“EACH ONE AS SHE MAY ”: Identity Performance And Hybrid Identity Reconstruction In Three Lives

Gertrude Stein(1874-1946)is regarded as the pioneer of modernism.Among her works,Three Lives(1909)is the most controversial one.Its dealing with race,while treated by some critics as politically racist,is held by many others as characteristic of “racial musk”,which has profound implication for her modernism and reveals identity as a discursive construction.A collection of two short stories and a novella,Three Lives focuses on the lives of three women: Anna,Melanctha,and Lena,who are all racial and sexual minorities.Drawing its theoretical framework from Michael Foucault's theory on power discourse and Judith Butler's view on the performativity of identity,this thesis analyzes racial and gender minorities' identity troubles and the reconstruction of identity under colonial and patriarchal discourses,hence disclosing Stein's anti-colonial thoughts and her appealing for constructing a hybrid identity.This thesis is divided into three parts.The first part focuses on literature review and thesis statement of this paper.The second part,also the main part,is made up of three chapters.The first chapter analyzes the racial trouble faced by racial minorities.The town of Bridgepoint is in essence an internal colony infested by colonial discourse.Assimilated by it,Anna,Rose Johnson,Haydon sisters,and Jeff Campbell all perform the racial ‘other',intensifying interracial and intraracial tensions.The second chapter analyzes the gender trouble faced by the three women and Herman Kerder.Under heterosexual dominance,they are forced to perform femininity and masculinity.Under social oppression,Anna and Melanctha are perplexed by nervous anxiety,and Lena is psychologically benumbed and deprived of self-consciousness.As gender minorities,the three women are also expelled from their environment.The last chapter analyzes Melanctha's chasing for a fluid gender and hybrid racial identity.Melanctha's wandering does not only mark her being exiled by power.Unfixed and decentering,her wandering can also be taken as her revolt against monolithic power.Melanctha's communication with people of different cultures and her non-normative performance of gender lead her to reconstruct a hybrid racial and fluid gender identity.The conclusion part of this thesis points out that,disclosing racial and gender minorities' existential crisis under monolithic power,Stein critiques the binarism of identity.Though stereotyped in characterization,Three Lives should not be neglected for its appealing for cultural hybridity and an expansion of the representation of gender.