Why Is Melanctha Black?: Gertrude Stein, Physiognomy, and the Jewish Question

Abstract

This article reads Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha” as a racial, if not racist, text—a text not solely about blacks but also about Jews in the sense that black characters work as a mask for the author’s concern about her own Jewishness. Nineteenth-century pseudoscientific medical discourses link blackness, Jewishness, and homosexuality—the trinity of “difference”—based on their biological connectedness and similarities. Examining the racism and misogyny particularly inherent in the theories of physiognomy, this article will demonstrate the ways in which Stein employs and manipulates representative prejudices of her time in the portrayal of female characters in Q.E.D., as well as the black Melanctha, through which she reveals and conceals her own racial and sexual identity as a Jewish-American lesbian woman. Arguing that the aesthetic experimentation of “Melanctha” grows out of the author’s concerns about her racial and sexual marginality, this article further offers a context in which the black Melanctha may be read as a character Stein created to treat her racial self-hatred, a problematic phenomenon exhibiting the productive power of fear.