Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography Of Alice B. Toklas

A Multifaceted Self

One might never expect one’s autobiography to be written by another. Would the information be correct? What would the purpose be? This is exactly the case with Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, as she has written an autobiography about herself to be able to illustrate her portrait style writing, to comment on the artists that the surrounded the modernist movement and to be entertain her readership on a larger scale.

Gertrude stein lived at 27 rue de Fleurus and was one of the understood founders of the modernist movement that centered in Paris. New theories had developed within this modernist movement concerning art and literature, and therefore new styles to support those theories were invented to illustrate and coincide with these theories. As Stein writes her autobiography from another’s

When stories are told to an audience, the information relayed represents both the present, as well as within memories. The avenue of portrait writing allows a story to demonstrate how a story is told in a more realistic manner. Additionally, a story is layered with different representations of perspectives concerning the same occurrence, while simultaneously entertaining the viewpoints of hindsight and introspection. The portrait style of writing allows more than “just a literal chronological description” (Farfane 391). The beauty and innovation of Stein is that these perspective are, according to Farfane, “simultaneously generated and suppressed in the text”, just as the mind might as one is trying to accurately recall all events pertaining to the story, some of them being in the forefront of the mind concerning purpose and others unearthed from memory as the story unwinds itself during its telling and receiving (391). These portrait writing is both an innovation of Stein representation of the artistic movement of modernism in art and