1 - Gertrude Stein and “Negro Sunshine”

Summary

There may be no better beginning for the story of ethnic modernism in American prose literature than the ending of Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha: Each One as She May.” This story, which forms the central part of Three Lives, an important book that was first published in 1909, ends:

But Melanctha Herbert never really killed herself because she was so blue, though often she thought this would be really the best way for her to do. Melanctha never killed herself, she only got a bad fever and went into the hospital where they took good care of her and cured her.

When Melanctha was very well again, she took a place and began to work and to live regular. Then Melanctha got very sick again, she began to cough and sweat and be so weak she could not stand to do her work.

Melanctha went back to the hospital, and there the Doctor told her that she had consumption, and before long she would surely die. They sent her where she would be taken care of, a home for poor consumptives, and there Melanctha stayed until she died.

Finis

Readers who are used to nineteenth-century aesthetic conventions – one only has to think of Little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin or of Mimi in La Bohème – will be startled by the coldness of this “detached” death scene of Stein’s heroine. No effort is made to draw on the reader’s sympathy or to develop the narrative in a way that would sustain emotional engagement and identification.