Autobiography alice toklas effective essay

Pablo Picasso, Modern-day Literature, Passionate Period

Excerpt from Dissertation:

life Alice Toklas successful?

The success of The Life of Alice B. Toklas

According to Time Magazine’s review of the 100 Ideal Books in history: “Writing her lover’s ‘autobiography’ proved a witty means for American writer Gertrude Stein to depth her very own life because Parisian article writer, salon number and arts patron. Ostensibly, readers may take in the book, printed in 1933, as Stein writing about Alice B. Toklas (which is actually the title suggests) or because Toklas ‘writing’ about Stein (which is what the publication actually is)” (Sun 2011). Regardless, unlike Stein’s usual dense, tough prose, the book contains a wittier and even more story-driven narrative. Many possess called this ‘Stein pertaining to Beginners’ to explain its succeeding popularity (Sun 2011).

The ‘gossipy’ facets of reading The Autobiography of Alice W. Toklas really should not be dismissed in terms of its ability to attract an extensive audience, provided that it contains stories of Stein’s contemporaries, which include Picasso, Tolstoy and Matisse (Sun 2011). The desire to participate in this literary scene was undeniably an important factor in the work’s popularity. However this collage of voices and visions of others dished up a purpose, and was not designed with the intent of name-dropping, but to exclusive chance Stein’s larger literary task, to deconstruct the very characteristics of autobiography. “With The Autobiography of Alice N. Toklas, Gertrude Stein radically alters the history of life. Stein effects the change to modernist autobiography by simply eschewing the romantic pregnancy of the do it yourself – a couple of feelings and internal purposes – to create herself as a modernist masterpiece of design, a collage of multiple identities, a multi-perspectival ‘Master-piece'” (Burros 1999). Instead of a self that is out there outside of society, Stein claims that social constructions create the do it yourself, hence the blending of Alice’s personality and hers into one. “The Autobiography along with Toklas’s The Alice N. Toklas Cook Bookfunction like a “network of ‘intertexts’ that ‘require a notion from the ‘true story’ as a radically relative category that is automatically multiple, provisional, and ever shifting” yet still manage to always be accessible to the average reader who desires a ‘story’ with ‘dialogue’ he or she is able to adhere to in a linear fashion (Rumbarger 2009). In making her modernist prose more accessible, Stein increased the audience for her