Stein embarked on a six-month lecture tour of various colleges and universities, among them Harvard and the University of Virginia. Her tour was also a success, and she was finally courted by an American publisher, Bennett Cerf of Random House.

In 1939, Stein and Toklas lived at their summer residence in the farming village of Bilignin, near the Swiss border. Even after France fell, the pair resolved to stay there for the remainder of the war even though their status as Jews and as American nationals made that a dangerous choice. Despite some close calls, they survived the occupation and returned to Paris at the end of 1944, where they began entertaining American G.I.s in their home. Stein's hectic lifestyle began to exhaust her, and she became seriously ill while vacationing in Luceau. She was diagnosed with cancer and underwent an unsuccessful operation for her condition. Stein died July 27, 1946, and was buried in Pere Lachaise Cemetery; Toklas, who died twenty-one years later, was laid to rest by her side.

MAJOR WORKS

Although Stein was an extraordinarily prolific writer who produced works in a wide variety of genres, her best known text remains The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, a memoir of her early years in Paris up to and including her involvement with the literary community of expatriates in the 1920s. The work was a Literary Guild selection and appeared in a series of four installments in Atlantic Monthly. Unlike most of her other works, The Autobiography was considered highly readable. In contrast was Stein's personal favorite, the novel The Making of Americans which was widely deemed long, rambling, and repetitious, and although the author compared it to Remembrance of Things Past, it was judged far too eccentric to find an audience. Assessed as equally difficult was the only volume of poems published during her lifetime, Tender Buttons (1914). The work is divided into three sections: "Objects," "Food," and "Rooms," and is considered by many scholars to be Stein's erotic tribute to Toklas.

Her dramatic works, most of them written in her unique experimental style, include What Happened (1913), Ladies' Voices (1916), and A Circular Play (1920). Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), which was scored by Virgil Thomson, was one of the few plays by Stein to be produced during her lifetime. She also collaborated with Thomson on 1947's The Mother of Us All, a drama based on the life and work of Susan B. Anthony.

Stein's essays on literature, such as Lectures in America (1935) and Narration (1935), and her memoirs of historical periods and events, such as Wars I Have Seen (1945) and Brewsie and Willie (1946), were produced in a more conventional, and therefore more accessible, style. Like her autobiography, these works were far more popular with both readers and critics than her more innovative texts.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Although Stein was forced to underwrite the expenses of her first published work herself, Three Lives was well received by American critics who especially praised the story "Melanctha." However, the reception of what Stein considered her masterpiece, The Making of Americans, was negative, and she was unable to find an English or American publisher until fourteen years after she completed the book. The majority of her work was considered far too eccentric for most readers and most of it was published at her own expense. Critics and literary scholars objected to Stein's experiments with language and syntax and by her deliberate violations of the standard conventions—both thematic and stylistic—of virtually every literary genre. Her intricate patterns of repetition and her failure to use punctuation made her writing not just challenging, but according to some critics, unreadable.

These same violations of literary norms, though, are what feminist scholars have found most praiseworthy in Stein's body of work. They consider her experimental use of language and forms to be a conscious rejection of the patriarchal literary tradition, and find her treatment of sexuality and gender roles to be bold and innovative. Wendy Steiner (see Further Reading) claims that although Stein was read only as a cult figure at the time of her death, forty years later she had been elevated to a position within the American literary canon largely due to increased attention from feminist critics. Bettina L. Knapp reports on Stein's complicated relationship to feminism, claiming that while Stein was "not an overt subscriber to feminism," in some of her poetry she "clearly displays her ire against the patriarchal Judeo-Christian society."

Ironically, although Stein rejected conventional notions of femininity in her own life, she often advocated a traditional role for other women. Her essay "Degeneration in American Women," written in 1901 or 1902 and recently analyzed by Brenda Wineapple, makes this clear. According to Stein, "the only serious business of life in which [the female] cannot be entirely outclassed by the male is that of child bearing," although she did allow for a limited number of exceptions—herself included. Janice L. Doane (see Further Reading) points out discrepancies between Stein's 1898 essay, "The Value of a College Education for Women," and her polemical 1904 novel Fernhurst. According to Doane, in the novel "Stein rejects … through her narrator's speech, the defenses of women's colleges which she had previously endorsed so wholeheartedly" in the essay. For Doane, by insisting on essential differences between men and women, Stein put herself in the difficult position of "reserving a special place for herself as an anomaly in terms of traditional categories. She is a woman speaking as a man …" Claudia Roth Pierpont concurs, reporting that Stein had been persuaded by a friend to write the paper on women's education; for Stein herself, though, "the last thing she was interested in was the cause of women's rights."

SOURCE: Galvin, Mary E. "'This Shows It All': Gertrude Stein and the Reader's Role in the Creation of Significance." In Queer Poetics: Five Modernist Women Writers, pp. 37-50. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1999.

In the following essay, Galvin analyzes the purpose and significance of Stein's subversion of traditional assumptions about literary language, form, and precedents in terms of her position as lesbian writer.

Next to Sappho, Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) is probably the most famous lesbian writer in recorded literary history. However, although the nature and duration of her relationship with Alice B. Toklas has long been common knowledge, until recently most Stein critics when considering her work have chosen either to disregard politely Stein's sexual "difference" or to act as if this "difference" in Stein really made her no different from other "men of genius": that she simply assumed the male role and acted out her relationship with Alice heterosexually, in the timeworn tradition of the great poet and his companion/servant/muse.

In either case, we can see heterosexist assumptions operating to erase the significance of lesbian existence in the creation of modern literature. The first approach simply ignores sexuality and gendered positions as relevant in reading Stein. This is a surprisingly "generous" move when we consider that the gender of the writer has been taken into account critically since the days of Plato and Aristotle. Yet with Stein, many critics seem to have been content to accept her as an honorary "man," in the generic, universal sense. Stein's inclusion within the canon of modernist poetry depends on a willingness to disregard her gender and her sexuality, except perhaps to note in passing that she is one of the few "female" participants in the category, "Significant Writers of the 20th century.">1>

The second approach, to acknowledge Stein's lesbian existence but recast it in bourgeois, heterosexual terms, helps bring her life, if not her work, into the realm of the "thinkable." Critics favorable to Stein attempt to render her life respectable in these terms, while those who insist on her lunacy find that her inability to be authentically heterosexual constitutes the source of great "anxiety" in both her writings and her life. Both of these positions assume a fundamental heterosexuality, which, even if it is somehow strayed from, is still the standard.

The idea that a lesbian is really a man trapped in a woman's body, is only one of several ways that the straight mind can acknowledge lesbian existence and yet still manage to dismiss it as culturally or epistemologically insignificant. By acknowledging a "difference" that is in fact the same, the straight mind, with its limited range of what is thinkable psychosexually, does not need to make any structural shifts in order to accommodate anything "other" than that which is already contained within the perameters of its dichotomies.

In more recent years, with the rise of feminist literary criticism and the increasingly visible lesbian and gay liberation movement, it has become more acceptable to discuss Stein's lesbianism as a relevant factor in any critical assessment of her life and work. One of the more popular strategies for reading Stein as lesbian is to insist that there is a Steinian code by which she can speak to Alice erotically, without drawing censure from her larger public.

Advocates of this hermeneutic approach often claim that although Stein's code is arbitrary, it can be cracked, and once we have our cribsheet filled in, we can readily interpret everything from her frequency of orgasm to her guilt complex at having failed heterosexually oriented familial expectations. While the motives for devising such an ingenious critical approach to Stein may be genuine in terms of accepting, even honoring, the lesbian behind the "man of genius," the major shortcoming of this method is that it rests on principles that are antithetical not only to Stein's approach to composition, but also to her articulation of a nonhierarchically based lesbian existence.>2>

Gertrude Stein was a relentless advocate of what she termed "democracy." While this particular term, along with its counterpart, "equality," have been perhaps irretrievably corrupted for us late-twentieth-century readers, conceptually, the ideas these terms represent are still quite fresh. In more contemporary terms, Stein's "democracy" translates into our grappling with the nonhierarchical, the nonpatriarchal, with new ways of thinking that embrace multiplicity.

Indeed, such a discourse is very strange to our patriarchally entrenched linguistic consciousness, and many readers have felt intimidated, or even threatened, by Stein's strange discourse. For example, her aversion to punctuation has been received with varying degrees of hostility and confusion, yet she avoided it because she found it to be too directive. As Judy Grahn says about Stein's use of (or lack of) commas, "She thought this was condescending to and undermining of the independence of mind of the reader.">3> By eschewing grammatical structuring, with its privileging of the noun-verb phrase and its insistence on temporal closure, Stein was extending this democratic attitude toward language itself.

To some extent, the hostility some readers have felt toward Stein's irreverent deconstruction of "meaning" and her abdication of the privileged position of knowing (authority) is understandable, in light of how much of our social order depends on such principles. Usually, the occurrence of certain expected structures constitutes its own sort of "code," which allows the reader certain shortcuts to comprehension. Without these structures in place, people tend to feel ungrounded, sensing that all their assumptions about reality and their place in it have been dislocated. In many ways, this is analogous to how lesbian existence is received under heterosexism. To acknowledge the presence and difference of lesbian existence, even unconsciously, is unsettling of the "comfort" provided by heterosexist structures.

On an unconscious level, then, the fact that Stein actually was a lesbian and not particularly secretive about it probably fed into the critical resistance toward accepting the challenge of her experiments. This resentment can sometimes take the form of feeling excluded, as if one were being left out of the joke.

We can see why some believe she was writing in a secret lovers' language to Alice. But if this were true, why would she bother to seek publication and to elicit responses from many readers, even of the unpublished manuscripts? While it is true that Alice was probably the first reader to take her seriously and the one to give her the most support most consistently (her brother Leo mocked her), there is no reason to presume she was writing only for Alice.

From the outset of her writing career, Gertrude Stein was outside the literary establishment. Trained in psychology and medicine, and subsequently living in Paris, she was an interloper in the field of American letters. The writing she produced, always composed of relatively simple words and phrases, drew directly from colloquial diction; Stein's use of a finite vocabulary eschewed the use of "literary" diction. Through a combination of repetition and variation, Stein found she could create emphasis and degrees of emotional intensity without relying heavily on adjectives and nouns to further her descriptions. In this way she could begin to move away from the categorizing tendencies of these particular parts of speech.

By abandoning nominalism, a staple of traditional literary poetics, Stein also severed her dependence on metaphor. If she felt any clarification was necessary, she would repeat her "meaning" (her original word choice) in a slightly different verbal context. In this way, she avoided drawing resemblances between two dissimilar beings, since doing so would have falsified the unique being of the person, place, or thing described. Stein was always acutely aware of the variety, the multiplicity of identity, of "being."

Thus, her writing, always in an American idiom, defies hermeneutic approaches in its repetitive, sparsely punctuated, and illogical form, yet manages to engage us through its effective use of sound and tone. This kind of writing is best read aloud, for it is then that we can fully appreciate the "insistence" for which she was aiming:

They did then learn many ways to be gay and they
were then being gay being quite regular in being
gay, being gay and they were learning little
things, little things in ways of being gay, they
were very regular then, they were learning very
many little things in ways of being gay, they were
being gay and using these little things they were
learning to have to be gay with regularly gay with
then and they were gay the same amount they had
been gay.>4>

While it is exceedingly popular to consider Stein a singular "genius" existing in isolation without connection to poetic predecessors, particularly other lesbian or even female predecessors, I see Stein as a direct descendant of Dickinson. In her linguistic experimentation, Stein, like Dickinson, often plays with the multiplicity of language: its ability for ambiguity, equivocation, and unstable meanings.

In both poets, we can witness a propensity for disrupting categorical distinctions, and therefore the "truths" they establish. Whereas Dickinson does leave just enough traditional structure in place to make interpretation feasible, Stein pushes her poetics of disruption into the realm of the rationally unrecognizable.

If Dickinson's poetics are like a ghost that haunts convention, displacing objects and expectations, then Stein's poetics are like a volcanic eruption, permeating and undermining structure and form on every level, from the "balanced completion" of the sentence to that of the paragraph, through genres, and ultimately addressing the larger assumptions of culture and tradition itself.

One such set of assumptions that Stein's writing undermines is the concept of literary language and form, and the need for critical interpretation. The passage quoted above, taken from "Miss Furr and Miss Skeene," is fairly self-evident in its content. Only if one is operating from a critical base that assumes the symbolic, that sense is concealed rather than revealed through language, can one be puzzled by the "meaning" of the passage. It's "about" two women who learn how to be gay and then do so "regularly." The "difficulty" in reading this passage comes only when a reader refuses the obvious and retreats to the familiarity of heterosexist assumption. Of course, Stein is playing with this propensity to think "straight" in her choice of the word "gay," which puns directly on the different, but not mutually exclusive, denotations accorded the word.

In "The There That Was and Was Not There," contemporary lesbian poet and theorist Judy Grahn writes: "For years I thought: 'She is difficult,' until one day it occurred to me to say it the other way: 'She is easy. I am difficult.'… Suppose it is not that she is veiled and obscure but that we, her readers, are. We are veiled by our judgments" (Grahn, 5).

Of course, the veil of heterosexism works to obscure the lesbian content of "Miss Furr and Miss Skeene," but the obscurity is not inherent in Stein's use of language. In a further example of this cultural obscurantism, many readers have taken the presence of "some dark and heavy men" as well as "some who were not so heavy and some who were not so dark" to imply that Helen Furr and Georgine Skeene had heterosexual liaisons. But just the fact that the two women knew and "sat with" some men does not mean they are not lesbian. Contrary to popular mythology, lesbians do not hate men and often have friendships as well as other relationships with a variety of men. And these men could, of course, be gay men. The fact that some of these men were "dark and heavy" (and some were not!) could contradict another heterosexist stereotype—that gay men tend to be pale and thin as well as lispy and limp-wristed. When Stein mentions these male associates of Helen and Georgine, she states, "They were regular then, they were gay then, they were where they wanted to be then, where it was gay to be then, they were regularly gay then."

In her personal life, Stein was not "in the closet." Anyone who came to visit her understood the nature of the relationship between Alice and herself. In fact, her overt lesbianism eventually became a source of great distress for Ernest Hemingway, who would have preferred her to be more closeted. There is little reason to assume she was closeted in her writing. In her subject matter, Stein tended to draw on the "actualities" around her—people, objects, and events she had known.

Yet, even as she drew on these "actualities," it is really the use of language itself and its interactions with consciousness that constitutes her main theme. Unlike her contemporaries the imagists, Stein's concern with consciousness led her to abandon any pretense of "objectivity." Hers is a writing of intersubjectivity—and the psychosexual aspect of her own subjectivity was decidedly lesbian.

One of the accusations hurled at Stein by her detractors is that her writing is solipsistic, self-occupied, and self-centered. Yet in her search for the "bottom nature" of her characters, for the "essence" of objects and foods, she was really seeking to discover and record the inner being, the consciousness of the world around her. Paradoxically, she realized, particularly in writing her first "poetry" cycle Tender Buttons, that the only access she could have to these other "inner beings" was through her own consciousness. Thus, she discarded the illusion of objective knowing and its concomitant poetics of "objective" description, and located her writing firmly within her own consciousness as it played in contemplation across the surface of its subject. This "self-centering," as Judy Grahn calls it, ironically, was not self-occupied, but was geared toward what she termed "listening."

Stein herself always considered her writing to be accessible to anyone who would listen. She believed strongly in the intelligence of her readers, and in publishing her writing, she was inviting her readers to listen alongside her to the inner being of the subject at hand, as well as to the play of her own consciousness in its encounter with her subject. Thus, the subjectivity in her writing is not solipsistic, but an extension of subjectivity from and to others, a layering of multiple subjectivities. In order to create this writing of intersubjectivity, she knew she had to forego any attempt at representationality. Not only would a poetics of resemblance compromise the unique inner being of her subject matter, but it would also burden her language with associations and meanings that would interfere with the immediate experience of "listening."

In this one aspect, at least, Gertrude Stein was not unlike many of her contemporaries, who were concerned with divesting the English language of its cultural baggage and reclaiming its poetic possibilities from an overwrought sentimentality. But while others were occupied with wresting new meanings from the language to express the radical sentiments of a new age, Stein went a step further, attempting to divest language from the burden of representationality itself.

In "Patriarchal Poetry," Stein explores the traditional role of linear sequence in the creation of "meaning." Rather than de lineating her comprehension of the way this discourse functions, however, Stein simply demonstrates her knowledge through parody:

What is the difference between a fig and an
apple. One comes before the other. What is the
difference between a fig and an apple one comes
before the other what is the difference between a
fig and an apple one comes before the other.
When they are here they are here too here too
they are here too. When they are here they
are
here too when they are here they are here too.
As out in it there.
As not out not out in it there as out in it out
in it there as out in it there as not out in it
there as out in as out in it as out in it there.
Next to next next to Saturday next to next
next
to Saturday next to next next to Saturday.
This shows it all.>5>

Patriarchal language, and by extension heterocentric thinking, depend on a categorical approach toward identity. In this passage, Stein demonstrates her understanding of how the concept of "difference" depends on a dichotomous distinction that hangs on the simple negative "not."

Typically, in this system of discourse, "not out" is equivalent to "in it." Yet, this is only part of the story. The initial passage, "What is the difference between a fig and an apple. One comes before the other" illustrates the role temporality plays in categorical concepts of identity. This temporal structure is usually maintained through the linear sequence of grammar. Thus, when she plays with the distinction between "out" and "in" without the guiding structure of grammatical subordination, Stein shows us that the distinction cannot hold through a simple dichotomous negation alone. Such a distinction must also exist in a larger structural context, one that privileges a certain notion of time as linear sequence.

Taken together, these combined elements of patriarchal poetry, definition through exclusion, and adherence to "proper" sequence, allow the arrogant and grandiose claim to complete knowledge: "This shows it all." At the same time, by parodying the certitude of such a technique, Stein herself is claiming to have uncovered something important about the way such a poetics defines a consciousness. Her playful traversal of linguistic boundaries has enabled Stein to reveal these boundaries at work in our consciousness. Thus, her writing also "shows it all."

In her explorations of linguistic structure in its relation to consciousness, Stein returned again and again to the problem of grammar. For it is here that we find the keystone to both linear and hierarchical thinking:

In Stein's work the linear plot inherent in English language sentences falls away. The noun is no longer the all-important main character surrounded by subservient modifiers and dependent articles and clauses, the verb is no longer a mounted hero riding into the sentence doing all the action, while the happy or tragic ending of objective clause waits in the wings with appropriate punctuation to lead us through the well-known plot to the inevitable end period.

She let the characters (which in some of her writing are parts of speech or numbers, not people or other creatures) spin out from their own internal natures as she let them happen from within themselves rather than placing them in an externally directed context. She discovered them as she uncovered them layer by layer through the rhythms of their speech or parts of speech, and the patterns of their daily lives, she listened to them as her eyes listened to Cezanne's intensity of color, carrying this idea of equality further to where everything in a given field is seen as equally vital, life is perceived as a dance in which every element contributes to every other.

(Grahn, 11)

Throughout her career, Stein experimented with various ways to achieve this effect. As she herself has written, she took her initial cue from Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, and other early modernist painters. Stein began converting words from bearers of meaning and identity into plastic entities, treating them in their purely sensory character. She did this by arranging them next to each other, setting up and exploring spatial and tactile relations among them rather than the more conventional syntactic, semantic, logical ones.

For the reader, these relations can only occur in the present moment, since they are unique to the text, yet do not depend on what precedes or follows in it. The absence of a linear syntax (on the level of the sentence) or a narrative progression (on the level of overall structure) strips the text of any temporal reference to anything else in the text.

Thus, in reading her text, we must inhabit the "continuous present" of the text at all times. Since this focus on language without the linear structure of past-present-future is so foreign to our typical ways of thinking through language, Stein brings to the forefront of our awareness the linguistic structures on which our thinking usually depends. Through what is absent, we become conscious of the role linguistic structures usually play in our creation of "meaning."

When the text frustrates our attempts to formulate a coherency of significance, we are made aware of the extent to which our "consciousness," as it is socially constructed through language, depends on the concepts of meaning and identity to hold it together. Any "meaning" that may arise from reading Stein's text stems from the confluence of linguistic habit with the reader's subjectivity, which includes personal experience, outside knowledge, and leaps of the imagination, all interacting within the context provided by the text itself.

Just as she sought to work nonhierarchically within the linguistic field of her writings, Stein also sought to establish a nonhierarchical relation to her readers. Stein's poetics of intersubjectivity depends on the participation of the reader, with her culturally inculcated desire for meaning and the openness of her own consciousness as it plays across the text in search of this meaning.

By taking words from their expected context and placing them outside the confines of typical grammatical structure, Stein is creating a linguistic space where words can be more flexible. Taken out of the clearly defined roles of a patriarchal discourse, they begin to resonate with their own potential, as the reader is thwarted in her attempt to determine the author's intent.

Since Stein is not interested in conveying any definitive "meaning" through her text, her writing is void of the patriarchal concept of the author's "intent." Rather, Stein seeks only to convey the play of her consciousness through language. She is abdicating her "authority" over "meaning," thereby subverting a hierarchical power and creating a more "democratic" relationship to her reader.

In playing fiercely with the multiplicity of language, Stein breaks down the distinction between author and reader in the search for "meaning." The absence of exact meaning is for Stein a space she opens up into a broad vista of significance, which she invites the reader to step inside to experience together with her, in the only time the text allows, the continuous present. The fluidity of language use she achieves by foregoing the hierarchizing structures of grammar allows each word in the text to reverberate with possible significances, and the reader's participation is crucial in this process.

Even when Stein's work focuses on her relationship with Alice, she invites us to participate in her play of consciousness as its language dances across the page. In what is perhaps her "most lesbian" poem, "Lifting Belly," Stein calls her disruptive poetics of intersubjectivity into action, so that the reader is invited into a lesbian world, the world viewed through a lesbian consciousness.

It is clearly evident that Alice played an important part in Stein's life, art, and sense of personal identity. Early on, in her portrait of Melanctha, Stein observed that everyone has loving in them and that this loving is a central aspect of identity. Nearly ten years later, in "Lifting Belly," Stein chose to write about the significance of the particular kind of loving she and Alice shared, and to explore the effects this loving was having on her own sense of being.>6>

Written while Gertrude and Alice were staying in Majorca during the First World War, the poem centers on the daily life and conversation shared by the two lovers. Although Alice had already been living with Stein for about seven years, Leo had moved out of 27 Rue de Fleuris only the previous year. The time period in which "Lifting Belly" was written (1915-1917) constitutes what must have been a "honeymoon" period in their relationship. Thus, it is fitting that the poem Stein wrote during this period comprises her fullest linguistic exploration of her relationship with Alice.

The poem places the two women in relationship with each other, and with the world and people around them. As they converse on various subjects with varying degrees of seriousness and silliness, they return again and again to the title phrase, "Lifting Belly."

Grammatically, the phrase constantly shifts roles. It is an action, a person, an event, and more. While the phrase has an obvious sexual connotation, Stein places it in an wide array of contexts so that the words begin to multiply with significances never before imagined. Thereby she destabilizes and expands its "meaning." Everything the lovers discuss in the poem is discussed in relation to "Lifting Belly." "Lifting Belly" becomes the lens through which the lovers view and speak of the world. It is their lesbian consciousness:

Lifting belly is an occasion. An occasion to
please me. Oh yes. Mention it.
Lifting belly is courteous.
Lifting belly is hilarious, gay and favorable.
Oh Yes it is.
Indeed it is not a disappointment.
Not to me.
Lifting belly is such an incident. In one's life
Lifting belly is such an incident in one's life.
I don't mean to be reasonable.
Shall I say thin.
This makes me smile.
Lifting belly is so kind.
(Yale, 10)

It is fairly common knowledge among lesbians and gay men that the process of "coming out" involves more than simply acknowledging and deciding whether or not to act on one's sexual inclinations. Because the decision to "come out" is made in the context of a culture that is hostile, or at best indifferent, to nonheterosexual choosing, this "personal" decision affects our relationship with the culture at large.

Coming out necessarily entails a "difference of view," since to accept the dominant view would render our lesbianism "impossible." This difference of view has been described by Audre Lorde as an "erotic knowledge," a knowledge that "empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence.">7> In "Lifting Belly," Stein is both celebrating and exploring the power of this erotic knowing in her life. She wants to share with us, her readers, the effects of "such an incident in one's life."

Lifting belly is such an experiment.
We were thoroughly brilliant.
If I were a postman I would deliver letters. We
call them letter carriers.
Lifting belly is so strong. And so judicious.
Lifting belly is an exercise.
Exercise is very good for me.
Lifting belly necessarily pleases the latter.
Lifting belly is necessary.
Do believe me.
Lifting belly quietly.
It is very exciting.
Stand.
Why do you stand.
Did you say you thought it would make any
difference.
Lifting belly is not so kind.
Little places to sting.
We used to play star spangled banner.
Lifting belly is so near.
Lifting belly is so dear.
Lifting belly all around.
Lifting belly makes a sound. (Yale, 13-14)

In devising techniques that are decidedly unlike traditional "patriarchal poetry," Stein does not set out to describe her relationship with Alice for us; a descriptive voice would automatically cast the reader as an outsider to the relationship. Rather, she wants to draw us into the play of her lesbian consciousness. She does this by bringing us into the poem as active participants in the wordplay of the language. For, above all, "Lifting Belly" is playful.

As she explores the eroticism of vision she shares with Alice, Stein also explores and celebrates the language in its erotic possibilities. The poem abounds with rhymes, homonyms, and associational relations among words and phrases. Bristling with what today might be called jouissance, Stein's text is an energy field, and we are invited to dance within the charged atmosphere of instability and overdetermination of meaning.

This is the way I see it.
Lifting belly can you say it.

Lifting belly persuade me.
Lifting belly persuade me.
You'll find it very easy to sing to me.
What can you say.
Lifting belly set.
I can not pass a door.
You mean odor.
I smell sweetly.
So do you.
Lifting belly plainly.
Can you sing.
Can you sing for me.
Lifting belly settled.
Can you excuse money.
Lifting belly has a dress.
Lifting belly in a mess.
Lifting belly in order.
Complain I don't complain.
She is my sweetheart.
Why doesn't she resemble an other.
This I cannot say here.
Full of love and echoes.
Lifting belly is full of love. (Yale, 30-31)

While it may be tempting to read "Lifting Belly" as a "dialogue" between lovers, the text itself resists such a reading. One of the greatest hindrances to a dialogic approach is that the poem is devoid of quotation marks or any other clear differentiation of speakers. The effect of the absence of clear reference marks is similar to that of Dickinson's ambiguously referenced pronouns: in both poets, ambiguity allows for a richly evocative multiplicity of significance. To try to sort out which lines can be attributed to which lover is not only impossible, but undoes what Stein has accomplished. Throughout "Lifting Belly," she is not trying to exclude the reader, but to create a shared linguistic space.

Rather than struggling to reassert an order intentionally eschewed by Stein, the poem might be more fruitfully engaged by giving ourselves over to the text as it is written. While it is true that the poem conveys a sense of intimacy between the lovers, the lack of attributive punctuation works toward inviting the reader into this intimacy. We must bring our own consciousness, full of imagination and inventiveness, into the text.

We cannot stand outside the poem in judgment of its "meaning" or its structure; we must participate in the construction of its "meaning" or else it remains meaningless. "Lifting Belly" is about relationship, the relationship shared by Gertrude and Alice, and the difference their lesbianism made in their relationship to the world, their consciousness of the world, and the events around them. Through a complex strategy of presenting us with a "dialogue" lacking quotation marks, in which a continually repeated and redefined "subject" ("lifting belly") is discussed with a deter-minedly ambiguous reference to other subjects, Stein makes the reader a participant in the conversation rather than an eavesdropper. In this way, Stein draws her readers into a relationship with her lesbian loving and perceiving. She is inviting us into the continuum of lesbian existence.

Lifting belly is so kind.
Darling wifie is so good.
Little husband would.
Be as good.
If he could.
This was said.
Now we know how to differ.
From that.
Certainly.
Now we say.
Little hubbie is good.
Every Day.
She did want a photograph.
Lifting belly changed her mind.
Lifting belly changed her
mind.
Do I look fat.
Do I look fat and thin.
Blue eyes and windows.
You mean Vera.
Lifting belly can guess.
Quickly.
Lifting belly is so pleased.
Lifting Belly seeks pleasure.
And she finds it altogether. (Yale, 49)

In "Lifting Belly," Stein brings to the forefront the play of the signifier as it joyfully traverses the boundaries of logic and identificatory meaning. Just as Stein's nontraditional use of language allowed her to experiment with nonhierarchically based forms of expression, her lesbian connection with Alice allowed her to experiment with nonhierarchical forms of human relationships.

Throughout the poem, several "roles" are mentioned: baby, pussy, caesar, bunny, husband, wife, mother, man, bird. But the lack of quotation marks makes it impossible to know which of the lovers to attribute lines to, so that the ambiguity of the speaker's identity feeds into the ambiguity of the roles named. The taking on of sexual/gender roles in the poem is arbitrary and temporary. Stein is playing with our expectations for such roles to be stable and consistent, just as she disrupts our expectations in regard to the grammatical functions of words. By inviting the reader into her linguistic dance, she is inviting us to experience the playful construction of identity, as consciousness, sexuality, and language collide within the energy field that is her text.

In the meantime listen to Miss Cheatham.
In the midst of writing.
In the midst of writing there is merriment. (Yale, 54)

Notes

1. For an excellent historical overview of Stein criticism, see Michael J. Hoffman, Critical Essays on Gertrude Stein (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986). Richard Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970) and Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986) were indispensable to me in writing this chapter.
2. I am indebted to Benstock for her argument advocating a reassessment of this approach and for the suggestiveness of her own reading strategy, particularly as delineated in Women of the Left Bank, 158-193. For approaches that favor this "lesbian hermeneutics," see Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces; Elizabeth Fifer, Rescued Readings: A Reconstruction of Gertrude Stein's Difficult Texts (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992); Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man's Land, Volume 1 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988); Lisa Ruddick, "A Rosy Charm: Gertrude Stein and the Repressed Feminine," in Hoffman, Critical Essays, 225-240; Cynthia Secor, "Gertrude Stein: The Complex Force of Her Femininity," in Women, the Arts, and the 1920's in Paris and New York, eds. Kenneth W. Wheeler and Virginia Lee Lussier (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1982), 27-35; and Catherine R. Stimpson, "Gertrice/Altrude: Stein, Toklas, and the Paradox of the Happy Marriage," in Mothering the Mind, eds. Ruth Perry and Martine Watson Brownley (New York: Holmes and Meyer, 1984), "Gertrude Stein and the Transposition of Gender" in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), "The Mind, the Body, and Gertrude Stein," in Critical Inquiry 3, no. 3 (Spring 1977): 489-506, and "The Somagrams of Gertrude Stein" in Poetics Today 6, nos. 1-2 (1985): 67-80.
3. Judy Grahn, Really Reading Gertrude Stein (Freedom, Calif.: Crossing Press, 1989), 10.
4. Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 566.
5. The Yale Gertrude Stein, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), 128.
6. For an insightful and specifically lesbian reading of this poem, see Rebecca Mark's introduction to Lifting Belly, published in book form by Naiad Press, 1989.
7. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Trumansburg, N. Y.: Crossing Press, 1984) 57.

BETTINA L. KNAPP (ESSAY DATE 1990)

SOURCE: Knapp, Bettina L. "Tender Buttons: Cubism and an Alchemical Linguistic Trajectory." In Gertrude Stein, pp. 111-35. New York: Continuum, 1990.

In the following essay, Knapp discusses the themes, style, and technique of Tender Buttons with those of cubism, interpreting the volume's three parts in terms of the writing process, sexuality, and psychology.

Tender Buttons (1914) may be regarded as one of Stein's most innovative and most esoteric works. Like the alchemist who transmutes his metals and records his findings in iconographic representations, ciphers, and diagrams, Stein projects her continuously altering mental meanderings, meditations, visions, and free associations onto real objects, foods, and rooms. First viewed as distinct substances, the images she observes, like the chemical combinations studied by those ancient scientists, are depicted with great "exactitude."

Working with the word, rather than with the alchemists' metals, Stein's lexicon, when externalized and placed on the white sheet of paper, is explicit and redolent with clarity. Such clarity, however, is a strategy, a subterfuge, a springboard for the spawning of infinite associations and analogies.

Like the alchemists who purified the baser elements (lead) with which they worked by putting them through triturating tests, so Stein also experimented with words, requiring them to go through her version of trial by fire and water. Words that had become atrophied through centuries of use and misuse were dismembered, mutilated, stripped of their traditional and logical meanings, relationships, analogies, memories, and associations. Dross was shorn while the core, the primitive essence and melody, was retained by Stein to decant into fresh and heteroclite conjunctions of words. Such a process allowed her to receive the old word(s) in the now, as it had once existed long ago; in its pristine purity, dazzling, sparkling, glowing, ready for incantation in melody—in the poem.

Alchemists, who had to maintain strict secrecy concerning their experiments in order to protect themselves against persecution by the Roman Catholic Church, which believed their discoveries might in some way lessen its authority, coded their records, writing them in symbols, glyphs, and iconic signs. Stein, unwilling to reveal her most private thoughts and feelings to an unfeeling and destructive public, was likewise secretive. Accordingly, Tender Buttons, is a confluence of word/signs—a mystery.

For some, this slim volume may be looked upon as a religious work, but only insofar as the word religion is understood in its original Latin sense—Latin religare: to root, to bind, to link back, to reconnect with a collective past. Never, when referring to Stein, is it to be associated with organized religion. In this regard, Tender Buttons, divided into three parts—Objects, Food, and Rooms—may be viewed as an inner trajectory, Stein's descent into being, into the collective unconscious, the source of creation.

Painterly factors are also evident in Tender Buttons. Cézanne's influence, as previously noted, is primordial. As he had believed it was more important for the artist to reveal geometric structures hidden behind objects than to delineate the objects concretely, so Stein adopted a similar method with regard to the function of words. Once terms had been pared down to their essentials, the skeleton structure and bone marrow of the word and work could come forth full-blown.

Cézanne's attempt to "re-create nature" by simplifying forms, reducing them to their basic geometric equivalents, led to certain distortions, as in Mont Sainte-Victoire (1885-87). Likewise did Stein's signs, symbols, and glyphs appear disfigured, deformed, and because of such altered appearances, were disorienting to the viewer. Cézanne, after divesting his canvases of traditional perspective, allowed new spatial patterns to emerge, leading him to delineate objects from shifting rather than from a single point of view. The resulting interaction between flat planes, which encouraged minute transitional color tones to oscillate one against another, gave the observer the impression of vibrating surfaces. In like manner did Stein divest her words of perspective and hierarchies, endowing them, once juxtaposed, with continuous motility, and not allowing one to assume greater importance than another. Indeed, so active and vital did they become both as single and sequenced units, that she played one "lively word" against or with another in a continuous present.

Cézanne's views were also significant in the spawning of cubism. There were, understandably, affinities between Stein's writings, most specifically Tender Buttons, and the canvases of such friends as Picasso, Braque, and Gris. Like them, she emphasizes still lifes, with their commonplace objects like potatoes or asparagus, which also have their cerebral and spiritual equivalents. When embedded in the sentence, a potato or an asparagus is conveyed two-dimensionally, flatly, without adjectives; nor is memory called upon since it serves to highlight one or another element within a grammatically self-contained speech unit. Thus did Stein dispense, as had Cézanne and the cubists even more radically, with perspective and the illusion of depth. Fragmentation and dissociation of traditional literary forms and conventions allowed her the psychological and aesthetic freedom to re-create fresh verbal compositions, and in so doing, expand and implement their impact on the reader. Like the cubists also, she did not attempt to find meaning in the group of objects depicted in Tender Buttons. What was of import to her was the need to convey ideas and feelings relating to these forms in terms of their mass, color, texture, and line.

Stein had come a long way since Three Lives and The Making of Americans and the universal types ("bottom nature"), which she attempted to portray non-mimetically, by means of the repetitive use of verbs of being, genderless pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions. What she now sought to capture was the perception of that single moment when the mind comes into contact with the object of its consciousness, and the sensory experience it then conveys in a continuous present. Each such occurrence is viewed by Stein as unique: no memory of a past or of a special type. Stein's mental leaps, requiring intense concentration and discipline on her part, revealed an ability to verbalize and sensorialize the effect of the shock or head-on collision between consciousness and the object of its focus in a present reality.>1>

Tender Buttons, like cubist painting, is representational. Yet, paradoxically, its gleanings are increasingly abstract and hermetic. Words used to replicate an object emerge arbitrarily. There is, then, no defining or ordering of them into readily understandable groupings. As Picasso, Braque, and Gris created their collages, so Stein brought forth her own pictorial reality in the word, which she viewed as a thing in and of itself. Unlike the cubists in their collages, she did not include fragments of newspapers, cigarette wrappers, tickets, and other sundry objects drawn from the everyday world in her writings. Her architectonic structures were built instead on polysemous words.

In Tender Buttons, therefore, words are for the most part non-referential, non-relational, nonideational, non-illusionist. Devoid of descriptions and for the most part unintelligible to those whose world is limited to rational reasoning, the forward movement of Stein's lexicon is triggered by an inner necessity—by some mysterious energy. Although she did away with most of the connective signs of discourse (conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns, articles, etc.), she reintegrated the noun, the very grammatical device she had abolished in an earlier work, The Making of Americans (see chapter 6). Why use the superfluous? She wrote: "A noun is a name of anything, why after a thing is named write about it.">2> In time, her views changed.

And then, something happened and I began to discover the name of things, that is not discover the names but discover the things the things to see the things to look at and in so doing I had of course to name them not to give them new names but to see that I could find out how to know that they were there by their names or by replacing their names. And how was I to do so. They had their names and naturally I called them by the names they had and in doing so having begun looking at them I called them by their names with passion and that made poetry, I did not mean it to make poetry but it did, it made the Tender Buttons, and the Tender Buttons was very good poetry it made a lot more poetry.>3>

Since Stein names the thing and its qualities, but does not deal with the thing itself, her language is forcibly abstract.>4> In that concrete nouns and adjectives are linked to one another in new and what appears to be arbitrary diagrammatical order and in a variety of arrangements, with seemingly no relationship to the world of contingencies, to decipher such poetry is difficult and depends for the most part upon the depth of the reader's projection.

Although Tender Buttons, like the works of the ancient alchemists, is a vas hermeticum, let us explore associationally some poems in the collection. First, its oxymoronic title. Both qualitative and quantitative, abstract and concrete, the appeal is to the eye, the pictorial element, rather than to the ear and sound, as in her Portraits. The eye, identified with the archetype of consciousness, is associated with the intellect and the cognitive use of words. It has also been identified, since ancient Egyptian times, with the spirit and soul; thus does it become instrumental in creating the sacred space (temenos) within which the glyphs will be imprinted. In that the eye is the organ that orders, selects, and differentiates levels of reading and understanding, the aura and vibrations it experiences pave the way for its relationships with the object (or objects) depicted in the poem.

The noun button (from the Old French, boton), is a bud, sprout, shoot, tendril; bouter means to push, eject. It may also be associated with a knob that one pushes as on a bell, or turns to open a door; with a button on clothing; or a pimple. That Stein appends the adjective tender (Latin tener) to buttons, adds a metatextual quality to the title. Buttons, as metaphor, represent something that is growing, burgeoning; its shoots and tendrils emerging from the earth, however, are still tender and must be cared for. Tender, therefore, suggests something malleable, easily cut, divided, masticated, vulnerable to feeling and affection. It was Mlle. de Scudéry who, in seventeenth-century France, dreamed up the Carte du Tendre, representing the various paths by which one could gain access to the land of love. Isn't this exactly what interests Stein? "Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns.">5>

By its very ambiguity, this metatextual title has almost infinite connotations, stemming from both matriarchal and patriarchal worlds. Divested of normal order, context, function, and semantics, the associations evoked by the title, along with the poems included in the volume, have been liberated from the limitations imposed upon them by the world of contingencies. As the eye focuses on the roundness of the button, the object may be used as a meditative device, taking the reader into a space/time continuum. From this vantage point, Stein took yet another revolutionary step in her stylistic ways.

Having freed herself, as she explained in The Geographical History of America, from her obsession with "human nature" that she now associates with linearity and the workaday world, she has penetrated another dimension, that of the "human mind," or the transpersonal realm that one may call the collective unconscious. From this new and more detached vantage point, she succeeded in endowing common, everyday objects—dress, petticoat, etc.—with a revitalized existence, thus transforming what had been dormant or latent into something with livingness. Not necessarily was the object's strictly utilitarian use focused upon in Tender Buttons; rather, and most importantly for her, it was its essence that was revealed in the work of art. Marcel Duchamp had also expanded the simply functional nature of an object in his masterpiece Urinal; as had Picabia, picking out objects from the five-and-dime store, then signing his name to them, after which he labeled them works of art.

Stein's new verbal iconography, as revealed in Tender Buttons, transgressed the limitations imposed upon language. Disorientation resulting from her realignments of words and verbal patternings, triggered new sensations born from her humanization of the inhuman material world. Her inner trajectory, unlike Charles Baudelaire's in The Flowers of Evil, which was accomplished in six steps, or Dante's, in nine spheres, is undertaken in three. Segments from each level—from the world of Objects, to the domain of Food, and finally to the inner sanctum of Rooms—will be explained in terms of the writing process, sexuality, and psychology.

Step 1. Objects

Objects (Latin objectum: jactere, something thrown in the way of the observer), suggests anything that one sees, that affects the senses, occupies the mind, calls for attention, and sets a goal. Grammatically, objects indicate nouns or substantives that directly or indirectly receive the action of a verb; philosophically, anything that can be known or perceived by the mind. The verb, to object, means to oppose, expose, protest, remonstrate, expostulate, and demur. Such associations, and the many more that come to mind, suggest an intensely active, aggressive, excited, powerful, and even hostile mood on Stein's part. She seems ready to explode, to give vent, to expel her new and loving vision of language.

The fifty-eight poems included under the rubric "Objects" deal with visible, tangible, and commonplace items. Stein's asyntactical placements and alignments of words into melodic patterns and rhythms, trigger an emotional response in the reader as does a puzzle, acrostic, logogriph, or anagram. In so doing, the poems titillate, frustrate, as well as bedazzle the mind.

"A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS"

A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.

The carafe—like the alchemist's crucible—is and contains mysterious elements. A bottle with a flaring lip used to hold beverages, wine, blood, or any liquid, it may be viewed in Stein's linguistic scheme as an ideogram: a picture, symbol, or sign used to represent a thing or an idea. No longer merely utilitarian, it has become an object of contemplation and meditation.

Pictorially, the carafe suggests the female body with its rounded, uterine-looking container at the bottom and the spreading outer lip or vagina at the top, which permits the entrance and exit of substances. Such an association is valid since Toklas moved into rue de Fleurus when Stein was composing Tender Buttons. It was the first time that either women had experienced a reciprocal love relationship. Unable to contain the joy of their union and fearful of revealing her sexual pleasures openly, she resorted to the ideogram to celebrate the excitement, joys, and fruitful nature of the female body.

Blind, indicating an inability to see in the outer realm, and therefore easy deception by appearances, permits on the other hand greater perception into those darkened, murky, and sometimes forbidding inner spheres. Homer, Tiresias, and Oedipus are all associated with blindness, the latter figure having gouged out his eyes in order to fathom the depth of his crimes. Were such emotions implicit in Stein's lesbian relationship? It is doubtful that she still felt guilt. Certainly, her pleasure encouraged her to intone her delight in poetry but always in a mitigated, restrained, and hermetic manner, thereby protecting herself from the aspersions of others. Was her love blind?

The description of glass a blind is a personification. It is opaque in its understanding of outer elements, but transparent for those who can peer inwardly, for the poet who knows how to secrete the contents of the glass. When hand blown, glass may be looked upon as an art object, worthy of admiration for its beauty, luster, color, tone—as is a beloved. If broken or chipped, as happens in relationships, the cutting, hard, and bruising edge may draw blood. The references to glass also suggests "spectacle"—eyeglasses make for better sight—but also a spectacle, an eye-catching public or theatrical display, an object of curiosity or contempt about which one may speculate. Because of Stein's sexual proclivities and her literary objections and rebellions against staid grammatical and syntactical conventions, she was vulnerable and open, like the carafe, to public shame were she to make a "spectacle" of herself.

"A kind in glass and a cousin," suggests a qualitative relationship, rooted in kindness and understanding. It may also intimate a type of bond to which a relative may be kindly disposed, though such a "spectacle" might lead some "to pointing" their finger at the object of their ire, thus casting opprobrium on the couple in question, despite the fact that there is "nothing strange" about such "an arrangement" or "system." Singly or individually, people "hurt" others for any reason at all—a different literary "system" or unusual sexual proclivities. In so doing, they draw blood ("color"), the "color," referring to wine contained in the carafe, which brings merriment, or as in communion, commemorates a bond or sacrament, thus uniting what had been divided and transforming the temporal into the atemporal. "A single hurt color" implies the pain of blood issuing from a cut or from menstruation, mirroring the bruising lot of women who are looked down upon in a patriarchal "system." Yet, this very liquid contained in the carafe/uterus is the sine qua non of life, that which permits its continuation. Redness, which intimates embarrassment and "not ordinary" passion is catalytic, but "not unordered," dissimilar "in not resembling" the behavior of the majority. While "The difference" between Stein's way as a lesbian poet and society may be increasing or "spreading," this sentence also refers to the lips of the vagina/carafe that, when opened up, allow the mysteries hidden within its liquid body to be decanted.

"GLAZED GLITTER"

Although a mood of jubilation and excitement also prevails in "Glazed Glitter," a warning is offered to those who take the world of appearances at face value:

Nickel, what is nickel, it is originally rid of a cover.

The change in that is that red weakens an hour. The change has come. There is no search. But there is, there is that hope and that interpretation and sometime, surely any is unwelcome, sometime there is breath and there will be a sinecure and charming very charming is that clean and cleansing. Certainly glittering is handsome and convincing.

There is no gratitude in mercy and in medicine. There can be breakages in Japanese. That is no programme. That is no color chosen. It was chosen yesterday, that showed spitting and perhaps washing and polishing. It certainly showed no obligation and perhaps if borrowing is not natural there is some use in giving.

The alliteration in the poem's title, "Glazed Glitter," and the previous poem's "Glass," suggests an object with a mirrorlike, sparkling, glossy, and highly polished surface. Although hard and immobile, like fired clay or enamel, its bedazzling, scintillating, flickering, and rippling exterior infuse it with life and dynamism. Let us recall that alchemists used nickel, a silvery hard ductile metallic element capable of a high polish and resistance to corrosion, in their scientific transmutations. Because of its gray/silvery tones, it was likened to lead, a base or unrefined metal, identified by alchemists with Saturn, the God of Time, and thus of death. The German kupfer (nickel), deceptively labeled copper, accounts for the "red" in the second sentence, perhaps referring to the moon, thus symbolizing change when identified with the woman's monthly menses. With the flow of time, the once-brilliant coloration "weakens an hour," growing paler and more feeble with each passing moment.

"The change in that is that red weakens an hour," indicates flux and aging as well as the desire to be forthright and open, to be "rid of a cover." In that nickel is also change (five-cent piece) that passes from hand to hand, it is a common denominator, facilitating commercial transactions in the everyday world. So should the word and its object be plain and commonplace. "The change has come" implies a change in time but also of monetary values, referring perhaps to Stein's financial transactions with her brother. Their once-glittering and bedazzling works of art, food for spirit and soul, had, when sold, taken on functional value. A question of tender, they now resemble the impure and leaden metals rather than the solely golden and aesthetic ones. "There is no search" now for higher worth—that of eternal values in art. Yet, there is "hope" in the "interpretation" and aftermath of such a transaction, though "sometimes, surely any is welcome." The mention of "breath" (pneuma), a sublimating force, refers to spiritual and creative powers within a being; others see it as a "sinecure" to be viewed as a disease, sine cure, that is, without a cure. Idleness is "charming," as Leo and Stein knew only too well. Relationships change, however; emotions and passions have a "cleansing" factor; they "clean" away the rubble, the dross, allowing for the essence of kinship to emerge: "Certainly glittering is handsome and convincing."

That "There is no gratitude in mercy and in medicine," intimates Stein's loss of expectation in science, relying more deeply at present on feelings as her guide. The "breakages in Japanese" may refer to Leo's collection of Japanese prints, also broken up during the division, thus mirroring the shattering of the brother/sister friendship. It was not so intended; there was "no programme" for such a happening. Nor was choice involved. Things had to be cleared up: anger, which "showed spitting," also viewed as a cleansing process for Orientals, reinforces Stein's frequent use of "washing and polishing," cleansing and cleaning. Nor was there any "obligation" that she share her life/art with her brother; no "borrowing," henceforth, between them. Her anger has dissipated. The need to be generous is uppermost now, "yet may there be some use in giving."

Stein seems to have traversed her Rubicon. The "glazed glitter" that prevails since Toklas moved to 27, rue de Fleurus, brightening, cleaning, and cleansing her life, bringing to it unheard of beauty, polish, and glitter, thus extracts the silvery and reddened tones from the object/life. The matriarchate had taken full sway over the partriarchate with its "handsome and convincing" autocracy of monetary values.

"A BOX"

In "A Box," viewed as a feminine symbol because of its containing/uteruslike quality, may also be identified with the cranium, the home of secret, fragile, precious, but also fearful elements. Protective as well as imprisoning, the brain case is the seat of potentiality, the origin of infinite riches, but also of distress, disease, and all of life's iniquities. Yet, as in Pandora's box, there is hope. When identified with a coffin, as in Osiris' case, the box symbolizes decay that, in alchemical view, is the locus for transformation from unregenerate to productive matter.

What emerges from within Stein's box? Ideas, feelings, sensations revolving around a human body? a brain? Qualitative factors, implicit in the poems already analyzed, reappear: "kindness," for example, may be so unexpected for some as to elicit "redness" or blushing; "rudeness," may provoke the "redness" of rage. The "rapid" barrage involving the "same question" also provokes anger, redness, and rudeness. The "eye," the organ of enlightenment and perception, probes the emotions that surge forth. Its careful "research" and "selection," painful at times, eliminates the "cattle" or multiple riches that exist within the box/cranium and the box/body. "Cattle" may also suggest domestication: these animals, considered property, are raised for the masses, that is, society's lowest common denominator. "Cattle" are like the commonest of objects Stein uses in her ideo-grams and cubists in their paintings. She succeeds in creating a work of art by her discerning placement of these objects in her poem, thus altering both their meaning and focus. A writer, like a cook who cleans food by stripping it of its dross, must peer critically into everything that emanates from his box/cranium and box/body: idea, emotion, sensation. The conscious mind must control, edit, classify each single moment of experience. Never should emotions be allowed entry into the written work without having first been probed and purified by the eagle "eye." The first syllable of "Question," indicates a quest, a search, thus underscoring the mental operation of "selection," the notion of looking, finding, seeking, spying, thereby separating the wheat from the chaff. The multiple alliterations, (r, s, c, s, q, p), underscoring sibilants, labials, gutturals, palatals, sound out the intense struggle existing within the box: "rudimentary" contents within the unconscious, which seek so desperately to surface.

What does "order" outside of the box, that is, in the world, imply? What is the "white" (Steinese baby talk for right) "way" for the "cattle" to take themselves or be taken out of the pasture? The virgins, referring to traditional values concerning the body and mind, like "cattle" do not like to be led out of their secure and contented ways. Enclosed within the pasture, however, virginal views "disappoint" both the thinking and sexually active person. So, too, is it easier for the writer to adhere to conventional ways (imitate the nineteenth-century techniques) and for the virgin to experience the normal (heterosexual) act of intercourse, "suggesting a pin" rather than to try the different (lesbian) way. The world outside of the boxed-in world may disorient, one may lose one's way and go "round" in circles, thus paving the way for a visionless, nondifferentiated, intellectually and sexually blinding life. Cut off from dangers, one is also severed from the excitement engendered by "a fine substance strangely." Withdrawal encourages vulnerability to hurt, but also to pleasure of the most "rudimentary" kind. Reactions, therefore, must "be analysed," cognized, contemplated, sifted, pruned. The discovery of "strangely" delicate, subtle, sensitive elements within being are to be pinpointed. All factors in the life process are invited to be scrutinized: the "green point," suggesting fertility; the "red," implying pain and menstruation. Each factor must serve to transform what remains latent and dormant within the "box" into active forces, be it in the domain of art or in human relationships.

"PETTICOAT"

Although not an overt subscriber to feminism, Stein, in her one-line poem, "A Petticoat," clearly displays her ire against the patriarchal Judeo-Christian society with its hierarchy of unsavory and deficient values. While emphasizing the fine dividing line between acceptable ways—the pure, virginal "light" and "white"—as opposed to the usually black "ink spot," she is referring to the writer who strays from conventional ways and is considered a "disgrace" to society. The spot left from "menstruation," viewed as unclean, symbolizes a rejection of women. Yet, both have their "rosy charm." Who better than Stein understood the meaning of "disgrace"? Her writings had been refused by so many publishers, her ideas and behavior discredited. She was an outcast. Yet, even in pain, straying out of the "pasture" held its "rosy charm" for the writer and the woman.

"Peeled Pencil. Coke" and "This Is This Dress, Aider" are two essentially pornographic poems. The first consists of three words, "Rub her coke." An example of Stein's stripping of phonemes down to their bare essentials, the alliterated title, "Peeled Pencil," suggests another kind of fruitful defloration: the readying of the vagina for the insertion of the dildo. The creative process is implicit in the phallic symbol of the pencil: as used by the poet, this instrument serves to make its mark on the paper. In the old days, pencils had to be peeled to be sharpened. As layer upon layer was being pulled off, its slender black cylinder essence was made ready to "pin" point the author's glyphs on the virginal page. Like the sexual, so the writing process arouses passion. Excitement reaches such a pitch that some feel as if their windpipe had been blocked, causing near strangulation.

To Rub, an active verb, defined as subjecting to back and forth or circular action with pressure and friction, as in cleaning, polishing, and smoothing, also suggests the hand massaging the surface of the body, thus generating friction and heat. The writer likewise encounters difficulties as she moves her hand across the page in an effort to smooth and polish the words in the manuscript. So, in alchemy, after the flammable, volcanic, ebullient powers have surged forth, distillation must take place. "Coke," the residue of coal and used as fuel, is what remains following the burning, triturating, or cleansing operation. In Stein's poem, "coke" symbolizes the transformatory round that must take place for the quintessential experience (the poem or sexual act) to make its mark on body, psyche, and intellect. Only after the raw or primitive experience has been lived can "coke" be extracted: that active substance that fuels both the sexual and creative process. "Coke," short for cocaine, acts as a local anesthetic and induces intoxication as well—something Stein never abided. Lucidity was her guide. Rather than "Coke," implying cock and coitus, she uses cunnilingus for sexual fulfillment.

"THIS IS THIS DRESS, AIDER"

In "This Is This Dress, Aider," Stein not only decorticates her words of conventional meaning, but uses, as always, onomatopeias and multiple puns to strengthen the point she is trying to make. The noun Dress, an outer garment that serves to hide the body, used as a verb, depicts the act of covering, hiding, secreting—a sexually exciting thought. Like a fetish, the dress as object is endowed with its own energy and magical qualities, thus transmuting the image into a tantalizing power. A feeling of "distress" (this dress) counters the joyous mood of anticipation, opening up the writer to the fear and frustration arising from her partner's built-in inhibitions, which prevent sexual fulfillment.

Aider why aider why whow, whow stop touch, aider whow, aider stop the muncher, muncher, munchers.

A jack in kill her, a jack in, makes a meadowed king, makes a to let.

"Aider," is Alice, the active participant in this poem. Like eiderdown, her presence is soft, pliable, and comforting. It is she who comes to the poet's aid and aids her. As the poet's scientific and medical side ponders the question as to "why" rapture takes place during coitus, she realizes that for highs to reach their peak, intellectuality must be stripped. To yield fully to instinct and to feeling, to basic or primitive elements, allows her to go beyond the state of reason and self-control. Rapturously and repeatedly, she expresses her glee: "whow whow stop touch, aider whow, aider stop." No longer is voice subverted; on the contrary, it is allowed to sing out the overwhelming, almost trancelike state she now experiences. The word muncher, someone who chews with relish, is an onomatopeia, its nasals and fricatives suggesting the action involved in oral sex and the sonorities accompanying such labial activities.

Fairy tales about Jack the Giant Killer, Jack and the Beanstalk, Jack Sprat, Jack-in-the-box, and many more, although frightening and humorous to children and adults, also trigger the imagination. So the writer's fantasy world is likewise aroused by the thought of sexual play, and the sensations evoked aid her in finding the word that will replicate the experience. A jack, is also a mechanical and portable device for exerting pressure or lifting a heavy body a short distance. The emphasis on this twice-mentioned "a jack in" recalls a similar heaving or hoisting motion in Stein's later "Lifting Belly," referring in both cases to the use of the dildo to bring on a climax. The word meadowed, associated with a tract of moist low-lying grassland, may be a metaphor for pubic hair. "King," ruler, master, and center of all he surveys, suggests the male partner—in this case, Stein, who always considered herself man, potentate, supreme consciousness, and creative principle, while Toklas was the woman, the homebody, and subservient in every way.

Step 2. Food

Stein's second step in her initiatic journey into the wonder-working elements of nature and of language, deals with food. Fuel for the body/mind, such nourishment as is mentioned in the fifty-one poems included in this section represents Mother Nature as both vital and destructive. The giver of life and energy, she sees to the propagation of the vegetal and animal worlds with which Stein now deals. Such a focalization suggests a need to regress to a primitive mode: the nonhuman psyche, the instinctual domain, in order to root out the very substance of word and sexual experience. Stein's desire to deal with common everyday entities such as foods replicates a similar movement on the part of the writer to "flatten out" poetic themes, as Arthur Rimbaud and Jules Laforgue had accomplished before her. In order to succeed, the writer must immerse herself in primal waters and bathe in the very source of existence. Only then can such vital questions as life and death be posed. These notions had always haunted Stein. Now, for the first time, they would no longer be posed from an intellectual, scientific, or philosophical point of view, but viscerally, via Mother Nature's fertility rites.

For the alchemist, food was energy—that is, the fire or catalyst needed to perform the operation that transmuted base metal into sublime gold. To effect such a change was arduous and painful, requiring the burning and water operations that stripped and cleansed the problem, thus isolating it from other elements. Stein's poetic needs may be examined similarly. Her intense search in the domain of language took her from the outer world, "the glazed glitter," into the very heart of physical being. Her trajectory, she believed, had helped her better assess her needs and her worth, thus aiding in the transmuting of feeling into its authentic container, the word.

Food also has a qualitative factor appended to it. Identified with agressivity, it is the mouth's task first to take it from the outside world, then masticate ("muncher"), ingest, digest, and finally eliminate it. So, too, must the word be internalized, experienced, sensed, palpated, prior to its implantation into the poem. Life and the creative process, then, require a combative, invasive, and militant stance.

"MILK"

A symbol for abundance and fertility, milk is nature's sustaining force par excellence. For mystics, such as the Orphics, it spells immortality; for the Druids, it was used for curative purposes. The inconographic representations of Isis, Hera, and Mary nursing their young, represent Mother Nature in her most fructifying form. The Philosophical Stone (Spiritual God), the summation of the alchemical operation, was referred to as "Virgin's Milk," for it brought immortality.

Climb up in sight climb in the whole utter needles and a guess a whole guess is hanging. Hanging hanging.

The vertical act of climbing to the breast or "utter" (udder) to suck out the fluid of life—a natural act for infants—requires effort, exertion, striving. Stein's verbal portrait, "Picasso" comes to mind: her admiration for his valiant and continuous struggle in contrast to "Matisse" who, once fame was his, abandoned the battle and renounced the challenge. Be it in the artistic or love process, contention is crucial; passivity, lethargy, an inability to concentrate and focus on one's goal, is death.

The word utter, closely allied in Stein's punning ways to a cow's udder, conflates the intellectual and the physical worlds. Without such sucking activity, the physical energy needed in the practical as well as the poetic worlds would be wanting. That the cow image is implicit in utter/udder is not, in Stein's view, a derogatory epithet attached to womankind. On the contrary, having recourse to it in many of her writings, she uses it to symbolize the nourishing aspect of Mother Earth.

"Needles," used repeatedly in the first section of Stein's work, are phallic images, suggesting pain during the act of penetration. In that they are also employed in sewing, designed to bind together bits of disparate cloth, they fuse the heteroclite. Likewise, the word is interwoven or intertwined into the text. To needle someone is to annoy, upset; but the energy aroused in such activity is catalytic. It is worth recalling that the cubists stuck pins and nails into their collages, introducing a non-painterly element onto the canvases, thus rejecting while also expanding the prevailing logo-centric definition of art. Nor are Stein's texts devoid of such puncturing and piercing objects. Hurt necessarily plays a role in the creative process as well as in human relationships.

"A guess a whole guess is hanging" implies the world of the unknown that comes into being as the milk of life is suckled. Nor are the sexual pleasures derived from such an act to be overlooked by the sensualist that Stein was. Guess (from Middle English gessen) suggests get, which like Climb, allows for the fulfillment of the wishing, wanting, and needing. The food (omitting the g leaves essen, to eat in German) within the "hanging" breast endows the one who "climbs" with energy, to be expended in sexual, philosophical, or literary activity. Within milk/breast exists the potential for life; within it hangs the fate of the human (intellect) and animal (body) species.

"Hanging hanging" is a reference to breasts in general and, in particular, Stein's pendulous ones. Within them resides the unknown, the unforeseen—that creative power that makes her world go round. Metaphors for security, tenderness, intimacy, breasts are an offering as well as a refuge.

"POTATOES"

Stein's three poems dealing with potatoes, a spherical, bulbous root nourished within the heart of Mother Earth, visualize the notion of growth and creativity. That the French equivalent for potato, pomme de terre, or apple of the earth, is the terrestrial counterpart of paradise's forbidden fruit that hangs from the tree of knowledge, conflates what had been severed according to Genesis. Unlike the spiritual fruit that leads to transgression, the potato yields knowledge of another sort: it permits an ingestion of earthly and everyday matter, thus serving to fructify both mind and body. Existential, the potato symbolizes this present life—the now—rather than the Christian's view of future heavenly domain.

POTATOES "Real potatoes cut in between."

POTATOES "In the preparation of cheese, in the preparation of crackers, in the preparation of butter, in it."

ROAST POTATOES "Roast potatoes for."

The three poems focus on the preparation of potatoes: from the raw and cutting phase, the cooking operation, to its final state in the serving.

The image in the first poem, reminiscent of Georgia O'Keefe's many opening or severed flowers, replicates the dividing and severing process in making the potato ready for eating. The cutting open of the vegetable opens up its secret parts to the light of the eye. So, too, may the "cut in between" be applied to other areas, needing no profound decoding since its message is more than obvious. In terms of the poet, however, to articulate requires a cutting up, a trimming and slimming of syllables in the preparation of the word's implantation into the text.

That "cheese" and "butter" in the second poem are added in the cooking process not only increases the vegetable's succulence, but in that they are milk products, they increase its nutritive powers. So, too, must the poet include foreign materials, as had the cubists, to enrich a text. "Crackers" are not only a dry crispy bread product made of leavened or unleavened bread used to mop up the delectable sauce from a dish or platter, but they also make snapping or crackling noises. To the combination of potatoes, cheese, and butter, a feast for the taste buds, is added the agreeable crackling sonorities from the "crackers" being eaten, but also those emanating from the oven as the "roast" (referred to in the third poem) is cooking, thus also becoming food for the ear. Crackers broken down into crack-er (her), has a sexual allusion, referring back to "the cut in between" in the first poem; and to the effort made by the poet, cracking her brain to come out with the proper combination of words to be added during the cooking process.

"ASPARAGUS"

That a fat and ungainly woman is alluded to as a sack of potatoes, an image that can readily be applied to Stein, may help to explain the poem entitled "Asparagus," referring, perhaps to Toklas's thinness.

Asparagus in a lean in a lean to hot. This makes it art and it is wet wet weather wet weather wet.

Asparagus, (Greek spargan) meaning to swell, is iconographically tall and pencil-like, and thus a phallic symbol. A perennial plant of the lily family having many-branched stems and minute scalelike leaves, the asparagus is cultivated for its edible shoots. No longer dealing with an invisible and secret world with regard to the potato, Stein broaches an ocular and delectable one. That the object depicted is "lean" suggests skinniness, but also the act of inclining, bending, or casting one's weight to one side for support. In these cases, it alludes to Toklas: her skeletal appearance, her subservience, her bending and fawning when in the presence of her deity; also the awkwardness of the sexual position when making love to Stein. The "hot" refers to the heat brought on by the rubbing operation during the sexual encounter; the "wet wet weather," to the perspiration resulting from such friction; and "wet weather wet," to the vaginal fluids discharged preceding and following the climax. There may also be a literary allusion: the efforts expended by Stein as she leans first on one word or artistic form and then another. The intensity poured into the choices she must make in the writing process generates bodily heat, liquidity, and when completed, moments of Dionysian ecstasy.

"CHICKEN"

Stein's many poems dealing with meats (roast beef, mutton, sausages, chicken) take us into the animal world, antithetical to Platonists and Christians who prize spirituality rather than instinctuality. Not so for Stein who loved animals, and especially dogs. In keeping with Western values, to allude to the animal in an individual is to refer to what is base or, in alchemical terms, is leaden and unrefined in that person. Yet, it is the animal as libido, raw energy, that empowers creation.

The "Chicken," the title Stein gave to four poems, is a barnyard animal, not too clean, not too bright, and easily scared. It may also refer to the coward, the young woman as a term of endearment, or to a prostitute, as well as to the young male homosexual.

The "Pheasant," unlike the common chicken, is a sought-after game bird known for its long sweeping tail and brilliant feathers. On the other hand, the chicken is "a peculiar bird," different, curious, odd, known for its eccentricities. Used in some religious, initiatory, and divinatory rites by shamans, the chicken symbolizes death and resurrection. In Orphic rituals, it is associated with the dog, friendly to humans. According to the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, the chicken leads the dead to the lower worlds—psychologically, to inner (unconscious) realms.

That Stein emphasizes the words dirty and third intimates an association between Christianity's (Trinity) view of dirt and women (the chicken is identified with the female). The emphasis placed by revealed religions on purity and virginity was anathema to Stein, as was their view of dirt as being synonymous with evil. Dirt and evil are implicit in the world of differentiation, thus of earthly existence. To reject these aspects of life is to seek to escape into the pristine purity of an afterlife, without ever knowing terrestrial joy. The same may be said of the writer's approach to his art. For Stein, all themes, all words, from the most commonplace to the most ethereal, fueled her pen providing they were picked, prepared, and served on the proper platter.

Like a collage, cooking and writing require the introduction of other ("more") foods into the dinner or completed text. Various plants in the mustard family, like "Cress," add a pungent flavor to the meat; as do "Potato" and "Loaves" of bread. The combination of foods and seasoning, like that of letters in a word or morphemes in a text, enhance the visual beauty of the arrangement on the platter as well as its aroma and taste during its ingestion.

As previously noted, eating is an aggressive act that in the case of the pheasant and chicken begins with the catching, continues with the killing of the bird (sticking), and then the depluming (sticking), cleansing of the inside ("sticking"); and then the "sticking" of it into the mouth, masticating, pulverising, digesting it. The repetition of stick, its strident sibilants, hostile dentals, grating gutturals, and ferocious fricatives, stick the ear with a medley of unpleasant cacophonies, thus replicating the murderous intent of the eater. This same analogy may be applied to sexuality, for example, during a sadistic act, with all of the "extra" "sticking" devices needed to bring on the climax. Nor should the writer be discouraged from entering into verbal sadomasochistic play, in the annexing, rejecting, and redefining of terms. For everything, positive and negative, must participate in the feast that is writing.

Stein has taken the mystery of matter from the world of objects to that of plants and animals. Her third step will deal with the inner sanctum, viewed in terms of body and mind (both conscious and unconscious). Like the alchemist working in silence in his laboratory, so the verbal draftsman fashions, shapes, colors, and texturizes his words, clauses, sentences, and paragraphs. The labors in both cases are conducted in the secret realms of remote climes.

Step 3. Rooms

The heart of the transformatory process takes place in the room/chamber/cavern. In ancient Egypt, initiates entered the most secret vaults within the pyramid to undergo their initiatory rituals: the transformation of the potential or unformed into the fulfilled and formed. Such a conversion was looked upon as a death of the old self and the birth of the new, purified, and elevated one.

The room in Tender Buttons represents that solitary area within the psyche into which libido (energy) withdraws in order to revitalize what has become worn and arid within being. Comparable to the womb, where the seed is nourished, or the vaginal area where the climax may be experienced, or the mind, replete with ideas, the room provides the seclusion and separation from the outside world that is crucial to the evolution of an individual.

Withdrawing into an inner space permits Stein to cut herself off from the excitement of the workaday world that drains and deletes her energies. Within the peace and security of her own mind/room, or vaulted cranium, Stein is able to sense and think authentically. Thus does she feel able to transmute the fruit of her meditations into the word. Within the mind (conscious and unconscious spheres) she learns to see, hear, listen, and palpate in a space/time continuum; thus does she feel competent to reorganize volume, space, and form, and all other inconstants. No limitations are imposed upon the senses, now reactivated by the inflow of energy into the psyche.

The tangled terminology and rescrambling of ideas and notions occurring in "Rooms," no longer made up of separate poems, but divided into paragraphs, is as esoteric, perhaps even more so, than the previous sections. No better paradigm of Stein's ambiguous views can be offered than her repeated use of centre. She warns ("Act so that there is no use in a centre") against imprisonment within a rationally conceived centre: that is, within concepts. According to Cézanne's vision of composition, the painter's and the writer's goal is to portray each object and all of its parts in positions that are equally responsive to his sensibility and to the livingness of his observation. All hierarchies within the frame, as well as the frame itself, are abolished. The center, therefore, is no longer the center of focus of anything; nor is it to be regarded as an organizing principle.>6> No frame; no point of reference; no boundaries. A poem has no more a center than does a canvas. The cubists' dictum is: an "object is an object"; its place in the composition is "decentralized"; its ideations and iconography are transformed into the object of the composition.

The same is true of the centre in "Rooms" if viewed three-dimensionally, that is, as the focalizing point on a classical compositional canvas or the suspenseful line in a poem or novel. When viewed four-dimensionally, however, as in such age-old religious symbolic images as the Star of David, Cross, Circle, and so on, the centre is everywhere and nowhere. Some mystics refer to this transpersonal centre existing within a space/time continuum as the Principle, Absolute, or God. Pascal, quoting Hermes Trismegistus, wrote, "God is a sphere the center of which is everywhere and the circumference nowhere." Stein, the nonbeliever, as God/the artist, must reach the creative center living inchoate and transpersonally within her. In this most sacred and unknowable region exists the beginning and end of all things in an eternal now. Forever spawning and disintegrating, life exists as a continuously reshuffling, redirecting, rebalancing, and rekindling process.

If the centre has the place then there is distribution. That is natural. There is a contradiction and naturally returning there comes to be both sides and the centre. That can be seen from the description.

Active and dynamic, the writer who plunges into a continuously shifting, expanding, and unlimited inner space, know chaos (the void). As conveyed in Genesis and in many creation myths, including Hesiod's Theogony, such fomenting mass yields, paradoxically, new insights while concomitantly dismantling nonfunctioning ones. Words, when inhabiting this dark, moist, and unlimited realm, expand in meaning, sensation, texture, and coloration. As their consistencies alter, so does their impacting upon other phonemes and morphemes in the sentence. Although word is one, it is made up of individual letters, each possessing its own identity, confluence, sensation, rhythms, and blendings, thus acting and reacting on the rest "of the herd" as the poet Stéphane Mallarmé used to say.

Body, psyche, and mind are energized by Stein's intuitive forays into and out of her centre. A redistribution in the placement of words in the sentence detaches them from conventional use, thus redefining them and pushing them to the extreme limit of language. Because of Stein's paratactical intervals, aided and abetted by her omission of punctuation, subjects, and objects, and the addition of a plethora of puns, extreme syntactical distortion and incomprehensibility are the result.

Metaphors, analogies, and associations to the pleasure and pain involved in the sexual and literary acts, for example, pepper the entire text: stress, distress, pain, joy, accomplishing, lifting, voice, centre, spreading, black line, distribution, kneeling, opening, rubbing, erection, swelling, open, four, startling, starving, husband, betrothed, sleeping, size, torn, sack, hangings, movement, bed, disorder, funnel, cape, conundrum, torn, target, breath, window, milk, water, empty, flower, cutting, clean, pecking, petting, asparagus, fountain, and so forth.

Coitus is alluded to in and of itself, but also its effect on mind and body is also suggested. The tremulous sensations triggered by climaxes and the sensual excitement generated, activates the poetic process. Described as an alchemical operation, Stein writes: "Burnt and behind and lifting a temporary stone and lifting more than a drawer."

The fire of passion produced during the sexual act heightens the flame or electric spark, which in turn, and in keeping with the alchemical process, not only burns off impurities, but dries out all moisture. Only "burnt" or charred remains are left "behind" (posterior), that is, the word's quintessence. Like a precious diamond, the word is no longer embedded in black carbon, but is polished, glittering, and gleaming with incandescent emotions, now that the old and unproductive perceptions and sensations have been killed.

The reborn and recrystallized insights are "lifting" (sexually and creatively) the poet into new areas of feeling and of expression. The "stone" that was raised suggests the removal of a veil: inhibitions have been dropped, adding to the impetus of the electric charge. An androgynous element, stone constitutes the wholeness and fullness of the primordial state, which has now been made accessible. But the experience of the sexual and verbal act, like unrefined and unshaped "stone," must be smoothed and polished, thus fulfilling its goal—the transformation of brute matter into the work of art. "Drawer," a boxlike entity used for storage, may be opened or closed. In like manner, ideas and feelings may be covertly or overtly conveyed in a poem. Stein's use of the comparison more suggests her increasing self-confidence in her talent as a writer.

Sight, always crucial for Stein, be it in her observation of paintings or words, is explicit in the following sentence:

No eye-glasses are rotten, no window is useless and yet if air will not come in there is a speech ready, there always is and there is no dimness, not a bit of it.

Within the secret space that is the room, the use of such devices as "eye-glasses" not only enhance vision, but protect the eye from the dirt outside. Since the "window" for Plato represents an opening onto the soul, such apertures increase the reception of Light from the spirit, senses, and mind on a variety of levels. Thus, every "window" serves the poet. Like eyeglasses, the "window," inviting air (spirit) to permeate formerly enclosed quarters, expands horizons. The eye/window may now indulge in a dual activity: to look out onto the world and within, into the deepest recesses of the room: body, psyche, soul. The world, like all other concrete or abstract notions, alters in meaning, consistency, texture, and coloration depending upon the light shed on it during the observing process. Such a seeing and looking activity is crucial. Such voyeurism helps her convey the carnality of language in social discourse.

"Air," a sublimated element, suggests height, spirituality, flight, an amorphous condition rather than the previously solid material principle. Such alteration of focus implies spiritual growth, an ability to abstract and conceptualize problems by divesting them of earthly entanglements. Air may be identified with "breath" (Hebrew ruh), the spirit of God as it moved over primordial waters in the beginning of time and created the world (Gen. 1:2). With breath, according to Judeo-Christian and Hindu belief, came the word and speech (John 1:1; Rig-Veda 1:164). Those who can see into matter and spirit sense the word; for them "there always is and there is no dimness, not a bit of it."

In another entry, Stein writes: "The time when there is not the question is only seen when there is a shower. Any little thing is water." Experienced as transpersonal and immanent, time, like the creative instinct, is both temporal and atemporal. As for the word imprinted on the page and embedded in matter, it too becomes abstracted, as thought. Question (from the Latin, quaestio), identified with quest (Latin quaestus), indicates a continuous search or process leading to fulfillment. The spirit of interrogation, so crucial to the writer, vanishes when the sensate world submerges the rational sphere. Yet, it has its positive attributes. Like the Flood, a "shower," identified with emotion, inundates. On the other hand, for the alchemist and poet, the water operation both solves and dissolves. In so doing, the unsolvable problem vanishes. What had been a stumbling block has been liquefied, as sugar or salt when placed in a bowl of water. A smoother or more objective and comprehensive attitude may therefore come into being. Problems, now viewed in particles, may be divided, thereby altering perspectives and approaches to them. The particular, rather than the whole, comes under scrutiny. If, however, currents are too swift, the "shower" leads to drowning, regression, and loss of identity. "Any little thing is water" suggests that rigid, fixated, and solidified attitudes and their accompanying words may be turned into a solution—that is, be allowed to flow freely. The poet, then, is given the freedom to evaluate and reevaluate, to position and reposition them, thus bringing a new reality into being.

There is no end to the meanings and interpretations one may glean on reading Tender Buttons. Each word imprinted on the page may trigger in the reader ideas, melodies, rhythms, colorations, codes, and the infinite reverberations to which these give rise. Stein's inner journey or descent into the mystic's centre, as conveyed in Tender Buttons, was a breakthrough—a turning point in her life as woman and writer. Successful in subverting the Westerner's logic and habitual modes of rumination, always anathema to her, she discovered her own working order. First visualizing her object, she then interiorized it by way of the cooking operation, through which she assimilated its energy. Finally, like the good alchemist she was, she sublimated and abstracted its contents, after which it was ready to be embedded in the text. Her bristling treatment of discourse and syntax, her polysemous meanings and meanderings, her subvocal nonsense, and her verbal and ideational fragmentations were spectacular examples of what could be called the cubist language.

As cubist and alchemist, Stein, the word stripper, offers her bewitching, puzzling, and frustrating brew to contemporary readers. May each and every one plunge into its infinite waters.

Notes

1. Randa K. Dubnick, The Structure of Obscurity: Gertrude Stein, Language, and Cubism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 35.
2. Stein, "Poetry and Grammar," Lectures in America, 209.
3. Ibid., 235.
4. Walker, Making of a Modernist, 132.
5. Stein, "Poetry and Grammar," 231.
6. Katz, "Matisse, Picasso, and Gertrude Stein," Four Americans in Paris, 52.

Three Lives (novellas) 1909

What Happened: A Five Act Play (drama) 1913

Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms (poetry) 1914

Ladies' Voices (drama) 1916

A Circular Play. A Play in Circles (drama) 1920

Geography and Plays (prose and dramas) 1922

The Making of Americans (novel) 1925

Composition as Explanation (essay) 1926

Useful Knowledge (nonfiction) 1928

A Lyrical Opera Made by Two (drama) 1928

Useful Knowledge (nonfiction) 1928

Lucy Church, Amiably (drama) 1930

Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded: Written on a Poem by Georges Hugnet (drama) 1931

How to Write (essay) 1931

Say It with Flowers (drama) 1931

Operas and Plays (drama) 1932

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (autobiography) 1933

Four Saints in Three Acts (libretto) 1934

Lectures in America (lectures) 1935

Narration (lecture) 1935

Everybody's Autobiography (autobiography) 1937

The World Is Round (novel) 1939

Ida (novel) 1941

Wars I Have Seen (nonfiction) 1945

Brewsie and Willie (nonfiction) 1946

Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein (prose) 1946

Four in America (prose) 1947

The Mother of Us All (drama) 1947

Things as They Are (novel) 1950

The Yale Edition of the Unpublished Works of Gertrude Stein. 8 vols. (novels, poetry, essays, lectures, and novellas) 1951-1958

Fernhurst, Q.E.D., and Other Early Writings (novel, short story, and essays) 1971

SOURCE: Pierpont, Claudia Roth. "The Mother of Confusion: Gertrude Stein." In Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World, pp. 33-49. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.

In the following essay, Pierpont narrates key events of Stein's life, highlighting their influence upon her writings.

"Pablo & Matisse have a maleness that belongs to genius," Gertrude Stein scrawled in a notebook, sometime in her early Paris years, about the two painters she planned to join in re-creating Western art. She was an aspiring writer just past thirty when she met the paired geniuses, in 1905, and their spectacular audacity helped her to determine her own ambitions: to overturn the nineteenth century's constraining rules and prejudices, and to find new words for people's secret inner lives. Stein—a Jewish woman who'd studied psychology at Harvard—had fled America to join her brother on the Left Bank in 1903, to write an anguished novel while he painted mediocre nudes. It was at that moment, when modern art was being born, that the Steins began to buy the best and most shocking paintings; before long, the best and most unshockable people were stopping by to view their riotous, thick-hung walls—and were staying for dinner. Although Leo had begun the collection, Gertrude was the one Picasso wanted to paint and the one he called Pard, using some cowboy slang he'd picked up in American comic strips. Casting off her stays and starting a new novel, she began to think it possible that she, too, might be a genius—that she might do in words what Picasso and Matisse had done in paint—and if maleness was a necessary part of it, well: "moi aussi perhaps," as she added in her notebook. That was not a problem but an opportunity to demonstrate a truth of her own secret inner life.

The first decade of the new century was barely over before she had achieved a version of her goal: the first indubitably modern literary style. Before James Joyce—as she volubly insisted all her life—before Dada or Surrealism, before Bloomsbury or the roman fleuve, Gertrude Stein was writing books and stories that were formally fractured, emotionally inscrutable, and, above all, dauntingly unreadable. This achievement has given the Library of America a particularly difficult task in assembling two hefty volumes of Stein's selected works. How best to represent her legacy? It is often forgotten that Stein commanded a broad literary range, from the psychological realism of her earliest fiction to the journalistic accounts of life in occupied France during the Second World War. The work that made her famous and still earns her canonical status is, of course, the barrage of janglingly repetitive lyric obfuscation that has come to be known as Steinese. "A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose," she wrote, with the philosophic kick of a nursery Wittgenstein. "The sister was not a mister," she warned, out on a sexual edge, and then provided her own commentary: "Was this a surprise. It was." Although she did not write "Yes! We Have No Bananas," it isn't surprising that the song has been accused of betraying her influence.

It was by perpetrating such suspiciously significant nonsense, somewhere between the studies of Freud and the logic of the Red Queen—"Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded" one cautionary title runs—that Stein entered our language as the bard of a culture of confusion, the vastly imperturbable mother of an age that had given up on answers. Yet no one took more vivid pleasure in the questions than she did, or set them out in a more brilliant company, beginning with the famous salon where she gathered Picasso and Matisse and Braque (who was so strong and so amiable that he would help the janitor hang the bigger pictures) and Derain and Juan Gris and Apollinaire. And after the Great War had blown this brilliant world apart, her rooms filled with charter members of the next cultural resurgence, and then the next, as there entered Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Cocteau, Tchelitchev, Christian Bérard, Cecil Beaton, Thornton Wilder, Virgil Thomson, and Richard Wright. For decades, there seemed no end to her gifts of renewal. She was host, sponsor, critic, instigator, frequently foe, and sometimes friend again of some of the century's finest provocateurs, and it was often hard to tell whether her life was a party or a revolution. But her intent was serious ("desperately" serious, as Alice B. Toklas put it), and she knew all along that the stakes were as high as the opposition was fierce, albeit nervous. "They needn't be so afraid of their damn culture," she erupted early on, and, for once, hung back in estimating her powers: "It would take more than a man like me to hurt it."

How did a girl born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, in 1874 turn into such a disruptive fellow? Her grandparents had sailed from Germany to Baltimore in time to take opposing sides in the Civil War—a difference of opinion that she thought well established the Stein familial spirit. She was the youngest of five, although she seems to have felt herself to be the youngest of seven, so often did she dwell on two siblings who had died before she was born—an infant boy and a stillborn girl—and without whose deaths neither she nor her brother Leo would have been brought into the world. Both Leo and Gertrude had perceived some regret on their parent's parts at the quality of the substitution. This was one of the things that drew the youngest pair so close together, along with the knowledge that they were smarter than everyone else they knew.

The family moved from Allegheny to Vienna when Gertrude was a baby, and then to Paris (where she added French to her English and German) and, finally, to the wilds of Oakland, California, in 1880, when Daniel Stein forbade his children to speak any language but "pure" American English. A cold and domineering man of minimal formal education, he went on to make a small fortune by investing in San Francisco cable cars, and provided well for the children whose lives he overloaded with tutors and lessons and ambitions. Leo recalled his childhood as a torturous regime lived out under his father's disapproval, while his softhearted mother was too weak to make any difference; Gertrude would only allow that she considered it a foolish idea to have had an unhappy anything, let alone something as important as a childhood.

But there can have been little room for bluster back in 1886, when their mother began to show symptoms of abdominal cancer. Years of wasting pain and withdrawal turned Milly Stein into something of a household wraith before she died in 1888, when her younger daughter was fourteen. In The Making of Americans, the massive novel Gertrude Stein wrote about her family—the first stunningly original disaster of modernism, finished in 1911, written as though from deep within a halting, troubled mind—she suggests that Milly's illness had rendered her so nearly invisible that neither her husband nor her children noticed when she finally disappeared.

Sometimes then they would be good to her, mostly they forgot about her, slowly she died away among them and then there was no more of living for her, she died away from all of them. She had never been really important to any of them.…Mostly for them she had no existence in her and then she died away and the gentle scared little woman was all that they ever after remembered of her.

Stein's notebooks, however, tell a different story: "All stopped after death of mother."

In fact, the household fell into chaos, while eighteen-year-old Bertha struggled to make up for a maternal presence that no one else would even acknowledge was missing. But if Gertrude had thought her mother negligible, she found her older sister sorely disgusting: "pure female," she wrote in her notebook for The Making of Americans, "sloppy oozy female … good, superior, maternal." Alone and untended, Gertrude left high school—her most thorough early biographer, Brenda Wineapple, states that she simply vanished from all records—and plunged into what she later called her "dark and dreadful" days. She took to reading with a kind of violence, buying piles of books (often with advice from Leo) and gulping them in great haphazard quantities. And she developed an almost equally violent need for food—"books and food, food and books, both excellent things," she wrote. Her discovery of food as a way back to early childhood, to "the full satisfied sense of being stuffed up with eating," marked her first divergence from the ways of her beloved Leo, who was just discovering how much he preferred to starve.

The case against Daniel Stein was set out many times by his two youngest children. They hated him, and yet they respected his power; they feared him, yet they wanted to be like him, if only for self-protection. More ambiguously, The Making of Americans contains some bizarrely dreamlike scenes that, among Stein scholars, have long raised the question of incest. (In the clearest example, a grown daughter accuses her father of having introduced her to an unnamed vice, and her words cause him to fall down paralyzed.)

In 1995 the biographer Linda Wagner-Martin, having studied Gertrude's notes for the novel, concluded that it was Bertha who had been sexually approached by their father: Gertrude wrote of his "coming in to her one night, to come and keep him warm." Complicating matters further, Gertrude elaborated by referring to a similar incident she had undergone with an uncle, her father's brother Solomon. "Scene like the kind I had with Sol," she wrote, and added, in a strangulated shorthand, "like me what he tried to do." Whatever actually took place, it is striking that just at those moments when she approaches what she cannot say, even in her own notes, this cautious writer begins to sound like quintessential Gertrude Stein. "Fathers loving children young girls," she goes on, and it appears that at least one branch of modern literary style may derive from a fearful evasion of meaning, and from the necessary invention—and wasn't that necessity "pure female"?—of a secret code.

"Then our life without a father began, a very pleasant one" was Stein's typically cloudless way of addressing the death of Daniel Stein—by apoplexy, three years after the death of his wife. Certainly his death precipitated a release of productive energy in his younger daughter. In 1893 she followed Leo to Harvard—this was a year before the Harvard Annex for Women became Radcliffe College—where, studying English and psychology, she turned out a quantity of notebooks in which her private turmoils were forced into traditional narrative forms. Her idols were George Eliot and Henry James, but her first work to be published was "Normal Motor Automatism," a psychological report she produced under the aegis of William James, who was doubtless responsible for rerouting her toward psychology as a science rather than, as in his brother's work, psychology as an aspect of literature.

In 1898 she went on to medical school at Johns Hopkins, planning to study the mysterious female affliction known as hysteria. Freud's book on the subject had been published three years before, but the frailties of women had preoccupied Stein since her childhood. Now she found refuge in the theory, not uncommon at the time, that a few rare women are born exceptions to their sex. To be extremely accomplished or intelligent or determined—to aspire to genius—was to be, by definition, less female. Although a friend persuaded her to present a public paper on the benefits of women's education, the last thing she was interested in was the cause of women's rights. As far as she could see, the only thing most women excelled at was having babies.

She did well in her first years of medical school, when the work centered on the classroom and the lab, but she had a great deal of difficulty when it came to visiting wards filled with sick human beings. And then, in her third year, she fell passionately in love with a young Bryn Mawr graduate who was permanently attached to another female medical student. The woman was responsive yet elusive. Instead of studying, Gertrude pined; she planned her life around seeing her beloved, or not seeing her. Sabotaged by the very parts of herself that she had been trying to cut off—the emotional, the uncontrolled—she failed her final exams and did not graduate. But by then, of course, she claimed she didn't care. She no longer wished to be a doctor. She had discovered that the only way to relieve her suffering was by writing. She was a novelist after all.

Virginia Woolf believed that no woman had succeeded in writing the truth of the experience of her own body—that women and language both would have to change considerably before anything like that could happen. She also believed that those who struggled toward the liberation of language—like herself and Stein and Eliot and Joyce—were bound to fail at least as often as they succeeded, and in this respect she judged Stein's "contortions" a generational misfortune. Woolf was eight years Stein's junior, and in many ways her experience and ambitions ran a parallel course: the death of her mother when she was thirteen; the influence of her dangerously overbearing father; the sexual "interference" inflicted by her stepbrothers; her love of women; her literary interest in male and female aspects of character and in an androgynous ideal. Also, like Stein, Woolf had enough money to write exactly as she pleased, and that was surely a major factor in allowing these two individuals, so different in their gifts and temperaments, to become the opposing poles of risk-all modern writing in a woman's voice.

The anguished novel Stein wrote when she joined her brother in Paris was an account of the love affair that had been tearing her apart. Stein's first full literary achievement, Q.E.D.—standing for quod erat demonstrandum, the conclusion of a geometric proof—was one of the few works she never tried to publish; although not explicitly erotic, it was plainly open about the fact that all three members of its sexual triangle were women. No explanations, no apologies, no wells of loneliness. Stein seems to have written the book as a kind of exorcism, incorporating in it actual letters and conversations, with the goal of restoring her serenity and never losing it again.

The book is fascinating not only for the information it provides about Stein but for the Jamesian acuity of its psychological portraits. It is hard to predict how far Stein might have gone in adapting this tradition—she was then twenty-nine—but the autobiographical narrator hints at why the attempt would be abandoned. She has always had a "puritanic horror" of passion, she confesses, and the pain of this love affair has rendered it absolute. "You meant to me a turgid and complex world," she rebukes her beloved—protesting also against the Jamesian tasks of emotional probing and dissection—before she heads off for a better or at least more soothing world of "obvious, superficial, clean simplicity." What she didn't know yet was how to find it.

After a year of frantic travelling, Gertrude moved in permanently with Leo in his apartment on the Rue de Fleurus. Because her erudite brother didn't approve of Q.E.D., she wrote only late at night, hurrying to bed just before dawn so the birds would not keep her awake. During ordinary hours she was more than ever Leo's pupil, with everything to learn about the flourishing art of painting. When Leo took her to see the work of a young Spanish painter in a gallery owned by a former circus clown, she initially refused to chip in her share of the funds required to make a purchase. She thought the long figure of a nude woman had ugly, monkeylike legs and feet. The dealer offered to cut off the offending parts and sell just the head, but the strange Americans eventually returned and bought the whole thing. Picasso's Woman with a Bouquet of Flowers was soon followed into the Steins' salon by many other Picassos, as well as Matisses and Cézannes. But, most important, it was followed by Picasso himself, who thought Leo a dreadful bore but recognized in Gertrude a companion spirit. He had barely met her when he asked to paint her portrait. Uncharacteristically, he struggled with the subject mightily: after more than eighty sittings, he wiped out the naturalistic head and quit. He returned to the canvas only months later, and what he finally produced was not Gertrude Stein as she then appeared—no one thought the portrait looked like her—but the grandly masked monstre sacré she would become once she had forged her genius and had paid the price.

It was while she was sitting for her portrait, in the spring of 1906, that Stein thought out much of the book that first won her literary renown. Inspired by Flaubert's meticulously understated A Simple Heart (which Leo had set her to translate as an exercise in French), Stein's Three Lives is a trio of stories about the grim existences of three women—two German-born servants and one poor black—who drift toward their fates in the airless atmosphere of a small American city. Stein's achievement was to make the writing seem as if shaped by the inner states of her characters: the childishly simple diction of those who had never willingly opened a book, the repetitiveness of those who had not much to think about or who were unused to being heard. The book was not published until 1909, and then in a tiny edition that Stein paid for herself. The reaction was astounding on almost any scale. "A very masterpiece of realism" was the general tenor of reviews. Many writers and critics began to see Stein's little book as the start of a truly American, unliterary literature, homely and vernacular and existentially unpresuming—a response suggesting that many writers and critics knew no more of the people she was supposedly writing about than Gertrude Stein did.

Like everything that she had written (but had not published) up until then, Three Lives is about Stein's autobiographical obsessions. Here are the vile but attractive father and the mother whose death is hardly noticed, the better-loved dead babies, and a continuous replaying of the tormented love affair, complete with psychological observations transposed from Q.E.D. But there is a change: the narrative voice is now so apathetic and the emotional temperature so low that it's no wonder the characters seem half-unconscious. The cause is not their social downtroddenness but the fact that Three Lives catches Stein in the very act of administering the emotional anesthesia that marked her style forever after.

The success of Three Lives coincided with two other important developments in Stein's life: Picasso's return from a summer in Spain with his first Cubist canvases, and the deepening of her relationship with Alice B. Toklas. The result was an explosion that shattered all her effortful old forms. The sudden outpouring of small, fragmented "portraits" and other glittering esoterica is usually said to have been inspired by—depending on one's source or one's inclination—either her desire to write like a Cubist or her need to conceal the erotic joy of her new attachment. Certainly, Cubism was vital to Stein, because it provided her with an intellectual rationale for doing exactly what she already urgently wanted and needed to do: keep her eyes on the surface. Facet it, mirror it, spin it around, and repeat it ad infinitum, but never go back underneath.

When Gertrude first met Alice in the fall of 1907, she thought her the same type of "pure female" as her sister Bertha, and she was wary. "She listens, she is docile, stupid and she owns you," runs one notebook entry. A tiny, brittle woman, dressed in exotic fringed shawls that seemed to emphasize her ever-remarked-on Semitic features—"an awful Jewess, dressed in a window-curtain" was Mary Berenson's typical assessment—Alice also gave signs of possessing, according to Gertrude, "an exquisite and keen moral sensibility." And there was no doubt that she knew a genius when she met one. (Actually, she claimed that she heard a bell ring whenever she met one.) Furthermore, she was absolutely certain (now that she'd seen it) of the world in which she wanted to live. This was a very different world from the one she'd come from, back in San Francisco, where for the past ten years—since her mother's death, when she was nineteen—she'd borne the domestic burdens of a household made up of her father, her grandfather, and her younger brother. None of whom she, gladly, ever saw again.

Stein and Toklas were formally "married" in the summer of 1910, outside Florence, and that fall Alice moved into the Stein ménage on the Rue de Fleurus. And so it was that Alice B. Toklas "came to be happier than anybody else who was living then," as Stein wrote in Ada, a biographical portrait of her bride. Because Alice, for the first time since the death of her mother, had someone to tell her charming stories to: "some one who was loving was almost always listening." Listening and loving, loving and listening—the paired satisfactions now nearly replaced books and food. Notably, at this time Leo began to display symptoms of chronic deafness, and to starve himself in fasts that lasted as long as thirty days; he claimed to be writing a book on painting, but he couldn't produce a word. Just as Gertrude was becoming the man that being a genius required her to be ("I am very fond of yes sir," she wrote), Leo was turning into the very model of the mysteriously afflicted, hysterical woman she had once been so interested in trying to cure. But no longer.

With someone now listening to her so well, Gertrude began to pour out words without hesitation, revision, or second thoughts. Privately, there are the sweet-breathed burps and coos of utter infantile contentment: "Lifting belly fattily / Doesn't that astonish you / You did want me / Say it again / strawberry." The work she offered to the world made even fewer concessions to standards of sense and communication:

One whom some were certainly following was one who was completely charming. One whom some were following was one who was charming. One whom some were following was one who was completely charming. One whom some were following was one who was certainly completely charming.

So runs the first paragraph of Stein's "portrait" of Picasso, which was published by Alfred Steiglitz (along with her "portrait" of Matisse) in Camera Work in 1912, a year before the Armory Show introduced modern art to le tout New York—with loans from the Stein collection—and made Gertrude Stein about as notorious as the painters whose outrageous principles she was said to share. ("The name of Gertrude Stein is better known in NY today than the name of God!" Mabel Dodge Luhan wrote to her ecstatically, and Stein replied, "Hurrah for gloire.") She didn't mind that most of her fame came in the form of parody and ridicule. "They always quote it," she pointed out in what may be her most truly modern observation, "and those they say they admire they do not quote."

All this was too much for Leo. He had hated Cubism from the start, and he didn't hang back from declaring Gertrude's work "Godalmighty rubbish." By late 1913 brother and sister were no longer speaking, and he soon moved out. The collection of paintings was divided more or less equitably, with Gertrude taking the Picassos and Leo the Renoirs; they split the Cézannes between them. (Picasso painted her an apple to make up for one of the Cézannes she lost.) Although Leo later tried to resume contact, she did not respond. "I have very bad headaches and I don't like to commit to paper that which makes me very unhappy," she wrote in one of her notebooks. More than thirty years remained of their lives, but Gertrude and Leo never spoke again. Alice claimed that Gertrude had simply forgotten all about him.

Stein had won enormous freedoms, but she chose to confine herself to a comfortably narrow space. In the midst of sexually explosive Paris, where the members of Natalie Barney's lesbian circle flaunted their glamour and their liaisons and their belly-dancing parties, Gertrude and Alice ran a salon that was a model of middle-class decorum. Despite occasional unorthodoxies of dress—Alice's window curtains, Gertrude's tents—and the Roman-emperor haircut Gertrude eventually got, they played the roles of two charmingly eccentric ladies who just happened to be man and wife (a fact as perfectly obvious to all as it was presumed unmentionable).

The effects of self-confinement on Stein's writing, however, were cruel. Beyond the occasional flash of wit or happy juxtaposition, her chains of words and repetitions come to suggest an animal's relentless pacing—cramped and dulled and slightly desperate. One feels that just outside the strict boundaries imposed by her pen lurked fathers and brothers and arguments and wars. In life, she could be head-on and courageous. During the First World War, she imported a Ford van and learned to drive it (except in reverse) to deliver supplies to hospitals all over France, and after the war she and Alice wrote to the many lonely American soldier "godsons" they had adopted. But nowhere in Stein's "literary" writing did she take in the experience: the wounded, the fear, the tenderness. She was writing less then anyway, giving over much of her time to advising and instructing (and sometimes to feeding and supporting) a group of young writers who found their way to her fabled door; in the twenties, as if by decree, the painters dispersed and the writers appeared. Among these, first in place and most fiercely devoted, was the twenty-three-year-old Ernest Hemingway, who sat at her feet and learned to write like a man.

"Gertrude Stein and me are just like brothers," Hemingway crowed to Sherwood Anderson in 1922. He brought her his stories to read and criticize, and they talked for hours while his wife, Hadley, was none too gracefully monopolized by Alice. (Holding off "wives of geniuses" was a stressful part of Alice's occupation; some had to be cornered behind large pieces of furniture.) He credited "Miss Stein" with getting him to give up newspaper reporting and to concentrate on his serious writing. He commended her method of analyzing places and people. And it was on the Rue de Fleurus that he was advised to go to Spain to see the bullfighting.

In 1925 reviewers of Hemingway's first volume of stories, In Our Time, recognized stylistic debts to Stein that were unmistakable: drastically short and unadorned sentences, repetition, a "naiveté of language" that suggested a complex, inarticulate emotional state. But for Hemingway the style clearly served as a kind of dam against an opposing sentimental pressure that was rarely if ever felt in Stein's prose. The new American hero was syntactically disengaged, because he'd been through hell and had already felt too much; his semiautism was part of his sexual equipment in a world in which physical courage was destiny and the only truly frightful things were women and emotion. Virginia Woolf—who used "virile" as an insult—particularly deplored Hemingway's exaggeration of male characteristics, for which she blamed the "sexual perturbations" of the times. (This was in 1927, and she was reviewing his aptly titled collection Men Without Women.) Woolf might have felt differently if she had traced the most famously virile of modern styles to its origins in the work of a woman—albeit a woman who liked to call herself "a roman and Julius Caesar and a bridge and a column and a pillar" (when all Virginia ever called Vita was "a lighthouse").

Are there male and female characteristics in writing? Male and female sentences? Is the comma a languishing feminine ruse, draining the strength of the tough male verb into a miasma of girlish uncertainties? Writing is self-exposure, and in the postsuffrage, neo-Freudian twenties the fear of what might get exposed was everywhere. Stein believed that the use of a comma was degrading and a sign of weakness because after all you ought to know yourself when you needed to take a breath. Woolf suggested that any woman who wrote in a terse, short-winded style was probably trying to write like a man. But at the heart of their difference is the fact that Woolf didn't see why a woman should want to do anything like a man; feminine generosity was life itself, and the necessary source of male achievement. One could hardly get further from Stein's perception of the sexes' division of properties. The two women met once—at a party in London, in 1926—and the revulsion was mutual. On Woolf's part, this was a matter of class and snobbery. "Jews swarmed," she wrote of the event in a letter to her sister. On Stein's part, there was defensiveness and bravado, surely based on a perception of the chilly atmosphere and perhaps, too, on the glaringly anomalous presence of a purely female genius.

By the late twenties, Stein and Hemingway had battled often, and they finally parted ways. She never spoke of what had come between them; he could hardly stop speaking of it. Sometimes he claimed that it was Alice, jealous of his relationship with Gertrude ("I always wanted to fuck her and she knew it"), who had caused the break. He also claimed that after Gertrude went through menopause she wanted no men around her except homosexuals—her "feathered friends," as he called all those whom he resented for usurping his place in the nest. Undeniably, there had been a change in the salon. Although Gertrude and Alice were as reserved as ever, they did live increasingly within a kind of tacit homosexual freemasonry. Indeed, it seems to have been this very reserve which was part of the attraction for such cautious old-world gentlemen as Frederick Ashton and Virgil Thomson and others from the highly sexually encoded worlds of music and theater and dance. In Stein's new role as a professional collaborator writing opera and ballet librettos, and also as a friend, she seems to have developed the appeal of a more or less inverted Mae West: a good-humored woman in male drag, a warm and wise mama who not only took in all her gay sons but was gay herself.

None of which was known to the public, of course, when The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in 1932, suddenly turned the world's most famously obscure writer into the best-selling author of a Literary Guild selection. From the start, Stein had thought of the Autobiography—actually it is her own biography, written from the dazzled point of view of her companion—as an embarrassingly traditional, moneymaking venture, on a different level from the meaningfully experimental work she still composed at night. In fact, this magical book doesn't resemble anything else in Stein's work—or, for that matter, anything else in American literature. Its only models seem to be those other famed "Alice" books, by Lewis Carroll, and the social surrealism of Oscar Wilde, which further muddles the question of the sexual significance of a writer's style.

The book is a modern fairy tale: the story of a golden age of art in Paris, when geniuses regularly came to dinner and were cleverly seated opposite their own paintings so that everyone was made especially happy, although everyone was happy anyway—this was back before death and divorce and success—and Henri Rousseau played the violin and Marie Laurencin sang, and Frédéric of the Lapin Agile wandered in and out with his donkey. And into the middle of this wonderland walks the sensible American Alice B. At her very first dinner, she finds herself next to Picasso, who gravely asks her to tell him whether she thinks he really does look like her President Lincoln. "I had thought a good many things that evening," she reports quite as gravely, "but I had not thought that." Ever temperate, Alice is the quiet but quizzical eye at the heart of the storm. Her equanimity, like her pleasure, is absolute. The book indulges in some small revenge—Leo is not mentioned by name, Hemingway is imputed to be a coward—and it leaves us with a sense of loss that is as profound as it is muted. Once, there was so much life all around that one had to hurry to bed before dawn to have any hope of sleep: "There were birds in many trees behind high walls in those days, now there are fewer."

With the book's success, Stein fell into a profound depression. Even her new gloire didn't help, at first; she was fifty-nine, she was having her first major success, and it was for the wrong thing. In Four in America, a particularly reader-resistant work she completed about this time, she rose—briefly, rather thrillingly—to a clear explanation of her intended goals and values:

Now listen! Can't you see that when the language was new—as it was with Chaucer and Homer—the poet could use the name of a thing and the thing was really there? He could say "O moon," "O sea," "O love," and the moon and the sea and love were really there. And can't you see that after hundreds of years had gone by and thousands of poems had been written, he could call on those words and find that they were just wornout literary words? …

Now listen! I'm no fool. I know that in daily life we don't go around saying 'is a … is a … is a …' Yes, I'm no fool; but I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years.

Alas for good intentions. When Stein returned to America for the first time in thirty years, in 1934, to attend a performance of Virgil Thomson's opera (to her libretto) Four Saints in Three Acts, she also gave a series of lectures around the country. Directly exhorting her audience, Stein made headlines (MISS STEIN SPEAKS TO BEWILDERED 500) but clearly failed to win the understanding she was after. The work of the woman who claimed to believe so fervently in the immediacy of language and the recovery of meaning remained synonymous with obscurity and confusion. (In the 1935 movie Top Hat, Ginger Rogers giggled that an indecipherable telegram "sounds like Gertrude Stein.") Any attempt to assess Stein's literary achievement raises many old questions—not only about her judgment and credibility but about the relationship of theory to art in the troubled history of modernism.

When Stein and Toklas returned to Paris in the spring of 1935, Toklas took it upon herself to ship copies of Stein's manuscripts back to America for safekeeping. This was the full extent of their preparations for the possibility of hard times ahead in Europe. Stein couldn't believe that anything would really happen, and certainly not to them—two elderly Jewish ladies with a bit of fame and no political interests. Their political indifference was now dangerously compounded by Stein's long-standing way of handling all serious unpleasantness: pretend it isn't there, and then tumble into nonsense or baby talk, so that perhaps it will be persuaded that you are not there, either—or, at least, that you are not a reasonable target. In her early Paris days, she had written to a friend who had apparently mentioned the Russian pogroms against the Jews, "The Russians is very bad people and the Czar a very bad man." In the mid-thirties, her thoughts about Hitler were hardly more sophisticated. She and Alice were staying in the countryside, at Bilignin, in 1939, when war broke out. They hurried to Paris in order to close up their apartment. Then, taking one Cézanne and Gertrude's Picasso portrait, they returned—against all advice—to Bilignin, which soon fell under the jurisidiction of Vichy. And there they spent the war.

How did they survive? Largely, it seems, through a French admirer and friend who was appointed head of the Bibliothèque Nationale under the Occupation and issued several requests that they not be disturbed. They lived quietly and scrounged for food; they sold the Cézanne and liked to tell visitors surprised at the quality of their dinner that they were eating it. They watched the German army march into the land and, a long and burning time later, straggle out; German soldiers were billeted for a time in their house, as were American GIs when at last they arrived. This experience is recounted clearly and movingly in a book Stein completed in 1944, entitled Wars I Have Seen. Sadly, the book is out of print, and its failure to meet a modernist criterion has kept it from inclusion in the Library of America compilation. Yet it is one of the few of Stein's works that might be called essential, because it tells the ending of the fairy tale.

There is much here that is richly, lovingly observed, about the women's daily life and that of their neighbors and about French pragmatism and courage. Typically, whatever could not be lovingly observed is passed over—or nearly so. For now history almost catches up with Gertrude Stein, and forces her into confrontation. One feels her struggling with the effort not to look away: the very term "collabo"—which is all she manages to spit out of it—causes her to stumble on the page, falling into a repetitive stutter that seems not a mannerism but a kind of seizure. Her attempt to address anti-Semitism begins with an early memory of the Dreyfus Affair, but she hasn't advanced beyond a sentence when she segues into senseless babble: "He can read acasias, hands and faces. Acasias are for the goat.…" "Acasia" is not even a word (and Stein never made up words; she thought such arrogant idiocy to be the province of Joyce). "Acacia" is the name of a tree, but "aphasia" means the loss of the ability to speak. It is as though Stein were making her own diagnosis, or as though a part of her reason were watching the rest of her mind run away.

After the war, back in Paris, the famous salon was filled with GIs eating Alice's chocolate ice cream. Gertrude wrote down what they said and how they said it as though they were the new poets of the age. She adored them, she celebrated them: they were, after all, young men and heroes. But something in her attitude was changing. Along with the ice cream, she dispensed correction; she worried that the great liberators were taken in by the flattery and politeness of the postwar Germans, or that they saw the world in terms of movies. By and large, it seems to have dawned on her that there was a lot these callow demigods ought to learn before the world was put in the hands of men, even the best and noblest men, ever again.

Although she was over seventy and weak with cancer, Stein was very eager to work. In late 1945 she began a second opera project with her old friend Virgil Thomson. It was his idea that the setting be the American nineteenth century; it was her idea that the hero be a heroine, the suffragist Susan B. Anthony. Stein completed the libretto for The Mother of Us All just before her death, in July 1946. Although the work is predictably baffling, Stein maintains an exceptionally strong dramatic focus on the character of Susan B. She had done a considerable amount of historical research—shocking in itself, given her usual methods—and it is Anthony's public concerns that dominate the text: the disparities between the sexes, and her passionate conviction that women are stronger and must lead.

For men are afraid, Stein's heroine observes: "They fear women, they fear each other, they fear their neighbor, they fear other countries and then they hearten themselves in their fear by crowding together and following each other, and when they crowd together and follow each other they are brutes, like animals who stampede." As for women, they are afraid not for themselves but only for their children: "that is the real difference between men and women." Stein shows Susan B. at the end of her life, when she knows that all her work has failed. She has helped to win the vote for black men, but she will die before it is granted to women, white or black. When someone attempts to comfort her by saying that women will vote someday, her despair only deepens: she dreads that when women have the vote they, too, will become afraid—that they will become like men.

How astonishing that Stein can now voice her lifelong wish—"women will become like men"—as a dreaded possibility. A new sense of the value of what women had traditionally done and been may even have given her succor in these last months, as she looked back on her own life as the mother of so much and so many. Perhaps by then she had realized that in her years of giving and feeding and advising and encouraging and (is there another word for it?) mothering—in the continual dispersal of herself to men whom she loved and admired, to geniuses and soldiers and cowards alike—she had inadvertently lived the life of the most profoundly womanly of women, and that it had been good.

"Patriarchal Poetry"

LINDA S. WATTS (ESSAY DATE 1996)

SOURCE: Watts, Linda S. "'Reject Rejoice Rejuvenate': Gertrude Stein's Feminist Critique of Spiritual and Literary Tradition." In Rapture Untold: Gender, Mysticism, and the 'Moment of Recognition' in Works by Gertrude Stein, pp. 131-44. New York: Peter Lang, 1996.

In the following essay, Watts explicates the literary and spiritual politics of the essay "Patriarchal Poetry," investigating the feminist implications of Stein's syntax and typology for patriarchal language.

They do not ask what is religion but I do. I ask what is religion. I cannot ask too often, what is religion.

Gertrude Stein, The Geographical History of America

With its polemical title, "Patriarchal Poetry," this 1927 Stein text, invites a political reading. By no means does Stein avail herself of didacticism, here any more than she does elsewhere. Still, there can be little question that one of Stein's accomplishments in this now often-quoted composition is commentary on and subversion of patriarchal poetry. As she notes in this and other writings, Stein considers language to be a belief system in itself, comparable in that sense to a religion. Invoking the images of Catholicism, she writes of "Patriarchal poetry and fish on Friday, Patriarchal poetry and birds on Sunday," linking the rituals of language and religion. (PP, ["Patriarchal Poetry"] 259) When treated with such reverence, language cannot change. Without change, language loses its vitality, becoming merely "worn-out literary words.">1> With an unexamined vocabulary, it also becomes a conservative social and political force. In her own writing, and particularly in a piece such as "Patriarchal Poetry," Stein rebels from literary traditions. To write as it has been written is to serve Mammon, and so Stein makes it her task to build a second, or alternative, form of literature, in which she "serves God" by resisting outside influence.>2>

Stein's declaration to serve "God" rather than "Mammon" is somewhat misleading, however, insofar as Stein's ideal writer serves no master but herself. Recall her insistence that creativity is "not being blown into you, it is very much your own.">3> Creativity (and responsibility for that creativity) resides within the individual. A writer's creative authority must be her own; she cannot inherit it or receive it from some altogether external mystical force. Since Stein views writing as a solitary enterprise, even the influence of literary predecessors is best avoided. In much the same way Stein advises the individual against deference to canonical law in religious matters, she characterizes the writer "serving God" as one who, while writing, "does not remember" her literary forebears. The great books are a chronicle of, rather than a substitute for, creative talent. Laboring under the weight of a literary inheritance, the writer faces the task of revivifying language. That challenge becomes greatest when the poet uses words grown weak from repeated use.

Stein calls for the poet to speak not with old images, but rather with a new diction. Using the familiar Romantic symbol of a "nightingale," ("Ode to a Nightingale") Stein chastises the derivative poet, saying "Not to such a pretty bird." (PP, 257) Just as she maintains that a new poetic image may appear ugly at first, Stein implies that an overused image may be all too pretty.

Compare something else to something else. To be rose. Such a pretty bird. Not to such a pretty bird. Not to not to not to such a pretty bird. Not to such a pretty bird. Not to such a pretty bird. As to as to not to as to and such a pretty bird.

(PP, 257)

Stein expresses boredom with the stock images of poetic tradition, as she urges poets to "Compare something else to something else." Metaphors lose their power if used so often that they are simply another name for the object described. To clarify her point, Stein supplies underused alternatives for animal imagery (which also functions for Stein as sexual imagery), including the "fish" and the "cow," two images which appear frequently throughout Stein's work.

The writer must renew poetic language. Stein's objection to literary inheritance is not offered simply as a means for avoiding poetic clichés, though, but also stems from her awareness of the conservative function a literary canon serves. By elevating literary greats, the canon forms a hierarchy which reflects the class and gender hierarchies of a society. When honoring that canon, writers defer to and perpetuate not only literary styles, but also the ideologies, both social and political, those styles encode. In this respect, Stein's indictment of patriarchal poetry anticipated feminist challenges to the literary canon by contemporary feminist writers, critics, theorists, and activists.

As a case in point, Stein identifies this literary inheritance ["Their origin and their history" (PP, 263)] as masculinist, and is quick to note that her own language, literary standards, and literary influences are largely if not exclusively male in origin. While such women as George Eliot, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Louisa May Alcott impress Stein, the bulk of her references are to men: Carlyle, Dante, DeFoe, Fielding, Flaubert, Scott, Smollett, Shakespeare, Sterne, Swift, Wordsworth, Meredith, Hardy, and Trollope. While Gertrude Stein's immersion in male writing is indisputable, some would say inescapable, she does not accept blindly these writers' techniques, perceptions, models, or hierarchies. Stein writes as one keenly aware not only of the possibilities opened by past writers, but also the options their language and actions deny to her. To these limitations, "Patriarchal Poetry" stands as her manifesto. To alternative possibilities, it stands as her blueprint.

It is significant that Stein assigns a name to the works representing this traditional literature, for traditional literature does not acknowledge what it cannot classify. With her capitalization of that name, Stein makes the tradition seem even more staid and static. This 1927 composition takes the shape of a series of assertions, many of which begin by invoking the name, "Patriarchal poetry," as in "Patriarchal poetry makes no mistake." (PP, 263) For patriarchs, names imply status over people and possession of things. ["Come to a distance and it still bears their name." (PP, 264)] Patriarchs preside over traditional literature, and so "Patriarchal Poetry is named patriarchal poetry." (PP, 293) Each time speakers use the name, they reassert possession. In this way, patriarchs also may assure their own honor by insisting that "Patriarchal poetry be often praised often praised." (PP, 279) In order for Stein to set out an alternative literature, then, she must see to it that Patriarchal poetry is "renamed." (PP, 289)

Stein has numerous reasons for resisting traditional literature. The chief issue Stein takes with Patriarchal Poetry concerns its rigid order: "Patriarchal poetry should be this.…" (PP, 281) Stein mocks that order with its endless language rules: "Which is why is why is why.…" (PP, 262) In much the same way that St. Ignatius of Loyola in Four Saints in Three Acts imposes upon religion a hierarchical and paramilitary order, patriarchs expect poets to fall in step: "Patriarchal poetry left left left right left," (PP, 294) because "This is what order does." (PP, 262) Patriarchal poetry, with its rules and arbitrary distinctions, reduces creativity to habit. There are so many rules to follow that all "Patriarchal poetry is the same." (PP, 264) Art becomes too routinized. Writing, after all, it not a set order like a menu or a calendar:

… and not meat on Monday patriarchal poetry and meat on Tuesday. Patriarchal poetry and venison on Wednesday. Patriarchal poetry and fish on Friday. Patriarchal poetry and birds on Sunday Patriarchal poetry and beef on Tuesday patriarchal poetry and fish on Wednesday Patriarchal poetry and eggs on Thursday patriarchal poetry and carrots on Friday patriarchal poetry and extras on Saturday patriarchal poetry and venison on Sunday Patriarchal poetry and lamb on Tuesday patriarchal poetry and jellies on Friday patriarchal poetry and turkeys on Tuesday.

(PP, 259)

Language rules produce standardization, and so "Patriarchal poetry makes it as usual," "Patriarchal poetry one two three." (PP, 274) If a writer is to become part of patriarchal poetry, s/he must accept its rankings, too, for Patriarchal poetry "makes no mistake in estimating the value to be placed upon the best and most arranged of considerations." (PP, 272) The writer must respect the literary canon and "Remember all of it too." (PP, 271) The canon must perpetuate itself in memory and deed.

It is, then, at the very least, convenient that Stein's spiritualized view of "creative" writing requires no knowledge of literary tradition or precedent. In so defining her ideal writer, Stein undermines the patriarchal shape of literary practice, recognition, and memory. By her standards, an original writer exists outside literary tradition, and need not fit into social categories to which that tradition's tribute has been exclusive. Stein's genius perceives in an "unhabitual way," free from the tethers of a literary past. Her expression is limited only by her creativity, and the value of her work resides not in its adherence to literary precedent, but rather in its own creative moment.

In comparing traditional (or patriarchal) literature to a religion, Stein does not overlook the connection between a literary canon and a religious canon. In her challenge to patriarchal poetry, Stein takes on the Bible, itself a sacred text. In particular, she deconstructs the gender roles of Genesis, asking

What is the difference between a fig and an apple.

One comes before the other.

(PP, 276)

Stein questions the distinction between Adam and Eve, making the difference between the two figures no greater than "the difference between a fig and an apple." At the same time, Stein uses the Biblical story to illustrate the tyrannies of a tradition ruled by "One [who] comes before the other." Patriarchal poetry is not superior to new poetry simply because it preceded the less traditional form. Indeed, by exposing arbitrary distinctions (such as that between Adam and Eve, or old and new poetry), Stein renders such attempts at classification meaningless. She asks of such distinctions:

What is the result.

The result is that they know the difference between instead and instead and made and made and said and said.

(PP, 264)

Stein constructs oppositions with equal terms so that an "initial boundary" melts away. (PP, 258) For Stein, there exist no absolute distinctions, and so she challenges the binary oppositions underpinning attempted distinctions.

Stein dispenses with the literary inheritance to which she refers as "Patriarchal Poetry." When finished, she resolves "Never to mention [or name] patriarchal poetry altogether." (PP, 263) The act of building an alternative literature liberates her from literary precedent, for that alternative "makes patriarchal poetry apart" rather than central. (PP, 265) As the name "Patriarchal Poetry" implies, Stein regards literary tradition as masculinist and laden with the perspectives of male domination. Such literature stands as a male province. Stein hopes to see "Patriarchal Poetry interdicted," (PP, 287) so that authors, especially women, might have options instead of simply being "Assigned to Patriarchal Poetry." (PP, 265) As Stein writes of this gender split, she encourages another mode of writing, particularly for women.

Let her try,
Never to be what he said.

(PP, 269)

Stein provides women writers with an alternative form of expression, in which they are no longer mere character/subjects of male writers, but rather valued contributors to literature. As she sets aside Patriarchal Poetry, Stein reprises her communion hymn, "When this you see remember me." Here she asserts that, "When this you see remember me should never be added to that." (PP, 282) To incorporate Stein in an existing (androcentric) literary canon would be to miss the point of her literary counter strategy and her efforts to see "Patriarchal Poetry replaced." (PP, 291) Stein writes of literary tradition "undone," (PP, 259) and needful of "rearrangement," (PP, 267) and "rectification." (PP, 264) Consequently, she considers it no tribute to be assimilated into patriarchal poetry.

Stein does not dismiss patriarchal poetry entirely ["These words containing as they do neither reproaches nor satisfaction.…" (PP, 265)]. She concedes to men that, "Patriarchal poetry might be what they wanted." (PP, 273) Stein does insist, however, that "Patriarchal Poetry makes mistakes" she finds unacceptable, and to which she does not wish herself or others to be subject. (PP, 280) Therefore, Stein calls for a new form of expression. Undaunted by anticipated objections from a male proponent of Patriarchal Poetry, Stein declares with the power of Biblical genesis, "If he is not used to it he is not used to it, this is the beginning." (PP, 362) With this declaration, Stein inaugurates a celebration of women's emancipation from patriarchal poetry, an emancipation whose impulses are plain in Stein's call to "reject rejoice rejuvenate." (PP, 262) Stein reclaims language from the patriarchal and oppressive uses to which it has been put. For this reason, she fills the piece with words in which the pre-fix "re-" depicts regeneration.

Patriarchal Poetry reclaimed renamed replaced and gathered together as they went in and left it more where it is in when it pleased when it was pleased when it can be pleased to be gone over carefully and letting it be a chance for them to lead to lead not only by left but by leaves.

(PP, 289)

By speaking in terms of claims, Stein points out the proprietary relation of patriarchal poetry to literary production. Indeed, within the composition, Stein appears to struggle with the patriarchs for power: "When this you see give it to me." (PP, 298) In renaming and replacing patriarchal poetry, Stein empowers new authors, providing "a chance for them to lead."

Naming as the Exercise of Power

Stein is best known, then, for her challenge to conventional syntax and word use. Stein's criticisms of androcentric religion must be understood as related to her challenge to androcentric language. In one of her works, "Woodrow Wilson," (1920), Stein makes explicit her critique of language as an instrument whose power is comparable to religion: "How can a language alter. It does no it is an altar.">4> Her affront to reader expectation was so dramatic that many readers accused her of writing in code, or in a personal language they termed "Steinese." Even the headline of Stein's New York Times obituary suggests her notoriety in this regard:

Gertrude Stein Dies in France, 72
American Author Was Known for Her
'A Rose is a Rose is a Rose' Literary Style
FIRST BOOK INTELLIGIBLE
Two Biographies Also Written in Lucid Form
Composed Plays and Opera Libretto.>5>

Where Stein disturbs the orderly literary language of tradition, though, she does so purposefully, making points not only about language, but also about the culture of which that language is both a part and an expression. For example, Stein had an aversion to nouns, or, as she refers to the noun, "the name of anything.">6> In a sharp tone she reserved for impertinent questioners at universities, Stein states the basis for her objection.

Now listen! Can't you see that when the language was new—as it was with Chaucer and Homer—the poet could use the name of a thing and the thing was really there? … And can't you see that after hundreds of years had gone by and thousands of poems had been written he could call on those words and find that they were just wornout literary words?>7>

Like other modernists, Stein argued that writers inherit from their literary forebears old words, tired from overuse. It is the task of the writer to restore language. For Stein, nouns represent the greatest challenge. It becomes her passion, for Stein maintains that great writing requires passion, to replace the noun. As Stein seeks models for this work, she rediscovers Walt Whitman. Here was someone who had done away with nouns. Stein writes of Whitman,

He wanted really to express the thing and not call it by its name. He wanted really wanted to express the thing and not call it by its name. He worked very hard at that, and he called it Leaves of Grass because he wanted it to be as little a well known name to be called upon passionately as possible.>8>

Stein takes note of Whitman, separating him from traditions of patriarchal poetry by determining that "creating it without naming it, was what broke the rigid form of the noun.">9> The noun must be reconsidered.

Stein considers the overused noun as a symptom of excess in traditional literature. Each time an author applies a noun, s/he claims the right to create something by assigning to it a name. In this way, authors may employ nouns as instruments of authority.

Think of all that early poetry, think of Homer, think of Chaucer, think of the Bible and you will see what I mean you will really realize that they were drunk with nouns, to name to know how to name earth sea and sky and all that was in them was enough to make them live and love in names, and that is what poetry is it is a state of knowing and feeling a name.>10>

Stein links these nouns as acts of literary and religious creation. To name an object ("earth sea and sky and all that"), or assign to it an identity, is to create it. Fellow writer Anäis Nin also objected to the gender-coding of creativity (and so, generative power), whether earthly or divine, as male:

As to this "I am God," which makes creation an act of solitude and pride, this image of God alone making sky, earth, sea, it is this image which has confused woman.>11>

It is telling that Stein describes writers "drunk with nouns" in much the same way that she might describe one who is 'drunk with power'. The poet has the power to (re)create the world through language. Stein argues that with time's passage, however, writers have exhausted the possibilities of nouns, or names of things. Stein does not reject nouns so much as she laments the manner in which nouns become conventional through continued use, losing the freshness of meaning.

Stein's alternative to using conventional nouns requires the writer to engage passionately with objects s/he might otherwise choose to render with clichés. Only through contemplation can the writer break the habits of naming, for "slowly if you feel what is inside that thing you do not call it by the name by which it is known.">12> Stein takes the overused noun, then, as a sign that a writer lacks the necessary level of engagement with subject matter. Nouns permit a writer to fall back on conventional meanings and symbolisms. They require no immediate experience of those meanings by the author. For Stein, writing instead should proceed from an intimate relationship to a subject. Explaining this difference, Stein draws on the emotion she believes to be universally experienced through love relationships. She writes, "Everybody knows that [engaged writing] by the way they do when they are in love and a writer should always have that intensity about whatever is the object about which he writes.">13> According to Stein. love names, spontaneous and emotional, should replace traditional poetic nouns.

In this regard, Stein takes special interest in the application of nouns to people. Such nouns reduce human beings to references. She is aware of the degree to which these references tend to target specific populations on the basis of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and creed. In literature, for example, Stein notes that convention dictates that certain cultural groups be relegated to the background of one's fiction. In one instance, Stein claims (somewhat playfully), "I am afraid that I can never write the great American novel … so I have to content myself with niggers and servant girls and the foreign population generally.">14> Stein's statement is no doubt a specific reference to her characters in Three Lives: the Good Anna, the Gentle Lena, and Melanctha. Despite America's claims of pluralism, when it comes to designating great literature, Stein observes that only works featuring members of the dominant group may receive consideration. It is most irregular for a work such as Three Lives to focus on three such characters and tell their life stories instead of reducing them to hidden references (in keeping with their confinement to servile and secondary positions in the world outside fiction). On the basis of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and creed, such individuals occupy the margins of an elite literary tradition. Within her own works, however, Stein frequently features those not part of the dominant population. In her letters, Stein refers to this process of shifting literary emphasis as making "foreground background.">15> It is a subversive act.

Stein's objection to nouns, then, is not purely literary. As Stein reveals the sense in which these individuals (and authors who choose to write about them in this way) fall outside literature's "ideological scripts," she also uncovers the role language itself plays in their marginalization. Stein recognized that language serves the interests of those with the authority to apply language to (classify) others. The result is a political process of nomenclature, in which the powerful name the powerless. Regardless, for example, of how many racial groups exist, the privileged status of whites in the literary canon reduces all other races to non-whites, forming a binary opposition. The same is true of gender, in which case there are males and not-males; class, in which there are haves and have-nots; ethnicity, in which there are Europeans and Orientals; and religion, in which there is Christianity and everything else. Once relegated to this secondary status (not-x), an individual's characteristics blur, rendering them interchangeable with any other member of that secondary group. They are equal in their perceived inferiority. This political process of naming interested Stein early in her career. It takes a striking form, for instance, in the revisions to the manuscript of The Making of Americans. Referring to a study by Leon Katz of the manuscript sources for Stein's epic novel, Richard Bridgman argued that

By the time she was working on The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein had already become ambivalent about her Jewishness. In successive revisions, the qualification "Jewish" became, first, "German," and then "middle-class.">16>

Although it may be true that Gertrude Stein was "ambivalent about her Jewishness," her series of substitutions suggests how, for Stein, the categories of analysis (religion, ethnicity, and class) are interchangeable examples of the ways in which typological systems may tag groups for "oppression.">17> Human complexity may be reduced to a label based on a single perceived characteristic: black, woman, Jew, lesbian, German, and the life. This particular example further demonstrates that a single individual may fit into numerous such classifications at once. (Stein herself was both a German-American and a Jewish-American.) In this way, the individual may represent a target on multiple bases. Throughout her career, then, whether writing about an "apostle of the middle class" or a "chinese christian," Stein calls attention to the embattled status of individuals on the basis of race, gender, class, ethnicity, or religion.

One might doubt that someone of Stein's wealth, status, and eventual fame could understand or identify with society's outsiders, yet Stein did have reason to see the culture through an outsider's eyes. She was a woman, a Jew, a lesbian, an expatriate, and, due to her unconventional writing style, a self-proclaimed literary "outlaw.">18> At the very least, one can say that Stein experienced anti-Semitism and homophobia firsthand. Although Stein herself does not make many references to anti-Semitism, testimony by those around her strongly suggests its influence on her life. Leo Stein, her brother, writes frequently about his own "Jew complex," or "pariah complex" which dates back to childhood in California. In an autobiographical writing, he remembers that "There were almost no Jewish families in East Oakland and most of the time I was the only Jewish boy in school.">19> Gertrude Stein's memories of Oakland were probably not altogether different from her brother's. Once she went away to Cambridge, there are indications that Stein's college years, too, may have been marred with anti-Jewish sentiment. In his correspondence with Gertrude Stein, Arthur Lachman makes quips and remarks which hint at their shared experiences of anti-Semitism at Cambridge. In one such letter, Lachman writes from his new home in Eugene, Oregon, telling Stein, "My Hebraic descent is pretty generally known, as I have freely told it. There is quite a colony of your co-religionists here—I am sure you would feel quite at your ease.">20> Stein also encountered objections to her lesbianism. She shared this information with Samuel Steward, who recalls the conversation:

"It bothers a lot of people," Gertrude said. "But like you said, it's nobody's business, it [the objection] came from the Judeo-Christian ethos, especially Saint Paul the bastard, but he was complaining about youngsters who were not really that way, they did it for money, everybody suspects us or knows but nobody says anything about it.>21>

As the above case reveals, Stein also was aware of the hostility of Catholicism to her own way of life. Stein knew very well what it was to be rejected and judged harshly by others' standards.

It was in this spirit that Stein described singer Paul Robeson as one who "knew american values and american life as only one in it but not of it could know them.">22> No one knows the structure of a society better than one forced to occupy its lowest ranks ("in it but not of it"). As a black man, Robeson knew all too well. Stein, too, was aware of the inequalities in American society, such as those based on race and class, by which individuals are born into oppression. She links this caste system to one's name, noting that, "After all occupation and your name and where you were born and what your father's business was is a thing to know about any one, at least it is for me.">23> Stein shares her society's curiosity about others' lineage, and acknowledges that such information often may be deduced from a name. As a result, she rebels against the tendency to emphasize the surname (or patrifocal family name), deciding that it is of "no importance.">24> Instead, in keeping with her interest in religion, Stein turns to the given (or Christian) name, which she maintains still "does … denote [individual] character and career.">25> Stein sees nomenclature and religion as related, for when one places faith in nomenclature, it becomes a religion. Stein writes, "Names and religion are always connected just like that. Nobody interferes between names and religion.">26> She also engages in some wordplay between naming and religion, observing that religion is "Just as necessary to know … as to know your name so that you can come when you are called.">27> With her pun on the word "calling," Stein suggests that both names and religion identify the individual to others.

Not only is Stein intrigued by names, but she also feels compelled to imagine what life would be like if one had a different name. In this way, Stein resists the static identity a name represents.

I do ask some, I would ask every one, I do not ask somebecause I am quite certain that they would not like me to ask it, I do ask some if they would mind it if they found out that they did not have the name they had then and had been having been born not in the family living they are then living in, if they had been born illegitimate. I ask some and I would ask every one only I am quite certain very many would not like to have me ask it if they would like it, if they would very much dislike it, if they would make a tragedy of it, if they would make a joke of it, if they found they had in them blood of some kind of a being that was a low kind to them.>28>

To change one's name is to change one' station. In this case, Stein asks how an individual would respond to being renamed as someone with less status ("illegitimate," "a low kind to them"). This same principle of renaming guides Stein's efforts in Four in America, a work she regarded as "the history of some one if his name had not been the name he had.">29> With playful impertinence, Stein approaches the great figures of American history, subverting the authority of those great (male) names by renaming them as each other.

If Ulysses S. Grant had been a religious leader who was to become a saint what would he have done. If the Wright brothers had been artists that is painters what would they have done. If Henry James had been a general what would he have had to do. If General Washington had been a writer that is a novelist what would he do.>30>

This juggling of identity forms the hypothetical premise of Four in America. In an individual's name, Stein sees her/his destiny.

Typologies as Naming Processes

Stein was particularly interested in the relationship between names and character. Within her writing about human typologies, Stein discusses individual characters in terms of social categories: race, ethnicity, class, gender, and religion. Like her ideas about naming, Stein's use and subversion of human typologies must be viewed in social context. Influencing her thinking were numerous figures, among them William James, George Santayana, Hugo Münsterberg, Josiah Royce, and Otto Weininger. All five studied and sought to classify the shapes of human consciousness. Although it would not be until 1924 that America would pass the National Origins Quota Law, and not until 1926 that natural law, social Darwinism, and nativism would combine to produce such institutional results as the American Eugenics Society, efforts to explain personality and individual character already divided the nation's theorists of human nature. Even those who opposed Eugenics, its principles and practices, and its campaign for genetic character improvement, argued over the source of human temperament and character. Some sought in their findings justification for cultural stereotypes.

Into this climate of controversy, Stein introduces her typological works, her own inquiry into human identity. Stein is far from an activist, yet the implication of her texts' representations of cultural stereotypes and social inequalities forms the basis for a debate concerning the author's intentionality. While John Malcolm Brinnen finds Stein's characterization an emblem of "the struggle within character that gives character its peculiar force," and Edmund Wilson comments on Stein's "grasp of the organisms, contradictory and indissoluble, which human personalities are," other readers, including Milton Cohen and Richard Bridgman, consider this union of psychological typology and literary characterization wrong-minded, even reprehensible.>31> They read Stein's typology as an endorsement of stereotypes and prejudice. However, these criticisms fail to weigh adequately Stein's critical distance from the human typologies about which she writes. In "The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans," Stein notes this distinction between typology and fact. She writes that, "Types of people I could put down but a whole human being felt at one and the same time, in other words while in the act of feeling that person was very difficult to put into words.">32> At best, Stein could record a human type, a single image of the multiplicity residing within an individual. Given that Stein knew herself to be incapable of complete description, it is doubtful that she ever intended her character types to display the fullness of human complexity. To the contrary, her characters are tracings, and rather transparent ones at that, laid down to help readers imagine the difficult process by which one would assemble the layers of human identity. By critiquing her own descriptive impulses, Stein demonstrated to herself and to her readers the inadequacies of character typology. While Stein never prefaced her use of character types, she trusted that her critical perspective would be clear in the language itself. Stein writes, "I was sure that in a kind of a way the enigma of the universe could in this way be solved. That after all description is explanation.…">33> The critical debate over Stein's typological characterization raises issues regarding what Stein's descriptive typologies explain.

Typologies in Stein's writing hold political implications, but not those usually claimed by Stein's critics. By equating human beings through their "bottom nature," Stein urges a chronicle to include all of society's members, "a history of every one.">34> Of The Making of Americans, a book which shares the experiments of Three Lives, Gertrude Stein reflects, "I could finally describe really describe every kind of human being that ever was or is or would be living.">35> With her literary typologies, Stein suggests that any system purporting to "describe every kind of human being" must be reductive, for it deals with groups rather than individuals. Her "types" thus mock the attribution of characteristics on the basis of race, gender, religion, class, and ethnicity. Gertrude Stein's characterizations, such as those in Q.E.D., reveal the power struggles and alienating effects of human nature so defined, for in a world where others constitute the "abjectly familiar type," one feels "no need of recognizing their existence" as individuals.>36>

Religion as Case Study

In many of her works, Stein directs the reader's attention to typologies of religious feeling, particularly as defined by William James. Such practices are most conspicuously present during two phases of Stein's career, (1) the early period (1895-1911), represented by such familiar works as the Radcliffe Themes, The Making of Americans, and Quod Erat Demonstrandum, and (2) the less familiar period of the 1920s, represented by "Lend a Hand or Four Religions," Lucy Church Amiably, Four Saints in Three Acts, and "Patriarchal Poetry." In both phases, Stein employs religious language and ideas in ways which may be as important to the study of culture as they are to the study of literature. Stein's response to religious authority (whether that of theology, clergy, doctrine, or deity) offers a case-study in the writer's challenge to patriarchy. In the early writings, such as the Radcliffe themes, The Making of Americans, and Quod Erat Demonstrandum, Stein challenges androcentric religion, with its patriarchal and hierarchical authority structure. Stein's objections to androcentric religion temper her enthusiasm for existing faiths. While Stein's religious ideas owe much to Catholicism, even her earliest writings are openly critical of some Catholic beliefs and practices. By the 1920s, Stein meliorates this conflict, making selective use of those elements of Catholicism compatible with her own views. In her writings of the twenties, Stein goes further to reject existing religions, advocating instead an individualized, woman-identified religion in which first-hand spiritual experience becomes the individual's quest. This alternative form of religion resists the hierarchical constructions of religious faith, in which clergy mediate religious experience. In Stein's alternative spirituality, religious doctrines and rules of morality no longer suppress the individual's spirit. One goal of such quest is spiritual union, whether it be unity of self or union with another. For Stein, this symbolic surrender of the individual's will to spiritual union remains distinct from blind obedience to church dogma, because it preserves the individual's insight.

In her writings of the 1920s, such as "Patriarchal Poetry," Stein takes issue with the gendered, hierarchical, and deferential structure of literary narrative. In this piece in particular, Stein presents a treatise on women's emancipation from a literary inheritance under girded by the same gender oppression found in other acts of androcentric language. In much the way that Four Saints in Three Acts establishes parallels between the mystic and the artist, Stein conjoins these figures in "Patriarchal Poetry" to call for an alternative spiritual life and an alternative literature. Finally, Stein's alternatives to restrictive spiritual and literary traditions distinguish themselves by incorporating unabashed forms of sensuality and sexuality, forms which previously required the cloak of more traditional images of passion as religious ecstasy and Platonic love. Erotic writing, another medium for the Stein's experimentations with a non-patriarchal, woman-identified spirituality, allowed Stein to elaborate on her ideas concerning the analogies between sexual and spiritual love. Regardless of Stein's encoding of sexual meanings, many of these writings were not published until after her death. While the period from 1915-1919 proved a prolific time for Stein's erotic writing, she continued to write in this mode later in her literary career. During the twenties, she added to their number related compositions, including "A Sonatina Followed By Another" (1921), "As A Wife Has a Cow: A Love-Story" (1923), and "A Lyrical Opera Made By Two" (1928). In these works, Stein presents anything but a patriarchal view of women's sexuality, particularly as expressed among women. That is to say, Stein celebrates sex, pronounces her pleasure in sex, declares her entitlement to write about sexual love among women, expands her discussion of homosexual marriage, and pays tribute to that marriage by likening it to spiritual union. Love, as Stein represents it, is redemptive. Her erotic poetry, like her spiritual writings, open a world of women's possibilities and pleasures. With these texts, Stein begins to demonstrate what it might mean to "live and love in names" liberated from an androcentric language.

Notes

1. Gertrude Stein, Four in America, v-vi.
2. Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America, 54.
3. Gertrude Stein, quoted in Thornton Wilder's "Introduction" to Four in America, xi.
4. Gertrude Stein, Useful Knowledge, 108.
5. New York Times, July 28, 1946, 40.
6. Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America, 233.
7. Gertrude Stein, Four in America, v-vi.
8. Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America, 241.
9. Ibid. 237.
10. Ibid. 233. Note that within this passage, Stein regards the Bible primarily as a work of literature. She does the same in Lecture 2 of Narration.
11. Anäis Nin quoted in Sandra Gilbert, "Patriarchal Poetry and Women Readers: Reflections on Milton's Bogey." PMLA 93 (1978): 368.
12. Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America, 210.
13. Ibid. 210.
14. George Knox, "The Great American Novel: Final Chapter." American Quarterly 21:4 (Winter 1969): 679.
15. Gertrude Stein to Carl Van Vechten, August 1923, reprinted in Edward Burns, ed., The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten, 1913-1946 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) 87.
16. Richard Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces, 161.
17. Gertrude Stein, Lucy Church Amiably, 101.
18. Gertrude Stein, Composition as Explanation, 8-9.
19. Leo Stein, Journey Into the Self [Being the Letters, Papers and Journals of Leo Stein (New York: Crown Publishers, 1950)]:, 175, 199.
20. Arthur Lachman to Gertrude Stein, Dec. 21, 1897, YCAL.
21. Samuel Steward, ed. Dear Sammy, 55.
22. Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 292.
23. Gertrude Stein, Everybody's Autobiography, 204.
24. Gertrude Stein, Four in America, 3.
25. Ibid. 7.
26. Gertrude Stein, Four in America, 7.
27. Gertrude Stein, Geographical History of America, 29.
28. Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans, 351.
29. Gertrude Stein, Narration, 28-29.
30. Gertrude Stein, Four in America, 2.
31. John Malcolm Brinnen, The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and Her World (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1959) 60; Edmund Wilson, Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1931) 238; Milton A. Cohen, "Black Brutes and Mulatto Saints: The Racial Hierarchy of Stein's 'Melanctha,' "Black American Literature Forum 18:3 (Fall 1954): 119-121, and Richard Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces. Cohen contends that the characterizations of "Melanctha," for example, were "tainted by cultural bias" consistent with the vast cultural chasm dividing middle-class, white medical students [such as Stein] from the poor blacks they treated [here, the fictional Melanctha]." (119); Cohen also cited Richard Bridgman's contention of Stein's bigotry, that Three Lives "swarms with clichés about the happy, promiscuous, razor-fighting, church-going darky." This issue has resurfaced with the publication of Sonia Salvidar-Hull's "Wrestling Your Ally: Stein, Racism, and Feminist Critical Practice," in Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram, eds., Women Writing in Exile (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989) 181-198.
32. Gertrude Stein, "The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans," reprinted in Meyerowitz, ed., Writings and Lectures, 88.
33. Ibid. 86.
34. Stein writes, "always this comes to be clear about them, the history of them of the bottom nature in them, the nature of natures mixed up in them to make the whole of them in anyway it mixes up in them. Sometime then there will be a history of every one." Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans, reprinted in Meyerowitz, ed., Writings and Lectures, 84.
35. Ibid. 127.
36. Gertrude Stein, Early Writings, 53.

Bibliography

Manuscript Sources

Gertrude Stein Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature (YCAL). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

Selected Publications By Gertrude Stein

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. New York: Vintage Books, 1933, 1961.

Composition As Explanation. Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1928.

Everybody's Autobiography. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, Inc., 1971.

Fernhurst, Q.E.D., and Other Early Writings. Introduction by Leon Katz. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1971.

Four in America. Introduction by Thornton Wilder. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1947.

Four Saints in Three Acts. New York: The Modern Library, 1934.

The Geographical History of America or The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind. Intro. by Thornton Wilder. New York: Random House, 1936.

Lectures in America. New York: Random House, 1935.

Lucy Church Amiably. Paris: Imprimerie "Union," 1930.

The Making of Americans: The Hersland Family. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1934.

Narration: Four Lectures by Gertrude Stein. intro. by Thornton Wilder. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1935.

Useful Knowledge. New York: Payson and Clarke Ltd., 1928.

Publications Treating Gertrude Stein

Bridgman, Richard. Gertrude Stein in Pieces. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.

Brinnen, John Malcolm. The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and Her World. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1959.

Meyerowitz, Patricia, ed. Gertrude Stein: Writings and Lectures, 1911-1945. Intro. by Elizabeth Sprigge. London: Peter Owen Ltd., 1967.

Steward, Samuel. ed. Dear Sammy: Letters From Gertrude Stein. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1977.

SOURCE: Stein, Gertrude. "Degeneration in American Women." In Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein, by Brenda Wineapple, pp. 411-14. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1996.

In the following essay, written sometime between October 1901 and early 1902, Stein discusses the problems of sterility and low birth rates among American women, outlining the physiological and voluntary causes which she attributes to the abandonment of maternal ideals.

In an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association October 5, 1901, Dr. Engellman [sic; the spelling of Engelmann's name varies throughout] discusses the alarming increase in sterility among American women. He finds that in the United States there is a higher sterility and a lower fecundity than in any other country outside of France and for the native American population the condition is worse than in France. The data that he uses are his own experience in private practice and in the dispensaries of St. Louis consisting of 1700 cases, series of carefully compiled statistics from Boston, Massachusetts and Michigan and the census records.

The facts are as follows:

The normal rate of sterility in foreign countries is eleven percent. In America over twenty percent of the women are childless. The highest fecundity among American born is to be found in St. Louis and that consists of 2.1 children to a marriage a lower rate of fecundity than than [sic] istobe found anywhere outside of Paris. In Boston the fecundity is 1.7 & in Michigan it is in the last few years 1.8. It has been slowly decreasing in every state in the union. This can be profitably contrasted with Franklin's estimate for his contemporaries of eight children to a normal marriage and Malthus's estimate of 5.2 children to a marriage in America.

In private practice in St. Louis Engelmann finds among the Americans of American parentage 1.7 children to a marriage and Americans of foreign parentage 1.9 children to a marriage. Among college women the results are still worse the average number of children to a marriage being 1.3 children to 1.6 while the non college woman of the same class and in the same city gives a record of 2.1. In England we find the same result among college women the average college woman's marriage producing 1.5 children while the non-college women in the same class of society average 4.2 children to a marriage.

Engelmann divides his cases among the laboring classes into those of foreign birth and those born in America. Among the foreign population the percent of sterility is 17 while in one generation of residence in America it rises to 26 percent and in the second generation becomes the apparent normal percentage for the modern American that is about 23 percent. In private practice in St. Louis he finds it to be about 23 percent and for college graduates 25. In Massachusetts we find the same discrepancy between the foreign and the native born population. The foreign born portion of the community shows 13.3 percent of the women sterile while the native population shows a percentage of 20.3 which in Boston runs up to 23.7. Now let us contrast these figures with those of foreign countries. In Paris the percentage of sterility is 27.3, in Berlin the sterility among the higher classes is 25.7 while among the laboring classes it is only 15 percent. These figures are rather appalling for these two cities have always been considered the most complete type of degeneration from the standpoint of fecundity and yet Berlin shows a better percent and Paris only a slightly worse one than obtains throughout America among the native population. From England we get the following figures, among the higher classes 16.4 percent among villagers 9.6 percent and among college alumnae 27.6 percent.

About 25 percent of all this sterility can be attributed to disease caused by the male for the rest as Dr. Engellmann concludes the barrenness in the large majority of cases is independent of physical causes as evidenced by the astonishing increase in sterility in this country with the marked increase in progress of gynecology which should control sterility were it due to disease and physical causes. Instead of that we have passed to a fecundity less and a sterility greater than any country except France. In considering the question of the causes for the marked increase in sterility among American women one fact cannot be too often dwelt upon. The fact that the normal period of fertility for a woman is from her eighteenth to her forty fifth year and that unless labor has so to speak cleared a passage, from her twenty fifth year on there is a gradual hardening of all her genitalia making conception rarer, miscarriages more frequent and labor much more dangerous. The first labor of a woman at thirty is always a much more serious matter than in the case of a young woman. This fact is one that must be kept constantly in mind when one is considering the causes of sterility among American women.

In considering the causes of sterility it is best to divide them into two classes,

1. Physiological sterility.
2. Voluntary sterility. These two classes must again be divided into
   1. Absolute sterility by which we mean women who have never conceived.
   2. Relative sterility that is women who have never come to term. The causes of phisiological [sic] sterility of the absolute variety are the impotence on the part of the male, anatomical malformation on the part of the female, gonnorheal [sic] infection of the female and gynecological operations. The relative physiological sterility is due either to a syphilitic infection of the female or to congenital weakness. All these causes together with miscarriages due to obscure puerperal infections combine to make up the eleven percent sterility that one may call the normal sterility among civilised races and which is known as Simpson's law of sterility. In addition to these causes for physiological sterility which we may perhaps call the normal causes of sterility among civilized peoples there are a set of causes bringing about physiological sterility both of the absolute and relative type which are due to the education and habits of life that obtain among the American women of to day.

The first point is that of the prevailing tendency to delay marriages until a woman's period of fertility is almost half over and the dangers and difficulties of conception and labor have become markedly increased. The second point is that in our modern system of education the heaviest mental strain is put upon the girl when her genitalia is making its heaviest physical demand and when her sexual desires are being constantly stimulated without adequate physiological relief, a condition that obtains to a very considerable extent in our average American college life. All these causes induce of necessity a weakening of the genitalia and a consequent increase of absolute and relative physiological sterility. The third point is the incessant strain and stress that the modern woman endeavoring to know all things, do all things and enjoy all things undergoes. This condition of life must of necessity lead to weakness and inadequacy of the genitalia as the whole physical scheme of the woman is directed toward fitness for propagation.

If these conditions only obtained among the upper classes in this country one might deplore but one could afford to disregard them for after all a nation never depends upon its upper classes but as will be noted in the statistics given by Engellmann there is not that immense difference in the percentage of sterility and fecundity in this country between the upper and lower classes that we find in all European countries. In America what the upper classes do the middle classes do and what is true of the middle class holds for the laboring classes and so we find in this country a uniform sterility and lack of fecundity varying very little from the top to the bottom.

The second and more important class of sterility is the voluntary type. It is this kind of sterility and lack of fecundity that that [sic] is so markedly increasing in America among all classes of the population. This type of sterility is of course all due to moral causes and these are so numerious [sic] that one can hardly do more than give the headings.

Voluntary sterility consists first of the absolute type that due to methods of prevention of conception and the relative type that of the criminal abortion. As both these types of sterility are due to the same moral causes they may be considered together.

Two classes of the community I imagine are chiefly responsible for the increased knowledge of methods of prevention among the laboring classes. On the one hand the charity workers with misdirected zeal and false ideals have spread as far as in them lay the knowledge of methods of prevention. The constantly increasing use of the dispensaries and the knowledge there obtained has helped to spread this feeling that prevention should be indulged in. As one old negress put it, "I had twenty children I would not do that now any more I know too much." Let us now consider a few of the causes that have led to the disrepute into which the ideal of maternity has fallen and see what can be said for them.

In the first place among the educated classes in this country, that is among the educated women and among the pseudo educated women there is a strong tendency to what we may call the negation of sex and the exaltation of the female ideal of moral and methods and a condemnation and abhorrence of virility.

By this statement is meant the tendency of the modern American woman to mistake her education her cleverness and intelligence for effective capacity for the work of the world. In consequence she underestimates the virile quality because of its apparent lack of intelligence. In the moral world she also finds herself the superior because on account of the characteristic chivalry of the American man the code of morality which her sheltered life has developed seems adequate for the real business of life and it is only rarely that she learns that she never actually comes in contact with the real business and that when she does the male code is the only possible one. All this of course leads to a lack of respect both for the matrimonial and maternal ideal for it will only be when women succeed in relearning the fact that the only serious business of life in which they cannot be entirely outclassed by the male is that of child bearing that they will once more look with respect upon their normal and legitimate function. Of course it is not meant that there are not a few women in every generation who are exceptions to this rule but these exceptions are too rare to make it necessary to subvert the order of things in their behalf and besides if their need for some other method of expression is a real need there is very little doubt but that the opportunity of expression will be open to them.

Another very important cause for the low rate of fecundity lies in the modern morbid responsibility for offspring. This is true in America for both parents. There is a foolish conviction abroad that the parents can raise one or two children better than half a dozen can raise themselves. This fallacy is due to the same cleverness of the American woman which has just ben [sic] mentioned and makes her mistake a knowledge of facts for training in method and makes her believe it possible for her to learn by a few lectures the things one only gets after years spent day after day in the daily round of working, listening and waiting. This conviction produces the type that is the terror to the trained professional mind, the intelligent mother. When this generation learns over again the truth that the training of children should on the one hand consist of a back ground in the home of a tradition that stands for honesty and right living and that for the rest it should in the hands of the trained professional the morbid responsibility, for the offspring will disappear [sic]. On the paternal side the responsibicity [sic] takes the form of the onviction [sic] that one should bear children only when you can remove them as far as humanly possible from the normal conditions of a struggle for existence.

The prevailing pessimism that characterizes the modern community and carries with it a ceaseless desire for amusement and a consequent incrnase [sic] in the expense of living is another of the important causes for the marked increase in sterility. The American population seems to have completely lost sight of the fact that the exercise of ones [sic] normal functions of living, walking, talking, thinking, being, eating and drinking is an endless joy of a healthy human being. As Jasper Petulengro puts it in answer to Lavengro's melancholy "There's night and day brother both sweet things, sun moon and stars brother all sweet things, there is likewise the wind on the heath. Life is very sweet brother who would wish to die." No in the development [sic] of the play instinct and the feeling of joy in the world one must look for a counteracting force against the prevailing pessimism and the consequent voluntary sterility. Another important element to be considered is the characteristic inefficiency in household matters of the lower class American woman. She is incapable for the most part of cooking sewing or any of the household duties for which her European sisters are famous. Her housekeeping is expensive and the food she supplies her family is not for the most part nutritious. Besides she does not want to increase her labors by her normal maternal functions. Just to cite one case that is extremely characteristic. A woman the wife of a railroad conductor and a very worthy person has been married for five years. Her husband is very fond of children and wants them the woman however refuses on account of the bother. She has within the last two years voluntarily brought about two miscarriages. This is not an isolated case but can be matched in any street and house in any city in the union. It is this point that cannot be too much insisted upon that this condition does not prevail among the better classes alone but that it is true of every class of the American population and that there is in no portion of the community that lives its fair quota of population except the foreign and this virtue is lost by the first generation born in America.

To conclude: unless the American woman can be made once more to realize that the ideal of maternity is the only worthy one for her to hold, until she can be made to realize that no work of hers can begin to compensate for the neglect of that function we are going the same way as France except that with true American push we are going France considerably better and a few years are showing a worse record than she has after ages of degenerative civilization. In discussing this subject one inevitably thinks of the picture of Brush in the Boston museum that of the mother with the lusty child in her arms. She is worn and weary but the vigorous struggling baby in her arms transfigures her weariness and changes it from a sacrifice to the purest pride.

Bibliography

Liston, Maureen R. Gertrude Stein: An Annotated Critical Bibliography, Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1979, 230 p.

Thorough listing of criticism on Stein's work.

Biographies

Knapp, Bettina L. Gertrude Stein, New York: Continuum, 1990, 201 p.

Covers Stein's life as an exile, incorporating criticism of some of her most famous works.

Kostelanetz, Richard. Introduction to The Gertrude Stein

Reader: The Great American Pioneer of Avant-Garde Letters, edited by Richard Kostelanetz, pp. i-xxxvii. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2002.

Provides an overview of Stein's life and career.

Sprigge, Elizabeth. Gertrude Stein: Her Life and Work, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1957, 277 p.

Details Stein's life in America and Europe and offers commentary on some of her works.

Criticism

Burke, Carolyn. "Gertrude Stein, the Cone Sisters, and the Puzzle of Female Friendship." In Writing and Sexual Difference, edited by Elizabeth Abel, pp. 221-42. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

Examines Stein's fictional treatment of female friendship based on her own relationship with Claribel and Etta Cone.

Chessman, Harriet Scott. "Ida and the Twins." In The Public Is Invited to Dance: Representation, the Body, and Dialogue in Gertrude Stein, pp. 167-98. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989.

Discusses Stein's use of the concept of twins in her 1941 novel Ida.

Doane, Janice L. "Fernhurst: Place and Propriety." In Silence and Narrative: The Early Novels of Gertrude Stein, pp. 32-51. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986.

Relates the narrator's search for a cohesive self-identity in Fernhurst to Stein's own shifting positions regarding the place and purpose of higher education for women.

Fifer, Elizabeth. "Father, Brother, Lover, Other: Gertrude Stein and the Search for Identity." In Rescued Readings: A Reconstruction of Gertrude Stein's Difficult Texts, pp. 22-45. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992.

Discusses identity issues in The Mother of Us All, The Making of Americans, and Geography and Plays.

Gibbs, Anna. "Helene Cixous and Gertrude Stein: New Directions in Feminist Criticism." Meanjin 38, no. 3 (spring 1979): 281-93.

Identifies similarities in the works of Cixous and Stein, despite the initial appearance of little common ground between them in their relationships to feminism and feminist criticism.

Johnson, Manly. "Stein Arose." Lost Generation Journal 2, no. 1 (winter 1974): 3-7.

Offers a brief overview of Stein's literary philosophy.

Modern Fiction Studies, Special Issue: Gertrude Stein 42, no. 3 (fall 1996): 469-680.

Features critical discussions of different aspects of Stein's life and works by a wide variety of critics.

Murphy, Margueritte S. "Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons: Beyond Description: A New Domestic Language." In A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery, pp. 137-67. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.

Discusses interpretive difficulties surrounding Tender Buttons.

Pladott, Dinnah. "Gertrude Stein: Exile, Feminism, Avant-Garde in the American Theatre." In Modern American Drama: The Female Canon, edited by June Schlueter, pp. 111-29. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990.

Examines Stein's contributions to American drama as a woman, a Jew, a lesbian, and an expatriate.

Ruddick, Lisa. "Tender Buttons: Woman and Gnosis." In Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis, pp. 190-252. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990.

Contends that Tender Buttons lends itself to interpretation and understanding far more than has been generally acknowledged.

Steiner, Wendy. Introduction to Lectures in America, by Gertrude Stein, pp. ix-xxvii. Boston: Beacon Press, 1985.

Demonstrates how Stein's work, particularly Lectures in America, both anticipated and influenced pop art and postmodernism.

Stimpson, Catharine R. "Gertrude Stein and the Lesbian Lie." In American Women's Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory, edited by Margo Culley, pp. 152-66. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992.

Explores Stein's dual reputation as a popular writer and as a transgressive figure in the sexual and literary realms.

Weiss, M. Lynn. Gertrude Stein and Richard Wright: The Poetics and Politics of Modernism. Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 1998, 150 p.

Bio-critical review of Stein and Richard Wright.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE:

Additional coverage of Stein's life and career is contained in the following sources published by the Gale Group: American Writers; American Writers: The Classics, Vol. 2; Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography, 1917-1929; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 104, 132; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vol. 108; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 4, 54, 86, 228; Dictionary of Literary Biography Documentary Series, Vol. 15; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors: British Edition; DISCovering Authors: Canadian Edition; DISCovering Authors Modules: Most-studied Authors, Novelists, and Poets; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Drama Criticism, Vol. 19; Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, Ed. 3; Exploring Short Stories; Gay & Lesbian Literature, Ed. 1; Literature Resource Center; Major 20th-Century Writers, Eds. 1, 2; Modern American Women Writers; Nonfiction Classics for Students, Vol. 4; Poetry Criticism, Vol. 18; Reference Guide to American Literature, Ed. 4; Reference Guide to Short Fiction, Ed. 2; Short Stories for Students, Vol. 5; Short Story Criticism, Vol. 42; Twayne's United States Authors; Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Vols. 1, 6, 28, 48; World Literature Criticism; and World Poets.