Primary Stein: Returning to the Writing of Gertrude Stein ed. by Janet Boyd and Sharon J. Kirsch (review)

Janet Boyd and Sharon J. Kirsch set out to make “Stein’s work primary, not secondary, to the study of her life” (2), and they highlight our enhanced critical and historical abilities now that Stein’s archives, mainly at Yale’s Beinecke Library, have been treated to “comprehensive reorganization” by Timothy G. Young (1996) and increasingly perused by Stein scholars (277). Ulla Dydo’s work at the Beinecke led to Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises (2003), which interprets somewhat different texts than previous Stein scholars had a chance to read. Work with the manuscripts has also led to the publications of “corrected” editions of several texts, such as Stanzas in Meditation (2012) and Tender Buttons (2014). When I was working on my dissertation, the archives were in discouraging disarray, and I am probably not the only one who will be inspired to try again after reading Primary Stein.

Gabrielle Dean’s “Make It Plain: Stein and Toklas Publish the Plain Edition” describes the production of five of Stein’s early books. Dean’s essay tells stories of Stein’s collaborative and useful friendships, and it contains a lovely paragraph that answers the question, “What is a publisher?” (16). But the essay may be most important to this collection in establishing that Stein wanted readers: “‘writers, university students, librarians and young people who have very little money’ [and] who would be ‘readers not collectors’” (22, citing The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas). The essays in Primary Stein are likely to drum up more of those readers.

The collection addresses crucial questions about Stein’s writing: what inspired Stein to write this? how did she do it? and how do I read it? One set of provocations for Stein’s unusual “textual encoding” (63) is examined by Jody Cardinal in “‘Come Too’: 1920s Erotic Rights Discourse and Gertrude Stein’s ‘Patriarchal Poetry.’” Cardinal introduces Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897–1910) and contemporary marriage manuals, and she compellingly argues that Stein depicts her relationship with Toklas as the ideal “companionate marriage,” which valued “emotional and particularly sexual companionship,” including simultaneous climax (59). Cardinal maintains that Stein saw her own project as feminine, lesbian writing, one that paralleled prevalent characterizations of essentialist “female sexuality . . . defined as gradual, elusive, complex, multiple, and diffuse” (61). Cardinal seems slightly uncomfortable with the idea that Stein accepts and builds on these popular binary distinctions, but I think that polarity is already undermined if one side is multiple and indeterminate. In spite of Stein’s idea of herself as Toklas’s “husband,” Stein critics have long argued that Stein’s writing is feminine writing, and it’s not just pretty to think that she might have seen it that way, too.

One example of reading Stein as a feminine writer is Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s “Woolfenstein, The Sequel,” the “bit more queer” (53n1) rewriting of her 1989 essay “Woolfenstein” (from Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction, ed. Friedman and Fuchs). Blau DuPlessis describes Stein and Woolf as working toward writing without “dramatic climax” (48) but instead by “beginning again and again” (45), with unordered lists, and in matted matrixes or grids (46–49, with reference to the 1985 essay “The Originality of the Avant-Garde,” by Rosalind E. Krauss). Her discussion of Stein’s “Forensics” will send me there, looking for more about rhetorical rules and resistances. I’m not sure republishing the essay was preferable to giving a forum to another voice and perspective, but Blau DuPlessis’s work is important in the field of women’s experimental writing. Although most Stein critics wouldn’t overlook or forget it, it’s important to remind potential new readers of this dominant vein in Stein criticism.

Neil Schmitz offers a pleasing new reading of Tender Buttons, one that corresponds to past readings in that the feminine and the...