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Gertrude Stein and the Politics of Literary Genius

This chapter examines a range of Gertrude Stein’s texts from the 1930s and her 1940 Ida A Novel to argue that her late-career work presupposes an opposition between art and politics and that the latter corresponds to an opposition between gifts and exchanges. For Stein, the world of art is a gift economy, while politics is rooted in the money economy. Thus, unlike the other authors here, she reinforces the separations at which Mauss took aim. And yet, like them, she suggests that these separations do not hold, particularly in the wake of the apparent generosity of the New Deal. Drawing on analyses of the aesthetic properties of money, the chapter sheds further light on Stein’s conservative politics, while also making the case for her status as a thinker of not just the gift but also money, and for the inseparability of these two lines of thought in her work.