"Sometime There is Breath": Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons as Maternal Lexicon

Abstract

A study of Gertrude Stein's poetry collection Tender Buttons, this thesis uncovers and explores the text's covert maternal trope. Although Stein staunchly evaded categorization as a feminist, the employment of maternal imagery and the exploration of a language predicated by the feminine space of the womb warrant a reassessment of Stein's stance on feminism. This thesis identifies and elucidates the poetic exploration of the womb as a space containing one not yet formed, that is, the unnamed, ungendered, uninscribed in the restrictive and hegemonic yoke of culture. In this space, Stein delights in the indeterminacy of a language not yet born into the society that prescribes it to a single denotative method. Through consideration of French Feminism, this thesis identifies Stein's poetry as a harbinger of Kristeva's semiotic register yet resists its categorization as feminist. Interpreting Tender Buttons instead as a portent of diachronic linguistics, I hope to extend the analysis of the collection beyond the feminist position that increasingly dominates Stein scholarship. Positing the collection as an attempt toward the nullification of gendered writing, I suggest the potential to divest the employment of the female body as a tool solely for the construction of a feminist/linguistic argument.