Three Lives: Stories of the Good Anna, Melanctha, and the Gentle Lena

Overview

Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives presents three linked novellas set in the fictional seaport of Bridgepoint, a town modeled on Baltimore. Each narrative follows a working-class woman whose character is etched through Stein’s distinctive repetitions, plain diction, and gradual, circling revelations. The lives of the good Anna, Melanctha, and the gentle Lena unfold in compressed arcs of service, longing, and submission, showing how temperament, social constraint, and desire shape fate as surely as any plot twist.

The Good Anna

Anna Federner, a German immigrant and headstrong servant, makes her life’s work the ordering of other people’s lives. She manages the household of Miss Mathilda with brisk authority, bullies tradesmen into fair dealing, adopts strays, dogs, maids, and wayward friends, and dispenses thrift and charity with equal force. Her closest attachment is to Mrs. Lehntman, a sentimental midwife whose warmth and easy optimism draw Anna’s hard devotion. Their friendship frays when Anna realizes Mrs. Lehntman mixes generosity with self-interest and a flair for schemes; Anna’s rigid idea of goodness cannot forgive warm-hearted imprudence. After illnesses, money strains, and a failed attempt to elevate Mrs. Lehntman’s prospects, Anna returns to Miss Mathilda’s service, worn down by her labors. Surgery and decline end her career of management. Even at the last she worries over accounts and animals, trying to keep the world decent and exact. Stein shows a life spent in fierce usefulness: goodness as control, love as nagging care, a servant’s authority as both armor and cage.

Melanctha

The central, longest tale turns from order to restlessness. Melanctha Herbert, a young Black woman of mixed parentage, drifts through Bridgepoint searching for wisdom and strength in experience. Impatient with steady work and safe respectability, she finds models and companions in two figures: Jane Harden, a worldly, education-hungry friend whose influence teaches Melanctha to test boundaries, and Jeff Campbell, a conscientious Black physician whose pride is rational control. Jeff admires Melanctha’s intensity yet resists her demands for emotional abandon; he wants mutual trust through talk and principle, while she asks for risk, proof, and surrender. Their prolonged courtship is an argument about how to live, feeling versus reason, daring versus caution, and it collapses under Jeff’s fear of being lost in Melanctha’s wandering heart. Later she turns to Jem Richards, a confident gambler, who speaks the language of freedom she craves but will not commit himself. Friendships sour, gossip spreads, and Melanctha’s restlessness becomes exhaustion. Illness and poverty finally close around her. Stein’s repetitions and incremental variations suspend events inside states of mind, portraying Melanctha as a woman whose desire to live largely runs up against the narrow moral and social pathways available to her.

The Gentle Lena

Lena, another German immigrant, embodies surrender rather than striving. Timid, obedient, and easily led, she moves from one household to another, always pleasing, rarely speaking her wants. An aunt places her as a servant; the household’s small frictions bruise her soft nature, yet she endures without complaint. A marriage is arranged with Herman Kreder, an unremarkable young man dominated by his practical mother. Courtship happens more to Lena than with her; marriage brings no new agency, only a transfer of dutiful habits from employers to in-laws. Pregnancy quietly threatens her weak health. In labor, Lena fades; she dies as gently as she lived, and her infant does not long survive. Stein renders a life scarcely resistant to circumstance, suggesting a tenderness that is, in this world, indistinguishable from erasure.

Design and Emphasis

Across the three lives, Stein stages variations on care, desire, and submission. Anna compels and protects until control consumes her; Melanctha quests after feeling until the quest defeats her; Lena yields until she disappears. The prose refuses ornament yet accumulates force through rhythm and return, making character a pattern of repeated acts and spoken phrases. Bridgepoint’s streets, kitchens, and back rooms hold these women in their economic and social places, but their temperaments are the deeper confines. The result is a triptych in which ordinary lives are made strange and exact, and fate is the sum of habits, hopes, and the words people can bear to say.

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