North American Fiction and Film

Chapter Three: Gertrude Stein

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"Melanctha"

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A Black American woman's experience written by a White woman

Stein is particularly notable for her stylistic innovations. Standard reference works such as Funk & Wagnalls make the following observations in this regard:
[Stein's] early works . . . are characterised by a shift from the traditional literary devices of plot and straightforward narrative to a narrative in which plot is almost wholly eliminated and a free, experimental style is employed, embodying radical innovations in syntax and punctuation. . . . [She] describes her technique of composition as resembling that of the motion picture. The succession of frames, or pictures, in a motion-picture film, each frame of which is slightly different from the preceding one, creates the illusion of a lifelike continuity. In an analogous manner, through the technique of partially repetitive statements, each serving to advance the story a step further, Stein attempted to project a continuous sequence of images which produce in the reader the illusion of the living present immediately experienced. (8237-8238)
This description is very apposite in regard to "Melanctha." You will probably note after reading only a few pages the rather childlike style with its frequent repetition. The issue immediately raised here is, of course, that if this style is meant to present "the illusion of the living present immediately experienced," whose living experience are we talking about?

With regard to "Melanctha," the question of whose experience is being presented is profoundly significant in that the story is about a Black American woman's experience written by a White woman. The question then becomes: by what power is Stein authorised to speak on behalf of Black American women and what politics surrounds her representation of these women? I would argue that "Melanctha," from its opening page, runs the risk of reinforcing certain White stereotypes about Black Americans. Consider, for instance, the following description of Rose Johnson:
Rose Johnson was careless and was lazy, but she had been brought up by white folks and she needed decent comfort. Her white training had only made for habits, not for nature. Rose had the simple, promiscuous unmorality of the Black people. (60)
There are two problems in the above: firstly, Stein is assuming a fixed or essential nature for Black Americans; and secondly, she declares knowledge of just what that nature is-simple, promiscuous and "unmoral", all of which are "standard" stereotypes applied by Whites to Blacks.

Stereotypes applied by Whites to Blacks
This stereotyping extends to Stein's depiction of the Black American man in the story. Consider, for instance, the following:
James Herbert was a powerful, loose built, hard handed, black, angry negro. Herbert never was a joyous negro. Even when he drank with other men, and he did that very often, he was never really joyous. In the days when he had been most young and free and open, he had never had the wide abandoned laughter that gives the broad glow to negro sunshine. . . .
James Herbert was often a very angry negro. He was fierce and serious, and he was very certain that he often had good reason to be angry with Melanctha, who knew so well how to be nasty, and to use her learning with a father who knew nothing. (64)
The stereotype here is that the Black man is purely physical-a fine "animal"; that is, not to be attributed with any of the "finer" qualities and sensitivities that we might associate with White men.
This particular stereotype is reinforced and intensified in the following description of a razor fight between James Herbert and John, "a very decent coloured coachman" (65) with whom Melanctha becomes friendly:
Suddenly between them there came a moment filled full with strong black curses, and then sharp razors flashed in the black hands, that held them flung backward in the negro fashion, and then for some minutes there was fierce slashing.
John was a decent, pleasant, good natured, light brown negro, but he knew how to use a razor to do bloody slashing.

When the two men were pulled apart by the other negroes who were in the room drinking, John had not been much wounded but James Herbert had gotten one good strong cut that went from his right shoulder down across the front of this whole body. Razor fighting does not wound very deeply, but it makes a cut that looks most nasty, for it is so very bloody. (65-66)
Here we have the stereotypical presentation-as in "Drum" and "Mandingo" for instance-of Negro men as fit for little else other than brawling. I would argue that this reliance on stereotypes as part of speaking on behalf of someone else carries over into what appears as the major concern of "Melanctha"-male versus female sexuality, which also further compounds the potential problems of Stein electing to speak on behalf of Black Americans.
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Male versus female sexuality

As you read further into "Melanctha," you will discover that it contains very little action, as such, but much dialogue (usually indirect) and psychologising sexual analysis. Indeed, the novella could be said to become a psycho-sexual drama. This is in keeping with Stein's strong interest in psychology as pointed out by William Rose Benet: "Her unique and celebrated style . . . was influenced by the psychological theories of William James [under whom] she studied at Radcliffe College" (961).
In one sense, Stein's explanation of sexuality in "Melanctha" could be seen as rather daring for the time, pointing, as it does, at Melanctha's bi-sexuality and her lesbian relations with Rose and Jane Harden.

It becomes problematic, however, on two counts: first, Stein appears to develop further the idea of an a-moral "Black" promiscuity (which she ultimately appears to bring under sharp disapproval); second, Stein spends a great deal of time expounding the nature of the male sexual psyche (which is somewhat suspect in that she is a woman).

This "critique" of Black sexuality appears in the following very early statement by the narrator concerning the basis of Melanctha's taste in men:
Boys had never meant much to Melanctha. They had always been too young to content her. Melanctha had a strong respect for any kind of successful power. It was this that always kept Melanctha nearer, in her feeling toward her virile and unendurable black father, than she ever was in her feeling for her pale yellow, sweet-appearing mother. The things she had in her of her mother, never made her feel respect. (67)
It is then underlined just a little later when we are told the following concerning Melanctha's attitude to a Black railway porter at the railroad yard she comes to frequently in her quest for sex:
Melanctha liked this serious, melancholy light brown negro very well, and all her life Melanctha wanted and respected gentleness and goodness, and this man always gave her good advice and serious kindness, and Melanctha felt such things very deeply, but she could never let them help her or affect her to change the ways that always made her keep herself in trouble. (69)
Melanctha considers she has finally found a man to satisfy her in the young doctor, Jefferson Cambell: "She wanted some one that could teach her very deeply and now at last she was sure that she had found him, yes she really had it, before she had thought to look if in this man she would find it" (76). The qualification articulated in the last part of the above drives the larger part of the recurring narrative in "Melanctha."

While Melanctha is willing to give emotionally, Jefferson continually holds himself in emotional check:
Jeff always loved now to be with Melanctha and yet he always hated to go to her. Somehow he was always afraid when he was to go to her, and yet he had made himself very certain that here he would not be a coward. He never felt any of this being afraid, when he was with her. Then they always were very true, and near to one another. But always when he was going to her, Jeff would like anything that could happen that would keep him a little longer from her. (95-96)
Jeff's ambivalence toward Melanctha is fuelled when Jane Harden tells him something of Melanctha's earlier sexual history, including her own relationship with her.

While this could be read as a critique of paternally controlled female sexuality, I think that the critique is overwhelmed by what becomes an almost tedious and highly questionable probing of Jeff's sexual motives, specifically, his dislike of the Negroes' sexual "laziness." This is exemplified in the following:
"Melanctha," began Jeff, very slowly, "Melanctha, it ain't right I shouldn't tell why I went away last week and almost never got the chance again to see you. Jane Harden was sick, and I went in to take care of her. She began to tell everything she ever knew about you. She didn't know how well I know you. I didn't tell her not to go on talking. I listened while she told me everything about you. I certainly found it very hard with what she told me. I know she was talking truth in everything she said about you. I knew you had been free in your ways, Melanctha. I knew you liked to get excitement the way I always hate to see the colored people take it." (106; see also 111-112)
What is more, in the end, after the continuing sexual struggle between Jeff and Melanctha results in their break up, it is Jeff's anti-Black sexuality stance which appears to be endorsed by the narrator. Melanctha drifts back into a presumably lesbian relationship with Rose Johnson as well as several affairs with other Black men such as Jem Richards.
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Melanctha the "servant"

When Rose gets married and is to have a baby, Melanctha willingly becomes her "servant," an act which the narrator strongly disapproves of:
Melanctha was very good now to Rose Johnson. Melanctha did everything that any woman could, she tended Rose, and she was patient, submissive, soothing and untiring, while the sullen, childish, cowardly, black Rosie grumbled, and fussed, and howled, and made herself to be an abomination and like a simple beast. (157-158)
This condemnation of Rose as a useless, grumbling Black is repeated a number of times. In the end, Melanctha is rejected by both Rose and Jeff, and dies of consumption in a hospital.

There are, of course, many ways of reading a narrative of this complexity. It could be read, for example, as showing Melanctha as a sexually free woman who suffers in a society unready for the expression of such freedom. I would argue, however, that my reading-which posits Stein, ultimately, as a type of moral realist-is supported by the movements and conclusion of the narrative. You should now test my comments against your own reading and those of other critics.
Whichever way you read it, "Melanctha" clearly says something from a White perspective about Black America and, as I said at the beginning of the chapter, we need to analyse carefully the assumptions that underpin the construction(s) of Black Americans in what Stein says. We will uncover further versions of Black America from a White perspective when we come to consider the short stories of Flannery O'Connor.
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Review questions

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Works Cited

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Last updated August 1996
Comments to Dr John Fitzsimmons:
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