Gertrude Stein and William James:
Contacts - Judgements - Influences

von: Sylvi Burkhardt

Contents

1.0 Introduction  1

2.0 Contacts - from teaching to friendship  2

3.0 Judgments - “Yes, a thousand times yes”  4

4.0 Influences and how “thought goes on”  6

5.0 Conclusion  14

6.0 Bibliography  16

1.0 Introduction

William James, psychologist and philosopher, and Gertrude Stein, one of the most influential writers of modernism, shared more than just a teacher and student relationship. According to Gertrude Stein herself, William James was the most significant influence upon her of anyone at Harvard, and one of the most important influences of her whole life. James had an almost legendary ability to inspire students and he awakened Stein’s interest in human personality, which remained her dominant and prevailing interest.

In the first section of my work, I will give some impressions of James’s and Stein’s meetings throughout their lives. Over a period of several years James was Stein′s teacher and made a profound and lasting impact on her. She participated eagerly in discussions and experiments on the subconscious, a to pic of great interest to James. Connected to the first section about ‘Contacts’ is the following one on ‘Judgments’. Here I will try to outline some of Stein′s subjective views upon her teacher and I will show James’s understanding of his highly independent student.

The remarkable influence that James had on Stein′s writing will be the theme of the section about ‘Influences’. Stein′s and James′s ideas seem to correspond significantly. James’s theory of the stream of thought shall be especially considered here, for a lot of aspects of it were observed by Stein and modified and embodied into her own style. James in a way established a certain pattern of how consciousness works and enabled Stein to use it and develop it further. This led to an extraordinary style, which also influenced other writers of modernism, for instance Hemingway. My aim is to give some insights into similar thoughts and philosophy of James’s and Stein’s writing. It is quite impossible to state the complete influence that James had on Stein′s writings and this is not the intention of this work. This work shall rather give a justifiable impression of their similar theories and of James’s direct influence upon Stein. The signs of their interaction can be seen both in Stein’s personal statements and in her distinctive and innovative style, which will be the basis of my argumentation.

2.0 Contacts - from teaching to friendship

The lives of William James and Gertrude Stein touched in the period of her early studies in Radcliffe in 1893. In her freshman year, Stein took Psychology I, an introductory course, which was lectured by James and others. Here she read his book The Principles of Psychology, which influenced and shaped her later writings. James was well known among his students as energetic and unconventional. He had "an inveterate sense of humor"1. As a pragmatist, he believed in knowledge gained from direct experience to be more valuable than from the knowledge about the subject. Therefore he challenged his students, asking them about their own thoughts and ideas. Stein also seemed to be won over by his extraordinary way of teaching and his philosophy. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein writes about herself through the eyes of Alice B. Toklas: "William James delighted her. His personality and his teaching and his way of amusing himself with himself and his students all pleased her."2 In her sophomore year, Stein took a course of laboratory experimentation taught by Hugo Münsterberg. She was an excellent student, which induced Münsterberg to write her: "... you were to me the ideal student, just as a female student ought to be." 3 Due to her success James invited her to take his seminar in her junior year, which included several psychological experiments. James was particularly interested in the phenomena of automatic writing. In the laboratory he aimed to find out whether automatic writing derives from the subconscious or from what he termed the "summer-land". Thus the subjects were tested under different conditions such as fatigue or distraction. Stein seemed to have a certain distrust of the unconscious and subconscious mind, which made her note some horror visions into one of her Radcliffe themes.

These experiments that were led by James revealed one noteworthy fact about Stein′s writing which can in retrospect be seen as an allusion to her later style. While experimenting with Leon M. Solomons, Stein herself had been the subject. The outcome of this attempted "spontaneous" automatic writing resembled in a way her later developing repetitive style: "When he could not be the longest and thus to be, and thus to be, the strongest." 4 Decades later some critics however claimed that Stein′s writing would be a sort of automatic writing from her student days. But Stein herself always intensely denied this accusation: She had not “been doing automatic writing, we always knew what we were doing.”5 (′We′ meaning Solomons and Stein herself.)

[...]

1 James R. Mellow, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company (London: Phaidon Press, 1974) 31.

2 Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (London: Penguin Group, 2001) 87.

3 Mellow, Charmed Circle, 32.

4 Mellow, Charmed Circle, 33.

5 Mellow, Charmed Circle, 33.