Gertrude Stein and the destruction of the subject

This project tracks the development of the subject in three major works by Gertrude Stein: Three Lives, The Geographical History of America, and Ida. In these texts, Stein struggles with the problem of subjectivity as both essential and already inscribed. While the subject cannot be separate from the symbolic world, the subject struggles to escape forces of subjection in order to exist more fully and wholly in-itself. In attempting to carve out a space where her characters may escape subjectivation, Stein's texts as well as her characters often become discombobulated and nonsensical. However, fragmentation is not accidental but, rather, purposeful because it countermands the rationalist and objectivist demands of modernist aesthetics by enabling textual and subjective spontaneity.;Employing feminist and post-structuralist critical approaches, this dissertation deals with two competing limits of Stein's writing: social ideology and the personal, phenomenological, and (possibly) inviolable self. These approaches enable a recuperation of the complex forces at work in Stein's time and in her writing because they look at what Spivak calls "the mechanisms of centering" ("In a Word" 162). However, to get at Stein's representation of a self that breaks with social and historical classifications, I draw on Merleau-Ponty's ideas about the intentional body and the phenomenological horizon in order to show that Ida pursues the possibility of a neutralized ontology. This being sheds all traces of social classification and sexualization, existing as an impersonal singularity rather a totalized cipher for ideology and discourse. Ultimately, I argue that Stein near-destroys the subject, and with it the forces of its subjugation, in order to get back the self.