SOURCE: “The Primitive in Gertrude Stein's ‘Melanctha,’” in New Mexico Quarterly Review, Vol. 20, 1950, pp. 358–65.

In the following essay, Braddy contends that “Melanctha” demonstrates aesthetic primitivism in its narrative form as well as in Melanctha's characterization.

Three Lives narrates the histories of three women in humble stations of life—these under the titles of “The Good Anna,” “Melanctha,” and “The Gentle Lena.” In each of these narratives Gertrude Stein employs repetition as a principal element in her style; but it is in the middle story, “Melanctha,” that the various forms of reduplication in words and sounds are most effectively utilized. For this reason, and also because the heroine Melanctha Herbert is negroid, I have chosen to examine this particular novelette as a revealing illustration of Stein's employment of primitive syntactical devices of narration in the development of a character who is not wholly civilized. Melanctha is not, on the...