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“I Always Wanted to Be Historical”: The Crack-Up of the Self from the Outside
Sarah George
English Honors Thesis
Stanislaw Witkiewicz. Self portrait (1910) Private Collection, Warsaw.
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“Am I I”: The Crack-Up of the Self from the Outside
Sarah George
English Honors Thesis
April 29, 2010
Professor Mark Schoenfield _________________
Professor Ellen Levy___________________
Professor Roy Gottfried __________________
Table of Contents
Introduction: Authors of Time
Chapter 1: Me, Myself and Fitzgerald
Chapter 2: Physician, Heal Thyself
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Chapter 3: Inside Out or Outside In?
Chapter 4: Stein's American Self
Introduction
Authors of Time
As a poster boy for American modernism of the Lost Generation, Ernest Hemingway once
wrote, “The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.” The
process of brokenness, and the possibility of reconstruction, is one that took the fore in American
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modernism of the 1930s. The interwar writings of two particular American modernists, F. Scott
Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein, highlight the way in which American authors at home and abroad
approached the consideration of identity in the face of external trauma. Their works pivoted toward
the exploration of their own selves, an outward turning of the innermost being through the
publication of The Crack-Up in Fitzgerald's case and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in
Stein's. The strange ways in which they view and treat the self and the “I,” and the fragility of that
self in the face of external forces, point to the primacy of the historical moment and the impact of
trauma on the individual that permeates the rest of their works during this time. Both authors
changed the scope and tone of their writing to reflect the destabilizing impact of World War I and
the Sock Market Crash. Fitzgerald and Stein both turned to the autobiography, to the exposure of
the fragmented self to the outside world in their writing, but each followed this process to a different
conclusion. In both cases, however, the interwar modernism takes on a strange fragility that was
absent in the boldness of the early modernism, a sense of searching austerity that attempts to
reassess the status of the individual in the face of an altered world.
The precedent of high modernism, represented tellingly by Gertrude Stein, an American
expatriate living in Paris in the nineteen-teens, was one fundamentally concerned with break-up, a
shattering of form in response to and further provoking the changing social norms and
understanding of the world leading into the roaring 20's. Published in 1914, on the eve of World
War I, Tender Buttons serves as the advance guard for Stein's formalist modernism. In its fractured
form, comprised of prose poems of varying lengths exhibiting Stein's quintessential ed repetition,
Tender Buttons predicts the fragmentation that characterizes Stein's later work. Applying a strange
and sharp violence to the interiority of the world Stein created, Tender Buttons mimics the way the
coming war would shatter the domestic interiority of European life. Stein described the process of
writing this work, “And so in Tender Buttons and then on I struggled with the ridding of myself of
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nouns. I knew that nouns must go in poetry as they had gone in prose if anything that is everything
was to go on meaning something” (Selected Writings 460). The noun, the signifier of the
autonomous being was gone in her writing, as considerations of the individual disappeared as well.
By concentrating her focus in this work on the “Objects, Food, and Rooms” of the home, Stein
explores the way in which an external, impersonal violence can fracture the internal, highly
personal space of the home. The interplay of the impersonal and the personal, the external and the
internal, breaks up, compartmentalizes, and defamiliarizes the home. Through Stein's eyes, the gaze
turns to each object individually, considering it, defamiliarizing it. The process occurs in the
disconnect between the “title” of these sketches and its content. In sketches such as “An Umbrella,”
which continues “Coloring high means that the strange reason is in front not more in front behind.
Not more in front in peace of the dot” (Tender Buttons 129), the title and the sketch experience a
block between them. The process of naming and the thing (the “I,” in other cases) are separated by
a whole host of the personal that Stein leaves unsaid. In this consideration of the nominal and the
formal essence of each idea, things fall apart. The titles are the centers around which the eyes
travel, gathering impressions, the essential “I's” around which conceptions of self rotate.
The quick turns between name and essence are emblematic of the modern condition as
expressed by literary modernism, reflecting the constancy of the present. This condition focuses on
the moment, the transitory “I” as it exists from one second to the next. The “I” is recreated at every
present. For Stein, “this which was so kindly a present was constant” (Tender Buttons 126). The
trajectory of the moment establishes itself as a line in Stein's terms, offering more insight into that
which divides the “titles” from their descriptions of “thing-ness”. She writes “Where is the serene
length, it is there and a dark place is not a dark place is not a dark place, only a white and red are
black, only a yellow and green are blue, a pink is scarlet, a bow is every color. A line distinguishes
it. A line just distinguishes it” (Tender Buttons 126). This faint line of distinction is the in-between
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place, the present between past and future, the self of the moment, an “I” kept separate from all
those of past and future, “just” distinguished.
Stein continues to explore the bonds of strength, order, and brokenness through the
centrality of lines and connections to the whole. Her assessment, “No cup is broken in more place
and mended, that is to say a plate is broken and mending does do that it shows that culture is
Japanese...Supposing a single piece is a hair supposing more of them are orderly, does that show
that strength, does that show that joint, does that show that balloon famously. Does it” (Tender
Buttons 129). By invoking the possibility that the breaking and mending of a plate, Stein creates a
new, stronger entity. Stein raises questions about the fracturing and reordering of the self in the face
of some trauma, connecting this reordering to place as the culture becomes “Japanese.” The shards
of the sketches Stein presents are emblematic of these same fragments of plates and cups. When
recombined into a new “house,” the resulting whole is fundamentally a different “I” than that
coherent whole that existed before. Although it is composed of the same pieces, the fragments are
swept together by the physical, the psychological, and a whole host of associations unseen, which
function as the invisible threads, connecting and occasionally shimmering in the half-light, darting
away when one attempts to look at them too directly. Ultimately, this reconstruction is a function of
the ability of words to create and change. For Stein,
it means no more than a memory, a choice and a reestablishment...All the
time that there is use there is use and any time there is a surface there is a
surface, and every time there is a dividing there is a dividing. Any time there
is a surface there is a surface and every time there is a suggestion there is a
suggestion and every time there is silence there is silence and every time that
is languid there is that there then and not oftener, not always, not particular,
tender and changing and external and central and surrounded and singular
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and simple and the same and the surface and the circle and the shine and the
succor and the white and the same and the better and the red and the same
and the center and the yellow and the tender and the better, and altogether.
(Tender Buttons 134)
The repetition inherent in Stein's invocation of such seemingly ambiguous and amorphous, or even
negative terms as “surface,” “exception,” “dividing,” and “suggestion” is a part of the process of
reestablishment of a whole out of the fragmentary parts. The words as arbitrary signifiers impose
an order onto those fragmentary parts. More structurally important, however, is the repetition of the
phrase “there is.” This repeated affirmation suggests a continued need to reaffirm the presence of
the process of externalization through writing. In this recreation of a whole, Stein points to the
necessity of the recreation of the “I” in the face of break down.
By framing the process of breaking down in Tender Buttons as removed from herself, from
an actual “I,” Stein suggests the ultimate unknowableness of another. By contrast, Fitzgerald's
Crack-Up is, while a deeply personal story, also the story of the American condition. The
experience is articulated to make it acceptable on a national scale. Here, Stein's story is
superficially less personal, negating the “I,” but by virtue of its exteriority it takes on an
unapproachable quality, suggesting something deeply personal in its structure. Stein approaches
this dynamic by writing, “The kindly way to feel separating is to have a space between. This shows
a likeness” (Tender Buttons 135). The “space” as constituting a “likeness” is counterintuitive, but
the relationship speaks to the destruction of binaries with which Stein deals specifically in later
works and which constitutes a part of the breakdown of the sense of the solid self. Stein's distance,
morphing into the deeply personal is linked to her understanding of solitude: “Melting and not
minding, safety and power, a particular recollection and a sincere solitude all this makes a shunning
so thorough and so unrepeated and surely if there is anything left it is a bone. It is not solitary”
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(Tender Buttons 137). The condition of solitude is one that puts the “I” outside the purview of all
else, allowing a personal “melting” and subsequent “recollection.” For all of that, the final result is
something “not solitary,” another binary broken in navigating the internal/external divide.
Turning specifically to the war on the horizon and its impending effects on Stein's
modernism, Stein explicitly invokes a sense of violence in Tender Buttons. While World War I does
not represent a causal mechanism in Stein's destabilization in these passages, the link between warlike violence and the destruction of which she writes simmers beneath the surface. A source for the
formal fracturing she exhibits, this violence is manifested in “A sentence of a vagueness that is
violence is authority and a mission and stumbling and also certainly also a prison. Calmness, calm
is beside the plate and in way in there is no turn in terror. There is no volume in sound” (Tender
Buttons 136). The presence of violence here creates the idea of a false essence, a “vagueness”
attacking the essential self, and a system in which “there is no volume in sound.” The effects of this
breaking violence further require a process of healing, of reconstruction and reconstitution. The
process is then “a hurt mended stick, a hurt mended cup, a hurt mended article of exceptional
relaxation and annoyance, a hurt mended, hurt and mended is so necessary that no mistake is
intended” (Tender Buttons 138). It becomes, through this repetition, routine that an “I” is both hurt
and mended, fractured and reconstituted. In “Eating,” Stein reaches her fractured height in Tender
Buttons. Stein begins this section, “Eat ting, eating a grand old man said roof and never never re
soluble burst, not a near ring not a bewildered neck, not really any such bay. Is it so a noise to be is
it a least remain to rest, is it a so old say to be, is it a leading are been. Is it so, is it so, is it so, is it
so is it so is it so” (Tender Buttons 145). The set of shattered words and sentences disrupts the
building blocks of language. The repetition of the final line points to the process Stein has put forth
for reestablishment in the power of those very words that had been de-constructed, as if by the
repetition it is possible to reassert wholeness. Stein repudiates this reassertion of wholeness in her
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works of the 1930s, leaving the shards of the individual sitting as they were at the moment of
breaking. The reassertion of the system broken by the historical moment becomes false. The
relationship between this work of high American modernism to her works of the 1930s that rests on
her personal relationship with the historical moment: “Stein and her texts present us with peculiar
and important difficulties when we attempt to make these measurements and the reasons for these
difficulties...[derived] from her understanding of the self's relation to time. Like any number of
modernists, she concerns herself centrally with the faculty of memory and the discipline of reading
the world historically” (Whittier-Ferguson). In exploring this relation to time in her later works, the
constitution of the self is inextricably linked to the breakdown of the divide between internal and
external, the externalization of the self through publication and, the way this process leaves the self
open to the destructive influence of the external.
Fitzgerald's connection with the historical moment has led critics to point to his place as
representative of the Jazz Age and the Roaring 20's in the United States. His ability to chronicle the
experience of a generation in America, the “flappers and philosophers” as he termed them in a title
of short stories, is well-acknowledged. While not the formalist modernism as seen in Stein's Tender
Buttons, Fitzgerald's stories of the 1920's tied him to the events and individuals guiding the country
and dictated how he viewed the production of identity. Because of his identification with the social
situation, “to a large extent Fitzgerald was responsible for his own predicament. From the moment
that he burst upon the literary scene in 1920 with his debut novel, This Side of Paradise, the
precocious twenty-three year-old encouraged audiences to acknowledge the umbilical connection
between his life and art” (Curnutt 4). This self-perpetuating cycle of the increasing ambiguity of the
auto-biographical nature of Fitzgerald's work is one that becomes problematic as the historical
moment that is informing his sense of identity shifts from the bacchanalian revelry of the 1920's
into the effects of the Stock Market Crash. At this moment, however, Fitzgerald battled against this
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unilateral identification of his work with the circumstances governing society and his own life. He
insisted
that the autobiographical elements in his work were not exclusively personal.
Rather, his tales of idealistic young 'jelly beans' and the flirtatious
flappers...reflected the experiences of peers who like him came of age amid
the welter of cultural change...In this way, Fitzgerald was not writing about
private concerns, but about the historical transformations that shaped the
character of his generation. (Curnett 5)
This compounding of the personal and the historical carries through to his work of the 1930's. His
break-down was the American break-down.
Fitzgerald further understands that the question of the identity of the United States rests on
the status of the American Dream, which was shaken from its golden foundations as the economy
was crippled by the crash. In a cyclical motion, one confronts Fitzgerald's realization that the
American Dream is an internal definition of identity that is contained in individuals as well as the
larger nation. In his progression between the decades, gaining the austerity coming forth from the
realities of the Great Depression, Fitzgerald went through the process by which
no longer dismissed as debutante valentines, for instance, the jazzier of his
Jazz Age tales could be read as evidence of the moral confusion that arose
from the postwar sexual revolution. Similarly, works inspired by the
Fitzgeralds' life abroad (Tender, 'Babylon Revisited') no longer bespoke the
couple's personal rootlessness but the felt exile of an entire literary generation
for whom expatriation was synonymous with artistic freedom. Finally,
Fitzgerald's recurring inquiry into the effect of easy money on individual
morality reflects 1920's anxieties over American culture's sudden glorification
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of fiscal and emotional irresponsibility. (Curnett 13)
The dialectic between internal and external for Fitzgerald and the larger society plays into the
destruction of the self that occurred in the face of such trauma as the Stock Market Crash and the
resulting Great Depression. This internal construction of the American Dream turns the focus again
onto the implications of the internal/external divide, and the way in which the external works upon
the internal of the individual, both creating and destroying it. This initial destruction, then, becomes
pivotal for making room for reconstruction and rebirth from the shattered and wounded pieces of
the self, as Fitzgerald delineates in The Crack-Up. The status of the self as an American and as a
self-contained individual is called into question by the extent to which external events, pressures,
histories, and individuals are able to dismantle and sway the internal self.
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Chapter I
Me, Myself, and Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald's story, his own as well as the ones he writes, is that of the failure of the
American dream – the American break-down. Explicitly dealt with in his “Crack-Up” articles
published in Esquire, the fragmentation of the self pervades Fitzgerald's work, taking on a
peculiarly American form. He explores the implications not only of a self divided, but possibly of
the very disintegration of that self as it encounters the trauma of the external. For Gertrude Stein
and her European compatriots, this modern conception of the self in all of its fragmentary ruin was
largely a product of the break-down of consciousness experienced after World War I. Their form
reveled in the fragments left to them to express a new reality. The experience of living abroad, for
Stein and her compatriots left the self open to the influence of the external, and created a new sense
of self divided. For Fitzgerald, the experience of the war was a far-away specter, as he was on the
cusp of the changing of generations. He inhabited a liminal period between generations, in some
ways haunted by the war, but also both physically and mentally removed from it. Fitzgerald's
fragmentation pivoted on experiences that called into question the American Dream, and ultimately
broke it for Fitzgerald: Prohibition and the Great Depression, manifested by his alcoholism and his
own inability to hold on to money. His life a distillation of the American experience on the brink of
disaster, Fitzgerald sought not to explore the shattered particles of himself, but to emulate Eliot in
shoring his fragments against his ruin.
The framework for understanding Fitzgerald's crack-up comes from his essay carrying the
same name. Coming late in his career, “The Crack-Up,” written for Esquire in the wake of the
stock market crash and the crash of Fitzgerald's own authorial stock attempts to explore the way
Fitzgerald broke and begin the process of mending. The larger implications of this exploration
revolve around Fitzgerald's understanding of the binary between internal and external. In his world
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of personal publicity and historical trauma, the external stimuli of war, Depression, alcohol, or
money had the power of creation, definition, and destruction. This process runs against the
separation of the autonomous self from the external world, suggesting a permeability that allows the
historical moment to form the “I.” Fitzgerald begins with an exploration of the way his situation is
exceptional and yet the most common situation in America:
Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic
side of the work – the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside –
the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your
friends about, don't show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that
comes from within – that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until
you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.
The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick – the second kind happens almost
without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed. (“Crack-Up” 69)
This passage detailing Fitzgerald's views of the forces causing breakdown shows the
implications of this breakdown for the conception of the “I.” The blows of which
Fitzgerald speaks and the process by which the breakdown is happening, impact a mystical
“you,” negating the sense of the fragmentation of the self by displacing it onto another.
Although he speaks personally later in the essay, the language employed here, creates a
milieu in which Fitzgerald's “I” has no place. Significantly, however, Fitzgerald does point
to the responsibility the self bears in the process of this breakdown. Exploring first the
outside blows that one understands as the root of the crack-up, Fitzgerald then turns to the
inner demons that destabilize the self. Continuing with the idea of blame and the “I,”
Fitzgerald writes, “I was living hard, too, but: 'Up to forty-nine it'll be all right,' I said. 'I
can count on that. For a man who's lived as I have that's all you could ask.' – And then, ten
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years this side of forty-nine I suddenly realized that I had prematurely cracked” (“CrackUp” 70). Even here, the sense of the “I” is separate from Fitzgerald as writer.
In writing “The Crack-Up,” Fitzgerald is searching for a way to hold his broken
pieces together. By identifying these pieces, setting himself as writer apart from them, he
seeks to bring them together, “trying to cling to something” (“Crack-Up” 73). By
reasserting his identity, projecting the internal out into the public, external realm through
publication, Fitzgerald attempts to reconstruct himself. Breezing through some of his past
selves, Fitzgerald sets up a divide between himself now and himself then: “The man with
the jingle of money in his pocket who married the girl a year later would always cherish an
abiding distrust, an animosity, toward the leisure class – not the conviction of a
revolutionary but the smouldering hatred of a peasant” (“Crack-Up” 77). The
revolutionary, outward-looking, is connected to the historical moment, while the peasant
occupies an almost ahistorical interior space. Yet the creation of the interiority directly
resonds to the external consideration of class and money. Significantly, Fitzgerald turns to
the lens of money through which to assess his past and current selves, looking to monetary
figures to bind together the “I.” Further, Fitzgerald's class imagery crystallizes his
definition of the monetary self. His sense of petering talent takes on the rhetoric of status
symbols in, “In its impact this blow was more violent than the other two but it was the
same in kind – a feeling that I was standing at twilight on a deserted range, with an empty
rifle in my hands and the targets down. No problem set – simply a silence with only the
sound of my own breathing” (“Crack-Up” 77). Fitzgerald's terms of self-definition slowly
crumble around him. The presence of this class outside of himself works on his own
identity, creating a sense of inferiority. In this case, however, Fitzgerald becomes acutely
aware of precisely what he owes to the wealthy classes, and the extent to which they hold
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his future in their hands: “I will try to be a correct animal, though, and if you throw me a
bone with enough meat on it I may even lick your hand” (“Crack-Up” 84). This loss of
autonomy Fitzgerald experiences compounds his sense of fracturing, underscored by his
increasingly pronounced ambivalence toward wealth and status.
In writing “The Crack-Up,” Fitzgerald unpacks his own neuroses during this time,
specifically the fragmentation of the self. He writes, “So there was not an 'I' any more –
not a basis on which I could organize my self-respect – save my limitless capacity for toil
that it seemed I possessed no more. It was strange to have no self” (“Crack-Up” 79). The
wandering inherent in this analysis, combined with the act of writing points to a sense of
separation between Fitzgerald's multiple selves. The creation of this self in the exterior
space of the written word and more importantly, publication speaks to the permeability of a
seemingly concrete binary as Fitzgerald casts himself out into the world in an attempt to
reassert coherence for the fragments of his self.
The culmination of “The Crack-Up,” and its implication for Fitzgerald's other
writings is the manner in which Fitzgerald reconstructs himself after the breakdown.
Involved in a process of recreating the self through his writing, he re-glues his fragments,
gathering and naming them as shards of his history with characters of their own. He
subsequently attempts to assemble them into a coherent whole, although the scars from the
breaking have not disappeared with the mending: “Sometimes, though, the cracked plate
has to be returned in the pantry, has to be kept in service as a household necessity. It can
never again be warmed on the stove nor shuffled with the other plates in the dishpan; it will
not be brought out for company, but it will do to hold crackers late at night or to go into the
ice box under leftovers...” (“Crack-Up” 75). Like Stein's cups and plates of Tender
Buttons, the idea of the re-unified, but still shattered and scarred whole pervades
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Fitzgerald's work and creates a strain of his own experience of cracking and reassembling
the American dream under extraordinary pressure.
Further essays in “The Crack-Up” explore Fitzgerald's views of the process of the
dissolution of self, specifically invoking ideas regarding the fundamental “I.” Writing
"Early Success" in 1937, Fitzgerald recounts the creation and dissolution of himself as an
author through publication of This Side of Paradise. For both Fitzgerald and Stein, the
projection of the self into the world through publication solidifies the self in the external,
but it also includes a loss of the “I” as the self crosses the internal/external divide. Written
at one of his most desperate moments and eventually published in The Crack-Up, "Early
Success" is not merely a retelling of Fitzgerald's entry onto the literary scene, but a
narrative of his production of identity. Fitzgerald's identification with his novel as a mirror
image of himself projected into the world is apparent in his reaction to its criticism: "These
weeks in the clouds ended abruptly a week later when Princeton turned on the book...There
was a kind but reproachful letter from President Hibben, and a room full of classmates who
suddenly turned on me with condemnation" (“Early Success” 88). The imposition of the
external here through the critical reaction to the physical manifestation of his self creates a
disconnect between former and current self. The translocation into the realms of the
external through the publication of his novel, however, completes itself in forswearing
against this past and the criticisms lurking therein. He describes the completion of this
process, writing, "But one was now a professional -- and the new world couldn't possibly
be presented without bumping the old out of the way" (“Early Success” 89). The process
and trappings of publication, of casting (as perhaps only Fitzgerald can do so thoroughly)
the innermost, most fundamental self into the external world, breaks down the
internal/external binary. The work of the external, then, through critical and public
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response to the physical manifestation of self, is to create a new identity, that of the
professional.
Fitzgerald's development in "Early Success" embodies this progression, with the
self taking the form of his first novel This Side of Paradise. Considered to be autobiographical, the novel represented his "coming out" to the world. Fitzgerald's creation of
his conception of self takes on a particular form in this essay: His transformation from
amateur to professional. The body of this transformation is contained in the publication of
his novel, as "that week the postman rang and rang, and I paid off my terrible small debts,
bought a suit, and woke up every morning with a world of ineffable toploftiness and
promise...the metamorphosis of amateur into professional began to take place" (“Early
Success” 86). Fitzgerald defines himself by the self that he sees represented in the form of
the novel. Through this novel presented to the world as his image, and the work of the
external on this image, he begins to understand himself. Fitzgerald points to this
transformation of his identity as one that is fundamentally controlled by the externalities of
the Other and History -- and one that has to be recreated ad nauseum as he continues to
publish.
This creation of identity, placed in terms of transformation from “amateur” to
“professional” is linked to other considerations revolving around the influence of the
external circumstance on the individual “I:” "I had been an amateur before; in October,
when I strolled with a girl among the stones of a southern graveyard, I was a professional
and my enchantment with certain things that she felt and said was already paced by an
anxiety to set them down in a story" (“Early Success” 86). Fitzgerald moves from the real,
tangible objects of the girl, the stones, and the graveyard into a sense of existence
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dominated by words ready to “set them down in a story.” Fitzgerald's experience in his
"Early Success" embodies the permeability self. Taking up the identity of professional
wordsmith, Fitzgerald alienates himself through language to send the “I” out into the world
via publication, which then comes back to him changed at its foundations by the pressures
of the outside.
Fitzgerald's understanding of the creation of the "I" is complicated by the idea that,
as he continues to publish and construct himself through the negotiation of internal and
external through this publication, he consciously creates the image of himself, pushing
back against the external. In effect, he understands (at least in hindsight) that in publication
he asserted his identity, one subsequently projected to the outside world: "On the other
hand, for a shy man it was nice to be somebody except oneself again: to be 'the Author' as
one had been 'the Lieutenant.' Of course one wasn't really an author any more than one had
been an army officer, but nobody seemed to guess behind the false face" (“Early Success”
88). With the idea of acting or the mask taking primacy in other works, the invocations of
the “false face” in “Early Success” is one that points to the transitory nature of identity, and
the dangers of attempting to create “just a mask.” Taking up this veil works on the internal,
winding itself sinuously around the “I” until the self and the mask are inseparable. The
oscillation between internal and external in the definition of self is further complicated by
the idea of falsity as Fitzgerald describes his experience of encountering his identity in the
form of his novel: "With its publication I reached a stage of manic depressive insanity.
Rage and bliss alternated hour by hour. A lot of people thought it was a fake, and perhaps it
was, and a lot of others thought it was a lie, which it was not" (“Early Success” 88).
Fitzgerald's creation of a self characterized by sturm and drang with his meeting of internal
with new self coming back from creation by the external points to the delineation between
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"a fake" and "a lie," which is a distinction that buttresses Fitzgerald's conception of his own
"I": possibly fake, but always true.
In the closing lines of his essay, Fitzgerald points to the transfiguration publication produces.
He discusses a sense of loss as the individual enters the vast world of experience and formative
influence. For Fitzgerald, this loss and its manifestation takes the form of
the mind of the young man with cardboard soles who had walked the streets of New
York. I was him again -- for an instant I had the good fortune to share his dreams, I
who had no more dreams of my own. And there are still times when I creep up on
him...But never again as during that all too short period when he and I were one
person, when the fulfilled future and the wistful past were mingled in a single
gorgeous moment -- when life was literally a dream." (“Early Success” 90)
Fitzgerald's progression from "amateur" to "professional" and his creation of a conception of the
self is not merely one characterized by un-circumspect evolution, but is accompanied by a sense in
which the realm of the internally constructed “I,” the life of the amateur kid, held a key to life that
can never be recovered.
The autobiographical work (or autobiography about autobiography) of The Crack-Up feeds
into Fitzgerald's fictional works as evidenced by his discussion of This Side of Paradise. Two of
Fitzgerald's late stories confront the issues (the break of success and alcoholism) that brought about
his own crack-up: “Babylon Revisited” and “A New Leaf.” "Babylon Revisited," written near the
time of Fitzgerald's crack-up, explores the harrowing impact of alcoholism and loss of wealth on the
family and the individual. In some ways parallel to Fitzgerald's personal history, "Babylon
Revisited" pivots on its representation of the self as faced with outside forces set to destroy it. The
character Charles travels to Paris to reclaim his daughter from his wife's family, who have been
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raising her because of his mental breakdown resulting from drinking and dissolution after his wife's
death. The plot is one of the gradual revealing that Charles was responsible for his wife's death,
precipitating his own collapse and the unwillingness of his wife's family to relinquish his daughter.
When Charles, now sober, returns to Paris to reclaim his daughter, he is suddenly thrust back into a
past life and confronted with a past self. Hearkening back to a certain Stein-like Paris, Charles
ruminates on the change his personal history has made on his conception of Paris: "He was not
really disappointed to find Paris was so empty. But the stillness in the Ritz bar was strange and
portentous. It was not really an American bar any more -- he felt polite in it, and not as if he owned
it. It had gone back to France" ("Babylon Revisited” 616). This personal change is magnified by the
larger changes of country, national feeling, and relatedly, ownership.
This change in the experience of Paris for an American reflects the change experienced by
Charles, and pervades the larger implications for the effect of outside forces on the "I." Charles puts
words to his sense of losing Paris and its implications, "It seems funny, to see so few Americans
around." His sister-in-law, Marion, represented as more of an expatriate than an American responds
"We've suffered like everybody, but on the whole it's a good deal pleasanter." Seeking to recreate his
past life in Paris and put words to the change he senses at having lost that life, Charles responds,
"But it was nice while it lasted...We were a sort of royalty, almost infallible, with a sort of magic
around us. In the bar this afternoon...there wasn't a man I knew" ("Babylon Revisited" 619).
Charles' response in this passage points to a number of different ways in which he conceives of his
sense of the "I" and points to how he understands its subsequent dissolution. Most explicitly, his
reply evokes the economic definition of self, evoking a past life, a past Paris, that was defined by
"royalty," pointing first to the crash of markets and wealth as the fall of the "I." This idea is then
immediately extended to the "infallible" self, implying that Charles conceived of his economic self
in Paris as protected, whole, and sure. The "infallible" self, however, also raises issues concerning
George 21
the creation of the ideal self. The "sort of magic around us" reinforces this idea, suggesting that
what has really been dissolved in Charles' loss of Paris is his ability to create an "I" onto which to
project his interiority and through which to observe himself. Indeed, when "in the bar this
afternoon...there wasn't a man I knew," Charles implies that he has lost himself and the mirror by
which he judges himself, the American living in Paris. By invoking his mourning of the loss of the
Paris he had known, Charles also points to the extent to which he feels he has lost himself and the
conduit through which he defines his own "I."
One of the questions at which Fitzgerald prods throughout "Babylon Revisited" is that of the
power of naming, of putting words to actions. Through Charles' initial refusal to talk about what
happened to his wife (and Marion's refusal to hear it), Fitzgerald points to the importance of the
ability to name.. In the first mention of what happened to Charles' wife, the impetus for his breakdown, Charles and Marion skirt actually naming the incident. Marion begins: "From the night you
did that terrible thing you haven't really existed for me." The essence of this "terrible thing"
underlies the rest of Marion's accusations and she proceeds to a more explicit explanation, "I'll
never in my life be able to forget the morning when Helen knocked at my door, soaked to the skin
and shivering, and said you'd locked her out." While the act has here been obliquely named, Marion
then refuses to speak of (or allow Charles to speak of) the underlying reasons behind this act and its
subsequent effects. As Charles begins "the night I locked her out,” and she interrupts “I don't feel
up to going over that again" ("Babylon Revisited" 625). The progression of learning the story of
Helen's death, the point of entry into Charles' broken sense of self, rests on the slowly developing
ability of Charles to put words to the events of that night. The next step in the process of naming
occurs in Charles' thoughts, "There was a scene at the Florida, and then he attempted to take her
home, and then she kissed young Webb at a table; after that there was what she had hysterically
said" ("Babylon Revisited" 628). In this "what she had hysterically said," Charles once again backs
George 22
away from the implications of naming his experience, thinking he can thereby avoid reliving it.
Eventually, Charles reaches the point at which memory subsumes him; he has gone so far in
putting words to his trauma that he cannot stop the flood of his past self into his present: "Again the
memory of those days swept over him like a nightmare...The little man Helen had consented to
dance with at the ship's party, who had insulted her ten feet from the table; the women and girls
carried screaming with drink or drugs out of public places." In these lines, Charles points to the
back story of the event that sparked his own dissolution. The following lines, however, tie this
event, this break-down specifically, to the American experience happening in parallel, and the effect
of this reflection on the individual: "The men who locked their wives out in the snow, because the
snow of twenty-nine wasn't real snow. If you didn't want it to be snow, you just paid some money"
("Babylon Revisited" 633). Money is as flimsy and unreal as the snow and there is just as much of
it in the days before the Stock Market Crash. The extent to which Charles progresses to the explicit
naming of the impetus for his break-down, however, points to the necessity of naming the event. To
relive it thoroughly becomes the only way to begin to create a whole self out of the pieces of the
crack-up. This process is reminiscent of the one in which Fitzgerald himself advances in "The
Crack-Up," attempting to impose the internal self onto the outside world. Although written out of
economic necessity, the writing of these essays was also an explicit process of naming that which
had destroyed him.
Fitzgerald points to the parallel effect of break-down on Charles, and the way in which he
recognizes the effect of it on his conception of the "I." Charles' fracturing begins in his evasion of
his past and escape from the external, as "it had been given, even in the most wildly squandered
sum, as an offering to destiny that he might not remember the things most worth remembering, the
things that now he would always remember -- his child taken from his control, his wife escaped to a
George 23
grave in Vermont" ("Babylon Revisited" 620). Looking to the cause of Charles' fragmentation,
Fitzgerald identifies the effect of disregarding memories on the break-down of the self, implying
that by blocking one's past, one denies the building blocks of any recognizable self. Charles, in his
own way, independently analyzes the way in which he has been fragmented: "All the catering to
vice and waste was on an utterly childish scale, and he suddenly realized the meaning of the word
'dissipate'--to dissipate into thin air; to make nothing out of something. In the little hours of the
night every move from place to place was an enormous human jump, an increase of paying for the
privilege of slower and slower motion" ("Babylon Revisited” 620). His understanding of his loss of
self rests on the idea of "vice and waste," which invokes the actions of the larger America of the
1920's, a country living a present without memory, disconnected from the past.
Already hinting at the shattering effects of alcoholism for the individual in "Babylon
Revisited," Fitzgerald explores the ramifications of excessive drink in "A New Leaf." Written in
1931, "A New Leaf" concerns Dick Ragland and Julia Ross, two young lovers who meet through
Julia's then-fiance, Phil Hoffman. Despite Phil's advice to the contrary and his evidence of Dick's
dissolute character, Julia is intrigued by the handsome, confident charm she sees in Dick. On what
is to be their first lunch out, Dick arrives at Julia's home in a drunken stupor, displaying the
transformation of character that his alcoholism creates. Julia renounces Dick because of his
unstable behavior, but they find themselves traveling on the same ocean liner back to America.
Dick has sworn that he is going to give up drinking on his twenty-eighth birthday, which passes on
the ship. In this controlled environment, after his birthday, Julia is able to monitor his drinking, and
falls in love with the version of Dick that he maintains during this period. Their affair continues in
New York, where Dick holds on to Julia as his anchor against the demands of his alcoholism. Julia
agrees to marry Dick if he is able to stay sober for a period of six months. During this time,
however, she travels to California to visit family, an absence that seems to nearly break Dick.
George 24
During her absence, he takes up with mutual friends to help him combat his urges to drink. In a
final effort, Dick himself takes a steamer to London. In the final scene, Phil Hoffman and Julia are
discussing the newspaper article chronicling Dick's disappearance at sea. When Julia asks if Dick
had been drinking on the ship, Phil mulls over the rumors of Dick's bar evenings on the steamer and
the whisperings of suicide surrounding his death, but tells Julia that he had kept his promise about
drinking. In this act, he preserved at least her stability, keeping her perceptions intact.
Concerned with the break-up of self in the face of alcoholism, “A New Leaf” is more
specifically a story of the transference of self to an exterior Other. Fitzgerald forges a demanding
relationship between Julia and Dick with implications for the influence of the external Other on the
internal self. Dick transfers the strengths of his character -- his charm, love, and remaining
willpower -- onto Julia as the physical manifestation of his self in order to preserve them as the rest
of his character self-destructs. Julia accepts this transference for the same reason that Dick initiates
it although, "she did not realize that his being a sort of outcast added to his attraction for her -- not
the dissipation itself, for never having seen it, it was merely an abstraction -- but its result in making
him so alone. Something atavistic in her went out to the stranger to the tribe, a being from a world
with different habits from hers, who promised the unexpected, -- promised adventure" ("New Leaf"
637). In this conception of the compatibility of their relationship, Fitzgerald suggests they represent
two parts of a whole, although the individual self represented in Dick's half is destined to crumble.
A way of confronting his own descent into alcoholism, Fitzgerald gives Dick the words to
explore his own addiction. Dick explains, "About the time I came into some money I found that
with a few drinks I got expansive and somehow had the ability to please people, and the idea turned
my head. Then I began to take a whole lot of drinks to keep going and have everybody think I was
wonderful" ("New Leaf" 637). This idea that alcohol creates for Dick a new and better self is the
George 25
driving force behind his alcoholism. In this conception, he has created a sense of a deceptively
simple, true “I” as the one that has had a few drinks, functioning under the effects of alcohol, and
heightening his personal strengths. Dick's alcoholism stems from an attempt to become the
manifestation of the “I” that he believes rests in this version of himself. Through Julia's eyes,
however, one views this manifestation as dissolution. When he shows up drunk to her home to take
her out to lunch, a transformed individual knocks on her door, but not the ideal self Dick believes he
is:
There in the outer hall stood a man whom she thought she had never seen before.
His face was dead white and erratically shaven, his soft hat was crushed bunlike on
his head, his shirt collar was dirty, and all except the band of his tie was out of sight.
But at the moment when she recognized the figure as Dick Ragland she perceived a
change which dwarfed the other into nothing; it was in his expression. His whole
face was one prolonged sneer -- the lids held with difficulty from covering the fixed
eyes, the drooping mouth drawn up over the upper teeth, the chin wobbling like a
made-over chin in which the paraffin had run -- it was a face that both expressed and
inspired disgust. ("New Leaf" 638)
This description is not merely one of destruction, but is one of complete loss of identity until Julia is
finally able to recognize the individual as one that she knows.
In unwittingly taking on the role of protector of Dick's self, Julia becomes the external force
that works on the shards of his character that remain, and the architect of his reconstruction. In this
process, Dick's ability to resist dissolution relies wholly upon her presence. When this stabilizing
force is absent, the fragments of his "I" drift further from one another and what remains of Dick's
self enters a liminal space in which he does not feel the consequences of his drinking. Fitzgerald
George 26
creates a physical presence of this state in his description of Paris: "There were other, small,
annoying episodes, but Dick's misdemeanors had, fortunately, been confined to Paris and assumed a
far-away unreality" ("New Leaf" 643). Upon their return to New York, Julia's presence wards off
this "far-away unreality," until her absence from New York propels Dick's affair and his turn toward
alcohol. The extreme of this manifestation of liminal space in which the dissolution of the self is
possible comes forth on the steamer Dick takes to London. Utterly disconnected from Julia,
disconnected from land, even, what remains of Dick's "I" is left without anything to hold it together.
Dick prefers the destruction of the body in suicide to continuance as the shell for a fragmented self.
Julia's reaction is telling. Preserved from the knowledge that Dick has killed himself, she
still feels the ramifications of a situation in which "it was human to risk the toss between failure and
success, but to risk the desperate gamble between adequacy and disaster--" ("New Leaf" 646).
Without the strengths that he had placed into Julia for her to protect, Dick was unable to hold
himself together in this "adequacy," and the dissolution resulted in his ruin. Although Julia does not
know that Dick has committed suicide, there is something in her that makes her say "I believed in
him -- and I was right in a way. He broke rather than bent; he was a ruined man, but not a bad man.
In my heart I knew when I first looked at him." ("New Leaf" 647). In her connection with Dick,
Julia is able to recognize the fractured nature of his final self, the nature of the man who "broke
rather than bent."
In Fitzgerald's naming the factors that lead to his own dissolution and transferring them onto
the character of Dick, he is involved in a process of reverse narcissism. Fitzgerald as author
becomes the ideal ego in their relationship. By looking into the mirror of Dick Ragland, Fitzgerald
both recognizes and examines his own fractured self, but also uses it as a process of absolution. As
author, he has placed the baser self in his writings, driven him to suicide, then subsequently
George 27
recreates his clean self outside of the work.
Despite the idea here explored that suggests that Fitzgerald was ultimately uncomfortable
with the fracturing of the self that accompanied his breakdown, there is also the sense throughout
his works that this fragmentation is somehow necessary for the modern author. The process of the
creation of the internal “I” requires the work of the external in building this self up, and then in
destroying it, leaving the individuals to attempt to collect and reconstitute the self in an outward
action of publishing and writing, pushing back against the external. The fragmentation that
Fitzgerald puts on display in his works is part of a process of identifying the source and effect of
this shattering on the individual, a part of a process to heal himself. Even in the midst of
formulating a plan for the preservation of self, Fitzgerald writes that “the test of a first-rate
intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the
ability to function” ('Crack-Up 69). Explicitly evoking the image of one attempting to hold together
disparate parts of a whole, Fitzgerald points again to the attempt to create unity and wholeness in
the face of a breakdown. The twist, however, is that for this process to have any meaning, for the
“first-rate intelligence” to emerge or be recognized, there must first be a break, a fracture of the self.
Chapter 2
Physician, Heal Thyself
George 28
Fitzgerald's experience of break-up, fragmentation, and rebirth from the ashes of his past
that he explores in The Crack-Up informs the creation of the plots and characters of his fiction of
the 1930's, particularly his novel of the early part of the decade, Tender is the Night. As a novel,
Tender is the Night weaves together the various strains of inquiry regarding identity whichmost
interested Fitzgerald and Stein. The relationship of artist to art is explored in the extent to which
Tender is the Night is autobiographical. Fitzgerald points to the external impetus of break-down (or
crack-up) in Dick Diver's dissolution, and the work of the external Other on the internal of the
feminine presences of Rosemary and Nicole Diver. These individuals are tied inextricably to the
historical moment in which they are living, as well as the influence of physically separate Others.
Fitzgerald's tale of the individual and the “I” in Tender is the Night looks to the external as the
driving factor of growth, destruction and rebirth, working on the internal.
The story of Dick Diver, his wife Nicole, and the child actress Rosemary, Tender is the Night
explores the ability of the external circumstance to both constitute the “I” and destroy it. The
individual must then reconstitute the fragments. The Divers' marriage explores these themes
through their ability to define one another. Dick meets Nicole when she is a patient in a mental
facility and he is a young psychiatrist about to ship off to war. Through Dick's letters, Nicole finds
her sanity, and through her reply letters, her writing, Dick understands her recovery. Their life as
expatriates in the South of France leads them into contact with the almost-child actress, Rosemary,
who falls in love with Dick. Dick takes his place in the script of the love triangle, while Nicole
seems on the verge of breakdown again. As they explore Europe, however, Dick suffers the
ultimate breakdown, unable to hold himself together against the effects of an increasingly
encroaching exteriority of society and history. The dissolution of Abe North foreshadows Dick's
downward spiral. As Nicole becomes stronger and more able to impose the self outward, taking a
lover, Dick falls more and more into fragments, culminating in a disturbing scene of racist and
George 29
classist expulsion that sends him into shattered fragments of a self.
Written in an historical moment in which psychology focused increasingly on the individual
as the ultimate determinant of identity, Tender is the Night responded by pointing to the work the
external does in creating identity. Fitzgerald addresses the expected relationship between the
internal world of the self and the external world of history, society, and Other, which exist in
opposition to the self. He asks, “When people have so much regard for outsiders didn't it indicate a
lack of inner intensity?” (Tender 84), pointing to the internal/external as quite visible and solid. The
“I” can define itself against the other, the internal against the external, but the interplay between the
two entities is non-existent. Individual experience, however, complicates this relationship, turning
it from negative definition to external definition of the internal. Fitzgerald addresses this new
conception of the relationship: “You will feel your own reflection sliding along the eyes of those
who look at you. You are no longer insulated; but I suppose you must touch life in order to spring
from it” (Tender 182). In this new equation, the self is determined from the outside, with “your own
reflection sliding along the eyes of those who look at you.” Fitzgerald implies that the power of the
Other over the “I” is not the loss of autonomy that it first seems. The “touch” of life on the self is
integral in the ability of the individual to learn, grow, and move through the world. The interplay
creates a self that functions in the world, “no longer insulated.” Fitzgerald further offers, early in
the novel, the example of continued insularity: “She was one of those elderly 'good sports'
preserved by imperviousness to experience and a good digestion into another generation” (Tender
8). The idea of “imperviousness to experience” as increasing isolation of the self and also the
ending of the self's ability to and progress suggests the importance of this contact for an individual.
Fitzgerald creates the transitory divide between the internal and the external in the form of a
mask that the characters adopt to show their (perhaps illusory) distance from the external. In Tender
is the Night, the fragile shell that protects the “I,” takes the form of the mask of the actor. Most of
George 30
this language revolves around Rosemary, a young professional actress with a changeable identity,
and her relationship to the world. In order to relate to the world of the adult, Rosemary recites a
script to enter into adulthood, which Fitzgerald describes,
“Take me.”
“Take you where?”
Astonishment froze him rigid.
“Go on,” she whispered. “Oh, please go on, whatever they do. I don't care if
I don't like it – I never expected to – I've always hated to think about it but
now I don't. I want you to.” She was astonished at herself – she had never
imagined she could talk like that. She was calling on things she had read,
seen, dreamed through a decade of convent hours. Suddenly she knew too
that it was one of her greatest roles and she flung herself into it more
passionately. (Tender 72)
Here, the external informs Rosemary's mask/role. The role becomes, however, more real than the
real, molding her self, adding “actor” to her most fundamental conception of the “I.” The status of
her “I” before this moment was tellingly not defined by the mask. Fitzgerald describes this former
self, “But Rosemary triumphed. Her fineness of character, her courage and steadfastness intruded
upon by the vulgarity of the world, and Rosemary showing what it took with a face that had not yet
become mask-like” (Tender 77). Without the mask acting as barrier, between the interior and
exterior, Rosemary is left with the force of her own consciousness, the “fineness of character, her
courage and steadfastness” to battle against the forces of history and the Other. Without the mask of
actress to defend her, she is vulnerable to the “vulgarity of the world.” Eventually she recognizes
the solution to this intrusion as the construction of this barrier: “You do the unexpected thing until
you've maneuvered the audience back from the objective fact to yourself. THEN you slide into
George 31
character again” (Tender 324). The creation of character is both protective and a conduit through
which the outside world enters into the inner consciousness.
Fitzgerald links Rosemary's profession as an actress with Diver's appropriation of masks and
roles by drawing parallels between the two of them, and then casting Diver off onto his own stage.
The parallel is made explicit when “Rosemary stood up and leaned down and said her most sincere
thing to him: 'We're such ACTORS – you and I'” (Tender 117). In this process of naming,
Fitzgerald creates the label's legitimacy through Rosemary's status as an actress. Hearing himself
named by Rosemary as an actor turns Diver into one who wears masks, who takes up roles in his
relationship to the world. Fitzgerald points to this status by writing, “So rigidly did he sometimes
guard his exposed self-consciousness that frequently he defeated his own purposes; as an actor who
underplays a part sets up a craning forward, a stimulated emotional attention in an audience, and
seems to create in others an ability to bridge the gap he left open” (Tender 103). Diver's
relationship to the world crosses divides between internal and external. The external world of the
audience not only enters his consciousness, playing into his identity, but is actively drawn in by his
own quality of performance. As he attempts to retreat to himself, the external moves closer in. So
in the process of “rigidly” guarding his innermost being by appropriating the role of an actor, Diver
actively invites the external world into the formation of “self-consciousness,” both in the form of an
understanding of self, and that uneasiness with the self in the presence of the outside world.
Fitzgerald further reflects the problems of individual identity, describing Rosemary's reaction
entering a restaurant, “There was nothing of the past, nor of any present Rosemary knew. The outer
shell, the masonry, seemed rather to enclose the future so that it was an electric-like
shock...perverted on a breakfast of oatmeal and hashish, to cross that threshold, if it could so be
called, into the long hall of blue steel, of silver gilt, and the myriad facets of many oddly beveled
mirrors” (Tender 80). The “perverting” effect of this relationship occurs in the disconnect between
George 32
history and the self, exterior and interior. In this way, Fitzgerald suggests that the connection
between the interior self and the external world of history and progress creates a normal life,
although the historical moment may fracture the self, fundamentally changing an individual's
identity. In the same way that Fitzgerald's ability to function in the role of authorship is reliant upon
his cracked sense of identity in The Crack-Up, Diver's ability to be whole rests on the permeability
of his mask, of his role as actor, and in the ability of the outside world to work upon him.
In exploring the increasingly compromised divide between internal and external, Fitzgerald
highlights myriad external factors that create and destroy the self. This story of breakdown extends
from the internal of psychology to the reflection of the personal onto society, to the external. Dick
Diver's identification as a psychiatrist points to his purported ability to heal fractured selves, but he
is not able to heal his own self. This profession emphasizes the individual as helpless against
outside forces encroaching on his conception of self as it dissolves. Fitzgerald addresses the
inevitability of the tide of history, “Dick got to Zurich on less Achilles' heels than would be required
to equip a centipede, but with plenty – the illusions of eternal strength and health, and of the
essential goodness of people; illusions of a nation, the lies of generations of frontier mothers who
had to croon falsely, that there were no wolves outside the cabin door” (Tender 132). Diver's
“illusions” point to the strange way the world works the most destructively on those individuals
who are the most optimistic, the most insulated, the most interior. Underlying the illusions that
Fitzgerald puts forth, particularly “illusions of a nation,” is the understanding that the myth of the
American Dream is ultimately being undercut as an “Achilles' heel,” ready to be pierced by the
arrow of war and Depression.
Fitzgerald's ideas regarding gender identity connect him to Gertrude Stein's writings on the
same sense of fragmentation and catalyze his delineation of the breakdown and the rebuilding of the
self in the face of the external. Particularly true for the male self, a counterpart to Stein's
George 33
construction and deconstruction of the female self in such works as The Autobiography of Alice B.
Toklas, the relationship between gender roles externalizes fragmentation and deconstruction. He
writes in a dialogue between Nicole and Dick,
“'I am a woman and my business is to hold things together.'
'My business is to tear things apart.'” (Tender 91)
Although many of his female characters are caught up in madness, men are responsible for tearing
the world apart. The connection between gender and madness expands the internal/external
permeations into a wider social sphere than that of the individual, altering the way Diver
understands his own being:
A wave of agony went over him. It was awful that such a fine tower should not
be erected, only suspended from him. Up to a point that was right: men were
for that, beam and idea, girder and logarithm; but somehow Dick and Nicole
had become one and equal, not opposite and complementary; she was Dick
too, the drought in the marrow of his bones. He could not watch her
disintegrations without participating in them. (Tender 216)
The inversion of the gender relations in the Diver marriage allows feminine control of such male
institutions as finances to work on him internally, creating a bond between two externally
autonomous beings so strong that Nicole's dips into madness become Dick's own forays into
dissolution. Nicole's understanding of the inverted gender roles in their marriage is incomplete,
possibly because he roles appear traditional. Nevertheless, in her estimation, “Always when he
turned away from her into himself he left her holding Nothing in her hands and staring at it, calling
it many names, but knowing it was only the hope that he would come back soon” (Tender 205).
Nicole's understanding of the power dynamic between her self and her husband rests, instead of on
an understanding of her financial influence over him, on his power to turn toward himself. The
George 34
Nothing that he leaves is impossible for her to name (which she tries to do as a woman who builds
things up).
The complication of this idea extends, for Fitzgerald, to a further external circle in its
relationship to class. Men not only tear themselves apart, but control those institutions that sway
the larger forces of the external world that form the individual self. By subverting these systems
women wield the same level of power of destruction over men. At the point of Dick's dissolution,
he remembers a conversation with his sister-in-law that “came back to him under the form of what
Baby had said: 'We must think it over carefully –' and the unsaid lines in back of that: 'We own
you, and you'll admit it sooner or later. It is absurd to keep up the pretense of independence'”
(Tender 201). This relationship of financial exchange undermines the gender relationships that
Fitzgerald displays complicates the gender divide. Because of the inverted gender roles regarding
social class, Dick's identity is dictated by Nicole's higher class. The Divers' relationship is
perverted by the external of money. The twisted gender relationship ascribed to money and class
then works on the two individuals, calling into question the autonomy of those selves from either
Others or the outside world.
The madness of the individual in Tender is the Night is closely related to the attempts of
individual selves to re-form against the outside world. Although it is clear by the final pages of The
Crack-Up that Fitzgerald senses the necessity of breakdown for the creation of a truer individual
from the fragments, that idea is more subtly underlying Tender is the Night, overshadowed by
Dick's inability to reconstitute himself. Other individuals, however, actively recreate themselves in
the face of externally induced destruction. Literally mad at the beginning of her relationship with
Dick, Nicole experiences externally induced episodes of psychosis. She is (although partially
through a feeding off of Diver's own sanity, leading to his own breakdown) rebuilt through the
interplay of internal and external, relying on the love of another to reconstruct that sense of self.
George 35
For Rosemary, this oscillation between internal and external allows her to rebuild herself after a
series of inner meltdowns and a life of living behind the mask of an actress. Fitzgerald describes
her exit after dinner with Dick, “The way she paused fractionally in front of the hall mirror on
leaving the restaurant, so that the incorruptible quicksilver could give her back to herself” (Tender
155). To “give her back to herself” suggests reconstruction necessitates the external presence.
Involved in the creation and destruction of the self, the external world is a surface from which the
individual judges that new self in the image given back to her, offering a conduit for selfreconstruction.
Dick shares many of the same class anxieties that Fitzgerald exposes in the Crack-Up.
Dick's contempt for certain classes emerges during his break down, as he attempts to reassert his
self against the invasive Other. Fitzgerald writes in this regard, “At that moment the Divers
represented externally the exact furthermost evolution of a class, so that most people seemed
awkward beside them – in reality a qualitative change had already set in that was not at all apparent
to Rosemary” (Tender 24). This passage points to class's (functioning as an external shell) internal
work as superseded by the external. The immediate, physical stimuli of Rosemary's presence,
replaces class to wreak fundamental internal change on the selves. This passage represents the shift
from the function of the external in creating the internal (class) and the ability of the external to
enact a total breakdown of the internal (Rosemary's presence).
Closely related to the question of class is that of money, a consideration close to Fitzgerald,
highlighted because of the historical events that precipitated his own crack-up. Fitzgerald
acknowledges this primacy in Tender is the Night, “'There we have it! Money!'” (Tender 198).
Money controls the language of the breakdown in the novel and having, or not having, this physical
manifestation of power links to the automatic dissolution of the internal self: “It was hard to know
where to go. He glanced about the house that Nicole had made, that Nicole's grandfather had paid
George 36
for...Naturally Nicole, wanting to own him, wanting him to stand still forever, encouraged any
slackness on his part, and in multiplying ways he was constantly inundated by a trickling of goods
and money” (Tender 193). Money is not, then, merely an external force that defines Dick, but also
represents ownership by another. The compounding of these external forces on Diver ultimately
forces the breakdown of his “I.” Not only defined by the outside, but totally owned, he loses all
agency of creation, including the ability to hold the self together in a coherent whole.
While Fitzgerald suggests that the seed of an internal self is inherent in an individual, the
external Other appropriates the definition of the “I.” The birth of Rosemary's true self occurs only
through her perception by an outside force, that of Dick: “He looked at her and for a moment she
lived in the bright blue worlds of his eyes, eagerly and confidently” (Tender 13). Specifically in the
eyes of an outside force, Rosemary recognizes her innermost self. Sustaining the self through
external invasion is more sinister in the case of Mrs. McKisco, who is not merely shaped by her
husband, but relies on him for self-validation. Fitzgerald displays the relationship of this fellow
American expatriate to her husband by writing, “'Yes,' agreed McKisco, grudgingly. Obviously he
had created his wife's world, and allowed her few liberties in it” (Tender 11). The interior “I,” no
longer autonomous, relies on the power of the external force. When the self begins to attempt to
push back against the formative power of the external, one encounters the inability of the self to
exist as a coherent whole. These problems in pushing back against the external foreshadow Dick's
problematic attempt to collect and rebuild the fragmented self. Nicole observes that Dick had
“uncharacteristic bursts of temper,” in which “he would suddenly unroll a long scroll of contempt
for some person, race, class, way of life, way of thinking, it was as though an incalculable story was
telling itself inside him, about which she could only guess at in the moments when it broke through
the surface” (Tender 300). Diver's reaction to the external of the world and the Other, contained in
“person, race, class way of life, way of thinking,” is at first a turn toward the internal, to self-
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creation of the “incalculable story,” and outward “bursts of temper” against the external that is
attempting to impose itself on Diver's “I,” and further points of breaking “through the surface.”
The imposition of the external on the creation of the self is the integral first step in breaking down
the binary of internal/external. Dick's relationship to the social concerns of class and race highlights
his attempt to push against the external through negative definition and the “not I.”
The external work of history and social memory expands the influence of social construction
of self. Early in the novel, Fitzgerald crafts images and scenes that link history to an ability to
shape and manipulate the “I.” Before Fitzgerald introduces Dick, Rosemary, Abe North, or Nicole,
who are alternately built up and destroyed by the fragmentary effects of the historical moment and
the physical manifestations of that moment, Fitzgerald presents “three British nannies...knitting the
slow pattern of Victorian England, the pattern of the forties, the sixties, and the eighties, into
sweaters and socks, to the tune of gossip as formalized as incantation” (Tender 5). The nannies
weave History into the very warp and weft of the clothes, and Fitzgerald's depiction of this as a
natural, continual process, characterized by “formalized...incantation” sets History as both separate
from the internal and influential in shaping the content and formulation of it.
Fitzgerald then posits History as the experience of war and the grief involved in death. The
language of death and mourning provokes a more broadly-reaching conception of the consequences
of sweeping trauma. Fitzgerald writes of Diver,
He slept deep and awoke to a slow mournful march passing his window. It
was the familiar helmets of 1914, thick men in frock coats and silk hats,
burghers, aristocrats, plain men. It was a society of veterans going to lay
wreaths on the tombs of the dead. The column marched slowly with a sort of
swagger for a lost magnificence, a past effort a forgotten sorrow. The faces
were formally sad but Dick's lungs burst for a moment with regret for Abe's
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death, and his own youth of ten years ago. (Tender 226)
The passage suggests the universality of the individual's response to death. The external event
works on the inner consciousness to create a continuity of response that extends even to Diver.
Experiences of the “everyman” suffering from trauma, the effect of death and its response, suggest
the invasion of the external into the personal, fundamentally changing it. Abe North was literally
“broken” to death by an external stimuli, and Diver's own consciousness has been fundamentally
changed, aged ten years by the experience.
Fitzgerald's understanding of trauma extends to publication, sending out a part of his self to
this world, rather than simply accepting its influence (as Stein's conception of publication also
explores). The idea of individual creation in Tender is the Night links to the reassertion of internal
against the intrusion of history and memory. Dick describes the transformative of the external of
the Great War rolling in the background,
That's different. This western-front business couldn't be done again, not for a
long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn't. They
could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of
plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the
classes...You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back
further than you would remember. You had to remember Christmas, and
postcard of the Crown Prince and his fiancee, and little cafes in Valence and
beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the
Derby, and your grandfather's whiskers. (Tender 64)
The “whole-souled equipment going back generations” is undeniably the “I” of all of those
individual soldiers, formed by memory. Those external circumstances build up the innermost being,
creating an individual through generations of patient molding of both internal and external to fit one
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another. This work, however, leads to a pinnacle at which the external can, through war (paralleled
in Fitzgerald's own life by the Stock Market Crash), destroy the internal memory creates. By
waging this war, individuals upset the balance and the external comes back to the self swiftly and
destructively. Fitzgerald indirectly expresses this sentiment as “But you used to want to create
things – now you just seem to want to smash them up” (Tender 300). That is the work of the
external upon the internal: creation and destruction of self. Tender is the Night displays both facets
of this relationship of the binary, held tenuously separate by the human body.
The figure of the expatriate is at the center of the questions Fitzgerald raises about identity
and the inability of the self to remain autonomous in an increasingly integrated world. Dick Diver
is the first among such figures, supplemented by a whole host of other expatriates in France. His
dissolution via the external stimuli of war, love, money, and class considerations highlights the
ability of the external to shape and destroy the internal self. This individual dissolution displays the
larger anxieties of a displaced generation of Americans and a country dismantled in the wake of
economic disaster. Fitzgerald points to the way these strains of identity questions, the historical
moment, and the status of the American manifest themselves through Dick Diver as he writes,
“Dick tried to dissect it into pieces small enough to store away – realizing that the totality of a life
may be different in quality from its segments, and also that life during the forties seemed capable of
being observed only in segments” (Tender 276). These pieces, “small enough to store away,” are
the foundations of the fragmented, compartmentalized self. Although Dick's break-down relies on
his historical moment and circumstances, dissecting his life into pieces points to the necessity of the
full process that Fitzgerald describes in Tender is the Night and The Crack-Up. The individual must
dissect in order to restore the fragments into a stronger, more complete whole. Diver represents the
full cycle of Fitzgerald's identity production: production through the external, destruction by the
external, and rebuilding from the fragments. The crux of this novel rests, however, on the
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implication that Diver's attempts to collect and reassert the “I”are futile and abortive.
The connection between this process of infiltration of the internal/external divide and its
implications for the dissolution of self complicates the status of the American in the novel. Tender
is the Night explores the ability of the American to respond and adapt as an individual to external
and historical stimuli and, by extension, the ability of the nation to do the same. Fitzgerald asks,
underscoring the statues of the American, “Why is it just Americans who dissipate?” (Tender 111).
The fragmentation of the individual consciousness displayed in Abe North, Nicole, and Dick always
dismantle the American. The overt status of the individuals as Americans suggests that their
dissolution links to their nationality. Living outside of the United States, they are particularly
vulnerable to the influence of outside forces. The displaced and fragile “I” lacks the protection of
their home country. The experience of the American abroad takes the following form: “After lunch
they were both overwhelmed by the sudden flatness that comes over American travelers in quiet
foreign places. No stimuli worked upon them, no voices called them from without, no fragments of
their own thought came suddenly from the minds of others, and missing the clamor of Empire they
felt that life was not continuing here” (Tender 15). The expatriate exists in a liminal space that
excludes them from the workings of the external, with “no stimuli.” The self-definition of the
political power of 'the clamor of Empire' is missing– in the final estimation of this turn to the
interior, the effect is so extreme that “they felt life was not continuing here.” The external is
necessary to define the expatriate's self, but in this scene, the lack of this stimulation suspends life
and vitality.
The fundamental difference in consciousness between American and Europeans (which
concerns both Fitzgerald and Stein) relates to the idea of death and its permanence, or lack thereof.
In one scene, Dick talks to his European colleague, who says,
'That's very good – and very American,' he said, 'It's more difficult for us.' He
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got up and went to the French window. 'I stand here and I see Zurich – there
is the steeple of the Gross-Munster. In its vault my grandfather is buried.
Across the bridge from it lies my ancestor Lavater, who would not be buried
in any church. Nearby is the statue of Doctor Alfred Escher. And over
everything there is always Zwingli – I am continually confronted with a
pantheon of heroes. (Tender 149)
In the same way that Stein, in The Geographical History of America suggests that the status of the
dead constitutes a division between the United States and Europe (in America, the dead are really
dead), Fitzgerald points to the way the mass of history constantly invading the European psyche is
absent from the American consciousness. The American dead are truly gone because they do not
have to join the “pantheon of heroes” that walk the European soil. The external working of the
Great War, however, changed the status of the American dead (on European soil, anyway).
Fitzgerald writes as Dick observes the widows mourning their losses from World War I, “In their
happy faces, the dignity that surrounded and pervaded the party, he perceived all the maturity of an
older America. For a while the sobered women who had come to mourn for their dead, for
something they could not repair, made the room beautiful” (Tender 112). Fitzgerald links
Americans, through the external impetus of war, to the internal experience of grief. The “maturity”
in place has been instilled by the Great War, not only an external force working to invoke a
fracturing, but also a thoroughly European force that brings the full experience of grief to
Americans.
Also similar to Gertrude Stein's The Geographical History of America is Fitzgerald's
concern with the effect of geography on the internal self. He approaches the implications of
location and physical landscapes on the two tendencies of the self: either to coalesce into a coherent
whole or to break apart into fragmented shards, spread too thin over the landscape of the sweeping
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expanse of the United States. Fitzgerald writes of the effect of geography on the identities of Dick
and Nicole, “But the diffused magic of the hot sweet South had withdrawn into them – the softpawed night and the ghostly wash of the Mediterranean far below – the magic left these things and
melted into the two Divers and became part of them” (Tender). The Mediterranean becomes an
integral part of both individuals, working on their interiors in a way that makes them a part of the
landscape. The sea, the sand, the beach, enter the fundamental self, dictating the form of the “I.”
Fitzgerald writes of the possibility of geography causing a fracturing, “But when he thought of what
he considered his own thin knowledge spread over that whole area, over all those wheat fields,
those endless prairies, he had decided against it” (Tender 28). The stretching expanse of land
evocative of the geography of the United States and the idea of the self facing such vastness shapes
the self, making it small or expanding it. The idea that the individual must stretch over such a scene
entirely in order to have an impact over it provokes an image of a self so far expanded that the
external landscape is able to poke through, breaking the “I.” The individual cannot have an equal
impact on the sweeping forces of landscape and geography. The ability of the landscape to
influence the construction and dissolution of the “I” represents the fundamental helplessness of the
individual in the face of larger external forces.
The question becomes, then, what constitutes the relationship between the internal and the
external, and how this relationship constructs and dissolves the self. Fitzgerald alternately suggests
that the relationship includes the external as actively forming an individual, at others that it shapes
the internal from its previous form, and at still others dismantles it piece by piece to leave a vast
landscape of shards of the “I.” The resulting permeable, dismantled internal/external divide suggests
power in the external to act upon the innermost self of an individual. Lying underneath the surface
of the creation-destruction process, however, is another step: recreation in the interplay between the
two sides of the divide. Of this healing process, Fitzgerald writes
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One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but
there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds,
shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick, but wounds still. The marks of
suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or the sight of an eye.
We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there
is nothing to be done about it. (Tender 36)
Fitzgerald points to the marks of suffering on the individual as those that will heal, perhaps, but
leave that individual fundamentally and irrevocably altered. The cracks in a mended plate and the
scars on a wounded soul both point to destruction, but also subsequent reconstruction of the “I”
under the aegis of externalities outside of the control of the individual.
Finally, Fitzgerald points to how this process of building up, destroying, and recreating is
necessary to the individual, as it was for him as an author in The Crack-Up. He writes in Tender is
the Night “--And Lucky Dick can't be one of those clever men, he must be less intact, even faintly
destroyed. If life won't do it for him it's not a substitute to get a disease, or a broken heart, or an
inferiority complex, though it'd be nice to build out some broken side till it was better than the
original structure” (Tender 26). Dick's inability to recreate himself coherently results in his leaving
society, wandering the backwoods of northeastern America. Being “faintly destroyed” – the mark
of any character of Fitzgerald's that touches the reader, strikes at reality in Fitzgerald himself. In
this faint destruction, one has the opportunity to gather the broken pieces and reconstruct a new
whole. This whole may always bear the scars of having once been “less intact,” but at these
junctures the new is strongest. The external works inevitably on the internal in both Tender is the
Night and in Fitzgerald's own life, and the process is not only one of inevitable destruction or
decay of the internal self, but also of rebuilding in the relationship of that permeable binary,
creating a fragile new “I.”
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Chapter 3
Inside Out or Outside In?
Gertrude Stein once wrote, “I always wanted to be historical, from almost a baby on”
(Selected Writings vii), stating in her own voice the importance of the historical moment in shaping
her identity as a writer and an American. Gertrude Stein's literary response to a historical moment
is crucially fashioned by her response to World War I, the build up of America as seen from abroad,
and its subsequent dissolution in the wake of the Market Crash and in a global context. These
considerations shaped her conception of the continuance of a unified whole. Stein's experience of
World War I questioned the identity of the self, what constitutes a whole self, and how to represent
this self in the face of an increasingly politically and globally integrated reality. Stein's reaction to
the uncertainty wrought by the war manifests itself in her continuation of fragmented stylistic and
formalist techniques, now tinged with the concerns of the outside world. The formalist
fragmentation strikes at the heart of the increasingly compromised self of the American. The sense
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of moral and physical absolutes disintegrated through the experience of war and economic hardship,
and the direct experience of these historical externalities allowed for the changing forms Gertrude
Stein employed to reflect the dissolution of the internal self. As an American living in Europe
during these defining moments, Stein's experience and internalization of the shifting perception was
magnified in a way not available to writers outside of Europe. The fragmented nature of Stein's
forms in her prose poems, novels, short works, and the “biography/autobiography” of Alice B.
Toklas reacts to the ambiguity of self and one's sense of the world as produced by World War I, the
1920s, and the Crash and Depression. Stein's fragmentation attempts to accurately reflect the chaos
wrought in this new world order. While Stein's writing only periodically explicitly engages the war,
its influence pervades her works, and the political language makes clear the influence of the
external circumstance on her writing. Launching discussions of her writing style and its purpose,
and reveling in the kaleidoscope view her writing produces, Stein highlights the way her style
emerged from a fractured reality. Her own experience in the war sets the groundwork for the
associations between her post-war forms.
Stein approaches her connections with World War I and her status as an American living
abroad explicitly in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. These considerations inform her
understanding of the fractured and restructured nature of consciousness. Published in 1933, it
records the way her visions of the world were fundamentally shifted by the shattering effects of the
war on Europe, creating a new basis from which to reconstruct perceptions of the world. This work
exemplifies the formal chaos brought by the war and economic crisis which shattered the American
psyche. It dismantles the binaries that constitute the internal/external divide by considering the
shifting norms regarding a society in flux, particularly concentrated around gender relations.
Formally, it is an “autobiography,” written by a woman writing as her companion. The fluidity
and/or rupture of Stein's sense of identity establishes the complications of drawing a dividing line
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between internal and external, self and other. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas questions what
constitutes an autobiography and, by extension, how one identifies oneself. Stein's ability to
reshape and recast her identity into that of Alice B. Toklas exists because the self as she conceives it
is no longer stable. The break-up of the formal aspects of Stein's writing in The Autobiography of
Alice B. Toklas encapsulates a larger phenomenon of crumbling traditions related to the
destabilizing effects of the historical moment of the interwar period. Stein integrates the experience
of the war with the circumstances of the 1930s explicitly as she deconstructs marriage, gender
relations, and other traditional binaries. In her formal disruption of unstructured sentences, lack of
nouns, and repetition, one encounters a physical representation of the dizzying disarray enacted by
the war and the advent of the modern world.
In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein points to her experiences (through the eyes of
another, which influences the way one understands Stein's fractured sense of the world) as an
ambulance driver in World War I. To mark the break instituted by large-scale political fracturing,
Stein writes “In short in this spring and early summer of nineteen fourteen the old life was over”
(Alice B. Toklas 142). This outright statement of a fundamental break points to an experience of the
world that was shifted from its most basic foundations. Stein then immerses herself in
understanding this new world. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas guides one through the lasting
impressions of the war and how it produced the new realities facing Europe and its citizens. Even
as an American who, “living in Europe before the war never really believed that there was going to
be war” (Alice B. Toklas 143), Stein sensed of the death of a way of life because of the war: “The
germans were getting nearer and nearer Paris and the last day Gertrude Stein could not leave her
room, she sat and mourned. She loved Paris, she thought neither of manuscripts nor of pictures, she
thought only of Paris and she was desolate” (Alice B. Toklas 149). Stein enters the concrete effects
of the war through this break with the physical existenc of the past, connecting the fall of Paris, her
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adopted home and guardian of her identity as author and individual, to the “I.” Fitzgerald parallels
this link in his own considerations of location and geography as external definers and destroyers of
the self. Stein's disassociation from the description of herself suggests the lasting disconnection
fom the “I” and former realities produced by the experience of war. This feeling of disassociation is
solidified by Stein's complete displacement of Alice in writing her “autobiography.” Literally
inhabiting the space of this Other, externalizing her own self to such an extent that she can insert
herself into the innermost identity of another suggests her ability to dismantle the internal/external
divide. This process resembles a military invasion, drawing a parallel between the historical
moment and its externality, and the constitution of the self.
Through Alice, Stein suggests that, in the middle of the violence, the experience of war is
one without an imaginable ending or remembered beginning. The intransigent present moment
becomes the only reality, unconnected to other feelings or experiences. For those directly involved
in the violence, Stein describes “It was our first experience of the tired but watchful eyes of
soldiers” (Alice B. Toklas 155). Stein directed her need to reassert the primacy of the self in the
world order in the face of the breakdown of the order with which she structured her life by
becoming an ambulance driver in France. This reassertion of the power of the individual over the
structure of the world at large provides the sense that the foundations of the world and the ordered
self as known in the past can be held together by the will of the individual. Stein recognizes this
process: “I had been so confidant and now I had an awful feeling that the war had gotten out of my
hands” (Alice B. Toklas 166). Stein's recognition of the breakdown of the primacy of the individual
begins her understanding of the breakdown of her own writing style. Alice explains the formation
of Stein's writing: “They were the beginning, as Gertrude Stein would say, of mixing the outside
with the inside. Hitherto she had been concerned with seriousness and the inside of things, in these
studies she began to describe the inside as seen from the outside” (Alice B. Toklas 156). Stein points
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to the “inside as seen from the outside,” the work of the external on forming the internal through
viewing. This process of disconnect that Stein describes in her writing is a product of the
dissociative effects of the war. World War I produced, through its desolation and violence, a
changed Europe:
Soon we came to the battle-fields and the lines of trenches on both sides. To any
one who did not see it as it was then it is impossible to imagine it. It was not
terrifying it was strange. We were used to ruined houses and even ruined towns
but this was different. It was a landscape. And it belonged to no country. I
remember hearing a french nurse once say and the only thing she did say of the
front was, c'est un paysage passionant, an absorbing landscape. And that was what
it was as we saw it. It was strange. (Alice B. Toklas 187)
This divide between the “terrifying” and the “strange” brought about by the desolation of the
physical violence of World War I provides a key for understanding the effects of the war on the
psyches of individuals and societies. The “landscape” that “belonged to no country” was the
physical embodiment of the absolute break-down of the self with which Stein is concerned. This
distancing of physical space from the myth of the nation, what would once have served as the
dominant defining feature of this space, extends to the distancing of the “I” from the former self.
The creation of self through physical space resonates with Fitzgerald's understanding of the effects
of external space, landscape, and nationality on the self. In dwelling on this landscape and the
effects of the fragmentation, Stein creates a self-portrait through the geography. In “it was a
landscape. And it belonged to no country,” the discussion shifts from a war-torn country to a wartorn individual, Gertrude Stein. She is the physical embodiment of the mix of English and French
language, belonging to neither culture, herself becoming part of the ambiguous subject of “it was
strange.” This crucial disconnect produces an anxiety that extends into Stein's discussions of
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history, the familiar, the personal, and the self which disintegrated into fragments that required
active reconstruction. Through story and form, she offers a process by which to begin this
reconstruction. The progression of this passage, however, suggests that attempts at this
reconstruction are futile; Stein's initial “strange” landscape is almost reborn in the construction of it
as a landscape, even an “absorbing landscape,” but Stein ends with allowing the fragments to fall
apart in “it was strange.” Where Fitzgerald would seek to reform the traumatized fragments into a
truer conception of reality, Stein allows the fragments to remain. Stein's personal and intimate
connection with World War I had lasting implications on her sense of what a coherent reality
entailed. Leaving fragmented the internal and external in the face of trauma suggests that she is
unwilling to re-establish this binary.
Stein's connection to the unified self as created and destroyed in the war extended to the
interwar years and is reflected in her discussion of gender norms and relations in the changing
cultural sphere. The influence of society on this inner conception of self represents a further
intermingling of the internal/external construction of the “I.” The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
represents a work that epitomizes the discourse of the feminine/feminist consciousness. Written by a
woman, through a woman's voice, and displaying the complex interworkings of female/male gender
relations, the work implicitly criticizes the gender relations, stereotypes, and ideals leading into the
twentieth century. At the same time, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, by being written in the
split manner (neither an autobiography, nor written by Alice) points to Stein’s solid conception of
her own self and her recognition of the fluidity of identity. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
emerges as a work inherently concerned with the idea of women in society with one another, with
men, and with society at large.
This work complicates the relationship between gender and identity by being authored by a
woman, writing as her companion, and being about their life together at the center of a society in a
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state of flux. Writing as Alice, Stein explores the way their relationship magnified he changing role
of women around them. Stein explores the external of society, imposing a set of norms on the
creation of identity through institutions such as marriage. Contrasted against Stein's unmarried
state, the marriages of the artists around her are highlighted both in their existence (and therefore
the way in which they subscribe to traditional gender relationships) and in their unconventionality
in a changing modern world (which undercuts the rigid ideas of the feminist paradigms that are
often focused on marriage as a sort of economic exchange that inexorably oppresses women in their
relationships to men). Writing in an age in which women gained independence, Stein portrays
gender relations in terms of tension between the traditional ideas of marriage and power
relationships, and new, liberated women. The changing nature of this external force of society
reforms the “I.” Alice's portrayal of her own conception of the relationships between the sexes
displays the blossoming confusion:
I had often said that I would write, The wives of geniuses I have sat with. I have
sat with so many. I have sat with wives who were not wives, of geniuses who
were real geniuses. I have sat with real wives of geniuses who were not real
geniuses. I have sat with wives of geniuses, of near geniuses, of would be
geniuses, in short I have sat very often and very long with many wives and wives
of many geniuses. (Alice B. Toklas 14)
This confusion is emblematic of the way in which Stein blurs the lines between the dichotomies of
gender and power relations. The repetition of the form “who were” and “who were not,”
particularly in conjunction with the conception of the “real” questions the status of identity. The
relationship between Stein and Toklas is, to some extent defined by Alice's observation here: As she
considers Stein the genius, she would seem to take on the role of the wife of the genius who sits
with other wives. And yet neither woman entirely fits the role that this configuration would ascribe
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to her. Although the male geniuses implied here might at first seem to be dominant in the gender
relations set up with their wives (who are conversely not geniuses and are further often mentioned
for their usefulness in their roles as models or for the money that they brought to the marriage), the
wives do also display their own agency. The possibility of divorce allows women to exercise
autonomy and throw off the external of the institution of marriage in order to reassert the individual
self. Further, the marriage itself often comes about as much for the benefit of the bride as for the
groom: "But it turned out that it was an arranged marriage. Uhde wished to respectabilise himself
and she wanted to come into possession of her inheritance, which she could only do upon marriage.
Shortly after she married Uhde and shortly after they were divorced" (Alice B. Toklas 98). From
such a seemingly traditional idea as an "arranged marriage" emerges a blurred reality in which the
power relations of marriage constitute a process instituted for individual and mutual gain.
Moving beyond simple marriage relations, Stein suggests in her representations of the
feminine and the masculine that the modern world creates the changing status of women. Stein
deconstructs this binary through her understanding of the roles of gender regarding the modern.
This binary of gender is one that links the feminine to the internal space and the masculine to the
external. Through their marriages to geniuses and the camaraderie of Stein's world, the women
become the guardians of the modern, even as it is the men that are mostly involved in creation. The
first hint of this new relationship emerges as Alice writes of Stein's sister-in-law's relation to the
modern, "Mrs. Stein brought with her three little Matisse painting, the first modern things to cross
the Atlantic" (Alice B. Toklas 5). Women become not only the guardians of the modern world, but
also the advance guard of it, communicating it across gender, space, and time. The strange
relationship between women, men, and the modern is, moreover, further confused in the process by
which the three interact with one another in the same moment: "It was also Nellie who made
Matisse blush by cross-questioning him about the different ways he saw Madame Matisse, how she
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looked to him as a wife, and how she looked to him as a picture, and how he could change from one
to the other" (Alice B. Toklas 150). Stein's characterization of the intermingling of these roles
undercuts clear differentiation in gender relations and suggests that the change is largely a function
of the modern world. The strange oscillation of inner identity as posited by the self and viewed
through another is crucially related to Stein's conceptions of identity. Stein's presence at the center
of the art world in Paris, and her undermining of the oppressed/oppressor paradigm of female/male
puts forth a more egalitarian conception of gender relations. This egalitarianism reflects a
fragmented binary that Stein refuses to reconstruct. Although unified identity may be found in the
reimposition of the ordering, external relations, Stein is unwilling to risk re-establishing a
hegemonic, paternalistic system.
The process of breaking down the traditional forms that Stein points to in The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas mirrors the breakdown of the gender relations that she describes.
Deconstruction traverses and shatters binaries of form, style, and writing. In the descriptions she
offers (while not, perhaps, the truest examples of the formal breaks in which she revels, which are
most clearly seen in her early Tender Buttons), Stein establishes her own tenets of modernism, and
places herself in the midst of the fractured world in the interwar years. Pointing to the inherent
difficulty of representing the fractured world she lived in, Stein writes, “Sure, she said, as Pablo
once remarked, when you make a thing, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly,
but those that do it after you they don't have to worry about making it and they can make it pretty,
and so everybody can like it when the others make it” (Alice B. Toklas 23). With that caveat in
mind, the exploration of the evolution of Stein's formalist modernism becomes clearer. By being
the first created and because of the work involved in this path-breaking, the necessity of the
difficulty of Stein's writing becomes more clear. There is a pain and struggle in this creation that
Stein both recognizes and seeks to further explore: “I cannot say I realized anything but I felt that
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there was something painful and beautiful there and oppressive but imprisoned” (Alice B. Toklas
22). The coalescing of the qualities of “painful,” “beautiful,” “oppressive,” and “imprisoned” in a
single sentence is emblematic of Stein's writing and points to her reality. In itself, The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is not the pinnacle of Stein's fractured form and its ability to
create identity, but it is the work that makes clear how her identity connects to her writing and
fragmented form. The shattered quality of Stein's writing makes following her reality difficult, but
also makes it her ultimate manifestation of reality, and thus makes that writing the truest form
through which she can express her sense of self. Stein explores her relation to these qualities in
both her writing and the world around her as she describes her personal relationship to a modernist
painting: “She then went back to look at it and it upset her to see them all mocking at it. It
bothered her and angered her because she did not understand why because to her it was so alright,
just as later she did not understand why since the writing was all so clear and natural they mocked
at and were enraged by her work” (Alice B. Toklas 35). Stein's work is so deeply personal that there
is a disconnect between what she sees as natural and what the rest of the world sees as natural. By
representing reality and the “I” as nearly as the arbitrariness of words as signifiers allows, Stein
distances herself from the readers, creating an odd sense of both interiority and distance. Stein
addresses this dissociation,
Gertrude Stein, in her work, has always been possessed by the intellectual
passion for exactitude in the description of inner and outer reality. She has
produced a simplification by this concentration, and as a result the destruction of
associational emotion in poetry and prose. She knows that beauty, music,
decoration, the result of emotion should never be the cause, even events should
not be the cause of prose. They should be the material of poetry and prose. They
should consist of an exact reproduction of either an outer or an inner reality.
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(Alice B. Toklas 211)
In her breakdown of a coherent sense of reality, Stein focuses her interest on overt rupture from the
past. As opposed to Fitzgerald's conception of breakdown, however, which understands external
history as perpetuating a destruction that the individual must reconstruct, Stein is content to allow
these fragments to remain without reconstituting it. If understood in terms of Gertrude Stein’s own
autobiography, the work links this rupture World War I and creates a reality in which this historical
moment changes the external world and, by extension, the understanding of the “I.” In Stein's
complex and compounded form as described in the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, the links
between history and the complications of internal and external binaries pervade issues of identity.
The work addresses the understanding of the transitory nature of the present moment, new foci of
writing, and the shifting of cultural norms in the form of gender relations in the way in selfdefinition.
In two of her short essays, "The Difference Between the Inhabitants of France and the
Inhabitants of the United States of America" and "Composition as Explanation," Gertrude Stein is
deeply engrossed in the process of creating and destroying binary systems. Through both content
and form, Stein sets ideas in contrast with one another, creating a dialectic between them, assigning
them an almost scientific dimension of juxtaposition, and then systematically destroys this
opposition, as both her "examples" and her linguistic distinction between the entities become more
malleable, resulting in an intermingling that breaks down the assumptions and associations with
which she begins. In the first of these essays, "The Difference Between the Inhabitants of France
and the Inhabitants of the United States of America," the binary system she puts in place at the
beginning of the work is the one contained in the title. For "Composition as Explanation," the
binaries are several: classic and composition, a thing beautiful and a thing irritating, even the vague
notions of alike and different. These binaries translate onto one another, and as one breaks down, it
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consequently destabilizes another. By repeating this process in these works, Stein hearkens back to
the larger binary of internal and external, subsequently relating it to the creation of identity through
the increasing permeability of the dividing lines of these oppositions.
In both of these explorations, Stein's initial binaries are transient, decomposing from the
moment of their inception. "The Difference Between the Inhabitants of France and the Inhabitants
of the United States of America" begins with Stein's ascription of certain characteristics to each of
the nationalities that are meant to set them at odds with one another: "The inhabitants of the United
States of America have this quality in their character in reference to drama that the things they do
and the things that they do do are such things that when they are young are different than when they
are older...Drama consists and in this they are so they are so certainly restricted, restricted to that
themselves and not any more so" (513). These qualities of the Americans persist in creating the
narrative of the American individual and consciousness. France is set up in opposition as "especially
so and for this reason especially when they are young and as an example not at all exacting not at all
as exacting and when they are young and not any more so not feverishly so not as exacting exactly
and as an instance and in collusion and not in very nearly as many cases secondary" (“Difference”
513). Rooted in negative definition, the preponderance of "nots" sets the inhabitants of France as
distinct from and opposite of the inhabitants of America. Even in this first description, however, the
reader is struck by the feeling that the need for including such a multitude of "nots" means that there
is some intrinsic link between these entities, beginning the process of breaking down the tenuous
binary system with which Stein commences.
Stein continues to deconstruct the binary system of American versus French by setting out a
series of "examples" meant to solidify the distinction, but ultimately blur the lines of nationality.
The distinction still exists, but the shading of nuance becomes murkier: "The example of the
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American lady who has a fan is the one selected for admiration in the same way the example of the
french lady who has a fan is the one selected as the one to be chosen to be an example of an
admirable frenchwoman" (“Difference” 515). The binary devolves from distinct juxtaposition to
similariy once removed. The American lady looks to the fan as a receptacle of praise, as the
pinnacle of fanhood. The French lady uses the fan in a system of admiration, but her fan functions
instead as a signifier of some level of perfect French-ness that requires admiration. This distinction
may point to the true difference between the nationalities -- perhaps there is no essential core to
American-ness. The binary, then, could be understood in terms of the presence and absence of a
core of national identity. As an expatriate ruling over the sphere of the American intelligentsia in
Europe, Stein inhabits the liminal world of identifying as neither French nor American. The
delineation between the two entities is blurry, and she explicitly states this blurriness, writing, "The
difference between the examples is this, one example shows this and the same example never shows
anything else. Another example shows something else and in this way something is proved.
Approved by all...The trouble with it is that they may be mistaken" (“Difference” 515). What of this
"mistaken?" The mock logic of this passage points to Stein's feeling that all of this scientific, clearly
delineated explanation of binaries is fundamentally flawed given the myriad connections (including
complications of identity) linking complicated and countervailing binaries. One may be mistaken in
the assumption that there is a primary difference between the Americans and the French, but, and
perhaps more essentially, one may be mistaken for one identity over another. This idea of being
"mistaken" is ambiguous and points to the continued deconstruction of the binary of nationalities.
Moreover, the notion of “mistaken” is inextricably linked to the conception of “identity.”
Stein points to questions of ambiguous identity and self through her status as an expatriate. For
Stein, the deconstruction of the national being envelops ideas of age disparities, exactingness versus
laxity, and the dramatic versus the tempered. Beyond the content of Stein's deconstruction of the
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national binary, the form that Stein employs when upending the continuum reinforces the increasing
bluriness of the delineation. Over the course of the essay, Stein uses myriad repetitions with slight
alterations: "The difference between there is a difference between, what is the difference and their
difference, to add to them to be added to them, to divide from them to be divided from them, to be
sent away by them and if sent away by them would they be willing are they willing have they
spoken of it and have they acted...This is partly a beginning" (“Difference” 517). Representative of
the way in which Stein builds sentences upon sentences that reverberate and chant reinforcing their
own truthfulness, these lines center around the idea of "difference." The lines addressing this
difference, however are surprisingly similar and the need to grammatically reassert the presence of a
difference suggests that the difference is not as stark as Stein initially asserts. The intrinsic
similarities between the two nationalities originally set forth in a binary culminates in a mantra of
swirling identities, in which the concept of a binary is ultimately discredited: "Which is which. The
first one here. The one here. Guess which is which. I guess which is which. The first there. Which is
which. Here and there. Which is which. To guess which is which To guess which is which here
which is which there. Which is which. To guess which is which, if to guess which is which, to
guess. Which is which" (“Difference” 518). “Which is which”: two sides of an equation, the same
as saying x equals x. In a mathematical setting, this sort of tautology is illogical, and the grammar
of the equation in a literary setting, in which one is attempting to delineate identity, necessitates
guessing to gain an answer. In this structure of repetition all sense of the primacy inherent in a
binary is lost, as is the binary itself.
Stein addresses the issue of primacy in a binary more directly in "Composition as
Explanation." The overarching binary she addresses in this essay might be described as the modern
or contemporary versus the classic. Wrapped up in these labels are the subsidiary categories of
(respectively) irritating versus beautiful and rejection versus acceptance. Stein intimates that, for
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most individuals, the primacy in this binary is placed on the beautiful, accepted classic. It is time,
however, that serves to deconstruct this binary: "The only thing that is different from one time to
another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything...Nothing
changes from generation to generation except the thing seen and that makes a composition"
(“Composition” 520). Distance from creation and composition flips the ideas of this binary. Stein
explains that "that is the reason why the creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until
he is a classic" (“Composition” 521). Distance from composition will destroy the binary,
transferring the modern work from the realm of unrecognizability to the realm of the classic. In the
process, time works on the public to reverse the binaries that were attached to this major one, as "of
course it is wonderfully beautiful, only when it is still a thing irritating annoying stimulating then all
quality of beauty is denied to it. Of course it is beautiful but first all beauty in it is denied and then
all the beauty of it is accepted" (“Composition” 522). Stein's binary placing modern or
contemporary works against the conception and public opinion of a classic crumbles as works gain
beauty and acceptance as classics with the passage of time. This discussion of classic and
contemporary relates to the idea of publication as an exteriorizing of an interior self. The classic is
fully external. The contemporary work, published and outside of the self, is external, but still
connected to the author's sense of self and can still work on the internal “I.” History has worked so
much on the classic that it is divorced from the self of the author, but a contemporary work still
serves as a conduit through which history can form the author's self.
Coming full circle in a Steinian fashion, it is fruitful to look once again at the quote that
opened this discussion, "I always wanted to be historical, from almost a baby on" (Selected
Writings vii). The immediate focus in this statement lies in its relation to the historical moment, to
an act of representing a history through the self that works to create a historical narrative of the "I."
The final clause of this sentence begins an understanding of the effect of Stein's conception of the
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historical moment on individuals. By asserting her identification with the historical and qualifying
it as "from almost a baby on," Stein pushes a new sense of what qualifies as history that is
consistent with the formal fracturing of her work. Concerned with the recasting of reality because
of World War I, Stein's conception of history is one that rests on the ubiquity of the present. For
Stein, history (particularly an individual's history) is perpetually restarting in the present moment. It
is perpetually being reborn so that she can be historical "from almost a baby on ." Looking again to
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, one sees how this perpetual restarting and rebirth took hold in
Stein's own life. The breakup and recreation that pervade this work are emblematic of the larger
process of recreation or not in the face of the uncertainty brought by World War I, and are further
explored in Stein's reworking of the traditional conception of gender for herself and society. The
genre bending in which Stein operates in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas represents a deeply
personal manifestation of the disassociation of self in which the shifting distances from self to other
are deeply connected to Stein as an individual. By operating in a mode of authorship that blurs the
lines between what constitutes a biography (Alice's portrayal of Stein, authored by Stein herself),
what constitutes an autobiography (Alice's telling of her own life, revolving around Stein, and
authored by Stein), and, by extension, what constitutes the self (where are these lines between Stein
and Alice, self and other), Stein creates a system in which all such delineations are deconstructed
into their constituent parts in order to rest in a brokenness that more closely reflects reality. Were F.
Scott Fitzgerald to be faced with the same disorder or fragmentation of identity, his inclination
would be to institute a reconstruction to create a coherent “I,” although this process works in his
writings to varying degrees. For Gertrude Stein, the war highlighted the extent to which we are all
disconnected from one another, and further disconnected from ourselves. It is in the breakdown of
these disconnecting spaces and arbitrary delineations, whether they be physical space, gender
dichotomies, or linguistic binaries, that Stein finds the means to reconnect with a true and powerful
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reality.
Chapter 4
Stein's American Self
In The Geographical History of America or the Relation of Human Nature to the Human
Mind, Gertrude Stein offers a particularly apt mechanism through which to consider the
construction of her novels and texts: “Think how that sentence goes” (369). When one considers
the ebbs and flows of nouns and arguments in Stein's writing, it becomes necessary to follow this
advice, and by following the structure of a sentence itself, one is able to follow the logic (or antilogic) of Stein's arguments, particularly in the uncovering of the process of Stein's construction,
deconstruction, and reconstruction of binaries. Indeed, following the title of The Geographical
History of America or the Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind is one of these instances.
By following the title grammatically, the reader gains a mechanism by which to understand Stein's
argument regarding the connection between geography history, human nature and the human mind.
The critical placement of the “or” in this title suggests a continuity between the social identity of
America and the Cartesian question of the human mind and human nature. Further, the title raises
the question of the utility of understanding the human mind (the “I”) in relation to human nature
(the social being). The Geographical History of America constitutes a work that provides a curious
melding of the binary divisions, specifically considering the internal/external divide in terms of
human nature/the human mind. This binary is fundamentally linked to the external social question
of human nature and the internal, individual human mind. Stein constructs the self through the
fragmenting effects of historical circumstances. Because Stein is overarchingly concerned with how
one constitutes identity in the face of dismantled binaries, she employs the resulting blurriness of
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these former dichotomies to explain how outside views create the inside self, how the external,
rather than being defined against the internal, as in a traditional binary, instead works on the internal
to define it.
The divide between human nature and the human mind traverses the work, serving as a
rallying point around which Stein gathers the other binaries she explores. The two sides are a
coding system for the terms of these binaries. Her initial explanation of the difference between
these two states of being begins,
Now the relation of human nature to the human mind is this. Human nature does
not know this. Human nature cannot know this. What is it that human nature
does not know. Human nature does not know that if every one did not die there
would be no room for those who live now. Human nature cannot know this.
Now the relation of human nature to the human mind is this. Human nature
cannot know this. But the human mind can. It can know this. (Geographical
367)
Beginning with a sentence as seemingly concrete and straightforward as “Now the relation of
human nature to the human mind is this” suggests the presence of a binary that will be itself
concrete and immovable. The grammar of this sentence, being unconventional, automatically
undermines the conclusiveness of the statement. Stein undermines these terms with the repetition in
this passage of the ambiguous “this,” that undercuts the idea that there might be a relationship in a
binary. What is known and unknown to each is unclear. Such a seemingly stable binary between
human nature (the external of a larger, social condition) and the human mind (the internal
conception of the individual) is immediately problematized. The abrupt transition following this
delineation and its breakdown posits of this relationship in conjunction with America as an entity:
“In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. This is what
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makes America what it is” (Geography 367). The human mind is connected with this conception of
America in a way that human nature is not. The abstraction of the mind (and it is pure abstraction)
leads into America as an abstract, empty space. Conversely, Stein identifies human nature with
other ideas tangentially connected with the idea of nation. It is an invented term defined in relation
to land, danger, and death. She explores this divide, “This is what makes religion and propaganda
and politics this and with this the human mind and human nature. And the human mind can know
this but human nature cannot know this and so the human mind pretty well does not know this”
(Geography 368). Even as the human mind and human nature converge in this sentence, they are
still held separate by the divide between “America” and religion, propaganda, and politics. The
creation of the difference remains unclear, although the human mind is related to the thinking,
analytical side of politics while human nature encompasses the instinctive of propaganda.
The idea of America extends into Stein's use of language of geography in her descriptions of
America to create an environment of lines and divisions, which reinforces the created binaries. She
lays out a technical vision of this geographical entity, writing,
I know so well the relation of a simple center and a continuous design to the
land as one looks down on it, a wandering line as one looks down on it, a
quarter section as one looks down on it, the shadow of each tree on the snow
and the woods on each side and the land higher up between it and I know so
well how in spite of the fat that the human mind has not looked at it the human
mind has it to know that it is there like that, notwithstanding that the human
mind has like what it has which has not been like that. (Geography 387)
Stein suggests that the lines of geography, the borders that create nations, a sense of internal and
external in relation to national identity, create a clearly delineated space, the external borders that
create a myth of nationhood and an autonomous individual, even as it is the imposition of the
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external on the internal that creates the self. By abstracting the language of geography to dividing
line and division, Stein relates this sense of nationhood and borders to the human mind, making it
purely mental. Stein's borders, however, human-created divisions, are problematized by the
primacy of nature, with “the woods on each side.” The vagueness of this arbitrary line is further
emphasized in its integration with the human mind and the way the human mind understands it as
Stein writes “I know so well how in spite of the fact that the human mind has not looked at it the
human mind has it to know that it is there like that.” This invocation of vision defines Stein's
estimation of the creation of identity. Stein sets up the relationship between geography and the
human mind: “If there was no geography no geographical history would there be any human mind
not as it is but would there would there be any human mind” (Geographical 376). This
question/statement forms the basis for Stein's exploration of the relationship between geography and
America, human nature and the human mind, and the broader implications of these divides and
subsequent interminglings for the notion of identity. As these ideas link explicitly and implicitly to
the binary terms of internal and external through a gloss of stylistic concreteness that covers their
essential ambiguity, they reflect the way Stein creates the “I.”
Looking at geography, borders, and divisions from the perspective of human nature yields
far different results from that of the human mind. The story Stein tells in relation to this connection
is one in which
When you climb on the land high human nature knows because by remembering
it had been a dangerous thing to go higher and higher on the land which is where
human nature was but now is an aeroplane human nature is nothing remembering
is nothing no matter how many have been killed from up there it is not anything
that is a memory, because if you are killed you do not remember no you do not, it
is only on land where it is dangerous but where you were not killed that you
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remember. (Geographical 374)
In this configuration, human nature becomes further coded as external as it pivots on being
unconnected to land, memory, and a knowledge of death. Human nature “knows” because it is not
thought, not consideration, but instinctual knowledge. The land is linked to the human mind and
thought, while the aeroplane, the machine of the air, has changed human nature. The human mind,
which is intimately connected with all of these facets of geography and nationhood, takes on a level
of internality that rests on deep-seated connections to the land. This land, in turn, is the locus of
memory, also an interior idea connected with the human mind and divorced from human nature,
which from its place in an aeroplane cannot access the ability to remember. Stein further explores
the connection between death, geography, and America in the sentence “One of the things that
makes a big country different from a little country makes the Geographical history of America
different from the geographical history of Europe is that when anybody is dead they are dead”
(Geographical 378). In Europe there is this inherent connection to place and a layering of history
that causes Europeans to never be truly dead, much as Fitzgerald discusses regarding those killed in
World War I in Tender is the Night. By instituting a coalescing of these qualities Stein further
emphasizes the dichotomy that she is creating between human nature and the human mind. She
creates whole systems of associations on each side of the divide, building networks of relations that
will be either supported or torn down. Even as Stein sets up this systems of associations, however,
she plants the seeds of discontent in the placement and concreteness of the dividing line in her
rhetoric of geographical divides. She slyly posits, “Wandering around a country has something to
do with the geographical history of the country and the way one piece of it is not separated from any
other one” (Geographical 392). The ambiguity of this statement lies in the consideration of which
“piece” she considers “not separated from any other one.” This ambiguity opens a path to consider
other dilemmas of the human nature/human mind divide and its implications for identity.
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Turning to more explicit considerations of the dichotomy between human nature and the
human mind, Stein simultaneously delineates this division and leaves room for more codings of
ambiguity. Stein begins by creating an absolute, rhetorical division between the human mind and
human nature, writing, “The human mind has no relation to human nature at all. The question has
been asked is it the relation of human nature to the human mind or is it the relation of the human
mind to human nature. The answer is there is no relation between the human mind and human
nature there is a relation between human nature and the human mind” (Geographical 376). The
unequivocal way in which Stein starts this discussion creates not only a dividing line between the
human mind and human nature, but a chasm between the two entities. Stein repeats and
reemphasizes their fundamental difference, but the final clause of this discussion inserts an
uncertainty into this divide, suggesting that “there is a relation.” By ordering the terms such that the
external human nature works on the internal human mind, Stein sets up a problematized system to
inform the discussion of identity. The stakes of creating and breaking down these binaries in
relation to identity rest on the constitution of the self through these binaries.
In considering the parameters of the human mind and human nature separately, Stein focuses
her discussion on the agency of these entities. The human mind becomes connected with such
questions as
Has the human mind anything to do with what it sees. Yes I think so. With
what it likes. No I do not think so. With what it has. No I do not think so, with
communism individualism propaganda politics and women no and yes I think
so, I think it is not so. With the world as it has said it was. No I do not think
so. Then what is the human mind. Has the human mind anything to do with
question and answer. Perhaps no I do not think so. (Geographical 387)
Not only does this discourse seek to delineate what does and does not constitute the human mind,
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but its form both emphasizes and calls into question its assertions. Asking these questions of the
fundamental characteristics of the human mind as statements implies that both question and answer
are already established. Further, the incorrect punctuation of this passage foregrounds a later
discussion of the relationship of speech to writing by pointing to the way in which her writing signs
speech by turning usual markers of punctuation on their head. The reader no longer has a coherent
basis of grammatical structure (which would appeal to the human mind) from which to understand
her argument. The back and forth becomes a sing-songy learning by rote that invokes speech and
the instinctual of human nature. It seems inevitable that the answers given are the only correct
answers. This passage plays on the Cartesian questions of what it means to think. For Descartes,
the presence of thought indicated the creation of identity. For Stein, however, thought is not enough
to create a self without the external societal considerations of human nature shaping the internal “I.”
In the question about questions, however, the addition of a “perhaps” to the repeated answer casts a
doubt on that answer, calling into question the necessity of all the attributes ascribed to the human
mind. “Necessity,” in fact, takes on a peculiar meaning in Stein's discussion of the human mind as,
“Nothing is known of the word necessary but Jo Alsop knows something of the word necessary oh
yes he does, he does not but oh yes he does and is it because he does know something about the
word necessary he does not know anything about the human mind” (Geographical 391). This
connection between knowledge of the “necessary” and lack of knowledge of the human mind
suggests something inherently unnecessary in the human mind. Jo Alsop, a political reporter of the
first half of the century, is connected to this discussion through his conservative political leaning,
which becomes linked to the instinctual human nature. There must then be something necessary in
human nature, something integral in the external, to which Stein returns in her later discussions of
identity.
In delineating what constitutes human nature as an entity separate from the human mind,
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Stein writes again of the abilities of this entity. She elaborates the binary through its associations:
“Now do you see why there is no relation between human nature and the human mind. Human
nature can not say yes, how can human nature say yes, human nature does what it does but it cannot
say yes. Of course human nature can not say yes. If it did it would not be human nature”
(Geographical 417). As an external force, then, human nature “does what it does,” but it cannot
reflect on these actions or apply the mind's sense of memory. The agency involved in “saying yes”
belongs to the opposite term of Stein's binary system, held as a privilege of the human mind.
Stein's fluctuating degrees of distinctness in the dichotomy between the human mind and
human nature result in moments of breakdown when they are discussed explicitly in terms of
internal and external, within and without. She writes, “Human nature only has to do with in
between and in between oh yes in between sleep and peace oh in between. And the human mind”
(Geographical 421). The invocation of “in between” complicates the binaries that Stein has worked
to impose. First blurring these distinctions with relation to human nature, Stein brings that
externality into a liminal world unrestricted by dichotomies, binaries, or dividing lines. Ending the
passage with the sentence “And the human mind,” attaches importance to the status of these two
terms in relation to one another. They are suddenly occupying the same space, in between internal
and external, despite their having “no relation.” This sense of convergence between the sides of a
binary rooted in ideas of identity works to form a new conception of the way internal and external
coalesce into the confusion that Stein exhibits in writing, “The human mind cannot find out but it is
in it is not out. If the human mind is in then it is not out” (Geographical 410). The ambiguity of the
status of the human mind in the internal/external dichotomy questions its own standing in the binary
systems.
Stein employs several other binary systems in The Geographical History of America, coding
them alternately under human nature and the human mind. The considerations of writing and
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publishing/speech and talking, and reality and imagination serve to both explicate and problematize
these binary divides, ultimately suggesting that the breakdown of the distinction between internal
and external allows the creation of an identity. In this process, she hints at how these divisions play
into this initial collusion of the binaries of internal and external. Stein adds the binary of writing
(codes as internal) and talking (external) to the system of internal human mind and external human
nature. As an internal manifestation of self, writing takes on an aura of sacredness: “As long as
nothing or very little that you write is published it is all sacred but after it is a great deal of it is
published is it everything that you write is it as sacred” (Geographical 372). Much the same as for
Fitzgerald in his discussion of the implications of publication in “Early Success,” this passage points
to two considerations Stein takes into account regarding the interiority of writing: the personal
sacredness of writing as an act, and the invasion of the external on this act through the process of
publishing. By offering up the inner, written self to the outside world, that self loses some of its
sacredness, but it is also through the externalization that one gains identity. This sense of self stems
from the encountering of the interior with the exterior, deconstructing this divide in the process of
reconstructing the self.
Stein begins her discussion of speech and talking by removing it from the purview of the
human mind (internal) and placing it on the side of human nature (external). She writes of the act of
speech: “I wish I could say that talking had to do with the human mind I wish I could say so and
not cry I wish I could” (Geographical 375). By stating “I wish I could say so and not cry,” Stein
suggests a fundamental inability to cross the bounds between “talking” and “the human mind.” It is
possible, however, that this gap is unbridgeable specifically by speech, given that Stein cannot “say”
it. And yet she does say it, or write it, anyway, only claiming not to do so, leaving room for the
possibility that the dichotomy that appears to be reinforced here may still be deconstructed by the
act of writing. Stein further explores the bounds of the internal/external divide in relation to speech
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by taking up the issue of naming and ownership (tellingly applying it to the issue of America, which
is coded as internal in the increasingly complicated binary). In deconstructing this divide she writes
of the question “How is America. Very well I thank you. This is the reply. If you say I thank you
that means that in a way it belongs to you. Very well I thank you” (Geographical 381). By saying,
“Very well I thank you,” one uses an externally coded act, talking, to claim ownership and
internalize America.
Stein then attempts to reestablish the primacy of her crumbling dichotomies and the way the
terms she uses are coded, even as she actively tears them down. By reaffirming “Has one anything
to do with the other is writing a different thing, oh yes and this is so exciting so satisfying so tender
that it makes everything writing has nothing to do with the human speech or human nature and
therefore and therefore it has something to do with the human mind” (Geographical 381). Although
this passage does seem to unequivocally reassert the dynamic between writing and speech, the
human mind and human nature, internal and external, there is a stutter in the writing (itself a curious
combination of writing and speech) as Stein says “it makes everything everything,” and again with
“and therefore and therefore.” Stein's inability to return to absolute assertions in relation to these
binaries suggests that they have been complicated to an irreparable degree.
Stein's final move towards deconstructing these binaries in terms of writing and talking also
links this crumbling system to the idea of identity. Explicitly, she says that “It carefully comes
about that there is no identity and no time and therefore no human nature when words are apart. Or
rather when words are together” (Geographical 463). Stein uses these lines to specify the collusion
of “words” rather than specifically naming writing or talking. Words, whether “apart” or “together,”
constitute identity. Stein's deconstruction of the binary of writing/talking plays into the
deconstruction of the human mind/human nature divide as well. Although only “human nature” is
mentioned explicitly in the passage, connected with the idea of “when words are apart,” Stein's
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immediate shift to “Or rather when words are together” invokes the opposite side of that binary,
applying it to its counterpart in a way that complicates the divide, suggesting its breakdown.
Closely related to the binary between writing and talking is the binary Stein creates between
the imaginary and the real. In the same manner, the imaginary is coded as internal, closely related
to the human mind, while reality is coded as external, relating to human nature. In exploring this
divide and its coordination with the construction of identity, Stein approaches the way the external
acts upon the internal, creating an intermingling relationship that further explores the implications
of dismantling binaries. Stein begins this discussion “There is no real reality to a really imagined
life any more...What is the difference between remembering what has been happening and
remembering what has been dreaming. None. Therefore there is no relation between human nature
and the human mind” (Geographical 380). Stein sets up the difference between reality and
imagination in this passage to be grammatically clear, with the mock logic of a mathematical proof.
There are, however, several ways in which the grammar of the sentence could be read. Stein
extends this distinction to “remembering what has been happening” and “remembering what has
been dreaming.” The repetition of “remembering” in this equation, however, suggests a certain
congruency between these two ideas. What is happening and what is dreaming are more parallel
than at first they seem. Stein also points to a one-time coalescing and cohesion between the real and
the imaginary in adding “any more” to the statement “there is no real reality to a really imagined
life.” In using this distinction as the basis for asserting the fundamental distance between the human
mind and human nature, Stein brings these two entities closer together. Stein continues the
ambiguity inherent in these statements, “Define what you do by what you see never by what you
know because you do not know that this is so” (Geographical 442). Beginning with the distinction
between what is seen (reality) and what is known (imagination), Stein blurs this line again by
invoking the ambiguous “this,” which could refer to the beginning of that sentence, or some
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undefined, amorphous “this.”
The imaginary and the real play upon each other. In this relationship they create something
bigger than their independent implications:
Could one get rid of war by it becoming like dueling and would the way be by
stopping saluting, if nobody saluted and nobody received saluting and nobody
saluted and nobody wore any clothes that were given to them would that have
anything like dueling to do with war ending, oh yes oh yes, and has anything
to do with the human mind no it has to do with human nature because it is not
like money it might be like romanticism but is it, it might be but is it.
(Geographical 447).
Stein suggests here that the trappings of war create the reality of war. By losing the imaginary and
arbitrary signifiers of war, one has the power to reduce it back down to its status of dueling. Also
imaginary and arbitrary, dueling nonetheless lacks the quality and scale of violence that signifies
war. The implication, then, is that taking away these trappings would work on reality in the same
way. Despite Stein's final assertions that “war ending...has nothing to do with the human mind,” but
instead “has to do with human nature,” reasserting the binary between imaginary and real and its
relation to the human mind and human nature, there is again a note of uncertainty in “it might be but
it is.” The performative nature of the external wreaks internal change by being imposed on the
physical self. The relations between this newly deconstructed binary and Stein's conception of
identity create a coalescing whole that works against the definitions of binaries.
In a final push to explicate and delineate the stark difference she posits between the human mind
and human nature, the imaginary and reality, Stein turns to the difference between the insulated idea
of “today” and the outside pressings of “any other day,” which she explains,
And if they do if they do not think that anything has come to stay what is the
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difference between to-day and any other day. But there is a difference. There
is no use in saying there is no difference because there is a difference there is a
difference between to-day and any other day. There is no need of their being
any difference no need at all. (Geographical 443)
This difference of which there is no need is further put into terms of “the difference between need
and is” (Geographical 443), recalling the divide between imagination and reality. The confusion of
this passage, however, is once again indicative of Stein's process of creating binaries, attaching a
whole host of associated terms to these binaries, and then subsequently dismantling them. The net
implication of this process is to give Stein a grounding from which to explore the creation of
identity from the remnants of these destroyed binaries.
While simple conceptions of an individual's identity may be grounded on the notion of strict
binaries, of defining the self in the face of the other, Stein's modern universe allows this system of
definition to stand only fleetingly. As soon as one believes one has a grasp on the premises on
which she bases her definitions, Stein undermines these premises, confusing what should be clear
lines between ideas such as internal and external, the human mind and human nature, geographical
lines, writing and talking, reality and imagination until each side of the divide necessarily works on
its counterpart, building a positive sense of definition and identity, rather than a negative one. Stein
produces a self-identification that relies on an external validation and recognition. In one of her
most famous lines regarding identity, Stein writes, “I am I because my little dog knows me”
(Geographical 401). In this first configuration of identity, of “I am I,” Stein creates a system of
self-construction (a largely internal affair) that relies on the presence of an external view. Stein
goes on to offer this intermingling of internal and external in other guises:
I am I yes sir I am I.
I am I yes Madame am I I.
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When I am I am I I. (Geographical 405)
Using the same language of “I am I,” Stein steps through a series of external validations for this
statement, relying on the unspoken approval of “sir” and “Madame” in the corroboration of her
assertion of identity. When, in the final line, Stein lacks this source of external validity, her former
assertion transfigures into a question laced with doubt, “Am I I.” The palindromic feel of this
passage relies on its convoluted grammar and the ambiguity of that grammar to point again to the
mock logic of a mathematical proof to display that I equals I. The possible ways these lines could
be read through their lack of punctuation and layering of the “I” comes to the fore in the last line.
Reading the line “When I am I, I am I. I,” it becomes a reassertion in itself. The possibility for a
reader's mind to process the line as “When I am, I am I. I?” or “When I am I, am I I?” suggests that
the “I” exists in a tenuous status of struggle for definition. Stein universalizes this process of
external validation of the internal self as “They are they because all who are there know they are
they and on no account cannot they not be no not as long as they are in the race...They are they just
the same only they are not because they are no longer identified and if they did not race at all well
then not any one is any one” (Geographical 423). The constitution of “they” rests on outside eyes
recognizing them as such, and once recognized by the external gaze they can “on no account”
change this identity or shed it. The internal condition of the self, once recognized by an external
force, be it the little dog or the “they” is both validated and solidified. But if the “they” of this
passage chose not to race, the action by which they are initially identified, their self as recognized
by the external disappears and “not any one is any one.” Racing, being in the race, is crucial to
identity because it represents the opportunity of contact with the external, a conduit through which
identity is formed. Without the signifier to the external world, the internal self loses its presence in
the world.
Stein coalesces the presence of outside eyes in the “little dog” and the “they” by explaining,
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“The little dog knows that I am I because he knows me but that is not because of identity but
because he believes what he sees and what he hears and what he smells and so that is really
superstition and not identity because superstition is true while identity is history and history is not
true because history is dependent on an audience” (Geographical 426). Retiring again to the
dichotomy of real versus imaginary in conjunction with identity, and further relating this binary to
superstition and history, as well as self and other, Stein superficially backtracks her earlier
statements of an externally validated or constructed internal identity. She does so in an ambiguous
way, however, confusing the binaries that she sets forth as proofs to suggest that the process is more
complicated than the phrase “not because of identity” would indicate. By coding what the little dog
knows as based in the real, she reaffirms it as part of the external side of the binary. This
real/external set-up, however, she first claims is not identity, and further posits as “really
superstition.” The odd connection between the real and superstition indicates the blurring of Stein's
binary system. Further, Stein defines identity as “history,” creating a binary between superstition
and history, associating the terms with the real and the imaginary, respectively. Through this
association, Stein's binaries are dismantled. Her link from “identity” to “history” to the necessity of
“an audience” displays the dependency of the seemingly internal (identity) on the defining work of
the external (audience).
In a “play” entitled “Identity” contained within the text, Stein further points to the inability
of the self to fully construct identity without external help: “If I know that I say that I will go away
and I do not I do not. That makes identity. Thank you for identity even if it is not a pleasure”
(Geographical 431). Although there is no indication of who Stein is thanking for the creation of her
identity, the beginning of this passage points to her inability to create this identity unilaterally. The
act of “saying” is less important for her here than the act of “doing.” It does not matter what she
has said, but what she does in spite of speech, much like it is the act of publishing that forms what
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she says. Thanking the reader for identity, although it is not a pleasure, suggests that it is in the
performative, the eyes of an outsider, that her identity as an author is created. Although she says
(and knows that she says) she will do or be something, if that condition does not materialize, she
does not know, and this condition “makes identity,” for which Stein subsequently offers gratitude to
an external force.
Stein later elaborates on the condition of identity in relation to some of the binaries that she
has already set forth and broken down (calling into question the status of identity in a system of
deconstructed binaries),
Now this might mean that there is identity if you were to say that this is so
which it is but nevertheless there is not because to-day is never to-morrow or
yesterday although if it is if to-morrow is to-day that is what she can say she can
say that if to-morrow is nearer to to-day, so some can say so she can say then tomorrow is to-day but if to-morrow is not anywhere near to-day which is what he
can say then to-morrow cannot be to-day. (Geographical 453)
The shifts between “to-morrow” and “to-day” in this passage recall Stein's earlier explanations of
the insular to-day and unknown, outside to-morrow in terms of the real and the imaginary, the
internal and the external. This discussion pivots around the idea that “this might mean that there is
identity.” This possible identity first rests on “you,” a force and entity outside of Stein's self, saying
so. The possibility of this process being completed, however, relies on where Stein comes down on
the status of to-day and to-morrow, another manifestation of the internal and external, respectively.
This dichotomy is itself complicated, subsequently, by the difficulty of coding “to-day” and “tomorrow” under the system of internal and external and its associations with imagination and reality.
Which is internalized, the present or the future? The future is a projection of the imagination, with
the present occupying the space of the real, but the idea of “to-day” is easier to internalize than the
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unknown of “to-morrow.” In this curious inversion, Stein goes so far as to write, “so she can say
then to-morrow is to-day,” which is quickly refuted by “he can say then to-morrow cannot be today.” This quick reversal exhibits not only the instability of the binaries Stein has been laying in
front of the reader, but also the larger message of the power of external speech and language in
creating internal validity. To-morrow both can and cannot be to-day based solely on the spoken
assertion of an outside force. The external creates internal consistency regardless of the extent to
which these ideas seem to have inherent qualities of identity and identification.
This curious construction becomes more clear when Stein posits the power of internal versus
external in the act of creating in an inverted scenario: “Naturally when inside is inside it sees
outside but it is inside. Therefore identity and time have nothing to do with from time to time since
inside is inside even if it does see outside” (Geographical 453). By considering the creation of
identity from the perspective of the internal, where one might have expected the locus of identity to
be formed, Stein reasserts the relative lack of power the internal self has in creating an identity.
Only able to see the outside, the autonomous inside has no power to create. In fact, “inside is
inside” necessarily. Kept in that inside sphere, it only penetrates the external by virtue of its own
gaze. By being kept internal, the self is unaffected by “from time to time,” by which Stein means
the transitory present. Time is an amophous medium for change. Instead, the internal identity finds
itself related to “time” more generally, the ambiguously internal/external, real/imaginary tomorrow.
Stein's final word on identity as it relates to the binary of human nature and the human mind,
to external defining forces and internal substance, takes the form of “Plainly not identity as much as
plainly identity. Human nature plainly worries about identity. And so human nature is all of
identity, and who is who. If they asked who is who what would identity do” (Geographical 466).
By asserting that “human nature is all of identity, and who is who,” Stein states that the work of the
external on the internal, of human nature on the human mind, of the other on the self ultimately
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defines this most personal sense of self. The internal becomes the raw material in a relationship that
cannot be determined by arbitrary binaries and divisions, but must instead be considered in terms of
a melding, a symbiotic relationship that crosses apparent chasms between supposed opposites. The
Geographical History of America, by positing binaries in terms of the human mind and human
nature, serves to deconstruct the binaries, in the process allowing Stein to explain how, in the
remnants of the previous guiding delineations, a new sense of identity and self can be constructed
through the intermingling of the remains, and through their work on, rather than against, one
another.
The stakes involved in the creation, break-down, and possibility of recreation for the
individual for Fitzgerald and Stein are intimately linked with their individual selves. For these
modernists, the title and implication of “author” rest on the way they conceptualize the influence of
the external on the internal. The relationship of History to this binary represents a particularly
salient facet of the conception of self, as an external force working to form and deconstruct the
individual. The acknowledgement of the historical moment in this process, however, not
immediately apparent, for while “the writer lived in the world, as we all do, and suffered its
events...the modernists, at least partly because of that suffering, decided to save the world through
an art purified of history – an art conceived as the re-invigoration of human capacities blocked,
thwarted and denied by modern social existence” (Dekoven 138). The modernism of Tender
Buttons, for example, exhibits this conception of modernism on its surface: the turn to interiority, a
shattered house that seems to exist outside of the historical moment and only within the individual.
Stein's creation of this space pivots on the very lack of the external influence. A countervailing
tendency in Stein's and Fitzgerald's works of the 1930's, however, pushed the modernist writer “to
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tell the whole truth, to make each fiction the book of the world” (Dekoven 138). The
manifestations of history in these works point to the way external history pushes its way into the
consciousness of the author, forming the author's sense of identity and thus informing the contours
of their works. Suppression and veiled representation of particular historical phenomena snake
their way through Fitzgerald's and Stein's works, creating a pervasive thread of History that creates
and destroys individual characters and the authors themselves. Despite the supposed ahistorical
nature of modernist writing, “in fact, a good deal of modernist fiction generally considered to have
escaped (repudiated or denied) history has instead suppressed it, thereby using one of the few
feasible strategies, given the modernist disgust with history, for writing about it at all” (Dekoven
137). This sort of side-stepping of the direct question of History and the historical moment in their
writing manifests itself in the preponderance of other conduits of the external, working in the same
was as History to break down the barriers between the self, the “I” and the external. The 1930's
works of Stein and Fitzgerald exhibit “the complex, powerful techniques of figuration available to
modernist fiction writers [which] allowed them simultaneously to turn away from the devastating
facts of modern history – a gesture of survival as well as of denial – and at the same time to render
those facts with greater power than direct representation would give” (Dekoven 151).
Underpinning these concerns of history and how this external relates to the “I” is how the authors
understand a larger arc of the self's relation to time. The world and the self must be read through
the veil of history, carved by the transitory historical moment, and following the larger trajectory of
a historical world (Whittier-Ferguson). Fitzgerald and Stein approach the question of the
internal/external divide and the process through which the self is formed in the face of the
shattering historical moment and exhibiting a fundamental difference of understanding. Both point
in their works to the process by which the external invades the internal (not unlike World War I
itself), creating and changing the self.
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The particular type of traumatic historical moment in which they are writing means that the
external is crucial in deconstructing, breaking down the individual “I” into fractured shards of the
self. Further, the break-down of the self is necessary for the individual (and particularly the author).
As Fitzgerald writes in Tender is the Night, “He mocked at his reasoning, calling it specious and
'American' – his criteria of un-cerebral phrase-making was that it was American. He knew, though,
that the price of his intactness was incompleteness” (Tender 26). The confluence of “phrasemaking,” the “incompleteness” of “intactness,” and “American” suggests a turn toward nationality
as a formative external consideration. The defining difference between Stein's and Fitzgerald's
structuring of the self rests in the normative question of whether or not the self should be reasserting
itself against the outside pressures to reconstitute the “I” on individual terms. Fitzgerald's personal
breakdown as exposed in The Crack-Up leads him to the tendency to complete this process with a
turn towards reconstruction of the self.
Works Cited
Curnutt, Kirk. A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2004.
Dekoven, Marianne. “History as Suppressed Referent in Modernist Fiction.” ELH. 51.1
(Spring 1984) 137-152.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. “Babylon Revisited.” The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ed. Matthew
J. Bruccoli. New York: Scribner, 1989. 616-633.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. “The Crack-Up.” The Crack Up. Ed. Edmund Wilson. New York: New
Directions, 1964. 69-84.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. “Early Success.” The Crack-Up. Ed. Edmund Wilson. New York: New
Directions, 1956. 85-90.
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Fitzgerald, F. Scott. “A New Leaf.” The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ed. Matthew J.
Bruccoli. New York: Scribner, 1989. 634-647.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. Tender is the Night. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003.
Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.
Stein, Gertrude. “Composition as Explanation.” Stein: Writings 1903-1932. Ed. Catharine R.
Stimpson and Harriet Chessman. New York: The Library of America, 1998. 520-529.
Stein, Gertrude. “The Difference between the Inhabitants of France and the Inhabitants of
America.” Stein: Writings 1903-1932. Ed. Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman.
New York: The Library of America, 1998. 513-519.
Stein, Gertrude. “The Geographical History of America or The Relation of Human Nature to the
Human Mind.” Stein: Writings 1932-1946. Ed. Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman.
New York: The Library of America, 1998. 365-488.
Stein, Gertrude. “A Message From Gertrude Stein.” Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Ed.
Carl Van Vechten. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. vii.
Stein, Gertrude. Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Ed. Carl Van Vechten. New York:
Vintage Books, 1990.
Stein, Gertrude. “Tender Buttons.” Three Lives and Tender Buttons. Stilwell, KS:
Digireads.com Publishing, 2008.
Whittier-Ferguson, John. “Stein in Time: History, Manuscript, and Memory.”
Modernism/Modernity 6.1 (1999) 115-151.