Legendary Expatriation of American Women Writers: Salon Coteries in Adventures of the Mind and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Abstract

The expatriate life of American women writers based upon salon coteries in Paris in the early 20th century is probed into in this paper. The expatriate American women writers constructed an impressive female community through artistic salons led by Natalie Clifford Barney and Gertrude Stein as well as cosmopolitan bookshops run by Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier. When post-war despair and cultural bankruptcy prevailed, they found a new approach in a different world, far from their hometown, and thus promoting American-European cultural exchanges, diversifying modernist ecosphere. The influx of expatriate women also benefited gender equality and feminist writing. Salon coteries reflected their quest for emancipation under constraints and nurtured collective creativity. In the modernist hemisphere belonging to them, the expatriate women writers shared new modes of language, and found their own freedom to write, to voice, to live. The innovation of the paper is the detailed study of salon hostesses Barney’s memoir Adventures of the Mind and Stein’s life narrative The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, with the analysis of public sphere theory and life-writing theory to highlight the memory of collaborative salon space—a created gender-equal sphere of women writers, and their self-discovery spirit in the legendary expatriation.