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eality; and the mutual bond between her inner and outer reality is the essential aspect of her
writing. Lastly, antedating post‐structuralism, her ideas on textuality are impressive and innovating.
In her Everybody’s Autobiography, Stein highlights the distinction between selfhood and textuality.
Again she underlines that it is all the question of identity. Being a bestseller author with The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein admits that something has changed inside her. Now what she
wrote had a value because people wanted to pay for it. She asserts that since people wanted to pay
for her writing, her writing became a commodity and was now detached from her selfhood. Unlike
traditional realists and autobiographers she rejected the assumption that the writer and his / her text
could be identified. In order to transcend such conventions she invented her peculiar style in her
written language. Unless a writer invented a language of his / her own, an authentic portrait could
not be possible. So far as it is observed, Gertrude Stein’s fictions of selves can be read as inspirational
sources for today’s women’s life writing, which is also in search for alternative modes of
representation and textuality.
Keywords: Fragmentation, Textuality, Life writing, Womanhood, Selfhood
Zeynep Asya ALTUĞ
Ege University,
American Culture and Literature Department
Yonca DENİZARSLANI
Ege University,
American Culture and Literature Department
Notes
1
Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (Cambridge: Random House, Inc. Print, 1993), 28.
2
Gertrude Stein, “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.” Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein
(NY:Vintage Book Series,1962), 38.
3 Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (Cambridge: Random House, Inc. Print, 1993), 12.
4
Carl Van Vechten, “Introduction.” “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.” Gertrude Stein.
Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein (NY:Vintage Book Series,1962), xii.
5
Ibid, xii.
6
Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (Cambridge: Random House, Inc. Print, 1993), 41.
7
Ibid, 45‐6.
8
Gertrude Stein, “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.” Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein
(NY:Vintage Book Series,1962), 30.
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