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Monday, January 14, 2013
LITERARY GENRE: NOVEL
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS
Gertrude Stein
The Plot Summary:
Stein inhabits the persona and speech patterns of Toklas throughout the book. The perceptions of other characters and the recounting of events, however, belong to both Stein and Toklas. For continuity, the narrator of the book will be referred to as Toklas.
Toklas introduces herself and provides some details about her life, mentioning, importantly, that her life changed after the San Francisco earthquake, and she met Gertrude Stein. Saying that she has only met three geniuses in her life, Toklas writes, "The three geniuses of whom I wish to speak are Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and Alfred Whitehead."
THE INTERPRETATION:
Gertrude Stein has written her memoirs. But she has attributed them to her friend and companion of twenty-five years, Alice B. Toklas; and her book is thus something a little different from the ordinary book of memoirs. It is Gertrude Stein's imaginative projection of how she and her life and her circle look to Alice B. Toklas. Miss Toklas is presented as the enthusiastic admirer and the obedient shadow of Miss Stein; she turns toward her as the sunflower toward the sun. Yet Miss Toklas's personality is by no means indistinguishable from Miss Stein's: Miss Stein has created her as an individual. And thus The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas has something of the character and charm of a novel — a novel of which the subject is the life which Miss Stein and Miss Toklas have made together in Paris, the salon over which they have presided, the whole complex of ideas and events of which they became the center: a social-artistic-intellectual organism.
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