ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how Gertrude Stein negotiates her place in the American tradition. The novel's distinctive trait is that Stein's narrator struggles simultaneously for autonomy and affiliation. The chapter argues that the struggle for creative autonomy and intellectual belonging is carried out not so much through patricide as through a confusion of tongues within the paternal tradition. If anything, repetition, the realization that concrete individuality is also abstract social subjectivity, reinforces the erotic introjection of others and the desire that people be writing matter. Facing up to the fathers' sins involves confronting the major preoccupations in the American intellectual tradition. Stein identifies one of the preoccupations exactly in the fear of writing. Stein rebels against the aesthetic timidity of the middle class, to which nevertheless the novel is a paean, by flashing her creative ambition as bad working class taste.
