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

Three Lives, Stein’s collection of three biographical portraits of lower-class women, combines French literary realism with American psychological theory. Two stories describe the monotonous lives of Anna and Lena, two German servant girls in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Williams James’s psychological theories inspired Stein’s episodic style, which transports the reader directly into the characters’ consciousness, especially in “Melanctha,” the longest of the three stories. The psychological drama of Three Lives consists in the protagonists’ search for the right words to express their identities. Trapped in their socially realistic, simplistic vocabulary and in perpetually repetitive speech patterns, these women fail to communicate their dreams of love and emotional fulfillment.