Content Warning: this text mentions suicide.

Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas with "Basket," at Their Home in Southern France at the Time of Their Liberation, September, 1944. Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, Gift of the artist. © Carl Mydans/LIFE Magazine, Time Inc.

I always saw Gertrude Stein, the celebrated author of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) or the outcast grammarian of The Making of Americans (1925), as someone who had the freedom to write what and how she wanted. I have an affection for her adamant, self-affirming passion for modernism and for her own art. While Virginia Woolf-another love of mine-remained doubtful about James Joyce’s value as a writer, Gertrude Stein saw him as a mere follower in her usual self-aggrandising habit. (Arguably, both women would later be obfuscated by his academic popularity until quite recently.) Naturally, I asked myself how a woman could openly settle in Paris with her female lover and live a life of absolute creative flow without being ostracised and even, astoundingly, managing to be a decisive figure in the Parisian circle of international artists and writers. This freedom was obviously due to her money, I presumed. But society isn’t a linear thing, so it’s far more interesting to telescope notions of art and society through modernist idealisms and their constructs of liberation.

As soon as she established herself in Paris, first with her brother and after with Alice Toklas, Gertrude Stein was a patron and a peer who would support, buy, guide, and critique artists and writers. She is praised for her collection of Picassos and Matisses among many other gems of the first half of the twentieth century. As such, she could make or break reputations, being the Great Organiser of soirées for which Toklas would cook exquisite meals. There, the expatriate US writers would mingle with the European intelligentsia: it was a moment of intellectual and creative effervescence between Pablo Picasso, Tristan Tzara, Ernest Hemingway, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Marie Laurencin, Sylvia Beach, André Derain, and so many others. What a dream of contained small talk! These social events doubled as work sessions, when Toklas would accompany the wives to another room so that the creatives could talk shop. Or so I’ve read so many times, without the gendered contrast ever ceasing to startle me. In any other household, this would simply unnerve. But here, in the love nest of these two queer lovers, it stands out like a retrograde middle finger. Not because it is revisionist, but precisely because it empirically clarifies how the association between masculinity and authorship could simultaneously accept female creatives in its circle while maintaining a rigid structure where wives had a socio-economic ancillary role.

Stein settled in Paris in 1903; meanwhile, Austria was receiving the fanciful gift of author Otto Weininger’s book Sex and Character, which can compassionately be deemed a complicated case study of self-harm using the sharp knife of misogyny. (I mentioned this text previously here). If it’s positively unknown now, Sex and Character was discussed, along with its author’s self-inflicted death, in Austria, throughout Europe and even beyond: Weininger committed suicide at the age of 23, a few months after his book was published, in the house where Ludwig van Beethoven lived and which he had purposely rented, because he considered the composer to have attained the status of universal genius. Nonetheless, or perhaps, consequently–who can tell– Weininger’s despaired opus was a lifelong reference for Ludwig Wittgenstein, admired by August Strindberg, Arnold Schoenberg and even James Joyce, and many others, mainly because it solved the famous “woman question”.

The difficulty with Weininger’s theories pertains to the fact that they are guided by a high degree of abstraction, attempting to define a new form of psychology, where specificities such as gender or religion are transcended, and a higher form of humanity is created. It’s a sobering adventure to read the studies of his ludicrous theories which worry whether or not Weininger was for or against modernism. To be clear: I’m as interested in Weininger as the next historian. However, I want to evaluate the interlacing of his repressed sexuality and concomitant hatred for women and Judaism (more on that later) with his Austrian context of Modernism (Art Nouveau (think Gustav Klimt) and the newcomer proto-Minimalism (think Adolf Loos)). The fact that he contributed to women’s liberation by supporting their voting rights and access to education doesn’t preclude him from misogyny; it confirms his aesthetic ideas of elevating a weaker and stupider form of human.

But there were exceptions.

Weininger’s theories provided a sublimated mysoginistic consolation for lesbians because it proposed that every human contained both gendered energies and was therefore, by definition, bissexual. In that sense, gender, for Weininger, was a far more fluid notion which could almost echo current inclusive theories of gender aligned with Judith Butler for example. But the high-mindedness of this philosophy stopped there, when it described the male side as active, rational, moral, logical, with productive faculties, and the female one as weak, amoral, passive, unproductive. To add insult to injury, a Jew converted into Catholicism, Weininger claimed that Judaism was a feminine culture, which was the direction Europe was taking according to him. The blooming intricacies of Art Nouveau were a symptom of a terrible crisis mining the formerly virile continent of Europe. Nevertheless, this brought good news for some: naturally, women, and even more so lesbians, who could create and produce, reason and opine, were “male”. Their “good” traits superseded the feminine ones.

Therefore, Gertrude Stein, both a woman and a Jew, could read this text that seemed to exclude her from the weaknesses of her sex and culture, because she was “male”. Her brother Leo led passionate discussions about Weininger’s book, whereas Stein, more pragmatical, used its theories about the psychology of character to write The Making of Americans, and excitedly sent copies of Weininger’s book to her peers. Repression of femininity was the name of the game, providing a herculean task to feminists of the second half of the century to disentangle societal constraints, aesthetics and social constructs from essences, that is, the association of sex with gender.

There is another notion in Weininger’s theories: the “genius”, a quality transcending specific fields. This obsession with the genius is not new and has precedents such as the far more complicated concept of the übermensch coined by Friedrich Nietzsche, and crystallises a crisis of Men seeking a new set of values: from the Russian avant-gardes to the Futurists, art was traversed by this anxiety or excitement, depending on who you read, of rejecting the past, and needing a guiding force to overcome the mediocre conventions of society. The French expatriate Henri Gaudier-Brzeska marveled at his feverish visits to the British Museum in London which allowed him to visit every corner of the world, inspiring him to develop an abstract and schematic style of sculpted figures. In a brazen flow state, he enlisted in the French army in 1915 (quickly meeting his untimely death) after declaring that sculpture 'has no relation to classic Greek, but... is continuing the tradition of the barbaric peoples of the earth (for whom we have sympathy and admiration)”. There was no escaping, it seems, this vortex of promise and its concomitant discontent, whereby the canons of European culture seemed to be pulverised by people tacitly deemed inferior, feminists, women in general, and non-white ethnicities from places where a lot of the European conflicts were being fought. Terrorised teleologists were bleakly validated in their belief of a progressive march toward an end of some kind. Our biblical tendency to narrate the times as a 35mm motion picture unraveling toward the closing credits prefers to think transition as decline, change as impoverishment or even annihilation, which Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918) later demonstrated in detail. I’ve been reading some fascinating texts here on Substack about the decline of the white man, of culture, of books, which I hope are militant and devotional stances to creativity rather than power narratives subterraneously disquieted by the Colston statues coming down, hopefully making space for other societal dreams.

It’s fine to state that Weininger’s issue concerned a vision for humanity rather than masculinity, as I’ve read many times. But why ignore that it hinged on women demanding to be active players for the first time as a social movement? That this added a difficulty to define what the heck the NEW MAN was going to be, and then provided an excluding factor, a first stepping stone to claim what HE wouldn’t be, that is, THE (WHITE) WOMAN–a being removed from action, leadership, law-making and creation since the dawn of time. (Not that I dream of matriarchies; how do you call a non-binary-chy?) It was getting more and more difficult to ignore that Mary Shelley, Ada Lovelace, Fanny Eaton, Marie Currie, were out there, sexual and feminine creative beings, a confusing menace to Schopenauerian exclusions of their abilities. On the other side of the spectrum there were also males not truly male as Schopenhauer would also claim, so there was a definite need to reinvent men, ahem, humanity altogether. You see, Weininger was also a “feminised” man–a homosexual.

I should not have to point out the amount of self-loathing one must carry to use the word “feminine” as “inferior”. This hatred of the self I flag up doesn’t concern Gertrude Stein only, not even women in general, straight or not, but men too, of all sexual orientations, as well as other genders. This is perhaps the only beauty of Weininger’s theory: it contains its antidote in its contradictions. Since, as he suggested, we all have a feminine “plasma”, no one gets to transcend themself without negating their self. This is not, consequently, a question for women only but for a society as a whole. A society where Sigmund Freud could look at his daughter Anna in 1933, absorbed at her loom, and conclude that women could not have contributed much to invention, except, he mused, precisely that–the loom–, an invention stemming from the sight of pubic hair growth and the natural desire to hide an absence of penis1. Which was not really an invention but a dictate of nature, so, in fact, women could not really create. Freud wrote this down, and left it to posterity without a single thought. European men walked among inferiors–whether they were against violence perpetrated against the latter or not marked their difference, but didn’t abolish violence’s veiled omnipresence: Weininger, for instance, and for all his jarring antisemitic theories, was opposed to social anti-semitism… while spewing hateful theories against his former religion and culture.

Easy to understand now how Trump can have POC in his government: the theories of sublimation and elevation associated with real identities allow for apparent exceptions to the rule because they separate the theory, the person, and the ideal value through unscientific theories that would make Bobby Kennedy Jr. blush (probably for not having thought of them himself). Everything is hierarchical, an entanglement of judgements based on power, performance, money, influence, prejudice, and the corollary ability of rule-making. Then there’s the poor idealistic creature who took the rules to the letter. For Weininger, the genius is a superior being, obviously male, an all observing, rational creative capable of sublimating the rampant worminess of humanity into music and art. Did he succumb to the pressures of his genius within (all people have it apparently), which could not fight his overpowering “femininity”? We’re not far from the incel who sees women as slaves who have to yield to his masculinity while complaining that they don’t because of his inadequate physique. Or of the feminists excluding trans women from their conception of womanhood because they’ve founded their whole identity on the principles of their diminishment (45% of trans people have attempted suicide at least once in the UK.) When the premise is wrong, there is no way yo get to right. If Max Genecov can posit that Weininger is a “photographic negative of his time, revealing its hidden, hateful structure”, what does incel and transphobic culture say of us now?

To my young self, Gertrude Stein was, understandably, a light in the past showing the potential for a whole fire in the present. After all, my mother still had to ask my father for permission to leave the country for a good part of her adult life; long after Germany and Italy had gotten rid of their dictatorships, Portugal was steeped in its own version of fascism (two days ago, 58 alt-right MPs were voted into the Portuguese Parliament after almost 50 years of what was called “the Iberian Exception”, i.e. no extreme right wing parties; the leader of the party I refuse to name believes that a woman who has an abortion should have her uterus removed forcibly). So I came to believe that this agency and power came to Stein through something external, a form of power she could have, provided she wasn’t demonstrative in regular society. I concluded it must have been the most vulgar and disappointing of tools, money. Stein was an heir, who had the privilege to go to university and study with the philosopher William James; to drop out and decide to study midwifery at John Hopkins instead; to move to Europe, settle for Paris and start an art collection with her brother Leo (granted, her chosen artists weren’t very expensive then).

Now I imagine that her American education must have been an even more discombobulating time for her, from flings with women to coming to terms with her aspirations. She had admiration for James but didn’t buy his Pragmatist philosophy, so, more importantly–the most important thing of all-: she was trying to figure out what the heck her philosophical and linguistic vision was. Also a form of misogyny: to forget that a female author’s most consuming troubles were the feverish quest of finding her form, her nomadic writing, and accepting her love of repetition, of soliloquies, of grammar. Stein moved to Paris to be freer, and also, I suppose, to go back to where her parents had taken her to get an education, to see art, to speak other languages. She was rich, she got the education of rich women who had well-meaning parents, albeit still tainted with exclusion. Not unlike Virginia Woolf, but whose European education wasn’t as institutional. The other James, Henry, wrote about these discrepancies between the American and the British white woman which, ultimately, led to the same destinies of destitution without a male protector or personal wealth. But both Stein and Woolf were of a certain social stratum. Woolf referred to James Joyce pejoratively in her diary, on the 16th of August 1922, as a “self-taught working man”, entitled, as she felt, to more attention from T.S. Eliot, who was enthralled by Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). So, for all his advantages of being a man, Joyce was still a poor sod. And for all their advantages of being rich, white and/or with access to a powerful community of opinion-makers, Stein and Woolf were still women. Recent history told us who was more powerful. Present and future history will tell other tales of their posterity, while their lives deserve nuanced and open-eyed scrutiny.

The present tells us that we’ve come to a point where not only we’ve re-evaluated The Quality, but we also look at the movements we studied through the context they emerged with, in and against, all at once. Woolf dreamt of writing uninterruptedly. Stein decided that her gatherings took place on Saturdays so that she had time to write during the week, without interruptions. When no one would write her biography, to promote what she relentlessly described as her genius, she wrote one herself but of a different kind…

In a self-serving and outrageous manner, “Mrs. Stein” wrote the autobiography of her life partner Alice B. Toklas, which is the most ambitious, ambivalent, and ambiguous piece of literature I can think of. Gertrude Stein gives voice to her lover with the evident goal of obliquely focusing on herself. If you read any biography of Stein’s you can be certain that she did not buy Weininger’s theory which only allowed her to be half as good as a universal genius (obligatory male). She had an almost narcissistic sense of her own value, and applied the G. substantive to herself, all the time. In the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, the G. epithet establishes the narrative immediately as a premise. Moreover, Stein had a social aura Toklas lacked: the latter is often described as a crone, whereas Stein is perceived as a formidable yet affable person. Only someone cherished would be able to write so brazenly about her peers as she did in The Autobiography… and remain unscarred by it (not to say that Matisse and Hemingway weren’t positively fuming). One can estimate, according to the goût du jour, that Toklas was more “female” than Stein, who was commanding like a Roman Emperor, “if you like your women to look like Roman Emperors”, Hemingway remarked. But he wrote later, illuminating Stein’s self-serving theories: “She [Stein] used to talk to me about homosexuality and how it was fine in and for women and no good in men and I used to listen and learn and I always wanted to fuck her and she knew it”2.

How easy to imagine that Stein had no regard for Toklas’ inner life.

Stein must have been a formidable woman, a force not many had the will or the gumption to contradict. That is, apart from her readership. While her previous books were mostly ignored, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was a success that humiliated her. While absolutely elated to earn a considerable amount of money from the book, she despised it. She didn’t want to be recognised for a book she wrote out of relative despair for not being recognised as the genius she knew to be. By all accounts, The Autobiography… wasn’t at all the book where she placed the grammarian love she had for the verb and the adverb, and utter disregard for nouns. Nouns, according to her, are known things, they’re fixed. Why write about them? A sentence must move. A “sentence is proof that there is future”. Toklas was thus a mere noun.

By naming Alice in the title of her book, with her own name under hers as the author, wasn’t Stein proclaiming the two loves of her life? Alice first and her own genius next. In the prose itself, where names are fixed and die, it’s her own name Stein that comes time and time again: 866 times to Toklas’ 8. A title is a title is a title. A writer is a bully, as Joan Didion reminds us–writers take a page and through it shout, whisper, cajole, seduce, abuse, disown, and alarm their readers.

My attention shifts to Alice now.

She remains the cipher in this story, the recipient of our pity, but mostly our disregard. We see her as the “non-writer”, the “non-genius”, and it is us who find that category inferior. Not because at the end of the book, Stein–Toklas enumerates Alice’s roles as traditionally feminine. She is indeed the “housekeeper” which is to say the “gardener”, “needlewoman”, “secretary”, “editor” of everyones’ life (and Stein’s books, as many authors’ wives were in the past). Oh, and “dog vet”–she was gifted, active, prolific. But she is indirectly feminine, as in Weininger’s summarised spirit of the times. We see her as the genius-adjacent, the inferior female irrational and immoral spirit to Stein’s productive masculinity.

I still remember the day I heard a locally famous Portuguese writer and critic declare on TV that a genius should be accommodated and given more leeway to misbehave. He must know, I thought, his mum is a famous poet. Now I see that he must have been referring to himself too, as he was about to start a writing career. So we see Alice as the inferior person, the person who had the destiny to accommodate because she was loved by a genius and wasn’t one herself, and although her personality was far from subservient. Not once, do we think that Alice B. Toklas loved, was loved, and understood deeply, libidinally, the need for Stein to tell her own story although at times it must have felt like she was the brunt of the joke. Stein was a misogynist in a misogynist society, and chose to historicise herself with the ancestral concepts of patriarchs. She did the most transgressive thing you can do in our ego-obsessed nature: she borrowed the contrasting narrowness of Alice’s persona as a literary device, a shrewd disguise in her beloved writing her into history as a genius and not as a rich, idle, American eccentric set free by her parent’s money and the confusing eroticism of her butch queerness, if Hemingway’s lust can be offered as the barometer of society’s suppressed concupiscence.

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Weininger explains male self-hatred as the inherency of woman in himself, to which one can respond, with far more societal realism, that (some, too many) heterosexual men hate women because their desire affirms female ascendence and when this ascendance loses power through old age, menopause or any deviance from its demanding parameters (61% of femicides are committed by a current or former partner in the UK). None of this applies to lesbian relationships although the disposal of gender by Weininger does diffuse its influence as a psychological trait. Weininger is one of those distilling thinkers who reflect transcendentally, not immersively. So he goes further in saying that sexuality is to be transcended, overcome, denied to attain a sublimated form of existence. Ultimately, for him, both femininity and masculinity must be overcome to conquer the Olympus of asexuality.

In her book Parade, Rachel Cusk imagines several characters named G, the first one being a painter who doesn’t believe women can be artists. Or, thinks his wife, who doesn’t believe that he could be a man, and an artist, without a wife (and there it is, very acutely explained why Picasso didn’t want his wives to be artists). One day, his wife is struck on the head so bluntly that she doesn't quite understand what happened to her until she sees her attacker far away, raising her fist at her-a woman. A crowd gathers around her as she bleeds on her hands and knees. This event distresses her profoundly. She can’t shake off a feeling of having been murdered while remaining alive, relating this state of “death-in-life” to everything she’d done in connection with her femininity3. And all of those actions, she acknowledges, were performed by what she calls a stuntman, separate from the other aspects of her life. Leafing through a book illustrating the work of a nineteenth century female artist, also named G, and whose self-portraits were completed shortly before her death in childbirth, she thinks about the condition of the woman artist. There is another painting of G’s husband sleeping, not even undressed, with his glasses still on. A sentence about it strikes me: “the painting is an exercise in mild wonder, wonder at the familiarity and yet unknowability of this being, her husband, wonder perhaps at his entitlement to simply fall asleep like that, wonder at the artist’s own power to perceive him when he doesn’t know he’s being watched, as women perceive their husbands from deep within their subjugation to them” (my emphasis). The male body is entitled to be at ease, an easiness never really afforded or attained by women. It’s as if, she concludes, G was asking what female art might look like and concluding that it could only be “a sort of non-existence”4.

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When she was hit on the head, the stuntman replaced her. Memories of childbirth, of all the female duties and their forceful obscurity came flooding back. If she could have erased her past she would have. But now the stuntman had taken over: the woman who hit her, and whose gender made it difficult to tell the story, as if it was shameful, had forced her to represent herself. The stuntman’s violence had been gifted back to her. Because she knew that the crowd was looking at her like a picture in a museum, waiting. They wanted nothing more than to ignore the act of brutality, so it was up to her to locate it in time and space. If it had been a man, she would have felt that the attack was deserved. But being hit by a woman was both outrageous and a present.

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