Two Women Dancing

Gertrude Stein’s portrait of Isadora Duncan, “Orta or One Dancing,” is a dance inscribed on paper. This becomes especially clear when observing Stein’s handwritten manuscripts. While Stein acknowledges that most of her portrait pieces have little, if any, relation to their subjects, the Duncan portrait is a form of writing in motion: gestural sweep and melodic incantation are felt in the handwriting. The size of her writing is prodigious. Her movements, like Isadora’s, were spatially magnified, and protrude upon space.

Figure 1.

Reproduces an original typescript page of Gertrude Stein’s “Orta or One Dancing.” The five images which follow are from Stein’s manuscript notebook, and correspond to the better part of the third full paragraph in the typescript: from the words “She was thinking” down to “she was moving” (three lines from the bottom of the paragraph). (From the Yale collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; courtesy of the Estate of Gertrude Stein.)

Figure 2.

The five images which follow are from Stein’s manuscript notebook, and correspond to the better part of the third full paragraph in the typescript: from the words “She was thinking” down to “she was moving” (three lines from the bottom of the paragraph). (From the Yale collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; courtesy of the Estate of Gertrude Stein.)

Figure 3.

The five images which follow are from Stein’s manuscript notebook, and correspond to the better part of the third full paragraph in the typescript: from the words “She was thinking” down to “she was moving” (three lines from the bottom of the paragraph). (From the Yale collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; courtesy of the Estate of Gertrude Stein.)

Figure 4.

The five images which follow are from Stein’s manuscript notebook, and correspond to the better part of the third full paragraph in the typescript: from the words “She was thinking” down to “she was moving” (three lines from the bottom of the paragraph). (From the Yale collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; courtesy of the Estate of Gertrude Stein.)

Figure 5.

The five images which follow are from Stein’s manuscript notebook, and correspond to the better part of the third full paragraph in the typescript: from the words “She was thinking” down to “she was moving” (three lines from the bottom of the paragraph). (From the Yale collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; courtesy of the Estate of Gertrude Stein.)

Figure 6.

The five images which follow are from Stein’s manuscript notebook, and correspond to the better part of the third full paragraph in the typescript: from the words “She was thinking” down to “she was moving” (three lines from the bottom of the paragraph). (From the Yale collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; courtesy of the Estate of Gertrude Stein.)

The Stein that most readers know is, of course, read through the typography of the manuscript; the lyrical nature of her handwriting is obfuscated. Indeed, the “typographical Stein” hides the body of Stein in the act of her writing, as well as complicating her ideas of repetition. The typewritten manuscripts that Toklas dutifully prepared for Stein, as well as the more recent typographical design of the computer, reduce Stein’s manuscripts to mechanically reified objects of the type that Benjamin problematizes in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (see figure 1).

But Stein’s use of repetition, as she describes it in her 1934 lecture “Portraits and Repetition” given during her speaking tour of the United States, was based on her belief in emphasis, insistence, and motion. She writes, “there can be no repetition because the essence of that expression is insistence, and...