Jews, but their country neighbors do not share their enthusiasm or
ambition.
Thus the Rosens bring a different set of ethnically based values to their relationship
with the Templetons, creating both bonds and tensions. Another element that the Rosens
bring into this cultural cross-stitch is demography. The Rosens have internalized the
standards of their more urban and northern background, while the Templetons reflect
their rural southern roots (Arnold 152). Like most women of her age and class, Mrs.
Harris “believe[s] that somebody ought to be in the parlour, and somebody in the
kitchen” (288). Conversely, Mrs. Rosen feels that Mrs. Harris should be accorded more
respect in her household. It becomes crucial for Mrs. Harris to show Mrs. Rosen that she
is not “‘put upon’ [for]…to be pitied was the deepest hurt anybody could know” (272). A
stalwart Yankee, Mrs. Rosen feels no affection for typically “willowy or languishing”
(279) Southern ladies and refuses on principle to acknowledge “a silly, Southern name”
(278) like Adelbert.46 The Templetons are equally mystified by the way Mrs. Rosen
“wasted so much pains and good meat” (298) on her clear soups. Nevertheless, it is
interesting that despite Mrs. Rosen’s northern affiliations, Mrs. Harris does not classify
her with Skyline’s “meddlesome ‘Northerners’ [who] said things that made Victoria
suspicious and unlike herself” (288). Furthermore, although Mrs. Rosen worries that old
Mrs. Harris is inadequately honored in the Templeton household, she takes pains to work
within the system, limiting her response to muttered expressions of indignation and
affronted complaints to Mr. Rosen. Mrs. Harris knows that Mrs. Rosen “understood how
it was” (271) and appreciates her efforts to avoid alienating Victoria.
This knowledge of how things are and the attendant willingness to play along allow
the Rosens to validate the Templetons in important ways. Having the benefit of a wider
experience, the Rosens can affirm some of the Templeton norms which seem so foreign
to the Main Street denizens of a “snappy little Western Democracy” (288). The
transplanted Templetons try without success to recreate a courtly code right out of the
Arthurian legend. For example, Victoria, “who had been a belle in…Tennessee” (286)
where she was “admired and envied” (288), acts the part of the Lady of a courtly
romance. Her “tall figure and good carriage” (295), along with her “training… to the end
that you must give a guest everything you have” (285) suggests noblesse oblige. Her
lover and husband—”people usually called him ‘young Mr. Templeton’” (278–9)—
”came of a superior family” (287), if not wholesale aristocracy. He has a “boyish, eager-
to-please manner[,]…[a] fair complexion and blue eyes” (279) and chivalrous, “lovely
manners” (300), much like Fair Welcome in Guillaume De Lorris’ “The Romance of the
Rose. 47
Also like a traditional knight-errant, Hillary Templeton spends a significant amount of
time away from home, allowing the Rosens to step in and effectively pay obeisance to the
ladies of his house. As if living out the symbolic roots of their name, the Rosens validate
the rules of the “feudal so ciety” (288) to which the Templetons still adhere, injecting
elements of courtly love into their interactions with the family. Mr. Rosen, perhaps the
only non-family member in all of Skyline who truly appreciates Victoria, is essential to
her self esteem. Observing and enjoying that Victoria is still a “handsome woman” (262),
Mr. Rosen displays his regard by closing “his store half an hour earlier than usual for the
pleasure of walking home with her” (267). At the Methodist ice cream social, Victoria’s
children are proud and happy to notice “how nicely he placed a chair for her and insisted
upon putting a scarf about her shoulders” (284). Although he is not a man of many words,
he “in his quiet way ma[kes] Mrs. Templeton feel his real friendliness and admiration”
(284). When this elicits a negative response from the malicious Mrs. Jackson, Mr. Rosen,
albeit unsuccessfully, tries to distract Victoria and protect her from hurt.
Mrs. Rosen is the similarly self-appointed champion of Mrs. Harris. Although Mrs.
Harris’ “friendship with this kind of neighbor was almost as disturbing as it was pleasant”
(272), Arnold goes so far as to suggest that “it is partly Mrs. Rosen’s appreciative point
of view that accords Grandma dignity and personal worth” (143). Mrs. Rosen considers
Mrs. Harris “impressive” (264), and seeks to enjoy her company alone whenever
possible. Like the Lover in “The Romance of the Rose,” Mrs. Rosen finds her
“advances…alternatively welcomed…and discouraged”(Horgan xii–xiii), as when Mrs.
Harris first accepts the gift of the nephew’s forgotten sweater and then guardedly parries
Mrs. Rosen’s questions while barely nibbling her coffee cake. In the end of both De
Lorris’ poem and Cather’s story, however, “love is stronger than reason…in spite of the
obstacles that separate” (Horgan, xiii). This kind of love and validation leads Arnold to
conceptualize the Rosens’s role as the “healer” (152).
Thus while other townspeople laugh at Mr. Templeton, scorn Victoria, and pity Mrs.
Harris, the Rosens behave in a manner the Templetons can understand for the most part.
At times, however, the habits and capabilities of the Rosens exceed even Mrs. Harris’s
capacity for psychological assimilation, and in these instances she accommodates their
idiosyncracies through the rubric of “foreign-ness.” For example, Mrs. Harris concludes
“that Mrs. Rosen managed to be mistress of any situation, either in kitchen or parlour
…because she was ‘foreign.’ Grandmother…knew well enough that their own ways of
cooking and cleaning were primitive beside Mrs. Rosen’s” (289). In this way, Mrs. Harris
both explains Mrs. Rosen’s capabilities and excuses herself from trying to emulate them.
Mrs. Harris’ conception of herself as “primitive” further invokes the insurmountable gaps
in sensibility between a pioneer community in Colorado and the civilized background of
thousands of years in Europe. On another occasion, Mrs. Rosen’s effusiveness leaves
Mrs. Harris “looking down at her hand [and thinking] how easy it was for these
foreigners to say what they felt!” (304). Just as the Rosens’s awareness of their own
otherness provides them a certain measure of distance from the people around them, Mrs.
Harris uses this otherness as a means of achieving detachment from a personal
relationship that might become threatening.
The irony, of course, is that the southern-born Templetons are at least as foreign as the
European-born Rosens. Both are outsiders, though they seem to be on opposite ends of
the spectrum: the people of Skyline consider the Rosens above themselves and the
Templetons beneath them. Mrs. Harris, however, sees her family’s southern heritage as
placing them a cut above, and she thinks “with modest pride that with people like the
Rosens she had always ‘got along nicely.’ It was only with the ill-bred and unclassified,
like this Mrs. Jackson next door, that she had disagreeable experiences. Such folks, she
told herself, had come out of nothing and knew no better” (306). In Mrs. Harris’s own
home in Tennessee, “there had been plenty of helpers…glad to render service to the more
fortunate” (287–88). Her daughter was a belle, and her son-in-law had good breeding, if
not inherited wealth. Indeed, in the context of Cather’s story, it would seem possible to
argue for “southern” as an ethnio ity and the Templetons as ethnic (im)migrants.48 Sollors
paves the way for this sort of reading when he points out that White Anglo-Saxon
Protestant is an ethnicity, although “it is a widespread practice to define ethnicity as
otherness” (Beyond 25). Using Sollors’s characterization of “ethnic” as denoting
difference or even a lack of full citizenship (according to mainstream Americans)
(Beyond 25), we can insist that the southern Templetons experience the difficulties of
their status as a marginalized minority in Skyline. Through their cosmopolitan
advantages, the Rosens win a position of acceptance in their Colorado community (and
one not usually available to Jews). Instead of reinforcing their own position by pushing
the Templetons down further, the Rosens use their liminality to heal, so that the otherness
they share cements a bond between them. The complexity of this bond is once again
embodied in the cross-stitch.
Although the task of forming innumerable small, meticulous x-shapes can seem
arduous or meaningless, the resulting gestalt is often beautiful. Mrs. Rosen’s impatience
with and criticism of the Templetons also eventually gives way to what Arnold identifies
as the “rather marvelous friendship” that evolves between Mrs. Rosen and Mrs. Harris
(150). Mrs. Rosen transcends and exceeds blood ties when the torn sweater she gives to
Mrs. Harris “become[s] the dearest of Grandmother’s few possessions. It was kinder to
her… than any of her own children had been” (271). Further, Mrs. Harris demonstrates a
real trust in Mrs. Rosen by turning to her for help when Vickie reveals that her father will
not fund her college education. In a rare expression of emotion “Mrs. Harris’s red-brown
eyes slowly [fill] with tears…[and she says] ‘Thank you, ma’am. I wouldn’t have turned
to nobody else’” (304). Mrs. Harris treats Mrs. Rosen like family. Mrs. Rosen’s response,
“that means I am an old friend already, doesn’t it Grandma?” (304), does not receive
direct affirmation from Mrs. Harris. On her deathbed, however, Mrs. Harris reflects that
“she didn’t have to see Mrs. Rosen again to know that Mrs. Rosen thought highly of her
and admired her—yes admired her. Those funny little pats and arch pleasantries had
meant a great deal” (313).
Although Mrs. Rosen claims to help Vickie solely out of a desire to please Mrs.
Harris, Cather indicates that Mrs. Rosen the cross-stitcher might also be stitched into the
web of life by others. If Mr. Rosen has adopted Victoria and Mrs. Rosen has adopted
Mrs. Harris, it would seem that Vickie has adopted the Rosens. In their relationship with
her, they become enablers, and these childless members of an ancient nation forge a link
with the future. Vickie, who “never paid compliments, absolutely never” (277), verbally
expresses her desire to emulate the Rosens, admitting, “I want to pick up any of these
books and just read them, like you and Mr. Rosen do” (277). Similarly, a frustrated
Vickie reacts to her family’s apparent indifference to her needs with the pouting
observation that “nobody but Mr. Rosen seemed to take the least interest” (312).
Although “sometimes Vickie Templeton seemed so dense, so utterly unperceptive, that
Mrs. Rosen was ready to wash her hands of her” (277), the relationship triumphs, and the
Rosens encourage, inspire, and enable Vickie to take the road out of Skyline that “led
toward the moon” (282).
When Vickie receives her acceptance letter, she goes first to the Rosens with the good
news. Mrs. Rosen, “delighted[,]…squeezed the girl’s round, good-natured cheeks, as if
she could mould them into something definite then and there” (298). For his part, Mr.
Rosen looks at Vickie “through his kind, remote smile” (299). Then trying “to distract her
and help her to keep back the tears” (299), he gives Vickie her first French lesson: “‘‘Le
but n’est rien; le chemin, c’est tout.’ That means: The end is nothing, the road is all’”
(299). This scene shows that the biologically barren Rosens have figuratively created a
child in their own image. The Rosens then take the step of putting this new-born creation
on its feet, so to speak, by granting Vickie an unsecured loan that will enable her to
actually attend the university. Now Vickie “won’t just sit on de front porch” (298), but
will make something of her life, and through her, the Rosens will help create the future.
It is worth noting that Vickie’s future success will also be brought about through
migration, and specifically through migration to a city. In facilitating Vickie’s move to
Ann Arbor, the Rosens point her in the direction of the cosmopolitan and also towards
another degree of otherness. As Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse point out,
“Vickie…move[s] outside the home, beyond female community, and into the larger
male-dominated world of the university” (596). Furthermore, this entrance will bring
both freedom and conformity, as Mrs. Rosen makes clear. Since Mrs. Rosen comes “from
a much wider experience” (296) than the Templetons, she takes it upon herself to teach
Vickie the proper etiquette, informing her, “if you are going off into the world, it is quite
time you learn to like things that are everywhere accepted” (300). Ironically, Mrs. Rosen
prepares Vickie for moving into the world by making her more conformist, but perhaps
Mrs. Rosen aims to save Vickie from the future embarrassment of being viewed as a
country-bumpkin. In finding her niche in Skyline, Mrs. Rosen has clearly discovered that
gaining respect requires a measure of conformity.
The Rosens—Jewish, cosmopolitan, and foreign—comprise a crucial element of this

story by virtue of the tension they create, the bonds they form, and the roles they play.
Instead of submerging or smoothing over their multiple identities, the Rosens nurture and
utilize their otherness as a “ditch to build bridges over” (282). Still, the Rosens can only
build bridges to the future—they cannot provide closure. Noting that we do not know
what will happen to Victoria and Vickie, David Daiches remarks that “patterns which
involve different generations are never complete” (93). Carlin similarly points out that
Vickie occupies a particularly ambiguous position, as “her destiny is left open-ended and
unsignified, seemingly different from the other women’s in the text” (112), and yet
Cather does tell us that Vickie’s “lot will be more or less like” Grandma Harris’s (314).
In this story, the narrative voice allows the reader to sympathize at various times with all
the major characters (Brown, Critical Biography 259). Furthermore, this sympathy
reflects Cather’s identification with (or at least her willingness to adopt the view of) three
people at once—teenager Willie Cather, middle-aged Mary Virginia Cather, and old
Rachel Boak. But she is also herself nearing sixty. Even in one of the last stories
published during her lifetime (and one of her most autobiographical) Cather continues her
career-long attempt to represent fluid fictional and personal selves through multiple
subject positioning.
Cather continually saw herself and her art anew, experimenting with narration, form,
and characterization and relentlessly trying to capture and communicate “the inexplicable
presence of the thing not named” (NUF 50). In her personal life and in her fiction, Cather
persistently defied easy categorization across a broad range of identity categories. Critical
models which seek to place her definitively on one side or another of such binarisms as
nativist/pluralist, nostalgic/modernist, patriarchal/feminist, prejudiced/openminded end in
quagmires which do not provide insight into Cather’s goals or accomplishments. By
engaging with some crucial issues of the early twentieth century—personal identity and
the nature of the self, national identity and immigration, tradition and change, love and
relationships—repeatedly and across her lifetime, Cather created an oeuvre of multi-
layered texts with lasting relevance, works which represent both an American subjectivity
and a looser conceptualization of identity.
Chapter Three
“Fiction Was Another Way of Telling the
Truth”: Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein had a lot in common with Willa Cather, but their literary lives turned out
quite differently. Still they did share some views on the art of writing. Although Cather
wrote subtle and often conservative fiction where Stein offered highly experimental and
explicitly erotic works (Shaw, “Victorian” 23–24), both knew that journalism and literary
art were incompatible. Just as Cather came to see the truth in Jewett’s admonition that she
would never be a great writer as long as she was working at McClure’s, Stein told
Hemingway, “if you keep on doing newspaper work you will never see things, you will
only see words and that will not do, that is of course if you intend to be a writer” (ABT
213).1 While both Cather and Stein needed and wanted to make money at their profession
and to secure an appreciative audience, both wrote for reasons other than fortune and
fame. Both writers were “trying to do something quite different,” in the words of Cather’s
Godfrey St. Peter, and like St. Peter, both struggled to communicate with a critical
readership that “merely thought [they were]…trying to do the usual thing, and had not
succeeded very well” (PH 32). Experimental in her own way, Cather sought to create her
own kind of realism and explored different possibilities for the novel demeuble.2 For her
part, Stein showed a career-long interest in the potential of modern narrative, particularly
as it related to the virtually concomitant coming of age of modernity and of her own
sense of self.
Stein never identified herself as an expatriate, and justifiably so, according to
Benjamin Spencer (211). However, subsequent critics have emphasized her outsider
status, particularly her position as a Jew, a lesbian, a woman artist/intellectual/genius, and
an American whose permanent residence was overseas. Perhaps against what would have
been Stein’s own self-concept, Dearborn identifies her as an “ethnic expatriate” (173).
Ethnicity was not always a salient aspect of Stein’s sense of who she was, and Jewishness
is not a major preoccupation in her earlier texts. Indeed, Three Lives seems to deflect
attention from Stein’s own ethnic heritage by concentrating on people who seem—on the
surface, at any rate—to have little in common with her, although many of these
characters are “ethnic” in American terms. In ignoring her own ethnic roots, however,
Stein set up a roadblock of sorts to any kind of satisfying sense of self. William Gass’s
characterization of the young adult Stein as “a faithless Jew, a coupon clipper, exile
anyhow, and in addition… desperately uncertain of her own sexuality” (16) highlights the
connection between these identity categories. Although Gass declares that “the problem
of personal identity…is triumphantly overcome in The Geographical History of
America” (16), Stein’s coming to terms with her own personal identity, as well as with
the concept of personal identity as a whole, actually takes place over a longer period of
time. With regard to ethnicity, for example, the transformation from writing about ethnic
others to owning one’s self as ethnic, from hiding behind the mask of ethnicity to
“Fiction was another way of telling the truth”: gertrude stein 65
employing it as a strategy, occurs over an extended period, roughly between “Melanctha”

(1909) and Everybody’s Autobiography (1937). “Melanctha” deals mainly with lower-
class black characters, and The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas speaks about Jews, but
only as objects of disparaging and distancing remarks. By Everybody’s Autobiography,
however, Stein owns herself as Jewish and sees that as a valuable link between herself
and other geniuses (Stimpson, “Lie” 160). Stein was a highly autobiographical writer. As
Benstock has observed, Stein “tak[es] her own biography as her artistic subject matter,”
adding that “everything in her adult life became a subject for and was subjected to her
art” (14). If biography was Stein’s main source of literary inspiration, admitting her
heritage and roots and owning her ethnic identity could only add to the fullness of her
writing.
On the surface, Stein does not seem like someone intent on loosening up the
boundaries between identity categories, in part because she was not outspoken in some of
her identifications. She downplayed her Jewishness (i.e., ignored her ethnic identity),
preferred to live where no one else spoke English (i.e., submerged her national identity),
and set up a remarkably traditional patriarchal household for herself and her “wife,” Alice
(i.e., reinforced traditional gender categories). Nevertheless, she would eventually find
strength in the same aspects of herself which she seemed most intent on suppressing or
denying. Stein could not create herself ex-nihilio. Rather she needed to learn to accept
and to use her roots as an asset, as William Carlos Williams insisted: “no use for Stein to
fly to Paris and forget it. The thing, the United States, the unmitigated stupidity, the drab
tediousness of the democracy, the overwhelming number of the offensively ignorant, the
dull of nerve—is there in the artist’s mind and cannot be escaped by taking a ship. She
must resolve it if she can, if she is to be” (58). The same could be said of Stein’s ethnic
heritage and sexual orientation. The tensions that Gass enumerates are resolved in part
through Stein’s life and in part through her texts—the line between the two is often
blurred. A writer of meandering and eclectic works, Stein was also a Wandering Jew and
a thoroughgoing cosmopolitan from an early age. As Donald Sutherland notes, “that she
was personally disconnected from any native or local context is again partly a Jewish
situation and partly the accident of being born in Pennsylvania, traveling in France and
Austria, and living in California and Baltimore, all before turning up for college work at
Radcliffe, in the deliquescence of New England and the Puritan tradition” (M.Hoffman
93). Thus thinking of Stein as “completely and entirely american” (ABT 16) or
connecting her exclusively with Paris still leaves out a good bit of the geographical
crossing she experienced and chronicles in her texts (e.g. Belley, Spain, England). Stein
admits that the habit of picking up roots and moving can create a sense of rootlessness,
but qualifies this assertion by pointing out that “‘our roots can be anywhere and we can
survive, because if you think about it, we take our roots with us’” (Preston 157). Further,
she argues that it is not necessary to return to roots; it is only necessary “‘to have the
feeling that they exist, that they are somewhere’” (Preston 157). As a lifetime traveler and
an American, a lesbian and a patriarchal presence, a Jew and an anti-Semite, Stein
occupied multiple subject positions. As a writer intent on creating a continuous present
and committed to giving birth to the twentieth century, Stein offers visions and re-visions
of her own development and that of the world around her.
Over the course of a lifetime of writing and changing, Stein discovered that adaptation
and survival in the modern period required transitivity, the loosening of inherited forms
and definitions, and the blurring and blending of boundaries. She redefined some genres,
such as autobiography, and discarded those which no longer seemed relevant, such as the
realistic novel.3 Binaries like fiction/non-fiction she dismantled beyond recognition.
MELANCTHA HERBERT, NEW TRUE WOMAN
Stein considered the story she placed in the center of her first published collection “the
first definite step away from the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century in
literature” (ABT 54). “Melanctha” does indeed constitute an early prototype of what
Cantor would call the expressionist strain of modernism, portraying minds immersed in
short, energized bursts of experience (80). As the middle narrative of Three Lives,
“Melanctha” occupies a symbolic discursive position. The story is a microcosm of the
larger work, focusing on three lives in and of itself, namely Melanctha Herbert’s, Rose
Johnson’s, and Jeff Campbell’s.4 Indeed, although Melanctha is the title character, the
story itself begins with Rose Johnson, and the first several pages are devoted to Rose’s
background and Rose’s view of Melanctha. The fact that many critics identify Stein with
Jeff would also lead us to expect him to take over the story (as, for example, My Antonia
becomes more about Jim—a Cather-figure—than Antonia), and yet the story remains
distinctly Melanctha’s.5
In addition to serving in a synechdochic capacity, “Melanctha” is framed (flanked,
enveloped, enclosed, entrapped) by two stories about working-class German-American
(white) women. This placement was clearly intentional because the order of composition
was “The Good Anna,” “The Gentle Lena,” and, lasdy, “Melanctha” (Wagner-Martin,
Favored 77). “Melanctha” both disrupts and elucidates the stories which frame it. In it,
Stein details a black world. No white characters of any importance appear within the
context of the story, and few are even mentioned (although Melanctha does wander with
a few unnamed white men at various points). And yet the white world impinges on
Melanctha’s from both sides. While we can see Melanctha as hemmed in by a legacy of
slavery and by ongoing racism, we might also observe that Stein’s collection
simultaneously poses a certain de-facto equalization.6 Implicit in referring to the
eponymous three lives as such is a lack of value judgment or distinction. All three women
live. All three women have troubled sexual and emotional relationships. All three women
die. White and black, smart and dull, the women end up in much the same place. The
same conclusion can be reached through Stein’s assessment of Three Lives as dealing
with “‘niggers and servant girls and the foreign population generally’” (qtd. in Wald
240). While this quote is racist, totalizing, and as politically incorrect as possible, it
nevertheless shows that Stein had some understanding of the marginal status shared by
lower-class, immigrant, and black Americans around the turn of the century.
Stein certainly claims to have firsthand knowledge of the kind of people about whom
she writes, referring to Three Lives as “‘a book about different characters, three different
people I knew long ago’” (qtd. in Wagner-Martin, Favored 87). While we cannot connect
the name “Melanctha” with that of a specific person as we can for Cather’s Antonia
(Annie Sadilek Pavelka) or Stein’s Good Anna (Lena Lebender), Wagner-Martin writes
that Stein would have had opportunities to gain insight into how people like Melanctha
lived: “during [Stein’s] teen years in Oakland, California, she had listened to and watched
blacks in Fruitvale; during her practical training at medical school, she had known black
women as patients in Baltimore” (Favored 78).7 This explanation hardly supports Stein’s
claim that “no one knew black culture better than she” (Wagner-Martin, Favored 78), but
it does to some degree legitimate Stein’s use of black subjects. Some have seen this text
as a racist and classist appropriation, a way to play it safe by deflecting her own
difference onto less privileged others.8 Although this phenomenon plays a role in the
text’s mode of representation, “Melanctha” should not be reduced to “merely” a code or a
set of substitutions. For instance, Stein’s Paris present comes into play in the text as well,
if we can trust “Alice,” who recalls that “the poignant incidents that [Stein] wove into the
life of Melanctha were often these she noticed in walking down the hill from the rue
Ravignan” (ABT 49). Further, both Jeff and Melanctha are comprised of some of the
attributes of Stein’s younger self.
As Cather would later do in My Antonia, Stein projects aspects of herself onto both a
male and a female character in “Melanctha.” She is Jeff Campbell, steady and reliable
man, and Melanctha Herbert, wild and wandering woman. Ruddick sees this
“bifurcat[ion]” as a division into “a Jamesian male and a victimized woman,” noting that
“Stein tends to think of herself as variously male and female” (Reading 53). While I
agree with Ruddick’s general point, I resist the binary implications of a term like
“bifurcation.” Ruddick sees Melanctha as a repository for the “parts of Stein that Jeff
(and William James) did not express” (4), but I would point out that “James” runs in
Melanctha’s blood, as well. The father whom she both hates and admires (and certainly
takes after) is also a James, namely James Herbert. Further, I would hesitate to identify
Melanctha purely as a victim, though WagnerMartin also sees Melanctha as a
“victim…of prescriptive heterosexual culture” (Favored 79). The woman-as-victim
paradigm is essentially Victorian, and it is the Victorian sensibility that Stein clearly
rejects in her creation of “Melanctha” (Blackmer 34). Stein shows Melanctha from her
girlhood as smart, savvy, and able to take care of herself. Her decisions might not always
be the best ones, but she is not ignorant, passive, or helpless. This heroine has nothing to
do with purity (she sleeps around), piety (she rarely attends church), domesticity (she has
no permanent home), or submission (she defies her parents and rarely acknowledges any
kind of authority), and yet she wins the reader’s sympathy. Melanctha is a new kind of
literary heroine, the True Woman of the twentieth century.
In addition to adhering to the tenets of the Cult of True Womanhood, the nineteenth-
century True Woman was, by definition, Anglo-Saxon, cultured, polite, and heterosexual.
Melanctha, on the other hand, is an American bisexual mulatta, an individualist, a free
spirit, and a paragon of mixed blood. Indeed, her story itself invokes an American
sensibility which actually stood as a barrier to publication. When Stein submitted the
manuscript of Three Lives to Grant Richards for possible publication in England,
Richards responded that the text would have trouble attracting an English readership, in
part due to “the question of scene and atmosphere, both in this case so very American
that the ordinary English reader would be a little at a loss” (54). Even more so than the
protagonists of the other two stories, Melanctha elides categorization. As if to dramatize
this difference, Stein leaves this title character on her own, without adjectives or
modifiers. She is not “good” or “gentle,” but simply “Melanctha: Each One as She May.”
This subtitle has several connotations. On the one hand, it invokes a moral hands-off: to
each his own. The relativism such a stance implies is characteristic of modernist texts
(Cantor 39), and it prefigures the position that Stein will take on such taboo issues as
promiscuity and lesbianism in the narrative that follows. Taken from a Darwinian or
economic perspective, the statement of non-judgementalism found in the story’s subtitle
suggests a lack of communal responsibility, a sense that everyone is on her own. The
narrator seems to sympathize with Melanctha, but no one can save her or help her escape
her predicaments.
Melanctha’s name is not typically black American the way that Anna and Lena are
common German-American names, but it does give us some indication of what kind of a
person she is. Melanctha is melancholy, as we see from the beginning pages of the
narrative: “sometimes the thought of how all her world was made, filled the complex,
desiring Melanctha with despair. She wondered, often, how she could go on living when
she was so blue” (48). And yet she also possesses the capacity for foolish joy. Further,
the name Herbert invokes the subtle and “lowly herb” (Skaggs 54) in contrast to Rose
Johnson’s flamboyant, strong-smelling, love-symbolizing bloom. “Herb” suggests
Melanctha’s socio-economic status (low), her tendency to display a meek “sweetness”
(73), the possibility of a bitter life for her (i.e., bitter herbs), and her potential for varied
usefulness (e.g., healing, producing a pleasant taste or smell). Melanctha is thus unlike
both the women whose stories frame hers and the other women in her text.
Blackmer identifies Melanctha as “a mulatta suspended between two races and
sexualities” (15), but I would argue that she is not so much suspended as passing. She
neither passes for white nor engages in cross-dressing, and yet she is ultimately
“mysterious” (50, 61) and unknowable. This is true on a physical level as well as on a
more symbolic one. Stein underscores the enigmatic quality of race by telling us that
Melanctha’s mother is a mulatta while her father is very black, and then referring to
Melanctha on several occasions as “half white” (48). In this way Stein shows the futility
of applying scientific terms to racial composition. Figuratively speaking, Melanctha’s
mystery might stem from her refusal to adopt and conform to a single, unitary subject
position for any sustained period of time. She will not settle down to the exclusionary
role of wife, mistress, or midwife. Unlike Larsen’s Helga Crane, whose passing is
connected to her serial identifications,9 Melanctha passes by eliding categories altogether.
She has no essential self. Helvie speaks to this phenomenon when she attests that
“perhaps the word ‘passing’ is more accurately a reflection of the ability of some people
to transcend artificial binaries, representing the slippage which occurs every time we
attempt to use an adjective” (39), simultaneously noting society’s discomfort with this
sort of ambiguity.
Melanctha’s fluid sexual orientation is potentially as threatening as her ambiguous
racial heritage. Elaine Ginsberg notes that gender ambiguity causes at least as much
anxiety and backlash in our society as racial crossing: “it can be argued that gender, in
the arbitrariness of its cultural prescriptions, is a trope of difference that shares with race
(especially in the context of black/white passing) a similar structure of identity categories
whose enactments and boundaries are culturally policed” (13).10 Thus, I would argue that
Melanctha does not hover between categories, as Blackmer’s term “suspended” would
suggest. Rather, she assumes and discards different identities fluidly. Furthermore, while
Melanctha might be viewed as a passing subject, I resist the temptation to view her text
as passing for Q.E.D., a blackface version of Stein’s earlier work. In agreeing with
Blackmer’s assertion that “Melanctha” is not just a translation of Q.E.D. in which race
substitutes for or masks sexuality (55–56), I would further point out that (homo)sexuality
is not at all submerged, repressed, masked, or coded in “Melanctha” (or, for that matter,
in “The Good Anna”). All of these issues are integrally connected with “Melanctha” as
an autonomous text.
As a passing subject, Melanctha is very much a “sel[f] in transit, between narratives as
much as between geopolitical locations” (Wald 238). She needs to wander in order to
live, like a shark that must move continually in order to keep oxygen pumping through its
gills. When she stops to perform a single unitary identity position, she is imminent danger
of suffocating or drowning. Thus Melanctha continually role-plays and experiments.
From being hoisted onto construction sites (58) to trying “drinking and some of the other
habits” (59) of her companions, Melanctha finds out who she is through experiential
learning. She has “a strong sense for real experience” (59), and recognizes it in others.
For Melanctha, “real experience” is lived experience, as opposed to book learning or
story-telling. Her taste for it leads her to “experience[d],” “roughened,” and “reckless”
people like Jane Harden (59). “Real experience” is inflected with danger and connected
with “bad habits” (59). Furthermore, its association with wandering suggests that the path
to such wisdom is not direct or predictable. Hence, Melanctha does not settle, but merely
passes through. Melanctha’s wandering helps her “to really understand” (59), and she
seems to be well-liked by the people she encounters. In some ways, though, her passing is
unsuccessful. Unlike Clare Kendry, who will pass in order to get the things she wants
(Cutter 84), “Melanctha had not found it easy with herself to make her wants and what
she had, agree. Melanctha Herbert was always losing what she had in wanting all the
things she saw” (50). After pages and years of wanting, having and losing, Melanctha
ultimately passes away.11
Although wandering is preferable to stagnation, it is not a comfortable place to reside.
Indeed it is not a place at all, but a no-place. Whereas migration implies a destination,
wandering does not have the positive connotations of directed movement. The
quintessential wanderer is, of course, the Wandering Jew,12 a figure who has
paradoxically been inflected with both the curse of homeless immortality and the
enviable position of complete freedom coupled with the possession of extraordinary
knowledge (Stableford 20–21, 7). Like the Wandering Jew, Melanctha seems to find her
“situation carefully made intolerable by one additional affliction or another” (Stableford
21), but unlike the prototypical wanderer she is at least released to death by the end of
Stein’s text. While the parallels to the symbolic Wandering Jew are limited and
Melanctha does not seem like the stuff of archetype, a provocative type of
cosmopolitanism inheres in her wandering. From a young age, Melanctha gives the
appearance of a cosmopolitan, though her worldliness is more social than geographical.
Although she stays in roughly the same location, Melanctha takes on the demeanor of a
world traveler, as the narrator reports, “in these days, Melanctha talked and stood and
walked with many kinds of men…. They all supposed her to have world knowledge and
experience” (55). Still, we might argue that Melanctha’s wandering bestows upon her a
“cosmopolitan mobility” (Robbins 172). She learns to escape and to keep relationships
from getting too deep, like a true metropolitan man. We might further see Melanctha’s
characteristic mysteriousness as a manifestation of metropolitan reserve (Simmel 53). In
order to function in an environment requiring almost continual interaction, the city-
dweller must adopt a protective stance which includes a detachment from the people
around him or her. Melanctha has intimate relationships, but many of her wanderings
take her into contact with only nameless people who do not penetrate her psychic space.
Indeed, one could not imagine Melanctha’s story set in the country. As an early or
“[almost] modernist” text (DeKoven, Rich 68), “Melanctha” reflects the convergence of
the growth of American cities and the beginnings of the modernist movement.13
Melanctha’s coming-of-age is tied to that of the twentieth century, literary modernism,
and, therefore, the modern metropolis.
Since “Melanctha” deals with multiple comings-of-age, it might seem plausible to
consider the text a bildungsroman. Indeed, this lens provides a context for the numerous
details of Melanctha’s childhood and family life that Stein includes in her story. In the
course of the text, we see Melanctha grow from girlhood to sexual maturity and
womanhood. The ending denies us a successful marriage and instead offers death,14 but
the coming-of-age plot is easy to trace. At the same time, it is problematic to assign a
traditional generic category to a text which is structurally underscored by and
thematically saturated with images of mobility, wandering, and passing. Furthermore,
while a young person’s coming of age generally follows a linear and predictable path
(like growing older itself), “Melanctha” employs a wandering sense of time.
Paradoxically, DeKoven sees “Melanctha” both as utilizing “nineteenth-century narrative
forms…as structuring frames” and as constituting a “naturalistic antibildungsroman of
Melanctha’s thwarted life” (Rich 67).15 Although “Melanctha” enters into problematic
dialog with the bildungsroman tradition, Melanctha’s life is not completely “thwarted.”
Also, if the story does not seem pedantic or moralistic, then neither is it naturalistic.
M.H.Abrams defines naturalism in the following way:
[I]t is distinctively a mode of fiction that was developed by a school of

writers in accordance with a particular philosophical thesis. This thesis, a
product of post-Darwinian biology in the nineteenth century, held that a
human being exists entirely in the order of nature and does not have a soul
nor any mode of participating in a religious or spiritual world beyond
nature; and therefore, that such a being is merely a higher-order animal
whose character and behavior are entirely determined by two kinds of
forces, heredity and environment. A person inherits compulsive
instincts—especially hunger, the accumulative drive, and sexuality—and
then is subject to the social and economic forces in the family, the class,
and the milieu into which that person is born. (175)
While Melanctha seems to take after her mother in having an innate drive to wander, her
intellectuality is continually underscored. The narrator characterizes Melanctha as
“subtle” and “intelligent,” while Rose reports that “Melanctha is so bright and learned so
much in school” (48). Even Jane Harden, who cheerfully slanders Melanctha whenever
given the opportunity, admits that “Melanctha Herbert had a good mind, Jane never
denied that to her” (64). Similarly, Jeff Campbell quickly (and to his great satisfaction)
determines that Melanctha “had a good mind” (76). Furthermore, naturalism’s belief in
the power of heredity and environment to totally define stands in stark contrast to the
epigraph of Three Lives, which is taken from Jules Laforgue: “Donc je suis malheureux
et ce n’est ni ma faute ni celle de la vie [Therefore I am unhappy and it is neither my fault
nor that of life]” (iv). The source of the speaker’s unhappiness is neither inborn nor
wholly a function of environment. Perhaps the speaker is cursed like the Wandering Jew,
doomed by a miracle (see Stableford 3), or perhaps the notion of blame itself has lost its
relevance in the speaker’s world. In either case, Melanctha, like Stein, lives at a
transitional period in American and world history. Naturalism’s adoption of Darwinian
theories of evolution and natural selection stands in contrast to modernism’s anti-
historicist stance, which “did not believe that truth lay in telling an evolutionary story”
(Cantor 35). Therefore it would seem that rather than reifying the nineteenth-century’s
preoccupation with the all-encompassing explanatory power of heredity and environment,
Stein is trying to move in a new direction, namely that of the twentieth century. In any
case, bildungsroman or anti-bil-dungsroman, Three Lives is not a novel and “Melanctha”
is not a novella. Stein’s response to questions about the book’s genre sound almost
exactly like the answer Cather will give ten years later about My Antonia: “when asked if
Three Lives was a novel, she replied in her plainspoken way, ‘I hate labels. It’s just a
book…‘” (Wagner-Martin, Favored 87).16
Stein’s refusal to identify Three Lives as a novel suggests that she considered the work
she was doing in the peculiarly twentieth-century “Melanctha” a radical departure from
nineteenth-century modes and concerns. In fact, “Melanctha” embodies some of the
tension between residual nineteenth-century forms and emerging twentieth-century ones.
For example, Stein’s text shares the bildungsroman’s preoccupation with the problematic
nature of families, while simultaneously constituting a breaking away from “the
characteristic plot of mid-nineteenth-century ‘woman’s fiction’” (Showalter 362). In this,
Stein finds an unlikely ally in Edith Wharton, whose Lily Bart wrestles with finding a
functional subject position in a transitional society. Elaine Showalter observes that Lily
“is stranded between two worlds of female experience: the intense female friendships and
mother-daughter bonds characteristic of nineteenth-century American women’s
culture…and the dissolution of these single-sex relationships in the interests of more
intimate friendships between women and men that was part of the gender crisis of the
turn of the century” (358). Melanctha, too, finds herself exchanging intense filial
relations for more shallow friendships and chance encounters with women and men
outside of her family. Thus Stein demythologizes Victorian conceptualizations of
families, and thereby enters the turn-of-the-century debate over the nature of family. One
example of the way Stein opposes Victorian notions of the family is by offering an
alternative to the reigning image of mothers who adore and fathers who protect their
children. Melanctha’s parents do not like her very much. They “found it very
troublesome to have her” (50) and take no pains to hide their disappointment in their
daughter, as Rose informs her husband: “one day Melanctha was real little, and she heard
her ma say to her pa, it was awful sad to her, Melanctha had not been the one the Lord
had took from them stead of the little brother who was dead in the house there from
fever” (127). The feeling is mutual, as Melanctha dislikes her father intensely and “had
not liked her mother very well” (50) either. Furthermore, she uses her book learning and
her “nasty” tongue “to annoy her parents who knew nothing” (51). Melanctha does her
filial duty by her dying mother, but there is never any sense of reconciliation:
“Melanctha’s mother never liked her daughter any better” (65). Early in the text,
Melanctha becomes a heroine whose mother, like Lily Bart’s, “is dead and unmourned”
(Showalter 362). Melanctha’s problematic relation to her parents is further complicated
by racial issues. In contrast with the stereotypical cases of little girls taking after their
mothers and little boys taking after their fathers, the light-skinned Melanctha identifies
with the “black coarse father” she “almost always hated” (50), downplaying her ties to
her “pale” (ghostly, ineffectual, unexciting) and “yellow” (weak, cowardly) mother.17
Melanctha looks like her mother, but inside she is filled with her father’s venom: she
“loved very well the power in herself that came through [her father]” (50). Her
inheritance from her “pale yellow, sweet-appearing mother,” on the other hand, “never
made her feel respect” (50).18 While Melanctha resembles her mother in physical
features, the raw power she longs to wield is modeled by her black and male parent.19
Like her creator, Melanctha first seeks to become part of a community of men: “in these
young days, it was only men that for Melanctha held anything there was of knowledge
and power” (54). Although she recognizes that her power derives from her father, she
does not necessarily see the extent to which she shares his traits. Jane Harden, albeit an
unreliable source, insists that “Melanctha was always abusing her father and yet she was
just like him, and really she admired him so much and he never had any sense of what he
owed to anybody, and Melanctha was just like him and she was proud of it too” (64). In
this way we might read Melanctha’s disdain for her father as a form of masochism or
self-flagellation. All the same, Melanctha eventually suffers because of her social legacy
from her mother. In a patriarchal society which demands fidelity and regularity, “‘Mis’
Herbert had always been a little wandering and mysterious and uncertain in her ways”
(50; see also 52). Her “sweetness, and [her] way of listening with intelligence and
sympathetic interest” (59) are also typical female traits, passed on from mother to
daughter. Although she does not have any children herself, Melanctha expends all her
energy nurturing others until there is no one left to nurture her.20 She occupies the
position of both nurse and mammy when she cares for her mother and for Rose’s baby.
Ultimately, however, Melanctha finds that the affiliative bonds she has created with men
(like Jeff Campbell and Jem Richards) and women (like Jane Harden and Rose Johnson)
cannot fulfill one main purpose of family, that of providing care. Melanctha occupies the
position of black mammy or domestic servant, but her blackness comes from her father,
whose skin color is linked to virility and strength, but also to abandonment and
irresponsibility. In this way, race complicates gender identity, and both require a
revamping of the traditional nuclear family.
In her first attempts to create a mutually supportive affiliative relationship to take the
place of the Victorian family, Melanctha finds Jane Harden. Melanctha initially looks
towards Jane as a parent-figure and eventually acts as a caretaker for her, suggesting that
Jane provides a microcosmic re-enactment, both idealistic and ironic, of a mother-
daughter relationship. Melanctha is sixteen when she meets Jane, a hardened woman of
twentythree, and she feels honored to be accepted by the older woman, “very proud that
this Jane would let her know her” (59). For the first year of their relationship, “Jane had
been much the stronger” (60). Jane occupies the powerful position of teacher, while
Melanctha is “sweet and docile” (60). During her year as a disciple, “Melanctha sat at
Jane’s feet for many hours…and felt Jane’s wisdom” (60). Before too long, however, the
power dynamic shifts—almost imperceptibly, yet irreversibly: “slowly now between
them, it was Melanctha Herbert, who was stronger” (61). Just as Melanctha’s book
learning gives her power over her parents, her wisdom-learning makes her stronger than
Jane. This change spells the end of the relationship, as “slowly now they began to drift
apart from one another” (61). The falling out takes place over about a year, just as
Melanctha’s waxing attraction to Jane does. By the time the relationship peters out,
Melanctha is eighteen, a legal adult and a person who was “ready now herself to do
teaching” (61). Melanctha does not drop Jane completely, but the relationship loses its
fire.
Not long after the relationship with Jane winds down, Melanctha’s mother begins to
die. And “Mis” Herbert takes a long time getting around to it. Prefiguring The
Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas in which circular time prevails and events occur and
recur out of chronological order, “Melanctha” repeatedly announces “Mis” Herbert’s
death and brings her back to life again. The plotting of the story line suggests that Stein
means to underscore the wandering and mysterious tendencies of Melanctha and her
mother by telling about their relations in a wandering, repetitive, indirect manner. The
narrator starts by informing us that “during this year…Melanctha’s pale yellow mother
was very sick, and in this year she died” (62). A few paragraphs later, we find out that
“Melanctha did everything that any woman could, and at last her mother died, and
Melanctha had her buried” (63). In terms of the story, however, “Mis” Herbert is far from
buried. At this point, the text backtracks to describe the evolving relationship between
Melanctha and Jefferson Campbell, the “serious, earnest, good young joyous doctor”
(63), who attended to “Mis” Herbert in her illness. Throughout this flashback, “Mis”
Herbert is “always getting sicker” (65) and “it was pretty sure that she would have to die”
(72), but she “linger[s] on” (77) for several days in story time and quite a few pages of
the text before “slowly and without much pain she died away” (77). Melanctha’s mother
will not pass away swiftly, completely, or simply. Hence, Melanctha has difficulty
separating from her mother and her mother’s legacy of meekness and impotence.
Melanctha’s need to define herself in opposition to her parents (or at least as autonomous
from them) has a psychological (and particularly a psychoanalytic) basis, but it also
reflects the position of the ethnic or immigrant heroine in America. As Dearborn has
pointed out, the typical ethnic heroine separates from her parents in order to establish an
independent American identity; distancing herself from her literal father (or mother)
enables the heroine to adopt the Founding Fathers as her own (76, 89).21 Melanctha’s
goal does not conform to an ideal of Americanization, but her homelessness is
emblematic of the American condition. As Joseph Urgo has extrapolated from a James
Baldwin essay which discusses Americanism, “an entire nation predicated on the belief in
origins elsewhere is a homeless nation” (195). Hence Melanctha’s position as a homeless
member of a homeless nation makes her a particularly apt figure for Stein’s explorations
of how an American self defines itself and functions in the world. Following her mother’s
death, Melanctha loses her living quarters and becomes an orphan without a place or a
purpose: “she lived now with this colored woman and now with that one, and she sewed,
and sometimes she taught a little in a colored school as substitute for some teacher.
Melanctha had now no home nor any regular employment” (62). Paradoxically,
Melanctha’s status as orphan and homeless person allows her to move forward, as the
narrator immediately informs us: “life was just commencing for Melanctha” (62).22
Indeed, her mother’s death might well be taken as a commencement ceremony of sorts.
Although she receives no formal degree, Melanctha now has “wisdom” (62) and the
capacity for independent action. She “did not need help now to know, or to stay longer,
or when she wanted, to escape” (62). At this point, Melanctha is ripe for the heterosexual
relationship which supposedly takes the place of the mother-daughter bond, according to
some models of human development. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, Nancy
Chodorow observes that “because her first love object is a woman, a girl, in order to
attain her proper heterosexual orientation, must transfer her primary object choice to her
father and men” (192). Melanctha’s orientation towards her father is an attraction to the
sources of his power as opposed to a desire to take her mother’s place. Nevertheless, her
eventual ability and willingness to enter into a sustained relationship with a man (namely
Jeff Campbell) is linked both textually and symbolically to her mother’s death.
Furthermore, from the point of view of literary (as opposed to human) development,
“Melanctha” moves away from the pattern of nineteenth-century woman’s fiction and its
emphasis on close mother-daughter relationships by offering a heterosexual friendship
which must have seemed quite risqué and ground-breaking at the time.
The literary representation of close friendships between unmarried men and women
was new and perhaps even radical, and it was certainly indicative of Stein’s plans and
desires to be an innovator. Although Jefferson Campbell enters Melanctha’s life in a
stereotypical and symbolic manner, Stein immediately subverts these conventions. As the
fatherless Melanctha prepares to nurse her mother during her final illness, Jeff appears as
the powerful and paternal doctor. By the time, “Mis” Herbert dies, Melanctha is ready to
affirm Jeff as everything a man or woman could be to a woman for all times:” you
certainly are mother, and father, and brother, and sister, and child and everything, always
to me’” (78).23 Jeff is handsome and successful, an educated professional, and class plays
an important role in the text. Although some critics see the entire story as dealing with a
monolithic “lower-class” (e.g. WagnerMartin, Favored 77), Jeff is in fact middle-class.
While I do not disagree with DeKoven’s statement that “dark race and low
class…together with the maternal itself, erupt in a troubled conjuncture at the birth of
modernist narrative” (Rich 67), I would point out that Melanctha, Jane, Jeff, and Jem are
all remarkable for their light skin, while Jeff is an upwardly-mobile professional. The
narrator perpetuates a pigmentocracy by insisting that Melanctha’s white blood entides
her to better treatment than the dark-skinned Rose (48), while Jane “had much white
blood and that made her see clear” (59). At the same time, Melanctha’s proclivity for
sexual abandon links her to a primitivism defined by “an exuberant enthusiasm for the
simple, the at-once innocent and sexually uninhibited” (DuCille 201). Looking at Jeff’s
model childhood and his middle-class pretensions, on the other hand, contemporary black
readers might well have recognized him as a figure who should be condemned as “less
than authentically black” (DuCille 198).24 Indeed Jeff embodies what Stein’s Harvard
professor, Munsterberg, somewhat patronizingly observes of the dilemma of the nascent
black middle class: “the real tragedy is not in the lives of the most miserable, but in the
lives of those who wish to rise, who feel the mistakes of their fellow-negroes and the
injustice of their white opponents, who desire to assimilate everything high and good in
the culture about them, and yet who know that they do not, strictly speaking, belong to
such a culture” (171). Jeff does not seem to feel his oppression particularly keenly, but he
certainly expresses frustration about the self-defeating behaviors he sees in his patients.
Indeed, he seems rather condescending at times. Jeff’s socioeconomic status constitutes
an important difference between himself and the other characters in the story. Bottomley
observes that lower socio-economic class “create[s], in James Baldwin’s phrase, ‘another
country’” (10), so we could view Jeff as living in a different world from Melanctha’s.
Nevertheless, although he comes from a much more stable and middleclass

background than Melanctha, Jeff Campbell is of mixed blood as well, “a young mulatto”
(62). Fluidity, however, has no place in Jeff’s ideal schema, as he believes “you ought to
love your father and your mother and to be regular in all your life, and not to be always
wanting new things and excitements, and to always know where you were, and what you
wanted, and to always tell everything just as you meant it” (67). This image of the family,
the social personality, and the process of communication is quite Victorian, suggesting
that Jeff’s attitudes are rearguard as opposed to modern. Indeed, Jeff sees almost
everything as capable of being sorted according to simple binary categories. When
Melanctha accuses him of not “believ[ing] it’s right to love anybody” (70) because love
is inherently bound up with irregularities and excitements, Jeff retreats to classifications:
“I certainly do only know just two kinds of ways of loving. One kind of loving seems to
me, is like one has a good quiet feeling in a family when one does his work, and is
always living good and being regular, and then the other way of loving is just like having
it like any animal that’s low in the streets together…and that’s all the kinds of love I
know” (71). The impasse Melanctha and Jeff reach over the nature of love might
profitably be linked to the modernist conflict between disruptive desire and the social
regulation of fixed identities. We might even choose to look at Melanctha and Jeff as
representatives of two strains of modernism. Melanctha suggests the expressionist school
of D.H.Lawrence, which emphasizes the mind immersed in short, energized burst of
experience, blood, sex and vitalism (Cantor 80). Jeff, on the other hand, aligns himself
with what will become the classical modernism of an Eliot or a Pound—analytical,
rational, emotionally restrained, and marked by elitism and cultural conservativism
(Cantor 80). Later Jeff will refer to the two ways of loving as “two kinds of ways of
living” (93). Life is love, but only within strictly demarcated boundaries. Even further
along in the story, Jeff articulates the idea that “loving is just living” (104). Reinstituting
the dichotomy, however, Jeff proclaims that he had never had “any claim to know what
Melanctha thought it right that she should do in any of her ways of living. All Jeff felt a
right in himself to question, was her loving” (110). In other words, everything. Melanctha
eventually informs Jeff that there are more than two ways of loving, as she explains, “‘I
do love you Jeff, sure yes, but not the kind of way of loving you are ever thinking it now
Jeff with me. I ain’t got certainly no hot passion any more now in me” (120–121).25
Melanctha’s recognition of diminished fervor stands in stark contrast to the black
primitivist icon of modernist eroticism, and her subject position is a complex one. Some
elements of Melanctha’s characterization draw on gross stereotypes of black female
sexuality (Ammons 103). It is important to note, however, that Stein simultaneously
subverts such caricatures, notably by portraying Melanctha as much more mature and
complex than Jeff in her world view and her self-knowledge.
Melanctha knows that there are different ways of loving: love with hot passion, love
without hot passion, the love of women for women, and the love of women for men. She
also subverts gender norms by occupying the space of both disciple (with Jane) and
teacher (with Jeff), and by seeking Jeff out as a potential love interest as opposed to
passively waiting for him to notice her. For his part, Jeff Campbell is not particularly
manly. Women are attracted to him because “he was so strong, and good, and
understanding, and innocent, and firm, and gentle” (75), but he does not seem capable of
sustaining a long-term relationship with a woman. Further, he seems as much concerned
that Melanctha “had a good mind” (76) as he is with any kind of physical attraction, and
he looks to Melanctha as someone who “could surely really teach him” (76). He later
exults in his status as Melanctha’s pupil, boasting, “You can’t say ever, Melanctha, no
can you, I ain’t a real good boy to be always studying to be learning to be real bright like
my teacher” (94). Jeff’s attraction to Melanctha is, in fact, predicated on his information
about her, so that when he finds out from Jane about Melanctha’s wandering with “the
different men, white ones and blacks” (84), Melanctha suddenly “seem[s] very ugly to
him” (84). Melanctha characterizes Jeff’s ensuing silence as “‘one of the queer ways you
have to be good’” (84),26 and concludes: “‘you ain’t man enough to deserve to have
anybody care so much to be always with you’” (85). Melanctha, on the other hand,
occupies the power position. She is, figuratively speaking, “on top” (Poirier 30) in her
association with Jeff. She initiates the relationship and she calls the shots. By stating that
Jeff is not sufficiently manly to merit constant attention, Melanctha implicitly compares
him unfavorably to herself, “a man like me,” to use Stein’s own words (qtd. in Pierpont
80). Later, Melanctha remarks, “‘modest, that certainly is a queer thing for you Jeff to be
calling yourself even when you are laughing’” (107). The text gives no overt indication
that Jeff is not heterosexual, and he certainly professes to tell it “straight” (99). Hence,
among other things, “queer” seems to signify contradictory impulses. When we consider
Stein as projecting parts of herself onto Jeff as well as onto Melanctha, the picture
becomes even more complicated. Stein did not engage in the male pseudonymy which
marked Cather’s and Larsen’s first published works, but she shares their use of male
surrogates. Stein’s use of Jeff appears much like Cather’s creation of Jim Burden (and
Niel Herbert), since in both cases a lesbian writer speaks through the voice of a man in
love with a woman with whom he cannot sustain a love relationship. This is not to say
that “Melanctha” is a coded text in which Stein employs Jeff as a mouthpiece for her own
frustrated attempts to secure a long-term relationship with a beloved woman. Rather,
different ways of loving are linked to fluid gender boundaries and to characters who
occupy complex subject positions.
The nature of love relationships is further interrogated in the text by Stein’s insistence
that love is not just subject to fate—it is subject to law. Throughout “Melanctha”
romantic affiliations which take place outside the bounds of “regular” marriage (e.g.,
Melanctha and Jane, Melanctha and Jeff, Melanctha and Jem) are continually held up to
those which are legally sanctioned (e.g., James and “Mis” Herbert, Rose and Sam). At
times it seems as though legal marriage is more important than almost anything else. On
the first page of the text, we are told that “Rose had lately married Sam Johnson,” while
“Melanctha Herbert had not yet been really married” (47). Thus Rose receives
legitimation and power in spite of the fact that the narrator deems her much less
deserving than Melanctha. The narrator expresses indignation at the irony whereby “this
unmoral, promiscuous, shiftless Rose [was] married …to a good man of the negroes,
while Melanctha with her white blood and attraction and her desire for a right position
had not yet been really married” (48). Rose squares her history of promiscuous behavior
with her belief in acting properly with a verbal sleight of hand: “You know very well
Melanctha that I’ve always been engaged to them” (49). Eventually Rose decides “it
would be nice and very good in her position to get regularly really married” (49) and does
so. Melanctha, on the other hand, comes to wish to marry a bad man of the mixed-race,
but he leaves her. This abortive engagement constitutes a disruption of the Victorian
marriage plot or the female bildungsroman’s heterosexual happily ever after. It also has
important ramifications for nationality. Melanctha’s story does not become “an official
narrative of American identity” because she cannot become part of a “traditional
American family” (Wald 253, 246).
It is interesting to note that even though Jeff and Melanctha constitute a heterosexual
couple, they never speak of marriage and their relationship shares qualities with that of a
homosexual one. For one thing, Melanctha and Jeff are intensely closeted. Taking again
Sedgwick’s assertion that secrecy creates a closet (205), we might observe that
Melanctha and Jeff keep their growing attraction for each other concealed, not knowing
whom they are hiding from or even what exactly they are seeking to cover up. The
omniscient narrator describes Melanctha and Jeff as if they were children hiding from an
amused parent, noting that “they always acted together, these two, as if their being so
much together was a secret, but really there was no one who would have made it any
harder for them” (83).
The ostensibly heterosexual relationship between Melanctha and Jeff unfolds in much
the same way as the same-sex relationship between Melanctha and Jane did. Melanctha
enjoys wandering with different types of men, but the narrator reports that “it was not
from the men that Melanctha learned her wisdom. It was always Jane Harden herself who
was making Melanctha begin to understand” (59). In the beginning of the relationship,
the older woman possesses both knowledge and power, but with time Melanctha becomes
ascendant. Again in her relationship with Jeff Campbell, Melanctha begins by yearning
for Jeff while he remains aloof. As the narrator explains: “he held off and did not know
what it was that Melanctha wanted. Melanctha came to want him very badly” (62).
During this time, Melanctha comes to “feel his power with her always getting stronger”
(72). When Jeff and Melanctha first start wandering together, “Melanctha never talked
much” (78). By the time the relationship is on its last legs, however, “Jeff was always
very silent with Melanctha…. Jeff never had much to say to her. Now when they were
together, it was Melanctha always did most of the talking” (111). This quote provides a
good example of Stein’s repetition with a difference. Jeff’s silence is not a regular
silence. He is “very silent” which suggests a particular kind of silence. It is a qualitative
and meaningful silence, not merely the absence of sound. Melanctha is “always…very
pleasant in her talk” (112) to Jeff, but such kindness brings him scant comfort, as was the
case with Melanctha’s diligent attentions to Jane’s welfare. Once Jeff has accepted that
Melanctha does not really love him, he “was never any more a torment to Melanctha, he
was only silent to her” (118). Again, the idiom is significant: Jeff is not silent with
Melanctha, but silent to her.
Jeff has nothing to say to Melanctha in part because he has no claim on her. Marriage
is, among other things, a property relation, and Melanctha and Jeff try to develop a sense
of possession in spite of the lack of legitimation for their love, an attempt that ultimately
proves unsuccessful. Early in the relationship, Melanctha is glad to claim “her Jeff
Campbell” (90), while Jeff starts feeling protective towards “his Melanctha” (95).
Already we know, however, that this nascent possession will ultimately disintegrate.
Indeed, before too long Melanctha’s attempt to assure “my own boy Jeff Campbell”
(104–105) of her undying love falls flat because Jeff knows that “something…was not
right now in her” (105). Jeff captures the irony of using possessive terms of endearment
when he states, “‘Good-bye Melanctha, though you certainly is my own little girl for
always’” (109). Afterwards, Melanctha begins to wander again, once again with girls at
first (107). Although Jeff and Melanctha each claim the other as his or her own, the
relationship lacks a certain element of accountability. Hence when Melanctha resumes
her wandering, Jeff does not question her about it: “Jeff Campbell always felt strongly
within him, he had no right to interfere with Melanctha in any practical kind of a matter.
There they had always, never asked each other any kind of question. There they had felt
always in each other, not any right to take care of one another” (109–110). The continual
tension between freedom and possession ultimately results in the relationship falling
apart. Although Melanctha and Jeff care for one another, they will not take care of each
other.
In some ways, it seems that the relationship had been doomed from the start, that
Melanctha and Jeff embody contradictory impulses which cannot peacefully co-exist for
any sustained period. While Melanctha wanders in a continuous present, Jeff allows the
past to hold sway over his impressions and emotions. Melanctha’s history changes the
way Jeff views his present relationship with her. In its interrogation of history and the
relationship between the past and the present, “Melanctha” displays a modern and
modernist sensibility, at least in one important way. According to Cantor, “modernism
was a revolt against Victorian culture” (12), and therefore against Victorian modes of
thinking. One such pillar of Victorianism was historicism, a generalized faith in the
relevance of history to the present (Cantor 12). Consistent with the notion that knowing
something’s or someone’s past can provide insight into a present condition, Victorian
historicism posited a unitary self which remains consistent across time (Cantor 12). In
Victorian fashion, Jeff tries to make sense of Melanctha’s past promiscuity and to square
this with her current protestations of love for him, but his reasoning ability is unequal to
the task. He cannot immerse himself in feelings and disregard rational explanations, and
so when his logic fails him he is lost.
Jeff’s inability to comprehend the complexity of Melanctha prefigures the limitations
another Herbert has in accepting a richly unpredictable woman, namely Niel Herbert and
Marian Forrester in Cather’s A Lost Lady.27 Jeff continually tries to explain Melanctha in
terms of binaries, as he says with a frown: “‘Sometimes you seem like one kind of girl to
me, and sometimes you are like a girl that is all different to me, and the two kinds of girls
is certainly very different to each other, and I can’t see any way they seem to have much
to do, to be together in you’” (80). The repetition of the word “girl” has important
ramifications for how Jeff conceptualizes (or fails to understand) Melanctha. A “girl”
stands in contrast to a woman, just as a “girlfriend” is not a wife. Hence Jeff suggests that
their relationship has an immature quality to it. At the same time, “girl” suggests the
paternalism found in Jeff’s status as powerful doctor. If we look at “girl” as an ironic
appellation, we might note that the term is often used for maidens or workers, while
Melanctha is sexually knowledgeable and chronically unemployed. Finally, “girls”
resonates with “hired girls,” a term that could refer to ethnic heroines, domestic servants
or prostitutes.28 “Girls” can mean many things, and Jeff cannot figure out what kind of
girl Melanctha is. As a solution, Jeff proposes that Melanctha “‘tell me honest…which is
the way that is you really, when you are alone, and real, and all honest’” (81). Again
later, Jeff asks Melanctha, “Can’t you help me any way to find out real and true…the way
I should be acting” (93). In this way, Jeff fails to question the assumption that Melanctha
is her truest self when she is alone. What Stein might be suggesting is the importance of
social constructions of identity, that perhaps we have no essential or true self that exists
in isolation. Ultimately Jeff concedes that “Melanctha was too many for him” (103). He
is unable to move beyond this realization, and the relationship continues its downward
spiral. An epiphany comes for Jeff when he tells Melanctha, “no man certainly ever really
can hold your love for long times together. You certainly Melanctha, you ain’t got down
deep loyal feeling, true inside you” (107; see also 113).
For Jeff, complete honesty comes naturally, as he acknowledges: “I am always
honest…. It’s easy enough for me always to be honest…. All I got to do is always just to
say right out what I am thinking” (74). Melanctha appreciates Jeff’s honesty (74) but is
incapable of duplicating it. And although Jeff accuses Melanctha of not being honest with
him, she does not seem actively dishonest. Further, Melanctha’s lifelong inability “to tell
a story wholly” (57) might spring from a recognition of the limitations of communication
as opposed to forgetfulness or dishonesty. Instead of viewing the situation in terms of
truth and falsehood, we might surmise that the binarism of truth and falsehood does not
adequately encompass Melanctha’s world view. In discussing The Autobiography of
Alice B.Toklas, Catherine Stimpson notes that ultimately we cannot “draw…reliable
distinctions between true and false” (“Lesbian Lie” 163), and I would suggest that the
foundations for a fictional autobiography are right here in “Melanctha.” Applying Bettye
Williams’s conclusions about the problematic autobiographical fiction of Nella Larsen, it
seems possible to say of Stein and Melanctha as well, “perhaps…fiction was another way
of telling the truth” (54). As the “anguished” Q.E.D. showed (Pierpont 83), Stein would
not be able to write with passion, fulfill her needs for self-expression, and communicate
her thoughts (e.g., through publication) by trying to faithfully recreate the facts. Rather,
her methods would need to be indirect, at times counterintuitive, and her truth would be
multiple as opposed to unitary. Ruddick implies as much when she asserts that she
“believe[s] that a text can be polysemous and still have themes, or ‘patterns of meaning’”
(Reading 7). The passing Melanctha who uses parts of many stories instead of telling one
wholly and accurately is an embodiment of Stein’s realization.
When Jeff compromises his integrity, he, like Melanctha, begins to pass. Deciding that
Melanctha’s feelings are more important than his commitment to honesty, Jeff realizes
that “he never could be honest now…for always every moment now he felt it to be a
strong thing in him, how very much it was Melanctha Herbert always suffered” (95). Jeff
cannot show Melanctha “his true feeling” (96), and he begins to act in ways that are
inconsistent with how he feels inside. As a result, “he never could be very strong inside
him” (96). As Jeff loses his trust in Melanctha, his stance on honesty changes, as the
narrator reports: “now Jeff never wanted to be honest to her” (111). The relationship
finally ends after Melanctha tells Jeff that she does not feel passion for him (121), and he
resolves “never [to] go anywhere any more to meet her” (122). Jeff is devastated by
Melanctha’s disclosure but he seems almost relieved to escape from the uncomfortable
position that he has felt forced to assume. They part amicably, with Jeff promising to be
“like a brother to her always…[and] a good friend” (122).
Melanctha then moves from her attachment to Jeff to a fondness for Rose Johnson.
Although Rose is lazy and selfish where Jeff is hard-working and generous, she
resembles Jeff in being “always strong to keep straight” (118). Melanctha’s desire to
please Rose is queer, as the narrator remarks: “why did the subtle, intelligent, attractive,
half white girl Melanctha Herbert, with her sweetness and her power and her wisdom
demean herself to do for and to flatter and to be scolded, by this lazy, stupid, ordinary,
selfish black girl. This was a queer thing in Melanctha Herbert” (118).29 One possible
answer to this question is that Rose allows Melanctha to escape a part of her history and
return to her childhood past. In Rose’s eyes, Melanctha’s relationships with Jane and Jeff
never happened: “all Rose knew about Melanctha was her old life with her mother and
her father” (119).
Melanctha exults in her new-found freedom to wander with Rose and to meet “new
men” (123). Although Rose tries to dissuade her from flirting with white men, they
satisfy a certain need for her. Melanctha returns to her younger days by enjoying the
company of men who “never meant very much to [her]. It was only that she liked it to be
with them, and they knew all about fine horses, and it was just good to Melanctha, now a
little, to feel real reckless with them” (124). She experiences “pleasant days” (124), but
she is still plagued by feeling “blue…and want[ing] somebody should come and kill her”
(125). Feeling herself falling, Melanctha “clung to Rose in the hope that Rose could save
her” (125). Rose tolerates Melanctha’s attachment for a time (“Rose always was, in her
way, very good to let Melanctha be loving to her” [125]), but soon decides to displace her
friendship with Melanctha in favor of marriage. As a result, Melanctha finds herself
homeless once again, since “Rose Johnson never asked Melanctha to live with her in the
house, now Rose was married” (127), and “it could never come to Melanctha to ask Rose
to let her” (128). Thus Melanctha’s relationship with Rose echoes her childhood and her
relationship with her mother. Melanctha turns to Jeff when her mother dies; when Rose
abandons her, Melanctha embarks on another illfated relationship with a man.
Realizing that Rose will “no longer help her,” Melanctha looks elsewhere to “see if
she could find what it was she had always wanted” and happens upon “a young buck, a
mulatto” (128). After one chance meeting and before knowing his name, this man
becomes “her mulatto” (129), a phrase which suggests that this relationship will be
plagued by the same possession issues as Melanctha’s romance with Jeff. Jem Richards
appears quite different from Jeff, though he does resemble some of the other significant
men in Melanctha’s life. He is manly and “a straight man” (129) who gambles and pays
off his debts. Like Melanctha’s childhood friend, John the coachman, Jem knows “all
about fine horses,” and like Melanctha’s father, Jem demonstrates “successful power”
(129). If Melanctha has looked to Rose as a mother figure, perhaps she sees an idealized
father in Jem, who seems like the stuff of fairy tales. He is gem-like, flashy, “dashing”
(129), “swell” (130), and often worth a lot of money. He gives Melanctha a ring and
promises her marriage. At the same time, he also confuses her, as she finds herself in
Jeff’s position of not understanding what her lover wanted (133). As Jem’s betting luck
(and his confidence in his own strength) diminishes, Melanctha is thrown back upon Rose
for companionship, though “Rose could now never any more be a help to her” (136).
Melanctha returns to help Rose have her baby, and as when she was tending her mother
in her final illness, “Melanctha did everything that any woman could” (132; see also
134). She puts all her energy into “waiting on Rose till she was so tired she could hardly
stand it” (134), but her work is without recompense. Melanctha helps Rose deliver the
baby, which dies shortly thereafter, and her relationship with Jem continues in its
downward spiral.
Just as Jeff lost patience with Melanctha’s inability to conform to his ideals of fidelity,
integrity, and truthfulness, Rose eventually breaks off the friendship when she concludes
that “Melanctha no way is really honest” (137). Melanctha feels unready to go off into
the world alone again, but Rose refuses to claim Melanctha as her friend. Melanctha still
“badly needed to have Rose always there to save her” (138), but Rose proclaims that “I
hear more things now so awful bad about you, everybody always telling to me what kind
of a way you always have been doing so much, and me always so good to you, and you
never no ways, knowing how to be honest to me” (138). Having been banished,
Melanctha feels devastated and realizes that she “wanted Rose more than she had ever
wanted all the others” (139). Jem leaves her as well, and the narrator tells of her death
shortly thereafter.
In “Melanctha,” Stein interrogates and dismantles a series of binaries, including
knowledge and understanding (71), thinking and feeling (76, 90, 101, 102), inside and
outside (95, 102, 110, 114), true and false (96, 97, 111, 112), dark and light (99, 100),
memory and forgetfulness (107, 113). I disagree, however, with the critics who wish to
see Stein as replacing binaries with tertiaries. Such a reading still reinforces the idea of
discrete categories. Benstock, for example, argues that “Melanctha” constitutes “a
version of Q.E.D., rewritten into a heterosexual rather than a homosexual triangle” (152;
see also 178). First of all, how can anyone talk about a heterosexual triangle when
heterosexuality is inherently dualistic? Taking a classic example, we might observe that
the triangular relationship between Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot was both
heterosexual and homosexual (or at least homosocial): Arthur is married to Guinevere,
Guinevere has an affair with Lancelot, and Lancelot loves Arthur. In “Melanctha,” I
would start by asking who exactly constitutes the three legs of the triangle. Melanctha
and Jeff are a given, but who else—Jane Harden? Rose Johnson? Jem Richards? Even
granting that someone could make a case for which character should be considered the
third,30 the triangular quality of the relationship would be difficult to demonstrate. The
point is that Stein has removed us from plane geometry altogether.31
Just as “Melanctha” need not be read solely as a revision of Q.E.D., the title
character’s untimely death from “the consumption” (141) need not be read solely as
fatalism, naturalism or pessimism.32 Rather, it is possible to see Melanctha as being
“consumed” when she is no longer needed. Stein employs a discursive position while it is
useful to her and then moves on. Indeed, we might argue that Stein—like an early literary
mentor, George Eliot—needed to kill off a part of herself as a survival mechanism, a way
for the whole self to keep on living.33 In Rosemarie Bodenheimer’s reading of Eliot’s
highly autobiographical The Mill on the Floss, for example, Eliot’s drowning of Maggie
Tulliver represents the drowning of Eliot’s own younger self. While Carol Gilligan sees
renunciation as a theme throughout the novel and particularly in Maggie’s death (148–
49), Ruby Redinger views the ending of the novel as “regenerative” (419). Yet other
critics fault Eliot for not allowing her heroines the kind of triumphs over patriarchal
adversity which she herself experienced (Heilbrun 73), and the same could be said of
Stein’s killing off Melanctha. As Benstock suggests:
had Stein’s personal life been tormented and self-destructive, had her art
consisted of a few desperate poems written in honor of Sappho, had she
not proclaimed her talents to all who would listen, she would have
become a lesbian cult figure and been patronized by a heterosexual public
that considered her pathetic. Instead, she was resented by her brother and
others for surviving so well. Survival for Stein included surviving as a

Jew, and some have questioned the means by which that survival was
effected. (190)
Unlike Melanctha, Stein survives and eventually flourishes. With “Melanctha,” her first
published text, Stein both sets the nineteenth century to rest and resolves the troubling
issues of sexual orientation which consumed Q.E.D.34 She also sets the stage for the texts
that would make up her 1930s, post-avant-garde period. Eliot leaves us with a mature
woman—not a martyr and not a victim—but a woman who knows her own mind, makes
her own choices, and carries them through. Thus The Mill on the Floss, which stands at
the threshold of Eliot’s career as a woman writer, embodies a dawning, not a death knoll.
Melanctha dies of consumption, and Stein bids farewell to her Jamesian masculinity and
her sexual insecurity. As Stein is engaged in finding a publisher for Three Lives, Alice
comes to Paris and Stein’s mature life begins.
LIES, DAMN LIES, AND AUTOBIOGRAPHIES
The ties between “Melanctha” and The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas are significant.
Abraham points out that the latter is Stein’s “first narrative since Three Lives, twenty-six
years before” (108), while Barbara Will argues that the lesbian triangle initially broached
in Q.E.D. (and taken up by “Melanctha”) is most effectively resolved in The
Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas (220). Further, Dearborn suggests a connection by
pronouncing the “Gertrude Stein” character one of Stein’s “most successful heroines”
along with Melanctha (178). Questions of identity, inside and outside, and the nature of
relationships recur in The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas, as well. And yet despite these
similarities and continuities, both Stein and the scholars who study her have tried to
perpetuate a rupture or phase theory approach to her work. Thus “Melanctha” is deemed
important because of its status as a full-fledged modernist narrative, the birth of a
century, and a literary text inspired by modern art. Following “Melanctha,” however,
Stein enters her “middle” or “avant-garde experimentalism” phase (DeKoven, Rich 68).
When Stein returns to narrative, it is to write money-making, “secondary” texts of
questionable literary merit (Haas 111).35 I wish to emphasize the continuities as opposed
to the rupture.
Like “Melanctha,” The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas is a narrative but not a novel,
a fictional text based on the real-life experiences of people Stein knew but not confined to
the facts of their lives. While The Autobiography is not the straightforward autobiography
its title claims (i.e., non-fiction written by the subject about her life), Stein does
eventually provide us with some guidelines for how to read and evaluate her text. In
“coming out” as the true author, Stein offers a precursor for her narrative strategy:
About six weeks ago Gertrude Stein said, it does not look to me as if you
were ever going to write that autobiography. You know what I am going
to do. I am going to write it for you. I am going to write it as simply as
Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe. And she has and this is
it. (252)
Precisely because this comparison is uttered lightly and without explanation, it demands
interrogation; indeed it provides some important clues as to Stein’s technique and
purpose. Defoe’s book, The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,
of York, Mariner, does not make its claim to autobiography in its title, but rather in its
preface, which insists that “the story is told with modesty, with seriousness, and with a
religious application of events to the uses to which wise men always apply them…. The
editor believes the thing to be a just history of fact; neither is there any appearance of
fiction in it” (25). Among other things, Stein’s avowed intention to write like Defoe
contains an acknowledgment that “Alice B.Toklas” is as fictional a creation as “Robinson
Crusoe” (even though both are based on real people, namely Alice Toklas and Alexander
Selkirk). While critics have commented on the constructed quality of the fictional figure
called “Gertrude Stein” (Dearborn 178, Marren 152), it seems equally important to point
out that “Alice B.Toklas” is a created character who happens to share the name of a real
person. Indeed, we might imagine a prefatory warning along the lines of “the persons in
this book are purely fictional, though in all cases names of living people have been
employed.” By creating fictional avatars of both herself and her beloved, Stein implicitly
questions the possibilities of mimetic representation and the non-fiction narrative. As
Marren points out, “in a passing autobiography the fraudulence of the convention of
faithful representation is particularly obvious, and so our sense of what is ‘natural’ must
transform itself” (169). Stein even questions the ultimate knowability of the self.36 On a
literal level, the term “autobiography” refers to “a biography written by the subject about
himself or herself…[and focusing] on the author’s developing self” (M.H.Abrams 15).
Clearly, The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas does not fulfill these expectations, and this
disappointed and outraged some of Stein’s readers. The backlash prompted by Stein’s
text indicates that some of her disgruntled contemporaries felt angered or deceived by her
broad application of the term. Arthur Lachman, for example, argues that Stein’s text, “her
autobiography, which she thinly veiled as The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas” (4),
shows her “inordinate vanity” and “almost morbid craving for recognition” (8). Other
readers accepted The Autobiography for what it was—autobiographical fiction. In a 1941
letter, Arnold Ronnebeck recalls, “when I think back on pp. 120 and the following of
Alice B.’s Autobiography, pages on which my name appears many times, I smile,
because I know you know it was not true, and I will not sue you” (355).37
Defoe’s novel engendered controversy and Stein’s text lost her several friends, but an
example of a similar literary exploit which did not cause such a furor is The
Autobiography of S.S.McClure, which is now considered a part of Willa Cather’s oeuvre.
Cather’s and Stein’s situations are not completely analogous. McClure told Cather his
story and she went home and wrote about it, as opposed to Stein’s simply writing the
story as she thinks Alice perceived it. Furthermore, Cather did not appear in McClure’s
story and does not seem to have any ulterior motives in writing it, whereas readers have
seen the main purpose of The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas as Stein’s self-
aggrandizement. Nevertheless, we might acknowledge that Cather claimed that the
experience of speaking as a man paved the way for Jim Burden’s narration of My
Antonia, while the voice of Alice allowed Stein to return from avant-garde
incomprehensibility to narrative readability and to resolve some troubling dynamics in
her earlier work.
Wagner-Martin points out that “just as Defoe’s work had created an angry sensation,
catalyzing fierce debates over truth and fiction, author and protagonist, so The
Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas unloosed critical battles that continue still” (Favored
202). In other ways as well, Stein’s text offers uncanny parallels with Defoe’s. While
Robinson Crusoe invokes the trope of middle-class economic salvation (i.e., “how I went
out in the world and God made me financially successful”), The Autobiography of Alice
B.Toklas is the first book of Stein’s that brought her any money at all. Further, Robinson
Crusoe’s status as a providential narrative prefigures the motif of fate or destiny which
also runs through The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas. Examples of this motif can be
seen most clearly in the case of the bells which Alice hears each time she meets a real
genius, Picasso’s portrait of Stein, and the cannon which represented to Picasso and Stein
all that they were trying to do. Even before starting to tell about “my arrival in Paris” (6),
Alice announces her firm conviction of Stein’s genius:
I may say that only three times in my life have I met a genius and each
time a bell within me rang and I was not mistaken, and I may say in each
case it was before there was any general recognition of the quality of
genius in them. The three geniuses of whom I wish to speak are Gertrude
Stein, Pablo Picasso and Alfred Whitehead. I have met many important
people, I have met several great people but I have only known three first
class geniuses and in each case on sight within me something rang. In no
one of the three cases have I been mistaken. In this way my new full life
began. (5)
I quote this passage at length because it invokes both the trope of fate and that of a
providential rebirth. In the case of Stein’s portrait, Alice makes small talk with Picasso by
complimenting his work, and he responds: “Yes…everybody says that she does not look
like it but that does not make any difference, she will” (12). Picasso here claims to have
presaged what Stein will come to look like, and Stein agrees. The artist and the subject—
insiders, geniuses, prophets—are the only ones who are immediately satisfied with the
results of so many sittings. Finally, the cannon episode, which recurs throughout Stein’s
later oeuvre in varied forms (Abraham 81), appears in The Autobiography of Alice
B.Toklas in the following manner. When Picasso, Eve, Stein and Alice first see a
camouflaged cannon, Picasso comments, “C’est nous qui avons fait ca…it is we that have
created that.” The narrator agrees with Picasso’s assessment, noting, “and he was right,
he had. From Cezanne through him they had come to that. His foresight was justified”
(90). The trope of fate or destiny functions here both on the level of Picasso’s (and
Stein’s) foresight in his formal experimentation and on the level of the narrator’s
willingness to see a causal line of creation.
Fate, destiny and causality operate within a male spiritual/psychological universe in
Defoe, but The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas departs from this paradigm by offering a
female-oriented alternative.38 Although people tend to think in free associations,
Robinson tells a linear, chronological story to show the order of providence—God is in
control. This strictly chronological narrative stands in stark contrast to the digressive,
associative recollections which characterize the structure of The Autobiography of Alice
B.Toklas (Marren 159). Furthermore, while Crusoe keeps time carefully and meticulously
(and narrates his story accordingly), Toklas and her autobiography offer an uneven sense
of time in that there is no fixed ratio between time elapsed and number of pages the text
devotes to its narration. Stein persistently calls attention to years, perhaps to show that the
numbers do not work out. The biggest disparity comes in Alice’s pre-Paris life, which
receives a scant three pages of mention; Stein’s does not fare much better with sixteen.
The four years of 1903–07 receive thirty-nine pages, a page-per-year ration of 9.75; the
following seven years have a page/year ratio of only 8.0. The war years introduce
proportionately more material, with a ratio of 12.25, and the following thirteen years are
described in a much less dense 4.5 pages per year. Nor does Stein’s and Picasso’s belief
that more happened when they were younger suffice to explain the differential. Alice
recalls “hearing Picasso and Gertrude Stein talking about various things that had
happened at that time, one of them said but all that could not have happened in that one
year, oh said the other, my dear you forget we were young then and we did a great deal in
a year” (6). The eleven years between 1903 and 1914 have a collective ratio of 8.6, but
the time span from 1907–1918 has a ratio of 9.5 (though both are admittedly much higher
than the 4.5 of the last thirteen years). Defoe employs a linear exposition that ultimately
yields a providential design, but circles, tangents, and crossovers prevail to create a
meaningful pattern in Stein’s female-oriented spiritual autobiography.
Robinson Crusoe was among the earliest English novels. The Autobiography of Alice
B.Toklas, on the other hand, is distinctly not a novel. Still, we might say that if Defoe’s
text confirmed the birth of the novel, Stein’s heralded the advent of modern
autobiography. DeKoven identifies “Melanctha” as modernist but declares that Stein
subsequently moved into avant-garde experimentalism (Rich 68). I would add that Stein
returns to modernism (as DeKoven describes it) in her 1930s narratives and
autobiographies. DeKoven differentiates modernism and experimentalism in the
following manner: “modernist writing constitutes itself as self-contradictory, though not
incoherent: incoherence is the province of avant-garde experimentalism and some
postmodernism” (24). While not all critics would agree that Stein’s more experimental
works are incoherent, I think that Stein’s autobiographies are both self-contradictory and
intelligible. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, for example, selves are constructed,
mediated, multiple, and performative. Time is fluid, circular, repetitive, and disruptive. In
addition, while The Making of Americans has been read as ethnic autobiography (Sollors
255), I believe the rubric could be fruitfully applied to The Autobiography, as well. Burch
argues that “ethnic novelists, perhaps even more than other writers, saw their world
through the prism of personal experience” (58); Stein ups the ante by seeing her world
through her experiences and presenting her world through how she perceives her lover to
have seen her experiences. While Stein’s act of adopting Toklas’s voice brought criticism
upon her for appropriation and deception, we might also see this act as a strategy for
mediation. Lowe points out that “one function of canonization is the resolution of
material contradiction through a narrative of formation in which differences—of gender,
race, nationality, or sexuality—are subsumed through the individual’s identification with
a universalized form” (52–53). Thus we might argue that Stein employs the form of
autobiography in order to free up space for a narrative of difference constructed by an
expatriate Jewish lesbian writing during a nativist, masculinist, anti-Semitic period.
Similarly, Dearborn points out that “midwiving and mediation” (31) are often
prerequisites for ethnic authorship (31), further noting that sometimes the author is
herself the “mediator, working between two cultures” (38). An American in Europe, a
Jew surrounded by Gentiles (not to say fascists), a lesbian seeming to participate in the
cult of masculinity, and the self-proclaimed “grandmother of the modern movement”
(qtd. in Wagner-Martin, Favored 154), Stein occupies the position of mediator and/or
midwife. In this context, we can evaluate Stein’s final paragraph as an ironically placed
(or an inverted) statement of intention. What we need to do, of course, is to go back and
read the text again, this time knowing that Stein is the author. And then again, knowing
that Stein is writing in the tradition of the elusive Defoe.
The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas might also be read as a story in Benjamin’s
sense, specifically in opposition to the classification of “novel.” Although Benjamin’s
point is precisely that the Great War has removed the storyteller from the midst of society
while the novel has supplanted the story (84, 87), Stein’s text represents an important
exception to (or at least a modification of) that claim. Benjamin observes that “men
returned from the battlefield [of WWI] grown silent—not richer, but poorer in
communicable experience” (84), but women (namely Stein and Toklas) seem to have
returned with ample stories.39 The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas, not a novel and not
an autobiography in the traditional sense of the word, draws on the strengths of
storytelling which Benjamin deemed dead approximately twenty years earlier. The
chatty, familiar tone of Stein’s text shares an object of storytelling as Benjamin defines it,
in that it “does not aim to convey the pure essence of a thing, like information or a
report…but sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of him
again” (91–92). In the case of The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas, we have two
storytellers, the author (Stein) and the narrative “I” (Toklas). In its elision of time through
alinearity, repetitions, and tangents, the text also distinguishes itself as more story than
novel (Benjamin 99).
Like all good stories, The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas raises at least as many
questions as it answers. One question that it brings to the fore is what it means to write
the autobiography of ones beloved. Stein’s appropriation of Alice’s voice is playful or
even deceitful, but it is also risky. Fuss argues that deploying essentialism is not
inherently dangerous, but rather “what is risky is giving up the security—and the
fantasy—of occupying a single subject position and instead occupying two places at
once” (19). This simultaneous occupation of several discursive positions is exactly what
Stein successfully manages in The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas. Drawing on the
ideas of queer theorists like Dollimore and Berlant, we might argue that Stein occupies
the position of a beloved Other as a way to express her feelings of love towards and her
desire for possession in a more socially acceptable manner.40 In this way, Stein’s
narrative “seeks to move beyond the self/other, ‘I’/‘not-I’ binarism” (Fuss 33) by
confusing author, narrator, and protagonist beyond recognition. Indeed, James Breslin
contends that Stein “creates herself through the external perspective of Alice” (152,
emphasis added). Along similar lines, a chapter heading that does not include Stein but
applies to what she attempts in The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas is Morgan’s
“Writing the Self From the Outside-In,” which “refers to authors who—because of race,
ethnicity, or sexual persuasion—have had to work through a kind of dual oppression.
Doubly marginalized, twice silenced, these writers…have had to negotiate a particularly
complex relationship to their cultural positioning in order to establish a valid identity and
to discover a speech that would serve them” (13). The voice of Alice brings Stein from
(literary and sexual) margin to mainstream (i.e., popular writing and traditional
marriage).
Issues of spatial positioning and queer identity are further seen in the thematic
recurrence of the inside/outside motif in The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas. Alice ends
her prefatory remarks by promising to “tell you how two americans happened to be in the
heart of an art movement of which the outside world at that time knew nothing” (28;
emphasis added). And yet their insider status is continually called into question because
they are Americans outside America, women in an intellectual/artistic world dominated
by men, lesbians amidst the Paris cult of masculinity, and Jews in an anti-Semitic
Europe.41 Alice comments that Stein “always was, she always is, tormented by the
problem of the external and the internal” (119). Perhaps Stein’s liminal status and
persistent concerns with borders link her to the subjects of Gambrell’s study of women
modernist insider/outsiders, “whose value consisted in their simultaneous distance from
and intimacy with the subjects of their own inquiry” (4–5). In this case, it would seem
that Stein’s act of adopting Alice’s voice serves to dramatize her own status as insider-
with-a-difference. This voice provides Stein with the psychological space she needs to
bring her experiences out of herself in the form of intelligible language. In order to write
about herself, she needs to leave herself, so to speak, just as many of her peers discovered
the need to leave a geographical home in order to articulate their sense of it (Urgo 56,
65).
Stein, of course, was one of those Americans who wrote about her homeland from
abroad. Thus it is not surprising that, like her personal identity, Stein’s national identity
as it emerges in the course of The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas is marked by shifting
afflliations. Alice recalls that “later I often teased her, calling her a general, a civil war
general of either or both sides” (16). This attribution suggests that Stein’s American
identity was fluid in terms of regional loyalty. Whereas Nebraska retains an almost
exclusive claim to Willa Cather, no single place in America is particularly connected with
Gertrude Stein. Ironically, Stein’s capacity to identify with all America is not a very
American trait, at least as Blair conceptualizes Americanism: “As a matter of course most
Americans find it easy to identify themselves with one side or the other of many available
sets of distinctions: one party or the other, one region or another, one team or its
opponents, one group or its rivals” (7). Thus Stein’s potential for being a leader on either
side of the Civil War suggests a broadness of national identification that is paradoxically
un-American. Stein’s status as (im)migrant/expatriate, on the other hand, marks her as
particularly American according to Urgo, who argues that “the single experience …that
defines American culture at its core is migration” (5). In both her childhood and her adult
life, Stein developed and maintained a “migratory… consciousness” (Urgo 13).
Whether or not Stein should be considered as American as she seemed to think herself,
The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas was a roaring success. Part of its resonance might
be attributed to the fact that American cultural studies began in the twenties and came
into prominence in the thirties (Gleason, Speaking 190), so that Stein’s chatty memoir
about Americans abroad met with an eager audience. Further, Stein managed to avoid
falling victim to a nativist double standard articulated by Fairchild: “we expect all
foreigners to be assimilated in the United States and blame them if they are not; we do
not expect any American to be assimilated in a foreign land, and blame him if he is”
(172). As a child, Stein assimilated fully to her American surroundings, apparently
fulfilling her father’s injunction that she and her siblings “should forget their french and
german so that their american english would be pure” (74). She remained steadfast in her
identification as fully American, going so far as to suggest that living in France made her
more so. Thus to Fairchild’s claim that “America is the best country in the world—for
Americans” (174), Stein might add that America is the best country to identify oneself
with, but “‘a parent’s place is never the place to work in’” (Benstock 12). America can be
home, but not office.
An American identity was valuable to Stein in other ways, as well. In The
Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas, for example, gender identity and nationality converge
to create further space for non-threatening difference. Alice relates that Vollard, the
picture dealer from whom Gertrude and Leo first bought Cezannes, “explained to every
one that he had been visited by two crazy americans and they laughed and he had been
much annoyed but gradually he found out that when they laughed most they usually
bought something so of course he waited for them to laugh” (32). As an American, Stein
can be dismissed as “crazy” instead of having to make sense; as an American with
money, Stein is someone to pay attention to. Similarly, after telling how “Mildred
Aldrich had a distressing way of dropping her key down the middle of the stairs where an
elevator might have been…” (35–36), Alice adds that “only americans did that” (36).
Americans are allowed to be clumsy and to refuse to adapt. They are also a “third sex”
type of category, as Picasso observes: “ils sont pas des hommes, ils sont pas des femmes,
ils sont des americains. They are not men, they are not women, they are americans” (49).
Given the gender freedom of third-sex status, Stein can then proceed to normalize her
own gender identity and sexual orientation. Indeed, throughout The Autobiography of
Alice B.Toklas, Stein makes matter-of-fact what might otherwise be considered
scandalous, unnatural, or marginal. In rehearsing Stein’s experiences in medical school
and her ultimate decision to leave without taking her degree, Alice observes that “she
always says she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious. She says the normal is so much
more simply complicated and interesting” (83). Once in Paris, Stein sets up a traditional
household in which she, the genius, is waited upon and attended to by Alice, her wife.
Alice’s discussion of the wives of geniuses she has sat with comes early in the text, as if
to situate her as a wife (and thereby situate Stein as a husband/master and a genius).
Along similar lines, Marren conceptualizes the “Gertrude Stein” of The Autobiography
of Alice B.Toklas as an identity “created…by a passing subject” (152). She further argues
that this “passing ‘I’” functions as a solution to the question of “how might Gertrude
Stein herself be represented in such a way that her embodiment—as a woman, as a
lesbian—will not preclude public recognition of her status an artist and an intellectual?”
(164). To this I would add that Stein is also a Jew, while a highly visible strand of
modernist geniuses are Gentiles. Furthermore, as Cantor has pointed out, T.S.Eliot, Ezra
Pound, and Wyndham Lewis were all “violently anti-Semitic” (128). Cantor attributes the
“anti-Semitic strain in Modernism” to the fact that Jews “were seen as the arch-
representatives [and]…as the arch-beneficiaries of that liberal historicist culture so
disliked by Modernism” (129). At the same time, Jews were condemned by anti-
modernists “as the arch-fiends of Modernism, who were eroding traditional European
Christian and national culture” (129). In order to establish herself as a member (or, as she
would have it, a leader) of the modern literary world and also to secure a popular
audience, Stein became a passing subject in terms of her Jewish roots.
On the one hand, it seems questionable to impute that Stein was a Jew passing for
WASP. She had been given at least a rudimentary Jewish education (Wagner-Martin,
Favored 16), and she certainly identified herself as Jewish, declaring in a college essay
that “a person was ‘a Jew first and an American only afterwards…‘ [and] emphasiz[ing]
that ‘race feeling’ was ‘an enlargement of the family tie’” (Wagner-Martin, Favored 34).
Further, during the heyday of her 1920s salon, Stein made little attempt to downplay her
Jewishness. Wagner-Martin suggests that “posing as the wise expatriate Jewish
American, approaching fifty, Stein created herself as the great, undiscovered American
writer” (Favored 162–63). By 1928, she had proclaimed herself “‘the most famous Jew
in the world’” (Wagner-Martin, Favored 185). Similarly, Alice was quite Semitic in
appearance, and Stein made no attempt to hide either their Jewish heritage or the nature
of their living arrangements from the many visitors who attended her salon.
Nevertheless, Stein persists in disseminating internalized anti-Semitism in The
Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas. Early in the text, “Alice” relays the following incident:
Gertrude Stein who has an explosive temper, came in another evening and
there were her brother, Alfy and a stranger. She did not like the stranger’s
looks. Who is that, said she to Alfy. I didn’t bring him, said Alfy. He
looks like a Jew, said Gertrude Stein, he is worse than that, says Alfy. (11)
Here Stein engages in the most gross forms of stereotyping, constructing as Other,
someone who may or may not even belong to a stigmatized group, of which Stein is
herself a member. Wagner-Martin relays an even more outrageous incident, which
occurred when Bryher visited Stein’s salon in the 1920s: “Stein described [her] as ‘an
ethical Jewess…rather a rare type’—although Bryher was not Jewish” (Favored 155).
Although one Jew’s act of saying another person looks like a Jew need not inevitably be
construed as a put-down (many people remarked on Alice’s Semitic features, for
example), Stein’s comment about Bryher draws attention to one of the many paradoxes of
Stein’s identity politics. As Blanche Wiesen Cook has observed, “‘she was Jewish and
anti-Semitic’” (qtd. in Benstock 19). Not all of Stein’s friends and visitors accepted her
Jewishness as a positive attribute, so perhaps she put down other Jews (or Gentiles, as the
case might be) in order to deflect attention from her own ethnicity. Indeed, Bravig Imbs
recalls how a mutual friend would say of Stein during this period: “‘Gertrude is the most
un-Jewish person I ever knew. She is so dangerous and tolerant and has such a
magnificent brain. Those aren’t Jewish traits’” (126–7). The fact that Imbs felt compelled
to establish that Stein did not display typical (or stereotypical) Jewish attributes or
behaviors indicates that Stein’s social milieu did not always accept her ethnic ties. To
establish and maintain her position as Queen Bee in the world of modernist male
geniuses, Stein might have felt it necessary to de-emphasize this aspect of her personal
history. In her life, Stein owns herself and her ethnic heritage, but in the text meant to
give her a public (written) voice, she retreats to anti-Semitism. Extrapolating from
Berzon, who argues that African-Americans who severed themselves from their African
roots engaged in passing (6), we might conclude Stein’s act of rejecting her ethnic
heritage is a form of passing, as well. Certainly, Stein’s actions also seem to suggest that
her self-creation at times required her to deny her descent to establish the “consent
relations” (Sollors, Beyond 223) which can situate her within a male, white, Christian
heterosexual tradition. The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas shows discomfort with

Stein’s Jewish identity, and one which is not resolved by the act of writing the text.
Arguably she does not begin resolve this tension until she writes Everybody’s
Autobiography.
In the first line of her own introduction to Everybody’s Autobiography, Stein offers the
following straightforward explanation for her title: “Alice B. Toklas did hers and now
anybody will do theirs” (1). The title seems playful and egotistical in equal measure. Its
underpinnings are also profoundly threatening to an American identity. Americans are
individualists, and an autobiography is the life story of a (single) self. Everybody’s
autobiography is different from everybody else’s. The notion that one book could suffice
for everyone (or that Stein equals everybody) is both preposterous and psychically
threatening, and yet Stein plows right ahead. We might also note that Alice did not do
hers, Gertrude did “Alice’s” and now anybody is not doing theirs—Gertrude is doing
everybody’s. Furthermore, given the logic of Stein’s first line, the book should have been
called Anybody’s Autobiography, but Stein opts for the more inclusive term. Stein soon
broadens the field of autobiography by announcing (in a line that gets its own paragraph),
“anything is an autobiography but this was a conversation” (3). Clearly Stein has not
developed any more respect for the conventions of the genre since her The
Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas days. Further, Stein, the self-proclaimed genius, attests
that “autobiography is easy like it or not autobiography is easy for any one and so this is
to be everybody’s autobiography” (4). If it is easy for anyone, why does Stein fritter
away her talents on something so trivial? And if Stein means to suggest that her
experiences can stand in for anybody’s and everybody’s, then she must not be as
exceptional a genius as she claims. As the text progresses, it becomes clear that Stein’s
project is both a continuation and an elaboration of some of the major concerns in her
earlier work.
Like The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas, Everybody’s Autobiography is not a novel:
“an autobiography is not a novel no indeed it is not a novel” (200). And as Benjamin
earlier pronounced the death of the storyteller, Stein here deems the novel a dead art. At
the same time, Stein seems to revive the art of storytelling by structurally accentuating
the importance of the oral tradition in her “very talky” text (Poirier 27). Stein believes
“the novel as a form of writing is dead” and advises “all the young ones now to write
essays, after all since characters are of no importance why not just write meditations,
meditations are always interesting, neither character nor identity are necessary to him
who meditates” (104). Characters and depth psychology are hallmarks of early modernist
writing—Stein’s own “Melanctha” is in fact an excellent example of a character study—
but Stein has clearly given up on character as a mode by now. Indeed Stein anticipates
the postmodern rejection of the depth model (Dollimore 64). In a similarly postmodern
move, Stein paraphrases a French acquaintance who remarks that “every generation that
is every two years is completely a different thing now everything is so confused…”
(205). She later takes credit for this realization herself, as she announces, “any two years
can make a generation” (314). Such fragmentation of what had traditionally been a
relatively large unit (i.e., the generation) suggests Stein’s belief that no one is connected
to anyone else in a meaningful way. It also pulls the foundation out from under
discourses like ethnic literature, which draw heavily on the metaphor of generations,
particularly in terms of first- and secondgeneration immigrant conflict (Sollors, Beyond
208; Dearborn 73). Still, Stein does not dispense completely with such forms. An
autobiography is not a novel, and an autobiography by an expatriate Jewish lesbian is not
necessarily an ethnic novel. Everybody’s Autobiography does, however, employ and play
with some of the conventions of both genre and sub-genre.
One example of a playful twist on ethnic women’s autobiography is Stein’s emphasis
on food. While the “hungry heroine” is a common figure in ethnic tales of the rise from
ghetto to American Dream (Dearborn 80), Stein tells the reader about all the significant
meals she and Alice ate during their six months in America: “I will of course always tell
everything we ate” (179). On a more serious note, Stein offers an alternative to immigrant
portrayals of America as the Land of Opportunity: “I used to be fond of saying that
America, which was supposed to be a land of success, was a land of failure. Most of the
great men in America had a long life of early failure and a long life of later failure”
(88).42 Stein’s own experience had been the opposite—her early years of relative
obscurity were seemingly wiped out by her immense and almost instant popularity
following The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas and her subsequent lecture tour. Stein
comes into her own as a celebrity, but it is clear that much of her American success stems
from the fact that she is a visitor and not a resident.
This success has been as disarming as it has been pleasurable, and it has had some
unpredicted effects on Stein’s perception: “it seems very long ago and it is long ago
because at that time I had never made any money and since then I have made some and I
feel differently now about everything, so it is a long time ago four years ago that I wrote
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas” (44). A shifting sense of time amidst a desire to
connect with one’s roots are, in fact, hallmarks of ethnic explorations. Indeed, Dearborn
identifies the central problem of ethnicity as the “relation of the individual to his
ancestor, or…to time” (182). Stein has been dealing with time throughout her 1930s
narratives, and she explains in “A Transatlantic Interview, 1946” that she wrote in the
present in order to make time cease to exist: “I did it unconsciously in The
Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas, but I did it consciously in Everybody’s
Autobiography…” (20). Just as Stein offered an uneven ratio between time elapsed and
pages devoted to narration in The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas, she purposely
disrupts the mimetic quality of Everybody’s Autobiography by reminding us that the
events she narrates took place in the past. For example, in the midst of her “America”
chapter, Stein talks about meeting Jacques Viot, “the day before yesterday” (216). The
past and the present impinge on one another. She then spends a few paragraphs speaking
about lecturing in Chicago, only to flip back to the “present” of writing the text by
stating, “I find out just today and in Paris that Americans and Europeans are different.
Two things happened to me today” (217). After musing on the differences between
Americans and Europeans (which, I might add, Stein had found out previously and
remarked upon on multiple occasions), Stein returns to her earlier narrative with a casual,
“so we stayed our two weeks in Chicago…” (218)—as if the episode of helping some
Americans in Paris stood in causal relation to Stein’s and Toklas’s time in Chicago. Later
in the same chapter, when Stein is telling about “leav[ing] for California in an airplane,”
she comments that “just now” (i.e., the present of writing the book) “a great many are
getting killed in the airplanes,” observes that she and Toklas were not killed, and
continues with her narrative (288). Breslin notes that The Autobiography of Alice
B.Toklas “provides not—as Stein seems to have thought—a mere submission to the
conventions of autobiography but an intense and creative struggle within them” (149),
since autobiography is “necessarily retrospective” and Stein strives to create a
“continuous present” (150); the same can be said of Everybody’s Autobiography.
In a continuous present, the subject is always changing. This makes the task of
producing a single autobiographical subject a difficult one. Indeed, Stein does not even
try, as Will points out: “in its refusal to produce a coherent autobiographical subject that
will mirror authorial presence, Everybody’s Autobiography poses a major challenge to
textual constructions of identity as fixed or essential, and to a phallocentric organization
of knowledge dependent upon the exclusion of some ‘feminine’ Other” (243). Further,
instead of focusing on the relation of the autobiographical subject to outside events, Stein
contends that “the real ideas are not the relation of human beings as groups but a human
being to himself inside him and that is an idea that is more interesting than humanity in
groups, after all the minute that there are a lot of them they do not do it for themselves
but somebody does it for them and that is a darn sight less interesting” (213). Hence the
philosophical quality of Everybody’s Autobiography. Stein seems to write as much for
her own edification as for any desire to transmit information to posterity. This
“autobiography” does not offer a unitary subject or a clear sense of time and events.
For a text which consistently denies the relevance of clear-cut categories, Everybody’s
Autobiography contains several surprisingly forthright statements of binary absolutes,
beginning with the declaration, “if you win you do not lose and if you lose you do not
win, at least if you win or if you lose it seems so” (9). Like winning and losing, thinking
and speaking are conceptualized as disparate elements in a polarized field, as Stein
reflects: “when I write I write and when I talk I talk and the two are not one, no not for
any one and when they come near being one, then the inside is not inside and the outside
is not outside and I like the inside to be inside and the outside to be outside, it makes it
more necessary to be one” (271–72). Thinking and speaking, inside and outside, are
further related to the realms of private and public, a major concern for a writer who
cherishes her privacy and who has recently been thrust into the public spotlight: “Well
anyway when you say what you do say you say it in public but when you write what you
do write you write it in private if not you do not write it, that is what writing is, and in
private you are you and in public you are in public…” (301). Stein also draws a
connection between the inside/outside dichotomy and the notion of identity by insisting
that “the thing is like this, it is all the question of identity. It is all a question of the
outside being outside and the inside being inside” (48).
Inside/outside boundaries are linked to national and ethnic identity in this text, as well
as in The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas. Once again, Stein is neither purely inside nor
completely outside of any given category. For example, she is neither a model American
(native born, raised, and residing) nor an acknowledged expatriate. Instead we might
think of the “Gertrude Stein” of Everybody’s Autobiography as a cross-cultural or trans-
Atlantic mediator. Stein clearly identifies as an American, both before and after her
lecture tour. In excusing herself for not wanting to make the trip, Stein insists that
identification is more important than actual location, asserting that “after all I am
American all right. Being there does not make me more there” (115). Having visited
America, Stein afifirms, “I am clear I am a good American, I am slow-minded and
quickly clear in expression, I am certain that I see everything that is seen and in between I
stand around but I do not wait, no American can wait…. Americans can neither serve nor
wait…” (310). She cannot make America her permanent home, however, because
Americans are too needy. In explaining why she remains in France, she observes that “the
reason is very simple their life belongs to them so your life can belong to you” (105). She
further observes that “in France everybody reads everything aloud. In America they talk
over the radio but they do not read aloud…. I like to read with my eyes and not with my
ears. I like to read inside and not outside” (168). Stein’s position—identifying with one
country and living in another—allows her to view both cultures from a distance, and
perhaps to offer a greater understanding of both.
Although Stein did not embark for America with the plan of becoming a mediator or
translator for two countries, her trip might be viewed as permitting her to re-establish her
connection to America, its Founding Fathers and its traditions. Having dismissed
generations as so frequent as to be meaningless, Stein nevertheless contends that fathers
are omnipresent: “Well feudal days were the days of fathers and now once more these
days are the days of fathers” (144). Fathers, and implicitly Founding Fathers, lead Stein
to thinking about biological and ethnic fathers, as well. Hence, Stein further suggests that
“the Jews and they come into this because they are very much given to having a father
and to being one and they are very much given not to want a father and not to have one,
and they are an epitome of all this that is happening the concentration of fathering to the
perhaps there not being one” (146–47). Stein is still not ready to acknowledge that Jewish
fathers are part of her history, however. Her language distances her from the group she
describes, as if she were not, in fact, one of its members. Stein’s gradual acknowledgment
of her own status as a Jew occurs within the context of another ethnic group, African-
Americans.
Having attended a party for “Negro intellectuals” hosted by Carl Van Vechten, Stein
offers the following thoughts:
I know they do not want you to say negro but I do want to say Negro. I
dislike it when instead of saying Jew they say Hebrew or Israelite or
Semite, I do not like it and why should a Negro want to be called colored.
Why should he want to lose being a Negro to become a common thing
with a Chinaman or a Japanese or a Hindu or an islander or anything any
of them can be called colored, a Negro is a Negro and he ought to like to
be called one if he is one, he may not want to be one that is all right but as
long as he cannot change that why should he mind the real name of
them…. Well its name is Negro if it is a Negro and Jew if it is a Jew and
both of them are nice strong solid names so let us keep them. (206)
This passage is rich with insights into Stein’s attitude towards race, ethnicity and the
power of naming. First of all, Stein expresses what must be seen as a personal affront to
hearing Jews spoken of as Hebrews, etc. Thus she speaks as a member of one group
(Jews) and believes that this authorizes her to comment on another group (African-
Americans). Secondly, Stein anticipates cultural theory by about sixty years in observing
that African-Americans are not the only “people of color.” She then argues that
specificity and uniqueness should be privileged above broader identification—Americans
of African descent should be pleased to use a term which refers to them and not to other
groups. Stein proceeds to offer an essentialist view of racial and ethnic identification as
an attribute which “cannot [be] change[d]” and should therefore be accepted.43 Finally,
Stein deems both “Negro” and “Jew” “nice strong solid names,” suggesting a certain
equality; her rhetorical coupling of the two groups further strengthens the ties between
her black characters in “Melanctha” and her own Jewish roots.
At the same time that she perceptively enumerates some parallels between black and
Jewish experience, Stein shows a pronounced lack of insight into the power relations
entailed in naming, particularly as they apply to who gets to name the Other. She sees “a
Negro…[or] a Chinaman or a Japanese or a Hindu or an islander” (206) as something one
is, but in fact such identities can be willfully chosen or forcibly assigned. William
Petersen notes that identities are ideally chosen by individuals, but he also admits that
“each person is also influenced by social factors over which he or she has had no
control…. We do not choose (entirely) how others will regard us or what, even despite
our best intentions, they may ascribe to us” (41). Stein herself (wrongly) attributes Jewish
status to certain hapless Gentiles, though we do not hear of any instances in which
someone “calls [her] a Jew” as Kathleen St. Peter does Louie Marsellus (PH 85). Clearly
Stein, author and shaper of words, occupies a more privileged position than the African-
Americans she urges to accept their identity as she has accepted hers.
In spite of the parallels she sees between black and Jewish experience, Stein is not a
proto-Civil Rights activist. Instead of considering her own history and well-being as
somehow conjoined to that of people of color and therefore using her voice to speak out
for silenced people on the margins, she basically uses these observations as a way to
understand and an excuse to talk about herself. After attending an all-black theatrical
performance, Stein comments that “negro actors act anything so naturally…publicity
does not hurt them because they can be what anything makes them and it does not make
anything else of them because they are the thing they are then. So it is not acting it is
being for them, and they have no time sense to be a trouble to them” (288). Here Stein
attributes chameleon-like characteristics to black people, suggesting that they have little
backbone and little ability to differentiate real life from make-believe. Her comment
about time draws on negative stereotypes of black workers as lazy, immature, and
carefree. Stein, on the other hand, is deeply concerned with issues of publicity and the
public self, particularly now that she has returned to the United States. America is defined
by a fundamental striving for legibility, as Stein explains: “in America they want to make
everything something anybody can see by looking. That is very interesting, that is the
reason there are no fences in between no walls to hide anything no curtains to cover
anything and the cinema that can make anything be anything anybody can see by
looking” (202). Ironically, race is something that many (white) people have historically
thought they could see by looking, when in fact people of color have successfully passed
for white throughout American history. This observation suggests that such legibility
made Stein feel vulnerable. Indeed, one’s public identity can only be a source of
vulnerability in a visual culture. Wagner-Martin argues that Toklas was “afraid of
slander” and homophobia, while Stein “was afraid of anti-Semitism” (Favored 209).
Perhaps Stein felt that racism, because it is more openly discussed, was less insidious
than anti-Semitism. At any rate, the popularity and acceptance the women achieved on
their American tour seems to have bolstered Stein’s comfort with her ethnic roots, even if
it did not make her substantially more understanding of other forms of minority status.
By the time she finished writing Everybody’s Autobiography in 1937, Stein seemed
“intent on being Jewish,” a shift which Wagner-Martin finds consistent with Stein’s
personality: “[Stein’s] claiming her Jewishness with such pride in the midst of the
secrecy and persecution that shrouded most of Europe seemed more brave than
foolhardy. Above all, it seemed characteristic” (Favored 230). Although Wagner-Martin
attributes a certain intentionality to Stein’s growing identification, Stein sometimes seems
naive or reckless in her lack of concern for the anti-Semitism building around her. In her
wandering, associative style, Stein off-handedly chats about friends, daily occupations,
and fascism:
So I wandered with Basket and Pepe and I enjoyed myself and I took to
gardening and it was a great pleasure I cut all the box hedges and we have
a great many and I cleared the paths more or less well, the box hedges I
did very well and then the weeds came up in the garden and we had corn
the Kiddie who sends it to us says now we must not give it to any fascists
but why not if the fascists like it, and we liked the fascists, so I said please
send us unpolitical corn, and Bennett Cerf and Jo Davidson came to see us
and we called for them in Geneva and got lost getting out of Switzerland
the way we always do. (318–19)
Stein wants unpolitical corn, but, as she certainly knew, boundaries are not always easy
to enforce. Hence as Everybody’s Autobiography winds down, we find Stein in a
characteristically paradoxical position, accepting her own Jewishness and liking the
fascists she encountered.
Stein’s attitude about Jews and her own ethnic roots indicates growth and change on
her part, while the paradoxes and self-contradictions inherent in her words and her
situation suggest continuity. By the end of her second autobiography, Stein decides that
perhaps the first was not an autobiography and the second is not a sequel: “And now I
almost think I have the first autobiography was not that, it was a description and a
creation of something that having happened was in a way happening not again but as it
had been which is history which is newspaper which is illustration but is not a simple
narrative of what is happening not as if it had happened not as if it is happening but as if
it is existing simply that thing. And now in this book I have done it if I have done it”
(312). She acknowledges the blurry line between that which is “described” (i.e., that
which is objective, outside, real) and that which is created (i.e., that which is fictional,
constructed, originating inside the self). She decides that she did not create the
continuous present in The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas, but thinks that she did that
more effectively in Everybody’s Autobiography. Also at the end of this text, Stein aligns
herself with painters whose “pictures are trying to escape from the prison of framing,”
noting that “all those so far have tried it have gone dead in not giving birth to it” (322).
Stein wants her work to escape the confines of genre, of categories like moneymaking
and real, of periods like early and late or avant-garde or narrative. She is a “grandmother”
now, but she is still trying to give birth. Stein knows quite well that The Autobiography of
Alice B.Toklas was hugely successful, but she offers a rare glimpse of her capacity for
humility when she states, “I guess it was a great success” (327). She reflects that “it is a
peaceful thing to be one succeeding” (327), but peace does not necessarily make for great
art. Indeed her next autobiography will be about war—Wars I Have Seen.
DOES SIZE MATTER? OR, BIG LITTLE DOGS
Everybody’s Autobiography is a sequel to The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas, and

Stein writes it as if it picks up exactly where the latter left off. In fact, The Geographical
History of America falls between the two. Although Gleason states that the concept of
identity did not come into articulation until after WWII (Speaking 137), Stein was fully
engaged in puzzling out its nuances in this 1936 text. One might even go so far as to
include Stein in the category of Jewish intellectuals who played a major role in theorizing
ethnicity and identity (Gleason, “American” 108). Gass links Stein’s “attempt to identify
America with modernity” (5) to her desire to create a continuous present, pointing out
that “geography would be the study appropriate to it: mapping body space” (8–9). This
“mapping [of] body space” constitutes for Stein yet another form of experimentation with
multiple discursive positions. The Geographical History of America is philosophical and
reflective, and Haas includes it in the category of “Entity: Really Writing” (115), in
contrast to The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas and Everybody’s Autobiography,
examples of mere “Identity: Audience Writing” (111). Still it is not an island unto itself,
disconnected from Stein’s other narrative texts or from the explorations of her
contemporaries.
The Gertrude Stein who wrote The Geographical History of America and the “I” who
speaks it are not unlike the Willa Cather who wrote The Professor’s House and the
Professor whose viewpoint is privileged. Cather had recently won a Pulitzer Prize and
achieved popular and financial success when she set about creating the disillusioned and
anti-consumerist Godfrey St. Peter. Stein had become an instant celebrity and finally
started making money with The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas, and her work was
finally assured of a publisher (and therefore an audience) when she pondered “the
problem of personal identity” (Gass 16) and the effect fame would have on her writing.
Similarly, the only house Cather’s Professor ever considers home is a cramped, rented
one, and Stein spends a lifetime “liv[ing]…in hotels, ships, trains, rented rooms…” (Gass
14). On a thematic level, St. Peter ponders issues such as “science as a phase of human
development” (PH 68) and the nature of human intellect, while Stein’s text delves into
“the Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind.” St. Peter reflects that “the fact is,
the human mind, the individual mind, has always been made more interesting by
dwelling on the old riddles, even if it makes nothing of them” (68) and concludes his
ruminations with his now-famous pronouncement: “art and religion (they are the same
thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had” (69).
Stein certainly “dwell[s] on the old riddles” in The Geographical History of America,
contemplating (and reiterated in a repetition-with-a-difference form throughout) “what
makes religion and propaganda and politics” (46).44 These issues might not be of primary
interest to Stein, but she cannot ignore them; indeed “religion and propaganda and
politics” have become the subject of art.
Like The Professor’s House, The Geographical History of America is a formal
experiment for the author. Stein’s work, while “in no sense a volume of philosophy” is
nevertheless “philosophically…the most important of her texts,” perhaps best

conceptualized as “the stylized presentation of the process of meditation itself, with many
critical asides” (Gass 23, 23–24, 23). Addressing the seemingly redundant passages in the
text, Gass explains, “we repeat when we think…[and] the style of The Geographical
History of America is often a reflection of this mental condition” (33). The structure of
The Geographical History of America is also characteristically American if we consider it
in light of Blair’s thesis of American modularity. Arguing that “Americanness” is not
“what people believe (or say they believe),” but “tendencies in the way life within it is
organized” (8), Blair proceeds to define modularity as “when the Americans take
something the Europeans had always considered as a whole…and break it up” (11). Some
examples of modularity which Blair offers include Whitman’s poetry and the work of
blues/jazz musicians. Whitman, he explains, “left behind the ruling European conceptions
of sequential and holistic literary structure in favor of modular openness” (62). Similarly,
blues and jazz demonstrate modularity because “both are essentially add-on structures
without inherent pointing toward any foreseeable climax” (76). Arguably, Stein’s text
belongs in this category, as well. Instead of offering a coherent, unitary history of the
country (starting, perhaps, with Plymouth or Jamestown and continuing through to the
Great War or the stock market crash), Stein offers a fragmented “geographical history,”
which is literally all over the map.45
If we place her work within the context of the modularity that partially defines
Americanism and the formlessness that partially defines modern writing, it seems
perfectly sensible for Stein to conclude that “there is no reason why chapters should
succeed each other since nothing succeeds another, no now any more. In the old novels
yes but not new any more” (82). She further states, “why is it not necessary to have
chapters and if in spite of it not being necessary one does have them why do they not
have to follow one another” (83). In The Geographical History of America, Stein offers
chapters, plays, scenes, volumes, pages, parts and autobiographies—all numbered (but
few arranged consecutively) and many used more than once. The text is narrative in that
individual sentences make sense, but there is no single story or overarching plot to speak
of.46 At one point, Stein offers a morality-play-like interlude in which the characters are
“identity, human nature, human mind, universe, history, audience and growing” (146).
She also provides a few more traditional narrative episodes, such as “the story of
Bennett” (72), but one would be hard pressed to offer a synopsis of The Geographical
History of America.
Nevertheless, in writing about America, Stein simultaneously claims the country as
her own and leaves her mark on it. While The Professor’s House delves deeply into
issues of possession, Stein offers the following meditation on the language of ownership:
“How is America. Very well I thank you. This is the reply. If you say I thank you that
means that in a way it belongs to you. Very well I thank you” (67–68). Despite her de
facto expatriation, Stein exerts a claim on America merely by answering for it, or in this
case, by writing about it. She defines herself as an American, and no one can say
otherwise. Stein offers her own bid for why “a Geographical history is important” (47),
but in typical form she does not write a geographical history—she writes the
geographical history. Stein never spells out what exactly her project entails, but she does
say that we will recognize it when we see it. As she explains, “when suddenly you know
that the geographical history of America has something to do with everything it may be
like loving any man or any woman or even a little or a big dog” (84). Once again
showing a Whitmanian influence, Stein situates her work by invoking a portrait of the
Everyman who loves Anyman (or -dog).
In addition to writing in the tradition of Whitman, Stein repeatedly situates herself in
relation to other geniuses. Indeed, The Geographical History of America begins with
Stein aligning herself, the speaking “I,” with two extraordinary American males, both of
whom are linked in the popular imagination with revolution and freedom: “in the month
of February were born Washington and Lincoln and I” (45). Such cataloging implies a
more-than-healthy ego in Stein, along with an identification with ideological
Americanism, freedom, and equality. Indeed, Fuchs points out that partio ularly in its
early years, “what distinguished the American national spirit, character, and identity was
not sectarian religion or ancestry but a culture of politics” (21), clarifying that “for
Jefferson, American identity was a matter of American ideology…” (56). Having
compared herself to two quintessential American symbols, Stein immediately proceeds to
insist that “these are ordinary ideas” (45). Broadening her identification from American
heroes to international literary greats across the centuries, Stein offers the following
linkage: “think of the Bible and Homer think of Shakespeare and think of me” (109).
When she tries to contextualize her writing within her own time, Stein can only
rhetorically (and repeatedly) wonder “why is it that in this epoch the only real literary
thinking has been done by a woman” (210; see also 216–17, 220). In contemplating her
status as an American, a writer, and a genius, Stein also finds a prototype for her own
position vis-a-vis nationality, namely that she is of her country but not in it. Thus she
observes, “Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt like Napoleon and Louis Napoleon even
though they belonged to the country to which they belonged were foreign to it” (127).
Stein, “non-expatriate” (Spencer 204) but non-resident, is similarly foreign to the country
to which she belongs.47
Establishing a cross-cultural and longitudinal context for her project is one strategy
that Stein employs in order to conceptualize her sense of personal identity. Another
method towards this end is Stein’s introduction of two mantras which recur throughout
the text: “what is the use of being a little boy if you are going to grow up to be a man”
(50), and “I am I because my little dog knows me” (99). While the former interrogates the
relationship between the child and the adult self (i.e., personal identity over time), the
latter invokes the relationship between personal identity and audience. In addition to
interrogating identity, human nature, and the human mind, both of these ritualistically
repeated lines further expand the explorations of discursive positions which Stein
attempts in “Melanctha” (writing about black, lower-class characters) and The
Autobiography of Aliċe B.Toklas (writing as Alice). Here it would seem that Stein’s
interest is in expanding the generic, perhaps presaging her decision to write another book
about herself and call it Everybody’s Autobiography. In the case of “little boy [who
is]…going to grow up to be a man,” Stein continues, “and yet everybody does so unless it
is a little girl going to grow up to be a woman” (50). This line occurs only once, though,
so it seems that the boy growing up to be a man suffices to summarize everyone’s
developmental pattern. Stein further articulates her broad use of the generic when she
says, “any man that is women and children” (58). In this case, it is difficult to discern
whether “any man” includes “women and children,” or whether “women and children”
substitutes for “any man.” Gass clarifies the first mantra and connects it to the second in
the following way:
When Gertrude Stein wrote that there was little use in being born a little
boy if you were going to grow up to be a man, she did not intend to deny
causality or the influence of the past. She did mean to say that when we
look at our own life, we are looking at the history of another; we are like a
little dog licking our own hand, because our sense of ourselves at any time
does not depend upon such data, only our ‘idea’ of ourselves does, and
this ‘idea,’ whether its our own or that of another, is our identity.
Identities depend upon appearances and papers. Appearances can be
imitated, papers forged. (37)
Thus in Gass’s estimation, Stein’s real concern is with the impossibility of perpetuating a
fixed identity when people are constantly changing and when the accouterments of
identity are so easily altered.
While I see the merit in Gass’s reading of the “little boy,” I think he stops short of a
thorough analysis of the “little dog.” Stein describes the reciprocal relationship between
the little dog (the audience) and the speaking “I” in terms suggestive of the mirroring
which occurs between a mother and a child—the little dog’s recognition confers identity
upon the speaking “I.” At the same time, Stein acknowledges the tenuousness of relying
on a outside source for affirmation: “I am I because my little dog knows me, but perhaps
he does not and if he did I would not be I. Oh no oh no” (100). Upon further examination,
cause and effect are not always clear, as Stein points out: “If I am I then my little dog
knows me” (102; emphasis added). Whereas Stein initially suggested that the dog’s
recognition confers identity, she here implies that the speaking “I” must have an identity
as a prerequisite for the dog’s acknowledgment. She then proposes that perhaps the little
dog’s knowing “does not prove anything about you it only proves something about the
dog” (103), eventually concluding that “I am I because my little dog knows me, even if
the little dog is a big one, and yet the little dog knowing me does not really make me be I
no not really because after all being I I am I has really nothing to do with the little dog
knowing me, he is my audience, but an audience never does prove to you that you are
you” (104–05). Since the little dog is a figure for an audience and “any dog has identity”
(134), we might assume that this discussion has been entirely hypothetical. At this point,
Stein gives her first indication that this mantra is not wholly of her own creation: “the old
woman said I am I because my little dog knows me, but the dog knew that he was he
because he knew that he was he as well as knowing that he knew she” (134). Stein herself
had several dogs, as any reader of her “autobiographies” is well aware. Thus it seems that
the little dog of The Geographical History of America functions on several rhetorical
levels simultaneously—generic (“a dog” [46] and “any little dog” [48]); specific (the old
woman and her little dog); and personal (Stein’s standard poodle, Basket). I will point
out, however, that Stein’s primary attachment was not to a little dog, but rather a big one.
Stein had Chihuahuas, as well, Byron and Pepe, but the only dog she mentions in this text
is Basket.48 In proposing that any dog, even a big one, can serve the purpose of “my little
dog,” Stein is pushing the generic one step further.
In addition to offering broad new forms of the generic, Stein further expands the
definition of autobiography by writing a slew of them (172–84). Most people write a
single autobiography (or perhaps several consecutive volumes on a particularly
noteworthy life), but Stein provides many autobiographies, and indeed, multiple versions
entitled “autobiography one” (179). Even when Stein unhinges autobiography from its
traditional definitions, however, there are limits to what the genre can do. Because it is
inherently dependent on an audience, autobiography cannot communicate entity:
Become Because.
Beware of be.
Be is not what no one can be what no one can see and certainly not what no one
can say.
Anybody can say be.
Be is for biography.
And for autobiography.
No not for autobiography because be comes after.
So once more to renounce because and become. (184)
In her interrogation of the tension between the desire to create a narrative of the self and
the impossibility of producing a unitary self to narrate, Stein prefigures Butler’s argument
which questions the “popular discourse on gender identity that uncritically employs the
inflectional attribution of ‘being’ to genders and to ‘sexualities’” (Gender 21). While
Butler insists that “within the inherited discourse of the metaphysics of substance, gender
proves to be performative—that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be” (Gender
24–25), Stein seems to be saying that the self is similarly performative or constructed.
Furthermore, the self is constructed only in the context of an audience. Autobiography is
about the self, but not for the self. Paradoxically, perhaps, one writes an autobiography
for an audience. When Stein does offer a few lines of autobiography it is not under that
rubric but rather “the story of my life” (187). Stein begins with, “at that time I had no
dogs” (188). By this she means no pets, but also no audience. Stein had a second best, “a
family,” but it is dispensable, as she points out, “they can be a nuisance in identity but
there is no doubt no shadow of doubt that that identity the family identity we can do
without” (188). Little dogs and national ties, on the other hand, are imperative.
If size does not matter for the “little dog” in question, it does matter for the United
States itself: “in the United States there is more space where nobody is than where
anybody is” (45). Gass agrees with the aptness of Stein’s decision to write a geographical
history. He clarifies that in a rootless, migratory country such as the United States,
“sometimes one feels there’s nothing but geography…and certainly a geographical
history is the only kind it can significantly have” (13). Stein further explains that history
is an appropriate genre, since “big countries cannot really make poetry because they do
not cannot all when they say the same thing feel as they do” (202). Along similar lines,
Stein’s former professor, Munsterberg, observes that “a nation which in every decade has
assimilated millions of aliens, and whose historic past everywhere leads back to strange
peoples, cannot with its racial variegation inspire a profound feeling of indissoluble
unity” (5). America is not the setting from which to produce great literature, but as a
subject it provides discursive positions for Stein to work from. Indeed, Stein’s literary
strategies in some ways epitomize Berlant’s definition of American nationality and the
American Dream: “to be American…would be to inhabit a secure space liberated from
identities and structures that seem to constrain what a person can do in history” (Queen
4). Stein rejects traditional history and traditional conceptions of identity in one fell
syllogistic swoop: “identity is history and history is not true because history is dependent
upon an audience” (139). As an alternative, Stein creates herself and re-conceptualizes
history not as the past but as a realm of possibility dependent on the presence of an
audience.
In spite of its vast size and its frontier tradition, America is no longer empty, as Stein
acknowledges: “leave well enough alone means nothing now because nothing is alone”
(168). Indeed, we might observe that Stein’s world view has (predictably) changed
dramatically in the thirty years since “Melanctha: Each One as She May.” Another
important shift which occurs between the publication of “Melanctha” and that of The
Geographical History of America has to do with the fact that Stein is no longer struggling
for money and fame. While “Melanctha” establishes links between living and loving,
Stein here adds, “now anybody who loves money and anybody who loves loves money
anybody who loves loves to have money” (48). Having a paying audience causes Stein to
question the paradoxical relationship between the intrinsic and the extrinsic worth of art:
“as long as nothing or very little that you write is published it is all sacred but after it is a
great deal of it published is it everything that you write is it as sacred” (53). Having an
audience seems preferable to obscurity (just as wealth seems preferable to poverty), but it
also has the potential to lessen a work’s spiritual value precisely in proportion to the
financial value it bestows.
Audience is also related to the inside/outside dichotomy which Stein addresses in
“Melanctha” and in her various autobiographies. Indeed, Harriet Chessman claims that all
of Stein’s work struggles with “the communication between an ‘I’ and a ‘you,’ between
an author (or a work) and a reader” (137). Thinking about human nature and the human
mind in terms of inside and outside, Stein insists, “if the human mind is in then it is not
out” (113). Public speech is also differentiated from private writing, as Stein explains:
“what is the difference between write it and tell it. There is a difference you can tell it as
you write it but you can tell it and not write it” (117). Along similar lines, “when inside is
inside it sees outside but it is inside” (180). Inside and outside are separate but not equal,
and they are not always clearly defined. At times Stein conceptualizes the two as a binary
either/or (e.g., the human mind is either in or out), but at times there seems to be space
for a more fluid both/and (e.g., inside can see, if not be, outside). In this way, Stein seems
to share the experience of the subjects about whom Gambrell writes that “if modernist
women ‘insider-outsiders’ were compelled to circulate constandy among discrete
intellectual formations addressing a series of different audiences with different agendas,
then frequent self-revision can be read, in part, as a defense, a necessary evasion” (33–
34). Stein’s audiences included the American public, her fellow artists and geniuses, and
herself (not to mention her big little dog). Thus we might conclude that Stein’s repetitive
meditations serve the purpose of allowing Stein to speak as her selves as opposed to
being limited to (defining and) speaking as herself.
Indeed, Stein toys repeatedly with the notion that a unitary self could be developed
and sustained over time. For example, she reflects that “when I was one that is no longer
one of one but just one that is to say when I was a little one, but not so little that I meant
myself when I said not one” (172). Here Stein plays with the slippage between speaking
of “one” as an age, as a generic person, and as a specific individual. Moving from her
childhood to her Radcliffe days, Stein recalls, “when I was at college I studied
philosophy that was it they did not know what they saw because they said they saw what
they knew, and if they saw it they no longer knew it because then they were two…. The
minute you are two it is not philosophy that is through it is you” (178). If philosophy
cannot resolve the tension between seeing and knowing in order to present a coherent
identity, neither can religion: “You see that is what religion means when it says two in
one and three in one and so religion can try to be one in one…. So after all then even in
religion one is not one” (179). One is not one in Stein’s oeuvre either, as her many
versions of “autobiography one” (179) imply. Thus Stein conceives of the self as
multiple, as fluid and as a potential object for wordplay.
Stein plays with words, but she also recognizes their power. Indeed, language has
important links to both nationality and identity. In terms of nationality, Massa and Stead
point out that “for the American, more than for the Englishman, language and the
construction of national identity have been inter-involved” (4), while Anderson insists
that language both creates and enables the solidarity of a nation (154). Gass offers a
summary of Stein’s partio ularly American linguistic attributes, including “her natural
American bent toward self-proclamation and her restless quest for truth” (20). He further
suggests that Stein ultimately defined herself “as an eccentric, dilettante, and gossip,
madwoman, patron, genius, tutor, fraud, and queer—the Mother Goose of Montparnasse”
(20). In addition, nationality and sexual orientation are intertwined in Stein’s writing and
ideologically, as Berlant comments, “linked complexly to the enigma of consensual sex is
that of consensual nationality, which similarly involves theories of self-identity, of
intention, and of the urge to shed the personal body for the tease of safe mutual or
collective unboundedness” (Queen 171). Stein qualifies her immersion in “collective
unboundedness” by raising issues of legibility: “It is wonderful how a handwriting which
is illegible can be read, oh yes it can” (183).49 Here she literally refers to the fact that only
Alice, her beloved, can decipher her longhand manuscripts, but she also highlights the
fact that not everyone can accurately read and comprehend all aspects of a multifaceted
person like herself. For example, Stein’s homosexuality is not necessarily “something
legibly written on the body” (Edelman 9), or, for that matter, something clearly written
on all Stein’s texts. At the same time, Stein insists that “anything that is anything can be
read again” (233). In other words, multiple readings from multiple perspectives produce
multiple texts.
Bringing the discussion full circle, we can observe that language plays a crucial role in
the construction and maintenance of personal identity, as well. Indeed, Stein might well
have agreed with Dollimore’s reading of Shakespeare’s Caliban as creation and creator of
language at the same time: “Caliban curses as an effect of language itself…. He possesses
no essential nature, perverted or true, but an identity partly formed in and by language….
It is within and by that language that he is made or made able—created/coerced—to
curse” (109). In The Geographical History of America, Stein essentially writes herself
into continuing existence, as an American, as a genius/hero/artist, as a lesbian, and as a
person. Through repetition and continual re-working of philosophical and
epistemological issues, Stein “become[s] her own literary progenitor” (Blankley 208).
The meditations which comprise The Geographical History of America do not come
together as a definitive and unambiguous treatise, however, and the text ends with a
prime example of the “willful inconclusiveness, inscribed within the textual sequences”
of Gambrell’s women modernists (184): “I am not sure that is not the end” (GH 235).
Outspoken and ambitious though she was, Gertrude Stein did not believe that she
possessed the key to ultimate, unchanging truths. Her “strong impulse towards self-
revision” (Gambrell 32), which links her to other women modernist intellectuals, led her
to accept growth and change, inconsistency and contradiction, not just as part of life but
as a condition of life. Indeed, we might observe that Stein’s various avatars demonstrate
both continuity and transformation—Melanctha and Jeff of “Melanctha,” the “Gertrude
Stein” of The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas, the narrator of Everybody’s
Autobiography, and the speaker of “I am I” in The Geographical History of America.
Furthermore, Stein employs a host of marginal, liminal, and transitional figures,
including the mixed-race individual, the cosmopolitan, and the Wandering Jew. Hence,
Stein uses innovative forms and fluidity of identity.
Stein claims to have written “for myself and strangers” (qtd. in Poirier 25), but she
was part of a literary and artistic movement, as well. She wrote within and against
traditions simultaneously (Dearborn 55), and considered herself to be centrally involved
in the forging of new ones. Although she would have been the first to call her work
ground-breaking, she was not one for social causes. As “Alice” relates of Stein’s decision
to leave medical school without her degree, “her very close friend Marion Walker
pleaded with her, she said, but Gertrude Gertrude remember the cause of women, and
Gertrude Stein said, you don’t know what it is to be bored” (ABT 82). Stein did not seek
out female protégées, devoting her attention to her male peers while charging Alice with
entertaining (and protecting her from) the tedious wives of geniuses, but she served as an
important literary role model for Nella Larsen. While Stein never considered herself part
of a community of women, she was working in ways that were analogous and
complementary to her literary contemporaries like Cather and Larsen. Stein unhinges the
concept of identity, allowing for looser and more fluid representations of nationality,
ethnicity, geographical movement, and gender. Through innovative forms and narrative
styles she actively participates in the (female, lesbian, expatriated American) quest for
self-expression, the ability to resolve “the problem of the external and the internal” (ABT
119) once and for all.
Chapter Four
“The Mixedness of Things”: Nella Larsen
Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen all showed a sustained interest in how
“geography, migration, and identity” (Yohe 1) converge to shape human experience.
Although the three writers are generally studied within the rubric of distinct and non-
overlapping sub-fields, all three moved in intersecting personal and professional circles.
To begin with, author and photographer Carl Van Vechten, who introduced many of his
friends to one another, sustained a long-term friendship with each woman. Mabel Dodge
sent Van Vechten to Stein with a letter of introduction 1913, and the ensuing relationship
lasted until Stein’s death, with Van Vechten acting as literary agent as well as personal
champion.1 Van Vechten also praised Cather’s work and the two had a friendly
relationship from 1912 at least through the mid-1930s, when Cather finally allowed Van
Vechten to photograph her. Van Vechten photographed Larsen, as well, along with being
a close friend and literary mentor from 1923 to Larsen’s virtual disappearance from the
literary and social scene following her husbands death in 1941. He discussed Stein’s
work with Larsen and tried to interest his publisher, Knopf, in both Stein’s and Larsen’s
work. Along with publishing both Quicksand and Passing in 1928 and 1929,
respectively, Knopf became Cather’s friend and publisher in 1920 and served in both
capacities until the end of Cather’s life.
In addition to having close relationships with some of the same people, Cather, Stein
and Larsen displayed some similar personal patterns. All spent formative time in Europe
but retained a sense of themselves as Americans. Further, each writer believed in the
possibilities for and took an active role in her own self-creation. Manifestations of this
shared predilection include fudged birth years, new names or nicknames, and alternative
narratives of personal history.2 Not surprisingly, these biographical similarities extend to
literary affiliations, concerns, and techniques, as well. From a thematic perspective,
Larsen’s treatment of identity is evocative of Stein’s “Melanctha”; stylistically, Larsen
writes in Cather’s demeuble tradition, offering a deceptively simple prose style and
dense, concise imagery. Indeed, Walter White compares Larsen to Cather in his 1928
letter supporting Larsen’s Guggenheim application (Davis 295). Also like Cather, Larsen
employs a male protagonist in a short story (Davis 180) and engages in male
pseudonymy.3 In Larsen’s case, the disguise is two-fold, as Wall observes of Larsen’s
story, “The Wrong Man,” “if the male pseudonym obscures the author’s identity, so too
does the absence of racial markers in the text” (86). Hence Larsen scholars, like their
equivalents in Cather studies and Stein studies, tend to read Larsen’s work as coded and
multivalent.
Representation—what is communicated, how, and by whom—is a key concern of all
three writers. In particular, all three see the complexity and potential problems inherent in
men’s attempts to portray women. Cather dramatizes this situation in her irony-laden A
Lost Lady (1923), a novel which shows an idealistic young man’s failure to comprehend
a richly contradictory older woman. As Cather was finishing her book about Niel’s
inability to capture and pin down the essential Marian, she was having her own portrait
painted by Leon Bakst, commissioned by the Omaha Public Library. In spite of his best
efforts, Bakst was unable to give the citizens of Nebraska a likeness of their native
daughter: “he went on painting desperately at the portrait, sitting after sitting, while all
the while it grew worse—stiff, dark, heavy, lifeless—everything that Willa Cather was
not…” (E.Lewis 132). In life, as in literature, men’s attempts to comprehend and
represent women produce a disappointingly “grim portrait” (O’Brien, EV 240). Picasso
did not fare much better with his portrait of Stein. She was happy with his rendition, but
few other people have been, and it is certainly telling that Picasso had to blot out Stein’s
head and repaint it from memory in order to complete the canvas. In the The
Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas, Picasso comments to Alice that Stein would eventually
grow into her portrait. While this assertion implies the genius of foresight, it is worth
noting that Picasso, who “struggled with the subject mightily” (Pierpont 83), was
incapable of painting the woman as she was—he could only offer his version of the
woman as she would be. Larsen’s Helga Crane is also the subject of a painting which
distorts her appearance. Looking at Axel Olsen’s depiction of her, Helga is repelled by
the “disgusting sensual creature with her features” (Q 89). Her aunt and uncle are
unpleasantly startled as well. When Larsen tackles representation of women by men, the
additional factor of how whites represent blacks complicates the issue.4 Hence Carby
notes that “the section of the novel [Quicksand] set in Copenhagen confronted directly
the question of the representation of blacks by whites” (171). Furthermore, Larsen
explores how white-identified black women represent (and create) other black women.
Thus, in Passing, which McCoy reads as “the emblematic tale of Irene Redfield’s
colonization of Clare Kendry” (71), “the narrative is driven not so much by Clare’s
hidden racial life as by Irene’s predilection for reading Clare an indeterminate free space
upon which to construct escapist narratives—narratives that help her to alleviate the
multiple pressures Irene herself experiences in being black, female, and bourgeois in
1920s America” (72). In this way, Larsen looks at many dimensions of the problem of
representation, simultaneously sharing the preoccupations of her predecessors and
moving beyond their work.
Larsen’s positionality also links her to Gambrell’s intellectual insider/outsiders.
Larsen traveled among the black social elite, but she also moved in white intellectual and
artistic circles. Her friends were both white and black, and she consistently resisted
pigeonholing. Thus Larsen illustrates what Gambrell calls “multiple affiliation: serial or
simultaneous connections to more than one formation—and in many cases, to competing
formations” (24). Indeed, Larsen’s life embodies the dilemma Gambrell poses: “what…
does it mean to be affiliated with a school, movement, or discipline in which one would,
under more usual circumstances, occupy the position of ‘Other’ …” (12). Gambrell’s
paradigm complicates Lewis’s assessment that Larsen had a”determination to write about
cultured Afro-America from the inside” (D. Lewis 140). Here Lewis fails to recognize
that Larsen was not wholly on the inside, as Davis notes: “after she became a celebrity,
she attended fashionable parties, openings, teas, and cabarets, yet she remained primarily
an observer, highly visible, but rarely the center of attention” (7). Martha Cutter picks up
this ambivalence in Larsen’s texts as well. She observes that, in Quicksand, for example,
Helga feels torn between what marrying James Vayle would offer in terms of social
“The mixedness of things”: nella larsen 107
status and what being Mrs. James Vayle would entail in terms of social conformity.
Helga “longs to be an ‘insider,’ [but] she also feels smothered by the prospect of adapting
herself to a particular social role” (Cutter 77). In Larsen’s case, even identifying as black
or white required complex negotiations. Sollors observes that black narrators “have
illustrated how external definitions by racial categories persistently interfere with
individual definitions from the inside” (Beyond 192), while Washington asks further,
“what happens to a writer who is legally black but internally identifies with both blacks
and whites, who is supposed to be content as a member of the black elite but feels
suffocated by its narrowness, who is emotionally rooted in the black experience and yet
wants to live in the whole world not confined to a few square blocks and the mentality
that make up Sugar Hill?” (162). We might attempt to offer an answer to these questions
by looking at how Larsen tried to situate herself professionally and artistically.
Well-read and eclectic in her interests,5 Larsen took up some of the same questions
(and utilized some of the same techniques) as Cather. Larsen’s texts, published in the late
1920s, are stylistically of a piece with the mid-1920s demeuble novels Cather wrote after
her world broke in two.6 Larsen also takes up Cather’s experiments with narrators,
especially unreliable ones, and with portraying an ironic distance between a narrator and
the author. While neither Cather nor Larsen is read as a high modernist writer, both share
thematic concerns with mainstream modernism. For example, Cantor identifies a
“rejection of absolute polarities” (38) and an attendant emphasis on interaction as
characteristics of modernism. In Cather, “the sun [lies] like a great golden globe in the
low west [, w]hile…the moon [rises] in the east, as big as a cart-wheel” (MA 206); Cather
introduces binaries in order to undo them. Surely this is also what Larsen’s preoccupation
with the “mixedness of things” (Davis 243) suggests. Furthermore, modernist writing
utilizes microcosms and particle physics, showing “a penchant for the fragmented, the
fractured, and the discordant” (Cantor 36–7). Cather uses microcosms in her Bohemian
Family of Man (the Shimerdas of My Antonia) and in her Professor’s
symbolicallycharged house, while she protests the encroachments of science by speaking
through St. Peter. Married to a physicist, Larsen shows more patience for science; her
microcosms employ science as a tool, thus taking up Cather’s question and moving
beyond her answer. For example, Helga’s Harlem, where “black figures, white figures,
little forms, big forms, small groups, large groups, sauntered, or hurried by” (Q 58),
presents a cross-section of America, as does the Negro Welfare League dance in Passing.
Such analogies as “her atom of friendship” (Q 5) clearly draw on Larsen’s knowledge of
modern science. Finally, both Cather and Larsen created episodic texts which utilize
flashbacks, letters, and out-of-body experiences, and which structurally underscore the
fragmented and fluctuating identities of the characters they portray.
Larsen also shares goals and approaches with Stein, whom she actually names as a
literary mentor. It is unclear, however, whether she ever actually met Stein or if their
acquaintance was strictly epistolary. Wagner-Martin reports that Larsen visited Stein’s
Paris salon sometime in the mid 1920s, bringing a letter of introduction from Carl Van
Vechten (Favored 177). Davis, Larsen’s biographer, makes no mention of this visit,
however, and Larsen’s letter to Stein suggests that the two had not met as of February
1928. Along with a copy of her newly-published Quicksand, Larsen enclosed the
following note:
Dear Miss Stein—
I have often talked with our friend Carl Van Vechten about you. Particularly about you
and Melanctha, which I have read many times. And always I get from it some new
thing—a truly great story. I never cease to wonder how you came to write it and just why
you and not some one of us should so accurately have caught the spirit of this race of
mine.
Carl asked me to send you my poor first book, and I am doing so. Please don’t think
me too presumptuous. I hope some day to have the great good fortune of seeing and
talking with you. (Gallup 215–16)
From this letter, we might conclude that Stein and Larsen had not actually met.
This is only one of several discrepancies amongst critics as to the facts of Larsen’s
life. Another example is Larsen’s trip to Copenhagen as a young adult: Cheryl Wall states
that Larsen never really visited Denmark as she had claimed (92), while Washington
accepts the story of Larsen’s studies abroad (161). Davis endorses neither version.
Although she reports that “no documents have surfaced that would indicate that Larsen
studied in Copenhagen, and no records support her claim of having lived in Denmark as a
teenager,” Davis stops short of discrediting Larsen’s claim, noting that “Larsen may well
have departed for Denmark during 1909 and returned before the fall of 1912” (67–68).
The important issue in the vexed history of Larsen scholarship is the fact that Larsen
continually “invented” herself (Ammons 185). Like Stein, Larsen creates multiple
versions of herself and perpetuates them. While Stein “created herself as the great,
undiscovered American writer” (Wagner-Martin, Favored 162), Larsen, like her
character, Helga, “is a self-made woman, selfmade in the sense that she has invented
herself” (Davis 276). Furthermore, Larsen fabricated much of what she allowed others to
know about her personal history (Larson xi-xii). Although her novels draw on
autobiography, much of the time Larsen spent revising her texts was devoted to “the
process of reinventing fact” (Davis 296). Her novels are thus doubly fictionalized, since
the “facts” of Larsen’s life are largely fiction and then Larsen subjects these to literary
fictionalization.
Whether or not Stein and Larsen met in person, Larsen’s awareness of modern science
and modernist experimentation suggests that Larsen shared Stein’s interest in modernity.
Also like Stein, Larsen seems ahead of her time in some ways, anticipating certain
postmodern tenets. By Everybody’s Autobiography, Stein begins to explore the
disappearance of the depth model and the fragmentation and multiplication of
generations. For her part, Larsen represents identity in a way that is consistent with
Fuss’s conception of postmodernism: “the postmodern identity is frequently theorized as
an atomic identity, fractured and disseminated into a field of dispersed energy. The
appeal to metaphors drawn from modern physics is not unsuggestive: one visualizes the
subject as a highly charged electronic field with multiple identity particles bouncing off
each other, combining and recombining, caught in an interminable process of movement
and refiguration” (103). Furthermore, conceptualizing identity in a way that reflected her
own experience necessitated some negotiations on Larsen’s part, as Gilroy has observed
of people with ties to both Africa and Europe (1). Nella Larsen, Helga Crane, Clare
Kendry and Irene Redfield all attempted to do so with varying success. Hence Larsen is
included in Gilroy’s list of “notable black American travelers” whose journeys “had
important consequences for their understanding of racial identities” (17–18).7 Clearly
Larsen wrestled with issues that are still quite relevant to people of mixed or multiple
heritages.
Before applying such terms as modernist or proto-postmodernist to Larsen’s work, it
seems appropriate to consider her work within the contemporary rubric of ethnic
autobiography. Ethnic and/or immigrant writers sometimes seem to be a few steps behind
the mainstream in literary trends. As Ferraro points out, ethnic realism, seemingly a
holdover from American realism in the nineteenth century, was still going strong during
the high modernist period (1, 58). Larsen’s membership in a black elite striving for
middle-class success situates her in much the same place as Cather and Stein, in spite of
the fact that she was nearly twenty years their junior. Accordingly, Victorian mores seem
to have been at least as influential for Larsen as they were for Cather and Stein. Indeed,
as Davis states, “although [Larsen] treats the emergence of a woman’s sexuality in both
of the novels, she does so partially with the attitudes toward sex and sexuality that are
more in keeping with Victorian mores and manners and that are at odds, rather than
compatible, with the new, Freudian ideas an of the world of the 1920s that also
influenced her thinking about sexuality and psychology” (328). Along similar lines,
Cutter observes that Helga uses her sexuality but also represses it and “recoils” from it
(84), much like Cather’s Jim Burden. Furthermore, while Mary McManus contends that
Larsen’s work demonstrates a shift away from nineteenth century “strictures of slavery
and the preoccupation with racial uplift” (80), I would point out that Larsen does not
break from nineteenth-century modes completely.
While Larsen (like Cather and Stein) rejected certain elements of her mother’s world,
she was not granted complete acceptance into the rarified world of the traditional (white
male) artist, either (Ammons 10). Unlike Cather and Stein, Larsen’s relationship to art
and history were complicated by race. Larsen was never a full part of her mothers world
not only because of the changes that came about with the transition from the Victorian
period to the modern period, but also because her white mother displayed such
ambivalence towards this black child born out of wedlock. Hence Larsen sought
“approval from male power-brokers as an exceptional female…[and] saw herself as being
in competition with other women for finite rewards” (Davis 14). Larsen wanted to earn
professional respect on her own terms and not within the subcategories created by race
and gender (i.e., black writer, woman writer). David Palumbo-Liu explains that such an
attitude is typical of “the ethnic artist [who] aspires to join the dominant’s universal
culture, to slough off ‘ethnic’ and solely identify as ‘artist’” (194). Touching on the
phenomenon by which Larsen sought to recreate herself and offer a new version of the
truth in her fiction, Palumbo-Liu observes that “it is no accident that the possibilities for
constructing a minority self as no longer subordinate to, but part of, the dominant are
sustained most vigorously in the realm of art, and particularly the world of fiction…. On
the other hand, the dominant can withhold such possibilities and place upon the minority
subject a set of de-limited sites of representation within the supposedly open field of the
universal” (193). It was precisely these limitations that Larsen sought to free herself from
through her fiction.
QUICKSAND: THE HEART OF AN IMMENSE DARKNESS
Larsen defined herself as a writer—” Nella Larsen, novelist” (Davis 2)—and sought to
situate herself as part of a literary tradition. It is interesting, therefore, that Gertrude Stein,
one of the few writers Larsen actually identifies as a literary mentor, was not yet widely
read. Nevertheless, Larsen’s “poor first book” (qtd. in Gallup 216) indeed shows the
influence of Stein’s first published text, though that influence may not manifest itself
overtly. As Davis suggests, Larsen’s “embedding of Stein’s ‘Melanctha’ into the
narrative gestures toward a gendered search for voice and actualization” (275). Thus it is
on the underlying level of subtext that Larsen most clearly takes lessons from Stein. The
protagonists of both “Melanctha” and Quicksand share salient (and more obvious)
features, however. To begin with, both Melanctha Herbert and Helga Crane are American
mulattas with a light-skinned (in Helga’s case, white) mother and a dark-skinned,
unscrupulous absentee father. Both women lose their mothers at a relatively young age,
and neither seems to find the loss particularly wrenching. Parents provide little emotional
support and offer meager financial resources. Consequently, “all her life long,
[Melanctha] loved and wanted good, kind and considerate people” (TL 72), and “all her
life Helga Crane had loved and longed for nice things” (Q 6). These seemingly modest
goals prove difficult to attain, as Melanctha undercuts her own efforts towards security
and advancement by “always losing what she had in wanting all the things she saw” (TL
50), while Helga battles a “ruthless force, a quality within herself, which was frustrating
her, had always frustrated her, kept her from getting the things she had wanted. Still
wanted” (11). Both protagonists also have trouble creating a correspondence between
inner and outer realities. Thus, Melanctha’s inability “to tell a story wholly” (TL 57) finds
an analog in Helga’s difficulty in being honest with those around her. Helga resorts to
telling “angry half-truths” (26) to Dr. Anderson, and she heeds Mrs. Hayes-Rore’s advice
to conceal her white origins by saying only that her mother is dead and leaving curious
minds to “fill in the gaps to suit [themselves]” (41). Perhaps in part due to their
communication difficulties, Melanctha and Helga are often seen as detached from other
people and from any specific landscape. Melanctha is characterized as an urban
wanderer, while Helga responds to the necessity of seeking employment in Chicago by
wandering (27, 32). She is offered the opportunity to make money by knowing white and
black men (as Melanctha does with “the different men, white ones and blacks” [TL 84]),
“but the price of the money was too dear” (Q 34). Because of their detachment from
people, Melanctha and Helga are puzzling to their acquaintances. Melanctha is
“mysterious” (TL 50, 61), like her mother was before her (TL 50, 52), while Helga
cultivates a certain “mysteriousness” in Copenhagen, a trait which had manifested itself
in America as an “air of remoteness…so disastrous to her friendships” (74).
In addition to depicting a character much like Stein’s Melanctha, Larsen offers
representations that share Stein’s racism and deployment of stereotypes. Helga observes
of the Naxos administration that “these people yapped loudly of race, of race
consciousness, of race pride, and yet suppressed its most delightful manifestations, love
of color, joy of rhythmic motion, naive, spontaneous laughter” (18). Here Larsen’s
incisive criticism of the hypocrisies and ironies of the black middle class combine with
her willingness to perpetuate the image of the carefree black person with “the free
abandoned laughter that gives the warm broad glow to negro sunshine” (TL 63). Helga
also demonstrates internalized self-hatred when she expresses disdain for the common
blacks around her, deploring “the care-free quality of their laughter [which] roused in her
the desire to scream at them: ‘Fools, fools! Stupid fools!’” (53). Attending a vaudeville
show in Copenhagen, Helga is “filled with a fierce hatred for the cavorting Negroes on
the stage” (83), suggesting that despite vehement protestations to the contrary, Helga is as
concerned with racial uplift as the next person. Although Larsen disparaged uplift,8 she
was held accountable by her peers. Even Larsen’s endorsement of Stein’s racist
appropriations suggests that Larsen had a mixed identification.
Larsen never sought Cather out as an acquaintance as she did Stein, and she does not
mention Cather as an influence. Nevertheless, Larsen’s work is compared to Cather’s by
Larsen’s friend Walter White (Davis 295), who also suggests that Larsen and Cather
might have had a similar audience (Davis 217).9 Furthermore, on a structural level,
Larsen’s novels share Cather’s use of the journey motif. In My Antonia, for example, the
action moves from train car to New York (Preface), from Virginia to rural Nebraska
(Book 1), from the country to the town of Black Hawk (Book 2), from the town of Black
Hawk to the city of Lincoln (Book 3), and finally back to the Burdens’s old homestead
and the Cuzaks’s new one (Books 4 and 5). Quicksand consists of a similar set of
journeys, as Helga moves from the southern Naxos to Chicago, from Chicago to New
York, from New York to Copenhagen and back again, and finally, from New York to
Alabama.10 In addition to linking Larsen to Cather, journeys situate Larsen within the
milieu of other black women writers, since “metaphors of travel recur in writing by
Harlem Renaissance women” (Wall xiv).
In Helga Crane’s case, travel means crossing. Crossing has multiple connotations,
including geographical movement (e.g. crossing the ocean, the Great Divide, or the
Mason-Dixon Line), hybridization, breaching of boundaries, and religious piety.11 The
motif of crossing is important in Cather’s The Professor’s House, as well as in My
Antonia. Helga is like Godfrey St. Peter, who travels frequently, both geographically and
in his mind, and the notion of crossing/crosses is foregrounded throughout Quicksand.
For example, Quicksand’s epigraph comes from Langston Hughes’s poem, “Cross.”12
Furthermore, Helga herself is a cross, a hybrid born of a mixed marriage. Throughout her
life, she continually crosses geographical lines, occupying the position of both migrant
and immigrant. Although Helga’s travels within the United States would normally be
considered migration as opposed to immigration, Helga (like Larsen) seems to consider
the South a foreign country. Along these lines, both Thomas Hammond and Lewis refer
to southern black migrants as “immigrants” (138; D.Lewis 221). By any definition, Helga
is a potential immigrant when she goes to Copenhagen for an extended visit and perhaps
to marry a Danish citizen. In another vein, the cross invokes Christianity. From a
religious standpoint, Helga comes to accept the cross of Christ and will presumably die a
martyr. Additionally, taking “cross” in the sense of “to cross out,” we might apply further
Clemmen’s observation that Quicksand ends with “a negation of life by life” (458) to our
analysis of crossing in Larsen’s text. Crossing out can also work as atonement—Helga’s
pious suffering in Alabama somehow makes up for her days as a “scarlet ‘oman” and a
“pore los’ Jezebel” (112). Finally, crossing is linked to passing, and while Helga never
passes for white in the traditional sense of the expression, she does pass for other
things.13
Part of what allows Helga to pass is her cosmopolitanism, which has produced in her
an awareness of other ways of being. In her status as a cosmopolitan, Helga once again
shares important features with Cather’s Professor and with St. Peter’s Jewish son-in-law,
Louie Marsellus. Throughout Quicksand, Helga moves uneasily between a positively-
inflected cosmopolitan mobility and its negative counterpart, a disturbing sense of
rootlessness. She is the modernist wanderer, the expatriate American and the Wandering
Jew—free to move, consigned to homelessness.14 In this sense she occupies a
quintessential American position: “passage itself, in other words, defines for Americans
either psychically or actually what it means to be an American” (Urgo 55). While Yohe
contends that “Larsen’s characters are on journeys which never end; they never attain
clear senses of identity or find places where they can belong” (12), I am not sure that
Helga’s ultimate goal (or what Larsen means to champion) is rootedness. Rather, it seems
equally likely that Helga’s/Larsen’s ideal world would be one which could accommodate
flexibility and transitivity instead of insisting that everyone fit into a unitary, essentialist
category. Like Cather’s St. Peter, who reflectively tries to figure out how to make peace
with his several avatars and how to go on living in an imperfect world, Helga struggles
with the Sisyphean task of finding her place and the subject position which most fully
captures her essential self.
In creating Helga Crane, Larsen builds on “Melanctha,” drawing from Stein’s
characterizations, her use of a racially ambiguous heroine, and her deployment of racial
stereotypes. Further, Quicksand evokes Cather’s My Antonia and The Professor’s House
in the attention it pays to journeys, cosmopolitanism, and boundary crossing. At the same
time, Helga’s story is very much her own. An attractive and attracting heroine, Helga, a
schoolteacher at a southern school for black children, commands the reader’s attention
from the onset of the novel. Larsen begins with a carefully framed scene in which Helga,
“a slight girl of twenty-two years, with narrow, sloping shoulders and delicate, but well-
turned, arms and legs” (2), sits “alone in her room, which at that hour, eight in the
evening, was in soft gloom” (1). She seems “well fitted to that framing of light and
shade” (2), but she is not well fitted to her present occupation: “the South. Naxos. Negro
education. Suddenly she hated them all” (3). Helga’s unhappiness comes about over time,
as she “had taught in Naxos for almost two years, at first with the keen joy and zest of
those immature people who have dreamed dreams of doing good to their fellow men. But
gradually this zest was blotted out, giving place to a deep hatred for the trivial hypocrisies
and careless cruelties which were, unintentionally perhaps, a part of the Naxos policy of
uplift” (5).15 This three-chapter segment sets crucial foundations for the future pattern of
Helga’s life.
Naxos is assimilationist in its philosophy and practice.16 Starting with “savages from
the backwoods” (12), the institution systematically makes its students over into
upstanding citizens who will be a credit to the race. Helga perceives Naxos as “a big
knife with cruelly sharp edges ruthlessly cutting all to a pattern, the white man’s pattern”
(4). The diction here echoes Melville’s “The Tartarus of Maids,” which describes an
outsider narrator’s trip to a “whitewashed factory” (2456) where “machinery—that
vaunted slave of humanity—…stood menially served by human beings, who served
mutely and cringingly as the slave serves the Sultan” (2458). The “sheet white” maids
who work at the paper factory seem to be “their own executioners; themselves whetting
the very swords that slay them” (2460). Despite a colleague’s insistence that Naxos is
better than most places, offering “pretty good salaries, decent rooms, [and] plenty of
men” (14), Helga cannot remain where she feels surrounded by the sterility born of
mindless imitation. Color has been outlawed in this school for colored children, but
Helga can see through the prohibitions to realize that “bright colours were fitting and that
dark-complexioned people should wear yellow, green, and red. Black, brown, and gray
were ruinous to them, actually destroyed the luminous tones lurking in their dusky skins”
(18). Like the supervisors in Melville’s story, who only accept asexual women as
potential employees, the puritanical matrons at Naxos ban sensuality and sexuality.
Indeed, just as Melville links women’s sexuality with death, Larsen portrays an
institution bent on upholding the worst in Victorian mores.
Naxos remains Victorian in its attitudes towards sex, and its intellectual paradigm is
profoundly anti-modernist: “it tolerated no innovations, no individualism. Ideas it
rejected…. Enthusiasm, spontaneity, if not actually suppressed, were at least openly
regretted as unladylike or ungentlemanly qualities” (4). Striving to make its students and
teachers into model African-Americans, Naxos squelches individuality. Although
individualism is a highly-touted tenet of American culture, Munsterberg observes that
individuality rarely flourishes in American society: “a stranger is at once struck by the
tendency to uniformity which arises from the belief in general equality. The spirit of
comradeship is unfavourable to individual differentiation, no matter whether it is a
question of a man’s hat and necktie to his religion and his theory of the universe” (553).
As a teacher in Naxos, Helga expresses sympathy for her students, “those happy singing
children, whose charm and distinctiveness the school was so surely ready to destroy” (5),
but she feels unable to change the system.
The Naxos approach is also basically that of the broader Americanization movement,
which was most faithfully carried out roughly between the turn of the century and 1920
(Gleason, “American” 84). Americanization called for “immigrants…to become new
people” (Gleason, “American” 82). In the classic case of Mary Antin, for example, the
transition from “immigrant” to “American” involves being born again (Salvaterra 29).
Furthermore, the process of Americanization requires time and intentionality (Fairchild
222), but Helga refuses to be converted to the Naxos way—” she hadn’t really wanted to
be made over” (7). At the same time, Helga feels blackballed, as if she could not have
obtained acceptance even if she wanted it, because of her lack of family connections: “if
you couldn’t prove your ancestry and connections, you were tolerated, but you didn’t
‘belong’” (8). In this way the Americanization movement and the sensibility of an
emergent black elite converge around a preoccupation with origins and lineage. Helga
knows she is not good immigration, so to speak—” she was, she knew, in a queer
indefinite way, a disturbing factor” (7). Her unwillingness and inability to be assimilated
is signified in the text by the adjective “queer.”
At the time Larsen was moving in literary circles and writing her fiction, “queer” was
evolving as a term to “mark…the differences between the still emerging categories of
‘homosexuality’ and ‘heterosexuality’…though its new meaning was a fluid one”
(Lindemann, Queering 2),17 Older meanings also in play during this period include,
“strange, odd, peculiar, eccentric, in appearance or character…[and/or] of questionable
character, suspicious, dubious…[and/or] any difficulty, fix, or trouble, bad
circumstances…” (qtd. in Lindemann, Queering 143, n. 2). “Queer” recurs as an
adjective throughout Quicksand, appearing no fewer than ten times in this 135-page
novel. While Deborah McDowell offers a convincing reading of queer overtones in

Passing, no one has questioned Helga’s heterosexuality, nor do I intend to do so. I will
suggest, however, that Larsen purposefully invokes the transitivity, inversion and
blending implicit in any discussion of homosexuality in her creation of Helga Crane.
Helga is fully aware of the double standard that is in operation at Naxos, whereby “you
could be queer, or even attractive, or bad, or brilliant, or even love beauty and such
nonsense if you were a Rankin, or a Leslie, or a Scoville; in other words, if you had a
family. But if you were just plain Helga Crane, of whom nobody had ever heard, it was
presumptuous of you to be anything but inconspicuous and conformable” (8).
To Helga’s observation, we might add Berlant’s contention that, “in contrast to the
zone of privacy where stars, white people, and citizens who don’t make waves with their
bodies can imagine they reside, the immigrant to the United States has no privacy, no
power to incorporate automatically the linguistic and cultural practices of normal national
culture that make life easier for those who can pass as members of the core society”
(Queen 192). Because Helga is not of a first family, she does not have the right to be
different. She is not an established southerner (like her Atlanta-born and bred fiancé,
James Vayle), so her status is much like the hypothetical immigrant Berlant de-scribes.
Helga tries to observe the Naxos dress code and thereby gain some measure of approval
and acceptance, but her peers disapprove of her wardrobe, considering “the
colors…queer” (18). For her part, Helga agrees that some colors are queer. Meeting
Naxos principal Robert Anderson for the first time, Helga reflects, “‘Queer…how some
brown people have gray eyes. Gives them a strange, unexpected appearance. A little
frightening” (20). Here the conjunction of queerness with Anderson foreshadows that he
will be a site of sexual questions and identity issues. Indeed, Helga will eventually come
to contemplate having an illicit affair with Anderson. In the meantime, given her
inassimilable queerness and her refusal to be “naturalized” (7) to the Naxos way, Helga
has no choice but to leave Naxos.
When Helga finally comes to the conclusion that Naxos is not for her, the decision is
described as a sort of anti-conversion, a premonition of her born-again experience at the
end of the novel. Having determined to cease in her persona as a Naxos teacher, Helga
undergoes a rebirth, and the second chapter begins with Helga waking “unrefreshed and
with that feeling of halfterrified apprehension peculiar to Christmas and birthday
mornings” (10). Something new and different is about to happen, and Helga does not
know whether it will be for better or for worse. Although the day feels like Christmas,
Helga does not have a worshipful attitude. Rather, she seems to be a born-again anti-
Christian like “God-free” St. Peter (Skaggs 76). Indeed, it is the memory of a visiting
white preacher who recently spoke at Naxos that precipitates (and steels) Helga’s
decision to leave the school. Helga gives in to her frustration with Naxos “with an odd
gesture of sudden soft collapse, like a person who had been for months fighting the devil
and then unexpectedly had turned round and agreed to do his bidding” (5). This scene
suggests the standard good girl/bad girl (Madonna/whore) dichotomy, a binary model
which will constrict Helga throughout the text. If Helga is not working for heaven, then
she must be working for the devil. In addition to introducing this dichotomy, the Naxos
section of the text sets out several other important thematic foundations for the novel as a
whole: the tension between individuality and the establishment, Helga’s simultaneous
desire to fit in and to stand out, the allure and revulsion inspired by elite groups, and the
vitiating presence of hypocrisy in people Helga wishes to admire. Further, this section
establishes “queer” as a key term, a signifier of blurred boundaries, liminality, and
disturbing emotions. Finally, it is important to note that Helga resolves her difficulties at
Naxos by leaving, by running away. This is a particularly American strategy, according
to Urgo, who asserts that “What all Americans share is… a sense that flight or relocation
is in itself of tremendous utility. If nothing else, move” (58).
Helga’s first major journey takes her back to her birthplace and raises questions about
home and family. Returning to Chicago, Helga experiences “a queer feeling of
enthusiasm” (30), a nascent sense of belonging. Here “queer” signifies an uneasy and
shifting relationship with people who should offer acceptance but do not. Helga’s only
living family member, her Uncle Peter, has married a woman who “plainly wished to
dissociate herself from the outrage of [Helga’s] very existence” (29). Mrs. Nilssen
quickly reminds Helga that she has no home and no family in Chicago, unequivocally
stating, “you mustn’t come here any more…. And please remember that my husband is
not your uncle” (28–29). Yohe concludes from this episode that racial identity is stronger
than blood kin ties (85), while McManus points out that “home space” is both
“ambiguous” and “equivocal” (151). When her family connections fail her, Helga tries
alternative sources for companionship and assistance. Helga’s first attempt to find “a
church home” (Wall 113) leads her to the Negro Episcopal Church, where the good
Christians ignore her, prompting Helga to “distrust…religion more than ever” (34).
Initially, at least, neither Helga’s family nor her “brothers and sisters” of the cross will
provide her with love or money.
As much as Helga wants friendship and a feeling of belonging, money is her first
priority. Money was “the most serious difficulty” (6) in Helga’s plan to leave Naxos, and
obtaining money quickly becomes her primary concern in Chicago. Money and
movement become linked at this point. In order to make money, Helga travels with Mrs.
Hayes-Rore to New York. Money is thus both catalyst and reward, since Helga is given a
good job in New York and chooses to relocate there. In the comfort of Anne’s
beautifully-appointed home, Helga tries to deny the importance and power of money. She
nonchalantly comments that “‘money isn’t everything. It isn’t even the half of
everything,’” proposing that “‘it’s only outside of Harlem among those others that money
really counts for everything’” (46). Here an ironic distance clearly emerges between
character and author. First of all, we know that money was indeed very important to
Helga and will be again, as she finds herself first with much more (in Copenhagen) and
later with much less (in Alabama) than she presently possesses. Secondly, Helga’s
ambivalent attitude towards money reflects the tensions that Larsen (like Cather and
Stein) experienced between money, art, and audience.18 Davis points out that Larsen’s
version of the American dream “included making money” as a novelist (217). Although
Larsen wanted to write carefully crafted and critically acclaimed works of literature, “her
dream did not carry with it a place for herself in a bohemian world of artists; rather, it
was an updated version of the dream of a middle-class woman to achieve status, position,
and money within the upper social echelons and, in her case, in both the black and the
white worlds” (Davis 217). Helga knows she wants money and enjoys living well, and
yet financial security is not enough to give Helga a sense of having found her place in the
world.
The proverbial rich man has a hard time earning his way to heaven, and the
comfortably-appointed Helga Crane finds New York another kind of hell. She takes
pleasure in attending devilish gatherings, such as the cabaret. In the cabaret scene, Helga
“descend[s] through a furtive narrow passage into a vast subterranean room[,]…one of
those places characterized by the righteous as a hell” (58). Here she gives herself up to
“the reek of flesh, smoke, and alcohol,” realizing “that not only had she been in the
jungle, but…she had enjoyed it” (59). Larsen here uses imagery suggestive of Dante’s
Inferno, an interesting counterpoint to her earlier evocation of “The Tartarus of Maids.”
Indeed it would seem that Helga’s move from Naxos to New York has been a shift of
hells, from the hell of maids to the hell of jungle creatures. Within the hell of New York,
Helga firmly establishes herself on the devil end of the devil/angel binary. Hence in spite
of making two significant geographical journeys (Naxos to Chicago and Chicago to New
York), Helga finds herself playing similar roles and returning to familiar subject
positions.
Regardless of her improved financial circumstances and her vibrant social life, Helga
finds her current positionality ultimately dissatisfying. Neither money nor the
excitements of Harlem can keep Helga from becoming bored. What seems like perfect
happiness quickly gives way to Helga’s characteristic and enigmatic “restlessness” (47).
Like St. Peter, who at first seeks physical causes for his falling out of love with life,
Helga “consult[s] a physician, who, after a long, solemn examination, said that there was
nothing wrong, nothing at all…. All interest had gone out of living. Nothing seemed any
good” (47). Helga’s woes stem from psychological rather than physical causes, of course,
but she cannot consider that her troubles are internal rather than external and she acts
accordingly. When nothing seems any good, Helga moves on. Once again, money, an
emblem of physicality, becomes the catalyst for Helga’s relocation. When she receives
her inheritance from Uncle Peter, Helga decides to travel to Copenhagen to see her
mother’s sister and her husband. Although “money as money was still not very important
to Helga” (54), she comes to believe that money can bring her freedom from racial
oppression (55) and decides to buy a steamer ticket.
In Copenhagen, Helga recognizes that “always she had wanted, not money, but the
things which money could give, leisure, attention, beautiful surroundings. Things.
Things. Things” (67). Larsen had read Theodore Dreiser (Davis 311), so Amy Kaplan’s
observation about Sister Carrie might easily be applied to Helga: “wanting to be different
takes the form of longing to have more, as identity is defined by the power to spend
money” (149). To the end of making herself different, Helga tries on a new persona.
Hence her relocation to Copenhagen constitutes yet another rebirth. Waking up from an
afternoon nap on the day of her arrival, Helga feels like the beggar in the opening section
of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. As David Bevington explains of that play,
“the induction sets up the theme of illusion, using an old motif know as ‘The Sleeper
Awakened’ (as found, for example, in The Arabian Nights). This device frames the main
action of the play, giving to it an added perspective” (108). The Copenhagen section of
Quicksand provides a sort of inverted frame (like Tom’s story in Cather’s The
Professor’s House), as the chapters on either side take place in America. Being given the
royal treatment without quite feeling like she deserves it, Helga experiences a “sensation
of lavish contentment and well-being enjoyed only by impecunious sybarites waking in
the houses of the rich” (67). Although she too begins with a sense of disbelief, she
quickly joins Sly in his willingness to accept royal status:
Am I a lord? And have I such a lady?

Or do I dream? Or have I dreamed till now?
I do not sleep: I see, I hear, I speak,
I smell sweet savors, and I feel soft things.
Upon my life, I am a lord indeed,
And not a tinker nor Christopher Sly.
Well, bring our lady hither to our sight,
And once again a pot o’ the smallest ale. (Induction 2.68–75)
Helga “liked it, this new life,” but even more important than the physical comfort is her
sense of finding her right station: “it was important, this awakening in the great high
room which held the great high bed on which she lay, small but exalted…. This, then,
was where she belonged. This was her proper setting” (67).
Paradoxically, the setting Helga considers proper is one in which she is continually
made to stand out (like a turquoise in dull silver?). At first she reacts ambivalently to the
prospect of having her aunt call attention to Helga’s differences. The attention she
receives makes her feel “like nothing so much as some new and strange species of pet
dog being proudly exhibited” (70). She is a curiosity, a show-thing, a domesticated
animal. It is interesting to note that Helga also becomes annoyed when the Danes treat
her “‘as if I had horns, or three legs’” (70). The reference to horns invokes myths about
Jews, suggesting a parallel between Helga’s experience and that of Jewish people. It also
suggests Satan, as if Helga’s Negro heritage potentially renders her a “scrimy black
devil” (P 172). Helga claims to be hesitant about emphasizing her difference
when “hitherto all her efforts had been toward similarity to those about her” (Q 72).
This statement is only partially true and demonstrates Helga’s lack of self-awareness.
While she did try to fit in at Naxos, she held herself apart from the other girls at the
Chicago YWCA and from the lower-class types in Harlem. In spite of her disinclination
to think of herself as a toy dog, a Jew, a devil, or a cripple, Helga is happy in the
knowledge that she has found her “own milieu” (74) and is proud to display her
individuality.
Before too long, Helga passively “[gives] herself up wholly to the fascinating business
of being seen, gaped at, desired” (74), much like the “odd gesture of sudden soft
collapse” (5) that accompanied her decision to leave Naxos. Observing Helga’s
propensity for “posturing and…dressing,” Davis contends that Helga “and the Dahls
have, perhaps not unwittingly, used her obsession with clothes to attract men” (267).
Dress is an indicator of class status but also of group membership: “dress serves not only
as a criterion of difference [i.e. social status], but as a signal of identification[,]…a ticket
of admission and a sign of belonging” (Kallen 13). Ann DuCille further points out that
Quicksand should not be dismissed as a novel of manners solely because of the attention
it pays to details such as clothing: “rather, clothes function semiotically as sexual and
racial signifiers” (205). Along similar lines, McManus uses the opening scene of the
novel to compare “sexual repression” with “transvestitism,” as she notes, “Helga’s
provocative appearance signals sexual desire, but because her isolation is also apparent,
dressing and posing will be the consummate act” (50). Finally, Dollimore insists that, in
the early modern period, “dress underwrites not only class differences but national and
racial ones also…. Accompanying the association between dress and class was that
between dress and gender” (288–89). Helga more and less consciously chooses to use
dress as a means of communicating messages about class, race, and gender.
Helga is not the only one who stands out for her dress and her difference. Axel Olsen,
the portrait painter whom Helga’s aunt and uncle aspire for her to marry, is like no one
Helga has met before. Furthermore, he is repeatedly connected with queerness. He is an
artist, as Helga immediately discerns from his “broad streaming tie. But how affected!
How theatrical!” (70). How gay. Indeed, as another member of the dinner party explains,
“‘He’s queer’” (71). Further, Olsen is “brilliant, bored, elegant, urbane, cynical, [and]
worldly” (77), a real cosmopolitan. He both propositions and proposes to Helga, but it
seems plausible to read Olsen as a Van Vechten-type figure, someone who has the
potential to be both a married man and a homosexual. When Helga turns Olsen down, he
responds “in a queer frozen voice” (88), incredulous. Soon thereafter he retreats “to some
queer place in the Balkans” (90).
Olsen is largely responsible for Helga’s exotic costumes, as Helga’s aunt and uncle
appoint him Helga’s fashion consultant. In addition to molding Helga’s appearance to fit
preconceived notions of how an African-American woman should appear, Olsen paints a
portrait which puts a specific slant on Helga. While Olsen argues that he has portrayed
“‘the true Helga Crane’” (88), Helga feels completely alienated from the subject of his
painting. Hence Ammons’s contention that “Helga Crane struggles to step out of the
frames others design for her” (188) uses a telling analogy. Like Stein, who came to
believe that portraits trying to escape their frames were the next wave of great art, Helga
(and Larsen) sought to avoid confining scripts. Copenhagen and the expectations of her
aunt and uncle prove too limiting, so Helga plans “a brief visit” to America (93).
Returning “home” to New York, perpetually homeless Helga takes up residence in a
hotel, “home” to transients. Her last American residence, Anne Grey’s house, is no
longer available to her because of Anne’s marriage to Robert Anderson. Nevertheless,
Helga is glad to be back in Harlem, convincing herself that New York is more home than
Copenhagen. She becomes “a little bored, a little restless” (96), but prefers the “gorgeous
care-free revel” of Harlem to her “stately life in Copenhagen,” which had “the heavy
solemnity of a church service” (96). The analogy is a telling one—clearly Helga is still
more party animal than parishioner. Furthermore, Helga uses the skills that she has honed
in Copenhagen to even greater advantage in Harlem:
Her courageous clothes attracted attention, and her deliberate lure—as

Olsen had called it—held it. Her life in Copenhagen had taught her to
expect and accept admiration as her due. This attitude, she found, was as
effective in New York as across the sea. It was, in fact, even more so. And
it was more amusing too. Perhaps because it was somehow a bit more
dangerous. (98)
Helga’s calculated flirtations are more dangerous because she is no longer off-limits. She
is not a decorative object, but an agent of live sexuality. And she is available. Whereas
the Danes found Helga’s sexuality non-threatening, Anne is aware that Helga causes
Anderson “to struggle against that nameless and to him shameful impulse, that sheer
delight, which ran through his nerves at mere proximity to Helga” (95). She therefore
resolves to make “her marriage …a success” (95) by any means necessary, most
immediately by keeping Anderson as far away from her former friend and housemate as
possible. Helga gets another chance at socially condoned, legitimate marriage when she
sees James Vayle again at a Harlem party, but she is even more put off by the idea of
marrying Vayle than when the two were at Naxos. Realizing that Vayle is indeed going to
propose, Helga escapes as quickly as possible, telling him “laughingly that it was
shameful of him to joke with her like that” (104). Immediately thereafter, Helga bumps
into Robert Anderson, who kisses her passionately, making her indignant and angry.
Over the next few weeks, her anger is transformed into “riotous and colorful dreams”
(105) of ecstasy. Helga mentally prepares herself for the social ramifications of having an
affair. Although she “wasn’t…a rebel from society, Negro society” and “had no wish to
stand alone” (107), Helga resolves to follow her passion. Having refused Axel Olsen in
Copenhagen, however, Helga now experiences the rejection of her overtures to Anderson.
Just as Olsen originally proposed a non-legal relationship, Helga wants to have an affair
with her sometime-friend’s husband. Anderson, who probably never knew of Helga’s
feelings, offers an apology for his drunken embrace. For Helga, this “surprising, trivial
apology loom[s] as a direct refusal of the offering” (109).
Anderson’s snub causes Helga to fall into an inappropriate match, the Reverend Mr.
Pleasant Green. The evening after her encounter with Anderson, Helga goes wandering
through the streets in a rainstorm. She seeks shelter from the wind and rain which have
just caused her to fall in a gutter by entering a storefront church. In the church, the
parishioners are “singing a song which she was conscious of having heard years ago—
hundreds of years it seemed” (110–11), creating a link not only to Helga’s childhood but
to some primal experience. The primitivism of the church, while suggestive of “sexual
excitement and orgasmic release” (McDowell xx), simultaneously invokes a climactic
utterance in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, “the horror! the horror!” (1811):19
Fascinated, Helga Crane watched until there crept upon her an indistinct
horror of an unknown world. She felt herself in the presence of a
nameless people, observing rites of a remote obscure origin. The faces of
the men and women took on the aspect of a dim vision. “This,” she
whispered to herself, “is terrible. I must get out of here.” But the horror
held her. She remained motionless, watching, as if she lacked the strength
to leave the place—foul, vile, and terrible, with its mixture of breaths, its
contact of bodies, its concerted convulsions, all in wild appeal for a single
soul. Her soul. (113; emphasis added)
Like Kurtz, Helga moves from observer to participant, until, in a moment of hesitation,
Helga is “lost—or saved” and the faithful hordes close in on her (113). Furthermore,
Helga, like Kurtz, will die in the savage land she has chosen for her home. While Kurtz
chooses to remain deep in the Congo, where he is absorbed “into the heart of an immense
darkness” (1817), Helga continues the downward path which began with a street gutter
and leads her into rural Alabama.20
Upon her arrival in “the tiny Alabama town where [Reverend Green] was pastor to a
scattered and primitive flock” (118), Helga reveals that the Naxos sensibility has not
completely deserted her. Resolving “to do much good to her husbands parishioners”
(119), Helga reveals her outsider status and her sense of her own superiority in conferring
charity on the less fortunate and less informed.21 Her missionary spirit does not last long,
however, as Alabama becomes, like Kurtz’s Congo, “an immense darkness” (Conrad
1817) which threatens to swallow her entirely. Helga surrenders herself to “the wisdom
of God” and thereby receives “a queer sort of satisfaction” (126), but childbirth becomes
a recurring horror without consolation (127). When Helga falls into a stupor after the
birth of her fourth child, her withdrawal is conceptualized as an immersion in darkness:
“nothing penetrated the kind darkness into which her bruised spirit had retreated” (128).
It is also a downward motion, a descent motif: “she had gone down into that appalling
blackness of pain” (128; emphasis added).
The final paragraphs of the novel, in which Helga contemplates escape for herself and
her children, draw on the history of female slave narratives. Helga’s stupor has been a
coping mechanism for a body exhausted by giving birth to too many children in too short
a period of time, but it might also be read as a means of transcending the bounds of
gender. Once she returns to normal consciousness, Helga chooses to perpetuate her state
as long as possible; it would seem that Helga finds freedom in her confinement. Like
Harriet Jacobs’s Linda Brent, who experiences a sense of personal empowerment by
choosing to lock herself in a garret where she can see and hear things from a safe
distance, Helga cherishes “that serene haven, that effortless calm where nothing was
expected of her” (128). Indeed, we might consider this period between Helga’s coma and
her acknowledgment, “I’m back” (128), as a sort of modernist vacation. Also like
Jacobs/Brent, Helga will not abandon her children, even at the cost of her own freedom.22
She puts off her escape until some future time when she will be physically able to
undertake the journey: “‘I’m still,’ she reasoned, ‘too weak, too sick. By and by, when
I’m really strong—’” (135). Generations after emancipation, Helga finds herself
enslaved. And although “there was not the element of race, of white and black [because]
[t]hey were all black together” (135), Helga is no less miserable. By the end, “the Helga
Crane who had dominated the narrative is symbolically dead” (Davis 271). This should
come as no surprise, given the text’s epigraph, which foreshadows a movement towards
death.
Quicksand’s downward spiral emerges within a narrative that is linear in time (events
are told in chronological order as they occur) and circular in geography (Helga moves
from the South to a northern city, and then to Europe; afterwards she moves back to a
northern city and finally returns to the South). In her multifarious crossings, her desire to
understand her world and find her place in it, and her unwillingness or inability to remain
firmly within any discreet social category, Helga Crane resembles Godfrey St. Peter and
Melanctha Herbert. Also like Cather and Stein, Larsen works within and against the
bildungsroman tradition. Thus, although death lurks close to the surface from beginning
to end, Quicksand can be considered a coming-of-age novel, and one which emphasizes
psychological and relational aspects of attaining maturity. As Davis has noted, the novel
“interrelat[es] psychological and social forces in Helga Crane’s search for definition and
development” (Davis 277).23 Consistent with this genre, Helga’s mother dies when Helga
is fifteen, and the text follows Helga’s progress to marriage (and implicit death). Larsen
does not manage to write beyond the ending in Quicksand,24 but she produces a
distinctively twentieth century bildungsroman in other ways. For example, Davis also
points out that Larsen read Freud and Otto Rank, and “was taken with…psychological
interpretations of childhood and its impact on the adult” (310). For practical purposes,
Helga loses her mother at a much earlier age than fifteen since she never felt like her
mother claimed her. This situation is replicated again, when, as an adult, Helga must deal
with the paradox of having a family that is not intimate or familiar, but foreign. Thus,
when she receives a letter from Uncle Peter, Helga looks reflectively “at the peculiar
foreign script of her uncle” (53). Literally, Helga might be noting that Peter’s
penmanship is that of an immigrant or that his handwriting is unfamiliar to her because of
the infrequency of their correspondence. On another level, however, the juxtaposition of
“foreign” and “uncle” highlights the fact that Helga is not a member of an organic family.
She is foreign to her birth family and they are foreign to her.
At times Helga also feels foreign to her fellow African-Americans and to the Danes in
her ancestral homeland. Speaking of her peers in Harlem, Helga confidently decides that
“she didn’t, in spite of her racial markings, belong to these dark segregated people. She
was different. She felt it. It wasn’t merely a matter of color. It was something broader,
deeper, that made folk kin” (55). Helga proudly considers herself a rebel, an outsider.
Still, she might not be as different as she imagines. As Stephen Greenblatt has observed
of the tension between containment and transgression, “[people] imagine themselves set
in diametrical opposition to their society where in fact they have unwittingly accepted its
crucial structural elements” (qtd. in Dollimore 285). Fitting in and finding her place
really do seem to be Helga’s goals, in spite of her protestations of independence. In
Denmark, Helga becomes the exotic other, as her aunt explains: “‘you’re a foreigner, and
different’” (68). Thus, the people of Denmark are not her family either. Helga recognizes
that “she wasn’t one of them. She didn’t at all count” (70). When Helga returns to Harlem
from Copenhagen, she does an about-face from her previous thoughts about her relation
to American blacks, insisting that she is bound to them by “ties that were of the spirit,”
ties which were “much deeper” (95) than mere skin color or physical features. This
bonding does not help Helga in Alabama, however, as she recognizes that “she, a poor
weak city-bred thing” (125), has little in common with her husband’s parishioners.
Wherever she goes, Helga comes to feel foreign, marginal, outside—her mother’s home,
Devon, Naxos, her Uncles home, New York, Copenhagen, Alabama. She is the
“foreigner within” (Lowe 5).
This lack of connectedness has ramifications for Helga’s identity. As Davis observes,
“family, both the individual members related by marriage and blood who make up a
domestic community and the social group through which human beings first derive a
shared identity, becomes one obsession shaping her life and limiting her possibilities for
constructive action” (260–61). Since Helga receives imperfect socialization from her
mother and never develops a sense of herself as part of a family or a larger group, she has
a lifelong struggle to figure out who she is, where she fits in, and how she can relate to
other people. Gleason speaks to this phenomenon when he explains that “identification is
involved in the process by which persons come to realize what groups are significant for
them, what attitudes concerning them they should form, and what kind of behavior is
appropriate” (Speaking 129). Not only is Helga’s personal identity compromised, but her
national identity is called into question. Writing only two years before Larsen, Fairchild
contends that “nationality is acquired” by “social transmission” (42), suggesting that

Helga’s lack of family socialization disrupts her American identity. Helga’s solution of
belonging to two countries is impractical: “this knowledge, this certainty of the division
of her life into two parts in two lands, into physical freedom in Europe and spiritual
freedom in America, was unfortunate, inconvenient, [and] expensive” (96). Nevertheless,
Helga’s quest itself is American at heart. Royce insists that the search for group identity
is peculiarly American: “The Americans’ unsystematic desire to identify with
intermediary groups—larger than the family, smaller than the nation—may be based on
real or imagined descent, on old or newly adopted religions, on geographic area of origin,
socialization, or residence, on external categorization, on voluntary association, or on
defiance” (qtd. in Sollors, Beyond 175–76).
Despite her yearning for a sense of belonging, Helga repeatedly denies essentialist
conceptions of race and gender.25 Clemmen agrees that the novel as a whole “feeds into a
modern movement against essentialism” (466). To begin with, it is Dr. Anderson’s
assertion, “‘You’re a lady.’…‘Financial, economic circumstances can’t destroy
tendencies inherited from good stock’” (21), that steels Helga’s resolve to leave Naxos.
In Copenhagen, where race does not seem to matter, Helga is criticized for claiming a
black identity which her appearance seems to deny. Thus “one day an old countrywoman
asked her to what manner of mankind she belonged and at Helga’s replying: ‘I’m a
Negro,’ had become indignant, retorting angrily that, just because she was old and a
countrywoman she could not be so easily fooled, for she knew as well as everyone else
that Negroes were black and had woolly hair” (76). Helga, like Larsen, legally takes the
status of her color, but for all intents and purposes her identification is with African-
Americans. Thus she tells her aunt that her marrying Olsen would be a “mixed marriage”
(78), though presumably her marrying a man with two black parents would not. Dearborn
has observed that intermarriage serves as both metaphor and means of Americanization
(100), though she notes that “miscegenation disrupted the idea of family” (139).
Helga is a mulatta, the result of miscegenation and a union without legal sanction.
While the implications of Helga’s mulatto status have been discussed at length,26 I am
particularly interested in the ways that Larsen’s use of the mulatto figure creates a bridge
between mixed-race characters and members of other marginalized or minority groups.
For example, Berzon’s observation that some mulatto characters “seek to create a third
caste in what is essentially a two-caste system” (13) suggests a kinship between the
mulatto and the “third-sex” lesbian. Indeed, McLendon’s contention that the archetypal
tragic mulatto “is depicted as the victim of persistent longing and unattainable desires
aroused by his mixed blood” (153) uses language much like that found in Radcliffe Hall’s
The Well of Loneliness.27 For example, during the “terrible, heart-breaking months”
during which Stephen Gordon becomes “gaunt with her unappeased love for Angela
Crossby” (WL 186), Stephen bemoans the mis-matched combination of her body and her
desires: “all her life she must drag this body of hers like a monstrous fetter imposed on
her spirit” (WL 187). Recalling her first trip experience with the Paris underworld,
Stephen reflects that she “never forgot…those haunted, tormented eyes of the invert”
(WL 387). Further similarities include the identification of black people with the curse of
Ham and Hall’s depiction of homosexuals as people who bear the mark of Cain (WL 301;
see also 352).28 In addition, although Helga concludes that having a home in each of two
countries is impractical, Stephen is advised, “‘one may have two homes—many homes’”
(WL 246). Like Helga, Stephen comes to believe that one country is insufficient to satisfy
her various needs for identification, rootedness, and freedom. Dearborn offers further
support for emphasizing the parallels between Helga Crane and other women who, like
Stephen Gordon, do not fit neatly into prescribed categories: “the problems Larsen’s
heroines suffer derive from their identities as women; race functions symbolically in her
novels rather than realistically, so the mulatto condition is, for instance, a metaphor for a
divided self—a condition Larsen feels all women share” (59).
While I find Dearborn’s argument about the importance of gender in Larsen’s texts
convincing, the split represented in the “divided self…[which] all women share” is not
Larsen’s only primary emphasis. The mulatto condition also provides a physical
embodiment of “mixedness” (Davis 243), a prominent motif in Quicksand. Along these
lines, mixedness is suggested by the color gray, a mix of black and white. Robert
Anderson’s most salient feature is his “piercing gray eyes” (22), which have a mesmeric
capacity, nearly causing Helga to lose her resolve to leave Naxos; “Gray Chicago” (27) is
characterized by uncertainty, ambiguity and ambivalence. Helga, “who had been born in
this dirty, mad, hurrying city had no home here” (27) and no family either. In New York,
Anne Grey appears quite secure, but, as Helga observes, she accepts white values even
while she espouses black separatism. Having borne too many children to her new
husband, a “rattish yellow man” (118), Helga falls into a “blackness of pain” (128), then
reemerges to a gray area. In this “borderland” (128), Helga “doze[s] and dream[s] in
snatches of sleeping and waking” (135). When she is comatose or only semi-coherent,
Helga is protected from her husband’s attentions and the pregnancies such attentions
invariably produce. Returning to the world, however, confirms Helga’s death: “and
hardly had she left her bed and become able to walk again without pain, hardly had the
children returned from the homes of the neighbors, when she began to have her fifth
child” (135). Although Quicksand explores mixedness throughout, its ending offers only
a biological certainty.
In her first novel, Larsen explores how race, gender, and nationality interact in a
liminal zone named Helga Crane. Strategically employing the journey motif, Larsen
looks at the relationship between physical movement, psychological space, and personal
identity. Quicksand offers a strong heroine, one reminiscent of both Godfrey St. Peter and
Melanctha Herbert, but one whose individuality cannot withstand the downward pull of
such social influences as assimilation, racism, and misogyny. Helga is continually born-
again, but she is never permitted to engage in the life-sustaining strategy of “dwelling in
possibility,” as Skaggs says of Cather’s Professor (63). Larsen’s second novel will return
to the questions of categorization and borders, only to reaffirm the significance of
permeability and fluidity and the inadequacy of binary systems.
PASSING: A CONSCIOUSNESS OF KIND
Larsen achieved moderate success with her first novel, but she was still not in a position
to take risks that might alienate her publisher or offend her readership. She thought of her
second novel as “Nig,” but it was not to be: “someone at Knopf had suggested the change
of its title because ‘Nig’ might be too inflammatory for a novel by an unproven writer,
while ‘Passing,’ and the phenomenon’s connection to miscegenation, would incite
interest without giving offense” (Davis 306–07). In fact, passing and miscegenation give
great offense indeed. Helvie observes that “there is an innate value judgment in the term
[passing] which seems to imply deception. Society is suspicious of anyone whom they
cannot place neatly into a predetermined category” (39). This desire to be able to
categorize is matched by an insistence that categories remain consistent over time. It is
not acceptable for someone whom society has deemed black, for example, to decide to
occupy the subject position of a white person. Indeed, Sollors points out the irony of this
situation, noting that the moral disdain for passing “seems at particular odds with a social
system that otherwise cherishes social mobility and espouses the right of individuals to
make themselves anew by changing name, place, and fortune, and that has produced
famous parvenus and confidence men” (Neither 249–50).29 Although the 1906
Naturalization Act allowing name changes encouraged immigrants to assume a new
identity (Wald 248), African-Americans were never encouraged to make themselves
anew in this way. Names could be legitimately changed through marriage, but only
through legitimate marriage. Whether or not an actual union was given legal sanction, the
idea of race-mixing remained threatening on several levels. Americanization takes place
through the family (Wald 246, 253), and miscegenation unhinges the ideological
underpinnings of family (Dearborn 139). Thus Passing, while not as overtly controversial
as “Nig,” nevertheless moves into dangerous territory.
First, however, Larsen situates her novel as part of the Harlem Renaissance. Passing’s
epigraph, taken from Countee Cullen’s “Heritage,”30 highlights the social and emotional
distance between the forced immigrant and his twentieth-century descendent. McDowell
contends that this excerpt “mislead[s] the reader” (xxiv) into “plac[ing] race at the center
of any critical interpretation” (xxiii) by presenting the romantic part of the poem as
opposed to its far less hopeful conclusion and thereby deflecting attention from the
novel’s powerful (homo)sexual subtext. While I think McDowell offers a strong and
convincing reading of lesbian eroticism in Passing (xxiii–xxxi), the epigraph also stresses
another important issue in the text, namely that “heritage” consists of more than just
“race.” In creating a speaker who feels alienated from his ethnic origins in spite of the
persistence of his skin color, Cullen offers a multidimensional view of African-American
identity. The relationship between race, ethnicity, and heritage has been largely
overlooked, as Fuchs has observed: “neither whites nor blacks acknowledge the ethnic
character of the African-American experience. Blacks and whites usually thought of
blacks in terms of race only” whereas ethnicity implies ancestral traditions (177). Along
similar lines, Petersen points out that in common parlance, “race” refers to non-whites,
while “ethnicity” refers to European nationalities, noting a problematic
“confusion…between physiological and cultural criteria” (6). Taking a universalist
approach, Sollors argues that “ethnicity includes dominant groups…and race, while
sometimes facilitating external identification, is merely one aspect of ethnicity” (Beyond
36). Thus Larsen seems ahead of her time—not romantic or sentimental, but quite
modern—in her choice of epigraphs.
It is the nature of the relationship between race and ethnicity, between present practice
and ancestral traditions, and between being and performing that Larsen interrogates in
Passing. “What is Africa to me?” is the doubleedged question both Clare Kendry, who is
passing for white, and Irene Redfield, who is living a model life as a “race woman” in
Harlem, must face. Washington contends that “‘Passing’ becomes, in Larsen’s terms, a
metaphor for the risk-taking experience” (163), but I would further suggest that it is a
scientific strategy (and one in perfect keeping with Larsen’s education and interests), a
means of isolating the several components of identity, including heredity, environment,
social milieu and spiritual or intellectual affiliation. Clare has black blood, lives a white
life, and feels spiritually connected to black people; Irene has black blood, immerses
herself in black society, and aspires to white values. Both women own themselves as
black at times and pass for white at others. Who is the better example of an ethnic
American?
Larsen delves into “this hazardous business of ‘passing,’ this breaking away from all
that was familiar and friendly to take one’s chances in another environment, not entirely
strange, perhaps, but certainly not entirely friendly” (P 157). But we cannot really get to
the nature of racial passing without taking a more careful look at the closely related
concept of ethnicity. This term is by no means uncontested in its definition; there has
been much discussion over the past hundred years as to what ethnicity is, how it is
transmitted, and how it relates to identity. Describing ethnicity as “‘a consciousness of
kind’” (57), Bottomley distinguishes it from culture or tradition (50) and from
nationalism (59). She further notes that “ethnicities are imposed, as well as assumed and
inherited” (60). Salvaterra adds a historical perspective when he points out that before
1970 ethnicity was considered biologically determined and heritable (39), while the
1990s view holds that “membership is not automatic…. [I]t is expressive of our urge to
differentiate among the great masses of other humans, to select some as ‘like’ us and
some as ‘others,’ not ‘like us.’ Foregoing membership, therefore, must be a far different
matter than merely a cultural swap” (44). Gleason further explains the difference between
two camps of thinking about ethnicity: “primordialists regard ethnicity as a given, a basic
element in one’s personal identity that is simply there and cannot be changed, while
optionalists hold that ethnicity is not an indelible stamp impressed on the psyche but a
dimension of individual and group existence that can be consciously emphasized or de-
emphasized as the situation requires” (Speaking 132). Novak also states that in the United
States “individuals are free to make as much, or as little of their ethnic belonging as they
choose” (40). This assertion is patently untrue for African-Americans, who have not been
allowed to ignore the racial dimension of their ethnicity.
In Larsen’s novel, passing is dual-edged and paradoxical. People pass for different
things at different points in the text, and the idea of passing is both compelling and
repulsive: “‘It’s funny about “passing.” We disapprove of it and at the same time we
condone it. It excites our contempt and yet we rather admire it. We shy away from it with
an odd kind of revulsion, but we protect it’” (185–86). Passing is connected with success
and danger (carrying off the masquerade brings status and wealth, but detection will
unhinge a life), and with convenience and embarrassment (amenities are more available
to the passer, but even “the idea of being ejected from any place” [150] is extremely
distasteful). The first chapter of Larsen’s text makes no mention of passing, however, as
the novel begins with Irene Redfield receiving a letter from her childhood acquaintance,
Clare Kendry. Irene seems middle-of-the-road American, while Clare (if her letter is any
indication) is something to inspire nativist fears. In this opening section, we have no
indicators of the subjects’ racial identifications or ethnic origins. We know merely that
Irene is minding her own business, sorting through her “little pile of morning mail[,
consisting of]…ordinary and clearly directed letters,” when “a thin sly thing” intrudes
(143). The offending document has a New York postmark, but it is not from a New
Yorker. Written on “Italian paper” which seems “out of place and alien” (143), the letter
is “mysterious and slightly furtive” (143), both for its lack of return address and for “its
almost illegible scrawl” (143). Furthermore it represents a difference that cannot be
ignored: “foreign paper of extraordinary size” (143). And yet in spite of these markings
of otherness, Irene immediately recognizes that “some two years ago she had one very
like it in outward appearance” (143).31
Receiving the letter launches Irene into a vivid flashback from many more than two
years ago, in which she sees “a pale small girl sitting on a ragged blue sofa, sewing
pieces of bright red cloth together, while her drunken father, a tall, powerfully built man,
raged threateningly up and down the shabby room, bellowing curses and making
spasmodic lunges at her which were not the less frightening because they were, for the
most part, ineffectual” (144). The image of this child mourning for her father shortly
thereafter, “weeping, swaying her thin body, tearing at her bright hair, and stamping her
small feet” (144), seems to bear no relation to the sender of the “flaunting” letter written
in “purple ink” (143). And yet to Irene, the dangerous letter and the “theatrical heroics”
(144) are both of a piece with what she knows of Clare Kendry.
Opening the letter sends Irene into yet another reverie, and the novel begins a second
time with “what Irene Redfield remembered” (146) about “‘that time in Chicago’” (145).
It is at this point that we receive our first clear indication that Irene is black. Having
escaped the stifling heat of Chicago’s streets by having tea on the roof of an upscale
hotel, Irene suddenly fears that a woman at the next table “somehow kn[e]w that here
before her very eyes on the roof of the Drayton sat a Negro” (150). The strangers stares
give Irene a moment’s panic, but she comforts herself by recalling that white people seem
incapable of correctly guessing her ethnic heritage: “they always took her for an Italian, a
Spaniard, a Mexican, or a gipsy. Never, when she was alone, had they even remotely
seemed to suspect that she was a Negro” (150). In this early scene, Larsen provides a
conceptualization of race which draws on both essentialist and constructionist paradigms.
Irene is secure in her identity as a black person—” it wasn’t that she was ashamed of
being a Negro” (150)—but her status is still ambiguous because other people cannot
correctly place her. Presumably black people would recognize Irene as one of their own
under any circumstances, and white people would know that Irene was black if they saw
her in context (i.e. amongst other black people). The thought that a white person could
pick her out in this situation, however, is “absurd! impossible!” (150).32 Unfortunately
this knowledge does not help Irene to see the social construction of race, namely that
race, like ethnicity, is context-bound and fluid (Salvaterra 39). Instead Irene subscribes to
the essentializing view of race which deems her a Negro, and she tries to categorize
others according to a similarly stringent system. Studying the stranger at the next table,
Irene tries to deduce from her physical appearance “some clue to her identity” (151).
After the other woman identifies herself as Clare Kendry, Irene discerns a telltale sign,
Clare’s “Negro eyes” (161). Instead of making Irene feel a kinship with Clare, however,
this facial feature makes Clare “exotic” (161) to Irene.
Clare might seem foreign or exotic, but she is in fact uncannily familiar, a neighbor
Irene has not seen in twelve years. In the course of speaking with Clare, Irene learns what
has happened to her since she disappeared from Irene’s neighborhood following Bob
Kendry’s death in a bar fight. This history is narrated at length in the novel, and it
introduces important motifs that recur in the text as a whole. Clare’s is a quintessential
rags-to-riches story and a fairy tale. The beautiful but penniless orphan is taken into the
household of her fathers white aunts (the sisters of Clare’s white grandfather) basically as
a domestic servant. Her only ties with her former life are furtive trips to her old
neighborhood, taken in moments “stolen from the endless domestic tasks in her new
home” (152).33 In time, however, the servant girl becomes mistress: Clare marries up and
far surpasses her aunts in wealth and status. She works hard for her aunts, and with a little
luck and a lot of pluck, Clare finds success in the form of John Bellew, a wealthy and
handsome white man. As soon as she turns eighteen, Clare runs off with Bellew, leaving
her aunts to assume she is “living in sin” (160) and her peers to speculate that she has
become a prostitute. Among Irene’s cohort, Clare’s perceived straying is accounted for
by her family background. Well-meaning former acquaintances reflect: “‘what can you
expect. Look at her father. And her mother, they say, would have run away if she hadn’t
died’” (153).34 In fact, the reality is both less risqué (Clare is married) and more
dangerous (Clare’s husband is terribly racist) than anyone in the old neighborhood had
ever imagined.
Clare is not given the admiration accorded to either a Horatio Alger hero or a
Cinderella heroine because her rise is tainted by the fact that she is passing for white. The
act of passing (and the deception it implies) somehow detracts from the legitimacy of
Clare’s rather remarkable triumph. Larsen interrogates this double standard in attitudes
towards social mobility and racial passing,35 and she marks the irony, the potential threat,
and the cultural discomfort with achieving success by closeting a defining part of oneself
with the word “queer.” Clare’s aunts, for example, are strange old birds, “queer” (159),
and queerness reappears throughout Passing. As Butler avers, “that Larsen links
queerness with a potentially problematic eruption of sexuality seems clear” (Bodies 176).
Clare describes her aunts with the adjective “queer” because of their hypocrisy regarding
illicit sex: “for all their Bibles and praying and ranting about honesty, they didn’t want
anyone to know that their darling brother had seduced—ruined, they called it—a Negro
girl. They could excuse the ruin, but they couldn’t forgive the tar-brush” (159). Because
of this situation, we might conclude that Clare has been passing for most of her life. As a
child, she never fit in with her peers because of her father’s mysterious situation: “Clare
had never been exactly one of the group, just as she’d never been merely the janitor’s
daughter, but the daughter of Mr. Bob Kendry, who, it was true, was a janitor, but who
also, it seemed, had been in college with some of their fathers. Just how or why he
happened to be a janitor, and a very inefficient one at that, they none of them quite knew”
(154). As a teenager in her aunts’ home, Clare feels the need to hide her from neighbors
as well. In this light, Clare’s decision to cross the color line seems a logical continuation
of earlier patterns rather than the radical break Irene considers it.
One indication that Clare has not broken entirely from her former life is her desire to
find old acquaintances. Having returned to Chicago on one of her husband’s business
trips, Clare hopes to reconnect with her past and to bring the past and the present
together. To this end, Clare invites Irene to join her and her husband for dinner. Irene
pleads other engagements, and Clare corrals her into promising to come for tea the
following Tuesday. Much against her better judgment, Irene actually goes. Upon arriving,
Irene discovers another childhood acquaintance, Gertrude Martin. Gertrude was never a
friend, and the fact that she too had married a white man (though not under false
pretenses) causes Irene to acknowledge her with “an unsympathetic, almost harsh voice,”
as she thinks to herself, “great goodness! Two of them” (165). The social dynamics at the
tea create fluctuating alliances, a tense undercurrent beneath an external calm, for the tea
is perfectly arranged. Clare pours “the rich amber fluid from the tall glass pitcher into
stately slim glasses, which she handed to her guests, and then offered them lemon or
cream and tiny sandwiches or cakes” (168). All these forms and manners cannot gloss
over the discomfort produced when these three women, who really have very little in
common except for a childhood passed in the same neighborhood, are put in a social
situation. The major wedges between them are class and racial identity. Clare is by far the
wealthiest and most cultured of the group. Her husband has amassed a large fortune, and
the two of them travel all over the world; she even speaks in “a voice remotely suggesting
England” (151). Next in the socio-economic scale is Irene, a member of Harlem’s black
elite. Her husband is a successful physician and she has traveled to Europe, but she is
rooted in the limited sphere of a specific section of New York City. Gertrude Martin has
married a white man, but she does not seem to have gained much status in this way. She
“looked as if her husband might be a butcher” (167), as indeed he is. Gertrude’s husband
has become primary owner of what was once his fathers store and the store itself has
relocated to another street, but Gertrude is clearly not on the same socio-economic level
as Clare or Irene.
If Clare and Irene share a basically comparable class status, Clare and Gertrude have
in common the fact that both married white men (though Fred Martin is aware of his
wife’s race and John Bellew is not). They also share a fear of giving birth to a dark-
skinned baby. Just as Clare “nearly died of terror the whole nine months before Margery
was born,” Gertrude was “scared to death too” (168) before giving birth to her twin boys.
Both agree that “nobody wants a dark child” (168). Here Irene steps in to emphasize her
distance from this clique, calmly announcing, “‘one of my boys is dark’” (168). Gertrude
tries with embarrassed discomfort to ascertain whether this was a surprise, but Irene cuts
her no slack: “her husband, she informed them quietly, couldn’t exactly ‘pass’” (168).
The tea-time conversation is intended to be light and polite, so Clare accordingly tries
to shift the topic to the safer ground of old acquaintances. An interesting exchange takes
place as the three women reminisce about a man named Claude Jones:
Gertrude shrieked with laughter. “Claude Jones!” and launched into the
story of how he was no longer a Negro or a Christian but had become a
Jew.
“A Jew!” Clare exclaimed.
“Yes, a Jew. A black Jew, he calls himself. He won’t eat ham and goes
to the synagogue on Saturday. He’s got a beard now as well as a
moustache. You’d die laughing if you saw him…”
Clare’s laugh tinkled out. “It certainly sounds funny enough. Still, it’s
his own business. If he gets along better by turning—”
At that, Irene, who was still laughing her unhappy don’t-care feeling of
rightness, broke in, saying bitingly: “It evidently doesn’t occur to either
you or Gertrude that he might possibly be sincere in changing his religion.
Surely everyone doesn’t do everything for gain.” (169)
This conversation is particularly telling. First of all, Larsen once again brings up
Jewishness as a counterpoint to African-American experience.36 Secondly, Gertrude
clearly thinks that Negro identity and being a Jew are mutually exclusive. She does not
speak of Claude’s converting to Judaism, but rather makes the essentialist proposition
that Claude has “become a Jew.” This is seen mainly in Claude’s behavior, namely his
abstention from eating pork and his observing the Jewish Sabbath by attending services.
Claude cannot change his skin (or the shape of his nose) but he grows a beard,
additionally providing a physical symbol of his new state. Gertrude takes these changes
as indicative of the fact that Claude has become a new person. Clare, on the other hand,
sees Claude’s conversion as a matter of “turning” Jew, suggesting transformation and a
certain fickleness. Perhaps Claude had a Jewish side lying dormant in his psyche, waiting
for the proper conditions to trigger its release. Or perhaps he has metamorphosed into a
Jew this time, and next time he will “turn” something else. Only Irene sees Judaism as a
religion alone—a matter of personal beliefs—and rebukes the others for not considering
the possibility that Claude is motivated by something other than personal gain or
constitutional weirdness. None of the women offers a perspective that is completely
accurate. Judaism encompasses both ethnic and religious aspects (Gleason, Speaking
242), but being black and being Jewish are not at all mutually exclusive. Etienne Balibar
speaks to this gap in conceptualization that the three women evidence when she notes that
“the distinction between ‘minorities’ and ‘majorities’ becomes blurred in a number of
ways. First of all it is blurred because a growing number of individuals and groups are
not easily inscribed in one single ethnic (or cultural, linguistic, even religious) identity”
(53). Irene, Clare, and Gertrude cannot agree upon a single way to conceptualize
Claude’s identity, and the conversation falters under Irene’s self-righteous declarations.
When “race or other thorny subjects” (170), such as religion, produce too much
tension, Clare once again tries (unsuccessfully) to steer the conversation in safer
directions. At this point, any pretense of politeness is shattered as Clare’s husband comes
home and greets her with an off-hand “Hello, Nig” (170). John Bellew is a fairly non-
descript man, “a tallish person, broadly made…. His hair was dark brown and waving….
His steel-grey opaque eyes …mov[ed] ceaselessly between thick bluish lids” (170). He is
not unattractive, but he is not completely manly either, as “he had a soft mouth,
somewhat womanish, set in an unhealthy-looking dough-coloured face” (170). When
Clare introduces her husband to her guests, her eyes reveal “a queer gleam” which Irene
cannot interpret (171). The queerness spreads as Bellew launches his attack on “the black
scrimy devils,” prompting Gertrude to emit “a queer little suppressed sound, a snort or a
giggle” (172). Bellew is not wholly masculine and the three women are not white—
queerness marks the blurred borderlines. Irene suppresses her rage because of “some dam
of caution and allegiance to Clare” (173) and meets Bellew in his attempt “to be
agreeable” (173). Irene even admits that Bellew is relatively likable, “a fairly good-
looking man of amiable disposition…. Plain and with no nonsense about him” (173).
Shortly thereafter, Irene and Gertrude manage to extricate themselves. Leaving the
Bellews’s hotel, Irene and Gertrude become the third possible combination of alliances as
the two discuss their anger at Clare for putting them in such a situation and speculate
about the details of Clare’s dangerous life. Ultimately, however, Irene wishes to stand
alone. She begs off traveling back to her father’s house with Gertrude and reflects on the
afternoon herself. The next day she heads back to New York. Destroying the letter that
Clare sent her by means of explanation, Irene “turn[s] her thoughts to her own affairs. To
home, to the boys, to Brian” (178).
On the surface, Brian Redfield seems completely unlike John Bellew, and yet he too is
connected with queerness, namely an “old, queer, unhappy restlessness” (78) which
overtakes him from time to time.37 Moreover, he too has features that hint at effeminacy.
Irene spends much time and mental energy trying to suppress Brian’s wanderlust, and she
also engages in semantic acrobatics to convince herself of Brians rugged masculinity. He
is “extremely good-looking,” but, as Irene is quick to insist, not “pretty or effeminate”
(183). Nevertheless, even Irene will acknowledge that Brian’s attitude towards his female
patients is both atypical and unnerving: “‘Brian doesn’t care for ladies, especially sick
ones. I sometimes wish he did. It’s South America that attracts him’” (173). Proud as she
is of Brian’s “pleasant[ly] masculine” (184) traits, Irene tries to shelter her boys,
prompting Brian to accuse her of “trying to make a molly-coddle” of them (189). When
Junior learns about sex from schoolmates, Irene tells Brian that he has “picked up some
queer ideas about things” (189). Queerness (and the boundary blurring it implies) has no
place in Irene’s respectable and regimented household.
In general Irene seems happy with her husband, though he is not always up to her
standards of proper bourgeois manners. Irene experiences a daily irritation as Brian eats
his morning toast “with that audible crunching sound that Irene disliked so intensely”
(185),38 but she does not comment. Like Grandmother Burden and Lillian St. Peter, Irene
ignores what she does not want to know or act upon (Marren 118). While Brian wants his
sons to become aware of reality at the earliest possible opportunity, “Irene wants to deny
racism as a shaping presence and instead envision a neutral, benign landscape” (Marren
133). Thus Brian considers lynching a suitable topic for dinnertime conversation, while
Irene wants her sons’s “childhood to be happy and as free from the knowledge of such
things as it possibly can be” (231).
Brian and Irene take different approaches to more abstract matters, as well. In
response to Irene’s musings about why Clare stays married to a bigot, Brian merely
comments, “‘If I knew that, I’d know what race is’” (185). Irene seeks rational
explanations, but Brian realizes that some things are beyond logic.39 Shortly thereafter, it
is Brian who proposes totalizing explanations, while Irene sees more complex
interactions at work. To Irene’s pondering of the paradox of passing, Brian responds,
“‘lnstinct of the race to survive and expand.’” “‘Everything can’t be explained by some
general biological phrase,’” Irene protests, but Brian gets the last word: “‘Absolutely
everything can. Look at the so-called whites, who’ve left bastards all over the known
earth. Same thing in them. Instinct of the race to survive and expand’” (186). From a
strictly biological perspective, Brian is right about the survival and expansion of a human
gene pool. Taking race and culture into consideration, however, it becomes clear that no
recognizable “race” survives or expands from the hybridization produced by
miscegenation (through passing or through bastardization). The logical conclusion to be
drawn from Brians argument is actually the impossibility of purity—ethnic, racial, or
cultural. As Bottomley has pointed out, “obviously, with so many people constantly on
the move throughout world history, there can be no such thing as a ‘pure’ culture, let
alone a pure ‘race’” (42–43). Irene does not answer Brian, but she clearly does not accept
his explanations.
Whether or not she can say for sure what race is, Irene feels compelled to protect Clare
because of an “instinctive” (227) race loyalty. Irene recognizes that “she had to Clare
Kendry a duty” based upon “those very ties of race, which, for all her repudiation of
them, Clare had been unable to completely sever,” simultaneously acknowledging that
“Clare Kendry cared nothing for the race. She only belonged to it” (182). Irene sees
“racial identity” (209) as fixed, not performed or chosen. In this way she would seem to
agree with Larsen’s contemporary, Commons, who asserts, “race differences are
established in the very blood and physical constitution” (7). Clare is black, and therefore
Irene must protect and help her. It does seem odd, however, to lump white-identified
Irene together with passing-for-white Clare within the category of “black.” Still, if we
take a biological perspective again, we might note that this taxonomy is appropriate, at
least to the degree that black people in America are the product of an intermixing of any
number of African national and ethnic groups, as Urgo elaborates: “not even the late
twentieth-century term African-American can assign the ethnic roots of black Americans
to a specific location. African American, understood as an ethnicity, must trace its origins
to the middle passage itself” (96). Clare and Irene share this common origin, such as it is.
Hence, they are somehow aligned.
Just how and why black people are related to one another in the text is not clear,
however. Irene and Clare misinterpret each other’s actions and attitudes in part because
each holds a different opinion about the nature of group- and self-identification. Irene
feels connected to Clare because of a shared race, and yet Clare does not seem to honor
(or even acknowledge) the alliance. In Irene’s opinion, Clare has “no allegiance beyond
her own immediate desire” (144). Irene sees this tendency as a fault in Clare, but perhaps
what Larsen means to interrogate is the nature of the bonds that exist solely on the basis
of race. While Irene seems to think that race is the basis of group identification, she might
be proposing a false source of unity or solidarity. To speak of “the race” (225) as Irene
does might be to make the same mistake as sociologists who speak of an “ethnic group,”
falsely implying a cohesion and a group awareness not necessarily present (Petersen 2).
Irene certainly considers race as delineating a group, but, as Young has pointed out, “race
or nationality can also be fruitfully conceptualized as a seriality” (206).40 In a seriality,
people interact with their environment as independent agents; the fact that some people
come into contact with similar environmental elements does not make for group
identification (Young 199). When the world positions Clare as white (or Irene as white,
for that matter), she does not belong to the seriality of black women. When Clare chooses
to come to Harlem to immerse herself in a black world, however, she “move[s] and act[s]
in relation to practico-inert objects that position” her as a black woman (Young 205).41
Young takes note of this phenomenon when she points out that “which, if any, of a
person’s serial memberships become salient or meaningful at any time is a variable
matter” (207). A group, on the other hand, suggests “a collection of persons who
recognize themselves and one another as in a unified relation with one another” (198).
Furthermore, a group “forms around actively shared objectives” (199). When Clare tries
to get involved with the Harlem social life, she seeks to become part of a group. Her race
alone, however, neither presupposes a group nor provides automatic membership.
In addition to challenging Irene’s definitions of race and race feeling, Clare disrupts
Irene’s sense of social propriety. The mobility she achieves through passing for white
enables and encourages her to pass across age and class boundaries as well. She does not
always act like an adult, “happily amus[ing] herself with Ted and Junior” (208) when she
visits the Redfield household. If the boys are not upstairs in their playroom, Clare shows
a perfect willingness to “descend to the kitchen and…spend her visit in talk and
merriment with Zulena and Sadie” (208). Clare descends the social ladder by socializing
with lowly servants, a behavior that Irene finds inappropriate and even threatening. Irene
would not stoop to such indiscretions, and Clare is—by virtue of her husband’s wealth
and position and her assumed race—of an even more elite socio-economic group.
Irene’s attitudes towards respectability and security are consistent with what we know
of her as a younger woman. She still “care[s] about such things” (157) as acting in perfect
taste and avoiding being conspicuous, as Clare is quick to surmise. Gertrude also
immediately assesses that Irene is “‘just the same…. Not changed a bit’” (165). In New
York, Irene insists that Clare should not seek her out because such behavior is “‘terribly
foolish, and not just the right thing,’” prompting Clare to respond, “‘you haven’t changed
a bit. The right thing!’” (195). This impasse Clare and Irene reach over the relative
importance of excitement and propriety duplicates the rocky relationship between Stein’s
Melanctha Herbert and Jefferson Campbell.42
Indeed, Larsen shows her debt to and admiration for Stein in her second novel as well
as her first by deploying thematic elements and developing characters reminiscent of
those in “Melanctha.” Here, however, Larsen makes a fuller attempt to move beyond
Stein’s answers. Most noticeably, Larsen avoids negative racial stereotypes, offering
instead a thorough deconstruction of the notion of race itself. Some similarities between
Stein’s doppelganger and Larsen’s include the fact that Melanctha and Clare both had
abusive fathers, while Irene and Jeff had happy childhoods. Indeed Irene would probably
agree with Jeff that “you ought to love your father and your mother and to be regular in
all your life, and not to be always wanting new things and excitements, and to always
know where you were, and what you wanted, and to always tell everything just as you
meant it” (TL 67). Melanctha does want excitements, of course, as does Clare, while for
Irene “safety [and] security… were all-important” (195). Irene correctly suspects that
Clare “was yet capable of heights and depths of feeling that she, Irene Redfield, had
never known. Indeed, never cared to know” (195). The dynamics in the relationship
between Clare and Irene are also similar to those that Stein creates between Melanctha
and Jeff. When they are first reunited in Chicago, Irene talks (like Jeff) and Clare listens
(like Melanctha). Thinking about it in retrospect, Irene realizes that “she hadn’t asked
Clare anything about her own life,” allowing her to sit “motionless” (155), drinking it all
in. Commenting on Larsen’s literary debt to Stein, Davis suggests that “Clare…owes her
passive nature in part to…Melanctha,” further proposing that interactions between
Melanctha and Jeff provide one prototype “for the bipolar relationship between Clare and
Irene Redfield” (311). Because of the tension that marks their association, Jeff and
Melanctha part ways and reunite several times in the course of the story, particularly in
correlation to Jeff’s moods and attitudes towards Melanctha’s wandering. Similarly, Irene
both “encounter[s]” Clare in Chicago and “re-encounter[s]” her in New York, and her
feelings for Clare repeatedly vacillate between intense dislike (and the wish to break off
all contact with Clare) and intense warmth. Indeed, the warmth of this relationship is
another example of how Larsen moves beyond Stein. Whereas Stein uses Jeff in part as a
way to talk about one woman’s attraction to another woman (as Cather uses Jim Burden),
Larsen explores the ramifications of the female-to-female gaze head-on.43 Davis further
observes that “the themes and central characters of Passing suggest that Larsen
interpreted the ‘complex and desiring’ Melanctha Herbert, Stein’s protagonist who
‘wanders’ in search of ‘wisdom,’ as an embodiment of the acute invisibility and
vulnerability of those who belong to many worlds and whose inability to discover a ‘right
position’ results from the failure of others to perceive and, therefore, to ‘read’ them
competently” (34). Like Melanctha, Clare is neither a pure victim nor a wholly
responsible person. Both women die at the end of the text, but they are neither passive
martyrs nor active agents of their own destinies. Furthermore, in both Passing and
“Melanctha” passing is structurally underscored by narrative strategies. Cutter suggests
that “Clare’s problematic passing presents the ultimate mechanism for creating ‘a
perpetual present’” (76). Although Cutter takes this term from Roland Barthes, we might
observe that it is much like the continuous present that Stein spent much of her career
trying to formulate and to make a reality in her texts. Hence in her second novel, Larsen
both acknowledges her legacy from Stein and, in some ways, exceeds that legacy.
Clare’s reserve provides another link to the “mysterious” Melanctha (TL 50, 61), as
“she still remained someone apart, a little mysterious and strange” (209). It also aligns
her with Larsen who was, “as an old friend tactfully put it, ‘a good pretender’” (Davis
10). Clare passes for white, and her general mannerisms are conceptualized as “acting,
not consciously, perhaps—that is, not too consciously—but, none the less, acting” (182).
Socializing in Harlem circles, Clare has no “object[ion] to appearing a bit pathetic and ill-
used, so that people could feel sorry for her” (209). By the last section of the novel, Brian
too is passing—for attentive husband, for involved father, for happy and successful
Harlem physician, and possibly for straight.44 Like Godfrey St. Peter, “Brian…had
withdrawn. The house contained his outward self and his belongings” (224). It also
becomes clear that Irene is passing for model racewoman and mother. She claims
altruism and high-mindedness but eventually admits that security is her real god (235).
Thinking strictly of racial passing, Clare wonders “why more coloured girls…never
‘passed’ over” (158). “Passed over” connotes a permanent transition, such as passing
over the bridge to heaven (or hell) when one dies.45 The passer’s condition would thus be
a permanent and irreversible one. As Clare’s own life demonstrates, however, passing is
not always permanent, as in “just passing through.” It can mean adopting a whole new
way of life and breaking radically from the past, or it can mean trying on different subject
positions and changing them when the time seems right. Irene’s crossing the color line
and then crossing over again provides yet another example of temporary passing, that is,
passing for convenience.46 Reflecting on the concept of passing in general, Ginsberg
offers, “passing is about identities…[and] passing is also about the boundaries established
between identity categories and about the individual and cultural anxieties induced by
boundary crossing” (2). As if to structurally underscore the motif of boundary crossing,
Larsen’s text continually crosses back over itself, particularly through the use of
flashback.
Irene’s meeting Clare in Chicago, the central narrative strand of “Encounter,” is told
as a flashback. A key scene in “Reencounter,” which deals with Clare’s time in New
York, also utilizes a backward-looking mode: the Negro Welfare League dance is relayed
as an incomplete retrospective account. The chapter begins: “the things which Irene
Redfield remembered afterward about the Negro Welfare League Dance seemed, to her,
unimportant and unrelated” (203). Each of the following three paragraphs opens with,
“She remembered…” (203–04). Occupying the outsider/observer position together, Irene

and white author Hugh Wentworth apply an analytical eye to the microcosm of humanity
before them. 47 As Wentworth relates, “‘Everybody seems to be here and a few more. But
what I’m trying to find out is the name, status, and race of the blonde beauty out of the
fairy-tale’” (204–05). Faced with the multitudes, Wentworth seeks to classify, to
pigeonhole according to traditional categories. Clare’s dance partner, the unusually dark-
skinned Ralph Hazelton, serves as a counterpoint to Clare’s blondness, producing a
“study in contrasts” (205). The exotic apparently resides on either end of the color
spectrum; whereas Irene had previously deemed Clare’s whiteness exotic, she here
surmises that Ralph’s attractiveness to women lies in his dark exoticism. Dancing with
men like Ralph produces “‘a kind of emotional excitement[,]…the sort of thing you feel
in the presence of something strange, and even, perhaps, a bit repugnant to you;
something so different that its really at the opposite end of the pole from all your
accustomed notions of beauty ” (205). Irene’s explanation recalls Ginsberg’s comment
about the anxiety produced when individuals threaten to traverse boundaries between
wellestablished categories of identity (2). Dancing with Ralph is exciting precisely
because of the proximity (and potential blending) of dark and light. The danger of the
situation only adds to its appeal. Following up on Hugh’s comment about Ralph’s
dancing partner, Irene challenges Hugh to guess Clare’s race, insisting,” you usually
know everything. Even how to tell the sheep from the goats. What do you think? Is
she?’” (206). Hugh admits himself defeated, as he responds, “‘damned if I know! I’ll be
as sure as anything that I’ve learned the trick. And then in the next minute I’ll find I
couldn’t pick some of ‘em if my life depended on it’” (206).
This conversation is revealing both for its content and for the concepts embedded in
the speakers’ words. Both Irene and Hugh utilize an essentializing and totalizing
definition of race. Race, African-American status in this case, is something one either is
or is not. We might further observe that “name, status, and race” is an odd conjunction of
attributes. Names are given at birth, but can easily be changed, both legally and
informally, through marriage or through choice.48 In addition, names can be both
descriptive and prescriptive, though what one is called is only indirectly related to what
one is. In some cases the connection is ironically and tragically closer than one might
suspect—Bellew’s calling Clare “Nig” is a case in point. Status is equally complex and
has any number of connotations and denotations: free or slave, married or single, friendly
flirt or professional courtesan, and socio-economic class. In a society that champions
upward mobility and the selfmade man, status should be changeable. And yet for
African-Americans who try to pass, this glorification of mobility disappears (Sollors,
Neither 249–50). Finally, race is fixed and knowable according to the paradigm accepted
by Irene and Hugh, but not by everyone. Irene can read people, but the transmission is
one-way. Blacks can always recognize each other, but whites can only sometimes
recognize blacks. The reason, as Irene smugly informs Hugh, is that whites do not pass
for black and this makes all the difference (206).49 Irene and Hugh both seek to place
people within discrete categories based on social and biological features. Ultimately,
however, “race and history and metaphysics do not enforce an identity” (Appiah 108).
Identity is particularly fluid among certain types of people, and Clare fits into two
such types. She is a cosmopolitan and a “metropolitan man.”50 Clare is a world traveler
and a cultured person, a creative and flexible thinker. She is also a city-dweller who can
keep calm in dangerous or trying situations, “react[ing] with [her] head instead of [her]
heart” (Simmel 48), who appreciates money, and who views her own life with a certain
detachment and objectivity. She remains somewhat aloof and mysterious, even when
among friends. Furthermore, it is the city itself which facilitates the fluidity of Clare’s
identity. Indeed passing largely is a metropolitan phenomenon both because of the
anonymity offered by cities and because of the opportunities cities present to occupy
several non-overlapping worlds simultaneously. As Park notes, cities “encourage the
fascinating but dangerous experiment of living at the same time in several different
contiguous, but otherwise widely separated, worlds” (126). Taking a historical
perspective, Sollors similarly observes that “[racial passing] thrived in modern social
systems in which, as a primary condition, social and geographic mobility prevailed,
especially in environments such as cities or crowds that provided anonymity to
individuals, permitting them to resort to imaginative role-playing in their self-
representation” (Neither 247–8).
Cities facilitate Clare’s successful passing; furthermore, Clare’s ability to carry off the
masquerade places her in a quintessential American subject position. Berlant explains
that using “ambition or plastic surgery or assimilation …or…interracial marriage to a
more racially and class-privileged person” can increase a person’s chances of becoming
“a member of the core national culture” (Queen 217). Clare has certainly undergone a
transformation in her rebirth as Mrs. John Bellew, and the perks of such a socio-
economic position lead Clare to claim “‘that it’s even worth the price’” (160).
Furthermore, Clare’s transience and lack of roots position her as distinctively American
since the “experience of change, mobility, and loss of contact with the past” (Gleason,
Speaking 169) largely creates and defines American identity.
Like any good American, Clare resents anything that holds her back from the pursuit
of happiness. In an ironic foreshadowing, Clare descries the fact that she cannot
participate in Harlem events while her husband is in town: “‘Damn Jack! He keeps me
out of everything. Everything I want. I could kill him! I expect I shall, some day’” (200).
Irene dryly cautions Clare to “be reasonable,” pointing out that “there’s still capital
punishment…[and] everything must be paid for” (200). While Clare’s sense of being an
American centers around freedom, Irene’s strong identification as an American comes
more from rootedness. Although she contemplates “some European school for Junior
next year” (190), she determinedly vows that “she would not go to Brazil…. She was an
American. She grew from this soil, and she would not be uprooted” (235). Irene’s
protestations of American pride are rather suspect, as Berlant points out by questioning:
“what kind of body does American national identity give her, and how does the idea of
this body solve or salve the pain that the colonized body experiences?” (“National” 112).
Marren explains Irene’s American pride by noting “that romanticization preserves in
Irene a sense of organic identity with the nation” (141). In any case, it is clear that Clare
and Irene have different senses of what it means to be an American. Whereas Clare
embodies the American ideals of social and physical mobility, individualism, and self-
creation (along with living out a rags-to-riches story), Irene displays loyalty to American
ideology (see Munsterberg 5; Gleason, “American” 62) and espouses a willingness to
uphold the laws, customs, and aims of her (white) country.
The two women also offer competing versions of what it means to be a mother. They
do agree, however, “‘that being a mother is the cruelest thing in the world’” (197). Larsen
read Kate Chopin (McManus 191), and Clare shares Edna’s priorities: “‘Children aren’t
everything…. There are other things in the world, though I admit some people don’t seem
to suspect it’” (210).51 Irene, on the other hand, admits, “‘I know very well that I take
being a mother rather seriously. I am wrapped up in my boys and the running of my
house. I can’t help it’” (210). Irene’s self-image is wholly bound up in her role as mother,
wife and homemaker, and yet she too has priorities beyond her family. Towards the end
of the novel, Irene realizes “that, to her, security was the most important and desired
thing in life. Not for any of the others, or for all of them, would she exchange it” (235).
By the same token, Clare does not wholly disregard the well-being of her family.
Consideration for her daughter’s welfare slows Clare’s urge to leave her husband and
move to Harlem, though it does not squelch it entirely. As Clare explains, “‘Margery?….
If it wasn’t for her, I’d do it anyway. She’s all that holds me back. But if Jack finds out, if
our marriage is broken, that lets me out. Doesn’t it?” (234). Like Helga Crane in
Alabama, Clare wants to escape from the confines of being a mother and a wife. Also like
Helga (and like Harriet Jacobs’s Linda Brent), Clare speculates about how to achieve her
freedom while causing the least amount of damage to the people who depend on her.
The more Clare thinks about leaving her own family, the more she seems to take up
residence with Irene’s. Irene becomes increasingly uncomfortable with Clare’s continued
presence in her household and her social milieu. Not unlike her creator, Irene feels
threatened by other women’s achievements or capabilities. As Brian becomes more
friendly towards Clare, Irene feels the need to belittle her. Aligning herself with Hugh
Wentworth, Irene contends that Clare does not have the intellect to keep up in cultured
company: “‘She isn’t stupid. She’s intelligent enough in a purely feminine way.
Eighteenth-century France would have been a marvelous setting for her, or the old South
if she hadn’t made the mistake of being born a Negro…. Clare has got brains of a sort,
the kind that are useful too. Acquisitive, you know. But she’d bore a man like Hugh to
suicide’” (216). In her quest for control and security, Irene moves from hoping that
Bellew will learn that Clare “was spending all the time that he was out of the city in
Black Harlem” to awaiting the moment when Bellew would discover “that his wife was a
Negro” (225). Irene does not want Bellew to divorce Clare. She needs Clare thoroughly
out of the way, and so she shamefully contemplates “if Clare should die” (228). The last
thing Irene wants is for Clare to be free—” if Clare was freed, anything might happen”
(236). Significantly, she uses the language of slave ownership and emancipation, “if
Clare was freed” (236)—not “were free” but “was freed.”52
If Clare was freed by Bellew and therefore were free to spend all her time in Harlem
(and perhaps to run off with Brian Redfield), all of the boundaries and rules which Irene
has spent her life arranging and enforcing would blur. Hence it is no surprise that the key
scenes towards the end of the book are suffused with references to queerness. In her
anger towards Brian for inviting Clare to her party for Hugh and towards Clare accepting
the invitation, Irene’s voice “go[es] queer” (216). Irene begins to suspect sexual foul-
play, in the form of Clare and Brian having an affair. Looking at her husband during the
party but unable to discern anything from his “half-effaced seeking look,” Irene finds it
“queer, that now she didn’t know, couldn’t recall” (220) if this was his normal
expression. Soon thereafter, when Bellew sees Irene with Felise Freeland and realizes
that she must be black, Felise teasingly rebukes Irene, “‘Been “passing,” have you? Well,
I’ve queered that’” (227). Following Clare’s death, “the golden brown of [Felise’s]
handsome face change[s] to a queer mauve color” (241). “Queer” here signifies blurred
boundaries, liminality, transitivity, and internal contradictions. Hence for someone like
Irene, a queer situation or exchange produces intense anxiety. Queerness warns of an
impending change, the possible blurring, blending, or dissolution of the fixed categories
upon which Irene has built her world.
Irene’s carefully managed universe does indeed fall apart by the end of the novel, and
Irene is intimately involved in the process, as both witness and agent. During the
climactic scene in which Bellew discovers Clare at the Freelands’s party, everything
seems to happen in slow motion. Bellew arrives in a fury, but Clare remains calm, with
“a faint smile on her full, red lips, and in her shining eyes” (239). Clare’s lack of
awareness of, or lack of concern about, her imminent danger pushes Irene over the edge:
“It was that smile that maddened Irene. She ran across the room, her terror tinged with
ferocity, and laid a hand on Clare’s bare arm. One thought possessed her. She couldn’t
have Clare Kendry cast aside by Bellew. She couldn’t have her free” (239). Irene’s
feelings and motivations are clearly mixed. On the one hand, her actions could be
interpreted as race loyalty and an almost maternal urge to protect. Perhaps she meant to
place her own body in front of Clare’s to take Bellew’s wrath herself. But because
Bellew’s freeing Clare would leave her at liberty to wreck Irene’s marriage and her
secure life, Irene’s actions seem to spring entirely from selfishness. Having been
psychologically and metaphorically pushed over the edge, Irene does the same for Clare
in reality: Irene cannot allow Bellew to figuratively cast Clare aside, and so Irene literally
pushes Clare out the window.
In either case, it is clear that the dynamic which takes place involves more than just
Bellew’s discovery of his wife’s Negro status. Dollimore speaks to the complicated
relationship between masquerade, discovery, and identity when he notes that “to be
unmasked is to be unspirited as well as undone. To lose one’s cover is to lose one’s soul,
to be undone in the sense of socially ruined and spiritually taken apart” (292). While
Butler contends that when Bellew detects Clare, we see “her color ‘outed’” (Bodies 170),
it also seems feasible to argue that Irene is outed as well, her true self unmasked and
unspirited by an incident which she is incapable of remembering. In the dream-like
sequence which follows, Irene steps outside of herself: “in the room there were voices….
In the hall below she heard dimly the sound of feet going down the steps, of a door being
opened and closed, and of voices far away” (240). Her subsequent loss of consciousness
is also a coping mechanism, a retreat from the world of passing, of transitivity and of
ambiguity. “Then everything was dark” suggests a return to a black world, one
uncomplicated by racial difference or racial fluidity. It also recalls the “immense
darkness” of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a central allusion in Quicksand. In this way,
Larsen’s second novel ends up in a similar place as her first—with characters who arrive
at the brink of realization and meaningful action but never achieve consummation.
The endings of both of Larsen’s novels are considered problematic, but as Kaplan
asserts, we need not attribute their perceived flaws solely a lack of skillful writing:
“realistic novels have trouble ending because they pose problems they cannot solve,
problems that stem from their attempt to imagine and contain social change…. The final
disjuncture at the ends of novels raises questions about our own expectations of realism:
how does a certain order of experience come to be identified as real and another as
unreal?” (160). For Nathan Huggins, Larsen’s crucial mistake was to conflate and
confuse literary approaches, as he explains: “this sharp dichotomy of realist and romantic,
etched in both her novels, that makes them seem schizophrenic” (161). DuCille, however,
points out that realism and romance are not as incompatible as Huggins supposes because
both are literary and fictive constructions (200). Given Larsen’s clear engagement with
Chopin’s The Awakening, it is significant that critics found both women’s work
dissatisfying for similar reasons. George Spangler sees the root of Chopin’s failure as
“inconsistent characterization, which asks the reader to accept a different and diminished
Edna from the one developed so impressively before” (187). Similarly, in her review of
Quicksand, Eda Lou Walton pronounces to Larsen’s discredit “that the young Helga at
the beginning of the book ‘cannot be the older woman of the latter half’” (Davis 280).
Further, Spangler says of Chopin, “one can easily and happily join in the praise that…has
be given to The Awakening—one can, that is, until one reaches the conclusion of the
novel, which is unsatisfactory because it is fundamentally evasive” (186). Huggins
reaches a similar conclusion about Passing, as he declares, “Nella Larsen constructs a
perfunctory and entirely unsatisfactory denouement” (160).
The negative assessments of Chopin’s and Larsen’s endings offered in the 1970s by
Spangler and Huggins are by no means representative of current critical opinion.
Nevertheless, the difficulties posed by these endings are acknowledged, even as more
recent (and, in most cases, more feminist) critics offer alternative readings. Wendy
Martin concludes her review of critical responses to Edna’s suicide with a statement that
acknowledges both the dissent and a certain level of accord: “Clearly, contemporary
evaluations of the novel vary markedly in their assessment of the effectiveness of its
conclusion, but most critics today agree that The Awakening is an important part of the
American literary canon” (14). Before attempting to contextualize Larsen’s work through
“the prism of black female sexuality” (xii), McDowell affirms that “[c]ritics of Larsen
have been rightly perplexed by these abrupt and contradictory endings” (xii). More recent
Larsen critics have used less negatively charged terms to describe the elusive quality of
the endings of her novels. Yohe states that Quicksand “ends indecisively” (55), while
Clemmen calls the novel enigmatic, “complex enough to conceal its logic” (458). Along
similar lines, Cutter describes Passing’s conclusion as open-ended and “uncontainable”
(97). This critical emphasis on ambiguity recalls yet another reading of The Awakening,
namely Suzanne Wolkenfeld’s pronouncement that “Edna’s suicide is not a conscious
choice reached through her achievement of self-awareness” (222). This ambiguity is
replicated in the uncertainty surrounding “whether Helga Crane is trying to destroy
herself” (Berzon 225) and in the murder/suicide/accident which brings about Clare
Kendry’s death.
Clare is only about thirty-one years old when she dies, and Helga immures herself at a
young age, as well. Larsen’s literary life was also cut off prematurely. Just as we can only
speculate what interesting turns Helga’s life might have taken had she returned to Harlem
or how Irene’s and Clare’s lives would have changed had Clare lived, “one naturally
wonders if Nella Larsen would have taken still more risks had her short, but
accomplished, literary career been extended” (McDowell xxxi). While accusations of
plagiarism, or passing for authorship (Butler, Bodies 185), played the most obvious role
in bringing Larsen’s career to an abrupt end, Davis offers an equally probable explanation
for Larsen’s disappearance from the literary scene. To Davis, Larsen falls by the wayside
because she slips through a breach between multiple subject positions: “in the psychic
split between her individual and group identity (whether that group is defined by gender
or race) and in the personality breakdown between her public and private roles, the
fiction and the writer herself were lost”(18)
But what does it mean to say that a writer and her fiction are “lost,” particularly when
the fiction has been in print for years and has been the subject of any number of critical
essays and dissertations? Larsen did lose her writing career, her sense of herself as a
novelist, and her ability to communicate with an audience via publication (Davis 17). All
the same, as Davis acknowledges, Larsen’s “novels continue to have a life” (465). So, for
that matter, did Larsen. After she stopped writing, Larsen lived a perfectly respectable, if
comparatively sequestered life, working as a night nurse and spending the rest of her time
in her small apartment. She did not choose suicide, she did not pass for white (Wall 137),
and she did not literally disappear (though the term is often used to describe her
withdrawal from former friends and acquaintances). Furthermore, Larsen was not unique
in her struggles. In their attempts to write with integrity and to live their lives as artists,
Cather and Stein also had to negotiate the tension between public and private selves.
Cather coped by becoming increasingly reclusive as she got older, though she continued
to write up until the end of her life.53 Stein became even more of a celebrity and a public
success as she got older, though none of her later texts equaled The Autobiography of
Alice B.Toklas in popularity. Although both women are now included in “The Library of
America” series and continue to be the subject of conferences, articles, and books, their
relative success is open to debate. Shaw, for one, believes that Cather was rewarded for
staying in America and facing the tensions that confronted her there head-on (as opposed
to taking what he considers the easy way out, expatriation). These tensions made for good
literature, and now, Shaw asserts, Cather’s work is more read and more highly respected
than Stein’s (“Victorian” 26). Whether or not one accepts Shaw’s valuation, it is clear
that both Cather and Stein were concerned with the shape their literary legacy would
take. Both actively took part in the publication process throughout their lives and made
formal arrangements for the future of their texts. Larsen, on the other hand, quietly
accepted the fact that “her old contacts with the publishing world were gone…[and] she
did not know how to establish new ones” (Davis 463). She responded to adversity with
silence and virtual hibernation, “perchance at some point to resume her writing or
perhaps writing all the while” (Davis 463), but not sharing her work with anyone. Larsen
might not have been able to get past the “Sanctuary” fall-out because the situation
threatened her very identity. If, as Wall has suggested, “Larsen tried to ‘pass’ as a
novelist and to an extent succeeded” (138), then “Sanctuary” was her out-ing. Having her
authorship called into question destroyed the sense of self which “Nella Larsen, novelist”
(Davis 2) had come to rely on. Whereas Cather and Stein were able to re-envision
themselves across a lifetime of writing, continually experimenting with new strategies
and trying out new personas, Larsen was left in the gap. Gaps are not immutably fixed,
however, but shifting, and the pendulum of literary greatness tends to come back around.
In literature as in life, Larsen was not really lost—she was just waiting.
Chapter Five
Conclusion: Other Countries, Other
Romances
THIS COUNTRY, TODAY
“‘If you’re talking of yourself and Vivaldo—there are

other countries—have you ever thought of that?’…‘Oh,
yes! And in another five or ten years, when we get the loot
together, we can pack up and go to one of those
countries…. And what do you think will have happened to
us in those five years? How much will be left?’”
—James Baldwin, Another Country (1960)
Questions about who counts in the United States, the benefits and problems associated
with immigration, and the meaning/legacy of the melting pot have not disappeared since
the great wave of European immigration ended in the 1920s. Indeed, the debates in 2004
are sounding a lot like those in 1904. The stakes are high as would-be residents seek to
join the American experience, and a new breed of nativist work to preserve what they
consider the nation’s threatened integrity. A typical reflection of their efforts is the title of
a recent newspaper article: “Immigration to cost states seven seats, study claims” (J.
Abrams A15). A spokesman for the anti-immigrant think tank that conducted the study
offered such classic nativist scare statements as “[redistribution is a] distortion of the
political system in which seats are taken away from citizens and reallocated in effect to
noncitizens” and “this can be seen as distorting our democracy.” The language of whim
and unfairness is consistent throughout: California will “end up” with extra seats, while
other states “lost” seats or “failed to get” the ones that were rightfully coming to them.
Some states will be “deprived” of their fair representation. New arrivals are jeopardizing
the very foundations of the political system.
As early as 1956, Kallen observed that Americans who can trace their ancestry to the
Founding Fathers feel that they are somehow more American than their later arriving
compatriots: “Our traditional isolationism, our laws respecting immigration and our use
of the epithets ‘alien,’ ‘foreign,’ our image of the ’100 per cent American,’ our
‘Daughters of the American Revolution/ unheeding of the ideals the Revolution was
fought for, their brothers, the Sons, the Ku Klux Klan, all are groups with a creed and
code, invidiously setting apart themselves, the elect, from the rest of the nation, somehow
the reject” (33). Forty years later, Lowe comments that “in the last century and a half, the
American citizen has been defined over and against the Asian immigrant, legally,
economically, and culturally” (4), a point that could easily be applied to other immigrant
groups, as well. Berlant notes a recurrent pattern: “every crisis of immigration in U.S.
history has involved the claim that something essentially American is being threatened by
alien cultural practices” (Queen 193).
Ironically, a similar fear is expressed by an African-American resident of the mostly
Mexican-American and high immigration town of South Gate, California: “Some people
have bought chickens. Others want a shed in the backyard. We have laws here. Why is it
that they want to come here and take over?” (Labi 8; emphasis added). As Time magazine
reported, the townspeople were squaring off in the debate over colorful expression versus
mainstream respectability. The article’s subtitle, “A town cloaked in shades of pale
shudders as homes cross the color barrier,” suggests that plays on racial passing are
intentional. The players are different, but the language is similar. The Mexican-American
mayor “has resolved to ban what he calls the ‘Day-Glo colors—the wild reds, oranges
and purples’” from houses in his community. According to the mayor, “the most vocal
supporters of a color ordinance are second- and third-generation Latinos.” The article’s
author wonders out loud: “will the melting pot end up with a can of commercial beige
paint?” (Labi 8).
Cather, for one, might well have sided with South Gate’s color contingent. As Bennett
has pointed out, Cather had no patience with second- and third-generation immigrants
who were ashamed of their parents and their ancestral traditions (148), a point proven
clearly by her satiric treatment of Oscar and Lou Bergson in O Pioneers!. Along similar
lines, if the individual houses in South Gate are painted a color “that makes your eyes
sting on a bright day” (Labi 8), they would probably not have made too great an
impression on Stein. Remembering her first visit to 27 rue de Fleurus, “Alice” remarks,
“the pictures were so strange that one quite instinctively looked at anything rather than at
them just at first” (ABT 9). Furthermore, although South Gate might seem a far cry from
the fictional Naxos in Larsen’s Quicksand, the anti-color, pro-homogeneity campaign of
ethnic Americans who want to fit in seems similar to the struggle Helga waged in that
model school for southern Negro children. In spite of what the Naxos matrons would
have her believe, Helga knows that she and her dark-skinned students look good in
vibrantly colored clothes (Q 18). In South Gate, Patricia Lazalde insists that the situation
is “an ethnic thing…. Color is passion, emotion. Hey, if you paint your house a beautiful
color, what’s the crime?” (qtd. in Labi 8).
While “people climb[ing] up the ladder of success” worry that displays by “ranch
Mexicans” will ruin everyone’s chances for respectability (Labi 8), the upwardly mobile
might keep in mind Bourne’s contention that assimilation is not the solution: “It is not the
Jew who sticks proudly to the faith of his fathers and boasts of that venerable culture who
is dangerous to America, but the Jew who has lost the Jewish fire and become a mere
elementary, grasping animal. It is not the Bohemian who supports the Bohemian schools
in Chicago whose influence is sinister, but the Bohemian who has made money and has
got into ward politics” (270). What will become of the Mexican-Americans who use
neutral tones on their houses has yet to be seen. Clearly, the relationships between
ethnicity, immigration and citizenship are still important. Assimilation has its benefits
(including upward mobility) but it also has its costs. “How much will be left?” remains
the crucial question in any trade-off between ancestral and adoptive traditions. And, as
newly-arrived Mexican-American immigrants might attest, going to another country does
not necessarily solve any problems.
Conclusion: other countries, other romances 143
ANOTHER COUNTRY
“All countries were beautiful to Mr. Rosen. He carried a

country of his own in his mind, and was able to unfold it
like a tent in any wilderness.”
—Willa Cather, “Old Mrs. Harris” (1932)
Although Cather, Stein and Larsen could show American birth certificates and held
American passports, each searched for another country (literally and figuratively) in her
life and in her art. To this end, all discovered geographical and creative spaces that
fostered their work in important ways and betrayed its limitations in other ways. All three
occupied the paradoxical position of identifying as American writers and yet finding it
difficult to write at home. Cather made many trips to Europe, but did not find the
continent congenial to her writing process. As Louise Bogan notes, “she does not like to
work away from America…. In Paris she misses clear American skies, becomes absorbed
in watching the changing soft colors of the Seine, and gets nothing done. She delights in
the turns and sound of colloquial American speech” (132). Although she enjoyed hearing
American voices and preferred to do her writing within the United States, Cather
nevertheless needed physical distance from her home region (and the one she is most
often identified with, popularly and critically), the Nebraska prairie, in order to find her
subject matter and to transform early experiences into mature writing.1 Residing in New
York and New England, Cather could once again hear the sounds of Nebraskan farm
women’s voices and could rework these memories creatively.2 Cather’s mentor, Sarah
Orne Jewett, had advised her as much: “‘Of course, one day you will write about your
own country. In the meantime, get all you can. One must know the world so well before
one can know the parish’” (qtd. in O’Brien, EV 345). While Cather liked to hear English
around her while she composed her texts, Stein had an opposite need. Marren suggests
that part of Stein’s motivation for living abroad was to establish an exclusive hold on the
English language (174). France was Stein’s “other country,” and her residence abroad
allowed her to establish her Americanness through distance. Marren observes that Stein
and Toklas considered themselves Americans on the basis of native-bornness (171), and
Spencer adds that “even at the end of her life, …Gertrude Stein not only retained her
belief in the ineluctable imprint of nationality but also affirmed the native roots of her
own writing” (224). As important as living abroad was for Stein, she needed to identify
herself as an American. Like Cather, Larsen left the scenes of her childhood—both
Chicago and Fisk—at the earliest possible opportunity. She spent time overseas, though
her published texts were written in the United States. It is worth noting, however, that
whereas Cather made frequent trips to Nebraska and Stein visited Baltimore and East
Oakland when she finally crossed the ocean for a lecture tour, Larsen only returned to her
childhood memories in fanciful reconstructions.3 Thus Cather, Stein and Larsen all bore
out Urgo’s contention that leaving home is a prerequisite to writing about it (56, 65).
A preoccupation with migration, or movement away from home, places these writers
squarely in an American experiential tradition. As Sollors notes: “it is hardly an
exaggeration to say that the exodus is one of Americas central themes” (43). None of
these women was either a first-generation immigrant or a self-identified expatriate, and
yet all experienced immigration or expatriation on some level. Elyse Blankley offers a
compelling interpretation of expatriation when she attests that “Stein, literally an
‘expatriate’ in Paris, was artistically shaping a distinctly ‘ex-patriate’ vision (in the
word’s original Latin sense of ‘away from the father’)” (202). Cather also moved away
from her literary progenitors, though this departure was not always clear to her critics.
Godfrey St. Peter speaks for Willa Cather as well when he complains that “nobody saw
that he was trying to do something quite different—they merely thought he was trying to
do the usual thing, and had not succeeded very well” (PH 32).4 For her part, Larsen
moved away from traditional male models and laid important foundations for the
tradition of twentieth-century African-American women novelists. McDowell includes
Ann Allen Shockley, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, and
Gloria Naylor in a list of black women who took up the challenges set in motion by
Larsen’s work (xxxi).
Hence making a literary mark entailed several forms of expatriation for Cather, Stein
and Larsen. In addition to leaving home, taking up residence in other countries or
regions, and charting new directions in literature, these writers created countries of their
own—through their texts and within themselves. These created countries might be
considered “imagined communities” of sorts, to use Anderson’s term.5 Some of these
countries were envisioned or expressed in texts. Indeed, geography plays an important
role in the works under consideration for each writer. In My Antonia, young Jim’s “old
country” is Virginia, while the adult Jim comes to look at Nebraska in the same way. The
cosmopolitan Godfrey St. Peter retains his attachment to “le Michigan” and “dream[s]”
of joining in the “self-sacrificing friendship and disinterested love…[of] the day-
labourers” in Outland’s country (PH 31, 172). For Vickie Templeton, the move from the
female world of her childhood to the male university world constitutes a relocation to
foreign territory.6
A similar pattern occurs in Stein’s and Larsen’s texts. Melanctha Herbert negotiates
varied psychological terrain and takes on the demeanor of a world traveler, while Stein’s
1930s narratives pose France and America as home and other simultaneously. The
Geographical History of America responds to the sense that “sometimes one feels there’s
nothing but geography in this country, and certainly a geographical history is the only
kind it can significantly have” (Gass 13).7 In Larsen’s writing, black and white America
are presented as intersecting but radically different worlds. Quicksand holds Europe up as
a counterpoint, but not a solution, to American racism, while Passing explores another
sort of dual citizenship, the excitement and risks inherent in an individual’s attempt to
occupy more than one non-intersecting “country” simultaneously (Park 126). Thus all
three writers posit complex and multivalent relations between identity and geography.
The search for another country also brought these writers to develop countries in
themselves, namely different (and at times seemingly contradictory) aspects of the self.
Bifurcation has been a common critical thread in analyzes of their texts. According to this
line of thinking, Cather splits herself into Jim and Antonia, Stein splits herself into
Melanctha and Jeff, and Larsen splits herself into Clare and Irene. While this kind of
oversimplification belies the complexity of their texts and elides significant differences
between fiction and life, all three writers did bifurcate themselves into public and private
personas. Cather systematically created a barrier between herself and her public starting
in the 1920s when she was becoming well-known (Schroeter 98). Indeed, her public self
was formidable at times:
Her voice is deep and resonant…. She stands and moves solidly. She sits
with an air of permanence, as though the chair were, and had always been
her home. She smokes a cigarette as though she really liked the taste of
ignited tobacco and rice paper…. Her face, when she detects some
affectation in another’s words or actions, can lose every atom of warmth
and become hostile and set…. The remarks ‘Oh well’ and ‘What does it
matter?’ have never, in all probability, passed her lips. (Bogan 131–32)
While Stein’s salon—and eventually her writing—became rather famous, she never
really melded her private and public personas. Simon points out that “Stein herself
believed that her identity as an artist differed essentially from her social or public
personality” (x). For Larsen, writing itself and the identity of “novelist” constituted
another country, so to speak. Wanting to act the part of the modern professional woman,
“she smoked in public, wore silk stockings and short dresses, mocked the religious
conservatives and the racial uplifters, played bridge, and drove a stylish automobile”
(Davis 10). All the same, Davis notes that “an outer mask disguised her anxieties about
belonging” (10). The identity of “novelist” and the ability to create alternative worlds in
her texts served as an important “means of her maintaining her sanity and her balance”
(Davis 16). Although Stein’s “America” provides the clearest example of an imagined
community, Cather and Larsen also offered versions of America and of themselves that
allowed them to function, personally and professionally.8 For these writers, imagination
and art jointly became the proverbial tent in any wilderness.
Cather, Stein and Larsen carried a country in their minds and gave voice to that
country with their pens. This propensity arguably provides further evidence for
considering these women modernist writers. Commenting on the quotation which
provides the epigraph for this section, Fetterley and Pryse argue that such an attitude
constitutes “a solution—both modern and in many ways modernist—to the problem of
‘losing’ home” (596). If we see “home” as both a physical location and a centeredness, a
sense of self, we might observe that all three women chose to have many homes by
negotiating multiple subject positions. Cather’s political, religious, geographic, and
personal affiliations positioned her inside and outside of multiple categories
simultaneously. Similarly, Stein variously chose to emphasize and de-emphasize her
sexual orientation, gender, ethnic/religious heritage, and citizenship. Wavering between
competing desires to belong and to be different, Larsen and her heroines moved uneasily
between bohemianism and social propriety (in both black and white circles). Rather than
producing paralysis, however, the ambiguities and fluidities these writers experienced
were constructively and beautifully transformed into art.
ROMANCE AND REALITY
“Mrs. Templeton shrugged. ‘You’re mistaken, Mrs. Rosen.

There ain’t a particle of romance in Vickie.’
‘But there are several kinds of romance, Mrs.

Templeton. She may not have your kind.’
‘Yes’m, that’s so,’ said Mrs. Harris in a low, grateful
voice. She thought that a hard word Victoria had said of
Vickie.”
—Willa Cather, “Old Mrs. Harris” (1932)
The country and the time period Bourne coined “Trans-National America” fostered a
particular kind of literary art. Transnationalism, entering the realm of writing, facilitated
trans-generic texts. The attempt to break free of confin-ing codes and expectations in
literary genres was an important struggle that Cather, Stein and Larsen all waged. In
particular, they grappled with the tensions between romance and reality (and a system
invested in keeping them separate and unequal). Despite mis-readings which deemed
their work “sentimental and nostalgic,” “historically conservative,” “incoherent,” and
“lying,” these writers have borne out the truth in Mrs. Rosen’s statement that “there are
several kinds of romance.”9 All three possessed alternative conceptions of what
constitutes reality or realistic writing and of how realism works. Cather and Larsen used
deceptively simple language in what appeared to be basically mimetic texts, while Stein
unhinged concepts of realistic writing (and sometimes unhinged words and their
meanings altogether). In any case, all three undermined the notion that realism is
straightforward and simple. Lilienfeld argues that “for Cather, seemingly traditional
realism became a method to render the safely obvious devious and obscure” (50). In her
own critical writing, Cather disagrees with traditional definitions of realism:
there is a popular superstition that ‘realism’ asserts itself in the

cataloguing of a great number of material objects, in explaining
mechanical processes, the methods of operating manufactories and trades,
and in minutely and unsparingly describing physical sensations. But is not
realism, more than it is anything else, an attitude of mind on the part of
the writer toward his material, a vague indication of the sympathy and
candour with which he accepts, rather than chooses, his theme?” (NUF
45)
Chessman suggests that Stein also had different ideas about reality and realism, and she
observes that Stein’s texts corroborate the notion that “‘reality’ is simply what works for
us; it is a social construction, socially encoded” (157). Stein explains her own views in
“A Trans-Atlantic Interview, 1946”: “because the realism of the people who did realism
before was a realism of trying to make people real. I was not interested in making the
people real but in the essence or, as a painter would call it, value” (Haas 16). In addition,
Stein says she derived some inspiration in her task from Cezanne and from Flaubert, both
of whom influenced Cather as well.10 Larsen employs a specific kind of realism for her
own ends, too. McDowell notes that “in Passing she uses a technique found commonly in
narratives by Afro-American women novelists with a ‘dangerous’ story to tell: ‘safe’
themes, plots, and conventions are used as the protective cover underneath which lie
more dangerous subplots” (xxx). Furthermore, Larsen’s Quicksand has been mis-read
(and summarily dismissed) as a novel of manners because of its careful attention to

details such as dress. However, as DuCille explains, these tropes actually serve a
symbolic function, reinforcing the novels thematic explorations of race and gender (205).
Thus all three writers moved away from strict demarcations in genre. The same cultural
climate that fostered transnationalism encouraged trans-generic experimentation and
alternative conceptions of reality and realistic writing.
In fact, on the level both of genre and of culture, the realism/romance divide has never
been as clear-cut as some critics would have it: “realism… is as much a code as romance,
as much artifice as lightening creams and greasepaint” (DuCille 200). Here DuCille
delineates the connection between the conscious employment of literary categories or
conventions and deliberate alterations of physical appearance towards a social goal.
Indeed, observations like DuCille’s highlight an important cultural phenomenon of
modernity, namely the increasingly coded and simulacral representation of everyday life.
Kaplan makes a similar point, agreeing that the generic debate that seeks to clearly
demarcate romance from realism (and to privilege realism as more legitimate than
romance) ultimately elides the point. Instead Kaplan contends that “fictionality itself—
rather than the particular form of the romance—seems to be the underlying enemy of
realism, and its danger lies not in its deviance from a normative reality but in the way in
which modern life has become indistinguishable from fiction” (19). The notion that life
has become collapsed with fiction is consistent with the post-structural tenet that reality is
itself a construction, and an unstable one, too, because it is created by inherently slippery
language (Eagleton 143–44). Indeed Barthes, along with many others, criticizes
traditional realism because of its attempts to pass itself off as an ultimate truth, as
Eagleton points out, “the realist or representational sign…is for Barthes essentially
unhealthy. It effaces its own status as a sign, in order to foster the illusion that we are
perceiving reality without its intervention” (136). Clearly, demanding that realistic
writing conform to a narrow set of conventional requirements produces neither truth nor
great literature.
Cather, Stein and Larsen offered their own versions of reality and realistic writing, and
in most cases, their ideas were not consistent with what their audiences and their critics
expected. In addition to defying generic expectations by showing the constructed quality
of literary realism, all three writers evoked boundary patrol anxieties by blurring lines
between fact and fiction—in their lives and in their texts—offering fictionalized versions
of themselves which they sometimes presented as fact. Thus trans-generic
experimentation was complemented by a willingness or a need to construct personal
identities as well. Cather and Larsen both lied about their birth years, an unremarkable
and common enough fib, except that critics find this act particularly significant in these
authors’ cases.11 Both women also toyed with their given names, while Stein took her
beloved’s name and voice as her own in The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas. These
propensities cause some observers to make value judgments. According to Schroeter,
“Miss Cather…was a poser, who deliberately constructed an imaginative or dramatized
public image” (97), an act, he implies, which is inherently deceptive and false. Stein’s
voiceswapping in The Autobiography generated a fair amount of backlash, as did her
questionable assertions uttered as true recollections in a memoir-like confidential tone.
Larsen offended fewer people with her emendations to history, but it has come to light
that much of the book-jacket biography she submitted to her publisher was as carefully
crafted as her fiction and not technically true. Larsen’s novels draw on autobiography but
the revision process, “the process of reinventing fact” (Davis 296), rendered whatever
biographical information one might hope to glean from them obscure. For Cather, Stein
and Larsen, identities were consciously constructed and sometimes bore little
resemblance to what is conventionally considered fact.
If genre (romance vs. realism) and truth (fact vs. fiction) were subject to loosening or
blurring in Trans-National America, gender identity was similarly fluid and ambiguous.
Indeed, the “several kinds of romance” alluded to by Mrs. Rosen can also refer to gender
identity, possibly hinting at alternatives to heterosexual unions. Vickie Templeton,
modeled closely on young Willie Cather, occupies an anomalous position. Carlin argues
that she is the outsider in the text and suggests that she might be a lesbian (108).
Although Bennett insists that Cather chose not to marry to avoid disappointment (221),
O’Brien (among others) has concluded that Cather’s primary emotional attachments were
to women and identifies her as a lesbian (EV 6). Stein chose to marry, but it was another
woman whom she took as her wife, a situation which caused her some initial discomfort
and which caused a rupture with certain friends and family members (Wagner-Martin,
Favored 102–03). While Larsen married a man, she was attuned to issues of same-sex
love and gender oppression. McDowell argues for a lesbian reading of Passing, while
Allan surmises that Larsen “must have been tempted to seize the issue and redefine black
lesbianism in positive terms. To do so behind a mask must have been as painful for her as
it was for [Virginia] Woolf” (107). Because marriage and Americanization have
historically been linked, the issues of “another country” and “several kinds of romance”
are also joined: “central to both the immigrant and the middle-class narrative is the
marriage plot…For the native-born American, no less than for the immigrant, marriage is
a key site of Americanization” (Wald 279). In the realm of gender, like those of national
and professional affiliation, transnationalism facilitated a relaxing of boundaries, a state
which had both liberating and dislocating ramifications.
Is the United States a true nation, and does American literature exist as a discrete and
recognizable entity? While Sumner thought that a racially and ethnically diverse
population meant that “the United States had no claim to the name of nation” (Fairchild
54), Munsterberg conceded that being a country composed of immigrants prevented
Americans from developing “a profound feeling of indissoluble unity” (5). He did not,
however, conclude that such diversity precluded nationhood. Indeed, Munsterberg
seemed to realize ahead of his time that unity is not the point. Concerns about American
identity—and influential components such as ethnicity, immigration and gender—are
variously ascendant and recessive in national importance. Cather, Stein and Larsen came
of age and produced important literary texts during a transitional period in American
history and American letters. What they strove to communicate in terms of the fluidity of
identity categories and the significance of multiple subject positions retains a lasting
relevance, as issues of nationality and geography, ethnicity and race, and gender and
sexuality continue to occupy a prominent place in today’s socio-cultural landscape.
Instead of squeezing themselves and their texts into constricting categories, they opted
for dispersal and re-creation, taking the path “that led toward the moon” (Cather, OMH
282). And beyond.
Afterword “a time to every purpose under heaven” 149
Afterword
“A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven”
“And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, you shall
not wrong him. But the stranger that dwells with you shall
be to you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him
as thyself; for you were strangers in the land of [Egypt].”
—Leviticus 19.33–34 (Jerusalem Bible)
“A poem about mushrooms or about a walk with the dog is

a more eloquent response to Sept. 11 than a poem that
announces that wholesale murder is a bad thing.”
—Billy Collins (qtd. in “Poetry and Tragedy”)
“Now that 9–11 happened, I’m very careful where I go

with my dog…. When people ask what kind she is, I just
say, ‘She’s a hound dog.’… The only reason I do this is for
fear of possible retaliation.”
—Lou Guerrero, owner-breeder of the No. 1-ranked
Afghan in 2001 (qtd. in Walker)
And the pendulum swings back around. Large numbers of European immigrants came to
the United States between 1880 and 1920, and then World War I left an anti-immigration
backlash in its wake. Within the resultant nativist climate, some German-Americans “did
not feel it was safe to show the hyphen because many Americanizers scorned the
newcomers as un-American when they showed pride in things German” (Fuchs 64). Such
a climate had broad repercussions, even extending to the world of purebred dogs:
“During World War I, the American Kennel Club changed the name of German
shepherds to simply shepherd dogs to ‘save the breed from prejudice.’ They were called
Alsatian wolfdogs in Britain, then shifted to merely Alsatians until the late 1970s”
(Walker). American nativism climaxed in the 1920s and receded in the 1930s; then
ethnicity was again de-emphasized from the 1940s to the early 1960s, when it became a
prominent element of personal and national identity (Gleason, Speaking l55). By the
1970s, “ethnicity truly was in vogue” (Sollors, Beyond 21), starting our culture on the
path to such pluralismfriendly melting pot substitutes as the kaleidoscope (Fuchs), the
salad bowl or the mosaic (Blair 142).
When I first started this project, in the late 1990s, our country seemed to be all about
multiculturalism, globalism, and the dismantling of barriers. The 2000 US Census
counted same-sex partners and offered sixty-three categories of racial identification, up
from six in 1990 (San Mateo). AllAmerican golfing phenomenon Tiger Woods had been
“put[ting] a face—that is reflective of a rich mixture of ethnic heritage—behind the

movement for official recognition of Americans who do not fit neatly into a single racial
category,” identifying himself as “Cablinasian” (San Mateo). Diversity was in.
September 11, 2001 abruptly changed that momentum. Now the bumper stickers
emphasize unity over diversity: “United We Stand.” And again dogs seem to be on the
front line. This time it was the Afghan Hound Club of America contemplating a name
change and keeping a low profile at its annual exhibition: “certainly no [other] dogs have
come under the kind of scrutiny the breed has faced since the terrorist attacks on the
World Trade Center and Pentagon…. [and] such bias led to a brief discussion [about]
whether the breed’s name should be switched to something that would attract less
attention” (Walker). Naming is important—and issues of who does the naming and who
might (mis)interpret the names seem perpetually relevant.
Issues of legibility have also become increasingly important in the current cultural
climate. Soon after September 11, a Sikh man was killed because his vigilante attackers
mistook him for an Arab; in fact, he was an Indian immigrant working for his American
Dream in Phoenix, Arizona (“Thousands”). And yet what exactly does a terrorist look
like? Certainly our country’s intensifying efforts at promoting homeland security have
failed to protect us from the enemy within, homegrown terrorists such as Timothy
McVeigh, Eric Robert Rudolph, and John Allen Muhammed, let alone “the American
Taliban,” John Walker Lindh. Is American identity ideological or performative? Under
what circumstances is it forfeited? Do we need to be more careful about whom we allow
to join the “American race”? Xenophobia and isolationism are unmistakably back in
style. The Patriot Act has placed severe strains on American civil liberties, and
immigrants (legal and otherwise) are being subject to any number of crackdowns.
In the wake of September 11, American writers have tried to make sense of the
tragedy, to use art to impose order and foster healing. Robert Pinsky, for example,
explains that his poem “Memorial” “tries to meditate death’s meaning, its peace, its
painful process, the life of the dead in the imagination of the living. It is an effort at
remembering and at imagining, and an attempt to register how hard those efforts can be”
(qtd. in “Poetry and Tragedy”). Paradoxically, some of this art has engendered additional
controversy and discord. Amiri Baraka’s divisive poem, “Somebody Blew Up America,”
for example, generated strong feelings of outrage (culminating in the elimination of New
Jersey’s poet laureate post) and equally fervent indignation about the perceived dangers
to First Amendment rights and artistic expression. Old tensions between blacks and Jews
were rekindled by the poem, diverting attention from the poem’s larger purpose of
protesting the “racist-patriarchal capitalist system” in America: “The First Amendment, it
seems, only guarantees freedom of speech to those who can afford a station or a press….
The state’s revoking of the poet laureate position is a clear message to other cultural
workers: Get out of line and you will pay the price” (Ytzhak).
Throughout their lives, Cather, Stein, and Larsen all stepped out of line, to varying
degrees, and each paid the price for her aesthetic experimentalism and her American
individualism. The decision to move beyond ready-made identity categories in the pursuit
of art that validates the complexity of life is not an easy one. But it does lay the
groundwork for lasting art. Cather and Stein both accepted and preached the premise that
journalism is not great art because it fails to transcend its original context. Literature, on
the other hand, retains its relevance across time periods and cultural contexts. Rabbinic
tradition comes to a similar conclusion when scrutinizing why, among the many prophets
who were active during the times of Kings of Judah and Israel, only the words of Isaiah,
Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the twelve Minor Prophets were anthologized in the Old
Testament. The answer provided is that only these fifteen books were written down and
passed on because only these prophetic messages have relevance for future generations.
In other words, those anthologized are truly literature. The same, I believe, is true of the
writings of Cather, Stein, and Larsen. In their struggles with literary, personal, and
national identity categories, these writers produced texts that transcend time period,
geography, and cultural climate.
Like the Kennedy assassination for my parents’ generation and the explosion of the
Space Shuttle Challenger for my cohort, September 11 will be the flashbulb memory for
the Millennials. And yet September 11 has changed the world for all Americans. How do
we—as a nation—go on with our lives in the face of such an event? Rabbinic tradition
again offers a suggestion, this time in response to the famous third chapter of Ecclesiastes
which begins, “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the
heaven” (Jerusalem Bible, Ecclesiastes 3.1). This section is read as positing a
fundamental realism. There is no predictable order in the pairings that follow (e.g., good
before bad or bad before good) because life is not predictable. Instead of trying to
pigeonhole the elements of our world into a consistent ordering that makes sense to us,
the text suggests, we are much better off tempering our reactions with realism. Life is not
always fun; the key to weathering the vicissitudes is knowing what to do in each time and
season. And knowing that life works in cycles. The pendulum will come back around.
In the meantime, I will continue to read the great literature that speaks to my spirit.
Great literature, by definition, is literature that can be read time and again, and always
reveal new meanings to its audience. Post-September 11, I will read these texts that deal
with the “the hardest human questions” (Skaggs 64) again, and again get something fresh
out of them—not because the texts have changed, but because I have. Perhaps Stein was
not so far off when she said “think of the Bible and Homer think of Shakespeare and
think of me” (GH 109).
Notes
NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

1. The term “minority” has been applied widely. As Gleason has observed, by the 1970s it
included “homosexuals, youth, the aged, the physically handicapped, the emotionally
disturbed, the poor, drug users, alcoholics, convicts and ex-convicts, and others on the
margins of society” in addition to ethnic or racial groups and women (Speaking 102).
2. The term “matrix of domination” belongs to Patricia Hill Collins, and reflects the fact that
oppressions are multiple and not merely additive. Along similar lines, Maxine Baca Zinn and
Bonnie Thornton Dill argue for “the importance of race in understanding the social
construction of gender” (321).
3. The relationship between women’s writing and feminism is complicated and not always
clearly defined, although Rosalind Coward’s essay, “Are Women’s Novels Feminist
Novels?” provides an early and compelling discussion of the topic. Noting that feminism is a
conscious political movement with definable aims, Coward insists that “it is just not possible
to say that woman-centered writings have any necessary relationship to feminism” (230).
She further denies that “to describe experience typical of women was sufficient to justify
calling that account ‘feminist’” (237). Critics have offered viable feminist readings of
Cather, Stein and Larsen, alike. Whether or not we wish to identify these writers as
“feminists,” their work tackles issues (power relations, gen der roles, naming, marginality,
etc.) central to the concerns of feminism.
4. Although Stein set up a full-time residence abroad, she was kept abreast of activities in
American metropolitan centers by the letters and visits of such well-connected friends as
Carl Van Vechten, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and the Cone sisters.
5. Berlant observes that “every crisis of immigration in U.S. history has involved the claim that
something essentially American is being threatened by alien cultural practices” (Queen 193).
6. Whether or not Larsen traveled to Denmark as a young adult is a matter of debate among her
critics. Wall states that Larsen never really visited Denmark as she had claimed (92), while
Washington accepts the story of Larsen’s studies abroad (161). Davis, Larsen’s biographer,
endorses neither version, but suggests that either one could be correct.
7. Cather, like her contemporary, O.E.Rolvaag, was an outspoken critic of melting pot ideology
(Pers 40).
8. Edith Lewis relates the following anecdote told to her by Cather: “she told once of an old
judge who came to call at Willowshade, and who began stroking her curls and talking to her
in the playful platitudes one addressed to little girls—and of how she horrified her mother by
breaking out suddenly: ‘I’ve a dang’ous nigger, I is!’” (13). O’Brien suggests that “we might
interpret this story as Willa Cather’s first rebellion against patriarchal authority, represented
here by the condescending judge” (EV 43). Wagner-Martin compares Cather and Stein in
terms of gender identity: “Unlike Willa Cather, who called herself ‘William Cather, Jr.,’
during four years of her adolescence, Stein never wore pants or men’s jackets, though she
did don derby hats, ties, and vests later in life” (Favored 24).
9. The phrase comes from Adrienne Rich’s 1986 collection of poetry, which is comprised of the
following three sections: “Sources,” “North American Time,” and “Contradictions: Tracking
Poems.” Common themes include identification, ethnicity, and geography.
Notes 153
10. A variety of critics and theorists call attention to the dual nature of identity formation and
attribution. Writing from a cultural perspective like Sollors, Bottomley points out that
“ethnicities are imposed, as well as assumed and inherited” (60). Berlant discusses the
relationship between identity and essentialism in the context of the debate over gays in the
military (Queen 17).
11. While Sollors discusses turn-of-the-century thinkers such as Randolph Bourne, Josiah
Royce, and Henry Pratt Fairchild in his study of the history of ethnicity in America, Fuchs
calls 1880–1920 “a period of almost continual national debate over the meaning of American
identity and unity” (56–7); Gleason points out that the concept of the melting pot introduced
in Israel Zangwill’s 1908 play gave rise to an ideological debate that continued for decades
(Speaking 5–24).
12. Culley emphasizes that race is usually the most salient axis of identification for women of
color: “black women’s ‘we’ usually has its foundation in race” (15). It is further worth
noting that Stein’s Jewishness did not function for her in the same way that Larsen’s
identification as African-American shaped her social and geographical milieu. Whereas
Larsen lived in Harlem, Stein did not seek out the company of other Jews and often
downplayed her Jewish roots.
13. Gleason observes that “the increasing imprecision of the minority concept resulted largely
from its application to more and more elements in American society” (Speaking 101).
14. Pers explains that Cather “could see the significance of their contributions to the settling of
the American Middle West in a wider perspective and not isolated in specific ethnic groups
unrelated to the world outside” and portray it sympathetically to native-born Americans (48).
In “The Novel Demeuble,” Cather rejects popular definitions of realism, arguing that the
minute details that clutter so-called realistic writing are extraneous and counterproductive.
Instead, Cather suggests that realism can be found in the authors state of mind, particularly
in her ability to be true to her material (NUF 45).
15. Kalaidjian contends that Bourne’s forward-looking vision of social diversity was repressed
by modernist cannon formation, noting that individualism/self-reliance (modernism) is
opposed to collectivism/ the social personality (Bourne) (19). In this way, Bourne becomes a
victim of the very process that kept Cather, Stein and Larsen out of books on modernism for
so many years.
16. A book-length study addressing Cather as a modernist writer did not come out until 1990,
with Jo Ann Middleton’s Willa Cather’s Modernism: A Study of Style and Technique.
Carlin’s 1992 work, Cather, Canon, and the Politics of Reading, looks at why Cather’s later
works have persistently been considered non-canonical.
17. Larsen is not included in lists of high modern writers, perhaps because of her simple writing
style (which has been compared to Cather’s) and because Harlem Renaissance was
considered a category of its own. More recent studies have tried to establish Larsen’s writing
as modernist, including Bonnie Kime Scott’s The Gender of Modernism (1990) and Mary
Hairston McManus’s “African-American Modernism in the Novels of Jessie Fauset and
Nella Larsen,” which calls for a “re-defining of modernism to include greater attention to
race and gender and less emphasis on form” (190).
18. Raymond Williams observes of modernist writers in general that language became a crucial
source of identification: “liberated or breaking free from their national or provincial cultures,
placed in quite new relations to those other native languages or native visual traditions,
encountering meanwhile a novel and dynamic common environment from which many of
the older forms were obviously distant, the artists and writers and thinkers of this phase
found the only community available to them: a community of the medium; of their own
practices” (45).
19. The title of Gillian Hanscombe and Virginia Smyers’s study suggests as much: Writing for
their Lives: the Modernist Women, 1910–1940.
Notes 154
20. Bourne urges acceptance of immigrants who retrace their steps by returning to their
homelands: “Along with dual citizenship we shall have to accept, I think, that free and
mobile passage of the immigrant between America and his native land again which now
arouses so much prejudice among us…. To stigmatize the alien who works in America for a
few years and returns to his own land, only perhaps to seek American fortune again, is to
think in narrow nationalistic terms. It is to ignore the cosmopolitan significance of this
migration” (282).
21. Sollors observes that racial passing is sometimes combined with cross-dressing (Neither
260). Ginsberg contends that gender passing is “usually effected by deliberate alterations of
physical appearance and behavior, including cross-dressing” (3).
22. Davis insists that “there is no indication that Larsen attempted to pass for white” (422).
Marren’s dissertation title asserts that both Larsen and Stein were “passing for American.”
23. Terms like “code” and “mask” abound in discussions of Stein, Cather and Larsen. Kaye
devotes a book-length study to explorations of masking in Cather (Isolation and
Masquerade), while Hively sees Cather’s work “as a fascinating puzzle, with…many hidden
clues” (176), and Lindemann relates queerness and “masking” (“Fear” 31). In reference to
Stein, Fifer argues that The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas shows Stein using “another
entire personality as a mask” (160) while seeing in Useful Knowledge “a sort of secret code”
(160); Ruddick contends that Stein employs “a private code” (M. Hoffman 225); Ammons
goes so far as to suggest that Stein “could only talk in code” (100). Bettye Williams argues
that Larsen’s Helga Crane “masks the essence of herself” (53); McManus sees Larsen’s use
of the mulatta figure as “a mask for the exploration of a female sensibility” (16).
24. Some postmodern and anti-essentialist theory seems to lend itself to this task. For example,
Rattansi proposes that we acknowledge that there are racisms as opposed to a single, unitary
racism (256); Nicholson and Seidman show how queer theory has built on the concept of
fluidity of identity (17); and Balibar urges us to “accept the scattered meaning of the
universal” (49). I do not, however, wish to dispense with the depth model entirely, but rather
to reconsider some of the valuations we have imposed on its layers. Like Dollimore, I resist
the postmodern attempt to see only a surface level as having significance (64).
25. One example is Abraham’s Are Girls Necessary? Lesbian Writing and Modern Histories,
which includes chapters on Woolf, Stein, and Cather.
NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO

1. For a detailed study of the prolonged apprenticeship that preceded Cather’s emergence as a
mature writer, see Sharon O’Brien’s Willa Cather: the Emerging Voice.
2. Georg Simmel spells out several defining features of the “metropolitan type of man” (48),
including intellectualization (48), an orientation towards money (49), “the blase attitude”
(51), “reciprocal reserve and indifference” between acquaintances (55), a high degree of
differentiation and specialization (57), and objectivity (58). Although metropolitan man is
generally cosmopolitan, a cosmopolite does not necessarily have to be a metropolitan man.
3. Even as she writes a book on Cather’s later novels, Skaggs acknowledges that Cather tried a
new experiment with each text (2).
4. An important exception to this trend is Cather’s dedication and generosity in answering
soldiers’ letters during World War II (Brown, Critical Biography 321).
5. On a wry side note, Cather did not want My Antonia taught in high school courses.
6. Although Isabel McClung expressed the fear that cultured east coast readers would
misinterpret (or take offense at) the appellation “hired girls,” Cather refused to change the
term (Moorhead 105). Cather the Midwesterner was in some ways speaking a different
language from her eastern compatriots, and if things got lost in the translation, so be it.
Notes 155
7. Jim’s reliance on the Widow Steavens’s portrayal of a binary moral system anticipates Niel
Herbert’s inability to comprehend the richness and complexity of a Marian Forrester in A
Lost Lady. Other parallels include the fact that Elizabeth Sergeant was not completely sure if
the “sicilian jar” (Sergeant 13) conversation was meant to refer to Antonia or to Marian and
Lee’s observation that Wick Cutter anticipates Ivy Peters (“Road” 167).
8. Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie was published in 1900 but suppressed until 1912, the
year Cather published her first “first novel,” Alexander’s Bridge.
9. Since Cather does not provide any sex scenes, we have no conclusive evidence that Peter and
Pavel engage in homosexual relations; it seems clear, however, that homosocial bonding is a
prominent element in their relationship.
10. Carlin sees palimpsest in Shadows on the Rock, as well (88).
11. Lee agrees that “to read Jim Burden…simply as a mask for lesbian feelings, is a narrowing
exercise” (“Road” 167).
12. Jeff Webb further points out that the adult Jim who narrates the story “is also a modern
immigrant, having left Nebraska to pursue a career in the East as a railroad executive” (229).
13. Carlin notes that Cather has been “viewed as an antimodernist, [and] an embittered elegiast”
(6), while JoAnn Middleton’s Willa Cather’s Modernism fights the uphill battle of
contextualizing Cather as a modernist. More recently, Webb reads Cather’s portrayal of
memory in My Antonia, A Lost Lady, and The Professor’s House as employing modernist
modes. From the perspective of a contemporary, Cather fails as an artist because her work
(and especially her later work) “fall[s] into supine romanticism because of a refusal to
examine life as it is” (Hicks 147).
14. In his attack on the concept of the melting pot, Fairchild suggests, “if we must have a
symbol for race mixture, much more accurate than the figure of the melting pot is the figure
of the village pound” (125).
15. Karen Hoffman discusses the inter-relationship of language and identity in her essay, which
argues that Jim “use[s]…narrative to construct his identity” (27).
16. A similar line-up can be found in the Compson family of Faulkner’s The Sound and the
Fury: a suicide (Quentin), a complaining old woman (Mrs. Compson), a ruthless older
brother (Jason), a sexually charged sister (Caddy), and an idiot (Benjy). Although he does
not identify the Shimerdas as a Family of Man, Scholes does explicate several Adamic
parallels in My Antonia (19).
17. Lindemann reports that “My Antonia was a USA Pictures production, directed by Joseph
Sargent, written for television and produced by Victoria Riskin, 1995” (Queering 144–45, n.
13).
18. Fetterley does actually argue that “Lena represents a model of lesbian sexuality” (Bloom
144). We might also apply Adrienne Rich’s concept of the lesbian continuum, “a range—
through each woman’s life and throughout history—of woman-identified experience, not
simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with
another woman” (“Compulsory” 51), to our understanding of Tiny’s and Lena’s relationship.
19. In arguing that Cather was indeed a lesbian, O’Brien notes that the young Cather mourned
that “feminine friendship should be unnatural” (EV 17).
20. An important exception to this generalization is Lindemann, who includes Marek in her
analysis of queerness in Cather (Queering 47, 64–65).
21. Shaw provides a detailed analysis of Marek’s disorder, focusing on his webbed fingers. He
concludes that in creating Marek, Cather combines the symptoms of two types of syndactyly:
Cenani and Filippi (“Marek” 29–32).
22. The prototype for Yulka Shimerda actually became a nun. Although Cather chose to leave
this event out of her narrative, the parallels between Marek and Yulka are striking. Joining
an order is, in fact, a form of incarceration, albeit one that is chosen rather than forced.
23. The Professor’s House stands out for its complexity and its boldness in formal
experimentation; Death Comes for the Archbishop, Shadows on the Rock, and Sapphira and
Notes 156
the Slave Girl all use a more distant historical and geographical settings than the early
Nebraska novels which made Cather famous.
24. Gleason observes that two million Eastern European Jews arrived in America between 1870
and 1914 (“American” 108), roughly the period between Cather’s birth and the publication
of her third novel. Cantor notes that “the era of high Modernism, which stretches from 1900
to 1940 is also the era of the rise of anti-Semitism in the West” (127), so Cather’s negative
portraits certainly were not created in a vacuum. Cantor also shows how Jewish intellectuals,
who played a key role in the modernist movement, were targeted for criticism by both
modernist and anti-modernist camps (125–29).
25. Pers points out that Jews were not among the prairie farmers that Cather knew as a child (19,
n. 16), and indeed Jews are absent from O Pioneers! and My Antonia. The Nathanmeyers of
Song of the Lark and the Ehrlichs of One of Ours (avatars of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wiener)
are cultivated German Jews who play a positive but minor role in their respective novels. In
Cather’s early stories, which tend to be less autobiographical than her early novels, Jews are
generally portrayed in a superficial, negative and stereotypical fashion. Examples include
Lichtenstein, “a Jewish picture dealer” marked by a “repulsive personality and innate
vulgarity” (53), in “The Marriage of Phaedra” (1905); Miletus Poppas, “the Greek Jew” with
an ugly accent, a “foreign” voice, and a “thin lupine face” (103), in “The Diamond Mine”
(1920); Siegmund Stein, “one of the most hideous men in New York” (162), in “Scandal”
(1920). In “Behind the Singer Tower” (1912), Cather offers “several surprisingly anti-
Semitic remarks” (Woodress, Literary 216).
26. I am positing that Cather’s representations of Jews evolved as she became older and more
world-wise. Li Zhu and Tim Bintrim have made a similar argument for Cather’s treatment of
the Chinese, noting that “no study has treated Cather’s three Chinese stories as a record of
her developing understanding of the Chinese immigrants in America” and calling for a
“reassessment of her Chinese stories” (1, 5).
27. The land is similarly referred to as “the great fact” in Alexandra Bergson’s Nebraska (OP
11).
28. Appelhoff seems like an old school Cather immigrant, and he anticipates Neighbor Rosicky
in his penchant for reflection following a lifetime of hard work: “‘When I was young, in de
old country, I had it hard to git my wife at all, an’ I never had time to t’ink. When I come to
dis country I had to work so terrible hard on dat farm to make crops an’ pay debts, dat I was
like a horse. Now I have it easy, an’ I take time to t’ink about all dem t’ings’” (52). His
horse-like characterization is also reminiscent of Anton Rosicky’s earlier avatar, Anton
Cuzak.
29. Joseph Wood Krutch comments that “in spite of many fine touches [The Professor’s House]
does not live up to the promise of the earlier pages. Fragmentary and inconclusive, it starts
off in several different directions but never quite arrives at any of the proposed destinations.”
He faults the inclusion of “Tom Outland’s Story” for disrupting the rhythm and integrity of
the book, as he continues, “the initial mistake was, I think, the elaboration of the character
whose story constitutes the second of the three parts into which the novel is divided” (56).
30. Tom does a better job of presenting information without interpretation than St. Peter does,
but Skaggs cautions against taking him at face value either: “a brightest and best young
American, Outland seems initially as delightful and as universally adored in his thoroughly
masculine way as Marian Forrester was in her feminine. One would be foolish, however, to
assume in this increasingly troubled period that Cather would present Tom Outland any less
ambivalently than she did Marian Forrester” (66).
31. Karen Hoffman similarly reads My Antonia as a study of “identity crossings” and as a
“questioning of fixed gender identities” (27).
32. In further corroboration for viewing Louie as one of Cather’s mulatto figures, Berlant points
out “the analogy between the passing mulatta and the assimilated Jew” (Queen 224).
Notes 157
33. All of these examples of the Professor’s closetedness draw on the OED definitions of
“closet” that Sedgwick provides (65).
34. We might thus conclude that the Professor’s passing takes place on at least two levels:
sexual and existential. Trapped with a wife and two daughters, the Professor fantasizes about
a homosocial universe, “this dream of self-sacrificing friendship and disinterested
love…among the day-labourers, the men who run the railroad trains and boats and reapers
and thrashers and mine-drills of the world” (172); in a materialistic society, the Professor
privileges the struggle above the goal but must pretend to enjoy the rewards of his labors.
35. Henry Colbert (Sapphira and the Slave Girl) serves as another example in Cather’s oeuvre
of a man who marries up.
36. In observing the parallels between Cather and St. Peter, Skaggs cautions that Cather “does
not suggest, because [she and St. Peter] are similar, that he should therefore be assumed
virtuous” (76).
37. Brown reminds us that Cather was confirmed as an Episcopalian on December 27, 1922
(Critical Biography 227), and contends that “not by any answers it proposes, but by the
problems it elaborates, and by the atmosphere in which they are enveloped, The Professor’s
House is a religious novel” (Critical Biography 246).
38. Carlin notes that cross-stitch acts as a metaphor for relationships and for fate (92).
39. Stouck’s study was written over twenty-five years ago, but it is still widely quoted and
referenced. Stouck first argued his point about the departure represented by Cather’s last
books in a 1973 article, “Willa Cather’s Last Four Books.” This essay was expanded in Willa
Cather’s Imagination (1975) and reprinted in Critical Essays on Willa Cather (1984). The
idea that Cather’s early works are qualitatively different from her later texts is the premise
on which both Carlin’s and Skaggs’s book-length studies are based (1992, 1990).
40. In “The Diamond Mine,” the Jewish Miletus Poppas is described as having “an
indescribably foreign quality in his voice” (103). Further, he has a “lupine” face, along with
a “cold, supercilious manner…[and] alarming, deep-set eyes,—very close together…and
always gleaming with something like defeated fury” (103–4). It is interesting that Mrs.
Rosen’s accent is treated much more sympathetically than Poppas’s, while no mention is
made of either of the Rosen’s noses.
41. As a group, German Jews came to America first, assimilated and succeeded. When their
less-educated Russian counterparts arrived and isolated themselves in ghettos, these German
Jews tried to distance or distinguish themselves from what they perceived as an
embarrassing connection. The stereotype which characterizes Eastern European Jews as
backward was a prevalent one during the periods of peak Jewish immigration. Further, as
Pers points out, Cather offers particularly positive portrayals of German Jews: “as a group,
Cather’s Germans are no doubt more sympathetic than her Scandinavians, and her German
Jews in particular are more prominent culturally” (80).
42. Ham and his descendants are subjected to a curse because of the lack of respect Ham shows
his father, Noah, by gazing on him drunk and naked (Jerusalem Bible, Genesis 9.21–26).
Rashi, a rabbinic commentator, explains that Moses demurs from being chosen as the leader
of the Jewish people (Jerusalem Bible, Exodus 4.10) because he believes that it would be an
affront to his older brother, Aaron (Ben Isaiah and Sharfman 31).
43. Skaggs notes Cather’s use of the courtly love tradition in other works as well (195, n. 2).
44. Cather lived for several Nebraskan months with her paternal grandfather, a Baptist minister,
so it is reasonable to suppose that she would have been familiar with this Scriptural
reference.
45. Whether this myth was popular in Cather’s lifetime is questionable. It is true, however, that
most of the two million Jews who entered the United States between 1870 and 1914
(Gleason, “American” 108) would have come through New York. Furthermore, Cather
would have encountered more Jews in her years living in Eastern cities (Pittsburgh and then
Notes 158
New York) than she did in Nebraska. In her fiction, Cather seems to connect Jewish
cosmopolitans with metropolitan centers.
46. Mrs. Rosen’s act of “disavowing difference…by reduc[ing] the boys to a single name and a
single identity” (Carlin 97) echoes the attempts of Grandmother Burden and Lillian St. Peter
to gloss over annoying or painful parts of life.
47. The narrator describes Fair Welcome as “a handsome and pleasant and quite irreproachable
young man” (ll. 2763–4) and informs us that he is “the son of generous Courtesy” (ll. 2765–
66).
48. Taking Bottomley’s definition of ethnicity as “‘a consciousness of kind’… constructed and
reconstituted in relation to specific political and economic circumstances” (57) along with
Fuchs’s insistence that ethnicity implies ancestral traditions (177), we can argue that the
Templetons are southern in all of these ethnic ways.
NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

1. In Everybody’s Autobiography, Stein further observes that newspapers are “dull reading
because they repeat every day the news of that day and they have to print it as if it were just
happening and it always had happened some time ago at least some hours ago and after all a
thing is interesting that you see happening or that has happened long enough back so that it
has an existence which is romanticism it having happened so long ago that though it is there
it is really not happening here” (271).
2. See chapter one, note 14.
3. On a similar note, K.Hoffman argues that the character of Jim Burden in My Antonia
constitutes “Cather’s implicit commentary on the autobiographical act” (28), further
suggesting that “through the act of narrating the manuscript […] Jim is able to shift
continually among different positions” and “enact[…] identity crossings” (31). Thus
Hoffman sees a redefining of the genre of autobiography in Cather, as well.
4. This microcosmic aspect of the story marks it as particularly modernist, according to the
characteristics enumerated by Cantor (36).
5. DeKoven observes that while Jeff can be read as a surrogate for Stein, the story is
Melanctha’s (Rich 82).
6. Sutherland comments that “the equal insistence on the integrity of each component part [in
Three Lives] is a very important twentieth century thing, obviously in politics, but even more
evidently in the arts” (Haas 144).
7. Between the fact that Stein was able to see how people like Melanctha lived firsthand in her
medical rotations and the fact that Stein herself juggled wandering and stability, emotion and
intellect, we can see Stein as occupying the position of an insider-outsider (as defined by
Gambrell). I do not think Stein’s goal was in self-nativising for sociological documentation,
though, so it does not seem fruitful to push this point too far.
8. Wald (241–42) and Ammons (101, 103) take this critical view. Laura Doyle, on the other
hand, argues that the racist descriptions “are calculated to offend” (263) and insists that
“there is clearly more going on than using black characters to signify transgressive
sexuality” (268).
9. Cutter argues that Helga “attempts to use ‘passing’ as a way of finding a unitary sense of
identity—a sense of identity structured around one role, a role that somehow corresponds to
her ‘essential self.’ Although Helga Crane passes for many things (an exotic Other, a
committed teacher, an art object, a devout Christian, a proponent of racial uplift, a dutiful
mother) she is only, at any given point in her career, one of these things” (75).
Notes 159
10. Like Ginsberg, Helvie points to the experience of Brandon Teena as an example of
“society’s violent backlash against those whom it deems ‘deviant’” (35) and therefore
threatening.
11. Washington points out that the word “passing” can “connote death” (164).
12. As a written legend, the history of the Wandering Jew begins around 1223, in an account
telling “of a Jew encountered by pilgrims in Armenia, who had taunted Jesus as he was
going to his martyrdom and was told ‘I go, and you will await me until I come again’”
(Stableford 3). Versions of the story proliferated with the invention of the printing press, and
tales flourished throughout Europe, reaching a particularly notable height during the
Romantic period (Stableford 4–17, 8). At various times “the Wandering Jew stands as a
symbol for the entire Jewish people,” “represents the historical misfortune of working men,”
epitomizes “the doomed wanderer,” and is portrayed “as an entirely enviable figure”
(Stableford 11, 14, 20, 21). The legend of the Wandering Jew was alive and well during
Stein’s literary time period and amongst her fellow writers, as Guillaume Apollinaire’s “Le
juif errant” (1910) suggests (Stableford 16).
13. For further information on this phenomenon, see Raymond Williams’s chapter,
“Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism” (37–48).
14. Rachel Blau DuPlessis identifies “the alternate endings in marriage and death […as a]
cultural legacy from nineteenth-century life and letters” (4). Although Melanctha fails to
marry and instead dies, we might argue that Stein is already on her way to “offering a
different set of choices” (4), a task that DuPlessis connects with twentieth-century women
writers of the bildungsroman.
15. DeKoven does qualify this assessment by referring to the text as “ostensibly naturalist”
(Rich 71), and again by noting that Melanctha’s wandering “disrupts [the text’s] ostensible
naturalism” (Rich 81).
16. Brown recalls that Cather “always showed impatience at the complaint that My Antonia is
not precisely a novel. Why should it be?” (Critical Biography 199).
17. Rhoda Unger and Mary Crawford describe this phenomenon in their discussion of gender
and cognitive developmental theory: “The son’s identification with his father […] progresses
from identifying with a stereotyped masculine role to identifying with his father’s own
personification of that role. Feminine identification involves first identifying with a
generalized female role, and then with the mother as an example of that role” (45).
Chodorow summarizes the “role-training argument” of women’s mothering as follows:
“Girls [….] ‘identify’ with their own mothers as they grow up, and this identification
produces the girl as a mother” (30–31). She further points out that “girls in contemporary
society develop a personal identification with their mother […]. By contrast, boys develop a
positional identification with aspects of the masculine role” (175).
18. According to Chodorow, “a girl’s father provides a last ditch escape from maternal
omnipotence, so a girl cannot risk driving him away” (195). In this light, James Herbert’s
irregular appearances in Melanctha’s life are significant because he provides her with a
model for breaking away from her mother (and therefore from the gender roles which female
children reproduce).
19. Gail Bederman observes that the turn of the century saw an important ideological shift, one
which links gender and race in much the same way that Stein does in “Melanctha”: “as the
middle class worked to remake manhood, many turned from gender to a related category—
one which, like gender, also linked bodies, identities, and power. That category was race”
(20).
20. Chodorow points out that “psychological and relational capacities for mothering” are
socially transmitted from mothers to daughters. She further remarks that “the reproduction of
women’s mothering is the basis for the reproduction of women’s location and
responsibilities in the domestic sphere” (208).
Notes 160
21. Sollors has similarly observed that “adopted ancestors are elective affinities who may help
revolutionaries overcome their physical parents; instead of continuously acting merely as
rebellious children, they may play the part of pious heirs” (Beyond 227).
22. The female bildungsroman generally requires a dead mother (or at the very least, an
ineffectual one) as a catalyst for the heroine’s coming of age.
23. Cf. the statement which Jim Burden makes to Antonia before separating from her for twenty
years: “‘Do you know, Antonia, since I’ve been away, I think of you more often than of
anyone else in this part of the world. I’d have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife,
or my mother or my sister—anything that a woman can be to a man’” (206). Scholars have
found this avowal problematic.
24. DuCille explains that critical standards facing Harlem Renaissance writers like Nella Larsen
and Jessie Fauset, for example, insisted that “authentic blacks are southern, rural, and
sexually uninhibited” (198). Hence “black women novelists […] whose settings are the
urban North and whose subjects are middle-class black women are not only dismissed in the
name of the vernacular; they are condemned […] for ‘historical conservativism’” (195).
25. Benstock observes that Stein came to the conclusion that love was not monolithic as she
explored her own sexual orientation: “To acknowledge a preference for women not only
involved Stein in a renunciation of her previous beliefs, but urged her toward acceptance of
various ways of loving. There was no one way that was ‘right’ and all others ‘wrong’” (163).
26. Benstock points out that Adele in Q.E.D. “is described as ‘queer’ (perhaps original,
interesting), accepted by her wealthy, indulged friends because she is different from them”
(150). Given that Jeff is a conformist and a protoproponent of racial uplift, it seems more
likely that Stein uses “queer” here to invoke a gay sensibility. Lindemann notes that “during
th[e] period [between 1890 and the 1920s], ‘queer’ became a way of marking the differences
between the still emerging categories of ‘homosexuality and ‘heterosexuality,’” further
pointing out that early 20th century “queers” were “devoted to middle-class values of
‘privacy, self-restraint, and lack of self-disclosure’” (Queering 2–3).
27. Other similarities include the ironic distance between the mature female author and a young
male character who in some ways seems to represent her view.
28. Burch observes the preponderance of “strong female characters” present in ethnic novels,
“often called ‘hired girls’” (58). The “hired girls” of My Antonia are domestic servants,
upwardly-mobile European farm girls who come to town to earn money for their families;
Cather was well aware that the term could also suggest prostitutes, but chose not to change
it. Abraham also ad-dresses the multiple meanings of the term “girls,” pointing out that it has
historically had class and racial overtones (xi-xii).
29. Stein herself had been exposed to such relationships in which one party serves and the other
accepts servitude as her due. Indeed, she would eventually experience both sides firsthand,
as Benstock observes, “although Alice began to tirelessly wait on Gertrude in the same ways
that Etta [Cone] waited on [her sister] Claribel […] the relationship between the Cone sisters
already mirrored aspects of the relationship between Gertrude and Leo. Claribel, like Leo,
was not attentive to Etta’s need to be heard” (167).
30. In my initial discussion of the three lives within “Melanctha,” I suggested that Rose Johnson
is the third protagonist of the story. Nevertheless, since Jeff and Rose never meet—let alone
have a love relationship—I think my interrogation of the love triangle concept stands on
solid ground.
31. Reflecting on Stein’s work as a whole, William Carlos Williams observes: “she has placed
writing on a plane where it may deal unhampered with its own affairs, unburdened with
scientific and philosophic lumber” (56).
32. DeKoven underscores the prevalence of naturalism, fatalism, and understatement in
“Melanctha” (Rich 68).
33. In Everybody’s Autobiography, Stein recalls the influence Eliot had on her early work: “I
read a poem of George Eliot when I was very young I cannot often remember poetry but I
Notes 161
can remember that” (119); “I wrote a little story [… ] when I was at Radcliffe and being still
under the influence of George Eliot I called it the Red Deeps” (157).
34. Blackmer, among others, argues that in “Melanctha,” Stein “break[s] the deadlock she
reached in Q.E.D.” (15).
35. This notion that Stein’s approachable narrative texts of the 1930s and 1940s are somehow
less artistically valuable than her difficult, avant-garde texts has persisted in Stein criticism.
Writing in 1995, Marren still feels the need to counter such assumptions, as she asserts that
“such sweeping dismissals of Stein’s less alienating work […] gloss over its considerable
complexity” (150).
36. Chessman avers that The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas, like any autobiography,
“compels us to wonder, from the beginning, about the nature of the ‘auto,’ the self” (62).
37. Stein later notes in Everybody’s Autobiography that, “it was funny about The Autobiography
of Alice B.Toklas, writers well I suppose it is because writers write but anyway writers did
not really mind anything one said about them, they might have minded something or liked
something but since writing is writing and writers know that writing is writing they do not
really suffer very much about anything that has been written” (32). Stein knows that writing
cannot be truly mimetic, and she appreciates those of her fellow writers who do not hold her
to misplaced standards.
38. By using the term “female-oriented” to describe Stein’s text, I do not mean to suggest that
she wrote for women or that her text is a “women’s novel.” To me, “female-oriented”
describes the use of cyclical (as opposed to linear) patterns and the inclusion of significant
female figures (as opposed to Crusoe’s male-only universe).
39. Stein’s and Toklas’s war stories are of a certain type, however. Marren notes the absence of
details about the wounded (177).
40. Dollimore argues that “‘I want to be in your place’ collapses temporarily into ‘I want you’;
identification merges with desire, which is then a desire to be/displace the male as other”
(267). Thinking about these issues in Larsen’s Passing, Berlant muses, “I wonder whether
Irene’s xenophilia isn’t indeed a desire to occupy, to experience the privileges of Clare’s
body, not to love or make love to her, but rather to wear her way of wearing her body, like a
prosthesis, or a fetish?” (“National” 111). It would seem that Stein adopts Alice as an
adaptive prosthesis. Further, Fuss utilizes Lacanian theory to suggest that “desire for the
Other often manifests itself as desire to speak as Other, from the place of the Other (some
would even say, instead of the Other)” (12). Thus we might argue that Stein’s speaking as
Alice is in fact a sublimation of her desire to possess Alice and/or to write openly about their
love.
41. Wagner-Martin suggests that “much of the recognized machismo in Paris’s expatriate
culture might also have been a disguised anti-Semitism” (Favored 185).
42. Stein’s brother Leo could be one example of such, according to Gass, who notes that after
Alice’s arrival in Paris, “Leo at last left to fulfill his promise as a failure, taking the Matisses
and the Renoirs with him, and allowing his sister finally her leeway, her chance to define
herself” (20).
43. Although the notion that a “Negro […] cannot change” (206) represents a fixed
conceptualization of identity, Stein offers a more fluid alternative elsewhere. Indeed, Stein
seems to endorse the logic by which Cather’s Godfrey St. Peter is thought by some to be a
Spaniard. Speaking of an old friend, Stein reflects, “[Harold] Acton is now a Chinaman, he
has been teaching in China a long time and I imagine he really does now really look and feel
like a Chinaman some people can and do and he will and does and can” (232).
44. Variations on this motif include the following: “this makes propaganda and politics and
religion” (47); “communism individualism propaganda politics and women” (77–78);
“politics and geography and government and propaganda” (88); “communism and
individualism and propaganda” (123); “politics and religion and propaganda and
Notes 162
communism and individualism” (124); “propaganda and money and individualism and
collectivism” (131).
45. Poirier sees Stein as writing within the tradition of Whitman. He points out that both made
“claims to multiple identity” (28), and specifically compares Song of Myself to The
Geographical History of America, noting that “divisions already overelaborated by Whitman
are elaborated still further [by Stein]” (28).
46. M.H.Abrams offers the following definition: “a narrative is a story, whether in prose or
verse, involving events, characters, and what the characters say and do” (123). Whether The
Geographical History of America includes “events,” whether its personas are “characters,”
and whether anyone “does” anything is open to interpretation.
47. These kind of comparisons are also typical of ethnic literature, as Dearborn observes:
“Stein’s attempt to define the nature of the writer’s relationship to language, human
experience, and the American identity by writing about and around American heroes places
her squarely in the American ethnic tradition […]” (174).
48. The prototype for the “little dog” is eventually unveiled as “Basket a story” (198).
49. Issues of legibility are a hallmark of ethnic writing as well, as Bottomley asserts: “one of the
problems [in ethnic literature] is whether and how such messages can be heard, seen and
understood by reader” (64).
NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

1. Dodge was a friend of Cather’s, as well. Woodress speculates that Cather “may have attended
Mabel Dodge’s famous salon on occasion, as everyone in Greenwich village seems to have
gone there, but her friendship with Dodge came after she married Tony Luhan [1923] and
was living in New Mexico” (Literary Life 236).
2. Speaking through Thea Kronberg’s music instructor, Cather insists: “every artist makes
himself born” (SL 153). Benstock similarly observes of Stein that “she wanted to create
herself and the new century through her writing” (192), while Larsen “envisioned herself as
a novelist” (Davis 282) and tried to arrange her life and history to fit that role. All three
writers yearned towards self creation. First of all, both Cather and Larsen pushed forward the
year of their birth. Secondly, all three named themselves: Cather called herself “Willie” and
“William Cather, M.D.”; Stein was both “Baby” and “Lovey”; Larsen went by many
different names in her lifetime (Nellie Walker, Nellie Larson, Nellye Larson, Nella Larsen,
Nella Larsen Imes, Nella Imes). Finally all three re-wrote history in their own terms: Cather
decided she was named for her confederate soldier uncle as opposed to her aunt who died
young; Stein’s “autobiographies” are a far cry from non-fiction; and Larsen’s dust jacket
blurb for Knopf contains questionable and largely unverifiable information.
3. Also like Cather, Larsen would look back at her early stories and pronounce them “hack
writing” (Larson xiii).
4. Culley speaks to this issue when she writes, “Black autobiography, and by extension ethnic
autobiography, while it may do other things as well, including contesting the sign WOMAN,
exhibit—even in its very being—black people in contestation with the content of the
dominant cultures sign ‘BLACK’” (9). Larsen’s work, like Cather’s and Stein’s, is
considered highly autobiographical.
5. Allan has pointed out that Larsen was particularly fluent in the work of her contemporary
moderns (99). It is also clear that Larsen read William James and Sigmund Freud (Davis
311, 310).
6. These novels include A Lost Lady (1923), The Professor’s House (1925), My Mortal Enemy
(1926), and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927).
Notes 163
7. What Nicholson and Seidman observe of Appiah’s mixed lines of descent could also be said,
with only minor modifications, of Larsen: “as the son of an African father and a European
mother, and as someone who grew up in both Ghana and Britain and who now lives in the
United States, Appiah was personally troubled by the way individual and national identity
has been framed by the African/European binary […which] leaves no ‘home’ or coherent
cultural space for Appiah’s own experience” (14).
8. Wall comments that Larsen “scorned purpose novels and mocked the sometimes sententious
rhetoric of racial uplift” (117).
9. The Harlemites about and for whom Larsen would eventually write were also the potential
customers for a bookshop Larsen contemplated opening. White suggested that the clientele
would initially “be interested in keeping abreast of books by and about Negroes,” adding that
“in time you could get them […] to buy books by Willa Cather […]” (qtd. in Davis 217).
10. McLendon contends that geographical movement in Quicksand foregrounds “a recurring
pattern of enclosure and escape” (154). Yohe concludes that “Helga’s five journeys […]
leave her trapped” (55). I would add that a sixth journey, Chicago to Naxos, is implied and
significant, even though we do not hear it narrated in the text.
11. Urgo additionally relates geographical crossing to cultural cross-fertilization (62).
12. The epigraph reads, “My old man died in a fine big house./My ma died in a shack./I wonder
where I’m gonna die,/Being neither white nor black?”
13. Cutter offers the following list: “an exotic Other, a committed teacher, an art object, a
devout Christian, a proponent of racial uplift, a dutiful mother” (75).
14. Helga’s restlessness and inability to remain satisfied with any given situation for an
extended period of time find an analog in a version of the legend of the Wandering Jew.
Stableford notes that “the Wandering Jew most frequently figures in German representations
as the most perfect possible embodiment of the weltschmerz (world-weariness) in which
Goethe’s Werther had taught a whole generation to revel” (10).
15. Helga’s growing impatience with Naxos links her to Melanctha Herbert, who seems to go
through a pattern of waxing interest for the first year of a relationship, followed by waning
interest for the second.
16. Ironically, so is Larsen. Although Larsen mocks the Naxos paradigm, she is not as much of
an iconoclast as she might have hoped, as Davis explains: “an assimilationist and a social
climber, Larsen took more pride in her inclusion in interracial gatherings than she did in all-
black affairs” (232).
17. Davis observes that “Larsen frequently associated with a literary and theater crowd that
included lesbians, homosexuals, and bisexuals who were open in their sexual preferences”
(325).
18. Cather needed to make money at her art. Indeed, her perception of Houghton Mifflin as not
advertising her books aggressively enough was one factor in her decision to switch to Knopf
(E.Lewis 108). Lilienfeld further notes that Cather wanted fame in the artistic world, but did
not disdain a money-paying audience (50). In The Professor’s House, however, Cather
explores some of the negative ramifications of financial success. Stein had a small inherited
income, but was by no means wealthy. She did not make money from her writing until the
publication of The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas, and she ponders the effect of money on
her art at length in Everybody’s Autobiography.
19. Larsen definitely knew her Conrad. Davis also suggests that “Larsen depended […] on the
modernist concept of the unreliable observer as represented by Joseph Conrad in Heart of
Darkness” (311).
20. McDowell applies this notion even more broadly, as she observes that “the structure of the
novel is a vertical line downward” (xxii).
21. While Helga retrospectively rues the novice teachers’ impulse of “doing good to their fellow
men” (5), she uses almost exactly the same words to describe her initial approach to the
“children” of her husband’s church.
Notes 164
22. Jacobs’s narrator keeps the welfare of her children foremost in her mind: “I had a woman’s
pride, and a mother’s love for my children; and I resolved that out of the darkness of this
hour a brighter dawn should rise for them” (130). Male-authored slave narratives generally
emphasize a solitary hero who escapes from slavery and regains his manhood (the classic
example being Frederick Douglass) whereas female-authored narratives emphasize
interconnectedness and family ties.
23. Clemmen, on the other hand, sees Quicksand as a text in diametrical opposition to the
bildungsroman, and he insists that “instead of a bildungsroman that feeds on experience, we
have…a narrative that feeds on difference” (460).
24. The phrase belongs to Rachel Blau DuPlessis. See note 14 in chapter three.
25. Cutter disagrees, arguing that Helga “attempts to use ‘passing’ as a way of finding a unitary
sense of identity—a sense of identity structured around one role, a role that somehow
corresponds to her ‘essential self’” (75).
26. Wall notes that in both of Larsen’s novels, tragic mulattos discover “the impossibility of
self-definition” (89). Carby comments that “her particular use of the figure of the mulatto
allowed Larsen to negotiate issues of race as they were articulated by both white and black”
(173). Both Washington and Berzon address the mulatto figure in their titles: “The Mulatta
Trap” and Neither White Nor Black. Yohe argues that Clare is not tragic or pitiful like
typical mulatto (71), while McManus sees Larsen’s use of the mulatta figure as “a mask for
the exploration of a female sensibility” (16).
27. Hall’s novel was published the same year as Quicksand, and so I am not suggesting
influence so much as confluence.
28. The legend of the Wandering Jew also seems to have its roots in the Biblical narrative of
Cain’s exile (Stableford 1). Furthermore, in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, the Wandering Jew
bears a Cain-like mark, an “image of a burning cross […] emblazoned on his forehead”
(Stableford 11).
29. Lowe similarly observes that “the American nation is founded on myths of mobility that
disavow the histories of both the immobility of ghettoization and the forced dislocations of
Asian Americans” (82).
30. The epigraph reads, “One three centuries removed/From the scenes his fathers loved,/Spicy
grove, cinnamon tree,/What is Africa to me?”
31. From this opening scene, Davis concludes, “the relationship between the concealed and the
revealed, announced by Clare’s letter to Irene […] is more complex because the central
consciousness, though not rendered by means of a first-person narrator, is unreliable” (324).
The use of an unreliable, non-first-person narrator links Larsen to Cather, who employed a
similar narrative strategy with Niel Herbert (A Lost Lady) and Godfrey St. Peter (The
Professor’s House).
32. In the realm of sexual orientation, “gay-dar,” the notion that lesbians and gays possess an
enigmatic and automatic ability to recognize fellow homosexuals on sight (whereas
heterosexuals presumably cannot), works on the same principle. This is similarly embodied
in the adage, “it takes one to know one.”
33. Cf. Helga’s entering Anne Grey’s house under questionable pretenses, being accepted
warmly, and “feel[ing] like a criminal” (42).
34. In this way, Clare is figured like Stein’s Melanctha Herbert, who is mysterious and who
wanders like her mother before her (TL 50, 52).
35. See Sollors Neither Black Nor White Yet Both 248–50 for a thorough elaboration of the
double standard.
36. An earlier example is when Helga complains that the Danes look at her, “‘as if I had horns’”
(70). Gilroy notes that Martin Delany “looks immediately to the Jewish experiences of
dispersal as a model for comprehending the history of black Americans” (23). Gilroy also
points out that the diaspora concept provides link between Jews and blacks and has
ramifications for “the status of ethnic identity, the power of cultural nationalism, and the
Notes 165
manner in which carefully preserved social histories of ethnocidal suffering can function to
supply ethical and political legitimacy” (207).
37. Several critics raise the possibility that Brian is a homosexual. McDowell reminds the reader
that he and Irene have a “sexless marriage” (xxiii), while Blackmer characterizes Brian as
“covertly homosexual” (18).
38. Cf. Helga’s husband, the Reverend Mr. Pleasant Green, who “consumed his food, even the
softest varieties […] audibly” (Q 121).
39. Reflecting on the same topic, Fuss offers the following rhetorical questions: “if ‘race’ is not
a biological feature, then what kind of attribute or category is it: psychological, historical,
anthropological, sociological, legal […]? Is race a matter of birth? of culture? both? neither?
What, exactly, are the criteria for racial identity?” (73–4).
40. Young adapts Sartre’s concept of seriality as a means of talking about “woman” as a
category without resorting to essentialism (188).
41. The term “practico-inert” comes from Sartre by way of Jameson.
42. If Irene is like Jeff Campbell and Clare is like Melanctha, then Brian is like Stein herself.
Brian is consigned to the life that Stein felt fortunate to be freed from at the eleventh hour:
“‘Lord! How I hate sick people, and their stupid, meddling families, and smelly, dirty rooms,
and climbing filthy steps in dark hallways’” (P 186).
43. Sollors makes the following observation: “because the novel’s attention is focused on two
women, the eroticized gaze that is conventional when maleimagined narrators describe
mixed-race women […] here is directed from a female center of consciousness toward the
mysterious woman who passes permanently, and the (otherwise conventional) description
therefore calls attention to itself” (Neither 276). DuCille sees Passing as asking crucial
questions about the power politics of the gaze: “who owns the gaze? is the gaze inherently
masculine or essentially sexual? what happens when women gaze upon each other? is the
very act of gazing upon the female body an appropriation of the masculine and an invocation
of the erotic? is there a grammar of the female gaze?” (213).
44. See note 37.
45. See chapter three, note 11.
46. Marren adapts Peter Rabinowitz’s concept of social versus rhetorical passing to Larsen’s
novel, arguing that Irene performs social (“to mislead people into thinking you are
something that you are not”), while Clare performs rhetorical (“flaunting your disguise in a
context in which you know that it will fool only some people”) (114).
47. McCoy and others have read Hugh Wentworth as a thinly-disguised representation of Carl
Van Vechten (83).
48. Larsen’s name was changed when she was a child, and she changed it many times
subsequently (see Davis 25, 60, 173, 443).
49. Cf. Antonia’s comment to Jim: “‘If I live here, like you, that is different. Things will be easy
for you. But they will be hard for us’” (MA 90).
50. The latter term belongs to Georg Simmel; see chapter two, note 2. Speaking of Larsen
herself, Davis comments that she “bore the imprint […] of transformations of identity,
possible given the fluidity of western and immigrant lives in an expanding city” (4).
51. Cf. Edna’s declaration, “‘I would give up the unessential; I would give money, I would give
my life for my children; but I wouldn’t give myself’” (Chopin 48). Larsen’s engagement
with Chopin is quite clear. In both Quicksand and Passing, Larsen explores the tension
between a mother’s duty to her children and her quest to achieve self-actualization.
Furthermore, Chopin and Larsen share in the attempt to represent an independent, sexual
woman. Such a subject position cannot be successfully maintained for any length of time by
Edna, Helga, or Clare.
52. McCoy deems Passing “the emblematic tale of Irene Redfield’s colonization of Clare
Kendry” (71), suggesting that we might read Clare as being as much in bondage to Irene as
Notes 166
to her husband and “master,” John Bellew, in addition to being oppressed by the ideologies
or social positions that Irene and Bellew represent.
53. Cather’s later novels have finally received critical attention and acclaim within the last ten
years, serving as the subject of book-length studies and the focus of academic conferences.
NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE

1. In “My First Novels [There Were Two],” Cather deems Alexander’s Bridge “a studio
picture…made out of ‘interesting material’” and ssesses that “the impressions…were
genuine, but they were very shallow.” When she wrote O Pioneers!, on the other hand,
Cather found her authentic voice and her proper subject and setting: “Here there was no
arranging or ‘inventing’; everything was spontaneous and took its own place, right or wrong.
This was like taking a ride through a familiar country on a horse that knew the way, on a fine
morning when you felt like riding” (OW 91–93).
2. Pers goes so far as to suggest that Cather’s phraseology shows that remembered turns of
speech “came back as sound rather than in writing” (43).
3. Davis comments that during the 1930s, Larsen’s “eccentricities were manifested in a fear of
new places, an obsession with wearing a hat at all times, a reliance on medication, a delusion
about her whiteness, and a fantasy of her youth in a loving family” (16).
4. Skaggs argues that St. Peter is Cather’s mouthpiece in this instance, expressing Cather’s
thoughts in his statement (11).
5. Anderson defines a nation as “an imagined political community[,]…imagined as both
inherently limited and sovereign.” He elaborates that “imagined” refers to the fact that an
image of unity or bondedness exists independent of physical meeting. “Limited”
acknowledges that nations have boundaries, while “sovereign” suggests autonomy and
freedom. Finally, “community” reflects the ideal of “a deep, horizontal comradeship” (6–7).
6. Fetterley and Pryse observe that “for Cather, the story of Vickie’s move outside the home,
beyond female community, and into the larger male-dominated world of the university
represents the road of development for women of her generation” (596).
7. Bourne offers a similar proposal: “In a world which has dreamed of internationalism, we find
that we have all unawares been building up the first international nation…. What we have
achieved has been rather a cosmopolitan federation of national colonies, of foreign cultures,
from which the sting of devastating competition has been removed” (276).
8. Marren suggests that “expatriation offers Stein the same opportunity to recreate herself as the
exemplary citizen of an idealized ‘imagined community’” (182).
9. Critics both perpetuate (Carlin 175; Swift 107–120) and react against (Lee, “Bridge” 40) the
idea that Cather’s work is nostalgic or sentimental. DeKoven classifies Stein’s texts as
“avant-garde,” a category which includes the incoherent (68, 24). DuCille notes that Larsen
(and Fauset) were dismissed by many critics for what appeared to be “historical
conservativism” in their works (195). Stein came under the most criticism for “lying” by
writing Alice’s autobiography, but Stimpson points out that the same could be said for just
about any text: “The Autobiography does lie. What packaging does not?” (“Lie” 153–54).
10. Warren French compares Cather’s writing to Cezanne’s work (241–42), while Cather
acknowledges Flaubert’s influence in “A Chance Meeting” (NUF 3–42).
11. Bennett states that in Cather’s case changing her birth year was symptomatic of “fury—and
a resentment that time, her greatest enemy, could effect such changes” as her father’s death
(28–29). Davis sees Larsen’s appropriation of an 1893 birth date as a sign that Larsen
wanted to align herself with progress, modernity, and the booming American metropolis, as
symbolized by the Chicago World’s Fair (4).
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Ytzhak. “POV: Amiri Baraka: Whose Free Speech?” Indymedia.org 7 July 2003 14 December
2003 . <http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2003/07/273925.%20html>.
Zabel, Morton D. “Willa Cather: the Tone of Time.” Schroeter 216–27.
Zhu, Li and Tim Bintrim. “The Chinese Connection: Cather and Pittsburgh’s Chinatown.” Willa
Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsletter and Review. 42.1 (Summer 1998): 1–5.
Zinn, Maxine Baca and Bonnie Thornton Dill. “Theorizing Difference From Multiracial
Feminism.” Feminist Studies 22.2 (1996):321–331.
Index
A
Abraham, Julie, 20, 56, 104
Abrams, Jim, 179
Abrams, M.H., 106
Afghan dogs, 189, 190
African-Americans, 7, 8, 9, 180
Nella Larsen and culture of, 13–14, 19–20, 24, 137–141
women writers, 182–183
in writings of Gertrude Stein, 84–86, 118–121
in writings of Nella Larsen, see Passing, Quicksand
in writings of Willa Cather, 42–45, 61
Allan, Tuzyline Jita, 22
America
family in, 154–155
identity in, 8–14, 17, 30–32, 41–42, 92–94, 112–113, 128, 187–188, 190–191
immigrants to, 5–8, 11–12, 14, 18, 41–42, 60–64, 69–73, 143–144, 179, 189–191
impact of World War I on culture of, 5–6, 42
interwar period in, 4–5, 9
as a melting pot, 5–7, 45, 179–181, 189–190
modernism in, 3–5, 15, 123–124
politics in, 179, 190
September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on, 190–192
transnationalism in, 4–8, 24–25, 186, 188
Xenophobia in, 190–191
Ammons, Elizabeth, 3, 10, 13, 21, 24, 43, 96, 137, 138, 150
Anderson, Benedict, 17, 46, 62, 130, 183
Anti-Semitism, 10, 113–114
Appiah, Anthony, 2, 16, 31
Arabian Nights, The, 148
Arendt, Hannah, 40, 46
Asian-Americans
identity and, 31
resentment toward, 180
Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas, The, 22, 23–24, 92, 100, 115–117, 121, 131, 134, 177, 187
American identity in, 13, 17
influence of World War I on, 5
linear style of, 107–109
literary categorization of, 20
narrative strategy, 104–106, 112
ties to “Melanctha,” 104
Awakening, The, 175
Index 177
B
Bakst, Leon, 134
Baldwin, James, 93, 95, 179
Balibar, Etienne, 14
Baraka, Amiri, 191
Beloved, 37
Benjamin, Walter
applied to The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas, 109
applied to Everybody’s Autobiography, 115
applied to My Antonia, 21–22, 40, 42
applied to The Professor’s House, 59–60
Bennett, Mildred R., 27, 40, 55, 180, 187
Benstock, Shari, 41, 82, 103–104, 112
Berlant, Lauren, 19, 65, 110, 128, 130, 144, 171, 172, 180
Berzon, Judith, 63–64, 155, 176
Bevington, David, 148
Bible, the, 189, 191–192
Bildungsroman texts, 89–90, 153
Binarisms
coding and, 20–22
expressed through literature, 1–3, 31–32, 66–67, 69, 102–103, 145
in insider/outsider paradigms, 9–10, 78–79, 109–110, 117–118, 129
in race and ethnicity, 2–3
in sexuality, 2–3, 30–31, 84–87, 99–100
Blackmer, Corinne, 10, 85, 86–87
Blair, John, 6, 9, 111, 123, 190
Blankley, Elyse, 182
Bloom, Harold, 32, 38
Bodenheimer, Rosemarie, 103–104
Bogan, Louise, 181–182
Bohemians, 50–51, 181
Bookstaver, May, 18
Bottomley, Gillian, 16, 30, 70, 95, 158, 166
Bourne, Randolph
on American identity, 14
on the American melting pot, 6, 185
on immigrants, 15, 181
on trans-national America, 4–5
Breslin, James, 110, 117
Brown, E.K., 7, 29, 50
on My Antonia, 40–41
on “Old Mrs. Harris,” 68, 79
on The Professor’s House, 64, 67
Burch, Betty Ann, 20, 41–42
Butler, Judith, 2, 15, 16, 19, 161
on Gertrude Stein, 127
on Nella Larsen, 161, 174, 176
on Willa Cather, 31, 32
Index 178
C
Cantor, Norman, 3, 4
applied to Gertrude Stein, 83, 90, 95, 99, 113
Carby, Hazel V., 134–135
Carlin, Deborah, 15, 21
on Willa Cather, 28–29, 52, 68, 79, 187
Cather, Willa, 1, 97, 106, 111, 122, 191;
see also Lost Lady, A;
My Antonia;
“Old Mrs. Harris”;
Professor’s House, The
African-Americans in writings of, 43–44, 61
autobiographical elements in writings of, 27–29, 38, 49–50, 53, 55–57, 66, 183–184
binarisms and doubleness themes in writings of, 54, 66–67, 69–70
business acumen of, 8
closets in writings of, 64–65
coding in writings of, 20–21, 38, 47–48
commonalities with Gertrude Stein and Nella Larsen, 3–4, 136–138, 176–177
concept of possession in writings of, 30, 32–33, 36–37, 38
cosmopolitan liberalism of, 28–29
eclectic knowledge of, 22
elitism of, 11
European influence on writings of, 7, 11–14, 133, 181–185
feminism of, 15–16
gender inversion in writings of, 34–35, 38–40
Hollywood versions of stories by, 29–30
immigrants in writings of, 10–11, 41–49, 56–57, 60–64, 69–73, 179–180
independence of, 7–8
Jews in writings of, 52, 57, 62–64, 70–79
lesbian identity of, 9, 12, 55–56, 187–188
modernist writing style of, 15, 28, 40–41, 41–42, 57, 58–59, 79, 184–185
moves back and forth across the Atlantic, 18
narrative form of, 21
One of Ours by, 5
otherness represented in writings of, 52–53, 76
passing and, 18–19
personal losses suffered by, 29–30, 66, 177
phases of work by, 22–23, 29, 52, 53
portraits of, 134
portrayals of gender roles by, 33–34, 57–58
race and ethnicity in writings of, 9–10, 41–46, 56–57, 60–64
repeated revisions by, 29–30
reworking of similar material in writings of, 27
romance and realism in writings of, 185–188
rural background of, 9
self-representation in writings of, 18
similarities with Gertrude Stein and Nella Larsen, 81, 140–141
social conservatism of, 9, 28–29
treatment of materialism by, 58
“un-story” use by, 40–41
women characters in writings of, 67–70, 73–74
Challenger Space Shuttle, 191
Index 179
Chessman, Harriet Scott, 15, 129, 186

Chodorow, Nancy, 93–94
Chopin, Kate, 172, 175
Clemmen, Yves, 21, 141, 154–155, 176
Coding in literature, 20-21, 38–39, 47–49
Collins, Billy, 189
Collins, Patricia Hill, 3
Commons, John, 9, 17
Conrad, Joseph, 151, 175
Cook, Blanche Wiesen, 114
Cross-dressing, 19
Cult of True Womanhood, the, 85–86
Cutter, Martha J., 88, 135
D
Daiches, David, 79
Davis, Thadious M., 7, 8, 13, 22, 24
on Nella Larsen, 134–141, 146–147, 149, 152–154, 156–157, 168–169, 175–177, 184, 187
Dearborn, Mary V., 42, 46–47, 65, 93, 109, 115–116
on Gertrude Stein, 81, 93, 104–105, 109, 115–116, 131
on Nella Larsen, 155–157
Deconstructionism, 2
Defoe, Daniel, 105–108, 109
DeKoven, Marianne, 15, 88, 89, 94, 105, 108
Derrida, Jacques, 1–2, 17
Dodge, Mabel, 133
Dollimore, Jonathan, 2, 16, 18, 130
applied to Gertrude Stein, 110, 115
applied to Nella Larsen, 149, 174
Dress and social class, 148–151
Dual citizenship, 14
DuBois,W.E.B., 13
DuCille, Ann, 15, 175, 186
E
Eagleton, Terry, 1-2, 17, 186–187
Edelman, Lee, 19, 31, 130
Eliot, George, 103–104
Eliot, T.S., 113
Elitism of Cather, Larsen, and Stein, 11
Essentialism, 31–32
Europe
influence on the writings of Cather, Larsen, and Stein, 7–8, 12–14, 110–113, 181–185
and Trans-National America, 4–8
Everybody’s Autobiography, 24, 114–122
F
Fairchild, Henry Pratt, 6, 9, 62–63, 144, 145, 154, 188
Feminism
goals of, 2–3
modernism and, 15–16
Index 180
Ferraro, Thomas, 42, 138

Fetterley, Judith, 43, 78, 184
Frost, Robert, 55
Fuchs, Lawrence, 6, 9, 124
on race and ethnicity, 158, 189, 190
Fuss, Diana, 2, 31, 110, 137
G
Gambrell, Alice, 11, 28, 111, 129, 131, 135
Gass, William, 82, 122, 125–126, 128, 130
Gender
ambiguity, 87
categories and roles, 2–3, 94–95
dress and, 148–1492
inversion, 34–35, 38–39, 144, 156
modernism and, 15–16, 56–57
passing, 18–19
possession and, 30–31
Geographical History of America, The, 24, 183
autobiographical elements of, 127–128
identity concepts in, 81–83, 122–123
philosophical elements of, 123–124
power of language in, 130–131
Gilligan, Carol, 104
Gilroy, Paul, 13, 18, 138
Ginsberg, Elaine K., 19, 89
Gleason, Philip, 6–7, 31, 42, 62, 143
on identity, 122, 154, 164
on race and ethnicity, 159, 172, 190
Greenblatt, Stephen, 153
Grumbach, Doris, 41
Guerrero, Lou, 189
H
Haas, Robert Bartlett, 105, 122
Hall, Radcliffe, 155
Hambourg, Jan, 30, 52, 55–56, 66
Harlem Renaissance, 22, 24, 141, 157
Heart of Darkness, 151, 175
Heilbrun, Carolyn G., 104
Helvie, Sherrie, 19, 38–39, 87, 157
Hemingway, Ernest, 81
Hicks, Granville, 52
Hively, Evelyn
on My Antonia, 39–40
on The Professor’s House, 54, 60, 67
Hoffman, Michael J., 83
Homosexuality, see Sexuality and sexual orientation
Houghton Mifflin Publishing, 29
Huggins, Nathan, 13, 175
Hurston, Zora Neale, 11
Index 181
I
Identity
American, 9–14, 17, 25, 31–32, 41–42, 93, 111–112, 128, 188, 190–191
binarisms in, 10–11, 21, 78–79, 109–110, 117–118
from childhood to adulthood, 125–126
dispersal facilitated through language, 1–2, 17–19, 130–131, 187–188
essentialism and, 31–32
family connectedness and, 154
female, 15–16
fluctuating and relative, 30–32
Jewish, 70–79, 113–114, 118–1119
marginal, 9–10, 157
memory and, 40–41
modernist writing and, 56, 79, 122–123
politics, 14–17
postmodern theory of, 16–17
race and ethnicity reflected in, 30–32, 70–79, 81–83, 84, 112–115, 138, 146, 157–158
sexuality and, 11–12, 31, 55–56, 93–104
Imbs, Bravig, 114
Immigrants to America, 4–8
Jewish, 9, 52, 56–57, 62–63, 70–79
political impact of, 179
resentment toward, 143–144, 180–181, 189–191
surviving the crossing, 17–18, 60–61
in writings of Willa Cather, 11–12, 15, 42–49, 56–57, 60–64, 69–73
J
Jackson, Laura Riding, 23
Jacobs, Harriet, 152
James, William, 22
Jewett, Sarah Orne, 81, 182
Jewish identity, 9
Gertrude Stein’s, 82–83, 112–114, 118–122
in writings of Nella Larsen, 148, 163–164
in writings of Willa Cather, 52, 57, 62–63, 70–79
Johnson, James Weldon, 13–14
Jones, Gayl, 183
K
Kalaidjian, Walter, 4
Kallen, Horace, 17, 149, 179–180
Kammen, Michael, 8
Kaplan, Amy, 21, 147–148, 175, 186
Kaye, Frances, 15
Kennedy, John F., assassination of, 191
Knopf Publishing, 29, 133, 157
L
Labi, Nadya, 180, 181
Lachman, Arthur, 106
Index 182
Larsen, Nella, 1, 63, 87, 97, 131, 191;

see also Passing;
Quicksand
autobiographical elements in writings of, 100–101, 183–184
binarisms in writings of, 143–144
coding in writings of, 20–21
commercial success of, 8, 157
commonalities with Gertrude Stein and
Willa Cather, 3–4, 21–22, 134, 136–139, 168–169, 176–177
disappearance from literary world, 176–177
elitism of, 11
European influence on writings of, 18, 133
feminism of, 14–16
identity concepts in writings of, 146
Jewish identity in writings of, 163–164
mixed-race ethnicity of, 6–7, 8, 9, 10, 13–14, 134–136, 138–139, 153–154, 160, 183
modernist writing style of, 15, 136, 137–139, 184–185
money and financial issues in writings of, 146–150
narrative form of, 20–21
passing and, 18–19, 141, 157–177
racial issues in writings of, 9–10, 24–25, 137–139, 154–156, 157–158, 180–181
romance and reality in writings of, 185–188
sexuality in writings of, 143–145, 150–151
use of racial stereotypes by, 142–143
Victorian concepts examined by, 143–144
visits to Europe by, 137
Lawrence, D.H., 95
Lee, Hermione, 10, 16, 18, 51
Lewis, David, 13, 135, 141
Lewis, Edith, 7, 29, 134
Lewis, Wyndham, 113
Liberalism, cosmopolitan, 28–29
Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, The, 105–108
Lilienfeld, Jane, 7, 8, 12, 185
Lindemann, Marilee, 28, 50, 144
Lindh, John Walker, 190
Lost Lady, A, 29–30, 99, 134
Lowe, Lisa, 31, 67, 109, 180
M
Making of Americans, The, 108–109
Mann, Thomas, 27
Marren, Susan Marie, 13, 19, 186
on Gertrude Stein, 105–106, 112
on Nella Larsen, 165, 172
Martin, Wendy, 175–176
Massa, Ann, 17
Materialism, 58
McClung, Isabel, 30, 52, 55–56
McCoy, Beth, 21, 135
McDowell, Deborah, 24, 183, 186, 188
Index 183
on Nella Larsen, 144, 151, 176

on Passing, 157
McLendon, Jacquelyn Y., 155
McManus, Mary, 138, 146, 172
McVeigh, Timothy, 190
“Melanctha,” 10, 22, 23, 24, 128, 131
binarisms in, 103
as a coming-of-age story, 89–90
gender ambiguity in, 87–88
influence on Nella Larsen, 139–140, 168–169
as a passing story, 87–89
racial issues examined in, 84–87
sexuality and male/female relationships in, 94–104
ties to The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas, 104–105
Victorian concepts in, 90–94
Melting pot, America as a, 5–8, 45–46, 180, 190
Mexican-Americans, 180–181
Mill on the Floss, The, 103–104
Modernist period, the
Cather’s work and, 15–16, 28, 41, 56
Larsen’s work and, 136, 137–139
Stein’s work and, 83–84, 88–90, 115, 122–123, 123–124
trans-national American identity during, 4–5
Morgan, Janice, 20, 27–28, 110
Morrison, Toni, 37, 183
Motion pictures, 29–30
Muhammed, John Allen, 190
Munsterberg, Hugo, 9, 24–25, 27, 172, 188
applied to Nella Larsen, 143
applied to Willa Cather, 43
Murphy, John
on My Antonia, 34
My Antonia, 20, 21, 22, 23, 27, 53, 84, 106
as an “un-story,” 40–41
autobiographical elements of, 27–29, 38–39, 50–51
Bohemian characters of, 50–51
compared to ending of The Professor’s House, 66–67
concept of possession in, 30, 32–33, 37, 38
economic issues examined in, 33–34
ending of, 37–38
immigrants in, 41–49
modernist style of, 41–42
motif of crossing in, 141
similarities to Quicksand, 141
N
Narrative literature, 21–22, 81, 104–106, 109–110, 124
Native-Americans, 61
Naylor, Gloria, 183
Nelson, Robert, 12
Index 184
on Willa Cather, 28–29, 62

Nicholson, Linda, 2, 31
Not Under Forty, 15
Novak, Michael, 28, 31, 159
O
O’Brien, Sharon, 9, 50, 134
on My Antonia, 38
“Old Mrs. Harris”
otherness examined in, 78
relationships between women examined in, 67–68, 73–74, 185
One of Ours, influence of World War I on, 5
O Pioneers! 180
P
Palumbo-Liu, David, 139
Park, Robert, 10, 72, 171, 183
Passing, 18–19
Gertrude Stein and, 86–88, 105–106, 112–114
Nella Larsen and, 141, 157–177, 175–177
Willa Cather and, 63–64
Passing, 5, 20, 21, 22, 25, 133, 135, 136, 144, 183
controversy surrounding, 157
ethnicity examined in, 158–159
influence of “Melanctha” on, 168–169
motherhood examined in, 172–174
plot of, 157–179
rags to riches story in, 160–162
social status issues in, 157–158, 162–164
tension and conflict in, 163–166
types of passing examined in, 159–160
Patriot Act, 190
Pavelka, Annie Sadilek, 50, 84
Pers, Mona, 7, 12, 20, 38, 52
Petersen, William, 119, 158, 166
Picasso, Pablo, 107–108, 112, 134
Pierpont, Claudia Roth, 23, 96, 101, 134
Pinsky, Robert, 190–191
Poirier, Richard, 96, 115
Politics, identity, 14–16
Possession
ethnicity, gender, and, 30–31
Willa Cather’s interpretation of, 30, 32–33, 37, 38, 57–58
Postmodernism, identity in, 16–17
Post-structuralism, goals of, 2
Pound, Ezra, 95, 113
Preston, John Hyde, 83
Professor’s House, The, 10, 23, 148, 156
autobiographical elements in, 52, 66
Index 185
closets in, 64–65

compared to ending of My Antonia, 66–67
compared to The Geographical History of America, 122, 123, 124
disillusion and diminishment themes in, 52–53, 55–56
doubleness theme in, 53–54
identity themes in, 56
immigrants in, 56–57, 60–61
issues of sexual orientation in, 55–56
materialism in, 58
as a passing novel, 63–64
race and ethnicity issues in, 60–64
sexual identity issues in, 60–61
Pryse, Marjorie, 78, 184
Pseudonymy, 19, 22, 64, 97, 134
Q
Q.E.D., 18, 87, 101, 103–104
Quicksand, 13, 21, 25, 133, 134, 135, 137, 175, 176, 183, 186
children portrayed in, 151–152
as a coming-of-age novel, 152–154
identity issues examined in, 154–155
influence of “Melanctha” on, 139–141
influence of World War I on, 5
money and financial issues examined in, 146–148
racial stereotypes in, 142, 152
sexuality in, 150, 154–156
social status issues in, 145–151
use of “queer” in, 144–145, 149
R
Rabinowitz, Peter, 19
Race and ethnicity
binarisms of, 2–3, 8–9
identity and, 31–32, 70–79, 82–83, 112–114, 137–141, 139, 146, 154–156, 157–158
mixing of, 165–167
modern views of, 190
of Nella Larsen, 7, 8, 9, 13–14, 24–25, 135–136, 137–139, 153–154, 183
passing and, 18–19, 63–64, 86–88, 105–106, 112–114, 141, 157–177
social status and, 157–158, 162–164
stereotypes of, 112–114, 118–122, 141–142, 152
in writings of Gertrude Stein, 81–83, 84, 94–95, 97, 101–102
in writings of Nella Larsen, 137–138, 153, 154–177
in writings of Willa Cather, 41–46, 60–64, 70–79
Rattansi, Ali, 2, 16
Redinger, Ruby, 104
Rich, Adrienne, 105, 108
Richards, Grant, 85
Robbins, Bruce, 73, 88
Index 186
Ronnebeck, Arnold, 106

Rosowski, Susan, 32, 33, 35, 38, 45, 48
Ruddick, Lisa, 20, 85, 101
Rudolph, Eric Robert, 190
S
Salvaterra, David, 31, 144, 158–159
Sapiro, Virginia, 66
Sapphira and the Slave Girl, 10
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 3
Schroeter, James, 55, 184, 187
Sedgwick, Eve, 2, 64, 66, 98
Seidman, Steven, 2, 31
Selkirk, Alexander, 105
September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, 190–192
Sergeant, Elizabeth S., on My Antonia, 38, 54
Seriality, 3–4
Sexuality and sexual orientation
binarisms of, 2–3, 144
family connectedness and, 154–156
of Gertrude Stein, 10, 12, 81–83
identity and, 12, 31–32, 55–57, 93–104, 143–144
modern views of, 190
passing and, 18–20
of Willa Cather, 9, 11–12, 55–56, 187–188
in writings of Gertrude Stein, 93–104, 109–111
in writings of Nella Larsen, 143–144, 150–151, 154–156
in writings of Willa Cather, 43–44, 55–56, 60–61
Shakespeare, William, 148
Shange, Ntozake, 183
Shaw, Patrick, 9, 12, 177
on Gertrude Stein, 81
Shockley, Ann Allen, 183
Showalter, Elaine, 90–91
Simmel, Georg, 171
Simon, Linda, 22, 184
Skaggs, Merrill, 29, 43, 145, 192
on The Professor’s House, 53, 54, 56, 58, 66, 67, 156
Social Postmodernism, 2
Sollors, Werner
on identity categories, 8–9, 28, 31, 64, 154
on marginality and national identity, 10, 157
on the melting pot of America, 6
on migration, 186
on passing, 219, 21, 171–172
on race and ethnicity, 13, 114–115, 135, 158, 171, 190
on writing and identity, 17
Song of the Lark, The, 10, 18
Spangler, George, 175
Spencer, Benjamin, 13, 81, 182
Index 187
Stableford, Brian, 88, 90

Stead, Alistair, 17
Stein, Gertrude, 1, 63, 191, 192;
see also Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas, The;
Everybody’s Autobiography;
Geographical History of America, The;
“Melanctha”
and African-Americans, 9–10, 84–86, 118–121
autobiographical elements in writings of, 84–85, 103–104, 115–116, 127–128, 183–184
binarisms in writings of, 102–103, 109–110, 129
coding in writings of, 20–21
commonalities with Willa Cather and Nella Larsen, 3–4, 21–22, 81, 131, 136–138, 168–169,
176–177
and dispersal of identity through language, 16–17, 130–131
eclectic knowledge of, 22
elitismof, 11, 184
European influence on writings of, 7, 12–14, 82–83, 110–113, 133, 182–185
feminism of, 15–16, 125
identity concepts of, 81–83, 92–94, 111–113, 118, 125–126
Jewish identity of, 8–9, 81–82, 111–115, 182–183
labeled an expatriate, 9–10, 83–84, 113–115, 186–187
lesbian identity of, 9, 12, 81–83, 188
life in Europe and America, 18, 24, 81–83
modernist writing style of, 15, 83–84, 88–90, 115, 122–123, 184–185
narrative writing sryle of, 21, 81, 104–106
observations of Americans, 7–8, 118, 124–125
passing and, 18–19, 105–106, 112–114
portraits of, 134
race and identity in writings of, 10–11, 81–83, 84, 94–95, 97, 101–102
self-promotion of, 8
self-representation in writings of, 18–19
sexuality in writings of, 93–104, 109–111
use of continuous present by, 116–117
use of transitivity in writings of, 22–24
Victorian concepts of family in writings of, 90–95, 143
Stimpson, Catherine R., 82, 100
Stouck, David, 69
Stuckey, William J., 51
Sutherland, Donald, 83
Swift, John, 21
T
Taming of the Shrew, 148
Terrorism, 190–191
Three Lives, 23, 82, 83, 84, 85, 104;
see also “Melanctha”
as twentieth-century literature, 89–90
Toklas, Alice, 108;
see also Autobiography of
Alice B.Toklas, The
Index 188
Transnationalism, 4–8, 25–26, 189, 192
U
Urgo, Joseph R., 93, 111, 142, 145, 166, 182
V
Van Vechten, Carl, 13, 22, 119, 133, 136–137
Victorian traditions, 90–95, 143
W
Wagner-Martin, Linda, 23
on Gertrude Stein, 8, 84–85, 94, 106, 109, 113, 120–121, 188
on Nella Larsen, 136
on Willa Cather, 45
Wald, Priscilla, 47, 66, 84, 157, 188
Walker, Alice, 183
Walker, Ben, 189, 190
Wall, Cheryl A., 64, 134, 137, 141, 177
Walton, Eda Lou, 175
Washington, Mary Helen, 19, 64, 135, 137,
Well of Loneliness, The, 155 158
Wharton, Edith, 90
White, Walter, 134, 140–141
Whitman, Walt, 124
Will, Barbara Elizabeth, 18, 104, 1117
Williams, Bettye J., 8, 100
Williams, Raymond, 5, 6, 13
on modernist writing, 28
Williams, William Carlos, 82–83
Wolkenfeld, Suzanne, 176
Women writers
and categorization of Cather, Larsen, and Stein, 15, 20–21, 29, 79, 133–134, 183, 191
and the Cult of True Womanhood, 85–86
identity and, 1–2, 17–19
narratives by, 21
Woodress, James, 27
on “Old Mrs. Harris,” 51, 67, 68
on The Professor’s House, 55, 62, 64, 66
Woods, Tiger, 190
Woolf, Virginia, 22, 188
World War I, 5–6, 42
X
Xenophobia, 191–192
Index 189
Y
Yohe, Kristine Anne, 7, 13, 14, 133, 176
Young, Iris, 3–4
Z
Zabel, Morton, 29

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Jessica Rabin - Surviving The Crossing - (Im) Migration, Ethnicity, and Gender in Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory) (2004) PDF

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What is the book about?

What is the book about?

What topics are covered in the book?

What topics are covered in the book?

LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL

BEYOND THE SOUND BARRIER

DEATH, MEN, AND MODERNISM

THE SELF IN THE CELL

REGENERATING THE NOVEL

SATIRE AND THE POSTCOLONIAL NOVEL

THROUGH THE NEGATIVE

LOVE AMERICAN STYLE

FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS OF THE 1970s

THE OTHER ORPHEUS

THE OTHER EMPIRE

THE “DANGEROUS” POTENTIAL OF READING

INTIMATE AND AUTHENTIC ECONOMIES

NARRATIVE IN THE PROFESSIONAL AGE

PROTEST AND THE BODY IN MELVILLE, DOS PASSOS, AND HURSTON

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group.

ISBN 0-203-50139-X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-58091-5 (Adobe eReader Format)

Chapter One Introduction: A Sense of Selves 1

COMING OF AGE IN TRANS-NATIONAL AMERICA

identifies as 1900–1940, fostered trans-continental exchange, the movement of both ideas

YOUR NATIVE LAND, YOUR LIFE9

herself; Larsen’s texts make distinctions between different classes of African-Americans,

Such cosmopolitanism allowed these authors to create textured, nuanced, and

SURVIVING THE CROSSING

employing identities fluidly—national, ethnic, and gender; personal and professional—

PASSING FOR MODERNISM

TRANS-NATIONAL AMERICA REVISITED

My project is, in part, an attempt to take up the challenge implied in Ammons’s

(3). Quicksand provides an in-depth character study of a mixed-race, mixed-nationality

phenomenon. It emerges under certain circumstances and recedes or virtually disappears

PRECIOUS BUT INCOMMUNICABLE: MY ANTONIA

A social conservative, Cather is sometimes considered an anti-modern writer who uses

“A DIMINISHED THING”: THE PROFESSOR’S HOUSE

force as the “‘massive dislocation’ achieved by Cather in introducing [Tom’s Story]

pot, and that he is a product of both amalgamation, “a blending of races,” and

Although James Woodress declares that “the Professor…is a self-portrait of Willa

(CATHER’S) THREE LIVES: “OLD MRS. HARRIS”

In examining the ending of The Professor’s House, Skaggs suggests, “Cather

The Rosens—Jewish, cosmopolitan, and foreign—comprise a crucial element of this

employing it as a strategy, occurs over an extended period, roughly between “Melanctha”

MELANCTHA HERBERT, NEW TRUE WOMAN

[I]t is distinctively a mode of fiction that was developed by a school of

Nevertheless, although he comes from a much more stable and middleclass

others for surviving so well. Survival for Stein included surviving as a

LIES, DAMN LIES, AND AUTOBIOGRAPHIES

heterosexual tradition. The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas shows discomfort with

DOES SIZE MATTER? OR, BIG LITTLE DOGS

Everybody’s Autobiography is a sequel to The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas, and

nevertheless “philosophically…the most important of her texts,” perhaps best

Dear Miss Stein—

QUICKSAND: THE HEART OF AN IMMENSE DARKNESS

novel. While Deborah McDowell offers a convincing reading of queer overtones in

Am I a lord? And have I such a lady?

Her courageous clothes attracted attention, and her deliberate lure—as