Gertrude Stein’s Habits and Habitats

This thesis explores formal shifts in the work of Gertrude Stein. Beginning in the Harvard Psychological Laboratory in 1893, it traces the evolution of her artistic approaches as her interests develop and cross the borders of psychological investigation into the modernist fields of literary portraiture, novelistic experimentation, and operatic performance. It seeks to understand a plurality of influences on Gertrude Stein’s creative work and considers a multiplicity of philosophies and ideas and individuals that have an effect on Stein’s development as an artist, broadly categorising this plurality as the intellectual habitat within which Stein lives and works. This thesis constructs a biography of method, a chronological history of Stein’s developing creative practices, and claims that her time in the Harvard Psychological Laboratory constitutes both the beginning of this journey and a lasting influence on her life and work. The method is procedural, and to that end the materials consulted and interrogated come from a myriad of sources: college assignments, published psychological studies, working notes, diaries and correspondence, multiple drafts of poems, operatic scores, and published works in journals and books. The approach makes extensive use of archival materials and juxtaposes sources, conducting close readings of famous texts and then placing these alongside unknown fragments of college work. This echoing of ideas across forms and periods is fundamental to one of the claims of this project: that the environments Stein was a part of had a vital and enduring effect on her artistic production. In uncovering obscure fragments of juvenilia, conducting dynamic readings, and juxtaposing known and unknown texts, this thesis seeks to view Stein with new eyes, and to challenge our established understandings of her canonical texts.