The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Critical Essays

The longest chapter in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas covers the fourteen years from the end of World War I to 1932, the years during which talented Americans swarmed into Paris. Stein wrote the book in six weeks during 1932, modeling it loosely on Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). It is significant that Stein devotes three pages to Toklas’ background but twenty-two to her own and to her move from the United States to Paris. Obviously, despite its whimsical title, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is Gertrude Stein’s autobiography, fancifully presented.

The writing style in this book is unique. In previous works, Stein had used her combined psychological and medical training to observe closely how people actually speak and to represent that speech as accurately as she could. In Three Lives (1910), she recorded precisely if often monotonously the actual speech cadences of three domestics: Lena and Anna, German immigrants, and Melanctha, a serving girl, the first African American protagonist seriously presented by a white American writer. The speech of these three women involves endless repetition and circularity. Although they sometimes talk drivel, Stein presents them with respect. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein is still experimenting with a style that bewildered her earlier readers but that has delighted many later ones. She allows thoughts to flow as they do in the unconscious mind. She uses punctuation sparingly. Her sentences often ramble in Stein’s attempt to depict how the...