Stein and Anderson

Wang Chen

ENGL 311

Dr. Drake

Feb. 2009

QQ 3

1.      The slight change and movement in Stein’s Hands.

2.      What influence does Stein have on Anderson? What are their differences and similarities?

When I first read Stein’s “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene,” it really drove me into a confusing situation. I did not know what she wanted to express and just found that she repeat the same sentence again and again. But when I read it carefully, I began to realize that every sentence has some slight change from the other.

For instance, the second paragraph:

        They were both gay there, they were regularly working there both of them cultivating their voices there, they were both gay there. Georgine Skeene was gay there and she was regular in being gay, regular n not being gay, regular in being a gay one who not being gay longer than was needed to be one being quite a gay one. They were both gay then there and both working there then (1198).

At first, it leaves a confusing impression on readers. She just puts so many similar sentences together and repeats them. It seems full of twists and turns and hard to understand. But when we notice the minutiae and details, the personality, characteristics of the character becomes more and more clear; this result is what Stein wants to reach.

According to Stein’s words in “How Writing Is Writing,” when she is writing, she always has a conception of whole. She says, “I had this idea of a whole thing” (490); “and I conceived it as a whole made up of its parts” (490). It is what Stein’s writing style different from other. It is a new and novel paper for me. I think it is really interesting style that I had never met before.

Stein points out, she “would wait until I got a picture of you as individuals and then I’d change them until I got a picture of you as a whole” (495). Let’s take the same paragraph of the story as an example. At first, we just know that Helen and Skeene are just gay there, and then through her following sentences, we can realize that how their life be, what they do there and the goal of their life. Readers cannot understand the characters immediately; they begin to know them bit by bit, step by step. The more they read the more things they can discover. It is what makes me feel really interesting.

And Stein is one of writers who have a big influence on Sherwood Anderson. Just as Anderson himself says, when he seeks a new way of writing, he meets Stein’s work “Tender Buttons.” It makes him excited, and he tries to deal with “words separated from sense” as Stein does. They both emphasize more on form than plot. Readers merely cannot find too much plot in Stein’s stories, such as her “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene,” she is just telling.

Compared Anderson with Stein, maybe Anderson’s have more plot, but still not much. Words are only the surface, what they do is trying to move the audience, let them know the deep meaning they want to say behind a story. In his “Hands,” Anderson does not tell much about what happens. The only incident describes in detail is what happens when Biddlebaum was a teacher in the Pennsyvania town. On the contray, Anderson just describes a man who named “Wing Biddlebaum” and his hands. Their new writing style challenges American tradition and give the short story a totally novel form. But as far as I concerned, it is also what makes readers a little more difficult to understand their works as they give each words