Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein

Her Early Life

Born on February 3, 1874 in Allegheny Pennsylvania, Gertrude Stein grew up in a middle class home where her love for language flourished. The fifth and youngest child of Daniel and Amelia Stein, Gertrude spent much of her young life traveling and living in America and Europe, and becoming obsessed with reading and writing. In primary school she developed a fascination for sentences, a fascination that would into a love affair producing some of the greatest works of the century.

Stein was an exceptional woman of her time in that she studied in higher education. With the encouragement and memory of her father (who passed away suddenly in 1891), Stein entered RadcliffeCollege in 1893. Stein proved an exceptional student in the fields of philosophy and psychology, and established a special relationship with her professor, William James. While taking her final exam for James’ course, she wrote at the top of her paper that she did not “feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy” that day. James replied with a postcard the next day: “I understand perfectly how you feel. I often feel like that myself,” and then gave Stein the highest mark in the course. After Radcliffe, Stein went on to study medicine (specifically, gynecology) at JohnsHopkinsUniversity. She dropped the idea, however to travel in Europe, and to then land in New York. It was here that Stein wrote her first novel, Q.E.D., which would not be published until four years after her death.

Family & Rue 27

Family was a central element of Stein’s life. Her brother, Leo, two years her senior, came to be her closest companion, especially in their shared loss of both their mother and father. Leo was also a central figure in Stein’s artistic development and expression. In 1904, Gertrude and Leo moved in with one another in an apartment home at 27 Rue de Fleurus in Paris, France. Both Leo and Gertrude were avid collectors of art, and they transformed their home into a salon and hot spot for modern artists, writers, and critics. Gertrude and Leo’s home gradually went from a place for Saturday night dinner parties toa writing sanctuary for poets such as Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire. In 1906, Stein met her life-long companion and lover, Alice B. Toklas at a party in San Francisco. In 1910, Alice moved in with Leo and Gertrude at Rue 27, becoming a pivotal proofreader of Stein’s Three Lives and The Making of the Americans.

War & Fame

By 1912 Leo and Gertrude’s relationship became strained (most likely by Alice’s presence) and Leo moved out and broke ties with Gertrude completely by 1914. World War I approached and Gertrude and Alice decided to help out with the war effort in 1916 by joining the “American Fund for French Wounded.” Both women drove a Ford automobile which they nicknamed “Auntie” to deliver supplies to war-front hospitals. Gertrude’s first taste of fame came in 1933 after the war and with her publication of TheAutobiography of Alice B. Toklas, an autobiography of Gertrude Stein, written by Stein as if she were Alice B. Toklas. On October 24, 1934, Stein received a taste of celebrity status when she and Alice arrived in New Yorkto Stein’s name written in lights. The New York Times headlines read: “Gerty Gerty Stein is Back Home Home Back.” Throughout 1935 Gertrude and Alice spent a majority of their time living in the privacy of the country home in Bilignin, and in 1937 the women lost lease of their home at Rue 27. With the approach of World War II in 1939, Gertrude and Alice found themselves narrowly escaping a Nazi-occupied Paris and concentration camps. Both women would not return to Paris until 1944. In December of 1945, Gertrude complained of abdominal pains which were later diagnosed as colon cancer. The disease took her life on July 27, 1945.

Her Work

Stein’s life and works have been cited by many critics asa paradox. The early twentieth-century public was less than ready to receive the elements of her personal life, but the linguistic and literary innovation she brought to the twentieth-century has been heralded as the greatest achievements in Modernism. Stein was heavily influenced by the Naturalists of her era, and especially their deep-rooted psychological determinism, or the idea that there is at any instance one possible future. However, Stein differed from her contemporaries in that she believed that nihilistic despair (or the concern of living without meaning) could be transcended through the continual creation of new forms of art. In her work, Stein diverts dependence upon the “real world” and expresses a completely self-contained existence. Imitation was drastically limiting in Stein’s perspective. Stein herself said many times, “If you can do something, why do it?”

Cubist Influence

Stein was also heavily influenced by Cubism, a twentieth-century art movement pioneered by Pablo Picasso (and Stein, for both maintained close correspondences on the subject) which focused upon depicting subjects from multiple viewpoints rather than objects from one viewpoint. Cubist painting demanded to be looked at, not interpreted. Stein did not wish to “imitate” artists such as Picasso in her writing, but rather she opted for the same freedom to dislocate the previous forms and conventions of the literary tradition in which she found herself. Stein composed several of what she called “portraits” in her lifetime which were portrayals of real individuals, such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse formed through the experimentation of words rather than by paint. Biographer Michael Hoffman describes Stein’s process for writing a portrait by the following: “She began with her subject, sometimes only with its name; from there, she went on to create a verbal form; and the basis of its structure evolves from its internal relationships rather than from its echoes of the world external to it.” Stein also produced a variety of operas and plays in her lifetime, many of which remained unknown to the public due to their later publications. Her play, What Happened, A Five Act Play, remains for most critics, one of the most unique in that it can hardly be called a play. There are no characters, clear dialogue, and no action in the play what-so-ever. Stein dramatizes the creation of an event through the interspersing of details of a party. One of the more well-known of Stein’s operas was Four Saints in Three Acts, performed in New York City in 1934 with music composed by Virgil Thomson and performed by an all-black cast.

Tender Buttons

Tender Buttons is one of the best-known hermetic works of Stein. It’s publication in 1914 created a rift between friend and patron Mabel Dodge Luhan and Gertrude because Mabel had been working to place it with another publisher. Tender Buttons is a series of still-life studies in which Stein explores ways to name things by experimenting with syntax structure and meaning.

Works Cited for Powerpoint:

Hoffman, Michael J. Gertrude Stein. Boston, Twayne Publishers, 1976.

Stendhal, Renate, ed. Gertrude Stein: In Words and Pictures.Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1994.

“The World of Gertrude Stein – biography of an early twentieth century author and legend.” < Feb. 24, 2008.

Bibliography

Bridgman, Richard. Gertrude Stein in Pieces. New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1970.

Chodat, Robert. “Sense, Science and the Interpretations of Gertrude Stein.” Modernism/Modernity 12.4 (2005): 581-605.

Copeland, Carolyn F. Language & Time & Gertrude Stein. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1975.

Farland, Maria. “Gertrude Stein’s Brain Work.” American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography 76.1 (2004): 117-48.

Hoffman, Michael J. Critical Essays on Gertrude Stein. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1986.

Haas, Robert B. and Gallup, Donald C. A Catalogue of the Published and Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein. Folcroft: Folcroft Library Editions, 1971.

Hilder, Jamie. “After All One Must Know More Than One Sees and One Does Not See a Cube in Its Entirety: Gertrude Stein and Picasso and Cubism.” Critical Survey17.3 (2005): 66-84.

Knapp, Bettina L. Gertrude Stein. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1990.

Schoenbach, Lisi. “Peaceful and Exciting: Habit, Shock, and Gertrude Stein’s Pragmatic Modernism.” Modernism/Modernity 11.2 (2004): 239-59.

Stein, Gertrude. Geography and Plays. Boston: The Four Seas Company, 1922.

Stein, Gertrude. Portraits and Prayers. New York: Random House, 1934.

Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons. New York: Claire Marie, 1914.

Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1933.

Stein, Gertrude. The Making of Americans. Paris: ThreeMountains Press, 1925.

Stein, Gertrude. Three Lives. Random House: New York, 1958.

Wright, George T. “Gertrude Stein and Her Ethic of Self-Containment.” Tennessee Studies in Literature. 8.1 (1963):17-23.