SOURCE: “Stein's ‘Melanctha’: An Education in Pathos,” in The Ethics of Intensity in American Fiction, University of Texas Press, 1981, pp. 143–62.

In the following essay, Hilfer argues that “Melanctha” is a radical empiricist work in the vein of the philosophy of William James, in which “mood is a phenomenological reality.”

1. Stein as Radical Empiricist

There is a passage in “Melanctha,” the great middle story of Gertrude Stein's Three Lives, that captures a long moment of silent tension between its two central characters: “They sat there then a long time by the fire, very silent and not loving, and never looking to each other for it. Melanctha was moving and twitching herself and very nervous with it. Jeff was heavy and sullen and dark and very serious in it.”¹ The “it” that they react to in such different ways has the same antecedent as in Henry James's late fiction, the...