Naming What Is Inside: Gertrude Stein’s Use of Names in Three Lives

Abstract

As far as I know, the curious first name Gertrude Stein gives her protagonist, Herbert, has attracted little comment, despite the prominence of this name in the title of Melanctha: Each One as She May, the second and arguably central narrative in Three Lives (1909).1 The critical neglect of this character's name is not surprising, considering Stein's criticism of given names, along with other proper nouns, as conventional uses of language and her insistence that and more one does not use (210). A traditional onomastic study of Gertrude Stein's use of characters' names would thus appear to be a quixotic project, based on an assumption about the symbolic significance of proper nouns antithetical to Stein's avant-garde use of language and its special emphasis on verbal action and stylistic performance. Yet as I shall argue in this essay, the significance of the name Melanctha offers one part of the solution to the intellectual puzzle concerning Stein's literary representation of race, ethnicity, and sexual identity in Three Lives. Was Stein merely adopting the persona of her African-American protagonist, Herbert, for purely aesthetic purposes, thus implicating her version of modernism in other forms of popular black-face minstrelsy? Was Stein exposing the social construction of racial and ethnic identities, perhaps of all identities, and thereby deconstructing avant le lettre race and ethnicity as essential categories? Was Stein equating her own social marginality as a lesbian with that of German immigrants and African Americans, and was this imaginative identification sympathetic or manipulative? The larger issue, of course, is Stein's relationship to other avant-garde modernists, including the high moderns (Yeats,