A Genealogy of Genius in Gertrude Stein's “Four in America”

Keywords: Gertrude Stein, Genius, Modernism, Fascism, Genealogy

Abstract

This article investigates the contentious nature of Gertrude Stein's Four in America (1947) as an epitome of the fundamental tension at the core of her biography and oeuvre: caught between resistance to the totalizing power of Fascist politics which threatened her as a gendered and racialized subject living in Nazi occupied France and her conservative sympathies, Stein flipped her delicate position into an instrumental one, controversially navigating a grey zone of power and vulnerability and, ultimately, supporting the Vichy regime of Marshal Philippe Pétain. I contend that in Four in America Stein appropriates and counters patriarchal history by writing the counter-biographies of four American high-profile figures – a creative act which places a Jewish, female, and lesbian author in charge of the nation’s master narrative – but she critiques and reconfigures the canon only to reestablish it through the same male characters; in this sense, she traces a new genealogy of American society while also reproducing the status quo. This condition of powerful vulnerability grants the author the intellectual independence of a genius.

Author Biography

Alice Balestrino, Roma Tre University

Alice Balestrino is junior assistant professor of American literature at Università di Roma Tre. She got her PhD at Sapienza in 2019, and from 2019 to 2022, she was program coordinator and research assistant of IFUSS – International Forum for US Studies, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is currently working on a comparative analysis of transnational Marrano texts in the first half of the twentieth century; a project which has been awarded the Gendell and Shiner Fellowship of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Illinois. Her book Extra-Vacant Narratives: Reading Holocaust Fiction in the Post-9/11 Age elaborates on the concept of vacancy as a reading strategy for Holocaust uchronias and autofictions written in the aftermath of 9/11. She is also the author of essays on postmemory, Jewish American literature, alternate histories, and the representation of memory in graphic narratives. She is the recipient of the 2023 Siegel/McDaniel Award of the Philip Roth Society.

Published
2024-07-25