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

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.