Now, at no point in time was this use of capital letters considered to be convention, and we can assume Stein is doing this intentionally. It's not easy to say what exactly she means by it, however. I will, for my part, submit that given her naturally occurring patriotism, she simply has a strong sense of national identities. Thus, she feels it necessary to pay the deference to a given nation by capitalizing it when using it, but when describing someone's nationality, she merely views it as another part of one's identity, and does not see it fit for capitalization. However, I'd be interested to see what other interpretations people have for this strange phenomenon.
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Racism
We discussed this in class a good deal, but one salient point that I don't recall anyone raising in class was this: when discussing nationalities, she never capitalizes the proper adjective form. Even when exhibiting what might be called racialist tendencies, she writes on page 125, "Gertrude Stein and spaniards are natural friends." In more neutral moments, as when describing Kahnweiler on page 108, she persists in this habit, writing, "Kahnweiler was a german married to a frenchwoman and they had lived for many years in England." This second example also shows how she doesn't hesitate to use capital letters when explicitly naming a country.
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2 comments:
I agree with Ross that Stein's lack of capitalization in describing one's nationality is purposeful; however, one key factor leads me to believe that she is not viewing nationality as just another part of identity. Stein describes a woman as "...an ardent Catholic who took her old Presbyterian mother from one convent to another" (p.54). As you can see, Stein blatantly capitalizes religion. To me, this means that religion is a more significant indicator of identity than nationality. Does anyone have another interpretation of Stein's purpose?
As far as I know she capitalizes nouns like "Spain" and "Europe," while not doing so on adjectives. So I guess she acknowledges the existance of nations/continents/cities geologically, but she lets the readers to think about how we lable one another with these names of regions.
Many Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese think they can distinguish people from the three countries by their looks. But when some of them were shown photos of random people from each country to identify the nationalities, most of them didn't even get half of them right. Basically, people have a fixed image of how people from each nation should look like, and view one another through that frame. Religion and art movements are relatively organized groups of people having similar tastes and beliefs. However, nationalities are more of a lable put on people by others. People tend to make more arbitrary assumptions--like the stereotypical images of Japanese, Chinese and Koreans--about someone by where he is from or where he seems to be from.
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