SOURCE: “‘Melanctha’: The Costs of Mind-Wandering,” in Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis, Cornell University Press, 1990, pp. 12–54.

In the following essay, Ruddick determines “Melanctha” to be Stein's conscious break with nineteenth-century literary standards.

Gertrude Stein thought of herself as having spent her life escaping from the nineteenth century into which she had been born. This [essay] is about the ambivalent beginnings of that escape. With the story “Melanctha,” Stein made her first leap into modernist modes of representation; she herself described the story (immodestly but plausibly) as “the first definite step away from the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century in literature.”¹ Yet the text looks backward at the same time.

“Melanctha” carries on a private conversation with William James, Stein's college mentor and the central figure in the early drama of her self-definition as a modernist. Along one of its axes, Stein's story reads as a...