Abstract
In 1903, in the aftermath of a disastrous love affair, and four years before she met Alice B. Toklas, the woman who would become her lifelong partner, Gertrude Stein wrote Q.E.D., a roman à clef that remained unpublished until after her death. In it, she recorded the complications of her first serious relationship, persistently analysing her emotional and intellectual responses to the interactions within the triangle of women in which she found herself. Towards the end of the narrative, she writes of Adele (who plays the part of Stein herself):
She had no real misgiving but she was deeply unhappy. Her unhappiness was the unhappiness of loneliness not of doubt. She saved herself from intense misery only by realizing that the sky was still so blue and the countryside so green and beautiful. The pain of passionate longing was very hard to bear. Again and again she would bury her face in the cool grass to recover the sense of life in the midst of her sick despondency.1
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Notes
Gertrude Stein, ‘Q.E.D.’, in Three Lives (London: Penguin, 1990), 235.
Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Vintage, 1933).
See Ulla E. Dydo, Gertrude Stein, The Language that Rises, 1923–1934 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 546. Dydo points out that the acceptance of the Autobiography by Harcourt Brace marked a new ‘phase’ in Stein’s career, which was characterized by ‘the marketing of the Autobiography, [and] of Stein herself’.
See, for example, Janet Flanner, who describes Toklas as the ‘friend’ who ‘lives with’ Stein (Paris Was Yesterday: 1925–1939 [London: Angus and Robertson, 1972], 90); and Edmund Wilson, for whom Toklas is Stein’s ‘friend and companion of twenty-five years’ (‘“27 rue de Fleurus”, A Review by Edmund Wilson’, review of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, by Gertrude Stein, The New Republic, 11 October 1933, reproduced in ‘Review-a-Day’, The New Republic Online [2003], http://www.powells.com/review/2003_07_31.html).
Catharine R. Stimpson, ‘Gertrude Stein and the Lesbian Lie’, in American Women’s Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory, ed. Margo Culley (Madison, London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 154.
Georgia Johnston, The Formation of 20th-Century Queer Autobiography: Reading Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf, Hilda Doolittle and Gertrude Stein (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 2. Johnston is primarily concerned with Lifting Belly in this work, rather than with the Autobiography, but the citation above refers to lesbian modernism more generally.
Franziska Gygax, Gender and Genre in Gertrude Stein (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1998), 62.
Cynthia Merrill, ‘Mirrored Image: Gertrude Stein and Autobiography’, Pacific Coast Philology 20.1 (1985): 14.
Gabriele Griffin argues that the Autobiography ‘present[s] a female protagonist focusing on an other as opposed to a self’, in her discussion of the way in which women’s autobiographies are interpreted in terms of an ‘autonomous’ self, in spite of the fact that the ‘self’ is often defined in such works as ‘relational’ (‘What Is [Not] Remembered: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas’, in Women’s Lives/Women’s Times: New Essays on Auto/Biography, eds Trev Lynn Broughton and Linda Anderson [New York: State University of New York Press, 1997], 143).
Gertrude Stein, ‘Ada’, in Gertrude Stein: Writings 1903–1932 (New York: Library of America, 1998), 277.
Leo Stein wrote to Weeks: ‘It’s the first time I ever read an autobiography of which I knew the authentic facts, and to me it seems sheerly incredible’ (cited in Diana Souhami, Gertrude and Alice [San Francisco and London: Pandora, 1991], 194).
See Eugene Jolas, ed., Testimony against Gertrude Stein (The Hague: Servire, 1935). For a comprehensive reading of Testimony against Gertrude Stein, see Darcy L. Brandel, ‘The Case of Gertrude Stein and the Genius of Collaboration’, Women’s Studies 37.4 (2008): 371–92.
See Randa Dubnick, The Structure of Obscurity: Gertrude Stein, Language and Cubism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 4–5; Donald Pizer, American Expatriate Writing and the Paris Moment: Modernism and Place (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 35; and Marianne DeKoven, ‘Gertrude Stein and Modern Painting: Beyond Literary Cubism’, Contemporary Literature 22.1(1981): 82.
Charles Caramello, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and the Biographical Act (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 123.
William James, Psychology: Briefer Course (1892; repr., Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press, 1984), 145.
Michael G. Johnson and Tracy B. Henley, Reflections on The Principles of Psychology: William James after a Century (Hillsdale, NJ and London: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1990), 271.
See, for example, Robert S. Lubar, ‘Unmasking Pablo’s Gertrude: Queer Desire and the Subject of Portraiture’, The Art Bulletin 79.1 (1997), 68; Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 2:250–1; Smith, Subjectivity, Identity and the Body, 77; and Blanche Wiesen Cook, ‘“Women Alone Stir my Imagination”’, 730–1. Cook does not actually refer to the Autobiography, but hers is an interesting early critique of the heterosexism and misogyny that she perceived as grounding the relationship between Stein and Toklas.
See Janet Malcolm, Two Lives (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2007), 62; and Ulla E. Dydo, ‘Stanzas in Meditation: The Other Autobiography’, Chicago Review 35.2 (1985): 12.
Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press, 2007), 5.
Woolf had written to Roger Fry that she was unsure whether Stein’s ‘contortions [were] genuine and fruitful’ or only ‘spasms’ (cited in J.H. Willis, Leonard and Virginia as Publishers: The Hogarth Press, 1917–41 [Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992], 126).
Virginia Woolf, 9 June 1926, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982) 3:89.
Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York, Zone Books, 2002), 52.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet (1990; repr., Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2008), 3.
Mary E. Galvin, Queer Poetics: Five Modernist Women Writers (Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 1999), 42.
Carolyn Faunce Copeland, Language & Time & Gertrude Stein (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1975).
Gertrude Stein, ‘Melanctha’, in Three Lives (London: Penguin, 1909), 60.
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© 2012 Sashi Nair
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Nair, S. (2012). ‘Gertrude, the world is a theatre for you’: Staging the self in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. In: Secrecy and Sapphic Modernism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230356184_5
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