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 Modern American Literature and the New Twentieth Century
Gertrude Stein
and the Politics
of Participation
Democracy, Rights and
Modernist Authorship, 1909 –1933

Isabelle Parkinson
Gertrude Stein and the
Politics of Participation
Modern American Literature and the New Twentieth Century
Series Editors: Martin Halliwell and Mark Whalan

Published Titles
Writing Nature in Cold War American Literature
Sarah Daw
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Short Fiction and American Popular Culture: From
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Jade Broughton Adams
The Labour of Laziness in Twentieth-Century American Literature
Zuzanna Ladyga
The Literature of Suburban Change: Narrating Spatial Complexity in
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Martin Dines
The Literary Afterlife of Raymond Carver: Influence and Craftsmanship in the
Neoliberal Era
Jonathan Pountney
Living Jim Crow: The Segregated Town in Mid-Century Southern Fiction
Gavan Lennon
The Little Art Colony and US Modernism: Carmel, Provincetown, Taos
Geneva M. Gano
Sensing Willa Cather: The Writer and the Body in Transition
Guy J. Reynolds
Gertrude Stein and the Politics of Participation: Democracy, Human Rights and
Modernist Authorship, 1909–1933
Isabelle Parkinson
Forthcoming Titles
The Big Red Little Magazine: New Masses, 1926–1948
Susan Currell
The Reproductive Politics of American Literature and Film, 1959–1973
Sophie Jones
Ordinary Pursuits in American Writing after Modernism
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The Plastic Theatre of Tennessee Williams: Expressionist Drama and the Visual
Arts
Henry I. Schvey
Exoteric Modernisms: Progressive Era Literature and the Aesthetics of Everyday
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Black Childhood in Modern African American Fiction
Nicole King
The Artifice of Affect: American Realist Literature and the Critique of Emotional
Truth
Nicholas Manning

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 Gertrude Stein and the
Politics of Participation
Democracy, Rights and
Modernist Authorship, 1909–1933

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© Isabelle Parkinson 2023

Cover image: Portrait of Gertrude Stein, with American flag as backdrop, January 4,
1935. Photographed by Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964). Library of Congress Prints
and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA
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 C O NT E NT S

Acknowledgementsvi

Introduction: Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and Democracy 1

1. The Politics of Authorship in Three Lives36
2. Authorship and Community in Stein’s Pre-war Portraits
and Tender Buttons84
3. Modernism’s Abject: Geography and Plays and Stein’s
Contested Authorship 140
4. Useful Knowledge and the Mind of Mass Democracy 189
Coda: Stein’s Democratic Authorship in The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas227

Bibliography238
Index250
 A C K NOW L E DGE M E NT S

My first and most profound thanks are to Suzanne Hobson, whose

generous support and guidance in the years during and after my PhD
at Queen Mary, University of London have extended far beyond any
possible obligation. I am also grateful to my adviser Morag Shiach
for calling me to account until I learned to account for myself.
Thanks are also due to Alex Goody and Robert Hampson, who
examined my PhD thesis, a process that helped me determine the
direction of this new project. The majority of this book was written
whilst I was teaching in the Department of Comparative Literature
and Culture at Queen Mary, and I have an enormous debt of grat-
itude to Kiera Vaclavik and Angus Nicholls for their mentorship
and encouragement, and for the extraordinary opportunities they
gave me to develop as an academic and teacher. Thanks also to
all those modernist scholars I always look forward to meeting at
conferences and whose lovely work and thrilling conversation has
stimulated and developed my thinking, including Hannah Roche,
Faye Hammill, Iain Bailey, Alix Beeston, Clara Jones, Sophie Oliver,
Natasha Periyan and Jeff Wallace.
Particular thanks are due to Janet Lyon, inspirational modernist
scholar and co-editor of the Journal of Modern Literature, whose
forthright feedback proved to be a formative intervention at an
important moment in the development of this study. I am very
grateful for EUP’s initial readers for continuing this work, and for
the ongoing support of Modern American Literature and the New
Twentieth Century series editors, Martin Halliwell and Mark Whalan.
 Acknowledgements/ vii

Thanks also to Susannah Butler from EUP for her patient and gentle
reminders.
I would like to acknowledge with deepest gratitude the bookish
friends Claudia Jessop, Andrew Gray, Kate Bomford, Nick Dodd,
Anneke Pettican, John Dunn and Emma Simpson who have lis-
tened and engaged with kindly attention to the long story of this
text, and especially Asiya Bulatova, modernist, traveller and dearest
padrooga. Finally, thanks to my best and most present reader, Marc
Lancaster, for his thereness, and to Evie and Vic Lancaster for being
Them.
Portions of Gertrude Stein and the Politics of Participation have
been published elsewhere. A version of Chapter 4 appeared as
‘Democrat or “imbecile”? Gertrude Stein’s Useful Knowledge and
Discourses of Intellectual Disability in the To-day and To-morrow
Pamphlet Series’ in Journal of Modern Literature, 43:3 (2020), and
sections from Chapter 4 and from the Introduction appear in Useful
Knowledge beyond the Beinecke: Gertrude Stein reading discourses
of democracy and rights in Life magazine and the Literary Digest’
in Historicizing Modernists: Approaches to ‘Archivalism’, edited by
Matthew Feldman (Bloomsbury Academic: 2021). Thanks to JML
and Bloomsbury for permission to republish.
 Introduction: Gertrude Stein,
Modernism and Democracy

The pragmatic value of modernism lies in it’s tremendous recognition of

the compensation due to the spirit of democracy. [ . . . ] Modernism says
Why not each one of us, scholar or bricklayer, pleasureably realise all that
is impressing itself upon our unconscious, the thousand odds and ends
that make up your sensery every day life. [ . . . ] Modernism has democ-
ratised the subject matter and la belle matière of art, through cubism the
newspaper has assumed an aesthetic quality, through Cezanne, a plate has
become more than something to put an apple on, Brancusi has given an
evangelistic import to eggs, and Gertrude Stein has given us the Word, in
and for itself.1

The most perfect example of this method is ‘Italians’, where not only are
you pressed close to the insistence of their existence, but Gertrude Stein
through her process of reiteration gradually, progressively rounds them
out, decorates them with their biological insignia [ . . . ]. They solidify in
her words, in ones, in crowds, compact with racial impulses. They are of
one, infinitesimally varied in detail, racial consistency.2

Modernism and Democracy

Mina Loy’s 1924 celebration of Gertrude Stein’s work, written in
the form of two letters to The Transatlantic Review, reveals a contem-
porary association of modernism with democracy that has Stein’s
authorship as the literary exemplar of its democratising force. In
Loy’s account, modernism is democratic both because of its subject
 2 / Stein and the Politics of Participation

matter and formal experimentation and because of its openness

to broad participation. By 1924, definitions of modernism were
being formed and contested after more than twenty years of rad-
ical practice by a profusion of international artists and writers in
European centres and, to a lesser extent, in rapidly modernising
American cities. Loy’s expression of allegiance shows that Stein’s
authorship was both produced by and generative of the expansive
possibilities of early-twentieth-century Anglo-American literary
culture. Stein’s significant position on the modernist scene reflected
and encouraged an expansion in authorship, notably in her case
the proliferation of women writers and of new modes of collective
production. Her practice and her presence exemplify a necessary
symbiosis in the ecology of modernism in a period characterised
by the florescence of both mass and coterie publication, the rise
of new audiences, the exploration of innovative aesthetic forms
and subjects, and by the emergence of new forms of authorship
and the recognition of a greater range of authorial subjects.3 This
expanding literary culture courted and created audiences for rad-
ical work through small presses and, increasingly after the late
1910s, through publication in a vast and steadily enlarging popu-
lar press. As Loy points out, Stein’s writing, like much modernist
work, also defined new aesthetic subjects in experimental forms,
including her explorations of working-class experience, of complex
sexualities and gender formations, and of the everyday life of the
ordinary consumer. Loy’s paean to Stein demonstrates her opti-
mistic belief that these significant shifts in literary culture reflected
and intersected a simultaneous expansion in the political sphere,
following extensions in suffrage as liberal democracies in America
and Europe consolidated their moves to mass democratisation in
the first decades of the twentieth century.
One might therefore, along with Loy, think of this as a democ-
ratisation of culture that reflects a wider political democratisation,
in which participation in the production of and engagement with
the arts opens up, in which the right to write expands as other
rights are extended. The story is, of course, much more complex
and much knottier than this. Loy’s apparently optimistic charac-
terisation of this democratic modernism and of Stein’s democratic
writing simultaneously signals the underlying tensions and some
 Introduction/ 3

of the darker implications of the growth of mass democracy in the

inter-war period. Her reference to the ‘pragmatic value’ of mod-
ernism in its recognition of ‘the compensation due to the spirit of
democracy’ offers an alternative to the narrative of break or rupture
reflected in much avant-garde rhetoric, positing instead a more
gradualist participatory shift.4 It also, however, reflects the anxiety
of a bourgeois cosmopolitan class about the potential engagement
of others (for example, the ‘bricklayer’) in public life, and by the
challenge to the class structure that this might presage. In Loy’s
formulation, modernism is pragmatic in that it makes the best of
a bad job: the social and political disadvantages of democracy are
compensated for by the cultural advantages of (and for) the arts.
Loy’s close reading of Stein’s ‘Italians’ points to another prob-
lematic in the emergence of the inter-war international order: the
entrenchment of nationalistic ideologies that accompanied mass
democratisation. As many scholars have argued, the organicist
nationalism of the nineteenth century deepened in the early twen-
tieth century as biological theories of race proliferated and the state
became increasingly interested in the bodies of citizens as a mass.5
In his study of nationalism and the modernist novel, Pericles Lewis
argues that the persistence of organicist nationalism complicated
liberal democratic conceptions of citizenship because ‘legal, formal
equality of citizenship in the liberal state was insignificant next
to what the organicists considered the real brotherhood arising
from shared blood and a shared linguistic or cultural heritage’.6
Loy’s insistence on the ‘biological insignia’, ‘racial impulses’ and
‘racial consistency’, of the Italians that Stein depicts reflects an
understanding of ‘race’ as the identification of nationality with
biology, in which individuals are deeply bound by a shared genetic
inheritance defined as coterminous with nationality. This is of a
piece with Loy’s earlier – though short-lived – association with
Filippo Marinetti, the founder of Italian Futurism and supporter
of Benito Mussolini, including her 1914 feminist manifesto in
which she advocated for ‘superior’ women to reproduce in order to
promote the genetic purification of the race.7 Thus, Loy’s optimistic
exemplification of the reciprocity of modernism and democracy in
the work of Gertrude Stein is shadowed by these hints at the inher-
ent inequalities and the b­ iopolitical horrors that a­ ccompanied the
 4 / Stein and the Politics of Participation

extensions of rights to citizens in the mass democracies of the

twentieth century.
Looking back from the post-Second World War moment at the
actualisation of conceptions of rights in Western democracies,
Hannah Arendt notes that, rather than being ‘“inalienable,” “given
with birth”’, or originating in ‘“self-evident truths”’, equality, ‘in
contrast to all that is involved in mere existence, is not given us,
but is the result of human organization insofar as it is guided
by the principle of justice’. She goes on: ‘We are not born equal;
we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our
decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights’.8 Thus, the
membership of a national group, with all the potential for ine-
quality and violence the organicist racial identification of nation-
ality entails, was the ground upon which rights had been granted.9
Arendt scholar Hauke Brunkhorst neatly delineates the inherent
problem in the paradigm of national membership and expanding
rights that Arendt addresses when he points out that

If we tell the whole story then we have to accept that in many cases (and in
some way in all cases) the expansion of social inclusion was with the price
of new exclusion, or new forms of first latent, later manifest oppression.10

As I argue in this book, what we can see in Stein’s authorial prac-

tices, in her formulations and reformulations of herself as author,
and in arguments over the legitimacy of her authorship across the
first decades of the twentieth century, is that, as is evident in Loy’s
contribution to Stein’s authorial consecration, literary culture was
a site of discursive contestation with complex ties to these parallel
discourses of democratic rights and national belonging. Just as
equality in the public sphere more generally is based on member-
ship of a group, so the right to authorial equality is founded on the
recognition and legitimisation of a writer as author in a specific lit-
erary and artistic unit. This study of Stein and her milieu is a study
of the corresponding processes of cultural inclusion and exclusion
that shape her work and define her authorship.
The relationship between the literary and the political is, of
course, complex and difficult to map, and it would be inaccurate to
say that the paradigms of inclusion and exclusion in early-twenti-
 Introduction/ 5

eth-century democracies and in modernist literary circles have the

same origins, causes or effects. Pascale Casanova offers a productive
framework for the analysis of these interactions that enables an
attention to the uneven yet connected historical shifts in the con-
figurations of literary and political (economic, social) space. In
her study The World Republic of Letters (2004), Casanova identifies
‘world literary space’ as a ‘world made up by lands of literature; a
world in which what is judged worthy of being considered literature
is brought into existence’.11 The space of literature is therefore a
sphere with its own rules and norms in which the adjudication of
value – indeed, of literariness as such – and the status of authorship
are conferred by its ‘consecrating authorities’ (12). Despite the fact
that it has its own rules, its own authorities, and an internal struc-
ture continually formed in contestation on an international literary
scene, the idea of ‘a literature emancipated from all historical and
political attachments’ is, for Casanova ‘a fiction’. In the world of
literature, alternative and contested or competing literary forms
were first mapped to national boundaries as states emerged in the
fifteenth century, and later claimed in the service of nineteenth-­
century nationalism, but ‘its boundaries, its capitals, its highways,
and its forms of communication do not completely coincide with
those of the political and economic world’ (11). The relationships
between the literary and political spheres change over time, and
they interact with each other differently at different moments. The
literary world is thus a space that has a relative, fluctuating and
unevenly distributed autonomy that means it is never fully divorced
from the political sphere, but neither is it, by the same token, ever
analogous or equivalent with the political. Casanova concisely
sets out the relations between the literary ‘world’ and the political
domain in an essay written to accompany the English translation
and publication of her book. Here, the ‘world of literature’ is a space
in which ‘struggles of all sorts – political, social, national, gender,
ethnic – come to be refracted, diluted, deformed or transformed
according to a literary logic, and in literary forms.’12 Casanova’s
conception of the relations between the literary and the political is
key to the way my study interrogates the changing configurations of
Stein’s authorship in relation to the social, political and economic
sphere of the early-to-mid-twentieth century that is continually
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