ABSTRACT

Of Gertrude Stein's immense literary output only the epic The Making of Americans, which she began in 1903 and published in 1925, can be classified as a novel in the traditional sense. Stein was a modernist writer who experimented continually with both form and style in order to question the parameters of conventional genres of writing. Her early sequence Three Lives (1909) is formally divided into three distinct tales-"The Good Anna," "Melanctha," and "The Gentle Lena"-on the model of Gustave Flaubert's Trois Contes (1877; Three Tales). However, the three stories form a loose narrative sequence that pushes the triadic structure closer toward the novel in a manner similar to two other influential US modernist collections: Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time (1925). Three Lives may be read as a late naturalist book (developing the work of US writers Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair), but the shifting and equivocal narrative voice creates an ironic tone that serves to highlight the method of narration over the subject matter of the stories. Three Lives has been interpreted as one of the earliest high modernist texts; Stein's interest in the unstable nature of language is connected with her attempts to apply to fiction the theories of consciousness expounded by the US psychologist and philosopher William James during her time at Harvard University.