“We Go”: Gertrude Stein’s Automobilism and World War I Writing

Abstract: This article documents how Gertrude Stein’s main activity during World War I, driving a truck for the American Fund for French Wounded, influenced her writing about the war, with lasting impact on her poetics and politics. Making a claim for Stein as a notable World War I writer, I examine her overlooked wartime poetry, her later writing about the war, and the reports that she and her partner, Alice B. Toklas, wrote for the A. F. F. W. Weekly Bulletin (which have so far evaded scholarly attention). Although Stein witnessed the war’s most devastating effects, her writing is oddly exuberant. I demonstrate how Stein’s fascination with her automobile contributed not only to her ebullient writing but also a technology-based aestheticism, a mechanistic world view, and, ultimately, a compromised feminism. While her machine infatuation bears much resemblance to that of fascist-minded modernists, it also stands out for being a specifically female response to technology and for inspiring ways of thinking that uphold the status quo. Stein’s automobilism thus helps shade in not only the contours of her reactionary politics but also the motley landscape of modernism’s problematic intersection with technology, war, and the political Right.