SOURCE: “Continuity of Romantic Irony: Stein's Homage to Laforgue in Three Lives,” in Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 12, No. 2, June, 1975, pp. 147–58.

In the following essay, Wood considers Three Lives as a conscious literary homage to the French Romantic ironist Jules Laforgue.

The epigraph at the beginning of Gertrude Stein's first published book may be considered archetypical of the utterances of Jules Laforgue, the short-lived, post-Baudelairean poet whom Warren Ramsey has called “the greatest of French Romantic ironists”¹: “Donc je suis un malheureux, et ce n'est ni ma faute, ni celle de la vie” (“I'm unhappy of course, and it's neither my fault nor life's”).² The major hallmarks of the mature Laforguean style and attitude are clearly present here: the peculiar combination of pessimism and light-heartedness; the intentionally ineloquent, conversational style; and the ironic joining of the “dissenting voices of instinct and judgment” (Ramsey, p. 238). But Stein seems to be...