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A Critique of Mainstream Conceptions of Stein Editor's Note: Claire LeDoyen is Quail Bell's editorial assistant, as well as a young writer from Suffolk, Virginia now studying at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She recently wrote this paper as a final for one of her classes and, damn it, we're proud. Gertrude Stein’s identity is as hard to pin down as the meanings in her complex and wonderfully original literary works. Through reading biographies, correspondences between family members and friends and accounts of her from both herself and other people, one cannot create a distinctive mold in which to put Stein’s persona. She is depicted in fragments, labeled in one book as childish, in a letter, matronly; some sources say lively and others stoic; famed psychologist William James found her extremely intelligent while some critics feel that Stein was an unoriginal copycat, dawdling in the shadows of big brother Leo Stein. Making assumptions from a biographical lens to rebuild Stein’s personality is an impossible feat, especially since she and virtually anyone who would have met her have passed away. Generalizations about her poetry and prose are worthless, because her words hold such a variety of ingenuity, creativity and playfulness. Her literary work remains a treasure trove of unique and complex experiments in language and identity that gets lost in the constant barrage of criticism based on assumptions of her personality. Throughout sources on Gertrude’s life and work there are almost degrading (and sometimes surprisingly so) stances on her inferiority to the men she called brother and friend: mainly Leo and Pablo Picasso. This pervasive attitude allows for an easy dismissal of her revolutionary and incredibly complicated play with grammar, syntax and structure of literary forms. Perpetuators of Stein’s inferiority have long been swayed by the continual positioning of her under Leo, do not take into account her own conception of what it is to know a person, and forgo in their analysis and criticism Stein’s inclination toward self-mythologizing in her work. In Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company, James R. Mellow calls Gertrude a “satellite after a superior planet (27).” Susanna Pavloska tells us in Modern Primitives that Gertrude was often “lost” in the glory of Picasso, and is usually represented as an onlooker or stimulating patron1 in the world of Modernist art collection she found herself in the thick of at her and Leo’s Paris salon in their home at 27 rue de Fleures. Irene Gordon’s book about their lives as art collectors, Four Americans in Paris, is written in relation to Leo Stein, though it comes across that its focus on Leo’s primary role in his sister’s life is an attempt to discredit Gertrude. Biographies of Gertrude, the two’s older brother Michael and Michael’s wife Sarah are given in relation to Leo, whom the author calls Stein’s “guide and teacher (16).” The book posits Leo as the ringleader of the siblings’ art collections – “two of the most revolutionary collections of art ever assembled (13)”– through examples of “correspondence, diaries, photographs and papers (14).” However, accounts such as these are easily manipulated to present a prejudiced view of their subject. There is little discussion of what Gertrude had to say about herself in Four Americans. In fact the book raises pertinent questions about how anyone can know or even simply understand who and how an artist was only through texts written about her years ago as the author continually presents Gertrude Stein as what she “comes across as (17)” through letters and others’ accounts. The presentation of Gertrude Stein only on assumptions of how other people interpreted her is sharply one-sided and intrinsically inaccurate, and only further asserts her artificial inferiority. It can even be proven that Leo’s interpretation of his little sister is not much worth paying attention to when trying to get at the truth of Gertrude Stein. It seems to be widely accepted in the study of Gertrude Stein that her brother Leo, although usually considered an important intellectual aesthete, was flighty in his interests. The subjects of which he had knowledge of were quite vast, but he only ever obtained a shallow understanding of topics of interest to him. He is described as “unteachable,2” yet his understanding of the Modernist movement is assumed to be top-notch. His shallow understanding seemingly applied to his little sister as well. Although famous for being one another’s closest and most constant childhood companion, Leo is quoted in his memoir that “…despite constant companionship throughout our childhood and early youth, in which we talked endlessly about books and people and things, [we] never said a word to each other about our inner life.3” In light of Leo’s shallow knowledge of even Gertrude- her emotions, passions and private life - the descriptions and opinions he held about his little sister lose validity. Thus it is made evident that others’ accounts of the revolutionary writer should not be given so much credit. Not only do these books invalidate Stein by emphasizing Leo’s dominance in texts written by friends and critics, the events that the authors choose to inform their readers of add sway to the impression they give of Gertrude. For example, a few sources tell us about Gertrude’s special study with famous psychologist William James at Radcliffe College and the paper she co-published about their experiments called “Normal Motor Automatism,” and an award she received in grade school for an outstanding essay. However, Janet Hobhouse chooses to illustrate a childhood scene in the lives of the Stein siblings that shows Leo’s intellectual dominance. The two write “masterful pastiches” of Elizabethan plays, but Hobhouse focuses on Leo’s finished pastiche of a Marlowe play and the Shakespearean history that the younger Gertrude left unfinished4. Ultimately, this event is totally arbitrary, and should not be considered any indicator of Gertrude’s inferiority, even though it is positioned as such. Hobhouse does not include analysis of the small but meaningful two-year age gap between Gertrude and Leo, nor does she think about the plays that each Stein kid took on. There is no mention of the accessibility and humor of Christopher Marlowe’s work especially in comparison to the Shakespearean verse and dense subject matter of any one of the Bard’s histories. This may seem a picky critique, but such subtle assertions of the superiority of the female artist’s male comrades are some of the most dangerous enemies in the accurate presentation of women artists. Probably the most interesting problem in the study of Gertrude Stein is her penchant for self-myth and the tricky way she talks about herself in her writing. The beginning pages of Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein demonstrate this right off the bat. In the preface A Message from Gertrude Stein, the very first words are “I always wanted to be historical, from almost a baby on, I felt that way about it…5” This personal admittance sets the right tone for the way analyses of Stein should be taken on. In Vechten’s General Introduction to the collection, the first topic he discusses is “Steinese,” “the peculiar literary idiom invented by Gertrude Stein around 1910 and made familiar to a large American public by her admirers and non-admirers alike.” In this compilation of Stein’s work, the reader vaguely curious enough to read the intriguing Message and General Introduction is immediately prepared to encounter a writer talented in the performance of self-identity. Just like Stein herself, her distinctive “repetitive, illogical” and “sparsely punctuated” style was and remains a “scandal and a delight. 6” Despite unattractive reviews and having continually been given the status of “onlooker” in her broad social circle and in texts about her, Stein seems to pay no mind. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Stein writes about herself as the nexus of Modernism in France7 in the company of up and coming artists Matisse, Cezanne and Picasso, all three of whom she was intimate friends with. Not only were they companions, Stein wrote about each one of these men in a way that suggests a respect between gifted and groundbreaking artists, not an unoriginal woman of privilege desperately riding the coattails of her talented acquaintances. Her assumed muddy-mindedness might be a product of the misunderstanding (or lack of comprehension) of her experimental writing style. Her description of Picasso in Three Portraits of Painters is abstract stylistically but at its core is a very sensible account of the trajectory of a great painter and friend. To briefly readdress the problem of her prejudiced critical portrayal, it is exactly her radical gift to the literary canon that is used against her in the plentiful unfriendly reviews. One can look at a scathing report by BC Reid, who writes Stein off as an intelligible fraud. What Reid and other critics usually fight with is Stein’s particular way of communicating through writing, what Pavloska calls her perceived “inability” or “unwillingness8” to write a text one can easily follow. Never in discussing the difficulty of Stein’s narratives (or lack thereof) does anyone analyze the possibility of an intentional intelligibility in her work, which is really a key element to understand her literary style. What was so innovative about Stein was her special attention to words as materials of art, and putting the convention of narrative storytelling on the sidelines. Another factor to consider in Gertrude’s self-mythologizing is the idea present in the actions of the Modernist movement of artifice and deception. First, for this Modernist element to relate to Stein, one must accept her integral role in the production of Modernism. Then we can consider more deeply the facet of hoax in her work and persona as an intentional manipulation of truth and imagination for the purposes of self-creation. A keystone of Gertrude Stein’s literature is slippage of identity. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein writes about herself from the perspective of her partner Alice, and more obviously, is the author of this “autobiography,” meaning that Stein sees herself as Alice Toklas. What is uncertain is to what extent and frequency she assumes this identity. Not only does she later position herself as a key figure in Modernism, at the end of the first chapter Stein writes herself as a “genius,” one of at least the same caliber as Pablo Picasso9. Often Stein’s characters are put through an identical or similar experience that Gertrude experienced in her real life, such as the often-cited Adele in Stein’s Q.E.D. in which Adele deals with a lesbian relationship and summer tour of Europe that mimics a complicated lesbian experience and summer of traveling with Leo that Gertrude went through shortly before writing it10. In this vein of Stein’s dramatization of live events, another problem in Stein studies of her relatively difficult personal conception of identity and what makes a person a certain individual arises, if we are to trust “The Making of Americans” as a truthful portrayal of what Gertrude thought about human identity. She talks about all human beings “looking like someone else,” or, in some way resembling somebody that is not them, therefore never completely being the full version of the self that individual being represents. However, this allows for a broader and deeper conception of what it is to be an individual. Stein stresses repetition, a screamingly evident literary device in the piece, in identity, claiming that everything and everyone is always repeating, and what is truly them is what is repeated consistently throughout their life, and that the “completed history11” of a person can only be gained by sustained attention to their repetitions. A position about an ideal stage of personhood can even be teased out, as Stein suggests that a person’s “real being” and “bottom nature” is achieved when “the whole of them comes to be repeating in them,”12 or when someone’s repetition becomes a sustained repetition of their wholeness. In the current state of Stein biographies or biographical accounts, her own “repetition” is dwindled down to hiding in the shadows of Leo, leaving a skewed representation of both what society perceives as identity and what Gertrude Stein herself thought about personality. The pervasive dominance of her big brother has dominated thought about the revolutionary artist and art collector that was Gertrude Stein, and has invalidated analysis of Stein’s own work and thoughts as a way of understanding her. Despite this, her genius cannot be dismissed, and will continue to live on as a major contribution to literature. 1. Hobhouse, Janet. Everybody Who Was Anybody: A Biography of Gertrude Stein. New York: Putnam, 1975. Print. 2. Mellow, James R. Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company. New York: Praeger, 1974. Print. 3. Pavloska, Susanna. Modern Primitives: Race and Language in Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway and Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Garland Pub., 2000. Print. 4. Simon, Linda. "Gertrude Stein | Jewish Women's Archive." Gertrude Stein | Jewish Women's Archive. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Dec. 2013. <http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/stein-gertrude>. 5. Stein, Gertrude, and Renate Stendhal. Gertrude Stein: In Words and Pictures : A Photobiography. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin of Chapel Hill, 1994. Print. 6. Stein, Gertrude, and Vechten Carl Van. Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein,. New York: Random House, 1946. Print. 7. Sutherland, Donald. Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work. New Haven: Yale UP, 1951. Print. 1 Pavloska 1-4 2 Gordon 17 3 Hobhouse 11 4 Hobhouse 7 5 Stein and Vechten vi 6 Stein and Vechten ix 7 Pavloska 5 8 Pavloska 9 Stein and Vechten 5 10 Mellow 54, 58 11 Stein and Vechten 264 12 Stein and Vechten 275 CommentsComments are closed.
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