Male Persona: Alice B. Toklas the Relationship

¶ … male persona: Alice B. Toklas

The relationship of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas

Much as Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas observed the rules of heterosexual gender roles as 'man' and 'wife,' in other respects the two were remarkably similar, including their politics. They remained surprisingly reactionary, despite the fact that both were Jewish as well as lesbians. Stein supported the side of the fascists of the Spanish Civil War and lived in France during the occupation: "How were Stein and Toklas-Americans, Jews, and, oh yes, lesbians-able to live unmolested in occupied France while the war raged all around them and deportations were being carried out at every mm? How did they manage to maintain their pleasant, country life while experiencing few deprivations other than a reduction in the number of their usually lavish meals?" (Stone 2008). The answer was their failure to support resistance movements. The two effectively presented a united front of a brand of peculiar, distinct politics that was entirely separate from those of their left-wing friends. Even in terms of the nascent gay rights movement, Toklas never openly supported more explicitly lesbian writers such as Radcliffe Hall, the author of The Well of Loneliness (Constantine 1998).

Stein and Toklas saw themselves as relatively conventional 'family' along the lines of a heterosexual couple. "A photo of Gertrude, Leo, [Michael Stein]'s family and friends vacationing in Italy comes with the caption, 'The Steins as a family unit'; another one, showing [Picasso] and his son Paolo with Gertrude, Alice, and friends in her country garden, lists 'the Picasso family'" (Stendhal 1996). Stein often referred to Pablo Picasso as a brother -- alienated from most of her own family, which she often characterized as cold and patriarchal, Stein created her own family unit amongst her friends and associates. This idea of family as something that can be reconstituted, regardless of gender and birth ties would seem radical, were it not for the approximation of the roles of a heterosexual couple between Gertrude and Alice.

There is also considerable evidence that Stein embraced a 'male' persona, not just with Alice but in relationship to the other female figures in her life. Of one of her female contemporaries, a biographer observed "nor is there a sense of overwhelming feminist sisterhood between them suggesting the same camaraderie she seemed to have enjoyed with her male friends" (Constantine 1998). And "while lesbian authors, painfully aware of censorship and the stakes involved when two women share a bed, often 'cross-write'…they rarely embrace the fundamental tenets of masculinity as fully or as unabashedly as Stein" (Constantine 1998). In one of Stein's works, "Didn't Nelly and Lilly Love You" Stein writes "a wife hangs on her husband that is what Shakespeare says a loving wife hangs on her husband that is what she does" with little evident irony (Constantine 1998). And Stein openly asks Alice: "can you obey. / Remember the position. Remember the attention that / you pay to what I say" (Constantine 1998).