The “Wife” and the “Genius”

As a movement, early twentieth-century modernism produced itself as a cultural phenomenon along with the highly experimental art that has become its hallmark. Both in its own time and retrospectively, the gestures of that self-production took many generic forms—manifestoes, critical essays, Künstlerromane, and memoirs—with many ideological inflections, including gender. “We must remind ourselves, for instance, that the ‘reality’ of these years exists today as a set of idées reçues constructed largely by men,” Shari Benstock writes in Women of the Left Bank (29). As arguably the most important female memoir of the period, Gertrude Stein's Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas has reaped a harvest of gender trouble that makes it highly useful for delineating the relationship between modernism and the memoir as a “technology of gender”—to borrow Teresa de Lauretis's term. Earlier worries about whether the memoir as a genre should function as history or fiction¹ can now be recast as a question of rhetoricity that, in Stein's case, can be used to clarify some of the more vexing gender issues. By distinguishing the memoir with a representational function from the memoir with a performative function, both the memoir and gender can be transformed from nouns into verbs, from portraits and images into exercises, acts, and processes of production. By the very nature of its gimmick that problematizes the subject's relationship to writing, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas has always announced itself as a performance of vocal doubling, an exercise in ventriloquism, with troublesome political implications for the sexual politics of the seemingly asymmetrical lesbian couple. But by putting Stein's Autobiography in play with other memoirs of modernism, I hope to render Stein's gesture not only politically benign—a performance of the lesbian textual embrace that could not be named or represented in the book—but also aesthetically avant-garde.