As a premise for discussing the anticipation of post-modern theories of identity in Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha,” my project intervenes in the debates surrounding Stein’s debt to William James’s psychology. Though scholars such as Richard Bridgman, Lisa Ruddick, and Marianne DeKoven illustrate James’s influence on Stein’s work as well as the challenges Stein’s aesthetics pose to the Jamesian model, few view Stein’s aesthetic innovations in light of postmodernpsychoanalytic models.
James argues that individuals construct their identities by selecting, amidst an onslaught of impressions, only those details that pertain to their interests. The Jamesian model, however, illustrates only a single subject’s ability to think the world, whereas Stein’s “Melanctha,” depicts the conflict between two subjects who exercise different habits of selection.
I will argue that Stein’s work not only provides new ways of constructing aesthetics but also new ways to consider the construction of identity. I will suggest that Stein tests the limits of the Jamesian model by depicting the engagement between two thinking subjects. Interpreting textual examples through Jessica Benjamin’s and Judith Butler’s theories of inter-subjectivity, I
will illustrate how the construction of identity in “Melanctha,” depends not only on the characters’ capacities to select objects of attention but also on 1) the recognition conferred on the characters by others and 2) the social forces that construct identities that precede the characters’ processes of individuation.