PLAYING GENIUS AND PERFORMING GENDER: HOW THE OLD GOOD GERTRUDE STEIN BECAME THE NEW BAD GERTRUDE STEIN
PLAYING GENIUS AND PERFORMING GENDER: HOW THE OLD GOOD GERTRUDE STEIN BECAME THE NEW BAD GERTRUDE STEIN

Summary/Abstract: This paper analyzes Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas both as a celebratory reenactment of the author’s life with her partner and as a declarative performance of gender roles. Once Toklas takes the formal role of wife in their couple and entertains the wives of famous “geniuses” like Picasso, Matisse or Hemingway, Stein immediately assumes the husband role. By adopting the status of a genius on equal footing with her male counterparts, Stein subverts the social codes of family and portrays herself and Toklas as a couple with distinct “conventional” roles of husband and wife. Blamed for using Toklas’s voice to perform her life story as a ventriloquist would use a puppet, Stein is in fact bending the rules of autobiographical writing by transgressing not only literary codes but also gender roles.

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