SOURCE: “Gertrude Stein: The Pattern moves, the Woman behind Shakes It,” in Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 13, Nos. 1 and 2, 1986, pp. 33-47.

Since Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons was published in 1914, its colorful chunks of language and imagery have been shaken in the kaleidoscopes of a dozen critical modes to produce a myriad of readings, designs, and explanations. The multitude of critical approaches attests to its brilliance and obscurity at once: readers presented with this wild, semi-verbless appraisal of objects, food, and rooms are justifiably intimidated but also challenged to find the “key” to a work in which “A Piece of Coffee” is “More of a double. A place in no new table,” and in which “Red Roses” are “Cool red rose and a pink cut pink, a collapse and a sold hole, a little less hot.”¹

Tender Buttons has been described as a series of prose poems, although no traditional genre can do justice to its departures from all traditions, genres, and syntax. Divided into three sections, “Objects,” “Food,” and “Rooms,” it uses things, occasions, or phrases as the starting points of “descriptions” that do not describe or “definitions” that do not define. Under “Objects” we find word-portraits or meditations on everything from the trivial to the obscure: “A Substance in a Cushion,” “Dirt and Not Copper,” “A Shawl,” “It Was Black, Black Took.” “Food” begins with a sensual five-page contemplation of “Roast Beef” (“There is coagulation in cold and there is none in prudence. Something is preserved and the evening is long and the colder spring has sudden shadows in a sun,” p. 481) and moves on to “Sugar,” “Lunch,” “Orange In,” and so on. “Rooms” is the last and longest piece, describing space as tangentially as any of the previous pieces had “described,” and including non-linear, semi-syntactical observations that are alternately rhapsodical and comic: “Alike and a snail, this means Chinamen, it does there is no doubt that to be right is more than perfect there is no doubt and glass is confusing it confuses the substance which was of a color. … Startling a starved husband is not disagreeable” (p.500). As several critics have pointed out, the text is meant to be read aloud and its sense of humor cannot be ignored in the most serious of its readings.

These various readings, and the causes to which Tender Buttons has been rallied, include automatic writing, literary Cubism, religious mysticism, linguistic experimentation, perceptual innovation, Jungian “mandala,” post-modernist narrative, and conflict with Stein's brother Leo. Without denying the validity of these readings—and crediting the genius of the text for accomodating multiple readings—I would like to propose one more, one that illuminates a relationship between Stein and several women modernist writers. The third party in this nexus is Alfred North Whitehead, whose thinking has been linked to Stein in the past and who was named by Stein, along with herself and Picasso, as one of the three “first class geniuses” of her lifetime.² For the past decade, feminist philosophers have aligned themselves with Whitehead's process thought as a viable metaphysics for a feminist perspective. Taking this idea into the literary realm, a Whiteheadian perspective clarifies the dilemma of self-identification that occurs in the works of several feminist modernists: Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Katherine Mansfield, and Kate Chopin. By identifying the similarities in Stein's and Whitehead's idea of self, we can understand the problem posed frequently in modernist literature, that of the integrated self caught in the language and philosophy of a dualistic culture.

Such a reading is not a “standard” feminist reading of Stein, as for example Cynthia Secor would give us in her biographical approach to Stein's novel Ida. Secor sees Stein's womanhood and lesbianism as the dynamic of her work: a radical re-definition of self and reality in reaction to patriarchal culture. Secor's thesis concentrates on Ida, but she refers to Tender Buttons briefly as a “celebration of the domestic and sensual aspects of [Stein's] relation with Toklas.”³

Such a reading, I believe, tends to attach a literalness of narrative to the text which seems to strain too much in the direction of “meaning.” As Pamela Hadas notes, “It is interesting, in a way, to go through Tender Buttons as one would a book of riddles trying to guess the ‘answers’ … but this approach (as [Stein] surely knew and was amused by) can only lead to overingenuousness on the one hand and frustration on the other.”⁴ Seeing life with Alice as the “answer to the riddle” cheats Tender Buttons of its linguistic and perceptual answer-in-itself described by Bridgeman, Hoffman, and Weinstein.

My approach to Stein is, on the other hand, feminist in an indirect way. I am connecting Stein with other female modernists through a consciousness that I believe can be accurately described as Whiteheadian. While Secor believes that Stein is reacting primarily to patriarchal culture as a woman, I am asserting that she is reacting primarily to a problem in language and self-perception that is part of the accoutrement of that patriarchal culture, a problem for men and women alike, but which manifests itself in the writing of women in a particular way. My purpose is not to claim Tender Buttons as a feminist text, but to show how Stein might be a link to a Whiteheadian consciousness that is as useful for feminist readers and writers as it has been for feminist philosophers.

The dilemma of self-identification in modernism arises in a tension between delineation and flux, between the need for a room of one's own and the resistance to confinement. Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, for example, is suspended in this kind of self-perception: “She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on.”⁵ This tension strains between the yearning for knife-like integrity and the knowledge that the self is not a “knife” at all, but a fluid process sunk into multiple processes. This sensibility is complicated in that the values of autonomy and affinity are set into opposition in our culture and related to gender. Valerie C. Saiving, describing traditional modes of identity, uses the terms “individuality” and “relatedness” to describe sexual stereotypes:

We are taught that men are … essentially self-directing, autonomous, and unique individuals whose needs, interests, and activities are valuable in themselves. In contrast, we learn … that women are, or should strive to become, beings whose existence is essentially constituted by their relationships to others.⁶

In such a dichotomy, the woman naming the self as separate is considered unnatural; moreover, her definitions and names are those imposed by a male culture, as Mary Daly and others have pointed out.⁷

Resistance to names and boundaries occurs in a number of women writers and their protagonists in the early part of the century when the confining definitions imposed by the Cult of True Womanhood were being defied. Barbara Welter describes the demands of True Womanhood as “piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. Put them all together and they spelled mother, daughter, sister, wife—woman.”⁸ When Stein wittily gives the non-definition of “Custard” as “Not to be. Not to be narrowly” (p. 490), she could be giving the motto for Kate Chopin's protagonist in The Awakening, for Woolf's undefinable Orlando, or for several of the women in Katherine Mansfield's stream-of-consciousness story “Prelude.” The women in “Prelude,” in fact, give us a paradigm of the dilemma: they are expected to fall into patterns like the domestic ones they arrange: “Everything in the kitchen had become part of a series of patterns” for the arranging grandmother,⁹ but her daughter, stultified in the male-defined roles of child-bearer and mate, is happiest when she is left alone, when the patterns of the walls themselves begin to move:

… she traced a poppy on the wallflower. … In the quiet, and under her tracing finger, the poppy seemed to come alive … Things had a habit of coming alive like that. Not only large substantial things like furniture, but curtains and the patterns of stuffs … (p. 68).

Driven much further into madness by her condescending husband and her circumscribed Victorian life, the narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper” hallucinates the trapped woman behind the wallpaper in her room: “The front pattern does move—and no wonder!” she discovers excitedly, “The woman behind shakes it!”¹⁰ She has had a long history of having “to be narrowly.”

Of all these protagonists, only Orlando, in the fantasy of easy androgyny, is not disturbed, repressed, or mad. Edna Pontellier of The Awakening does not survive her journey into selfhood at all; she clearly knows what she does not want to be, but in rejecting one set of structures—the True Womanhood precepts—she finds herself in another: the structures and patterns of heterosexual romance.¹¹ Disappointed in the latter, she feels she has no choices, no delineated self. Only the water seems unstructured enough; swimming is her way of “reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose herself.”¹² Her “unlimited” sense of self, however, can be attained only by her self-extinction. Likewise, Gilman's narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” pulls herself out of the patterns at the price of her sanity. Finally, the women of “Prelude” float like ghosts in their male world, feeling unconnected to their private “real” selves. The young unmarried Beryl is miserable, sensing that her trained flirtatiousness and defence to men is a “false” self. “She saw the real Beryl—a shadow … A shadow. Faint and unsubstantial she shone. What was there of her except the radiance? And for what tiny moments she was really she” (p. 98). The “unsubstantial” self has no mode of being. Like the other women in the house, she ends by dressing and answering for and to men, complying with her society's given definitions because the undefined self remains elusive and inarticulate.

In all cases, the non-delineated self, in a culture that respects clear-cut, autonomous classifications, has no power. Woolf's woman writer, after all, needs a room of her own not simply for practical purposes, but for the self-definition, the self-assertion of having private space. Mrs. Dalloway's habitual retreat to her attic room is a deliberate refusal of her role as wife/mother and an assertion of an earlier, purer self:

So the room was an attic; the bed narrow; and lying there reading, for she slept badly, she could not dispel a virginity preserved through childbirth which clung to her like a sheet. Lovely in girlhood, suddenly there came a moment … when, through some contraction of this cold spirit, she had failed [her husband] (p. 46).

The ambiguous nature of the retreat, however, is revealed in the connotations of death, the retreat from life itself: the narrow bed is a coffin as well as a virginal renewal; the sheet a shroud. The “cold spirit” in its refusal of sexuality is also a refusal of life.

Moreoever, Mrs. Dalloway is later confused when her life-expanding empathy, which seems to dissolve walls and rooms, is confronted by the terrible facts of the rooms themselves. She watches the old woman in the next house move as Big Ben strikes, and senses that the woman moves “as if she were attached to that sound, that string. Gigantic as it was, it had something to do with her … Clarissa tried to follow her …” (pp. 192-3). Unfortunately, her sense of being connected to the woman, having “something to do with her” like the sound, is elusive, is both true and not: “And the supreme mystery … was simply this: here was one room; there another” (p. 193). The self remains in the confines of its walls, retreats to it, and at the same time resists those walls.

Stein's Tender Buttons resembles, in its methods, this wall-dissolving, pattern-shaking motif. Without ascribing to it a theme or narrative, we can at least see in it a consciousness that is deliberately breaking down categories of perception, time, space, and language. Rebelling against the confinements of definition, Stein liberates our habitual ways of seeing ordinary objects. She turns our eye to what the domestic woman traditionally deals with: household objects, kitchen items, the home. Then she explodes our traditional perceptions, asking us to understand eye-glasses as “A color in shaving” (p. 470), or asparagus as “wet wet weather” (p. 491). Her own categorization into “Objects,” “Food,” and “Rooms” is deliberately deceptive, for her definitions overlap, the distinctions break down, so that “Roast Beef” sounds like a room, “In the inside there is sleeping, in the outside there is reddening” (p. 477), while a room is described as time and action: “The author of all that is in there behind the door and that is entering in the morning. Explaining darkening and expecting relating is all of a piece” (p. 499). Sometimes the object is a series of impressions: “A Petticoat” is “A white light, a disgrace, an ink spot, a rosy charm” (p. 471). At other times the object is a process: “Milk” is “Climb up in sight climb up in the whole utter needles and a guess a whole guess is hanging” (p. 487). The total effect is a radical shaking of the categorical Victorian world.

Given the linguistic eccentricities of this text, it is not difficult to see why early critics wrote it off as an experiment in “automatic writing,” a phenomenon Stein had researched in medical school.¹³ Later critics related it to the techniques of Picasso, explaining that Stein's refractions of reality are the literary equivalent of Cubism. Michael Hoffman, who once allied himself with that theory, later qualified, explaining that the use of one medium to describe another is “at best a metaphor.” Stein's association with Picasso is not entirely irrelevant, however, for as Hoffman points out, ‘What she opted for was the same freedom to dislocate the previous forms and concentrations of the literary tradition.’¹⁴ Most critics have concurred in that opinion, and detailed analyses of the poetic and stylistic techniques have begun with the assumption that Stein's purpose is the achievement of a new mode of perception, one that begins with the object but does not remain with it, and one that constructs the moment in an alternate perception of time.¹⁵ Stein herself calls this structure of time “the continuous present,” which she says is “a natural composition in the world … I knew nothing of a continuous present but it came naturally to me to make one.”¹⁶

Of Tender Buttons Stein wrote, “I struggled with the ridding of myself of nouns.”¹⁷ She does not quite succeed in doing that, only occasionally discarding syntax altogether: “Aider, why aider why whow whow stop touch” is her description of the last “object” in the first section—actually not an object at all but the statement, “This Is the Dress, Aider” (p. 476). Even an impressionistic “More” depends on nouns: “An elegant use of foliage and grace and a little piece of white cloth and oil” (p. 469). Studies of her language are as numerous as studies of her perceptual experimentation. Norman Weinstein explains the syntactical play as an approximation of the attempt of consciousness to articulate experience as it occurs. He calls the gathering of the chaotic multitude of words “the linguistic moment.”¹⁸ Like other critics, Weinstein is interested in Stein's part in the creation of a modernist literature that takes linguistic risks in order more accurately to catch human perception. Critic Neil Schmitz goes further than this, however, seeing in Tender Buttons a heralding of the “post-modernist” concerns with narrative and point of view taken up later by Barthes and Barthelme. Stein looms in the venerable position, then, of one of the recognized architects of modern literature, and Tender Buttons as its monument. Weinstein calls the work “a child's first guide to the twentieth century” (Weinstein, p. 67), though it is, ironically, considered unreadable by a majority of twentieth-century readers.

The relationship of Stein's alternate modes of perception to the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead has been frequently cited and accurately qualified by critics who point out that the iconoclastic Stein is no philosopher.²⁰ Allegra Stewart, however, connects the theory of religion and art shared by Stein and Whitehead, the creative act and the act of meditation, both being acts of “presence, by which the dualism of experience is overcome here and now … Knower and known are joined …”.²¹ Reading Tender Buttons as an act of meditation, Stewart makes the point that it is an attempt to unify the dissociations of experience. She later takes this further in an extended Jungian interpretation of Stein, in which Tender Buttons is seen as a “mandala,” a ritualistic meditative prayer structured to bring the subconscious in contact with the universal subconscious.²² In general, this, along with Secor's feminist interpretation, is one of the few readings that attempts to see Tender Buttons as other than a linguistic, narrative, and perceptual experiment.²³

With Bridgman, Hoffman, and Weinstein, I agree that interest in the text must center on its method, not its meaning, and that its method is directly concerned with the presentation of an alternate means of perception. While such critics do justice to the art of Stein's dealing with the “continuous present,” however, I feel the need to extend this approach into its philosophical implications. Placing Stein into the context of Whiteheadian process thought does not tailor her into a philosopher, for she resisted systematic philosophies as much as she resisted categories of identity. Process thought, however, gives us a way of understanding not only a work such as Tender Buttons, but the sensibility of a Mrs. Dalloway, an Edna Pontellier, and a Mrs. Ramsay. If feminist philosophers are right, such an understanding might help us in the shifting of attitudes necessary to achieve an androgynous culture.

Such a reading requires that Whiteheadian thought be considered seriously, not just in its general ideas about religion or creativity, but in its metaphysics. While a comprehensive analysis is not possible in this format, a brief summary is necessary. Whiteheadian metaphysics differs from most philosophical systems in that the latter ask us to think of ourselves as rooms in which events (thoughts, experience) occur, while Whitehead asks us to think of ourselves as events, constantly coming into being through interaction with other events—which include perceptions, actions, other persons, and the immediate and distant past. These multiple “pulsations” of process unite in “concrescence” to constitute a moment of experience. The individual person's “subjective aim” is capable of infinite creativity in the use of past and present moments of process, and the person is in fact made up of a complexity of past and present occasions, always in the moment of creation.²⁴

Stein's method of the “continuous present” is congruent with Whitehead's description of how the present moment actually occurs and how the individual consciousness “occurs” with the present moment. It is certainly easier to think of the items in Tender Buttons as “occurrences” rather than “descriptions.” The “experience” of the object is occurring simultaneously with a multitude of other physical and mental experiences—or prehensions. The radical subjectivity of the text, then, prevents an “analysis” not only of the New Critical variety, but of the feminist literary variety, too, for such readings ultimately depend on meaning and relationship to at least a minimally objective reality. On the other hand, philosophical analysis is equally unsuitable as the final “key” to this work. We can only say that Whiteheadian process thought gives us a way to approach it by placing it into a context that Stein would have approved—sanctifying Whitehead's view of reality by enshrining him in that sacred trio with herself and Picasso.

Whitehead is especially concerned about the “mistaken” perception of reality and individuals as “enduring substances.” “The simple notion of an enduring substance sustaining persistent qualities … expresses a useful abstract for many purposes of life,” he writes. “But whenever we try to use it as a fundamental statement of the nature of things, it proves itself mistaken.”²⁵ In Tender Buttons, no object, space, or person “endures” in time. “A Brown,” for example, is “Not liquid not more so is relaxed and yet there is a change, a news is pressing” (p. 473). In “Rooms” she explains changes in space in this way: “Explaining darkening and expecting relating is all of a piece … and yet there comes a change, there comes the time to press more air. This does not mean the same as disappearance” (p. 499). The “change” is clearly not an “event” in the conventional understanding, nor is the color a “thing,” nor is the person a delineated entity: “A Little Called Pauline” is “A little called anything shows shudders. Come and say what prints all day. A whole few watermelon. There is no pope” (p. 473). We can call this “stream of consciousness,” or “the linguistic moment,” or “free association,” but as a “description” of Pauline it certainly opposes our traditional idea of personhood. The notion of enduring substances, says Whitehead, “arose from a mistake and has never succeeded in any of its applications. But is has had one success: it has entrenched itself in language, in Aristotelian logic, and in metaphysics” (italics mine).²⁶

The “entrenchment” in language Whitehead refers to here has to do with constructions of Aryan languages which separate person from action. Such a language is fairly incapable of expressing a Whiteheadian (and Steinian) perception of reality—though one might argue that the visual arts are more capable of doing so in phenomena such as Cubism. When Stein tells us that she is attempting to “rid” herself of nouns, she is imagining a process language—one entirely made of verbs—that Whitehead must have admired when he met her a few years later in the “beautiful country” around Paris: “Doctor Whitehead and Gertrude Stein never ceased wandering around in it and talking about all things.”²⁷

Relating Stein's breakdown of language to the breaking down of the categorical modes of perception and identification, critics such as Weinstein have readily connected her to major trends in modernism. If we further link her perspective to a Whiteheadian one, then the sensibility of the modernist writers discussed previously can also be examined in the perspective of process thought. In Woolf, Gilman, Mansfield, and Chopin, characters who vacillate between defined identity and the flux of interrelatedness fear that the latter will result in a loss of “self.”²⁸ Mrs. Dalloway, Edna Pontellier, and the “Prelude” women retreat to rooms and enclosed spaces because they sense that their only means of self-assertion consists in claiming such defined spaces.²⁹ This retreat is, in fact, the metaphor culture has given them: the self as an “enduring substance” in space, asserted by ownership of space—colonization, conquests of frontiers, capitalism. In such a culture, too, Edna Pontellier's search for self in The Awakening instinctively takes her out of her husband's home and into her own “pigeon-house.” The move to different space fails, however, and she later understands all her options as pigeonholes too narrow and bound for her liking.

When these protagonists feel they have no options, they are expressing the reality of their language and cultural perception, which divided “self” and “other” categorically and absolutely.³⁰ In Whiteheadian metaphysics, on the other hand, such a dichotomy is impossible, for the “self” is constituted of its interrelations with all other experience. Saiving explains that in process thought, “Not only are individuality and relatedness compatable aspects of every actuality, these two principles require each other. And since they require each other, neither is more ‘real,’ important, or valuable than the other.”³¹

Consequently, the experience of these protagonists as both self and other is a more “true” experience than that of the autonomous self. There is no doubt that the “truth” Gilman's tormented narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” sees in the shifting wall patterns is more valid than the sane, honeyed, artificial world imposed upon her by her husband: “‘Bless her little heart!’ said he with a big hug ‘she shall be as sick as she pleases! But now let's improve the shining hours by going to sleep …’” (Gilman, p. 24). Likewise, Edna Pontellier, shaking all the patterns of her previous life, is condescendingly humored by her husband, to whom her new behavior is either sick or mad. Edna's “problem” is her refusal to identify with a single, recognizable “self;” when she “searches” for a new identity, she expects actually to find one—unable to understand that her self is the process of its changes. Again, the villain is cultural expectation of enduring consciousness. Cartesian philosophy, Whitehead points out, “conceives the thinker as creating the occasional thought. The philosophy of organism inverts the order, and conceives the thought as a constituent in the creation of the occasional thinker.”³²

Is this tension between “self” and “interrelatedness” an intrinsically female problem? Saiver has pointed out that women are traditionally expected to be more “related” to others than men. Penelope Washbourn, writing of the female experience and its expression in process thought, notes that the experience of pregnancy and menstrual cycles tend to “erode” in women traditional distinctions between self/other and mind/body.³³ Certainly the dilemmas of the previously discussed protagonists are centered on female sexual experience—on wifehood and motherhood. The sexual experience, then, may trigger the self/other or substance/flux problem in women in a particular way because sexuality more obviously demonstrates to women the metaphysics that Whitehead claims is actually universal. However, the problem is a cultural one, not an inherently female one, and further study would show, I think, that the problem manifests itself in the writings of men in other ways.

Having placed Stein's Tender Buttons in these contexts, I believe that this approach accords with that of Anna Gibbs, who uses the feminist criticism of French novelist Hélène Cixous to understand Stein “in terms of the possibilities she opens up for other women writers.”³⁴ Gibbs too avoids a biographical-feminist reading of Stein and allies herself and Cixous with a “third wave” of feminist criticism that centers on writing as self-creation and self-naming. She finds that Stein and Cixous share the dynamics of transformation and repetition that produce “entity writing” instead of “identity writing.” Entity writing concentrates on continuous presence, “so that consciousness is forced to become reflexive, and writing becomes a process of concentration, or intensification” (p. 288).

This concept of writing as “intensification,” which is repetitious in its exploring of the alternate possibilities of the moment, is very similar to Whitehead's description of the creative process in Religion in the Making. While all existence is naturally “creating” in process, the artist “brings together something which is actual and something which, at its entry into the process, is not actual.”³⁵ The novelty must resemble the actual, “but it must contrast with it in respect to contrary instances so as to obtain vividness and quality” (p. 115). Donald W. Sherburne has done an extended study of Whiteheadian aesthetics and explains the metaphysics of creativity as a “horizontal” prehension of experience, which is usually prehended “vertically.” The creative perception is sensitive to areas of consciousness not explored in commonplace experience; while “vertical” perception involves the integration of microcosmic entities into one macrocosmic prehension, the “horizontal” and creative perception is able to “concentrate macrocosmic entities into one focal point of experience.”³⁶

Thinking of Tender Buttons in relation to Whitehead is, I hope, a “horizontal” perception of several modernist writers and ideas. It involves the belief that feminist criticism must look beyond social context in literature to the philosophical context as a way to pinpoint the dilemmas of self-identity. The result may give us a more “complete” perspective on our experience in the world. Whitehead gives us a complex but viable model for that perspective, while Stein, ultimately iconoclastic, gives us the sound and sense of it: “The care with which there is incredible justice and likeness,” she concludes, “all this makes a magnificent asparagus, and also a fountain” (p. 450).

Notes

1. Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons, in Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten (New York: Modern Library, 1945), pp. 463 and 472. All references to the text come from this edition.

2. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, p. 5.

3. Cynthia Secor, “Ida, A Great American novel,” Twentieth Century Literature, 24 (1978), 100.

4. Pamela Hadas, “Spreading the Difference: One Way to Read Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons,” Twentieth Century Literature, 24 (1978), 64.

5. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1925), p. 11.

6. Valerie C. Saiving, “Androgynous Life: A Feminist Appropriation of Process Thought,” in Feminism and Process Thought: Harvard Divinity School/Claremont Christian Center for Process, ed. Sheila Davaney (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1981), pp. 18-19.

7. Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation (Boston: Beacon, 1973), p. 8.

8. Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” American Quarterly, 28 (1966), 152.

9. Katherine Mansfield, “Prelude,” in Stories (New York: Random House, 1956), p. 70.

10. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper (Boston, 1899; rpt. New York: Feminist Press, 1973), p. 30.

11. Jean Wyatt, “Thoughts on Fantasy in The Awakening,” N.E.H. Seminar, U. of Cal., Davis, 1981.

12. Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899; rpt. New York: Avon, 1972), p. 48.

13. B.F. Skinner, “Has Gertrude Stein a Secret?” Atlantic, Jan., 1934, pp. 53-57.

14. Michael J. Hoffman, Gertrude Stein (Boston: Twayne, 1976), p. 59.

15. See Robert Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York: Oxford 1970) and Michael J. Hoffman, The Development of Abstractionism in the Work of Gertrude Stein (Philadelphia: U. of Pa. Press, 1965), pp. 175-95.

16. Gertrude Stein, “Composition as Explanation,” in Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, p. 517.

17. Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America, quoted in Van Vechten's introduction to Tender Buttons in Selected Writings, p. 460.

18. Norman Weinstein, Gertrude Stein and the Literature of Modern Consciousness (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1970), p. 62.

19. Neil Schmitz, “Gertrude Stein as Post-Modernist: The Rhetoric of Tender Buttons,” Journal of Modern Literature, 3 (1974), 1208-18.

20. Rosalind S. Miller, Gertrude Stein: Form and Intelligibility (New York: Exposition Press, 1949), pp. 47-8; also see Weinstein, p. 57.

21. Allegra Stewart, “The Quality of Gertrude Stein's Creativity,” American Literature, 28 (1957), 496.

22. Allegra Stewart, Gertrude Stein and the Present (Cambridge: Harvard, 1967), p. 72.

23. See Pamela Hadas' work, which sees Tender Buttons as an articulation of the tensions between Stein and her brother Leo in the transition time when Alice Toklas had come into Stein's life and her brother was about to leave it.

24. See Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected ed., eds. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Macmillan, 1929; rpt. 1978). For the beginning reader of Whitehead, an easier summary is provided in the Saiving article.

25. Whitehead, p. 79.

26. Ibid.

27. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography, p. 145.

28. Anna S. Benajmin has done a thorough and brilliant analysis of the structure and “view of reality” in Mrs. Dalloway using a Whiteheadian approach in “Towards an Understanding of Virginia's Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 6 (1965), 214-227. While Benjamin emphasizes the structure of reality in the novel, I would press it further to show a problem of identity in Clarissa Dalloway that can be understood with process thought.

29. Another interesting point of view on rooms is given in James Naremore's The World Without a Self: Virginia Woolf and the Novel (New Haven and London: Yale, 1973), pp. 240-44.

30. It is interesting to speculate if our culture's dichotomy of perception is responsible for the development of schizophrenia. Maremore, discussing Virginia Woolf's expression of reality, brings up R. D. Laing's descriptions of a certain schizophrenic symptom of feeling a rush of “oneness” with the world followed by a rush of terror that the self will be “absorbed” wholly into this world and “lost.” Naremore mentions this, he says, to illustrate that part of Woolf's psychosis may have been incorporated into her lucid creativity (Naremore, p. 247). Nevertheless, we can wonder if the “schizophrenic” feels terror only because he has been conditioned to think that the “dissolving” of the self into a “oneness” is a terrible thing.

31. Saiving, p. 26.

32. Whitehead, p. 267

33. Penelope Washbourne, “The Dynamics of Female Experience: Process Models and Human Values,” in Feminism and Process Thought, pp. 93-4.

34. Anna Gibbs, “Helene Cixous and Gertrude Stein: New Directions in Feminist Criticism,” Meanjin Quarterly, 38 (1979), p. 291.

35. Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making (New York: Macmillan, 1926), p. 114.

36. Donald W. Sherburne, A Whiteheadian Aesthetic (New Haven: Yale, 1961), p. 162.