Historically, as letter writers have known, not writing for publication allows for a "natural" or unfinished writing style. Even early on, Dickinson understood epistolary conventions and tested them in her letters and, atypically, in her poems as well; in doing so, she asserted to the recipients of her "published" poems that she was unequivocally their author. This essay regards Dickinson as a participant in her culture—she shared, for instance, its fascination with private lives becoming public. Though wary of public attention herself, she knew the popularity of "authentic" things, and cultivated a "natural" writing style that her 1890s editors would exploit in their marketing of her work.
Gertrude Stein's twinWhen Gertrude Stein began constructing an archive of her life's work at Yale University Library in 1937, the first text she worked on was a novel, Ida. Stein wrote and rewrote this novel for three years and carefully saved a record of the process. Then concurrently in February 1941, Yale held an exhibition celebrating her archive and Ida was published. This essay argues that the two narratives, the making of the archive and the novel, should be read together. The twin-like relationship Stein created at the Yale exhibition, between the private manuscript and the public book, reflected a larger one she had been meditating on throughout the late 1930s: the relation of the private writer to her public work. She wanted to reverse the flow of interest so that people were studying not her personality but her texts. Stein's twin was her archive and Ida takes us to it: she wrote Ida as a composite novel, incorporating a number of previously written texts. Here is proof, then, that her creative practice was more conscious than is typically thought, and more intertextual.
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