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egg shell in coffee to clarify. […]” Thus, Alice Toklas practically abridges the reader with what Matissé
is doing in art. Furthermore, as the critics of contemporary women’s life writing, we immediately
recall through Toklas’s cooking metaphor the écrite feminine. Rather than underestimating her
feminine voice, thus, Toklas’ perspective puts forward her unique selfhood into an authorial identity
to transgress traditional male autobiographies. In Stein’s and Toklas’s time, success and historical
significance were the prominent aspects attributed to male autobiographers as well as male artists
and intellectuals. Lastly, on the matter of authenticity, in her Everybody’s Autobiography, Stein’s
remarks on ontological aspects of writing are noteworthy:
When I was young the most awful moment of my life was when I really realized that
the stars are worlds and when I really realized that there civilizations that had completely
disappeared from this earth. And now it happens again. Then I was frightened badly
frightened, now well now being frightened is something less frightening than it was. There
are a great many things about that but that will come gradually in everybody’s
autobiography. Now I am still out walking. I like walking. 3
Through her flow of words breaking the bounds with standard English and punctuation, here,
Stein refers to her childhood memory of an existential moment when she became aware of the fact
that stars were worlds. This moment of awareness is recalled through her present moment of
realization that just as the ancient civilizations had once collapsed her world was being collapsed as
well, as she says “now it happens again.” She refers to Europe in world wars.
So far as the issue of representation is discussed, textuality appears as another aspect of
Stein’s autobiographies. In both The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and Everybody’s
Autobiography, Stein frequently refers to Carl Van Vechten, who was another American writer and
her literary executor. In his introduction to The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Vechten draws a
distinction between Stein and another group of modernists, who were mournful of a collapsed past
of Western civilization after the world wars and were still affirmative of a totalizing realm of culture.
Namely these modernists were James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and William Butler Yeats:
To her as to them (up to a point), literature in the twentieth century presented itself as
a problem in the reconstruction of form and language. But where the solution of this
problem was a means to an end for these writers, it became, for her, on the whole, a
pursuit worthy in itself of her best efforts. She had no quarrel, as they did, with culture,
with history, with the self. 4
According to Vechten such was the theoretical basis of Stein’s texts which have often been
approached with the wrong principles dictated by knowledge of Joyce’s or Eliot’s methods. In
contrast to this approach, therefore: “culture in her terminology becomes composition, an aggregate
of institutions, technologies and human relations which the artist, as artist, accepts as it is, eliciting
its meanings primarily through eye and ear rather than through mind, memory, or imagination.” 5
In her second chapter of Everybody’s Autobiography, entitled as “What Was the Effect Upon
Me of the Autobiography,” Stein admits that her selfhood, which she once used to associate with her
life that was equal to the process of artistic creation, turned out to be labeled as a value as The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas became a bestseller: “I bought myself a new eight cylinder Ford car
and the most expensive coat made to order by Hermés […]” 6 From now on, then, being a bestseller
writer, Stein realizes the fact that her authenticity that is her selfhood as an artist turned out to be an
element of textuality. Besides being commodified, Stein complains about being textualized, which
has just become the main concern of contemporary critics of autobiography as Paul de Mann,
Jacquez Derrida and Roland Barthes who have announced the death of the author.
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