ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the resources of polysemy to argue that Gertrude Stein was concerned about national monolingualism, at least on a conceptual level. Four Saints in Three Acts is a rich poetic text about the temptations of monolingualism, a song of social harmony, which Stein, via William James, sees at the heart of American literature. James's text was delivered as a series of twenty lectures at Edinburgh between 1901 and 1902 as part of the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion. He expands the definition of religious experience to comprehend three levels: saintliness, social life, and art. Saint Teresa's writing becomes an impediment to James's triangulation of saintliness, aesthetics, and society. James's Saint Teresa and Saint Ignatius are political saints, germane to the modernist artist who invests his or her creations with the power to displace deeply ingrained and oppressive symbolic structures.
