The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

An autobiography is the account of a person’s life written by that person. An orthodox autobiography of Alice B. Toklas would have been written by Toklas herself. Instead, with Stein as the author, the work is really the autobiography of Stein and the biography of Toklas. It could also be interpreted as a form of dramatic monologue, as Stein makes Toklas her mouthpiece and imitates her manner of speaking. Readers interested in Stein and her interactions with Modernist artists often refer to the book to access Stein’s autobiography.

Cubism was an artistic movement that took place in Paris between 1907 and 1925. An example of abstraction, Cubism features compositions of geometric shapes and tessellating fragments. Rather than pretending to represent reality, Cubism announces its artifice. The earliest phase of Cubism gave way to Analytic Cubism (1910-1912), which used a monochromatic palette and basic shapes to suggest parts of the subject. Synthetic Cubism (1912-1914) incorporated brighter and more varied colors and elements of collage.

The key proponents of Cubism were Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris. While Stein acknowledged Braque’s contribution to Cubism, she viewed it as an essentially Spanish movement. This is because Stein perceived the Spanish landscape as composed of cubes and thought that only the Spanish and the Americans truly understood abstraction. While Americans had a disembodied sensibility, Spaniards were practiced in “ritual so abstract that it does not connect itself with anything but ritual” (77).

Stein was especially fond of Analytical Cubism, as she saw its goal of exactitude as mirroring her own goals in writing. Like the Cubists, she sought to strip her writing of any excess or any pretense of being anything other than the materials of its composition.

The Lost Generation refers to those who were young adults in the 1920s, the decade following the First World War (1914-1918). They were said to be lost because they had no clear sense of their values and wanted to experiment with different lifestyles and types of morality. Because the First World War demonstrated the values of their parents’ generation leading to mass destruction, members of the Lost Generation sought to discover for themselves what life was about. Prominent members included Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and The Autobiography recalls a period of two to three years in the 1920s when “all the young men were twenty-six years old” and it seemed “the right age apparently for that time and place” (180). Thus, while Stein and Toklas felt middle-aged, past their era of peak cultural relevance, they looked to these young men to explain the world to them. Still, writing The Autobiography in 1933, when her friendship with Hemingway was cooling, Stein was conscious of her time with the Lost Generation being a fleeting phase in her life.

Modernism is an artistic movement that took place between the last decade of the 19th century and the advent of the Second World War in 1939. Modernism’s premise was to question the long-standing traditions of representation in the arts. In visual art, these traditions included figurativeness, or truth to life; in literature, they included sentimentalism and the use of elaborate metaphors. By contrast, Modernism sought to strip both painting and literature to their essentials and show rather than conceal the medium and the methods of construction. Thus, a painting should look like a work of artifice and human creativity rather than the view from a window. The Autobiography chronicles Stein as a proponent of Modernism in her preference for abstraction and her consciousness of the constructed, arbitrary nature of language.