The Trauma of The Making of Americans :
2013; Penn State University Press; Volume: 15; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/intelitestud.15.2.0240
ISSN1524-8429
Autores Tópico(s)Poetry Analysis and Criticism
ResumoThe 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.3Inspired 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.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 audience is the world; when he had asked people he knew, that is, his neighbours, if he should publish his poem, half said yes and half said no. He decided not to listen to the naysayers, thinking that the greater world, or “strangers,” would judge his book as worth reading. Stein's allusion to Bunyan's introduction positions her work in relation to a Protestant tradition of militancy.The very elusiveness of this literary allusion is a signature of how Stein gestured to literary classics. In his famous unpublished PhD dissertation, “The First Making of The Making of Americans,” Leon Katz noted that though Stein read almost everything that had been written in English literature, she mainly absorbed, rather than studied, what she read: “One must remember that though prodigious portions of her time were spent reading, she was influenced by few writers—and even by these, in only small ways—as one understands ‘influence’ of ideas and style. Hints from other writers were taken in by a sort of ingestion, and even then, only if they entered smoothly into the strong drift of her own beliefs and predilections, for she read, as she listened, with absorbed inattention.”11 One may argue that Stein's “absorbed inattention” does not apply to this Bunyan allusion, since the Calvinist long poem offered a fundamentally political dimension to her Jewish immigrant in America story.The American constitutional right to freedom of religion was inspired by the Calvinist pilgrims who landed at Plymouth in 1620 seeking to live where they could practice their faith without persecution. The religious convictions of these Protestant pioneers, combined with the ideals of the French Revolution, inspired the revolution that led to the formation of the United States of America and the constitution that defined American tolerance for the religious beliefs of its citizens. It is indicative of the Christian-centered tolerance of this new nation that John Bunyan's Calvinist story would become so popular in nineteenth-century America. Into this Christo-centric American culture, the Jewish immigrant family in TMA tried to integrate; the irony as exposed by Stein in her portraits of the immigrant family is that these constitutional promises made integration impossible.Indicative of America's embracing of Bunyan's poem is the mythological scope of the journey to the new world as supported by God. Stein absorbes and critiques this myth in TMA, with significant irony. Progress tells the story of a pilgrim named Christian; his journey to Jerusalem/heaven was equivalent to a Protestant revision of the exodus of the Hebrew slaves to the promised land in Canaan. Applying this Protestant revision of the Exodus story to descedents of the original “pilgrims” out of slavery in Egypt, Stein qualifies the Protestant narrative as derivative and realigns it with the motivations for the Herslands' migration; as did their forebears in Egypt, the Herslands were seeking “freedom” from a form of slavery in Europe. As new immigrants, they sought the “promised land” for its promises of the American Dream and a secular society promoting religious tolerance. The irony that is emphasized in Stein's allusion is that, while the Calvinist Pilgrims sought freedom for their religion, the Jewish pilgrim desired freedom from religion. The erasure of religious detail in the portrait of Martha Hersland exemplifies that desire.The “Martha Hersland” section, read as the delayed introduction to the novel, starting at page 287, designates a break with the narrative conventions that preceded it and coincides with the use of the present continuous tense for the rest of the book. This chapter also initiates long sections each devoted to one of the three siblings (Martha, Alfred, and David) who represent the fulfillment of the older generation's hopes and dreams in migrating to the promised land of America; yet it is in this contemporary generation of the “continuous present” that the promise of progress, both in life and in fiction, is derailed. Moreover, since the exact halfway point of the novel is within “Martha Hersland,” and since Martha has been recognized as representing a veiled autobiography of Stein, this section elicits the most direct access to the trauma Stein is working through in TMA.In Stein's third year of her undergraduate studies at Radcliffe College, for a course she was taking on forensics, she wrote a paper titled “The Modern Jew Who Has Given Up the Faith of His Fathers Can Reasonably and Consistently Believe in Isolation.” In this work, she argued that all Jews, whether believers or not, must agree on one thing, that Jewish people must marry fellow Jews: “The Jew shall marry only the Jew. He may have business friends among the Gentiles, he may mix with them in their work and in their pleasures, he will go to their schools and receive their instructions, but in the sacred precincts of the home, in the close union of family and of kinsfolk he must be a Jew with Jews[;] the Gentile has no place there.”12 She proceeds to argue that the Jewish person is of a race; a race distinguished by “being chosen by God.” Stein felt it was the responsibility of every Jewish person to embrace his or her difference as a Jew, which meant accepting the prejudices that this difference would inspire. Stein then concluded that every Jew should keep his or her private life separate from the public world of Gentiles, and thereby protect the future continuation of the Jewish people. In short, Stein promoted the popular nineteenth-century idea that Jewish identity was racial and domestic segregation necessary for the continuance of the race.In the introduction to Stein's Radcliffe paper, Amy Feinstein makes the point that Stein's concept of her Jewish identity, and her allegiance to it, remain a question for scholars of her work in light of her profascist associations in World War II. Despite that question about her associations, Feinstein argues, Stein's argument for segregation, limiting relations with Gentiles to the public sphere, and keeping the home life Jewish became a successful strategy for her survival in WWII.13 Stein's Jewishness was critical in her early writing, Feinstein claims, and can be found in the narrative of Q.E.D., a novella widely recognized as based on her affair with May Bookstaver; Feinstein also claims that Stein's preoccupation with her Jewishness is also evident to an extent in The Making of Americans.14 Through cross-referencing TMA with Q.E.D., I will show that the central traumatic issue running through TMA is not only Jewish identity but also this identity in a Protestant-dominant America.The portrait of Martha has been understood as autobiographical, though with some conscious modifications; Martha is an “independent dependent” personality, which was the exact opposite of Stein's “dependent independent” personality. Despite that difference, we first see Martha through an event centering on an umbrella, an event that was taken directly from Stein's own childhood.15 Interestingly, the umbrella becomes a repetitive motif in Martha's portrait, affirming its “traumatic” associations, as noted by Caruth: “The story of trauma then, as the narrative of a belated experience … attests to its endless impact on life.”16 In TMA, Martha is introduced as a little girl on her way home from school one day, angry for being abandoned by the other kids who had run on ahead of her; she is taking her anger out on her umbrella by dragging it in the mud while the rain is coming down and she is getting wet. She is so angry that she threatens to throw the umbrella in the mud and repeats the threat four times before she finally does: “'I have throwed the umbrella in the mud,' burst from her, she had thrown the umbrella in the mud and that was the end of it all in her” (TMA, 388). Martha's behavior with the umbrella seems an overreaction to the circumstances; and it is, since, as Stein represents it, the actual trouble for the child Martha was in having been “hurt” by someone, the impact of which resurfaced in the unrelated event of the umbrella.The original “hurt” for Martha is referenced indirectly in a generic interaction between a girl and boy; a little boy does something to a little girl, the girl does nothing in response, and it seems that what the little boy did was nothing and was soon forgotten: “She is not angry, she seems not to remember then to be angry, her reaction is not there then to it. Then she does something violent to show it and often then the one that did something to that little girl is surprised at it, that one then has forgotten all about it” (379). Note that this description in the present simple tense interrupts the continuous present, which thus erases the historicity of the event by making it a condition of “always” present, repeated regularly. As “an endless impact on life,” the trauma of this hurt returns from being dormant and forgotten in the unconscious, to surface in another apparently unrelated time and circumstance.In Martha's violent throwing of the umbrella into the mud, it is logical to see her umbrella as a metaphorical nest for the boy's hurt; this hurt repeats, in a compulsive way, in her adulthood. As a young woman on her way back from a singing lesson, Martha watches on the street as a man hits a woman with an umbrella. In the narrative, this new umbrella moment convinces Martha that she must go to university: “She would go to college, she knew it then and understood everything and know the meaning of the living and the feeling in men and in women” (424). From our privileged position as readers, and considering Stein's highly controlled use of metonymy in the umbrella, we see Martha's unconscious associations to the original forgotten hurt in this event as something to escape from by going to university. Ironically, in psychoanalytic terms, university is no escape for Martha, but in fact forces her to return to the original hurt, or in psychoanalytic terms, trauma, through her meeting and then marrying Philip Redfern.Philip Redfern is an only child from the American Southwest whose reserved father and protofeminist mother stopped having sex after Philip was born. He grew up with a skewed sense of family life, love, and sex. The coeducational world of university was new and dangerous for Philip. Martha saw their friendship as “all perfectly simple and matter of course…. They had long talks on the meanings of things, he discoursing of his life and aims, she listening, understanding and sympathizing” (433). Excited by the new kind of bond he has found in Martha, he claims that the comradeship is “the new world.” This sentence defines the moment at which the narrative of TMA officially moves from the old world of the Herslands in Germany, which began the past-tense historical project of migration as progress, to the modern new world present continuous of Martha and her siblings as the collapse of the American dream and its promises. As I will show, that change is political, not in economic terms of progress and capitalism, but in personal terms of domesticity and marriage.The talkative Philip is self-interested and has superior intellectual skills. As time goes on, this difference creates a divide between him and Martha: “This comradeship continued through the three years. They spent much time in explaining to each other what neither quite understood. He never quite felt the reality of her simple convictions, and she never quite realized what it was he did not understand” (433). Philip seems to feel that her simplicity is an illusion; and Martha's initial understanding proves to be as unsophisticated as her simplicity. As his intellectual pursuits become more sophisticated, so does his emotional and psychological needs. Meanwhile, Martha remains unchanged.As Wald outlines in some detail in Constituting Americans, Stein's personal doomed affair with May Bookstaver in Stein's novella Q.E.D. (1903) recurs in TMA in the marriage between Philip and Martha, wherein “the writing itself registers disturbance” and “an increasingly insufficient cover-up.”17 I would say that what Wald identifies as a cover-up in Stein's text could be pinpointed in distinct phrasal echoes between Q.E.D. and TMA, which ground the fiction in Stein's autobiography. I shall show how these fictions, read together, can show a clear vision of Stein's emotional loss and her ethical problem with marriage.In Q.E.D., which is considered a very close account of Stein's love affair with May Bookstaver while May was in a relationship with Mabel Haynes, we see Stein in the figure of Adele, May is the character of Helen, and Mabel Haynes is Mabel Neathe. In the first chapter, Adele comments to Helen, “I wonder if either of us has the slightest idea what is going on in the other's head.”18 Adele elaborates on this later: How completely we exemplify entirely different types” she began at last without looking at her companion. “You are a blooming Anglo-Saxon. You know what you want and you go and get it without spending your days and nights changing backwards and forwards from yes to no. If you want to stick a knife into a man you just naturally go and stick straight and hard…. while I, I would have so many compunctions and considerations that I would cut up all his surface anatomy and make it a long drawn agony but unless he should bleed to death quite by accident, I wouldn't do him any serious injury. No you are the very brace man, passionate but not emotional, capable of great sacrifice but not tender-hearted.19 To what extent Stein is honest about herself is not my place to say. What is clear in this quote, however, is how the passion and hard-hearted Anglo-Saxon figure of Helen is very much like Philip, whose self-absorption inhibits both empathy and having a strong moral compass.If the secondary relationship in Q.E.D., Helen and Mabel, can be seen as equivalent to the primary relationship in TMA of Philip and Martha, another contrapuntal relation is evident in the personal traits of characters; Martha's mind is not as sharp as Philip's; Helen had to accept not being intellectually stimulating for Adele. Thus, Philip, in TMA, and Adele, in Q.E.D., are aligned against the inferior minds of Martha and Helen. And yet another deflection from Stein's personal story is seen in the fact that certain characteristics of Helen's Anglo-Saxon nature can be found in Philip. At one point, Helen comments on how chivalrous Adele is, because she assumes a shame that Helen does not feel.20 Adele states she is not chivalrous, which shows her distinction from Philip, who is chivalrous but shameless.After two years of marriage, Philip understands that Martha's narrow and raw mind is not complex enough for him. In contrast to Philip, in his development, Martha remains myopic in the face of his desires: “It was part of him elaborate chivalry and she though harsh and crude should never cease to receive from him this respect. He knew she must suffer but what could he do. They were man and wife, their minds and natures were separated by great gulfs…. Mrs. Redfern never understood what had happened to her” (TMA, 434). Philip is self-centered and seems indifferent to people's suffering. He plays his role of husband to wife as a medieval knight does to his country, full of duty, but called by the higher ideal of passion, is prepared to commit adultery. To his wife he gives the respect she deserves, but to Miss Cora Dounor, the teacher at Farnham with whom he starts an affair, he gives his love and passion. When Philip leaves Martha, she does not understand why the marriage has failed and continues to hope for a reunion with Philip until his death finally ends any reason for hope (470). Martha's obtuseness makes her appear very much like Helen, but that is where the similarities stop.The fact that Helen shows no guilt in her affair with Adele aligns her more directly with Philip. As I will show in Alfred's portrait, Philip's role in ending the marriage with Martha is paralleled by Adele's role in ending the affair with Helen, which aligns Adele with Philip in one critical aspect. Overall, in the marriage between Philip and Martha we can see elements of both Helen and Adele mixed into each as if in a coy pattern of dissimulation, which points again and again to Stein's personal trauma of a failed love. Two things remain consistent between Q.E.D. and TMA; the fact that Philip's lack of remorse in his affair with Cora is echoed in Helen's apparent disregard for Mabel's feelings while she is carrying on with Adele; and both Philip's and Adele's ending of their relationships is the result of a key inequality. In TMA, the inequality between Martha and Philip is intellectual; in Q.E.D. the intellectual difference between Adele and Helen is subordinate to the ethical difference, which reflects the religiously based cultural divide between Adele and Helen and highlights the dominant concern for Stein.It has been noted how religious and cultural details are elided in most of TMA, but in Martha's portrait, these are utterly erased. If we put back in the religion that Stein excludes, we know that Martha is Jewish, like Adele; Philip, like Helen, is not. Philip's religious upbringing is ambiguous, but the parallels to Helen's personality suggest he, like her, is Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Cast in this light, the Martha and Philip marriage is a heterosexualized version of Stein's lesbian affair with May Bookstaver. Read together, it would seem that Stein's issue with marriage focuses on adultery; as I will show in the Alfred section, however, adultery is a ruse to protect what Stein cannot admit publicly.Structurally, the centre of TMA is in the Martha section. At this center, we read the synopsis of the death of Mrs. Fanny Hersland, already seen and not seen in the earlier chapter, “Mrs. Hersland and the Hersland Children,” but here repeated differently in three noncontiguous paragraphs: “When there was the end of her living with Redfern her brother Alfred was just coming to his marrying Julia Dehning. Martha was then travelling and studying and then she came back to be with her father and her mother was weakening then and later she was dead and Mr. Hersland lost his great fortune and Martha then took care of him” (470). Unlike the repetition of the continuous present of the novel's portraits, formalistically representing living and thinking along a continuum of time, this recapitulation of events is compulsively circling a historical missed event; that is, Mrs. Hersland's death documented in the simple past tense, “and then later she was dead,” is entirely unseen and, as emphasized in this sentence, already “dead.” The trauma signaled by the “missed” death is the focal energy of TMA.“Alfred Hersland and Julia Dehning” follows the Martha section and complements it contrapuntally; it continues the marriage theme in “Martha” but from the Jewish perspective. Unlike Martha, who married a Gentile, Alfred in his first marriage wed a woman of a wealthy Jewish family known as the Dehnings; unfortunately, his ethical business practices were not honest enough for the Dehnings, and thus the marriage dissolved. Unlike Martha, Alfred married a second time. His second wife, Minnie Mason, who was an associate of his shady business partners, was, concluding from her name, a Gentile. A parallel development and formalistic counterpoint to the portraiture is the narrator's sporadic interference in Alfred's narrative, which leads to a crisis reflected in her realization that Alfred is in fragments inside “her.” As diagrammatic as the forgotten trauma that led to Martha's memorable umbrella, this crisis in Alfred's section echoes the umbrella scene by resurrecting the small portrait of the living mother. Alfred's portrait, which repeats the family story from his perspective, operates as a displaced center in that it reflects the unseen death of Fanny Hersland in Martha's section once again, but from a Jewish perspective; from this perspective, Stein's issue with religious prejudices becomes visible.In contrast with the section on Martha, the Alfred section contains religious references that reflect on what it means to be Jewish in America. We read about the Plymouth Brethren, who supposed that only the women in their clan menstruated and were shocked to discover that all women share this physiological trait. In contrapuntal relation to this apparently bizarre idea, Stein introduces an idea that on the surface may be seen to be secular and not religious but on further consideration is shown to be significantly Jewish: “Dead is dead. To be dead is to be really dead said one man and there are very many men who really feel this in them, to be dead is to be really dead and that is the end of them” (198). In TMA, death is a dominant trope. Primarily, it relates to the physiological condition that is repeatedly associated with the death of Martha's mother, Fanny Hersland, taken up more directly in the David section; in a secondary though equal respect, and of interest for my analysis in this article, death reflects the religious paradigm that differentiates Jewish faith from the Christian anticipation of eternal life with Jesus; “dead is dead” stands for Judaism in contradistinction to Christianity. In this metonymic of death, we see a contrast with the Plymouth Pilgrims revelation about the equality of women. The “death” metonymy epitomizes the Jewish realization that Martha's mother is ineligible to participate in the American promise of eternal life after death with Jesus. Ironically, and intelligently, Stein's identification of the inequality between the Jewish and the Protestant American, problematizes the Plymouth Brethrens' understanding of equality among all people.In effect, in defining a binary of Jewish and Christian cultural ideas of death, Stein dramatizes the forces of equality and inequality that lead to Alfred's ambivalence about his Jewish identity. On the one hand, he is similar in nature to his grandfathers: “There was then Mr. Hissen and Mrs. Hissen and Alfred Hersland had it in him to have a good deal in him Mr. Hissen being but it was very different thing in him at any time in him religion, he was a mixture then of old Mr. Hissen and old Mr. Hersland” (512). Mr. Hissen and Mr. Hersland are both religious. In fact, in the old country Mr. Hersland, a butcher and an “important person” in religion, was the rabbi who provided kosher meat to the community. Despite being like them, Alfred “never had at any time in him religion” (512). A review of Stein's Radcliffe article can shed some light on this incongruity in Alfred's portrait. In the article, she defines a kind of Jew who is obviously the spitting image of Alfred, and who is representative of contemporary Reform Judaism: “The more religiously inclined temperamentally have also from a different stand-point begun to depart from their old faith. They are beginning to change not because of skepticism but because the strenuous religiousness of their souls makes them wish to escape from a religion which has become a hard-shell of formalism with all the soul fled and the living substance gone.”21 Clearly, this phrase shows how the Herslands came to America to be freed from religion. Alfred is a mystic kind of Jew, like his grandparents. As a Reform Jew, whose acculturation to American society keeps him free from formalism, Alfred becomes alienated from the clan, identified here as the Dehnings. Some quality in him makes him a little dishonest for the Dehnings family, so he turns more and more to Gentile associations.In the same way that the narrator gets at the religious details in Alfred, which contrasts the erasure of religious particularity in Martha's portrait, a difference in narrative tone is evident in Martha's portrait, compared with Alfred's. In “Martha” we read: “I love it and now I will write it. This is now a history of my love of it…. They live it and I hear it and I see it and I love it and now and always I will write it” (TMA, 290). The joyful iambic rhythm is emphasized by a series of short staccato phrases linked by the repeated conjunction and. The iambic phrasing is repeated in Alfred, but with an entirely different emotional rhythm caused by the softer and heavier consonants: “I feel it and I brood over it and it comes then very simply from me, do you see how simply it comes out of me, you see, I feel it and I think about it and then I know it and I know then it is a simple thing, why are you always saying then it is a complicated one when really it is a very simple one this thing” (564). The narrator's brooding turns into an argument with someone, or her alter ego. Wherever the dissent is coming from, its interference in the portrait-making points to the narrator's role in the project. Something breaks down in the narrator in the Alfred portrait: “Every one was a whole one in me and now a little every one is in fragments inside me. There are a very great many not now in me, mostly every one now in me is in pieces inside me. Mostly not any one now is a whole one inside me. Alfred Hersland is in fragments inside me, I will now begin again and it will be a describing of pieces then, pieces of perhaps a whole one” (519). In this quote, we can read that the very fragmentation that she claims has interrupted her narrative portraits is being dramatized. Although she “begins again” to describe Alfred as whole, the fracture of his wholeness takes over like a refrain, making the narrator's portrait project secondary to her crisis.The process of narrative disintegration hits critical mass when the following line is repeated seven times in seven paragraphs: “When I have not been right there must be something wrong” (573–74). The anxiety expressed in this tautology, centered on the narrator, signifies that the reality on which she has relied has failed her for one reason or another. The cause of that crisis is indicated in the secret referenced in the following quote: “T
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