Gertrude Stein and the Metaphysical Avant-Garde

Dana Tanner-Kennedy

doi:10.3390/rel11040152

Abstract

When American metaphysical religion appears onstage, it most often manifests in the subject matter and dramaturgies of experimental theater. In the artistic ferment of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture, theater-makers looked both to alternative dramaturgies and alternative religions to create radical works of political, social, and spiritual transformation. While the ritual experiments of European avant-garde artists like Artaud and Grotowski informed their work, American theater-makers also found inspiration in the dramas of Gertrude Stein, and many of these companies (the Living Theatre and the Wooster Group, most notably) either staged her work or claimed a direct influence (like Richard Foreman). Stein herself, though not a practitioner of metaphysical religion, spent formative years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at Radcliffe under the tutelage of William James. Cambridge, at the turn of the twentieth century, was a hotbed of spiritualism, theosophy, alternative healing modalities, and James, in addition to running the psychology lab in which Stein studied, ran a multitude of investigations on extrasensory and paranormal phenomena. This article traces a web of associations connecting Ralph Waldo Emerson, Transcendentalism, and liberal Protestantism to Gertrude Stein and landscape dramaturgy to the midcentury avant-garde, the countercultural religious seeking of the 1960s and 1970s, and the Off-Off-Broadway movement.

Highlights

American theater-makers found inspiration in the dramas of Gertrude Stein, and many of these companies either staged her work or claimed a direct influence
This article traces a web of associations connecting Ralph Waldo Emerson, Transcendentalism, and liberal Protestantism to Gertrude Stein and landscape dramaturgy to the midcentury avant-garde, the countercultural religious seeking of the 1960s and 1970s, and the Off-Off-Broadway movement
Ralph Waldo Emerson, a key architect of Transcendentalism, a uniquely American philosophy that influenced many of the metaphysical religions to which James devoted years of research

Summary

Metaphysical Religion

In the ever-unfolding story of religiously-inflected theater created for secular American stages, scholarly narratives may neglect to focus on the presence of metaphysical religion. While Schmidt focused on the shift towards liberalism in the nineteenth century, Albanese’s story of metaphysical religion in America began in the Hermetic and vernacular magical traditions of Europe and traced its reformulation in the New World after contact with African and Indigenous traditions. She followed the word “metaphysics” from a nineteenth-century “catholicity of mind and spirit signified, especially, by an openness to Asia and an embrace of South and East Asian religious ideas and practices” through the twentieth-century shift towards “a self-styled name for Americans who understood themselves as seekers on a ‘spiritual’ path” As Ulla Dydo pointed out, more knowledge of Cambridge in the 1890s would help illuminate the intellectual atmosphere of Stein’s formative years and offer new ways of thinking about her work (Dydo 2003)

Meditation and the Late-Nineteenth Century Metaphysical Ferment

Meditation and Landscape Dramaturgy

Stein’s Revised Correspondences

Four Saints in Three Acts