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FICTIONS OF SELVES: AUTO/BIOGRAPHIES OF GERTRUDE STEIN AND
ALICE B. TOKLAS
Zeynep Asya ALTUĞ *
Yonca DENİZARSLANI **
Introduction
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table,
Let us go, through certain half‐deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one‐night‐cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells,
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question
Oh, do not ask “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit
T. S. Eliot / The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Gertrude Stein’s fictions of selves evoke a particular epoch with particular types of characters
lived in Paris in early twentieth century through which the writer depicts her discontent with all kinds
of fixed notions such as civilization, authorship, selfhood, identity and representation. Thus, reading
these autobiographies, one recalls the mise‐en‐scéne of modernism depicted in T.S. Eliot’s The Love
Song of J.Alfred Prufrock: “Streets that follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent / To lead
you to an overwhelming question […]” Thus, let us go and make our visit into Gertrude Stein’s
autobiographical selves, which were spread out into multitudes of selfhoods denouncing a pact
between the selfhood and the name of the author as well as between the author and the text. Stein’s
transgression of this generic boundary can be felt from the title of The Autobiography of Alice B.
Toklas. Written by Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas’s autobiography collapsed the legitimacy of
traditional biography and autobiography as literary genres as well as truthful accounts of life writing.
The aim of this study is to analyze Gertrude Stein’s sensibilities on the matters of representation
including selfhood, identity, authenticity, and textuality with reference to her Everybody’s
Autobiography (1937) and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933).
Representatıon And Textualıty
To begin with the matter of representation, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is often
considered to be one of the most accessible works of Gertrude Stein. Projecting through her lifelong
partner Alice B. Toklas’s narration, Stein, in a way delineates the distinction between autobiography
and biography by creating Toklas as an indistinguishable personality from herself. With the
intentional imitation of Miss Toklas’s own manner, Stein’s ideological and ontological questionings
on the nature of writing and selfhood become an experience with the formal and conventional
*
Ege University, American Culture and Literature Department.
**
Ege University, American Culture and Literature Department.