The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas | Themes

Identity/Self-Image
By telling her own story through the persona of someone close to her, Stein implicitly suggests that a person’s identity can only ever be provisionally known. She adopts Toklas’s voice and draws on her memories for her ventriloquist’s trick, effectively creating an identity that is part Toklas, part Stein. Experiments with point of view in literature and painting were popular during Stein’s time, and the idea of objectivity was giving way to the notion that reality was subjective and plural. Stein experiments with point of view in other books as...

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