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    A Study Guide for Gertrude Stein's "Ida"
    A Study Guide for Gertrude Stein's "Ida"
    A Study Guide for Gertrude Stein's "Ida"
    Ebook45 pages33 minutes

    A Study Guide for Gertrude Stein's "Ida"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Gertrude Stein's "Ida," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJun 15, 2016
    ISBN9781535825542
    A Study Guide for Gertrude Stein's "Ida"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Gertrude Stein's "Ida" - Gale

      08

      Ida

      Gertrude Stein

      1941

      Introduction

      A good way to read Gertrude Stein's 1941 novel Ida is aloud. The prose is musical, its rhythm is sing-song and comparable to children's stories. Its lilt carries the reader along even though there is no conventional plot development, conflicts, or resolutions, and little actually seems to happen.

      Usually a novel tells a story, developing a narrative of events connected to each other by cause and effect. One thing leads to another; tensions are created; tensions are resolved. As characters act and react to events and to each other, their human characteristics and concerns are revealed. These characters and their concerns, if the author is skillful, become important to the reader. The most common responses to a story are: What is going to happen next? and Why? Indeed, a story usually shows how the past has led to the present, how the present becomes the future, how the characters direct events, and how events direct them.

      In Ida Stein sabotages the novel, destroying the tensions that make a reader keep reading to find out what happens next. She eliminates cause and effect from the narrative. What happens in Ida is not, fundamentally, a story with a plot (a sequence of events moved forward by cause and effect), but is instead a musical flow of words tracing perception and consciousness.

      Ida uses, in distorted form, many incidents from Stein's life, her quests for love, her achievement of fame, her artistic focus on the consciousness of her own perception. Ida is the story of a lonely woman whose parents die soon after her birth. The title character, Ida, becomes well known for her beauty, but she is not genuinely known by anyone. Thus, the novel traces Ida's attempts to find a true companion.

      In Ida Stein does not attempt to present the psychology of her protagonist's actions, reactions, and interactions, as most novelists would. Instead, thoughts, observations, feelings, dreams, and apparently actual occurrences are treated with the same tone, as if they are not distinguishable from each other. Perception, as it occurs spontaneously, independent of knowledge of what is actually happening, guides Stein's narration. Reading Ida is like sitting on a bus overhearing a conversation between two strangers. They talk about things with which one is unfamiliar, as one looks around, taking in the surroundings, and being aware, at the same time, of one's own thoughts reveries, and associations.

      A somewhat more recent printing of Ida is available in Gertrude Stein: Writings, 1932-1946, edited by Catherine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman, and published by the Library of America in 1998.

      Author Biography

      The youngest of five children, Gertrude Stein was born on February 3, 1874, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. Her parents, Daniel and Amelia Stein, of German-Jewish descent, were financially successful and determined to

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