SOURCE: "'If Nobody Had to Die': The Problem of Mortality in Gertrude Stein's 'The Geographical History of America'," in Philological Quarterly, Vol. 70, No. 2, Spring, 1991, pp. 237-52.

In the following essay, Goebel probes the interwined crises of personal identity and mortality in Gertrude Stein's fiction.

While still quite young, Gertrude Stein overheard that her parents had planned for only five children. As the seventh child, it made her "feel funny" to think that her birth had depended upon the deaths of two earlier Stein children. This sudden awareness of mortality, or as she put it, this loss of the "everlasting feeling," haunted her the rest of her life. In Everybody's Autobiography, written at the age of sixty, she acknowledges:

Then there was the fear of dying, anything living knows about that, and when that happens anybody can think if I had died before there was anything but there is...