SOURCE: Giesenkirchen, Michaela. “Where English Speaks More Than One Language: Accents in Gertrude Stein's Accents in Alsace.” The Massachusetts Quarterly (spring 1993): 45-62.

In the following essay, Giesenkirchen describes the multilingual dimension of Stein's style in Accents in Alsace, contrasting her famous preference for the English language with her sensitivity to the conversational aspect of other languages exhibited in the play.

Gertrude Stein's central relationship was with the English language. She called English her “only language,” the first language she learned to read, the only language she ever learned to speak and write perfectly, the language in which she composed.¹ However, as Stein was exposed to a good deal of French and German in her youth and then spent most of her adult life in France, she developed a distinct multilingual sensitivity which was primarily of an aural nature. Claiming that vision was the essential perceptual faculty underlying her...