Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory

stein’s queer modernism

The text’s treatment of gender and sexuality obliquely inflects its account of Stein’s early years in Paris, even though the relevance of these factors is not immediately apparent. The Autobiography foregrounds modern painting and the art world’s rising stars by placing Stein’s career as a writer and an art collector before her childhood in the narrative. Toklas emphasizes that Stein’s capacity for perception is superior to that of others in that she was able to see the painting’s innovation well before the general public did. Upon first viewing Henri Matisse’s fauvist painting La Femme au chapeau at the 1905 Salon d’Automne, for example, most “people were roaring with laughter at the picture and scratching at it. Gertrude Stein did not understand why, the picture seemed to her perfectly natural. . . . This picture by Matisse [End Page 53] seemed perfectly natural and she could not understand why it infuriated everybody” (32). Much as in the book’s accounts of her haircut’s reception, this passage is narrated retrospectively, twenty years after the exhibit—after Matisse’s work had ceased to be shocking. Toklas positions Stein as ahead of her time and possessed of an unusual capacity to see from a perspective other than that of the hegemonic gaze elicited by earlier styles of painting. Her vision is advanced, and thus her look at Matisse’s painting is different from that of those around her. Much as the text’s juxtaposition of Picasso’s, Stein’s, and Anderson’s divergent ways of looking at the “Julius Caesar” haircut mobilizes the fracturing of perception that accompanies challenges to the dominant gaze, the passage on the reception of La Femme au chapeau also foregrounds the multiplicity of perspectives initially at play in its reception. Though Toklas asserts that “the picture seemed . . . perfectly natural” to Stein, the larger context of this apparently essentialist phrase destabilizes the assumption that there is a normative way for a painting to elicit the gaze or for a viewer to look at it. Later—by the time the Autobiography would be published—far more viewers would agree with Stein’s assessment, and their looks—acting “in concert with enough other looks”—would have shifted the hegemonic gaze (Silverman 223).⁸ This shifting of the look and the gaze will have changed what Kaja Silverman calls the “given-to-be-seen”: those images that appear to enjoy “a certain inevitability” because they are dominant, but that can be “reterritorialize[d]” when sufficient numbers of viewers approach them differently (156, 221, 223). In the case of La Femme au chapeau, a painting initially received as unviewable within the hegemonic gaze was eventually revalued as a masterpiece.

Stein’s reference to La Femme au chapeau as “perfectly natural” also shows none of the anxiety that registers in Picasso’s 1906 portrait of her and that is recalled in The Autobiography by his initial reaction to her 1926 haircut. The text thereby suggests that whereas his painting of Stein challenges dominant modes of perception by registering his discomfort with her gender—and thus unsettling his works’ viewers in turn—Stein’s own challenge to the hegemonic gaze works differently. If Gilmore is right that a mutually constitutive split between Toklas’s femininity and Stein’s masculinity is enacted in the book’s narrative strategy, it is also important to note that this move destabilizes perspective in a way that directs readers into following their looks rather than [End Page 54] looking upon them in shock. The text uses this playful twist on the autobiography genre to counter the effects of the initial misogynist and homophobic devaluing of Stein’s writing and to queer the changes to the dominant mode of perception that the book suggests to have been the consequence of modern art.

The Autobiography thus implies that the initial response to Stein’s writing was a linguistic and aesthetic manifestation of the same anxieties that both prompted the formal innovations of Picasso’s 1906 portrait of her and that attended the early reception of his and other modern painters’ work. To reorient perceptions of Stein’s place in the avant-garde, the text connects the initial reception of Stein’s writing to the dominant response to La Femme au chapeau at the Salon d’Automne. The crowd’s reaction to Matisse’s painting, Toklas states, “bothered [Stein] and angered her because she did not understand why because to her it was so alright, just as later she did not understand why since the writing was all so clear and natural they mocked at and were enraged by her work” (32–33). In this passage, Toklas establishes the radical aesthetics—and thereby the value—of Stein’s work by comparing its ability to disturb to that of Matisse’s painting. But there is more to this passage than the writer’s self-promotion. Toklas emphasizes Stein’s anger at the picture’s reception—her vexation by the crowd’s furious response and by the similar reaction elicited by her own writing. By depicting this cycle, The Autobiography offers a figure for the disorienting of vision prompted by Stein’s writing and by her butch gender. However, through its narrative strategy the book also works to counter the hegemonic gaze at work in such responses by allowing Toklas—and her steadfast support of Stein’s genius—to shape what is given to readers to be read and seen.

Thus, though both of these passages are most overtly concerned with establishing Stein as a major figure of the Euro-American avant-garde, the queerness animating the book’s narrative technique and the text’s subtle strategy of reiteration offer readers multiple opportunities to recontextualize the opening portrayal of modernism and the significance of gender and sexuality within it. The fracturing and shifting of the gaze and the look that The Autobiography mobilizes in its narrative of Stein’s role in the early years of modernism will continue to inflect its inscription both of Stein’s and Toklas’s relationship and of Stein’s homosocial bonding with other artists and writers. The visual economy through which The Autobiography does so illuminates trajectories [End Page 55] of queer desire that have been obscured in debates over the book’s treatment of Stein’s and Toklas’s marriage. These disputes turn on the question of whether the text participates in a masking of Stein’s and Toklas’s lesbian relationship—that is, in an encoded telling of what an early article by Catherine Stimpson calls “the lesbian lie”—or whether it hides its protagonists’ sexuality in plain sight, making it visible to those who know how to look. The book’s economy of vision strongly suggests the latter.

Moreover, when viewed from an alternative angle, The Autobiography reveals trajectories of what I call “masculine homosocial desire” by deploying Toklas as narrator to position Stein as a masculine genius among her fellows. Stein’s inflection of what I call masculine homosocial desire is similar to what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls “male homosocial desire,” yet is distinct in its inflection of masculine gender as a matter of cultural positioning rather than sexed bodily morphology. Such desire in The Autobiography, along with inscriptions of Stein’s relationship with Toklas, establishes the former’s masculinity as an effect of her texts’ playful renditions of female homosexual and masculine homosocial desire alike. Yet by placing Toklas in the pivotal role of narrator rather than that of the woman exchanged “between men,” The Autobiography importantly departs from the pattern of male homosocial desire that Sedgwick tracks in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English literature.

stein’s masculinity

Stein’s masculinity signifies multiply within her writings, yet discerning its significance often demands that one look askance at what Silverman calls the “given-to-be-seen” (227). Questions of legibility and visibility have been central to Stein’s changing scholarly reception, and responses to her appearance reveal widely varied perspectives. Though it was not until 1926 that Stein took up the cropped “Julius Caesar” haircut that provides the image of masculinity through which she is now often retrospectively read, she played with exterior signifiers of gender throughout her adulthood, with widely varied results (Corn and Latimer 51).⁹ Nonetheless, during her lifetime she was sometimes mocked as a “ridiculous imitation male,” and this characterization also makes an unfortunate appearance in some early feminist scholarship that accuses her of “male identification” (Benstock 171; DeKoven 136). [End Page 56] ¹⁰ The implications of Stein’s early remark that she, Matisse, and Picasso all have “a maleness that belongs to genius” are at stake in some of this work.¹¹ It would be a mistake to interpret Stein’s statement as evidence of her simple mimicry of male models, however. Implicit in the charge of “male identification” and in Shari Benstock’s questionable attempt to rescue her from such allegations by pointing to photographs of the young Stein in long hair and feminine garb is the troubling assumption that female masculinity is somehow discreditable because it implies an identification with patriarchy (171). In texts such as “Patriarchal Poetry” (1927), however, Stein’s own critique of patriarchal modes of thinking, writing, and behaving counters this view even as they figure her as masculine.

Moreover, Stein’s remark posits a likeness between herself and the two painters without claiming that her sense of “maleness” comes from imitating theirs. Charges of “male identification” inaccurately imply a mimetic relationship to male masculinity—an account of gender ontology that The Autobiography counters. Judith Halberstam’s Female Masculinity powerfully challenges the claim that female masculinity is derivative of maleness, and makes the case for the originary capacity of female masculinities. Her argument opens up the possibility of reconsidering the significance of Stein’s gender, as The Autobiography establishes that Stein decided on her 1926 crop after seeing it on the Duchess of Clermont-Tonnerre. This short hairstyle—the Duchess’s garçonne cut that was popular with women during the time—entailed a complex mix of genders (Corn and Latimer 51). A feminization of the French word for boy, the word garçonne suggests both masculinity and femininity. Placed onto Stein—whose solid frame and self-presentation as a “genius” differentiated her from the typical flapper—the haircut subsequently elicited comparisons to male figures. However, these interpretations should not be read as evidence that Stein straightforwardly imitated men. The Autobiography emphasizes, for instance, that Anderson—not she herself—likened Stein to a “monk.” By presenting his response as flattering only after it shows that Stein’s crop was actually inspired by the Duchess’s, The Autobiography sidesteps—rather than engages in—the logic of “male imitation” of which she is often charged. By highlighting the way Stein’s masculinity was achieved through a complex process of signification and attribution, the text underscores the way her gender does not function mimetically but rather as a signifier [End Page 57] whose significance varies in different settings.

The Autobiography deploys Toklas’s look—and, in turn, those of the text’s readers—to establish Stein’s masculinity. The text marks her as masculine by simultaneously redirecting the reader’s look onto Stein’s masculine symbolic positioning and challenging readerly expectations about the kinds of bodies that are the “proper” referents of gendered language. The text thereby suggests that her queer gender does not always and only register externally. When scholars such as Benstock turn to Stein’s clothing to rebut arguments for her masculinity, this gesture obscures the way Stein’s masculine self-positioning often takes place through mechanisms of identification and association whose traces in her texts surface through indirect rather than direct means. Rather than enacting masculinity externally—through the stylization of her characters’ bodies, or through explicit references to sexological theories of inversion and sartorial self-fashioning—Stein instead manipulates her texts’ structure so as to inscribe female masculinity through other means. In her most experimental and most mass-marketed work alike, Stein’s texts inscribe female masculinity not through the dressing of a female body in masculine garb, but rather through a linguistic performativity that derails normative expectations about the relationship between gender and the body.¹² Through these textual practices, Stein participates in an avant-garde form of masculine self-inscription that animates both the sexual desire at work in her partnership with Toklas and the homosocial desire at play in her friendships with men. Whereas the former works through a logic of opposition that distinguishes the masculine Stein from the feminine Toklas, the latter functions through a pattern of non-mimetic association that establishes the former’s masculinity through contiguity with male artists and writers.

heterogendered stein

One way that The Autobiography highlights Stein’s masculinity is by deploying a heterogendered form of social organization in which the implicitly masculinized Stein sits with the “geniuses” and Toklas with their “wives” (81). Stein’s device of using Toklas as narrator is a particularly clever means of deploying through narrative focalization what Judith Halberstam has described in reference to film as a “transgender gaze”: one that recognizes the subject’s gender as he or she wishes it to be seen (In a Queer Time and Place 76–96). This “transgender look,” as [End Page 58] I prefer to call it, is grounded in imaginary reflections that—as Jacques Lacan reminds us—are ultimately misrecognitions.¹³ Yet Gayle Salamon demonstrates the vital role the intersubjective look plays in constituting transsubjectivity, however much its apparent “identity is always already marked by nonidentity or difference” (23).¹⁴ In The Autobiography, Toklas’s self-positioning among the “wives of geniuses” identifies Stein with the “geniuses” and implicitly designates her as a “husband” within the salon’s heterogendered frame. This constructs Stein as a masculine “genius” within Toklas’s affirmative gaze. Although Stimpson claims in an early article that the dénouement of The Autobiography, in which Stein reveals her authorship of Toklas’s story, “erases Alice as the gaze, the eye, that fixes Stein’s identity,” this account misses the way Alice’s look—like all looks—entails a méconnaissance that is no less significant because it is illusory (“Gertrude Stein and the Lesbian Lie” 318). The text’s eventual revelation that the staging of these looks is a ruse does not cancel the significations they enabled. Indeed, the text turns on the inability of its conclusion to erase the inscriptions of queer gender and sexuality that its earlier linguistic and visual plays mobilize. Toklas’s desiring look works as a means of recognizing and validating Stein’s masculine gender even as the text’s narrative strategy complicates imaginary fantasies of total recognition and subjective plenitude.¹⁵

This economy of vision works in tandem with the book’s well-known destabilization of Stein’s and Toklas’s genders. Far from setting Stein up against the putatively more “real” masculinity of her male colleagues, the “Toklas” narrator works to insert both of them into a context in which the identities of “wives” and “geniuses” all figure as what Jaime Hovey describes as “impersonations” (101). As Hovey observes, Toklas describes herself as having “‘sat with wives who were not wives, of geniuses who were not real geniuses,’” with wives “‘of geniuses, of near geniuses, of would be geniuses,’” and so destabilizes those identities (101). This account highlights the way The Autobiography stages gender as a performance rather than an essence. As Stimpson similarly writes of Stein’s “As A Wife Has A Cow,” “the knowledge . . . that both ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ might be women severs a sense of the necessity of the putative connections between femaleness and femininity, maleness and masculinity” (“Gertrude Stein and the Transposition of Gender” 12). But much as Halberstam’s Female Masculinity emphasizes the consistency that transmasculine identifications often take on over time, [End Page 59] The Autobiography persistently places Stein in the category of masculine “genius” and Toklas in the role of feminine “wife”—however constructed and actively taken on those genders may be.¹⁶

However, Gilmore convincingly argues that writing Gertrude’s story in Alice’s voice does not involve an appropriation of the latter’s identity, as is frequently charged. Rather, The Autobiography depends upon the “coupled,” or “doubled” nature of its subject: on the way its inscriptions of “Stein” and “Toklas” blur the boundary between self and other, making them mutually dependent at the very scene of representation (60, 68).¹⁷ As Corinne Andersen observes, this strategy “allow[s] Stein to view her own subjectivity from the vantage point of the Other,” thereby undercutting “the illusion of her ego’s stability” upon which criticism of Stein’s purported egotism is premised (30). And even though Toklas functions as a narrative device that Stein mobilizes as author, this feminine figure has the powerful role of shaping the story—and therefore the characters’ and readers’ looks.

Moreover, Norris observes that the book’s title—unlike others Stein considered—“situates the ‘wife’ as a subject” who narrates the story from her own perspective (86). Her role as narrator makes it possible for “readers to assume the sight and interest of Alice’s implied reader of The Autobiography: that of a wife” (86).¹⁸ Johnston similarly observes that while Stein “retains control” of the story The Autobiography voices through Toklas, the text nonetheless “displaces” their subject positions and thereby creates an “alternative reading practice” that plays upon their different perspectives (596). This narratological strategy animates what Norris calls the book’s “cubist gesture of multiperspectivism” (89).

Neil Schmitz argues that The Autobiography mobilizes at least three different portraits of Stein (“Portrait, Patriarchy, Mythos” 69) that constitute a “fundamental act of transgression” because they allow her to refuse “her proper place in Cubism” and “to declare her own artistry.” He is right that this strategy contests Picasso’s 1906 painting of her and challenges the “prejudicial exclusion” of her “genius from the Pantheon of Modern Art” (Schmitz, Of Huck and Alice 204). However, Norris observes that the book’s cubist strategy also calls attention to Toklas’s subjectivity. This strategy differentiates The Autobiography from conventional forms of portraiture that deploy a painter’s wife as a “‘face’” that “‘becomes immortalized’ as a muse and survives as a residue of inspiration, with all of her labor—domestic, economic, and artistic—effaced [End Page 60] in the art” (Norris 88). The Autobiography instead makes visible not only Stein’s position within networks of modernist “geniuses” but also the way these artists’ and writers’ work was enabled by—and in Stein’s and Toklas’s household integrated with—the latter’s practice of domestic arts such as cooking and needlepoint (85).

“Ada,” Stein’s early portrait of Toklas, has a complex role in inscribing the latter in The Autobiography. As Johnston notes, The Autobiography frequently employs extratextual references to encourage intertextual reading. This move “disrupts textual closure and also creates a new reading position,” which in turn encourages perspectival multiplicity (Johnston 597). References to “Ada” in The Autobiography both exemplify the text’s interimplication of Toklas’s and Stein’s subjectivities and further the latter’s self-inscription as a masculine genius. Stein’s use of Toklas as narrator in The Autobiography and privileging of “Ada” both differentiate the partners, highlighting the importance of their heterogendered form of homosexuality to Stein’s subjectivity and to her artistic trajectory. Moreover, as Margaret Dickie observes, The Autobiography privileges “Ada”—rather than the better-known portraits of Paul Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso—as the first of Stein’s portraits, and thereby positions Toklas, rather than any of the painters, “as the person who launched [Stein] into portraits” (6). For Dickie, this textual strategy both situates Toklas “both as a source and as a subject” for Stein’s writing and reinforces the latter’s placement among the geniuses (6).¹⁹

By assigning “Ada” priority in its narrative of Stein’s literary portraiture, The Autobiography constructs Toklas as Stein’s sitter, much as Picasso’s women lovers were “sitters” for his portraits. Norris argues that like Matisse’s and Picasso’s portraits of their wives and lovers, “Ada” effaces Toklas into a “‘face’” that “subsume[s]” her “into the aesthetic signature of the genius’s style,” thereby transforming her into “a mirror of the artist” (88). However, her reading overlooks the importance of dialogue in “Ada.” Harriet Scott Chessman persuasively argues that Stein’s dialogic writing in “Ada” and other pieces blends her and Toklas’s voices rather than silences the latter (63–67). This strategy distinguishes Stein’s portrait of Toklas from the painters’ portraits of their wives by rendering the latter more than a static “face.” Moreover, The Autobiography itself figures this dialogism. Presenting herself and Stein as recognizing one another perfectly through the look, Toklas declares that she is “very often able to read” Stein’s “illegible” handwriting when [End Page 61] its author cannot (71).²⁰ This statement underscores Stein’s opacity to herself and thus the text’s splitting of her and Toklas’s subjectivities. It both toys with Stein’s role as the text’s author and points to the possibility that Toklas’s subjectivity and voice register in both pieces—not just The Autobiography, as Norris claims.²¹ Other of Stein’s texts show a similar blending of voices that is especially apparent when they are read alongside the love notes she and Toklas frequently exchanged.²²

The way Stein handles Alice’s role as a sitter for “Ada” is also significant. Drawing on Harry Berger’s account of portraiture as involving the agency of painter and sitter alike, Lubar argues that the art form involves “a highly complex economy of psychic and social exchanges between the painter and the sitter” (57). Both the act of painting and the portrait itself are “located within a symbolic economy that is mediated by the gaze” (63). The intersubjective dynamics between sitter and painter register within the final product, and the critic can trace the effects of these dynamics through psychoanalytic reading of the portrait as “a trap for . . . the gaze” (57). Lubar’s insistence upon the sitter’s agency is an especially helpful response to the frequent but false charge that Stein appropriated and exploited Toklas in The Autobiography and in their everyday life. Yet whereas the act of sitting generally involves incommensurability between the artist’s fantasies and those of the subject of the portrait, Stein’s placement of “Ada” within The Autobiography presents a special case because Stein not only refers to her portrait of her partner but also scripts Toklas’s reactions to it. Using this gesture, The Autobiography self-consciously figures an exchange that is only implicit in other forms of portraiture.

As with other key events, The Autobiography offers two very different scenes of the portrait’s reception, and therefore—in cubist fashion—two ways of looking at its portrayal of Toklas. When the book first references “Ada,” Stein has Toklas incorporate it into her narration and vouch for its accuracy. The latter states that in “Ada,” Stein “has given a very good description of me as I was at that time”—the time, that is, of Toklas’s childhood, depicted in the first chapter of The Autobiography (4). Turning on what Freud calls Nachträglichkeit (deferred action), Toklas’s gesture invests her own and Stein’s pasts with the significance of their eventual relationship and aligns their views of “Ada.”²³ Here we have a different manifestation of the identification to which The Autobiography attributes Stein’s decision to get the “Julius Caesar” haircut. To a certain extent, Stein and Toklas share “the look” in The Autobiography [End Page 62] and thus what appears to be the same subject position. However, this apparent alignment is split through the former’s deployment of the latter’s viewpoint to construct the gaze through which their household is given to be seen. This narrative ruse both destabilizes perspective and reveals that identification—and, in turn, imitation—always also entails the multiplication of differences (Chessman 65). These differences register in the text’s interimplication of Stein’s and Toklas’s subjectivities and mobilize a cubist proliferation of perspectives.

Multiperspectivalism also informs the book’s inscription of Toklas’s reaction to Stein’s representation of her in “Ada.” As Norris observes, in a second and later reference to that portrait in The Autobiography, Toklas’s narration “allegorizes the politics of the genius and the wife as a competition between fine art and domestic art staged as a marital quarrel” (91). This version not only playfully highlights Toklas’s resistance to her portrayal in both “Ada” and The Autobiography but also “dramatizes” her “resistance to having her own domestic art, the hot meal, categorically displaced by Stein’s invention of a new genre of portraiture” (91). When Stein prevails by stopping Toklas’s meal to share “Ada,”

her victory is provisional at best, for the marital conflict, and Alice’s inability to see herself in the signature portrait by Gertrude, obliges her to invent a new genre of portraiture all over again: one that will restore Alice’s domestic art to Stein’s fine art, and one that will allow Alice to “see” herself as she sees herself, rather than as Stein sees her.

(91)

For Norris, this scene implies that “Stein’s signature portrait of Alice as ‘Ada’ is such a narcissistic ‘face’ that it must be redrawn in The Autobiography in order to erase Stein’s signature style and let Alice’s Alice, the wife’s portrait by the wife, achieve a fictional self-representation” that is more convincing than the early portrait (88–89).

What Norris misses, though, is not only the portrait’s dialogic inscription of Toklas’s voice but also the way The Autobiography offers us two different perspectives on Toklas’s reaction to “Ada.” Whereas the second version, as Norris observes, underscores Toklas’s resistance to the effacement of her culinary art, the first version is nonetheless noteworthy for its emphasis on the portrait’s representational accuracy: Toklas calls it a “very good description” of her early years (4). It is thus not, the first scene suggests, that “Ada” misrepresents Toklas but that [End Page 63] this early piece does not fully register the significance of their marriage. Nor does Toklas’s first remark about “Ada” merely call attention to the difference between its style and the ruse of representation that animates The Autobiography. Her qualification that the portrait registers her subjectivity “at that time” highlights the temporal gaps that accompany the latter text’s mobilization of shifting perspectives (4). This defiance of linear temporality works in tandem with the text’s narrative strategy to decenter its subjects and refract perspective.

Stein uses this narrative apparatus to inscribe herself and her partner within a heterogendered social order in which Toklas’s positioning with the “wives” is the condition of Stein’s placement with the “geniuses”—however playful, denaturalized, and resituated within a domestic reworking of modernist aesthetics those positionings ultimately may be. In so doing, The Autobiography also highlights the difference between Stein’s masculinity and that of Ernest Hemingway, Matisse, and Picasso. As Norris shows, unlike these men—who exploited their wives’ labor at home and in the studio only to discard them and marginalize their voices once they no longer proved useful—Stein not only stayed with Toklas for the rest of Stein’s life but also made Toklas’s voice and domestic artistry central to the portrayal of modernism in The Autobiography (96–97).

By making Stein’s relationship with Toklas the lynchpin of its narrative strategy, The Autobiography also minimizes the earlier role played by Stein’s brother Leo in establishing the salon. However, what the text does include about Leo—with whom she first came to Paris and hosted the salon—provides hints about early iterations of Gertrude’s masculinity. The portion of The Autobiography that features Leo focuses on the siblings’ activities as collectors of modern art and hosts of the salon, and presents them as equals in their dealings with the “geniuses” who would visit them. This parallelism subtly establishes the masculinity that Gertrude reinforces through her figuration of Alice as her “wife,” and sets the stage for the exclusive claim to the role of family “genius” that Gertrude makes upon Leo’s departure. The fracturing of Gertrude’s bond with this male sibling anticipates the fraught nature of her subsequent homosocial bonds with heterosexual male colleagues such as Matisse, Picasso, and Hemingway and the ambivalence that eventually emerges in her relationships with them. [End Page 64]

homosocial stein

Though biographical work on Stein has established that she took an interest in and relied upon both men and women for friendship and professional networking, The Autobiography highlights the play between her heterogendered desire for Toklas and her homosocial desire for men, and uses this pattern of relationships to establish her masculinity.²⁴ The text underscores Stein’s desire for masculine homosocial alliances while also highlighting their potential to fracture. As narrator, Toklas both directs readers’ attention to moments at which Stein’s and her friends’ looks either align (in the case of Anderson) or cross (in the cases of Hemingway, Matisse, and Picasso), and offers her own perspective on their interactions. By using this strategy to mimic the perspectival multiplicity of cubist painting, The Autobiography mobilizes multifarious views of Stein’s sometimes strong and sometimes fraught homosocial alliances. It registers both the warmth of her connections to colleagues such as Anderson and the gender anxiety that emerges as her friendships with Hemingway and Picasso unravel.

The Autobiography strategically highlights Stein’s affiliation with famous male writers and artists in order to bolster her own reputation and to strike back against some of their misogynist characterizations of her person and work. The Autobiography emphasizes Stein’s role in the early stages of Picasso’s and Hemingway’s careers at the same time as it challenges their retroactive efforts to minimize the help she gave them. As a struggling young artist in Montmartre, Picasso actively courted Stein’s patronage—that is, her financial capital. But once he was established and she sought to leverage his cultural capital to enhance her own reputation, their friendship soured.²⁵ Similarly, Hemingway initially sought out her mentoring—as well as Anderson’s—and went on to attack them once he had become a successful writer.²⁶ The Autobiography presents a narrative that highlights Stein’s impact on these men and that subtly alludes to their poor treatment of her. The text thereby suggests that it was only after those men became famous and Stein sought to benefit from their reputations that their friendships turned sour. The Autobiography also recruits Anderson as a sympathetic peer who acts in alignment with Stein to counter their mutual targeting by Hemingway’s lack of gratitude and his wrath. Thus, while pointing to the potential for viable friendships between men and masculine women, The Autobiography [End Page 65] also seeks to counter some men’s hostile portrayals of Stein and to challenge larger institutional biases.

Moreover, The Autobiography suggests that Stein’s desire for masculine homosociality was not limited to males, but also extended to masculine women such as the dandy Jane Heap.²⁷ This vector of homosocial desire denaturalizes the putatively essential connection between masculinity and maleness. Though Halberstam makes a compelling case in Female Masculinity for the feminist potential of this conceptual move, her study forestalls exploration of the forms of bonding that can take place between men and masculine women. By contrast, The Autobiography’s dual attention to Stein’s heterogendered romantic relationship and to the vicissitudes of her masculine homosocial desires for both men and masculine women establishes her female masculinity and deploys it for feminist purposes. The inclusion of both varieties of masculine homosocial desire contributes to the book’s cubist strategy: it multiplies perspectives on masculinity, while also denaturalizing their relationship to maleness.

In so doing, The Autobiography uses associative contiguity with masculine modernist luminaries to foreground both her celebrity and her masculinity. Emphasizing The Autobiography and other texts that concern her relationships with fellow modernists, Jonathan Goldman analyzes the way Stein established her celebrity through affiliation with other stars.²⁸ Goldman argues that this logic of association works like Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of the sign, much as does Stein’s own experimental writing: value is established through the differential positioning of elements within a signifying system rather than grounded in a claim to inherent worth (Goldman 81–110). “Stein” thus takes on value within the star system through her contiguous positioning with regard to “Matisse,” “Picasso,” and other luminaries. Though Goldman’s theory offers a promising means of accounting for Stein’s strategies of self-positioning, his assertion that the roles of Gertrude as “husband” and Alice as “wife” are “divorced from the body and attached to the idea of celebrity” in The Autobiography needs to be complicated (94). He claims that “Stein categorizes husbands and wives as entities divided into public and private rather than male and female” (94). However, this formulation overlooks several decades of scholarship that documents many other instances of Stein’s masculine identification, textual plays with pronouns, and cross-writing. The persistence of masculine [End Page 66] self-inscription in Stein’s life and writing suggests that in The Autobiography, too, the term “husband” continues to be gendered—though not sexed—as masculine even as it designates stardom. If in The Autobiography, “husbands are celebrities . . . whose names refer beyond the text to their position in the differential system of the public sphere,” the position of “husband” can be “divorced” from the male body but not from masculinity (Goldman 94).

Stein’s female masculinity registers in The Autobiography through her positioning as Toklas’s “husband” and her affiliation with other “geniuses” in a circuit of masculine homosocial desire. However, Stein’s masculinity takes a very different form from the painters’ male masculinities, and thus the homosocial desires that animate these friendships frequently—though not always—fracture. Stein’s strategy of writing back against those who courted her patronage (Picasso) and mentoring (Hemingway) in their twenties but devalued her later on represents a challenge to the institutional forces that influenced the asymmetrical trajectories of their careers—forces that played out over time and whose complexities cannot be fully captured by a purely synchronic approach to the logic of celebrity construction in The Autobiography.

This dynamic is apparent in the passage in The Autobiography that recounts a luncheon hosted by Stein and attended by both Matisse and Picasso. The meal takes place during a time at which a crisis of triangulated desire emerges through jealousy expressed in terms of aesthetic differences. Matisse displaces his irritation at Stein’s growing intimacy with Picasso onto the claim that her preference for “local color and theatrical values” should make a “serious friendship” with Picasso impossible (61). Stein is able to bridge this gap temporarily by manipulating the look and the gaze as conduits of desire. At the luncheon, she places each artist in front of his own work, thereby directing their looks quite differently. This stratagem maintains harmony until Matisse steps out of position and looks at the room from another spot. His wider angle reveals Stein’s tactics and leads him to believe that she “had lost interest in his work” (61). Like the text’s handling of Stein’s 1926 haircut, this scene turns on a shifting of the look. All is harmonious until Matisse takes an angle of approach that Stein did not prescribe for him, causing him to see that his work is not the sole object of her desire. His revaluation of the luncheon scene contributes to the breakdown of their friendship over her interest in Picasso. [End Page 67]

Paralleling the text’s two showings of Stein’s “Caesar” crop and the “Ada” portrait, The Autobiography precedes the above story about the luncheon with an earlier version. The first account makes no mention of Matisse’s and Picasso’s rivalry, and emphasizes that the artists were very “happy” with the event (14). Matisse alone notices Stein’s ruse—again retroactively, not “until just as he left”—and takes it as evidence that she is “very wicked” (14). Underscoring the méconnaissance at work both in Stein’s arrangement of the painters’ looks and in her conversations with them, Matisse observes to her that “the world is a theatre for you, but there are theatres and theatres, and when you listen so carefully to me and so attentively and do not hear a word I say then I do say that you are very wicked” (14). This comment highlights the role of visual and verbal differences in the difficulty between Stein and Matisse.

The later account of the luncheon heightens this effect by using the visual to stage the short-circuiting of Stein’s and the painters’ homosocial desires. By offering this view of the luncheon well after an account that focuses exclusively on its role in celebrating modernist painters’ aesthetic innovations, The Autobiography mobilizes multiple perspectives on its role in the development of modernism—some playing up the painters’ aesthetic differences, others highlighting Stein’s queer masculinity and role within a fractured circuit of triangulated desire. The use of multiple perspectives shows that questions of aesthetics and desire are articulated simultaneously in The Autobiography and are both crucial to understanding Stein’s relationship to her colleagues. In the second version of the lunch, the men look at paintings that affirm their value as artists—and thereby sustain a circuit of desire in which Stein plays only a supporting role—whereas Stein seeks to elicit a gaze in which the importance of all three as modernist geniuses is affirmed. Moreover, in this account Stein occupies both the masculine role of the “genius” and the feminized position of the object of jealousy that emerges between men. This differentiates her female masculinity from Matisse’s and Picasso’s male masculinities. However, The Autobiography also emphasizes Stein’s agency in working to redirect the looks through which triangulated desire circulates. The text’s narrative strategy furthers this attempt to step out of the role of object by foregrounding both her affiliation with men and her differentiation from the feminine Toklas. The latter is presented as controlling the narration, and thus as refusing the role of object exchanged between men. [End Page 68]

The Autobiography takes a more understated approach to the eventual ruptures in Stein’s and Picasso’s friendship, subtly deploying the look and the gaze to track the shift in the nature of Stein’s and the painter’s desires. Between the two world wars—during which time Stein and Picasso “always talked with the tenderest friendship about each other to any one who had known them both but . . . did not see each other”—Stein speaks fondly to Picasso’s mother of how he was “remarkably beautiful” during the early years of their friendship (182). When Stein portrays Picasso as “illuminated as if he wore a halo,” his mother responds that

if you thought him beautiful then I assure you it was nothing compared to his looks when he was a boy. He was an angel and a devil in beauty, no one could cease looking at him. And now, said Picasso a little resentfully. Ah now, said they together, ah now there is no such beauty left

(208).

Particularly noteworthy is the physical attraction to Picasso that this passage attributes to Stein. By pointing to Picasso’s illumination during his early years, Stein both stages his appearance as eliciting a gaze in which he appears beautiful, and suggests that her masculine homosocial desire sometimes could be homoerotic. His mother, in turn, suggests that the gaze that he staged as a child was even more compelling because he appeared simultaneously as “an angel and a devil” (208). They both agree, however, that after the war “there is no such beauty left”—that is, that the gaze has shifted and that they look upon him differently than before (208). The shifting perspectives at work in this passage point to the short-circuiting of the desire that initially animated his and Stein’s personal and professional attraction to one another—an attraction whose complexity also registers in his 1906 portrait of her and in his reaction to her 1926 haircut.

At other times, a complicated vacillation between sympathetic homosocial association and hostile aggression registers in The Autobiography, with Anderson consistently appearing in the former guise and Hemingway in the latter. In contrast to Picasso, Toklas tells readers that “Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson have always been the best of friends” (185). Anderson first appears in The Autobiography as a celebrated writer who “moved and pleased” Stein with his testimony to the importance [End Page 69] of her work to his own (185), and resurfaces as a colleague who shares her view of Hemingway as a “pupil” who left them “both a little proud and a little ashamed of the work of their minds” (203–4). The Autobiography consistently aligns Stein’s look with Anderson’s in this regard.

The Autobiography deploys Toklas as narrator to critique Hemingway’s pattern of behavior, which is quite different from Anderson’s. In a pivotal move, she challenges Stein’s and Anderson’s shared “weakness for Hemingway” (204):

They both agreed that they have a weakness for Hemingway because he is such a good pupil. He is a rotten pupil, I protested. You don’t understand, they both said, it is so flattering to have a pupil who does it without understanding it, in other words he takes training and anybody who takes training is a favorite pupil. They both admit it to be a weakness.

(204)

The Autobiography portrays Stein and Anderson as flattered by Hemingway’s obedience—even though they label it “yellow” behavior—but also uses Toklas to unmask and label as “rotten” the aggression that leads him to attack his mentors (204). The text characterizes Hemingway as a man who submits to the mentoring of others, repays them with attacks, and then fears the consequences. Toklas tells us that

Hemingway had at one moment, when he had repudiated Sherwood Anderson and all his works, written him a letter in the name of american literature which he, Hemingway, in company with his contemporaries was about to save, telling Sherwood just what he, Hemingway thought about Sherwood’s work, and, that thinking, was in no sense complimentary. When Sherwood came to Paris Hemingway naturally was afraid. Sherwood as naturally was not.

(203)

This passage stages Hemingway as a cliché driven by what Harold Bloom calls the “anxiety of influence,” and Anderson—and by extension, his ally Stein—as a writer so confident as to have no need of the Oedipal model of masculinity or fear of its rebellious sons. This is why—the mentors go on—Hemingway “looks like a modern” but “smells of the museums”: in attempting to “save” American literature from its forebears, he ironically displays his enslavement to tradition [End Page 70] and his submission to the very masters he resents (204). This is the “real story of Hemingway” that Stein and Anderson lament that he will never tell, but that Toklas exposes to the readers of The Autobiography nonetheless (204).

Much as it does by comparing the effect of Stein’s writings to that of Matisse’s painting, The Autobiography uses masculine affiliation to align Stein’s view of Hemingway with Anderson’s and thereby position her as a modernist innovator. The text also suggests the weakness hidden behind Hemingway’s famed bravado and—in stating that he “smells of the museums”—presents his form of masculinity as amusingly antiquated in comparison to Stein’s. At the same time, Toklas teases Stein and Anderson for their own “weakness for Hemingway.” In so doing, she shows far more fondness for Stein’s and Anderson’s vulnerability to sycophants than for Hemingway’s behavior toward his mentors. But she also suggests that the former two writers are attached to the same power dynamic that drives the latter’s supplication, even though Stein shows far more susceptibility to flattery than interest in submission in The Autobiography.²⁹

Stein’s use of Toklas as narrator to critique the gender politics of her male colleagues becomes even more explicit in the text’s handling of Picasso’s homophobic treatment of Jean Cocteau. She begins by attributing to Picasso a remark that characterizes Cocteau as obsessed with maintaining a youthful image: “It was at this time that Jean Cocteau who prides himself on being eternally thirty was writing a little biography of Picasso, and he sent him a telegram asking him to tell him the date of his birth. And yours, telegraphed Picasso” (208–9). This portrayal of Cocteau as vain continues in the text’s recounting of an interview that Picasso gives to a Catalan newspaper with the expectation that it would not be translated into French. During this exchange, Picasso speaks more freely than usual, and “said that Jean Cocteau was getting to be very popular in Paris, so popular that you could find his poems on the table of any smart coiffeur” (209). Here, Picasso couples the insinuation that Cocteau is preoccupied with his own image with the suggestion that his work is middlebrow and targeted to a popular gay audience rather than to elite aficionados of high art. The Autobiography tells readers that once the interview with the Catalan newspaper is translated, Cocteau seeks out Picasso, who hides and attempts to attribute the interview to Francis Picabia, who denies it. Subsequently, [End Page 71] Picasso’s wife lies to Cocteau’s mother and leads her to believe that the former had not given that interview (210). Picasso’s behavior in this scenario is a different iteration of Hemingway’s fear of femininity. Whereas Hemingway betrays his own weakness by submitting to his mentors and then turning on them with aggression, Picasso reveals his own cowardice through his refusal to own his remarks about Cocteau. Toklas, by contrast, reveals Picasso’s homophobic remarks about Cocteau and his attempts to deny them.³⁰

Stein’s role in the text’s treatment of these events is noteworthy. As a character in The Autobiography, she does not challenge Picasso’s attack on Cocteau. However, as the text’s author she nonetheless deploys Toklas as narrator to reveal and critique the painter’s conduct. Though Picasso’s disparaging of femininity is part of the dominant construct of masculine homosociality in which Stein participates by engaging him and Hemingway, the narrative strategy of The Autobiography shows her difference from it by deploying Toklas to critique its homophobia and regain the upper hand. Thus, even though Toklas relates that it was during the summer of Picasso’s attack on Cocteau that “Gertrude Stein, delighting in the movement of the tiny waves on the Antibes shore, wrote the Completed Portrait of Picasso, the Second Portrait of Carl Van Vechten, and The Book of Concluding With As A Wife Has A Cow A Love Story this afterwards beautifully illustrated by Juan Gris,” the circuit of desire animating this set of texts is fractured (210). Whereas “As A Wife Has A Cow” enacts Stein’s and Toklas’s sexual bliss, their heterogendered jouissance contrasts with the fondly mocking attitude toward the Napoleonic self-centeredness that “If I Told Him” attributes to Picasso. The latter text’s subtle critique of hegemonic male masculinity reverberates within portrayals of Stein’s counterhegemonic female masculinity as well, as other of her texts’ playful references to their author as “Caesar” suggest.

The explicit treatment in The Autobiography of Hemingway’s attacking behavior and its more subtle allusion to the period of time between the two world wars during which Stein and Picasso “were not seeing each other” both suggest that Stein’s homosocial desire for these two men—and for association with their dominant modes of masculinity—is fractured by difference (182). Toklas’s choice of vision as a metaphor for the mutual withdrawal of Stein and Picasso between the wars indicates their divergent perspectives and echoes the latter’s earlier explanation [End Page 72] for his delayed completion of Stein’s portrait. The Autobiography tracks the visual reverberations of his reaction to Stein by refracting it through the interplay between her, his, and Toklas’s looks. Toklas relates that “all of a sudden one day Picasso painted out the whole head. I can’t see you any longer when I look, he said irritably. And so the picture was left like that” to be finished later (44). She also notes that Picasso finally finished the head “without having seen Gertrude Stein again” (53). Both of these passages underscore the fragmenting of vision at work in the portrait. However, Toklas also states that upon seeing the finished picture—in which the artist painted Stein’s face as a mask—both “he and she were content” with its appearance (53). This alignment of looks is markedly different from the reaction that Lubar finds in the portrait itself. He argues that in the finished picture, Stein’s hollowed eyes result from Picasso’s anxiety over and “refusal to see” her gender (62). Anticipating analytic cubism, the picture fractures perspective and reanimates Picasso’s anxiety for its viewers. The portrait’s mobilization of the gaze is thus quite different from the dissipation of anxiety that The Autobiography suggests both when it recounts the two parties’ pleased reactions to the portrait and when it tracks Picasso’s prompt shift in reaction to Stein’s 1926 cropped haircut. Though this early passage claims commensurability between Stein’s and Picasso’s looks at the completed portrait, The Autobiography goes on to use Toklas’s look (itself orchestrated by Stein as author) to shift the gaze and prompt the reader to look at the portrait—and Stein’s and Picasso’s very different masculinities—from another angle. This alternative perspective reveals the gender anxiety underpinning their friendship.

The Autobiography also inscribes Stein’s queer gender by registering her interest in other queer modernists—even though their sexualities are not remarked upon as such. The explicitly queer routing of Stein’s homosocial desires would intensify in the 1920s, and the final chapters of The Autobiography note her connections to the lesser-known queer artists, composers, and writers who would form her inner circle as her friendships with Picasso and Hemingway became increasingly strained.³¹ Though they did not have the celebrity status that attached to Picasso and Hemingway, Stein’s involvement with queer men in the 1920s underscores her continued interest in homosocial bonding. As Stimpson observes, however, the book does not remark upon the same-sex relationships that flourished between pairs of men and of women in Stein’s and Toklas’s network (“Gertrude Stein and the Lesbian Lie” 317). [End Page 73] These occlusions contrast with the attention early chapters pay to the female partners of Stein’s male colleagues. Stein’s eventual move toward alliances with queer people does suggest, though, a shift away from the fraught bonds with heterosexual men that she cultivated earlier in her career.³²

Moreover, The Autobiography occasionally figures Stein’s masculinity by calling attention to her interest in other masculine women. The fact that not all of Stein’s homosocial desires are for males indicates the anti-essentialist character of her masculinity. Both mimicry and affiliation are at work in the book’s portrayal of her response to these women. Affiliation characterizes the book’s treatment of Stein’s friendship with Jane Heap, the female dandy who arranged for the publication of two of Stein’s texts. In a statement that runs parallel to passages that show Stein’s gratitude toward men such as Anderson, Hemingway, and Ford Madox Ford (who had facilitated the publication of her work), Toklas tells readers that her partner “had always liked Jane Heap immensely, Margaret Anderson interested her much less” (208). Here, Toklas both signals Stein’s preference for Heap, the more masculine member of the lesbian couple who ran The Little Review, and references the “valentine” that—in Ulla Dydo’s view—simultaneously thanks Sherwood Anderson for his introduction to Geography and Plays and offers “a love poem to Toklas” (Dydo, A Stein Reader 376).³³ The reference to a popular genre for romantic love in Stein’s tribute to Anderson suggests that it sustains multiple trajectories of desire. Though Dydo is right that “A Valentine”—like many of Stein’s writings—should be taken as expressing her love for Toklas, this circuit of desire also implicates the man whose name appears in the title. Moreover, when “A Valentine” appears in the context of The Autobiography, Stein’s desires are both heterogendered (for Toklas) and homosocial (for both Heap and Anderson), with the latter trajectory running through male-bodied and female-bodied masculine persons alike.

Whereas The Autobiography emphasizes Stein’s affiliation with the dandy Heap—thereby positioning them both as fellow masculine modernists—it uses both affiliation and identification to track the effects of the “Julius Caesar” haircut that has become such a powerful feature of her image. In showing the crop, the text mobilizes multiple angles of vision: Stein’s identificatory look at the Duchess, Anderson’s approving look at Stein, and Picasso’s anxious looks at her. These occur in [End Page 74] the context of yet more looks—Stein’s look at La Femme au chapeau, Picasso’s and Matisse’s crossed looks at their own paintings, and Stein’s and Anderson’s parallel looks at Hemingway—all of which are orchestrated by Toklas’s bemused yet loving look upon Stein and their milieu. Given to be seen through the cubist fracturings of Toklas as narrator, Stein’s masculinity appears kaleidoscopically. The Autobiography thereby denaturalizes masculinities and allows the reader to imagine both Stein and the scene of modernism anew.