"Stein's Mind"

Gertrude Stine was quoted saying, “In Tender Buttons and then on and on I struggled with the ridding myself of nouns, I knew nouns must go in poetry as they had gone in prose if anything that is everything was to go on meaning something. And so I went on with this exceeding struggle of knowing really knowing what a thing was really knowing it knowing anything I was seeing anything I was feeling so that its name could be something, by its name coming to be a thing in itself as it was but would not be anything just and only as a name” (242).


She has explored the fact that peoples, places or things, also know as nouns, have been give a name derived usually from a series of letters that combine to form a word. One could say, all words are groupings of meaningless letters combined to form meaning. However the sum of its parts do not convey meaning they convey a sound and this sound then in turn is attached to an object. Stine believes, nouns lack meaning, as they are merely labels, a novelty. This novelty makes it easier to register in our brain as something particular. Although for sight and material value the word doesn’t describe truly what it is nor what it does. Nouns seem to be purely adapted for retention rather than description. They lack emotion and material context therefore are not suited for poetry especially poetry that is suppose to captivate the mind and make you feel. Also I feel as if Stine feels language, particularly nouns, have been created by white male supremacist and that the refusal of using them creates a further disconnect from the male oppressor. In examining “Rooms” she takes a much more personal language experience than either “Objects” or “Food”. Rather than simply assuming male ubiquity and omnipotence, Stein specifically antagonizes a male presence, oblivious to male objectification and alleged male needs, which she wants no part of. Steins argument, that nouns have lost their power to accurately convey meaning, without also limiting its significance by excluding other meanings. Stein’s exclusionary theory of language, then, was her motivation for an exploration of literary cubism. Like the visual artists who rejected the possibility of a single objective representation, Stein’s poetry is a response to power dynamics behind systematic labels. More specifically,
Tender Buttons reclaims meaning from patriarchal and exclusionary traditions. Within the poems, she often writes of women; specifically she mentions names like “Pauline” and “Mildred” and generally she uses “ladies,” “little women,” and “sister.” Many assert that even Stein’s words refer to women by using “-er” as a pun on “her” especially in nouns created from verbs like “hunter” so that the action is redirected (hunt her). This redirection is another example of the ways Stein challenges noun usage.

Gertrude Stein literary experimentation turns English into “a foreign language of her own”(Mellow 64). Tender Buttons remains impermeable to any interpretive operation aimed at an thematic synthesis.( Mellow64)



Works Cited
Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
Linguistic Exoticism and Literary Alienation: Gertrude Stein's "Tender Buttons" Author(s): Mena Mitrano Source: Modern Language Studies, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Spring, 1998), pp. 87-102