Stretching Language Past its Prime: Gertrude Stein

Considering a sample of Gertrude Stein’s most notable literary works, including Three Lives (1909), Tender Buttons (1914), and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), this introduction to her oeuvre takes as its central focus Stein’s innovative linguistic experimentation. A self-professed “genius” of the Modernist period, Stein cultivated a celebrated literary identity through the salon gatherings at her home, and through the faux-autobiographical style of better-known texts like The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Throughout her work, Stein sought to deconstruct the fabric of literary norms, playing with language, grammar and semantics to open up writing to the multifarious potentialities of meaning-making. Stein has been reconfigured under a number of guises in her critical reception, as a linguistic revolutionary, a modernist heretic and most recently as a lesbian/feminist icon. Recognizing Stein’s newly secured position as a key figure of the Modernist period, this essay examines her major influences, including Cubism, psychology and the long term companionship with her partner Alice B. Toklas, to offer a view of Stein as both a key agent of the avant-garde, and a radical literary innovator on her own terms.