Drawing from a wide range of theoretical fields, both Michael North in “Stein, Picasso and African Masks” and John Carlos Rowe in “Naming What's Inside,” analyze the masquerade of Gertrude Stein's Three Lives, interpreting the text as a means of understanding the birth of literary and aesthetic modernism and as a way of exploring Stein's conceptions of the dichotomies raised by race, gender, culture, and geography. The two critical essays address Three Lives using "masking" as a technique through which to demonstrate the "conventionality" of a subject and as an integral development in Stein's creation of American modernism. Stein and Pablo Picasso, his friend and contemporary, both used masking as an aesthetic means through which to alter the nature of an initial subject. Inspired by African masks, Picasso painted a mask on a portrait of Stein, while Stein rewrote his own story, first captured in QED, in the black characters of the central tale in Three Lives. In doing so, North argues, Stein invited her white readers to live in her characters and allowed herself to see both race and gender as a "role," not a biologically predetermined attribute. At the same time, the literary and linguistic mask asserts itself as a representative of freedom from the European "convention" and as an example of nature and freedom, but also as a cultural construction, convention and restriction in and of itself. The use of the mask, for North, represents the breakdown of the dichotomy between "impersonality and individuality, [and] conventional representation and resemblance". Rowe echoes North's assertion that the role of the mask, applied to visual art, is "embodied convention, the sign of signs", exposing the structure of art in...... medium of paper.. Concluding that Stein's style serves to "destabilize prevailing racial and ethnic stereotypes," Rowe constructs a framework through which to understand Three Lives as a proposed alternative to "rationalist and technocratic social values" and as an exploration of literary representation. Together, the two essays construct a picture of Stein's use of language and structure as a means through which to escape conventional preconceptions and representations and to begin an exploration of American literary modernism. Works Cited North, Michael. "Stein, Picasso and African masks." In Three Lives and QED, edited by Marianne DeKoven, 429-440. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2006. Rowe, John Carlos. “What's Inside: Gertrude Stein's Use of Names in Three Lives.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 36, 2 (Spring 2003): 219-243. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1346127