Three Lives Themes & Symbols

The book ends three times, and each ending refuses consolation. Anna's last line, that she led a hard and troubled life, is almost an obituary written by the world that worked her to death. Melanctha's death from consumption in a home for poor consumptives, with no one to remember her, reads as the book's true climax: the woman who wanted real feeling dies of a wasting disease, feeling nothing much at all, unmourned. Lena's ending is the starkest, 'Lena died, and there was nothing more to say about her,' a sentence that performs the erasure it describes. One reading: Stein is showing lives that society valued so little it could not narrate their deaths with feeling. Another: the flat endings are mercy, a refusal to sentimentalize women who were never given the material for a dramatic life. There is also the reading that the prose itself, with its circling repetitions, is the only memory these women get, the book remembering them when nobody in Bridgepoint does. It lands because the flatness is not coldness; it is the sound of a world that never learned to notice these women while they were alive.