The Trauma ofThe Making of Americans:

Abstract

The self-absorption with which Gertrude Stein read literature and philosophy was reflected in the autobiographical interests of her literary production.1 The scope of this production has inspired some psychoanalytic approaches to analyzing her work, such as research by Merill Cole and Priscilla Wald; while Cole focuses on a more semiotic analysis through the Oedipal signifier of the Name of the Father in Stein’s work, Wald explores her literature through the historical context of Stein’s autobiography as a lesbian and second generation American immigrant.2 In this article, I am interested in reading Stein’s work psychoanalytically, but with a particular consideration of the relation between her language practice and her Jewishness.3 Inspired as Stein was by visual artists in her Paris community, her experiments in representing people repeating themselves “insistently,” led her to devise a unique history of American migration in The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress (TMA) (1925).4 Evident in Stein’s stylistic signature of repetition in her portrait making are repetitive motifs in her works based on her life, which Wald brings to light in her analysis.5 One motif in particular is emphasized in Barbara Will’s paper on Stein and Zionism in which she observes that the race-centered focus in Stein’s “more explicitly Jewish autobiographical novel Q.E.D. (1903)” is repeated in the representation in Melanctha.6 While this race-thinking may explain an avoidance Maria Damon sees in Stein scholarship, my attention is drawn to the fact that the recurring racial narratives would