ABSTRACT
The anonymous viewer whose hand penned in 'Gertrude Stein' under the photo of Adrienne Monnier and Francis Scott Fitzgerald is right: among all other prominent modernist women, it is to Monnier that Stein is visually closest.' The costumes are a visual commodity that speaks of a meaning congealed in history, of a difficult transition from the constrictions of the ideological-historical level to the freedom of the semiotic one. The visual transformations of the body can be read as an attempt to approximate a native tie of attestation and entitlement to culture. As the women age, the gender divisions harden, the most material evidence of the effect of time in the face of critical desire. In photographs of Sylvia Beach and Monnier in the countryside at Rocfoin, Monnier's large body looks like that of a peasant. Beach's gaze at Monnier is emblematic of the latter's public identity. The photographer looks amiably on Monnier's sacrifice of autonomous creativity.
