Portrait of Gertrude Stein by Pablo Picasso, 1906

Gertrude Stein was a literary genius not just the at the center of the art and literary world in Paris. Though many find her work incomprehensible--even ridiculous--it is probably because her work is not visual, but auditory. A combination of auditory communion and an understanding of her poetic theory lends to a more pleasurable experience of her work.

Gertrude Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, in 1874, but her affluent parents moved the family to Vienna and later Paris before finally settling in Oakland, California. Eventually returning east, Stein enrolled in what would later be Radcliffe College to study psychology, and after graduation she furthered her studies at Johns Hopkins Medical School.

In 1903 Stein went to Paris, following her brother Leo, an art critic, and the two soon had built a salon for artists and writers, including Picasso and Hemingway. However, Gertrude and Leo’s relationship began to fall apart because he had been a "domineering and pestering brother who had made her feel stupid and insignificant" (Benstock 162-163). At the same time, Stein began a relationship with another ex-patriot, Alice B. Toklas. When Toklas moved into the salon with Gertrude, Leo moved out. After that, whenever Stein saw her brother in the streets of Paris, supposedly she "acknowledged her brother with a nod from her automobile" (Wright 39). The two exchanged no words.

Beyond the Steins’ feud, the salon flourished with creative genius. Her first book of poetry, Tender Buttons, appeared in 1914, and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, published in 1933, became a bestseller. The next year her stage production Four Saints in Three Acts opened on Broadway. Acquiring celebrity status while lecturing in America, Stein successfully remained at the forefront of the Modernist literary movement until her death from cancer in 1946.

Although Stein published other collections of poetry, none received the same amount of critical praise and notoriety as Tender Buttons. Stein wrote her first novel Q.E.D. (about a love triangle between three women) while attending Johns Hopkins, but it was not published until four years after her death. A Modernist experiment-- Three Lives (1909)--was less successful than her later prose works. The Making of Americans (1925) "chronicles the story of humanity in that of a single family" (Paschen 38). Her next work, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), was actually about Stein’s own life. While working on The Autobiography, she also wrote a series of difficult lyrics entitled Stanzas in Meditation, which was not published until after her death.

Stein’s poetry and prose show her affinity for Cubist painters like Picasso and Matisse. What they do visually, she does audibly. She saw "words as objects, not fixed units of meaning. However, the actual sense of the word, the ‘Steinese,’ stands clear" (Wright 40). She was interested in a "cinematic continuous present" which she employed with her "vigorous application of repetition" (40). Stein uses this repetition to allow each word to have a new meaning.

Stein’s "She Bowed to Her Brother" (1934), features her usual repetitious lines, split into three separate sections. A common trait of her writing, her elementary experimental way with language was what her brother Leo called an "abomination" (Bernstock 152). He says in his memoirs, "If I hadn’t known that Gertrude was in her pre-‘cubist’ days a barbarian in her use of language . . . if I hadn’t known that Gertrude couldn’t write, though she then had something to say, I might be inclined to take her more seriously" (152). These feelings likely caused their vicious separation. "She Bowed to Her Brother" is not only a good example of Stein’s literary technique, but also good insight about Stein’s feelings about Leo.

Although Stein lived and worked in Paris, she was an American experimenting with form and creating new meaning with language. More than a literary genius, she created a space for other artists to come together and create. Clearly she was a major proponent of the Modernist movement.

Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987.

Paschen, Elise and Rebekah Presson Mosby, eds. Poetry Speaks. Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks, 2001.

Wright, C.D. "C.D. Wright on Gertrude Stein." Poetry Speaks. Elise Paschen and Rebekah Presson Mosby eds. Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks, 2001. 39-40.