Gertrude Stein's twin

Abstract

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.