The Story ofone: Narrative and Composition in Gertrude Stein'sThe Making of Americans

Abstract

The most common readings of The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress (first published in Paris, 1925) contend that Gertrude Stein’s 900-page novel deconstructs the role narrative plays in constituting identity by employing an indeterminacy that challenges readerly subjectivity. Whether taking up issues of race, gender and sex, class, or the very complexity with which all these factors combine in constructing identity, critical readings usually focus on the iterative repetition Stein uses in the text as a means for deconstructing narrative and confusing the reader’s experience (Taylor 27; Doyle 250; Wald 295). Whether arguing that its repetitive structures function on a micro level—like frames in a movie reel in which “each picture is just infinitesimally different from the one before” (Wald 295)—or on the macro level, where dizzying narrative shifts invoke a kind of tilting-windmill stupor (Ngai), critics agree that the reader’s usual processes of making meaning through narrative are rendered useless while reading The Making of Americans. From this perspective, a reader’s sense of frustrated agency in the meaning-making process becomes an important aspect of the text’s overall project of deconstructing identity formation. On the other hand, seeing this complicated text as highly constructed enables a new reading that is based on the manner in which expectations are stabilized by the novel’s structure. From a perspective afforded by digital tools, and in contrast to critical readings in which The Making of Americans is a postmodernist and chaotic text, I posit that it is a mimetic, modernist text that has been misread as indeterminate. I. Background: Theory and Method Most postmodernist readings of The Making of Americans rely on a central premise: readers experience a tension created by frustrated expectations that result from the text’s progressive disbandment of the story and, ulti