[In the following essay, Winston explains the metaphorical implications of the proper names, literary allusions, and historical quotations that Stein used in The Mother of Us All to reflect her development as a literary woman.]

Gertrude Stein's last major work, The Mother of Us All (1946), is an opera about Susan B. Anthony, the champion of woman suffrage.¹ Yet like other writing by Stein, it is also “disguised autobiography.”² In dramatizing Anthony's campaign to win the vote for women, Stein relives her own struggle to make a name for herself as a writer and contemplates her growth from literary novice to experienced artist and mentor. According to Elizabeth Fifer, Stein in her early erotic poetry devised “a witty code” of metaphors drawn from domestic life, nature, religion and sports to describe her relationship with Alice Toklas (472-83). In The Mother of Us All, she again uses a code—this time composed of proper names, literary allusions and historical quotation—to explore her development as a woman and writer.

The Mother of Us All depicts Susan B. Anthony's lifelong fight to promote women's self-government both as individuals and as part of the body politic. The action shifts between public gatherings and domestic scenes. Confrontations occur between Susan B. Anthony and that defender of the Union, Daniel Webster; Anthony and a trio of male V.I.P.'s; and Anthony and a chorus of men, who listen politely to her speeches but refuse to support her cause. Anthony is also seen at home with her companion Anne, lamenting the selfish conservatism of men or reflecting on the reasons for their continued opposition: “Men have kind hearts,” she says, “but they are afraid” (80). The final scene of the opera takes place in the Halls of Congress, where a statue of Susan B. Anthony is unveiled to celebrate the victory of woman suffrage. The voice of Anthony from behind the statue brings the opera to a close with a quiet meditation on the meaning of her long life. This speech is usually viewed as Stein's own valedictory to the public she had addressed for over forty years (Van Vechten xii; Bridgman 341; Mellow 463-64).

Commentators on the opera have noticed parallels between Susan B. Anthony and Gertrude Stein. Neither woman married. Both had lasting close relationships with another woman—Anthony with Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, Stein with Alice Toklas.³ Both worked aggressively for the principles in which they believed: Anthony for women's rights and Stein for what she called “exactitude in the description of inner and outer reality” and renewal of the English language (Toklas 211). Finally, both women, though confident of eventual triumph, died without having achieved their primary life goal. Full enfranchisement for women in the United States came in 1920, fourteen years after Anthony's death; full recognition as a leading twentieth-century writer consistently evaded Stein. Today, however, she is receiving long overdue critical attention as a key theorist and practitioner of literary modernism.

In the character of Anthony, Stein portrays her mature self, the writer who vigorously challenged literary traditionalists and openly acknowledged her personal and literary debts to other women. In another character, Indiana Elliot, Stein draws a less obvious parallel: between herself and a young woman who, in the course of the opera, moves from ingénue awed by male authority to assertive (albeit disillusioned) married woman, committed to the suffragist cause. Elliot represents Stein's younger self, the Stein who early in her career identified genius with the male gender and had not yet come to terms with herself as a writer and woman. By creating Elliot and Anthony as her alter egos, Stein affirms her female identity and reviews her own progress from male-identified artist of the early 1900s to the feminist stance of her last years.

This is not the first time that Stein had assigned the experiences of her younger, less authoritative self to another character. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), where she attempted to win recognition as a genius on a level with Picasso, Stein omitted an account of her early years in Paris under the esthetic tutelage of her older brother Leo. Instead, she presented herself as Leo's equal in knowledge of modern painting and gave her former role of apprentice to Alice Toklas.⁴ By having Alice play the part of novice, Stein could vicariously relive the years when Leo was introducing her to the work of Cézanne, Matisse and others, without threatening her image as a leader in the world of avant-garde art.

Stein violated literary tradition in the 1933 autobiography by assuming the voice and role of Alice Toklas to write an account of her own life. In The Mother of Us All she preserves her reputation as an artistic revolutionary by manipulating the public and private history of Susan B. Anthony and other historical personages to dramatize the life of Gertrude Stein. One of her techniques is to play freely with chronology, bringing together characters like Daniel Webster and her own contemporaries—Virgil T[homson] and Jo [Barry], for instance. Collapsing centuries, she creates a love affair between John Quincy Adams and her friend Constance Fletcher, the author of Kismet. For a second romantic couple she pairs the devil-defeating Daniel Webster with an invented character, Angel More.⁵ In another manipulation of history, she creates a highly idiosyncratic account of the fight for woman suffrage by quoting—with a fearless disregard for context—from the speeches and letters of Webster and Anthony. Furthermore, she slants her presentation of Anthony to highlight the similarities between this nineteenth-century feminist and herself.

Perhaps Stein's most interesting device for conveying the opera's central themes—the relation of women to patriarchal tradition and, more covertly, her own relation to literary tradition—is her exploration of characters' names. Repeatedly Stein calls attention to the political significance of a woman's last name. She emphasizes that a woman's surname usually identifies her as the possession and responsibility of a father or husband. For example, although Henrietta M., like another minor character, Henry B., has an initial instead of a last name, it is her lack rather than Henry's that Daniel Webster finds “troubling.” At the end of Act II, scene ii, Webster introduces Henrietta M. to the assembled crowd: “Ladies and gentlemen let me present you let me present to you Henrietta M. it is rare in this troubled world to find a woman without a last name rare delicious and troubling …” (67). For Webster, one suspects, a woman like Henrietta M. is “rare” and “delicious” because seemingly unattached—a ripe fruit ready for picking by a discriminating male. Yet she is “troubling” too because she seems to have slipped through the patriarchal system; she flourishes without paternal roots.

The issue of women and patriarchy is treated seriously at times, at other times playfully, as in the following passage from Act One, in which President Adams serenades Stein's friend, Constance Fletcher:

JOHN Adams.
Dear Miss Constance Fletcher, it is a great pleasure that I kneel at your feet, but I am an Adams, I kneel at the feet of none, not any one … if I had not been an Adams I would have kneeled at your feet.
CONSTANCE Fletcher
And kissed my hand.
J. Adams.
(shuddering) And kissed your hand.
CONSTANCE Fletcher.
What a pity … what a pity it is what a pity.
J. Adams.
Do not pity me … I am an Adams and not pitiable.

(62-63)

Smitten with passion for Constance Fletcher and wanting to show his devotion, Adams feels—initially at least—that he cannot kneel at her feet or kiss her hand because he has a family name and honor to uphold. Stein is here spoofing the tradition of male authority, for by the opera's end, despite Adams's stout declarations of immunity to women's powers, he is paying tribute, kissing the hand of his “dear friend beautiful friend” Constance Fletcher (81).

Daniel Webster meets a similar fate. The woman who captures his heart, Angel More, was once a martyr to male dominance, submitting to the domestic drudgery of “Darn and wash and patch, darn and wash and patch” (55). In the course of the opera, however, she begins to redefine the meaning of her name.⁶ In her mild-mannered way she both challenges Webster's statements and critiques the famous orator's delivery: “Speak louder,” she recommends (76). When he urges her in the final scene to “come to me and we will leave together,” she gently corrects him: “Dear sir, not leave, stay” (84). By refusing to go away with Webster, choosing instead to remain in the Congressional Hall by the statue of Susan B. Anthony, Angel More demonstrates her respect for women who have spent their lives fighting for the franchise. This angel has left the house to take her place with other women in the political arena. One can even imagine her occasionally voting in opposition to her beloved statesman from New Hampshire. At least one would hope so, since the historical Webster put the preservation of the Union above every other cause, including the abolition of slavery and woman suffrage.

The Mother of Us All is structured around three main actions: the efforts of the proudly single Anthony to encourage female independence through the franchise; the resistance of patriarchs like John Adams and Daniel Webster to Anthony's cause (they prefer traditional romance to egalitarian relations with women); and the progress of Anthony's young friend Indiana Elliot from ingénue in the world of sexual politics to married suffragist. It is through the characters of Elliot and Anthony that Stein examines the question of women's relation to the patriarchy most thoroughly, and at the same time explores her own personal and artistic development.

In the first exchange between Elliot and Anthony, Stein clearly establishes Elliot as a young woman in need of guidance and the famous suffragist as the one who can give that direction.⁷ Indiana Elliot declares in her opening words in Stein's text, “Choose a name.” Anthony's emphatic reply puts the young woman in her place: “Susan B. Anthony is my name to choose a name is feeble … a name can only be a name my name can only be my name, I have a name, Susan B. Anthony is my name, to choose a name is feeble” (53). Here Anthony asserts the weakness of inventing a name for oneself. The difficult but necessary task is to make something of the name one has been given. From Indiana Elliot's perspective, however, some names have more potential than others: “Yes that's easy,” she says, “Susan B. Anthony is that kind of a name but my name Indiana Elliot. What's in a name.” To which Anthony responds, “Everything.” The action of the opera demonstrates the truth of this sweeping claim.

Evidence suggests that the name “Indiana Elliot” is full of significance for Gertrude Stein. It may incorporate allusions to three of Stein's literary foremothers, all of whom wrote under pseudonyms: George eliot (Marian Evans), Currer Bell (Charlotte Brontë), and George Sand (Aurore Dupin).

The links between Indiana Elliot and George Eliot are both textual and biographical. An examination of the manuscript of The Mother of Us All in the Beinecke Manuscript Library at Yale reveals that in the line quoted earlier, “but my name Indiana Elliot. What's in a name,” Indiana's last name is spelled with one l, like the Victorian novelist's pseudonym. The slip is significant when one remembers that early in her literary career, Stein had read and drawn upon the work of George Eliot. Stein called her first short story “The Red Deeps,” after the meeting place of Maggie Tulliver and Philip Wakem in Eliot's second novel, The Mill on the Floss (1860). In another apprentice piece, a lecture written about 1898 while she was attending Johns Hopkins medical school, Stein cited a passage from Eliot's last novel, Daniel Deronda (1878), to make a point about the value of a college education for women.⁸ By naming Indiana “Elliot,” Stein could simultaneously allude to George Eliot's oeuvre and to the beginning of her own career.

The connections between Indiana Elliot and Charlotte Brontë are more indirect. “Elliott” is the alias Jane Eyre uses to conceal her identity from the Rivers family after her flight from Thornfield to Marsh End.⁹ Stein, who reports having read Jane Eyre as a girl in Oakland (Everybody's Autobiography 151), may be subtly preparing her audience for the incident in Act II, scene v of the opera, when someone identifying himself as “Indiana Elliot's brother” rushes in to try to stop his sister from marrying Jo the Loiterer, because the groom may be “a bigamist.” The action is reminiscent of the famous scene in Jane Eyre when Rochester's mad wife's brother, Mr. Mason, interrupts the wedding between Rochester and Jane to reveal that Rochester is attempting bigamy.

Indiana Elliot's first name provides the link with George Sand. Indiana is the title of the first novel Sand published under her famous pseudonym. Stein recalls reading the works of George Sand and other French writers in English translation: “they were to me romantic but not historical,” she explains in her essay “An American in France”—part of that foreign culture that “any one who is to create” needs in order to be free to produce works that transcend time (What Are Masterpieces 67-68). The connections between Sand's Indiana Delmare and Stein's Indiana Elliot are thematic. Both are young, inexperienced women dissatisfied with marriage, though for different reasons: Indiana Delmare is locked in an unhappy union with the jealous retired Colonel Delmare, a man many years her senior; Indiana Elliot, through her work for woman suffrage, comes to suspect marriage as a threat to female independence.

By naming the character who represents her younger self “Indiana Elliot,” Stein can allude to famous female predecessors, unobtrusively acknowledging their importance in this disguised exploration of her own literary career.

At the thematic center of The Mother of Us All is the wedding of Indiana Elliot to Jo the Loiterer. (Jo, as his name suggests, is defined by a misdemeanor. Stein took the idea for his name from the journalist, Jo Barry, who told her how he was once arrested for picketing at the University of Michigan but was officially charged with loitering [qtd. in Van Vechten xi].) As noted earlier, at the beginning of the opera Indiana Elliot is a naive young woman with a traditional view of male-female relations. She stands in awe of authoritative men like Daniel Webster. This is especially apparent in Act II, scene iv, in which Indiana Elliot and Constance Fletcher come to the meeting where Webster and Anthony are speaking, and “bowing low,” offer extravagant praise to “this dear this dear great man” (70). Anthony pronounces their praises “slush” and twice tells them to “Hush.” Indiana Elliot seems to take this scolding to heart, for from the next scene to the opera's close, she asserts herself quite firmly in exchanges with the men who claim authority over her. During the wedding ceremony she chides the groom for not paying attention. (The wistful Jo remarks, “I wish my name was Adams” [73].) When Indiana's brother tries to stop the marriage on the grounds that he doesn't know enough about Jo's background—perhaps he is “a bigamist or a grandfather or an uncle or a refugee”—the groom seems ready to back down quietly, but Indiana renounces her brother, and the ceremony continues.

The extent of Indiana's transformation becomes evident in the next scene, when Jo comes to Susan B. Anthony's house to announce that his wife will not change her name: “she says that she is Indiana Elliot and that I am Jo, and that she will not take my name and that she will always tell me so. Oh yes she is right of course she is right it is not all the same Indiana Elliot is her name, she is only married to me …” (77). Elliot now enters, clearly exhilarated by the struggle to win the vote for women and proud of her own personal defiance of patriarchal tradition: “Oh Susan B … I have not changed my name can I tell them you are coming and that you will do everything.” But the young woman has much to learn. She seems to have invested Anthony with the superhuman powers she had once assigned to Webster, believing that if Anthony will only speak to the men, she can persuade them to extend the franchise to women. Susan B. Anthony knows better:

they won't vote my laws, there is always a clause. there is always a pause, they won't vote my laws.

(77)

Anthony's political cynicism is based on repeated, unsuccessful attempts to persuade men to recognize women's right to the franchise. Earlier in the opera she implies that getting help from men depends on not annoying them (68). In this later scene, she states directly the lesson her experiences have taught her: men will act only to protect their interests, and these interests are very narrowly construed. When Thaddeus Stevens (one of the V.I.P.'s and architect of the Reconstruction Acts) defends male resistance by saying that “humanity comes first,” Anthony quickly retorts that for him, “humanity” means “men,” and “Men come first” (77).

Stein uses quotations from historical documents—speeches and letters—to dramatize the conflict between Anthony and the opponents of woman suffrage and, covertly, the conflict between Stein and those who challenged her claim to literary greatness. In Act One, she stages a debate between Anthony and Daniel Webster, alternating twelve consecutive passages from Webster's famous 1830 Second Reply to Hayne with Steinian assertions from Anthony. In reality, of course, such a confrontation never occurred. According to Ida Husted Harper, Anthony's official biographer, the suffragist did not make her first public speech until 1849 and did not begin her fulltime public career until 1852, the year Webster died (I: 53). But by using the Reply to Hayne, in which Webster refers to his opponent as “he” and speaks more to the assembled audience than to the one he is debating, Stein conveys just how strongly the two sides disagree on the role of women in politics:

DANIEL Webster
When this debate sir was to be resumed on Thursday it so happened that it would have been convenient for me to be elsewhere.
SUSAN B.
I am here, ready to be here. Ready to be where. Ready to be here. It is my habit.
DANIEL Webster.
The honorable member complained that I had slept on his speech.
SUSAN B.
The right to sleep is given to no woman.

.....

DANIEL Webster.
What interest asks he has South Carolina in a canal in Ohio.
SUSAN B.
What interest have they in me, what interest have I in them, who holds the head of whom, who can bite their lips to avoid a swoon.

.....

DANIEL Webster.
Mr. President I shall enter on no encomium upon Massachusetts she need none. There she is behold her and judge for yourselves.
SUSAN B.
I enter into a tabernacle I was born a believer in peace, I say fight for the right, be a martyr and live, be a coward and die, and why, because they, yes they, sooner or later go away. …

(57-58)

The debate accurately conveys the distance between men, like Senator Webster, who enjoy the advantages of shared power and the luxury of eloquence—who can pause to choose words carefully and build majestic clauses—and disenfranchised but passionately determined women like Anthony, who “fight for the right” without ceasing and who ultimately struggle alone.

Anthony has learned that women can count only on themselves to fight for the right to vote. The male slaves Anthony worked to free and enfranchise will not help. The political V.I.P.'s will exclude women from suffrage by ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing equal protection of the law for male citizens only. Even male relatives—husbands and brothers—cannot be depended upon to support their wives and sisters in this struggle. Just before the marriage of Indiana Elliot and Jo the Loiterer, Anthony asserts her view that women must develop radical self-reliance:

Will they remember that it is true that neither they that neither you, will they marry will they carry, aloud, the right to know that even if they love them so, they are alone to live and die, they are alone to sink and swim they are alone to have what they own, to have no idea but that they are here, to struggle and thirst to do everything first because until it is done there is no other one.

(72)

In this passage, Stein may be putting some of Webster's words into Anthony's mouth, for in his “Discourse in Commemoration of Adams and Jefferson” (Boston, 1826), Webster, quoting John Adams, declares: “Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, I give my hand and my heart to this vote.”¹⁰ If Stein is quoting here, she has slightly altered the original, changing the coordinating conjunction from “or” to “and”: women are alone to live and die … sink and swim—a change which emphasizes the certainty, the inevitability of their solitude.

Anthony's insistence that women must assert themselves independently of the men they love is reminiscent of Stein's 1898 speech on higher education for women, in which she stressed the necessity for female independence and the priority of a woman's career over her biology. In her own life, Stein certainly affirmed the primacy of individual accomplishment, doggedly pursuing a literary career despite the lack of encouragement from those around her and the downright opposition of her once devoted older brother Leo. From childhood, through the years at Radcliffe and Harvard, and into the early years in Paris, Leo had guided and encouraged Gertrude in her intellectual and esthetic pursuits. But Leo came to judge the work of both his sister and her friend Pablo Picasso as “the most Godalmighty rubbish that is to be found” (53). He expressed this view soon after his departure in December 1913 from the Paris apartment he had shared with Gertrude for over ten years. Gertrude's explanation for their estrangement (as related in Everybody's Autobiography) is that she, who “had always been following,” began to believe that she was a genius and that Leo was not: “and that was the beginning of the ending and we always had been together and now we were never at all together. Little by little we never met again” (77). Stein, like Susan B. Anthony, “began to follow herself” (Mother 59).

The excerpts from Anthony's writings that Stein chose to include in The Mother of Us All further stress the need for women's independent action and integrity. Two of the quotations concern Anthony's early work in the Temperance movement, but in the context of the opera they become references to her campaign for woman suffrage. One excerpt is from the March 1849 speech at a Daughters of Temperance supper, cited by Harper as Anthony's “first platform utterance” (I: 53, 55). Stein uses it at the beginning of Act II, scene iv: “Ladies there is no neutral position for us to assume. If we say we love the cause and then sit down at our ease, surely does our action speak the lie” (70). The second quotation comes from a letter to Lucy Stone in 1853, urging defiance of the male leaders of the World's Temperance Convention (she calls them “old fogies”) who have barred female delegates from participating in a planning meeting for the annual convention. Anthony argues that Temperance women should convene a separate “Whole World's Temperance Convention” because the same men who prohibited women from taking part in the planning session will be “the leading spirits” at the World's Convention: “how then can we entertain a hope that they will act differently?” Anthony questions. “We may go in good faith but there will be no faith in us.” Stein has Susan B. speak these words at the beginning of Act II, scene iii, when (as Maurice Grosser explains in his scenario for the opera) Susan B. “sees, in a day dream, a negro man and woman and realizes. on questioning them, that the negro man, whom she has helped to enfranchise can not help her in her fight for woman suffrage” (Stein and Thomson 16).

A third quotation from Anthony's writings used by Stein in the opera comes from a letter of Anthony's to her mother in 1870, on the occasion of Anthony's fiftieth birthday (Harper I: 343). The daughter's reflection on her mother's courageous struggle to rear her six children in times of physical and economic hardship strengthens Anthony to continue her fight to win the vote for women. The slightly altered quotation in the opera reads, “My constantly recurring thought and prayer now are … that no word or act of mine may lessen the might of this country in the scale of truth and right” (alteration italicized).

In this scene and throughout the opera, Stein stresses not the traditional view of Anthony as the consummate organizer (Dubois 255) and co-worker for women's rights (first with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and later with Anna Howard Shaw) but as the solitary fighter who knows that, married or single, women “are alone to live and die … sink and swim.” In fact, the assertions about women's essential solitude and need for self-dependence sound more like the views of Elizabeth Cady Stanton than those of Susan B. Anthony. Perhaps Stein had read Stanton's famous farewell address to the National American Woman Suffrage Association convention in 1892, in which the retiring national president described life as a sea voyage that each man and woman must make alone. Stanton called the speech “The Solitude of Self” and considered it “the best thing I have ever written” (qtd. in DuBois 246-54). Her message was that since “in the tragedies and triumphs of human experience, each mortal stands alone,” it is imperative that each one be free to develop fully, through unimpeded participation in the educational, economic, religious and political life of the nation. “The great lesson that nature seems to teach us at all ages is self-dependence, self-protection, self-support,” Stanton asserts.

A vivid contrast to this speech was Anthony's final address to the NAWSA in 1906, shortly before her death. Here she makes a plea for concerted action to win the suffrage fight, her last words affirming that “Failure is impossible.” And on the last day of her life, Anthony repeated, “as in a final roll-call,” the names of the hundreds of women, famous and obscure, “who had worked with her” (Shaw 234; DuBois 260). Again Anthony stresses not the solitude but the solidarity of women.

By choosing to portray Anthony in her singleness rather than in her more characteristic role of organizer, however, Stein presents the suffragist as very much like herself—a woman who mistrusted collectivism and always championed the individual, the singular in art or life.¹¹ Stein also reinforces the connection of herself and Anthony by linking her with the professional artist who continues to work in the face of repeated discouragement. When in Act II someone comes to Anthony's house to announce that the crowd wants to know if she is there and will speak to them—a crowd of men who have listened many times but still “won't vote [her] laws”—Anthony replies: “Yes. … Painters paint and writers write and soldiers drink and fight and I I am still alive” (76). Though disillusioned and ill, Anthony allows herself to be persuaded to go out and speak again in women's behalf. “Shall I protest,” she had mused at the close of her debate with Daniel Webster: “Shall I protest while I live and breathe.” The answer, then as now, is “Yes.”

But what of Anthony's young protégée in the fight for woman suffrage, Indiana Elliot? Does she preserve her identity in marriage, keeping her family name as a sign of this independence? Characteristically, Stein surprises us. Indiana decides to take Jo's name after all—but for esthetic, rather than conventional, reasons: “Not because it is his name but it is such a pretty name, Indiana Loiterer is such a pretty name …” (82). Even so, Indiana insists that Jo “will have to change his name, he must be Jo Elliot. …” That way the world will know that theirs is an egalitarian union.

Beneath the playful tone of this exchange, Stein presents a serious idea: a woman who appears to follow custom—in this case assuming her husband's name—may in fact be acting independently. A conventional exterior may hide radical content. One remembers Stein's homoerotic poetry expressed in the form of heterosexual love lyrics (Bridgman 150-53; Fifer 472-83). One also thinks of her comment near the end of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas that “if you are way ahead with your head you naturally are old fashioned and regular in your daily life” (246). In Indiana's esthetically motivated decision to assume Jo's last name, Stein represents her own adherence to social custom in everyday affairs but her departure from tradition in her literary work. More important, perhaps, by having Indiana assume the name “Loiterer” for its euphonious quality, while insisting on her continued independence from Jo, Stein is affirming the connection between her own literary gifts and her gender.¹²

There is evidence that early in her career, Stein associated genius with the male sex. James Mellow, in his fine biography, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company, cites a note Stein made while writing The Making of Americans in which she says “Pablo & Matisse have a maleness that belongs to genius. Moi aussi perhaps” (121). A survey of Stein's career as a whole reveals that she moved away from this traditional linking of genius with the male sex, away from an exclusive stress on her association with male artists, to affirm her identity as a writer and woman influenced by other women in literature and in life. In Everybody's Autobiography, her 1937 sequel to The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, for example, Stein acknowledges George Eliot as a literary predecessor, and she openly admits what she had only implied in the 1933 narrative: the authority and influence of her companion, Alice Toklas. Indiana Elliot's progress from male-revering ingénue to assertive suffragist thus parallels Stein's own development from male-identified artist to one who acknowledged her kinship with all women as daughters of Susan B. Anthony.

When Indiana Elliot, now Loiterer, appears at the end of the opera, she has become an intensely practical woman with “a great deal to say about marriage” (85). She interrupts Constance Fletcher to announce that success in marriage depends on the husband or wife being economical, and she thinks wistfully of Susan B. Anthony, who never gave up her single state. Apparently, preserving her individuality within marriage has not been easy. At least, she points out, she has not assumed Jo's criminal record along with his name. As a loiterer her husband (in the world of the opera) has forfeited his right to the franchise, but Indiana Loiterer can vote.

Indiana's limited success in her project of self-development matches Anthony's own realization that woman suffrage by itself will not transform women into independent and courageous citizens: “Having the vote will make them afraid,” she predicts, “like men” (81). This sober knowledge does not, however, prevent her from continuing the fight. Though her closing speech from beyond the grave is subdued and tentative (“But do I want what we have got, has it not gone, what made it live …”), she continues to emphasize her longevity and endurance: “My long life, my long life.”

In Anthony's final speech one can also hear Gertrude Stein contemplating her “long life of strength and strife” (83). Like Anthony, Stein saw herself as a fighter, a pioneer—albeit in art rather than in politics. She was well aware of those who doubted her achievement: the skeptics who laughed at her unusual sentences (“A little called anything shows shudders,” “Pigeons on the grass alas”); the newspapers that labeled her writing “appalling.” But, Stein insisted, “they always quote it and what is more, they quote it correctly,” while the writers “they say they admire they do not quote” (Toklas 70).

Throughout her career Stein had fought for an honored place in literary history. Waking up to the painted tribute from Picasso (“hommage à Gertrude”) above her bed had pleased and cheered her in the early 1900s, when much of her work was still either unpublished or known only to a small group (Toklas 89). But she also needed confirmation of her work's value from a wider audience. Even so, seeing her name in lights on the Times Square marquée during her 1934 lecture tour had both surprised and worried her (Everybody's Autobiography 175). For, along with her name, she wanted her writing recognized and read.

Early in Four in America, Stein poses the same question that Indiana Elliot asks of Susan B. Anthony: “What is in a name. Now you know,” she continues. “Everything is in a name. Character and career” (17). Retelling the story of Susan B. Anthony and inventing Indiana Elliot, Stein ably assesses her own character and her career of more than forty years. Like Indiana Elliot, Stein had at one time accepted men as superior in authority and in art, and had spent her time talking with the geniuses while Alice Toklas sat with their wives. But later in her career she came to acknowledge the enduring authority of female genius and claimed it as her own. The Mother of Us All thus becomes not just an opera about getting married and winning the vote but about Stein's accepting her gender as part of genius and making history by revising the past.

Notes

1. Set to music by Virgil Thomson, the opera was first produced on 7 May 1947 at Columbia University. The performed version is structurally somewhat different from Stein's text. For details, see Thomson.

2. Fifer uses the phrase “disguised autobiography” to describe Stein's erotic poetry of 1914-21 (472).

3. See Katherine Anthony (383ff.) for a description of the 18-year friendship between Anna Howard Shaw and Susan B. Anthony.

4. For a fuller discussion of Stein's relationship with her brother Leo during the years 1903-07, see Winston 239-40.

5. When she paired the statesman with her softspoken Angel More. Stein may have had in mind Stephen Vincent Benét's 1936 short story, “The Devil and Daniel Webster.” In Benét's story, Webster wins a case brought by the devil against one of Webster's fellow New Hampshire men who had bartered his soul for ten years of prosperity. Benét had been introduced to Stein by Sylvia Beach sometime in 1919-20 (Beach 29).

6. According to Bridgman, Angel More is “a woman of unearthly passivity” (344). I see her instead as dynamic—developing in her relations with Webster from a submissive character to a more assertive one.

7. That Anthony looked upon herself as a mother to the younger women in the women's rights movement is clear from her own words, recorded in Dorr's 1928 biography and Shaw's autobiography. Dorr reports that during the 1896 National American Woman Suffrage Association convention, a resolution opposing Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Woman's Bible was passed, despite Anthony's strong objection. Stanton urged Anthony to join her in resigning from the organization which they had helped to establish. But after three weeks of agonizing indecision, Anthony wrote her beloved colleague that she could not “leave those half fledged chickens without any mother” (313-14). In a happier moment, Anthony inscribed on the fly-leaf of Volume IV of the History of Woman Suffrage the following words to Shaw: “This huge Volume IV I present to you with the love that a mother beareth, and I hope you will find in it the facts about women, for you will find them nowhere else …” (Shaw 235). Stein had good reason for calling Anthony “the mother of us all.”

8. In the typescript of the 1898 lecture, Eliot's name is spelled incorrectly with one uppercase L, two lowercase l's, and two t's (9). A veiled reference to a George Eliot poem appears in Act II, scene v of The Mother of Us All: Angel More alludes obliquely to Eliot's 1867 poem, “O May I Join the Choir Invisible,” when she says “I join the choir that is visible …” (74). Stein reports having read the poem as a young girl (Everybody's Autobiography 115-16).

9. In his biography of Eliot, Haight mentions Jane Eyre's alias as a possible source of George Eliot's pseudonym (220).

10. Richard H. Jackson, Head Librarian of the American Collection, Music Division, New York Public Library, suggests that Stein may have been quoting a line from Webster's 1826 speech. I am grateful to Mr. Jackson for allowing me to read and refer to his unpublished master's thesis.

11. Sutherland illustrates this Steinian commitment to the individual word, thing or being by referring readers to the passage in Useful Knowledge “where she counts up to one hundred by ones” (144).

12. In her 1974 dissertation on the development of Stein's attitudes toward women and feminism, Armatage judges as a “weak excuse” Indiana Elliot's explanation that she decided to take her husband's name for esthetic reasons. For Armatage, Indiana's act represents a failure of principle by a character “who throughout has stood as an example of the ‘emancipated woman'” (235). Yet Indiana Elliot first appears not as a feminist but as a traditional, male-revering female (she is identified in Grosser's scenario [Thomson and Stein 14] as a “young pretty provincial”) and changes her perspective only after working with Anthony for the suffragist cause. In the opera's final scene, she shows that she has not reverted to her original naive position. Indiana Loiterer views marriage, and her husband's comments, with circumspection.

Works Cited

Anthony, Katherine. Susan B. Anthony. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954.

Anthony, Susan B., and Ida Husted Harper, eds. The History of Woman Suffrage. Vol. 4. Rochester, NY: 1902.

Armatage, Elizabeth Kay. “The Mother of Us All: The Woman in the Writings of Gertrude Stein.” Unpublished Diss. Toronto, 1974.

Beach, Sylvia. Shakespeare and Company. New York: Harcourt, 1959.

Bridgman, Richard. Gertrude Stein in Pieces. New York: Oxford UP, 1970.

Dorr, Rheta Childe. Susan B. Anthony: The Woman Who Changed the Mind of a Nation. 1928. New York: AMS P, 1970.

DuBois, Ellen Carol, ed. Elizabeth Cady Stanton/Susan B. Anthony: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches. New York: Schocken, 1981.

Fifer, Elizabeth. “Is Flesh Advisable? The Interior Theater of Gertrude Stein.” Signs 4 (1979): 472-83.

Haight, Gordon S. George Eliot, A Biography. New York: Oxford UP, 1968.

Harper, Ida Husted, ed. History of Woman Suffrage. Vols. 5-6. New York: 1922.

———. Life and Works of Susan B. Anthony. 3 Vols. 1898. New York: Arno and New York Times, 1969.

Jackson, Richard H. “The Operas of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson: A Binomial Study.” Unpublished Thesis, Tulane, 1962.

Mellow, James R. Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company. New York: Praeger, 1974.

Shaw, Anna Howard. The Story of a Pioneer. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1915.

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, et al. eds. The History of Woman Suffrage. Vols. 1-3. Rochester, NY: 1881, 1886.

Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. 1933. New York: Vintage/Random, 1960.

———. Everybody's Autobiography. 1937. New York: Vintage/Random, 1973.

———. Four in America. Intro. by Thornton Wilder. 1947. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries P, 1969.

———. The Mother of Us All. Mss. 2 Vols. New Haven: Beinecke Rare Book Room and Manuscript Library, 1945-46.

———. The Mother of Us All. 1949. Rpt. in Last Operas and Plays. Ed. and Intro. Carl Van Vechten. New York: Vintage/Random, 1975. 52-88.

———. “The Value of a College Education for Women.” Typescript. Baltimore: Archives of the Baltimore Museum of Art, 1898.

———. What Are Masterpieces. Foreword by Robert Bartlett Haas. 1940. New York: Pitman Pub. Corp., 1970.

———, and Virgil Thomson. The Mother of Us All. Scenario by Maurice Grosser. New York: Music P, 1947.

Stein, Leo. Journey Into the Self. New York: Crown Publishers, 1950.

Sutherland, Donald. “Gertrude Stein and the Twentieth Century.” A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein. Ed. Robert Bartlett Haas. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow P, 1971.

Thomson, Virgil. “How The Mother of Us All Was Created.” New York Times (15 April 1956): Sec.2, 7.

Van Vechten, Carl. “How Many Acts Are There In It?” Intro. to Last Operas and Plays. New York: Vintage/Random, 1975.

Webster, Daniel. “Second Speech on Foot's Resolution” (Reply to Hayne). The Writings and Speeches of Daniel Webster. Vol. 6. National Edition. Boston: Little, Brown, 1903. 3-75.

Winston, Elizabeth. “Gertrude Stein's Mediating Stanzas.” Biography 9.3 (1986): 229-46.