Money on My Mind: Stein’s Meditations

Abstract

This essay looks at Gertrude Stein’s fraught relationship with money across her career, from the strong ethical importance that she attached to it in her early prose through to her crisis of value after the success of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Focusing on her 1932 long poem Stanzas in Meditation, I argue that Stein’s language works to undermine our shared social and economic language while at the same timerevealing a profound anxiety about money. Ultimately, I suggest that in its language of number and measurement Stanzas describes and enacts an intellectual labor, the logic of which is incompatible with wage labor or capital’s gendered hierarchy of values.