The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Although laws at the time did not officially permit women to marry each other, Toklas was in essence Gertrude Stein’s wife and fulfilled many of the roles performed by the wives of artists, including domestic work, typing Stein’s manuscripts, and keeping other artists’ wives company. Toklas’s actual autobiography, which she kept threatening to write, would have partly been a fly-on-the-wall account of her life with Stein and the influence her partner had on the biggest names in Modernism. However, as Toklas hadn’t gotten around to writing her autobiography and Stein wanted to produce a lucrative book, Stein took it upon herself to write Toklas’s autobiography and used her partner as a mouthpiece from which to narrate her own experiences. Although the opening chapters do report Toklas’s early life, Toklas largely fades into the background as the text shifts to focus on Gertrude Stein, who is always referred to by her full name. Thus, in The Autobiography, Toklas’s subjectivity is subordinate to Stein’s.

At the end of The Autobiography, Toklas asserts, “I am a pretty good housekeeper and pretty good gardener and a pretty good needlewoman and a pretty good secretary and a pretty good editor and a pretty good vet for dogs and I have to do them all at once and I found it difficult to add being a pretty good author” (214).