Subjects, objects, and the fetishisms of modernity in the works of Gertrude Stein

Abstract

This thesis reopens the question of subject/object relations in the works of Gertrude Stein, to argue that the fetishisms theorised by Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and later Walter Benjamin and Michael Taussig, and problematised by feminist critics such as Elizabeth Grosz, are central to the structure of those relations. My contribution to Stein scholarship is twofold, and is reflected in the division of my thesis into Part One and Part Two. Part One of this thesis establishes a model for reading the interconnections between subjects and objects in Stein’s work; it identifies a tension between two related yet different structures. The first is a fetishistic relation of subjects to objects, associated by Stein with materiality and nineteenth-century Europe, and the identity categories of the “genius” and the “collector”. The second is a “new” figuration of late modernity in which the processual and tacility are central. This latter is associated by Stein with America and the twentieth century, and was a structure that she, along with other modernist artists, was developing. Further, Part One shows how these competing structures of subject/object relations hinge on Stein’s problematic formulations of self, nation, and artistic production. Part Two uses the model established in Part One to examine the detailed playing-out of the tensions and dilemmas of subject/object relations within several major Stein texts. First considered is the category of the object as it is constructed in Tender Buttons, and second the category of the subject as it is represented in the nexus of those competing structures in The Making of Americans and ‘Melanctha’. The readings of Part Two engage with the major strands of Stein criticism of materiality, sexuality, and language in Tender Buttons, Stein’s famous study of objects. The critical areas engaged with in her biggest and most controversial texts respectively – The Making of Americans and ‘Melanctha’ – include typology, “genius”, and Stein’s methodologies of writing such as repetition/iteration, intersubjectivity, and “daily living”. This thesis contends that the dilemma of subject/object relations identified and examined in detail is never resolved, indeed, its ongoing reverberations are productive up until and including her final work.