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| | Gertrude Stein, William James, and habit in the shadow of war Twentieth Century Literature - Find Articles |
 | | Stein's household felicities--her late mornings, her love of large meals, her relationships with her servants, her attachment to Basket the poodle (and subsequent poodles named Basket)--constituted a life of specific routines that, even when the two world wars ravaged Europe, she was exceptionally reluctant to give up. |
 | | Similarly, William James--Stein's mentor, with whom she studied in the 1890s when she was a student at Radcliffe--celebrates habit as a result of the freedom to choose, and the subsequent indication of a fully formed character. |
 | | Stein views habits as neither life denying in Pater's sense, nor prosaic: "Repeating is a wonderful thing in living being," she writes in The Making of Americans, a text in which she praises the "monotony" of middle-class life and lays out the sweeping proportions of her attraction to repetition, both linguistic and thematic (265). |
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