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WHY JEANETTE WINTERSON QUOTE GERTRUDE STEIN IN HER NOVEL?

Reading Jeanette Winterson's novel, the reader notices that at chapter 9, the narrator quotes Gertrude Stein's Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. The intelligent reader knows that all the narrator's choices in style, words and organization are not casual, as well as quote. Indeed J. Winterson was influenced by G. Stein, as well as by V. Woolf because she gives credit to them important innovations in novel. She thinks only to test something new warrants the survival of the novel. She thinks literature has not to copy or imitate old work but the narrators have to use words in a new different way. And it is what G. Stein did. She wrote someone else's biography and, as J. Winterson says in his novel, she was collapsing the space between fact and fiction.

For a woman like Jeanette, who was adopted and lived all her life swinging between reality and fiction, G. Stein's  innovation was very interesting because reading the book she had to try to distinguish between real facts and fictional facts in search of truth. It seems as if she continued searching her real mother, her real life, ... Indeed, evermore in chapter 9, Jeanette writes: for me, fascinated with identity, and how you define yourself, those books were crucial. Reading yourself as a fiction as well as your fact in the only way to keep the narrative open - the only way to stop the story running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.

Another important point is that G. Stein broke the barriers between what people can say and what they cannot. Indeed when she published her novel, G. Stein affirmed she had written the novel because she needed money. Also J. Winterson did it. Both in life and in her novel. Indeed she declared her homosexuality and she wrote about it (for lots of people it is still a taboo) and she also wrote about her mother's real identity, about her real thoughts, ...

In addition, the reader finds also some analogies in G. Stein and J. Winterson's life: they are both homosexual and in the stylistic choices: they both used the first person narrator and they didn't follow a define chronology.