Gertrude stein poems

When Gertrude was an infant, the Stein family left Pennsylvania and traveled back to Europe. Stein spent her early years in Austria and later in France. In 1879, the Steins returned to America, settling first in Baltimore, where Amelia Stein had relatives, and then, in 1880, moving to Oakland, California, where Stein spent the rest of her youth. Of Oakland she was later to utter the famous remark, “There is no there there,” claiming that she could no longer discover her youthful memories in the changed community. Growing up, she countered a lack of cultural stimulation by reading voraciously. Shakespeare, Scott, Richardson, Fielding, and Wordsworth were among her favorite authors.

After both parents died—her mother in 1888 and her father in 1891—Stein’s eldest brother, Michael, moved his four siblings to San Francisco, where he directed a street railway company. In 1892, with her brother Leo and sister Bertha, Stein moved to Baltimore to live with an aunt. Throughout Stein’s youth, Leo was her closest companion and confidante. When he decided to leave Baltimore to enroll at Harvard, Stein followed without hesitation.

Because Harvard was closed to women, in the fall of 1893 Stein enrolled at the Harvard Annex, the precursor to Radcliffe College, where she studied for four years, graduating in 1897. In a composition class in 1896, Stein wrote “The Modern Jew Who Has Given Up the Faith of her Fathers Can Reasonably and Consistently Believe in Isolation,” an essay that reflects her rejection of Jewishness as religion in favor of race, which she argues should be preserved by the prohibition of intermarriage. Stein studied with William James, George Santayana, Josiah Royce, and Hugo Munsterberg, among others, and later cited James as the most significant influence of her college years. Stein worked in James’s psychology laboratory, carrying out experiments in automatic writing that became the basis of her first publication, “Normal Motor Automatism” (coauthored with a classmate, Leon Solomons), which was published in the Psychological Review in 1896.

Although some critics later connected Stein’s experimental writings to these laboratory experiments, it is more likely that the experiments inspired Stein’s interest in subconscious layers of personality. In early notebooks and various literary portraits, one can see Stein attempting to discover the “bottom nature,” as she put it, of her friends, acquaintances, and her own personality. Because Stein expressed an interest in studying psychology, James suggested that she continue her education at the Johns Hopkins Medical School. Following his advice, she began to study at Johns Hopkins in the fall of 1897. But her enthusiasm for scientific coursework soon waned, and her grades plummeted.

Besides disappointment in her studies, Stein, not for the first time, suffered in her personal life. Her occasional writings during her undergraduate years at Radcliffe reveal a troubled and depressed young woman, unable to envision herself fitting into such prescribed roles as wife and mother. Her “red deeps,” as she termed her tumultuous feelings, became exacerbated at Johns Hopkins, where her love for another woman was not reciprocated. This emotional crisis made its way into her first extended piece of fiction, Things As They Are (1903), which was published posthumously.