The Struggle with Realism

This chapter considers the conception of authorship represented in Stein's earliest publication, Three Lives, which, despite its small circulation, attracted much commentary. Prevailing scholarly opinion regards Three Lives, written in Paris, as both a break from American realist literary forms and a reflection of Stein's dissatisfaction with the bourgeois progressivist culture of her university days. For many, it marks the moment when she shakes off the Jamesian realism adopted in her first attempts at writing, the unfinished novels Fernhurst and Q.E.D., and, influenced by the Parisian avant-garde in general and Matisse and Picasso in particular, moves into the first phase of the experimentation that would characterise her subsequent literary oeuvre. I argue in this chapter that, although it is more overtly experimental than her other early works and, without doubt, reflective of her new cultural experiences, Stein's first publication retains significant aspects of the American realism of the early twentieth century, in particular the progressivist vision of the American author as pioneering chronicler of social reality engaged in the cataloguing of contemporary American life. I would contend that, rather than manifesting a rejection of American reformist politics, Three Lives sustains the progressive attitude to the demos, informed by the ideology of social Darwinism, in which the documenting and regulation of types accompanies the drive toward greater social inclusion and the extension of rights. Stein’s

fundamentally progressivist desire to increase representation and participation in cultural life, here by extending literary representation to new subjects in new forms, ends up with a set of detailed classifications expressed in limiting biological terms that reproduce the pseudo-scientific taxonomies fundamental to American progressive thinking. What I also argue, however, is that, while identifying the same issues on similar terms, Three Lives simultaneously problematises progressive methods and approaches aimed at improving social conditions and moulding fitter democratic subjects, and, in doing so, begins to develop a new conception of authorship.

This chapter also considers the reception of Three Lives, exploring what I argue is a tension in the tendency of contemporary reviews to see the text as either deploying realist techniques to promote the expansion of participation and representation in which the author is actively involved in the promotion of such a vision of American democracy, or as an example of the aberrant practices of an avant-garde figured as a degenerate and un-American strand of literary production.