The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is not an autobiography and not by Alice B. Toklas. Rather, it is a fictional text written by Gertrude Stein and populated by colorful characters that happen to share the names of real people, such as Alice Toklas, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and Ernest Hemingway (Rabin, 105). Its status as an American novel has been debated because of presumed categorical mutual exclusivity: novel (fiction) versus autobiography (nonfiction). Additionally, the text is set in Paris, and its author had not lived in America (or even visited) in the 30 years prior to its publication.
And yet, The Autobiography made Stein immensely popular among American readers, and it also holds an important place in the development of the modernist novel. It is a brilliant experiment in which Stein takes on the narrative voice of her beloved in order to occupy the discursive space of self and other simultaneously, exploring timelessly relevant questions about relationships, reality, identity, self-knowledge, and communication.
Covering the period between 1903 and 1932, The Autobiography adopts “Alice’s” chatty voice to describe the travels, social milieu, and artistic development of Gertrude Stein in the context of Stein and Toklas’s long-term domestic partnership. The text reads like a virtual Who’s Who of the literary and artistic expatriate scene in Paris’s Left Bank (including Ernest Hemingway, Carl Van Vechten, and Mabel Dodge) and the international artistic scene (for example, Picasso, Matisse, Juan Gris).
From a literary perspective, perhaps the most important aspect of the text is its relationship to and portrayal of time: The chronological overlay of chapter divisions is coupled with cyclical organization within each section. Such internal structuring devices include dinner parties, European travels, and social configurations, particularly the comings and goings of artists’ wives and mistresses. The text divides nearly everyone into geniuses and wives, with Stein an exemplar of the former and Alice of the latter. These devices create a “circular pattern of meaning” (Abraham, 96) that both complements and subverts the expected chronology.
Even the chapter divisions themselves are neither consistently divided nor strictly chronological: “Before I Came to Paris,” “My Arrival in Paris,” “Gertrude Stein in Paris, 1903–1907,” “Gertrude Stein Before She Came to Paris,” “1907–1914,” “The War,” and “After the War, 1919–1932.”
Although some argue that the text is more properly characterized as a narrative or a story as opposed to a novel (Abraham, 108; Rabin, 109), The Autobiography defies simple categorization. In contrast to the expectations set up by the title—namely that the text will be “a biography written by the subject about himself or herself [ . . . and focusing] on the author’s developing self”—the work seems more like a memoir, a text “in which the emphasis is not on the author’s developing self but on the people and events that the author has known or witnessed” (Abrams, 15).
And yet, it is fictional in content (and includes events that neither happened to “Alice” nor were witnessed by her), literary in form, and philosophical in purpose. Stein’s writing style—expansive, repetitive, and filled with run-on sentences—clearly displays the novelist’s willingness to abandon the “linguistic decorum” of earlier literature in favor of compelling content (Watt, 29).
Stein’s text also conforms to other criteria of novels: It offers realistic portrayals of plausible characters representing a range of experiences, focuses on an individual’s subjectivity, and rejects conventional plots (Watt, 10, 13, 32). Hence “Alice’s” avowal that Stein prefers to concentrate on everyday situations fits nicely with the defining focus of the genre: “she always says she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious. She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting” (83).
Further, and in true modernist form, Stein takes the mimetic aspect of novels to the highest possible degree. Instead of merely presenting a correspondence between art and life, The Autobiography provides an intimate glimpse into the life of art(ists).
Pushing the boundaries of autobiography and memoir, The Autobiography claims its novelistic birthright: “[literary] imperialism . . . [the] ability to take over features from other species and assimilate them into a new form” (Hunter, 58). In constituting a new variety of modernist novel, Stein’s Autobiography simultaneously reworks the spiritual autobiography made most famous by Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (Rabin, 107–108).
Stein herself instructs her readers (albeit belatedly) to read her text in the context of Defoe’s, claiming that she writes Alice’s autobiography “as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe” (252), a text that “created an angry sensation, catalyzing fierce debates over truth and fiction, author and protagonist,” as would Stein’s (Wagner-Martin, 202). Hence Stein subverts her own title, as if to show that expectations of unitary truth are not realistic in the modern age: “The Autobiography does lie. What packaging does not?” (Stimpson, 153–154).
Certainly critics discuss The Autobiography as a work of fiction, praising Stein’s characterization, for example, in a way that would not be appropriate for a nonfictional portrayal. The Gertrude Stein character is called one of author Stein’s “most successful heroines,” comparable to the equally fictional Melanctha Herbert of Three Lives (Dearborn, 178).
Thematically, The Autobiography questions the nature of the self (Chessman, 62); structurally, it offers an image of the self through an outsider’s view (Breslin, 152). In keeping with the novel genre’s fundamental didacticism (Hunter, 54), The Autobiography espouses the purpose of “tell[ing the reader] how two Americans happened to be in the heart of an art movement of which the outside world at that time knew nothing” (28), a subject of particular interest for “Gertrude Stein” who “always was, . . . always is, tormented by the problem of the external and the internal” (119).
Contrary to what some angered contemporaries believed, Stein’s purpose was neither self-aggrandizement nor gossip-mongering. Rather, Stein uses the lens of the beloved other to explore the growth of the self, and the voice of the beloved other to place the self within its social context. At the same time, Stein manages to transcend the very individual experience she portrays. Typical of modernism’s emphasis on the microcosmic (Cantor, 6), The Autobiography implicitly offers the development of the individual artist as a synecdoche for the development of modern art. That she does so in a way that is immensely readable and entertaining is all to her credit.
Sources
Abraham, Julie. Are Girls Necessary? Lesbian Writing and Modern Histories. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 6th ed. Fort Worth, Tex.: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1993.
Breslin, James E. “Gertrude Stein and the Problems of Autobiography.” In Critical Essays on Gertrude Stein, edited by Michael J. Hoffman, 149–159. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1986.
Cantor, Norman. Twentieth-Century Culture: Modernism to Deconstruction. New York: Peter Lang, 1988.
Chessman, Harriet Scott. The Public Is Invited to Dance: Representation, the Body, and Dialogue in Gertrude Stein. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989.
Dearborn, Mary V. Pocahontas’s Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Defoe, Daniel. The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. 1719. New York: Penguin Books, 1985.
Hunter, J. Paul. Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990.
Rabin, Jessica G. Surviving the Crossing: (Im)migration, Ethnicity and Gender in Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. 1933. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.
Stimpson, Catherine R. “Gertrude Stein and the Lesbian Lie.” In American Women’s Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory, edited by Margo Culley, 152–166. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992.
Wagner-Martin, Linda. “Favored Strangers”: Gertrude Stein and Her Family. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995.
Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.
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