Stein, Gender, Isolation, and Industrialism

As I begin to reevaluate the place of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio in the development of American fiction, I first want to look at Anderson's symbiotic relationship with Gertrude Stein, a relationship most Stein devotees will know about through her The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which Stein pretends to write as her lover, Alice. Anyone interested in Stein or Anderson should also read Sherwood Anderson/Gertrude Stein, edited by Ray Lewis White. This book features chronological excerpts from their letters to each other and from their published comments about each other.

Anderson apparently came to love Stein through some of her portraits and through her 1909 book Three Lives. Stein generated considerable controversy with Lives, a controversy she would sustain with her subsequent works. In writing about the critical reactions to her prose, she sounds as frustrated as Anderson often felt, and much of what she says about her frustration could apply to Anderson, who appears prominently and constantly in literary anthologies and literary history books, yet continues to receive the label "marginal.” Stein says the newspapers claim "that my writing is appalling but they always quote it and what is more, they quote it correctly, and those they say they admire they do not quote" (Alice 70). The newspapers, however, reflected the general public, who found Stein's work fascinating and repulsive.

Unlike the response to Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, which appeared a decade after Three Lives, critical objections to Stein's work focused on its form rather than its content. Stein experimented radically with syntax, punctuation, and narrative form. In "The Work of Gertrude Stein" (1922), Anderson says he learned about her 1914 book Tender Buttons through his brother, and he shared his brother's enthusiasm for Stein's experimentation with words, her emphasizing of each word's importance (White 14). Before beginning my studies of Winesburg, I want to look at Stein and at the relationship between Stein and Anderson, a relationship that helped define the face of American literature in the twentieth century. It began when Anderson introduced himself to Sylvia Beach, a bookstore owner in Paris, and she offered to introduce Anderson to Stein.