The Stein Aura: Gertrude Stein in the Twenty-First Century

Scholars of Gertrude Stein have enthusiastically adapted to the "expansion" of modernist studies discussed by Mao and Walkowitz in 2008.¹ The "perpetual definitional crisis" of modernism has been, as Gayle Rogers and Sean Latham observe in Modernism: Evolution of an Idea (2015), "a boon" to scholars; interest in Stein has mirrored this expansive trajectory, as many binaries once defended by modernist scholars have been complicated, challenged, and revised.² Stein's flexible, dynamic relationship to high and low culture, tradition and revolution, marketing and advertising, activism and conservatism have all been usefully analyzed by critics, who suggest that Stein's complex and sometimes controversial relationships to language, culture, and politics may not be exceptional, but instead quintessentially modernist.

Three recent books focus on significant aspects of Stein's life and work of continuing interest not just to Stein scholars, but to the modernist community: gender, Judaism, and celebrity. Chris Coffman's Gertrude Stein's Transmasculinity (2018) argues that Stein presented a "unique mode of transmasculine subjectivity" that differs from normative gender definitions in her time (3). Amy Feinstein's Gertrude Stein and the Making of Jewish Modernism (2020) shows the centrality of Stein's understanding of Jewish identity and language in her work. And Roy Morris Jr.'s Gertrude Stein Has Arrived: The Homecoming of a Literary Legend (2019) is an accessible biography about Stein's rise to fame with a focus on her American lecture tour. These studies each draw on a distinct, rich critical tradition. The Steins that emerge from each are vivid and self-contained, but points of convergence in the studies show that each scholar generally presents a progressive, revolutionary figure. In order to present Stein in such a positive light, the authors must address some troubling aspects of Stein's interests and influences that have received attention in the past decade.

Coffman and Feinstein both reshape our understanding of Stein's interest in the problematic theories of Otto Weininger. Leon Katz was the first to document that influence, significantly shaping studies about Stein related to gender, sexuality, and Judaism. Katz is a bit of a legendary figure in Stein studies, as Janet Malcolm explained in her 2005 New Yorker piece and in Two Lives (2007).³ In 1948, when Katz was a doctoral student at Columbia, examining the many Stein artifacts that had recently been deposited at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Yale University), he found the notebooks Stein had kept while writing The Making of Americans (1925), still wrapped in brown paper. He arranged to interview Alice B. Toklas in 1952–53, going over the details in the notebooks and keeping meticulous records that he planned to use for his dissertation, an annotated edition of The Making of Americans, and other scholarly work. As Malcolm notes, Katz never published most of the extensive information he collected in those many interviews with Toklas, although he did write an explosive introduction to the 1971 edition of Fernhurst, Q.E.D. and Other Early Writings that details Stein's early relationship with May Bookstaver; in 1978 he published an article about Weininger's influence on Stein. It was not until 2012 that he published "My Year with Alice B. Toklas" in the Yale Review, a lively description of his interviews with Toklas that reveals a taste of the gossip she divulged to him.⁴

In the 1978 article, Katz explains that after Leo and Gertrude Stein read Otto Weininger in 1908, both were fascinated by the book and "sent copies to everyone, even to old friends in America."⁵ Weininger's ideas about gender and Judaism are central to the racist taxonomy outlined in Sex and Character (1903...