Henry Handel Richardson
and Otto Weininger1
He is always guest in her house. Always hers, always guest.
—Bianco Luno*
My grievance is that in their eyes I count for nothing…
—Clarice Lispector2
The allusions to Otto Weininger in Henry Handel (Ethel Florence Lindesay) Richardson’s 1908 novel Maurice Guest3 have been documented and accompanied with predictable surmises about Weininger’s contribution to the […]
the point of the death penalty
The meaning of capital punishment—insofar as it has a meaning and is not a reflex—is concerned with the distribution of responsibility. The field of responsibility is limited to moral agents. Constituted authorities are not moral agents. Individuals, who are, may or may not be missing the requisite nerve. Usually, they […]
Notes on Barbara Will, “Gertrude Stein and Zionism.”
Will offers an insightful discussion of the 1920 Gertrude Stein text:
439
The Reverie of the Zionist
I know all about the war I have been in France ever since the peace. Remember what was said yesterday.
We can think and we know that we love our country so.
Can we believe that […]
Gertrude Stein wrote the twenty-five-page manuscript, “The Modern Jew Who Has Given Up the Faith of His Fathers Can Reasonably and Consistently Believe in Isolation,” while a student at Radcliffe in 1896. “The essay is distinctly occasional and reads like an early work. It is, nonetheless, one of the few known pieces in which Stein […]
Introduction and Text
Gertrude Stein’s paper “Degeneration In American Women” first appears in the Appendix to biographer Brenda Wineapple’s 1996 book Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein. Wineapple writes:
I found the following essay in a nondescript folder tucked among the miscellaneous papers of Mary Mackall Gwinn Hodder.* Eight pages long, typed on legal-sized paper, and titled […]
Notes on Brenda Wineapple, Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein.
254
Stein judges her cousin Bird as lacking in moral courage.
It takes very much courage to do anything connected with your being unless it is a very serious thing.
256
from notes, “yes I say it is hard living down the tempers we are born with.” The idea makes […]
Notes on Catharine R. Stimpson, “The Mind, the Body, and Gertrude Stein.”
493
Loneliness weakens women. [It doesn’t weaken so much as kills men. It may take some time to convince them, though.]
497
Stein reads Weininger whose “dreary classic of male supremacy disguised as science” “exactly embodied” her views. (The last quote from Mellows.) [It must be “dreary” […]
Notes on Gertrude Stein and Adolf Hitler
In 1938 Gertrude Stein led a campaign to urge a Nobel Prize for Adolf Hitler. The story is disclosed by Gustave Hendrikksen, a former member of the Nobel committee. The committee, according to Hendrikksen, rejected the proposal: “politely but firmly, citing among their reasons the attitude of the Nazi […]
Notes on Gertrude Stein, Three Lives
Stein was first introduced to Otto Weininger’s book during the Winter of 1907-8 by her brother, Leo. (See Katz’s article and Stein’s recently discovered article on the degeneration of American women.) Weininger is perceptible here but as much as intellectual peer as inspiration, something to be kept in mind while […]
Notes on Gertrude Stein, Fernhurst, Q.E.D. and Other Early Writings
[Written before (but not long before) she read Weininger, Stein here begins to reveal her doubts about the plausibility of certain forms of feminism common at the turn of century. There is much here to help explain why she was primed for Weininger when she […]
