Identity in Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans

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Throughout her career, Gertrude Stein was fascinated by the possibility of revolution in the sense of "a complete or drastic change," especially in relation to her ideas of identity and agency. However, critics disagree about her conclusions. For example, Bruce Goebel sees her early texts as "embracing a deterministic attitude about the formation of identity" (238) that conceives of identity as locked within historical and biological contexts. At the other extreme, many critics, such as Caren Kaplan, locate Stein's work within the context of expatriate modernism and see it within the discourses that "celebrate the rootless traveler" (7), cut loose from nation and history and thus free to create a self of her own choosing. This contradiction arises because Stein's texts are themselves often contradictory, with one passage exploring the inescapable weight of history and heredity on her characters, while the next admires her characters' capacity to resist cultural prescriptions, to exercise agency, to transform themselves, to be "singular." Identity in many Stein texts, especially in The Making of Americans, is, then, a negotiation between cultural prescriptions, biological and historical determinants on the one hand, and self-definition, change, and agency on the other. In this sense, Stein's work anticipates Foucault's later theories of identity in which he explores possibilities for "freedom" or agency. In "The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom," Foucault begins to define what he calls "the practices of the self." Stein's work is cited in several critical works, including Patricia Wald's Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form, Jaime Hovey's "Sapphic Primitivism in Gertrude Stein's Q.E.D.," and Benjamin Spencer's "Gertrude Stein: Non-Expatriate." Stein's own writing is also cited, including The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family's Progress, Narration, and "The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans."

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