The Trauma of The Making of Americans: Stein and Protestant America

The self-absorption with which Gertrude Stein read literature and philosophy was reflected in the autobiographical interests of her literary production.¹ The scope of this production has inspired some psychoanalytic approaches to analyzing her work, such as research by Merill Cole and Priscilla Wald; while Cole focuses on a more semiotic analysis through the Oedipal signifier of the Name of the Father in Stein’s work, Wald explores her literature through the historical context of Stein’s autobiography as a lesbian and second generation American immigrant.² In this article, I am interested in reading Stein’s work psychoanalytically, but with a particular consideration of the relation between her language practice and her Jewishness.³

Inspired as Stein was by visual artists in her Paris community, her experiments in representing people repeating themselves “insistently,” led her to devise a unique history of American migration in The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress (TMA) (1925).⁴ Evident in Stein’s stylistic signature of repetition in her portrait making are repetitive motifs in her works based on her life, which Wald brings to light in her analysis.⁵ One motif in particular is emphasized in Barbara Will’s paper on Stein and Zionism in which she observes that the race-centered focus in Stein’s “more explicitly Jewish autobiographical novel Q.E.D. (1903)” is repeated in the representation in Melanctha.⁶ While this race-thinking may explain an avoidance Maria Damon sees in Stein scholarship, my attention is drawn to the fact that the recurring racial narratives would suggest a repetition symptomatic of trauma. In the Freudian sense, the compulsive repetition that denotes trauma is always a return of the crisis that was missed. In Unclaimed Experiences, Cathy Caruth reconstructs Freud’s consideration of the medieval figure of Tancred, who murders his fiancée a second time, to emphasize how he does so “against his very will.”⁷ In Lacan’s terms, the recurrence of trauma arrives “as if by chance.”⁸ The apparent destiny of traumatic repetition is integral to its retrospective nature: only after the crisis can the subject look back and retroactively posit a narrative by which to make visible the missed event. Stein’s training in psychology encourages my reading of the TMA chapters “Martha Hersland” and “Alfred Hersland and Julia Dehning” together and with Q.E.D., in relation to Stein’s biography, as reflecting the working through of a series of personal traumas; as my analysis will show, leaking through the conscious efforts by Stein in her literary works, we can see what may be understood as an unconscious expression of the trauma of her Jewish difference in Protestant America.

Martha: The Emotional Center

Perhaps to emphasize how much religion has been sublimated in Martha’s story of the family progress in TMA, and how ironic that sublimation is, the Martha section begins with an allusion to a text popular in nineteenth-century America: John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. TMA begins: “I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it. Everybody is a real one to me, everybody is like some one else too to me. No one of them that I know can want to know it and so I write for myself and strangers.”⁹ The narrator divides her audience into “strangers” and the people she knew: the strangers would read it and the people she knew probably would not because they did not want to see themselves in it. A similar consideration of audience can be heard in Bunyan’s self-conscious introduction to Progress:

. . . But yet I did not thinkTo shew to all the World my Pen and InkIn such a mode; I only thought to makeI knew not what: nor did I undertakeThereby to please my Neighbour; no, not I,I did it mine own self to gratifie.¹⁰

As with TMA’s narrator, the Progress’s narrator is writing for himself. As the rest of the poem qualifies, his...