The Stein Aura: Gertrude Stein in the Twenty-First Century

The coda expands on the implications of the textual and visual artefacts of Stein’s masculine homosocial desires by cross-reading her ambivalent reflections on celebrity in Everybody’s Autobiography (1936) with her frequent appearances in the public consciousness from 2011 to 2012. Although Chapter One showed that by the early twenty-first century Stein had emerged as an icon both of modernism and of queer culture, that high standing has recently been challenged because of her homonational attitudes and masculine homosocial bonds with Vichy collaborator Bernard Fäy. If Gertrude Stein’s Masculinity uses psychoanalytic theory to present Stein as an important character in the stories of modernism and queer theory, that story will continue as she circulates into new contexts. As she does so, there will likely be further changes to the ways that her masculinity is made available for view, with unpredictable consequences for her iconicity.

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Stein, Gertrude (1874–1946)

Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism ◽

10.4324/9781135000356-rem127-1 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Bob Perelman

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Gertrude Stein ◽

First Century ◽

Public Figure ◽

Literary Achievement ◽

Critical Attention ◽

Language Writing ◽

The Usa ◽

Twenty First Century

Gertrude Stein was a modernist writer of the twentieth century, notable for the extremity of her stylistic innovations. During the first half of her career, her radical experimentation made her a target of mockery. In 1933, she published The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, a memoir of modernist activity in Paris written in a more accessible style. Intellectually serious but amusing and filled with gossip about charismatic figures (Picasso and Hemingway, among others), it was a surprise best seller in the USA and made Stein a celebrity; she remained an affectionately regarded public figure for the rest of her life. However, at her death and for decades after, she was not a respectable object of critical attention. To university critics, Joyce, Pound, and Eliot had set the standard for literary achievement, and Stein’s work seemed a formless self-indulgence. It was not until the latter decades of the twentieth century, with the rise of a number of related intellectual and artistic forces — feminist critics and poets, the general US innovative poetic tendency, Language writing, and post-structuralism — that Stein began to be taken seriously. In the twenty-first century, while her writing still raises controversy, it is prominent in the modernist canon.

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