Lesbian Images: Essays

by Jane Rule

  What Gertrude Stein came to terms with in Q.E.D. out of her own experience, she later transformed into the novella “Melanctha,” published early in her career as the middle piece in Three Lives, and in many of her other books the hard knowledge of the part power plays in human relationships surfaces again, based on the model of the three characters in Q.E.D. There were clear personal reasons for Gertrude Stein not to publish the book during her lifetime. Though she lived in fairly open defiance of convention in France with Alice B. Toklas for most of her adult life, she wanted to be known to her public as the genius who would transform the novel and language itself for the twentieth century as Picasso had transformed painting. She frankly wanted and finally achieved not only fame but popularity. Aside from protecting herself from the scorn and moral disapproval of large audiences, she may also have felt that Q.E.D. was aesthetically faulty because it was too close to her own experience, too uncertain and pedantic in the sentence rhythms which later became one of her chief preoccupations as a writer. Though “Melanctha” is the story of a black woman in love with a black doctor and therefore does not raise either the question of lesbian love or the power struggles involved in a triangle, it does use great passages of Q.E.D. nearly verbatim, Helen of Q.E.D. becoming Melanctha, Adele becoming the doctor. In this later work the struggle to understand, trust, love is written in a language of far greater tragic power than it is in Q.E.D. The one difficulty in “Melanctha” is that occasionally the transformation is not complete, the psychological tension arbitrary since the heterosexual possibility of marriage is entirely ignored. But it is a minor flaw in a piece of work which otherwise solves many of the stylistic problems that make Q.E.D. sometimes clumsy and flatfooted when it should be moving. “Melanctha” embodies the basic separateness of human beings which was to remain Gertrude Stein’s view of the nature and limitation of human relationship. It does not, however, offer the insight into relationships between women so remarkable in Q.E.D. If honesty is a selfish virtue which Gertrude Stein herself struggled to leave behind, one can feel only gratitude that Adele, the character in Q.E.D. who is the mouthpiece for the young Gertrude, has survived the later monumental Gertrude not to overthrow her or to diminish her real achievements but to make her remarkable way clearer and warmer and more humane.

  Adele is described in the beginning of Q.E.D. as a bright and innocent moralist, making friends with a couple of women, Helen Thomas and Mabel Neathe, who are far more sophisticated than she. When they tease her about her claim to be solidly middle class when she is really not, she explains, “I am rejected by the class whose cause I preach.”4 She nevertheless goes on preaching, “I simply contend that the middle-class ideal which demands that people be affectionate, respectable, honest and content, that they avoid excitements and cultivate serenity is the ideal that appeals to me, it is in short the ideal of affectionate family life, of honorable business methods.”5 She believes “the whole duty of man consists in being reasonable and just.”6 When the subject of physical passion is raised, she frankly admits, “I have an almost puritanic horror and that includes an objection to the cultivation of it in any of its disguised forms.”7 The only way to redeem physical passion is to idealize its object, and idealizing people is something Adele feels incapable of.

  At first these sermons are offered as good-natured entertainment for her two companions, all on their way to Europe by boat, but gradually Adele is aware not only of a certain tension between Mabel and Helen but of a growing sense of connection between herself and Helen, who chides her about her lack of emotional experience. “That’s what makes it possible for a face as thoughtful and strongly built as yours to be almost annoyingly unlived and youthful and to be almost foolishly happy and content.”8 The moments of quiet intimacy between the two stir Adele’s curiosity more than her emotions. There are things she wants to understand which she doesn’t know how to articulate or explore with Helen, who, on the last night of the trip, says to her, “You are so afraid of losing your moral sense that you are not willing to take it through anything more dangerous than a mud-puddle.”9 Adele is good-humored in her response: “I never wanted to be a hero, but on the other hand I am not anxious to cultivate cowardice.”10 She does not really trust Helen: “she may be interested in seeing how far I will go before my principles get in my way or whether they will get in my way at all.”11 And she does not really trust herself since she may be indulging in nothing but a superficial flirtation, but Adele is really not sure that she isn’t growing to care for Helen, and, if she really is beginning to have some strong feeling, “I won’t back out, no not for any amount of moral sense.”12 Vacillating between two views of what is happening, Adele decides to end the flirtation, but the moment she sits down next to Helen, she changes her mind again; “her moral sense had lost its importance.”13 At Helen’s touch, Adele “felt convinced of Helen’s rare intensity and generosity of feeling. It was the first recognition of mutual dependence.”14 That moment is the beginning of a long confusion in Adele between understanding and erotic need, for touch is not a monitor of generosity of feeling, nor is response to it proof of mutual dependence.

  The threesome disembark for their various holidays. Adele, in the company of a male cousin, still finds this “family friendship” superior to her tentative relationship with Helen, which “belonged to another less pleasant and more incomplete emotional world.”15 But she cannot stop thinking about the experience Helen has hinted at. “It is something one ought to know. It seems almost a duty.”16 But she complains, “It rather annoyingly gets in my way and disturbs my happy serenity.”17

  When they all return to America, Helen takes up the flat-footed offer Adele made while they were together on the ship: “I could undertake to be an efficient pupil if it were possible to find an efficient teacher.”18 They meet often secretly but publicly, taking long walks, having endless and inconclusive conversations. Helen asks, “Haven’t you ever stopped thinking long enough to feel?”19 Adele replies, “Why I suppose if one can’t think at the same time I will never accomplish the feat of feeling.”20 There are tentative gestures, withdrawals, testings, arguments, all in slow-motion intensity.

  Adele occasionally sees Mabel, too, sometimes when she is with Helen, sometimes alone. Mabel has been described in unflattering moral terms: “heavy about the mouth, not with the weight of flesh but with the drag of unidealised passion, continually sated and continually craving. The long formless chin accentuated the lack of moral significance.”21 When Mabel comments on the growing friendship between Adele and Helen, Adele replies defensively, “I am far from sure that she is not both coarse and decadent and I don’t approve of either of those qualities.”22 Finally Mabel tells Adele what she has been trying not to know anything about, the intimate details of the relationship between Helen and Mabel. Adele’s figure at that moment is “dreadful in its concentrated repulsion.”23 She is appalled not only by the sexual explicitness of the relationship but by her awareness that Mabel holds Helen to her in financial dependence, but even this revelation is not strong enough to break Adele’s attachment to Helen. When Helen rebukes Adele for her cruel silence, Adele writes, “It is hardly to be expected that such a changed estimate of values, such a complete departure from established convictions as I have lately undergone could take place without many revulsions.”24

  Adele is relentless in her examination of Helen’s character, seeing her sometimes as nothing but a prostitute in her relationship with Mabel, yet seeing, too, that without financial independence Helen needs to be provided for, a responsibility Adele does not want to undertake. She feels no debt to, or guilt about, Mabel at one moment, but then “in spite of the clearness of her reasoning, she could not get rid of the feeling that she had stolen the property of another.”25 She is no less hard on and inconsistent about herself, sometimes believing that she is interested in “the mere machinery” of their complex relationships, sometimes revolted by her own need, sometimes sure she is really learning to love Helen. Eac
h time she bursts out in judgment of any of them, she is immediately contrite. Through this whole process, Adele has not actually consummated the relationship with Helen.

  After a kiss that “seemed to scale the very walls of chastity” Adele “lost herself in the full tide of her fierce disgust.”26 She says again and again, “I am a hopeless coward. I hate to risk hurting myself or anyone else.”27 But her revulsion, of course, hurts Helen badly. Adele is honest and endlessly explaining:

  I don’t know on what ground I’m objecting, whether it is morality or a meaningless instinct. …One must either accept some theory or else believe one’s instinct or follow the world’s opinion.

  Now I have no theory and much as I would like to, I can’t really regard the world’s opinion. As for my instincts they have always been opposed to the indulgence of any feeling of passion. …I guess I haven’t any moral objection any more and now if I have lost my instincts it will be all right.”28

  This is hardly a speech designed to encourage sexual response. It is more an admission of moral defeat. After the months of struggle, when Adele finally does come to terms with her erotic needs, Helen is exhausted and unable to respond as passionately as Adele would now like. Their moral and emotional rhythms are entirely at odds.

  Helen goes off for a European holiday with Mabel. Adele, now ardent and determined to prove her love for Helen, joins them, asking nothing more of Helen than that she allow Adele to help her in any way she can. Mabel is at first fiercely and openly jealous, but gradually, as Helen submits to her demands, she relaxes a little. “Adele’s domination was on the wane and Mabel was becoming the controlling power.”29 Helen admits to Adele, “I don’t care for you passionately any more. I am afraid you have killed all that in me as you know, but I never wanted you so much before and I have learned to trust you and depend on you.”30 The book ends with Adele’s understanding that there is no resolution, Helen unable to see things as they are but only as she wishes they were, but it is a despair, a terrible suffering of defeat, for the impetuous and at the same time slow-minded student has finally learned to feel, and it is all pain.

  The biographical parallel for Gertrude Stein went on longer, was dragged out by more separations, more attempts at reconciliation, by a complete disruption of her studies, her plans for her own life. She spent months at a time in total lethargy, unable to concentrate on anything. Even after she had brought herself to write Q.E.D., she did not immediately regain the confidence which later in life was to give her a reputation as an extreme egotist, certain she was one of the few great geniuses of her time.

  Three Lives contains not only the transposed experience of Q.E.D. in “Melanctha” but portraits of two other gentle, defeated women. “The Good Anna” is the study of a servant whose emotional life is obviously lesbian. Her relationship with her friend, Mrs. Lehntman, is “too sacred and too priceless ever to be told”31 even to Mrs. Lehntman one supposes, who takes Anna for granted, “too sure of Anna to be jealous of her other friends,”32 and involves herself with a doctor who is an abortionist, leaving Anna disillusioned and lonely. In “The Gentle Lena,” the arranged marriage of a serving girl to give her security provides instead a terrible apathy in her which finally leads to her death. The suggestion is that she would have been far better off staying in service and enjoying her female friends. In “Melanctha,” though the main study is heterosexual, Melanctha was clearly initiated by a female friend. “Jane had many ways in which to do this teaching. She told Melanctha many things. She loved Melanctha hard and made Melanctha feel it deeply. She would be with other people and with men and with Melanctha, and she would make Melanctha understand what everybody wanted, and what one did with power when one had it.”33 The references are careful and decorous enough not to implicate their author while at the same time the stories allow her to express some of the defeated grief she herself was feeling.

  Richard Bridgman, in Gertrude Stein in Pieces, suggests that her departure from the clarity of her early work may be due, in part, to her realization that she could not go on being honest in her preoccupation with lesbian experience. “By selecting general nouns and verbs and replacing nouns with pronouns that lacked distinct referents and if possible gender—‘one’ and ‘some’, she moved steadily toward abstraction.”34 As she went on writing more and more obscurely, only occasional random references show that she at least sometimes grew weary of disguise. “It is better to name it naturally than to have it changed from Jack to Jaqueline or from Henry to Henrietta.”35 For a person as committed to process writing, to spinning a web of words out of her own experience, the inability to name naturally forced her often into grotesquely private solutions. In Lifting Belly, she was reduced to coy code games to tease at rather than explore her domestic and erotic relationship with Alice B. Toklas. About all the insight that can be gained is that Gertrude thought of herself as a man in the relationship, referred to Alice as her wife, that they both played the intimate, inane sexual games in which most people indulge, fortunately without the temptation to record them and claim literary value for them. Tender Buttons is probably not code at all, though certainly some words have private and charged sexual meaning for Gertrude Stein. It is more likely that this is a serious if not altogether satisfying experiment to dislodge words from any meaning, personal or public, to create arbitrary aesthetic pleasure from their being grouped together.

  At fifty-eight, Gertrude Stein emerged from the more and more private experiments to write The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, done, so the book claims, because Alice was too busy attending to the practical problems of their life to do it herself. Richard Bridgman, without conclusive evidence, suggests that it may be more genuinely an autobiography than has been supposed. An earlier project, called The Book of Thank You, seems to have been written by both of them, a collaboration which was to celebrate a return to domestic peace after one of them had had an affair with someone else. Though the notebooks which contain the draft of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas are all in Gertrude Stein’s own hand, Bridgman speculates that Alice may have dictated a good deal of the book since it is, in style, so different from anything else Gertrude Stein was working on at the time and so similar in method to the book Alice B. Toklas finally did write after Gertrude Stein’s death, What Is Remembered. If The Autobiography is actually a collaboration, Gertrude Stein’s difficulty with the fame it brought her is more understandable. Since she had known a great many famous people throughout her life in Paris and claimed a place among them, enjoying the respect of painters and writers for years before The Autobiography brought her much wider recognition and fame, the crisis in identity she suffered seems to Bridgman bewildering unless the book was, in fact, not her work, but a project in which she had shifted roles with Alice and become her secretary and mouthpiece. The other, more common explanation for Gertrude Stein’s ambivalence about success is that she had given in to a more conventional and decorous prose for the sake of reaching a wider audience and as a result had sacrificed the splendid isolation and integrity of her earlier aesthetic position.

  The book, of course, has very little to do with Alice B. Toklas and is all about Gertrude Stein and her famous friends. “The geniuses came and talked to Gertrude Stein and the wives sat with me.”36 But so is What Is Remembered, a book which makes use of many of the same anecdotes, often very little changed. The two books together do give some indication of how both women felt about their relationship, Gertrude Stein’s work, and the world they lived in.

  Alice B. Toklas entered Gertrude Stein’s life after she had finished Three Lives and was working on the monumental Making of Americans, a history of her own family which was to become the history of all Americans. She and her brother Leo, provided with independent incomes by their generous and sympathetic older brother, had established themselves in Paris and were already collecting paintings and entertaining everyone who was interested in them. By that time Leo, older than Gertrude and always her mentor, was obviously impatient w
ith her growing need to be someone in her own right rather than a follower in his footsteps, as she had been through college and graduate school. A relationship that had been so close and important to both of them took some years of struggle before it was finally dissolved, so radically that they did not speak to each other again as long as they lived. What could not be forgiven was Leo’s low opinion of Gertrude’s writing to which she had committed herself as she could not to medicine or psychology. Without his support, suffering increasingly from his mockery, Gertrude Stein turned to Alice B. Toklas to find in her a person willing to devote her life to Gertrude Stein’s own image of herself as a genius. Though nothing is overtly said about their sexual relationship in The Autobiography and it emerges clearly only in Lifting Belly, there is a charming moment in What Is Remembered when Alice confesses, “Gertrude during this winter diagnosed me as an old maid mermaid which I resented. The old maid was bad enough but the mermaid was quite unbearable. …By the time the buttercups were in bloom, the old maid mermaid had gone into oblivion and I had been gathering wild violets.”37 Gertrude Stein must have by that time achieved the hope expressed by Adele in Q.E.D., “someday to find a morality that can stand the wear and tear of real desire to take the place of the nice one that I have lost,”38 and persuaded Alice to accept a relationship as nearly patterned on a middle-class marriage as possible, in which Gertrude would be the husband, Alice the wife, all understanding, tending, and admiring. But Alice, though she absolutely accepted Gertrude Stein’s importance, was obviously not in awe of her. “Later I often teased her, calling her a general, a civil war general of either or both sides.”39 She seems to have managed Gertrude much as any other loving and clever wife has managed a husband who needs to feel superior but is bound by dependent needs, both emotional and practical. Gertrude Stein had been the youngest child of five, the baby, and it suited her to stay in all domestic matters tended and spoiled, stubborn and proud in her public and writing life, but persuaded to change any decision if confronted by Alice’s tears. Like Radclyffe Hall, but not so extreme in her pose, Gertrude Stein could not identify herself as a woman. Adele says in Q.E.D., after witnessing a complex scene between Mabel and Helen, “I always did thank God I wasn’t born a woman.”40 Gertrude Stein could not align herself with the cause of women, either when she was chided by her friend Marion Walker about the slur against women it would be if she dropped out of medical school or years later when Marion again asked her to support the women’s movement. “Not that she at all minds the cause of women or any other cause but it does not happen to be her business.”41 It was obviously a defensive stance, as was her attitude toward psychology. “You don’t know how little I like pathological psychology, and how all medicine bores me.”42 And she reports of herself through Alice, “She always says she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious. She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting.”43 Though she cut her hair off and assumed the social role of husband, providing money and learning to drive a car (very badly), “whenever there was a soldier or a chauffeur or any kind of man anywhere, she never did anything for herself, neither changing a tyre, cranking the car or repairing it.”44 Having been raised by a tyrannical father and having fought bitterly with a beloved brother for the right to her own identity, she did not easily identify with men either. She explained the help she got from men along the road in these terms: “The important thing, she insists, is that you must have deep down as the deepest thing in you a sense of equality. Then anybody will do anything for you.”45 It’s a fine Steinian contradiction on the surface of it, but like so many of her paradoxes, it also contains deep, good sense. As early as in Q.E.D. she was expressing her perceptive theories about the nature of power in a relationship. Of Mabel’s attempt to manipulate, she explains, “The subtlety and impersonality of her atmosphere which in a position of recognized power would have compelling attraction, here in a community of equals … lacked the vital force necessary to win.”46 With whatever arrogance she asserted her own genius, with whatever egotism she controlled a room with a monologue, she had a deep understanding and real suspicion of the use of power. “Father Mussolini and father Hitler and father Roosevelt, and father Stalin and father Lewis and father Blum and father Franco …There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing.”47 In Brewsie and Willie she went so far as to explore the need for revolution to destroy industrialism in America. Though she never became a supporter of the women’s movement, she wrote a play about Susan B. Anthony called The Mother of Us All in which men are seen as poor things, pitiful, blustering, fearful, but with the essential power to get what they want. Still, Gertrude Stein was afraid that women in the struggle for the vote would become more like men, for whom she obviously had very little general respect, though she probably numbered more men than women among her numerous friends.