SOURCE: '"Excellent Not a Hull House': Gertrude Stein, Jane Addams, and Feminist-Modernist Political Culture," in Rereading Modernism: New Directions in Feminist Criticism, edited with an introduction by Lisa Rado, Garland Publishing, Inc., 1994, pp. 321-50.

[In the following excerpt, DeKoven draws parallels between the lives and of Addams and Gertrude Stein.]

An enormous gulf would seem to divide Jane Addams's immigrant Chicago from Gertrude Stein's expatriate Paris; Jane Addams's social work and politics from Gertrude Stein's writing and art. But the terms of the first opposition, immigration and expatriation, suggest at least a symbolic mutuality, and it will be my purpose here to investigate, within a particular historical context, the parallel mutuality of progressive politics and avant-garde art.¹ Gertrude Stein and Jane Addams opened remarkably similar spaces: borderlands that served as powerful mediations, if not resolutions, of the contradictions of gender, politics and culture in the early twentieth century.

These borderlands were at once the feminist-modernist spaces opened by these two women's lives and works, and, at the same time, materially incarnated as or in actual houses. Stein and Addams reinvented not only the Angel but also the House she must sanctify. Addams's reputation is perhaps more firmly associated with Hull House than Stein's is with 27 rue de Fleurus, but Stein's was originally founded on her salon in the atelier of that house. She became famous as the guru of the Steins' remarkable collection of modernist paintings well before her writing received any meaningful notice. I will begin, therefore, by discussing the significances of the parallels between the political culture each woman created in her house.

I

Women are supposed to occupy houses. Stein and Addams both worked from within the house, literally and metaphorically, to change its politics. These changes were palpable, but at the same time palatable, to most of the agents policing gender at the turn of the century, in large part because the umbilical cord connecting the woman to the house was not severed.² Neither Stein nor Addams led a life or adopted a persona that would force the general public to name or even really recognize their radical revisions of acceptable feminine scripts. Stein presided over a salon in an atelier attached to the house she occupied first with her older brother and then with her "companion"—what could be less unusual for a woman of her class and education? Addams ventured farther out than Stein on a visible political limb, but carefully, carefully.

Perhaps the most important borderland Addams forged occupied the ground between traditional charitable work and movements for radical social change. To begin, she worked within the already established social settlement movement; Toynbee Hall in London was her primary inspiration.³ Though her impetus in joining that movement was precisely to avoid the genteel do-goodism of upper-class ladies' charitable work, her activities were perceived and categorized in relation to that safe, familiar feminine role (Davis, Heroine).*⁴ For example, in an 1889 article entitled "A Chicago Toynbee Hall," appearing, crucially, in the feminist publication founded by Lucy Stone, Woman's Journal, Leilia G. Bedell writes:

It is evident to every one that she [Addams] goes into the work from no desire for notoriety, for she is the physical expression of modest simplicity itself; nor as an employment for remuneration, for she gives not only her time but generously of her means, of which she possesses sufficient to place her beyond the need of remunerative occupation.… Miss Addams' rarest attraction—although possessing a generous share of physical beauty—is her wonderful spirituality.

These remarks are painfully governed by the confining codes of genteel feminine stereotype Addams had finally shed in founding Hull House: the emphasis on the modest body, or the embodiment of modesty; the dissociation from the masculine world of "remuneration" concomitant with the assurance of upper-class independent income; the "generous share of physical beauty"; and most important, the absolving "spirituality." One wonders whether Bedell was, either consciously or semiconsciously, providing a protective camouflage for Addams's feminism.

Although she objected to the language of this article, particularly its emphasis on her spirituality (Davis, Heroine 60), Addams took care throughout her career at Hull House to annex the assistance and remain in the good graces of Chicago's upper-class charitable establishment, especially of women's organizations such as the Chicago Woman's Club, which endorsed her work enthusiastically. She was determined to "use everything," as Stein said in a different context.⁵ She saw no contradiction between establishing an upper-middle-class home—establishing it as her home, as a new bride would—and locating that home in the slums for the purpose not just of going out among the lowly as the great lady come to improve their lives, but explicitly for the purpose of inviting the neighbors in, with books around the rooms and fine china visible on the sideboard. As she says in Twenty Years, "probably no young matron ever placed her own things in her own house with more pleasure than that with which we first furnished Hull-House" (78). It is not just that this nesting provided her with an acceptable feminine niche, literally a home base, which it did. More than that, it allowed Addams to satisfy her own need to play some version of the feminine role for which she was raised and trained while at the same time revising, rewriting that role from within in accordance with the "unfeminine" ambitions also instilled in her by her contradictory upbringing and training. This structure of simultaneously deploying and reconfiguring an old social or literary text is characteristic of feminist-modernist political culture, as it is characteristic, as I have argued in my book Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism, of modernism itself.

I would like to digress at this point from Stein and Addams in order to summarize briefly one version of that analysis of modernism, because it provides the historical-theoretical basis for the arguments I am making in this essay. Perry Anderson locates the modernist historical moment at the conjuncture of "a still usable classical past, a still indeterminate technical present, and a still unpredictable political future" ("Modernity" 106). For my purposes here, that "still usable classical past" includes the rigid Victorian gender binary along with the great heritage of Western high art, as well as the moribund artistic academicism that Anderson mainly has in mind. The "still indeterminate technical present," which Anderson associates with "mass consumption industries" just in their earliest stages at the turn of the century, provides the context for the opening of public space to women as consumers, an opening Stein and Addams, and many other public women in this period, were able to use differently, to redefine women's movement into the public sphere in more radical terms.⁶ Finally, the "still indeterminate political future" encompasses what Anderson describes elsewhere as the "profoundly ambiguous possible revolutionary outcomes" of "the downfall of the old order," and also as the "imaginative proximity" throughout the modernist period of "a violently radical… rejection of the social order as a whole," the "apocalyptic light" of nascent social revolution (105), phrases all of which I find profoundly suggestive for my argument here.

Stein and Addams, like most other modernists, were both at once entranced and terrified by that apocalyptic light. It allowed them to see their way to an entirely different order of gender at the same time that it revealed to them the void beyond the limits of some version of the old order. It was Kate Chopin's "light which, showing the way, forbids it" (14); both Stein and Addams managed to convert that formula for defeat into its more enabling obverse: It became the light which, forbidding the way, shows it. While Anderson is primarily concerned with proletarian revolution, it is crucial to recognize that the egalitarian forces generating this apocalyptic light in their promise or threat of imminent revolution in this period were just as much feminist as they were socialist. It is also crucial to remember that this promise/threat of egalitarian revolution was what Fredric Jameson has called the "political unconscious" of modernism.

Stein's atelier at 27 rue de Fleurus, like Hull House and unlike the standard Parisian salon (as represented, for example, by Proust), was permeable to its environment, nonselective, open to heterogeneous penetration from outside the house and the social circle it would normally define. James R. Mellow begins Charmed Circle, his popular account of what he calls "Gertrude Stein and Company," with an imagined new visitor arriving at the salon on a Saturday evening, greeted by the ritual question "De la part de qui venez-vous"; by whose invitation do you come? Mellow continues,

Because anyone was admitted to the weekly at homes at the rue de Fleurus, the question was a mere formality. As likely as not, however, the guest might be forced to stammer "But by yours, Madame." For Gertrude Stein … was frequently in the habit of meeting interesting people, inviting them to her honra—and promptly forgetting that she had. (13-14)

Stein not only allowed anyone in, she actively but very casually recruited new people. The embracing, egalitarian openness of Stein's salon was diametrically opposite to the exclusivity of the conventional salon, defined as superior, selective and elite precisely by means of regulation of admission, enforced by exclusion of the unworthy.⁷

This nonselective openness was crucial to Stein's own representation of her salon, clearest in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Much of the book is structured by recollection of who came to the Saturday evenings in each period. The salon functions not only as a device of narrative ordering, but also literally as a narrative home base from which the anecdotes that are the primary substance of the book depart and to which they return. Just as the dedefined social space of the salon itself was anchored by the atelier, the paintings, the regular Saturday evening, and the obligatory but emptied-out question, "De la part de qui venez-vous?", this very freewheeling, nonlinear, associative narrative is anchored by repeated return to the salon.

Stein's account of the inception of the salon reveals the deep imbrication of both her own writing, and also the social and intellectual relationships that grew out of her art collecting, with her life in that house. "Little by little," she says, "people began to come to the rue de Fleurus to see the Matisses and the Cézannes, Matisse brought people, everybody brought somebody, and they came at any time and it began to be a nuisance, and it was in this way that Saturday evenings began" {Autobiography 41). Comfortable regulation of domestic life in the house that contained the remarkable paintings produced the Saturday evening salon.

It was not only domestic life, however, that the random visitors disrupted. Immediately following "it was in this way that Saturday evenings began," Stein says, "it was also at this time that Gertrude Stein got in the habit of writing at night. It was only after eleven o'clock that she could be sure that no one would knock at the studio door" (41). Stein wrote in the studio—the space of the salon was also the space of her working life. When the Saturday evenings began, she was working on The Making of Americans, as she puts it "struggling with her sentences, those long sentences that had to be so exactly carried out" (41). It was in this period, approximately 1906 to the war, that her work most radically and definitively broke with all known literary convention. Even though the Saturday evenings presumably ended those unwelcome interruptions, her habit of writing at night persisted, as she says here, "to the war, which broke down so many habits" (41). After a detailed description of what it was like to write at night, going to sleep as the birds awoke, comes a one-sentence paragraph, "So the Saturday evenings began" (42).

In the voice of Toklas, Stein summarizes the significance of the Saturday evenings for both of them as well as for this narrative: "But to return to the beginning of my life in Paris. It was based upon the rue de Fleurus and the Saturday evenings and it was like a kaleidoscope slowly turning" (89). The kaleidoscope is at once circular and nonhierarchical. Again, "everybody brought somebody.… It was an endless variety. And everybody came and no one made any difference" (123-24). Within that endless variety of people who came and made no difference, class distinctions are further undercut. In fact, the point of this passage is that aristocrats and even royalty had begun to arrive but Stein was not impressed, as she "sat peacefully in a chair and those who could did the same, the rest stood" (124). "As I said," she says, "the character of the Saturday evenings was gradually changing, that is to say, the kind of people who came had changed. Somebody brought the Infanta Eulalia and brought her several times" (123). The combination of "somebody" and "brought her several times" deflates the importance of "the Infanta Eulalia," as does the impatient cabman of the unnamed "roumanian princess" mentioned a few paragraphs later. It is the cabman rather than the princess who stars in this anecdote: "Helene came in to announce violently that the cabman would not wait. And then after a violent knock, the cabman himself announced that he would not wait" (123).

Since both the egalitarian openness of Hull House and also the fact that it was at once private and public, Addams's home and the site of her life work, are so firmly established that they need not be demonstrated here, I will only clarify the parallel to 27 rue de Fleurus by discussing the unusual heterogeneity of both the residents of Hull House and also of the neighborhood groups that used it, and also by pointing to the same-sex relationships at the center of the lives of both houses.

Toynbee Hall in London's East End, Addams's inspiration, was far more homogeneous in its residential population than Hull House. It was inhabited, as Addams herself said in a letter to Alice Hamilton, by "University men who live there, have their recreation and clubs and society all among the poor people, yet in the same style they would live in their own circle" (June 14, 1888, quoted in Davis, Heroine 49).⁸ Her primary purpose in this description was to praise Toynbee Hall for its freedom from what she calls "professional doing good"—a freedom derived from the way in which its inhabitants integrate their normal lives into the lives of the poor instead of descending from a great height in order to perform charity upon them.

One of Addams's alterations of the Toynbee model involved the nature of the lives so integrated. The founding residents of Hull House were of course Addams herself and her closest friend, Ellen Starr. While Addams was never part of the kind of lesbian bohemian subculture in which Stein and Toklas were able to live as lovers, acknowledged at least to a "charmed circle" of knowing friends, and it is most likely that Addams's two primary romantic friendships, with Ellen Starr and later with Mary Rozet Smith, never became overtly erotic, it is nonetheless the case that relationships with female partners were crucially enabling for the lifeworks of both women, and also were literally at the heart of the houses where those lifeworks transpired and in which they were to a large extent incarnated. Jane Addams would not have been able to found Hull House without the support, encouragement and active collaboration of Ellen Starr, any more than Gertrude Stein would have been able to make her miraculous leaps into the literary unknown without the support, encouragement and active collaboration of Alice Toklas.

Unlike the "University men" of Toynbee Hall, the first residents of Hull House were all women, though quite early on a men's residence was added (Twenty Years 115).⁹ In addition to being therefore "coed," Hull House was exemplary in the diversity of its residents (Davis, Heroine 74-75). Residents brought to Hull House a wide variety of backgrounds and social-political agendas. Addams herself emphasizes that diversity in her account of the earliest residents of Hull House:

The group of Hull-House residents, which by the end of the decade [the '90s] comprised twenty-five, differed widely in social beliefs, from the girl direct from the country who looked upon all social unrest as mere anarchy, to the resident, who had become a socialist when a student in Zurich, and who had long before translated from the German Engel's Conditions of the Working Class in England.… (145-46)

The diversity of the residents consisted not only in their political beliefs but also in the nature of their contributions to Hull House. Ellen Starr herself lived her life in the arts. Her commitment as cofounder of Hull House was to make the arts accessible to the community, and in doing so she made the arts as central to the neighborhood work of Hull House as was its work in areas of social reform.

The resident Addams mentions as having translated Engels was Florence Kelley, a professional social investigator who, according to Allen F. Davis, was "responsible for making Hull House a center for social reform, rather than a place to study art and hear lectures on Emerson and Brook Farm" (Heroine 77). Davis concedes that "both kinds of activity remained," but claims that Kelley "helped redress the balance" in favor of social reform. Note the valorization of social reform and the condescension toward the study of art and toward lectures on Emerson and Brook Farm evident in Davis's formulation.¹⁰ However, Addams gives both lectures and Brook Farm a prominent place in her saga of the founding of Hull House. They were both the province of "a charming old lady who gave five consecutive readings from Hawthorne to a most appreciative audience, interspersing the magic tales most delightfuly with recollections of the elusive and fascinating author. Years before she had lived at Brook Farm as a pupil of the Ripleys." This woman, who "gaily designated herself Hull House's '"first resident,'" came to Hull House, according to Addams, "because she wished to live once more in an atmosphere where 'idealism ran high'" (Twenty Years 83). Addams continues, concerning the Hawthorne readings, "we thus early found the type of class which through all the years has remained most popular—a combination of a social atmosphere with serious study" (83). The study and practice of art and literature within a congenial "social atmosphere," aspects of Hull House a male historian like Davis trivializes implicitly as feminine, were crucial to Addams's lifework in ways that might elude the dominant discourses of social science.¹¹

Social work and social science have claimed Hull House, rightly and understandably, for the politics of social reform. A look down the index of Twenty Years under "Hull-House," however, yields a much more diverse, polymorphous, uncategorizable sense of the uses to which Hull House was put and of the groups that defined those uses, a heterogeneity far more striking even than that of the Hull House residents. Here are some of the entries under "Hull-House," of which there are over seventy: "first Kindergarten at, first coffee house at, Cooperative Coal Association, art at, day nursery at, reputation for radicalism, unions organized at, and law enforcement, playground of, post-office at, pleasures at, art exhibitions at, studio at, shops at, concerts at, chorus, music school, theater, college extension, summer school, gymnasium, military drill at, economic lectures at, University Extension at"; under "Hull-House Buildings," "Butler Gallery, Music School, Theater and Gymnasium," and under "Hull-House Clubs," after the obvious boys', children's, men's, working people's, and women's clubs, the "Dramatic Association" and the "Shakespeare Club." Clearly, literature and the arts were crucial activities at Hull House, just as Addams says they were in her chapter devoted to "The Arts at Hull House" in Twenty Years, and as she also indicates in this poignant statement from her chapter on "Early Undertakings at Hull-House": "Life pressed hard in many directions and yet it has always seemed to me rather interesting that when we were so distressed over its stern aspects and so impressed with the lack of municipal regulations, the first building erected for Hull-House should have been designed for an art gallery.…" (Twenty Years 113).¹²

As upper-middle-class American women, both Addams and Stein were raised and trained to be conspicuous consumers of culture and genteel promulgators of the arts. As college-educated American women, both Stein and Addams were at the same time imbued with the feminist ambitions of the earliest generations of women in higher education for work in the public sphere. Each woman forged her own complex mediation of these two excruciatingly contradictory feminine trajectories.

II

The biographical parallels between Jane Addams and Gertrude Stein are clear and important. Addams, born in 1860, was fourteen years older than Stein, who was born in 1874; Addams was Quaker and then Protestant while Stein was Jewish; Addams's father was a successful businessman who was also very involved in public life while Stein's was exclusively a successful businessman. Those strike me as the most apparent differences between the backgrounds of the two women. The similarities are much more salient. Each was the youngest child in a large family. Both families were dominated by powerful, charismatic fathers, with whom each daughter identified in ways both enabling and inhibiting.¹³ Addams's mother died when she was quite young (two and a half), while Stein's, whom she represents fictionally as passive and ineffectual,¹⁴ died after a long illness when Stein was fourteen. Both Stein and Addams grew up in relatively rural, relatively Western outposts—Addams in Cedarville, Illinois (a frontier town when her father settled there), and Stein in Oakland, California, about which she later memorably said "there is no there there." Both women were precocious, clearly exceptionally intelligent, but for both of them college was a somewhat accidental destination.

Addams wanted badly to go to Smith, the preeminent women's college at the time, but was not allowed by her father to do so because he insisted that she remain closer to home. She went instead, as her older sisters had, to Rockford Seminary in Illinois, at that time on its way to becoming a full-fledged women's college modeled after Bryn Mawr, but still also strongly influenced by its original purpose as an institution for training in Christian submissiveness and feminine domesticity. Stein attended the Harvard Annex, which later became Radcliffe College, but only because her brother Leo was at Harvard at the time, and Gertrude went wherever Leo went. Both women had powerful, transforming intellectual awakenings in college, both women were very successful academically, and both graduated determined to pursue a medical career, within the feminist context of the new possibilities opening for women of lives in the public sphere. Both women failed to complete their medical education, and that failure coincided with extended periods of depression, self-doubt, paralysis of will, and quasi-psychosomatic illness. Both women then emerged from these periods of despair by means of finding at once ways to work and ways to live in a primary relationship with another woman. The ways they found to work allowed them to reconcile some version of traditional femininity with some version of the brave destiny they acquired in college.

Stein and Addams were both propelled into their different but similar inventions of feminist-modernist political culture by resolving for themselves, in very different ways, contradictions inscribed in their lives by the tangled relationships among higher education, high culture, femininity, feminism and the public sphere at the turn of the century. In order to understand how this resolution worked itself out for Stein, we will need to piece together excerpts from several of her texts. For Addams, we need only look at her consecutive chapters in Twenty Years entitled "Boarding-School Ideals" and "The Snare of Preparation."

Toward the end of "Boarding-School Ideals," her ironically titled chapter on her experience at Rockford Seminary, Addams brings into focus the contradictions it will take her eight painful years to resolve (as she herself says, "it required eight years—from the time I left Rockford in the summer of 1881 until Hull-House was opened in the autumn of 1889—to formulate my convictions even in the least satisfactory manner, much less to reduce them to a plan of action" [59]). The first step in this revealing textual sequence is the story of what her schoolmates considered her disappointing performance in the "intercollegiate oratorical contest of Illinois" (Interstate Oratorical Contest, Davis, Heroine 21), to which she and her friends "succeeded in having Rockford admitted as the first women's college" (53). This anecdote is located in relation to what Addams calls "the new movement of full college education for women," which inspired her and her cohort with "a driving ambition … to share in this new and glorious undertaking" (52). She connects this glorious undertaking very explicitly to the suffrage movement, by claiming that her companion in the study of mathematics, which the two women undertook in the service of their college's scholastic standing, "has since accomplished more than any of us in the effort to procure the franchise for women" (53). However, Addams distances herself subtly from the "glorious undertaking" in ways that reveal her fear of turning her back on sanctioned femininity, a fear that, in equipoise with radical desire, characterized feminist-modernist political culture in general.

Addams's account of being chosen Rockford's orator is strongly tinged with resentment of what she paints as an unfeminine feminist fanaticism. She says,

When I was finally selected as the orator, I was somewhat dismayed to find that, representing not only one school but college women in general, I could not resent the brutal frankness with which my oratorical possibilities were discussed by the enthusiastic group who would allow no personal feeling to stand in the way of progress, especially the progress of Woman's Cause. I was told among Other things that I had an intolerable habit of dropping my voice at the end of a sentence in the most feminine, apologetic and even deprecatory manner which would probably lose Woman the first place. (Twenty Years 53)

She came in fifth, "exactly in the dreary middle," as she puts it, having lost to no less a man than William Jennings Bryan, "who not only thrilled his auditors with an almost prophetic anticipation of the cross of gold, but with a moral earnestness which we had mistakenly assumed would be the unique possession of the feminine orator" (53). She is satisfied with her performance, she does not insist on winning, but her friends are sorely disappointed, "much irritated as they contemplated their garlands drooping disconsolately in tubs and bowls of water" (54). Forced to stamp out traces of her "feminine, apologetic and even deprecatory manner" in the service of Woman's Cause, she loses to a great man who prevails partly by means of a feminine strength. Water, the feminine element, wrecks the garlands that would crown an unfeminine victory.¹⁵

Not surprisingly, given these fierce contradictions, Addams collapsed almost immediately after her graduation. The rise of feminism coincided exactly, as we know, with the hystericization and invalidation of women,¹⁶ and the first generation of college-educated women, were prime targets of this form of debilitation (Davis, Heroine 25). Addams roused herself enough from her mysterious nervous prostration to enroll at the Women's Medical College in Philadelphia the following fall, in spite (or perhaps also because) of her father's sudden and devastating death in August. She had decided at the end of her four years at Rockford that she would "study medicine and 'live with the poor'" (Twenty Years 57). Medical school was very explicitly a way into masculine science and officially sanctioned masculine public efficacy. Science, as she wrote in her graduation speech on the tragedy of Cassandra, would allow woman, "always … in the right and always … disbelieved and rejected," to "grow accurate and intelligible" by means of "eyes accustomed to the search for truth" (57). Further, as Addams does not say, medical school would provide access to, and feminist appropriation of, precisely the disciplinary, repressive power over women's hystericized bodies being deployed at this time to suppress the New Woman.

Medical school, perhaps not surprisingly given how much was at risk, was even more of a disaster for Addams than it would be for Stein. After just a few weeks of feeling bored and ineffectual, Addams collapased again.¹⁷ This time she was delivered into the hands of S. Weir Mitchell, that bogeyman in the lives of so many women in this fraught space of feminist modernism. Mitchell's notorious rest cure left Addams "literally bound to a bed in my sister's house for six months," a chilling and unelaborated statement, during which time, when she was at last allowed to read and write, she produced notebooks that struck her as she wrote Twenty Years as having been written in "deep depression when overwhelmed by a sense of failure" (60-61).¹⁸

Addams sees this period in her life as the originary moment of "the spiritual struggles which this chapter is forced to record," the chapter entitled "The Snare of Preparation," recounting the story of the years leading up to the founding of Hull House. The thesis of this chapter is that "the pursuit of cultivation,"¹⁹ as she calls it—the passive and conspicuous consumption of European high art that was the expected occupation of a college-educated woman who has succumbed to nervous prostration and was then sent abroad to recover—in fact brings only "a sense of futility, of misdirected energy" (Twenty Years 64). "I gradually reached a conviction," she says,

that the first generation of college women had taken their learning too quickly, had departed too suddenly from the active, emotional life led by their grandmothers and great-grandmothers, that the contemporary education of young women had developed too exclusively the power of acquiring knowledge and of merely receiving impressions.… (64)

She goes on to describe "American mothers and their daughters who had crossed the seas in search of culture." The mother could establish "real connection with the life around her" … "using her inadequate German with great fluency" in "exchanging recipes with the German Hausfrau, visiting impartially the nearest kindergarten and market," responding directly and unselfconsciously to "the mere presence of suffering or of helplessness" (64). The daughter, on the other hand, "was critical and uncertain of her linguistic acquirements, and only at ease when in the familiar receptive attitude afforded by the art gallery and the opera house" (64).

In a telling substitution, the daughter's college education, which in Addams's case had inspired her to enter the masculine public sphere of science, becomes instead a sheltered, passive, almost cloistered life of social uselessness, self-cultivation, and conspicuous consumption of high culture. Where Addams blames the distorted expectations engendered by higher education, we might much more readily blame upper-middle-class grooming for the marriage market, and in fact resocialization away from the expectations of entry into the public sphere young women acquired precisely from their college educations.

Such an analysis does not occur to Addams. Instead, she repudiates her college education and retreats nostalgically, safely, to Victorian femininity, albeit a version of it that emphasizes active engagement in the welfare of the community rather than Christian submissiveness and cloistered domesticity.²⁰ She gives herself here an ideology of femininity that allows her to break free of the antifeminist reterritorialization of the college-educated woman without provoking retaliation, and to lead a new social movement under cover of a relatively conservative gender self-definition, one that at the same time accomodates her own resistance to the kind of feminist single-mindedness she rues in her debate narrative.

This self-definition, in its repudiation of a passive self-cultivation and acquisition of high culture, ostensibly involves a repudiation of art and literature as ends in themselves. Addams sets up a binary of art and literature versus social engagement; as she puts it, "the paralyzing sense of the futility of all artistic and intellectual effort when disconnected from the ultimate test of the conduct it inspired" (Twenty Years 67):

This, then, was the difficulty… the assumption that the sheltered, educated girl has nothing to do with the bitter poverty and the social maladjustment which is all about her, and which, after all, cannot be concealed, for it breaks through poetry and literature in a burning tide which overwhelms her, it peers at her in the form of heavy-laden market women and underpaid street laborers, gibing her with a sense of her uselessness. (65)

In her account of her stay in London, she locates the epiphany of her visit to the East End as a geographic and symbolic opposition to the futility of her West End life of passive acquisition of high culture. However, just as the arts were always crucial to the work of Hull House, the visit to the East End enacts not a narrative of anti-art but a narrative of both a different kind of art and also a different relation of art to the feminine. The official culture Addams and her cohort were supposed to acquire was precisely the moribund academicism Perry Anderson identifies as the residual social formation determining the conservative boundary of the historical space of modernism. Further, women were passive consumers, not producers, of this academicism. Addams's experience in the East End inspired her to produce a modernist moment of narrative, and her years of culture-vulturing led her to formulate a modernist view of art.

The story of what Addams saw in the East End is for her a story of hands.²¹ She has been taken with a small group by a missionary to witness a Saturday midnight auction of rotten fruit and vegetables which could not be sold legally otherwise. It is a scene of horror for Addams, and it stays with her as symbolic of the human wretchedness she will commit her life to ameliorating. She sees a man buy a rotten cabbage and, "when it struck his hand, he instantly sat down on the curb, tore it with his teeth, and hastily devoured it, unwashed and uncooked as it was" (Twenty Years 61-62). But it is not the obviously memorable dehumanization of this man that comes to symbolize to her the mission she will undertake. Rather, "the final impression was not of ragged, tawdry clothing nor of pinched and sallow faces, but of myriads of hands, empty, pathetic, nerveless and workworn, showing white in the uncertain light of the street, and clutching forward for food which was already unfit to eat" (62). In its symbolic abstraction, its synecdoche (hands stand for both suffering bodies and suffering humanity), its eerie, penetrating yet detached horror, its power as an objective correlative of Addams's response to poverty, this is a piece of modernist writing. Quite literally, "bitter poverty … breaks through poetry and literature in a burning tide," (62) not because poetry and literature deny or stand in opposition to bitter poverty but because they can most powerfully represent it.

Later in this chapter, Addams discusses her response to the paintings of Albrecht Durer. She says she sees them "in the most unorthodox manner, merely as human documents" (66). However, in seeing "merely a human document," what she finds in Dürer is not something opposed to or different from art. Instead, again, she sees a modernist art rather than the academicist high culture she was supposed to be acquiring. As she says,

I was chiefly appealed to by his unwillingness to lend himself to a smooth and cultivated view of life, by his determination to record its frustrations and even the hideous forms which darken the day for our human imagination and to ignore no human complications. (Twenty Years 66)

Complication, frustration and dark, hideous imaginative forms, as opposed to smoothness and cultivation, sound to me like elements of certain kinds of modernist art practice, for example expressionism, or at least of the ideology of the late-nineteenth-century realism and naturalism that were modernism's precursors.²²

Modernist versions of art enabled Addams to retain her strong connection to art and literature while repudiating feminine upper-middle-class passive self-cultivation and consumption of high culture. Similarly, Addams created, by means of Hull House, borderlands of mediation between traditional upper-class feminine charity work and radical or progressive feminist and socialist movements for political change. While ostensibly repudiating art and embracing politics, and while ostensibly rejecting her college education in favor of an earlier, Victorian feminine model of social engagement, Addams found a feminist-modernist space in which art, politics, and the ambitions for work in the public sphere she acquired in college could coalesce in new ways.²³

Gertrude Stein's trajectory was, as we have seen, remarkably similar to Jane Addams's, yet also neatly opposite to hers. Both women went from the optimism and ambition of college through the failure of medical school and a subsequent period of depression and inertia, and finally emerged into a productive life based on forging new mediations or borderlands of engagement with traditional femininity, new art forms, women's entry into the public sphere, and possibilities of radical social change. But where Addams ostensibly rejected art in favor of politics, Stein ostensibly rejected politics in favor of art. Yet, as I have argued in Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism, feminism and egalitarian politics in general were a powerful if displaced and ambiguous motive force in Stein's radical writing.

Like Addams's, Stein's story begins with a violent reaction against her successful career in higher education. Stein set her 1904-05 story "Fernhurst" one of her earliest works, written just before she met Alice Toklas, at a women's college based on Bryn Mawr. She describes the college and its graduates in language remarkably similar to Addams's account of the futile lives of college-educated women:

I have seen college women years after graduation still embodying the type and accepting the standard of college girls—who were protected all their days from the struggles of the larger world and lived and died with the intellectual furniture obtained at their college—persisting to the end in their belief that their power was as a man's—and divested of superficial latin and cricket what was their standard but that of an ancient finishing school with courses in classics and liberty replacing the accomplishments of a lady. Much the same as a man's work if you like before he becomes a man but how much different from a man's work when manhood has once been attained.… I have heard many graduates of this institution [the fictional Femhurst] proclaim this doctrine of equality … mistaking quick intelligence and acquired knowledge for practical efficiency and a cultured appreciation for vital capacity and who valued more highly the talent of knowing about culture than the power of creating the prosperity of a nation.… Had I been bred in the last generation full of hope and unattainable desires I too would have declared that men and women are born equal but being of this generation with the college and professions open to me and able to learn that the other man is really stronger I say I will have none of it. (3-8)

Like Addams, Stein blames her failure not on the powerful social forces working against women's success in the public sphere but on the desire to attain that success, and the confidence in her ability to do so, that she acquired at college. Stein ends her account of Philip Redfern, an idealistic but failed professor at Femhurst, with a judgment remarkable in its reflection of Jane Addams's dilemma:

This was the end of Redfern's teaching experience—for the rest of his days he lived the difficult life of a man of letters who aspires to be an effective agent in the actual working of a boisterous world. Such lives are hard in the living and for the most part poor in result. He plunged deeply into the political life of his time and failed everywhere. (47)

Even a man, if he associates himself with the cause of higher education for women, becomes enmeshed in the contradictions it generates between the life of culture and the life of political action.

Like Jane Addams, Gertrude Stein assimilated her failure at medical school and her subsequent inertia and depression by blaming and repudiating both her college education and the self-confident ambition, nurtured by feminism, it instilled in her.²⁴ In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, she gives a very complex, ambiguous account of her career at Johns Hopkins Medical School, where she had gone on the advice of her mentor at Harvard, William James, so she might follow in his footsteps in the study of psychology: "for psychology you must have a medical education, a medical education opens all doors, as Oliver Wendell Holmes told me and as I tell you" (80), Stein has James say to her. In going to Hopkins, Stein was quite explicitly acquiring a patrilineage of male greatness in the public sphere: Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Gertrude Stein. Stein did well, by her own account, in the first two years, but in the second two years she became bored, "frankly openly bored." Stein claims she dropped out after failing one course; in fact, she failed four courses.²⁵ As she tells it, the story is again remarkably similar to Addams's: Where Addams passed the requisite exams for her first year but used the advice of an authoritative male doctor as her official "sanction" for leaving medical school after her collapse, Stein claims the professor in question would gladly have given her another chance at passing his course, since all the big men thought she was brilliant and wanted her to finish, but she took the opportunity this failure gave her to get out, just as Addams had taken the opportunity offered by the doctor's advice.

Two sets of comments in the Autobiography within this narrative of the medical school failure are most relevant to my concerns here. One is Stein's notorious repudiation of feminism:

There was great excitement in the medical school [at the news of her failure]. Her very close friend Marion Walker pleaded with her [to finish her degree], she said, but Gertrude Gertrude remember the cause of women, and Gertrude Stein said, you don't know what it is to be bored. (82)

She then says she had seen Marion Walker again "only a few years ago," as she writes in 1932, and they "disagreed as violently about the cause of women as they did then. Not, as Gertrude Stein explained to Marion Walker, that she at all minds the cause of women or any other cause but it does not happen to be her business" (83).

The other set of comments concerns Stein's sense of the relationship of her experience at medical school to her career as a ground-breaking modernist writer. At the end of her last year at Hopkins, when she was generally bored and failing, she had the opportunity to "take her turn in the delivering of babies and it was at that time that she noticed the negroes and the places that she afterwards used in the second of the Three Lives stories, Melanctha Herbert, the story that was the beginning of her revolutionary work" (82). A page earlier, she had associated her arrival in Baltimore at the beginning of her medical education with having a "servant named Lena and it is her story that Gertrude Stein afterwards wrote as the first story of the Three Lives" (81). The feminist ambition for masculine-style success in the public sphere that sent Stein to Hopkins, but that failed her, was converted into literary ambition to do revolutionary work based on childbirth and the lives of black and working class women. Both the overt feminism and any overt radical politics that Stein repudiated returned in the form of the subject matter of her pioneering modernist work, Three Lives, and then, as I have argued elsewhere,²⁶ in the form of form itself—the radical, antipatriarchal, culturally subversive literary forms she invented in the 1910s and 1920s.

At the end of her life, successful and possibly reconciled to the feminist context of her early academic success, Stein wrote a fairly adoring play about Susan B. Anthony called "The Mother of Us All." And even in the Autobiography, a sequence of juxtaposed recollections reveals an association in Stein's mind between feminism and the launching of her career with the publication of Three Lives. On a trip to London to negotiate that publication with John Lane, Stein says first that she began reading the Daily Mail because she liked to read about the suffragettes, and then, further down the same page, that John Lane made an appointment with her to sign a contract for Three Lives because he has, as he says, "confidence in that book" (144).

The Autobiography bears some remarkable similarities to Twenty Years at Hull-House. Both autobiographies use deep-structural distancing devices in order to promote their authors' reputations and publicize their achievements by the very means used to deprecate them. Stein's device of course is to write the autobiography of herself as if it were the autobiography of her lover, so that it is in another's voice that she extols her own genius. This device also allows her to avoid altogether the appearance of claiming for herself sufficient importance to be the subject of an autobiography. Addams structures her book, as her title indicates, as the story of Hull House rather than the story of Jane Addams, but, of course, the point is that one is essentially the same as the other. She uses self-deprecation throughout the book to make possible this chronicle of her remarkable success. Both books are episodic, anecdotal, partly achronological. These are casual forms for new feminine modes of public autobiography, producing the informal story of the great woman, not the official history of the great man.²⁷

There is a further, quite specific parallel: In both books, strongly gender-marked scenes of looking and not looking at the violence of the Spanish bullfight coincide with moments of career-altering revelation. The force of that revelation is only implicit in the Autobiography, though explicit in Twenty Years. In the chapter on their lives from 1907 to 1914, after Toklas had moved in with Stein and before the war, Stein describes the crucial trip to Spain during which she began to forge the most powerful, vibrant experimental writing style she ever invented, the style I have called "lively words." It was this style that culminated in Tender Buttons. Again, it is necessary to read the juxtaposition of recollections in order to understand the significance of the passage. First, Stein says "we finally came back to Madrid again and there we discovered the Argentina and bull-fights" (118). The Argentina was the flamenco dancer who was the subject of Stein's great poem "Susie Asado." Bullfights are therefore connected immediately to her new writing and to the lesbian desire associated with one of its most successful instances.

Stein and Toklas as Toklas goes on to say, went to see the Argentina "every afternoon and every evening. We went to the bull-fights. At first they upset me and Gertrude Stein used to tell me, now look, now don't look, until finally I was able to look all the time" (Autobiography 118). Two paragraphs later, we hear that it was in Spain that "Gertrude Stein's style gradually changed. She says hitherto she had been interested only in the insides of people, their character and what went on inside them, it was during that summer that she first felt a desire to express the rhythm of the visible world" (119). Able to claim the masculine gaze—to look at the Argentina and at the bullfight as a man would, fearlessly, with confidence and desire—Stein is able to initiate Toklas into the gaze and then to align it with a powerfully subversive new style of writing the "rhythm of the visible world." The public sphere has opened out again for Stein; she could not enter it as a great man like William James or Oliver Wendell Holmes, but she can enter it now as a great experimental writer, as long as Toklas is there with her.

Addams presents her experience of the bullfight in much more equivocal terms. At the end of that pivotal chapter on "The Snare of Preparation," Addams finds herself in Madrid, with a group of friends including Ellen Starr, some twenty-five years before Stein and Toklas. She goes to a bullfight, where, as she says, "greatly to my surprise and horror, I found that I had seen, with comparative indifference, five bulls and many more horses killed" (Twenty Years 73). She did not even notice that her friends had long since left in what she calls "faintness and disgust." "I finally met them in the foyer," she continues, "stern and pale with disapproval of my brutal endurance" (73). She claims that it is her ensuing self-loathing, her horror at her ability to enjoy this bullfight, that "made quite clear to me that I was lulling my conscience by a dreamer's scheme" for founding a settlement house, and that pushes her to take the first steps toward the realization of her plan. The very first step consists of discussing the plan with Ellen Starr. I would argue that it was precisely her ability to watch the bullfight, not her disgust at her ability, that empowered her to take that step. Like Stein, she saw that she could function as a man would.²⁸ She therefore could have access to the public sphere, as long as her partner would go there with her, and as long as no one knew.

III

I do not know whether Stein read Twenty Years at Hull-House. It's quite possible that she did, because she claims she read everything. Addams's book, published in 1910, had just come out when Stein and Toklas made that momentous trip to Spain in 1912. I wish I knew whether Stein had the book with her on that trip. I do know, however, that Stein knew of Hull House. The penultimate section of "Objects," the first part of Tender Buttons, is a very short piece entitled "It Was Black, Black Took," which I will quote in full:

Black ink best wheel bale brown.

Excellent not a hull house, not a pea soup, no bill no care,

no precise no past pearl pearl goat. (476)

This is one of the most obscure pieces in Tender Buttons. Unlike even the pieces before and after it, which are equally radical in their destruction of the conventional sense-making function of symbolic language, it offers very little access to the interpreting reader.²⁹ The pieces before and after are loaded with puns and with strongly emotive, suggestive verbal juxtapositions. "It Was Black, Black Took," by contrast, is cool, detached, offering access, if any, only through its submerged illusion to Lord Jim—"It was black, black" is Jim's description of the squall that overtakes the renegade Patna officers in their ignominious lifeboat—and through the self-referentiality of its black, black, black ink. The repeated negation, "not a hull house, not a pea soup, no bill no care, no precise no past," functions almost to erase this piece as it is written. But the second line of the piece begins with the word "excellent,"³⁰ and ends with the almost readable "pearl pearl goat," suggesting (to me at any rate) the pearls that were his eyes, the sea change in the realm of the empowered sexuate maternal feminine that enabled modernism and that modernism brought about.³¹ The string of negations suggests perhaps that "hull house" is part of the mundane universe of pea soup, bills, and cares, and that "excellent" connects to the negation of that universe. However, "precise" and "past" seem to belong to a different realm, at least linguistically, from pea soup, bills and cares, and perhaps "hull house" occupies precisely the position in this piece that I have argued it occupies in its historical-cultural moment, a position of mediation between the mundane, ordinary and known, on one hand, and on the other the realm of powerful historical gender transformations.

I would argue in general that, at the current juncture in feminist scholarship, we ought to expand our sense of the connections between feminism and modernism: to move beyond analyses of women modernists, their separate tradition and their complex relations to canonical male modernism in order to include a much broader historical provenance and a much wider range of cultural work. Exemplary in that expansion is a recent article in the journal differences by Janet Lyon entitled "Militant Discourse, Strange Bedfellows: Suffragettes and Vorticists Before the War." In this article, Lyon demonstrates the influence of suffragist rhetoric and political practice on the development of the vorticist manifestos and of Blast itself. In comparison to bedfellows as strange as those, Jane Addams and Gertrude Stein, and my argument here for the congruence of the feminist-modernist political-cultural spheres they invented, may perhaps seem less unlikely.

NOTES

¹ The historical affiliations of avant-garde art and left politics have been explored most fully, of course, by the Frankfurt School theoreticians and their chroniclers. See especially Aaron, Anderson et al., eds., Jameson, and Lunn.

² For a powerful liberalization of that umbilical cord, a prime representation of the woman's relation to the house in the turn-of-the-century feminist imaginary, see "The Yellow Wallpaper," in which the protagonist ends literally tied by a rope to the marriage bed. Gilman's remarkable story resonates throughout the material that concerns me here.

³ Davis, Heroine 57; Addams, Twenty Years 74.

⁴ See Walkowitz, 59, on the influence of women's charitable work on Samuel Barnett and his founding of Toynbee Hall.

⁵ Stein says in "Composition as Explanation": "Continuous present is one thing and beginning again and again is another thing. These are both things. And then there is using everything.… A continuous present and using everything and beginning again.… In the first book [Three Lives] there was a groping for a continuous present and for using everything by beginning again and again" (518). By "using everything," Stein means undoing the censorship of consciousness that produces coherence and consistency of characterization in realist fiction. What she promulgates here is akin to stream of consciousness, though Stein's version is much more abstract, stylized, and focused on time-sense rather than the psyche. The connection to Addams comes in the embrace of contradiction, the renunciation of consistency.

⁶ See Walkowitz, 46-50, for an analysis of this phenomenon most directly relevant to my argument here.

⁷ For an analysis of this egalitarian openness as a primary motive force in her writing, see Rich and Strange, chapter 6, 198-201.

⁸ See Walkowitz, 59-60, on Toynbee Hall's elitism.

⁹ See Walkowitz, 59, on Toynbee Hall's exclusion of women.

¹⁰ Davis expresses a more explicit contempt for Hull House art practices in Spearheads (40-43), finding them "unrealistic," and disparaging a popular Hull House art exhibit because its viewers were primarily women and children.

¹¹ See, for example, Levine and Linn.

¹² Chapter 11 of The Second Twenty Years is entitled "Play Instinct and the Arts." In it, Addams argues that the "power of unfolding human life which is implicit in the play instinct" (358) is an antidote to the reification of factory life, and is also necessary for the cultivation of the imagination of common purpose on which democracy must rest. See also

¹³ "The frequency, passion and extent of Gertrude Stein's treatment of her father in her writings all indicate his ineradicable primacy in her imagination" (Bridgman 10). The opening chapter of Twenty Years reveals the centrality of Addams's relationship to her father in the construction of her ambivalent self-image—her idealization of and identification with him coupled with her fear of his disapproval and her sense of unworthiness.

¹⁴ See especially Stein, The Making of Americans.

¹⁵ Davis, Heroine, notes the way Addams plays down this episode almost apologetically in a letter to her father, while sounding "confident and full of enthusiasm" (21) about it in a letter to her sister Alice.

¹⁶ See for example Bernheimer and Kahane, eds., Foucault, and Showalter.

¹⁷ "The long illness inevitably put aside the immediate prosecution of a medical course, and although I had passed my examinations creditably enough in the required subjects for the first year, I was very glad to have a physician's sanction for giving up clinics and dissecting rooms and to follow his prescription of spending the next two years in Europe" {Twenty Years 60, italics added). Addams retreats from the dangerous position of female medical student to the safe position of female patient. See also

¹⁸ Note again the remarkable parallels to "The Yellow Wallpaper."

¹⁹ For an ironic treatment of upper-middle-class feminine self-cultivation, see Stein's "Miss Furr and Miss Skeene."

²⁰ Addams had given a speech at Rockford foreshadowing this move, advocating for women a fusion of the new independence with the ancient "saxon" womanly role of "breadgiving" (Davis, Heroine 20).

²¹ "The [East End] slum street acquired [for female charity workers] the ludic qualities traditionally associated with the city center; it became an improvisational site for strange encounters with unforgettable characters" (Walkowitz 57).

²² In a similar vein, Elshtain refers to Addams's "rich exploration of her own complex motives" (9) in Twenty Years, and describes Addams's view of human life as "complex, not simple … a dense thicket, difficult to cut one's way through" where "one often has to choose between two goods, not between a clear-cut case of good versus evil" (8).

²³ See Walkowitz, "Contested Terrain: New Social Workers," on women's charity work as entry into masculine public space.

²⁴ See Blankley, 196-97, for evidence of Stein's early adherence to feminist principles, particularly in a speech she gave in Baltimore in 1898, visibly influenced by Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Women and Economics, advocating higher education for women and endorsing the New Woman. See also

²⁵ See Bridgman 360; these events occurred in 1901.

²⁶ See my A Different Language and Rich and Strange.

²⁷ The feminist study of women's autobiography is of course a burgeoning field. See for example Benstock, ed., and Smith and Watson, eds.

²⁸ See Walkowitz on "The Glorified Spinster and the 'Manly Woman,'" 61-68.

²⁹ Ruddick (213-14) makes a valiant attempt.

³⁰ In a noteworthy coincidence, Addams collected her memorial essays in 1932 under the title The Excellent Becomes the Permanent.

³¹ I refer here to the central argument of Rich and Strange.

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