I know we have talked about gender in the sense of geniuses and their wives, but I felt that the notion of gender and mistaken identity played an important role in the final chapter of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. On page 195 Alice recounts an incident when Gertrude Stein sent manuscripts to the Atlantic monthly. When her publication request was denied, she wrote to a Miss Ellen Sedgwick when in fact it was Mr. Ellery Sedgwick. I was puzzled about Gertrude Stein's reaction to the matter: "Gertrude Stein of course was delighted with its being Ellery and not Ellen." I started thinking about how although Stein is a woman, she played the dominant, or male, role in their relationship and while Alice spent time with the wives, Stein spent a majority of her time with men. Although she did have good women friends, Stein's best friend was Pablo Picasso. With this in mind, I would interpret this sentence as an insight into Stein's preference for males over females.
Another example of gender and mistaken identity is found on page 201. I don't have any idea how to interpret it but it is a very interesting moment in the book. Speaking of a correspondence between herself and T. S. Eliot's secretary, Alice says:
"We each addressed the other as Sir, I signing myself A. B. Toklas and she signing initials. It was only considerably afterwards that I found out that his seretary was not a young man. I don't know whether she ever found out that I was not."
Any ideas?
There were a few places in the last chapter where I got confused, so I thought I'd put those questions out there and maybe someone can help me out.
The third full paragraph on page 210 this pretty much went completely over my head- talking about Picabia
Page 219- "He has a certain syrup but it does not pour." Huh?
Page 220- Rotarian?
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I also found the example on page 201 to be quite interesting. However, in my mind, the part made me think more about the concept of reality in general than specifically identity and gender. In my mind, I could see these two people, writing back in forth, with some idea in their heads about what the other person looked like. They must have had some sort of perception of what this exchange was and who was involved in it. However, as Toklas suggests, the whole reality of this exchange was false. Their perceptions by which they based their reality on was false.
I understand what Virginia is saying, but I'm not sure exactly why we care. I think that Stein's motivation in relating this (assuming there is one, which is rarely if ever not in question) is to show the irony of the situation--two women in a sort of Prisoner's Dilemma game, reluctant to show their identities when in fact they are in identical situations. I have trouble, given the casual relation of this story, thinking that Stein intended to use this passage to show us that our perceptions differ from reality--that kind of a notion can really be taken for granted. Further, I think its important to be careful about using the word "perception" interchangeably with the word "assumption." In this case, Toklas and her counterpart each had incomplete, and misleading, information. It's not that their perception failed them, it's simply that they assumed, given incorrect information, the sex of each other incorrectly.
For the quote on page 219, I believe that Gertrude Stein is simply trying to say that even though Glenway Wescott has substance, it is too much to handle or too thick to flow. She is simply critiquing someone else in order to prove to herself and others that Hemingway is the true genius. Gertrude Stein is constantly putting others down, but she fails to critique herself.
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