ABSTRACT
Painting and Paul Cezanne preside over Gertrude Stein's birth into modern culture. This birth is amply documented both in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and in Lectures in America, where she presents herself as a woman with no particular trade except that of looking at pictures. Stein's unpublished notebooks belong squarely in a modern culture whose climate is best captured by Luigi Pirandello's formula 'one, no one, and one hundred-thousand'. In Charles Baudelaire's time, the writer's attempt to negotiate his belonging to a humanity of men and women without qualities had changed poetry into a drama of consciousness attended by estrangement and unreality. The corset visually mediates Stein's American identity as a potentially seductive form capable of initiating a 'narrative' of desire. In its assimilation to the corset, her American identity assumes a theatrical capacity for shaping desirable objects. The corset transforms her corpulence into fashionable desirability.
