Gertrude Stein’s poem, “Tender Buttons,” may appear to be an illogical re-arrangement of reality at first glance. Although it draws upon objects that are familiar to us in our daily lives, taken from domestic household milieus, they are organized in syntax that appears to make little narrative sense. Juxtaposing images loosely connected to the domestic sphere, from cushion, to cotton, to closet, in unconventional ways, Stein’s work may appear visually like a surrealist painting: a seal and a box of matches are placed next to each other in a physical description; a closet and a sash are narrated one after another, without much direct narrative connectivity. Her work brings to mind the work of French surrealist painter Renée Magritte, who noted that dreams were the most distilled format of the world, and that art was meant to reflect this. Attempts to decipher Stein’s work are met with the obstacle of her complex, winding syntax, as well as synesthetic connections that cross sensory modalities, tying together the visual, auditory, and tactile to create a multimodal experience. The nuance of her experience is, thus, not immediately available for consumption by an external reader. By using synesthesia and a condensed visual format, the narrator conveys that her perspective of the objective world is not fully accessible to the reader. However, by varying grammaticality between sentences and using emotion-based metaphors, Stein shows evidence of a coherent inner world that floats to the surface. Taken in conjunction, there exists a purposeful refusal to allow the reader to objectively experience fragments of the domestic sphere, hinting towards the possibility of re-inventing relationships between domestic objects as a form of agency. 

Primarily, Stein employs repeated synesthesia in narrating her perspective of the objects that surround her, continuously destabilizing the reader’s experience. In her first sentence, Stein writes, “A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing” (Stein 9). She joins together “a kind in glass” and “a cousin” to serve as the two opening subjects of the sentence, yet the first evokes a glass-like material, while the second is a living family member. Both are subjects; they are equivalent from a grammatical standpoint, but they are radically different in terms of the typical roles they play in the household, and even in typical narrative plotlines. She does this again: later on in the sentence, she places “a single hurt color” and “an arrangement in a system” on a similar syntactic level, both functioning as the objects of this sentence, yet the first is a color, a tangible visual stimulus that can be sensed in the concrete world, while the second is a reference to an abstract, man-made mode of organization. She transitions between the material and the living, and the sensory and the conceptual, within the same syntactic ‘unit’ of subject or object, thus affording them the same degree of agency, if they are subjects, or the same capacity to receive action, if they are objects of the sentence. Stein draws subtle relationships between the words used within each syntactic unit, inviting consideration of how these pairs of words can perform or receive the same actions if they are so different. Thus she draws the reader’s attention to the shifting roles that objects have the capability of occupying. Each domestic object, suddenly, is animated with foreignness and fluidity, each ‘alive’ in a way that merits a second consideration. Stein’s perspective of each object’s capabilities is much more comprehensive and multimodal than the reader’s, generating a sense of uncertainty with each new sentence the reader is presented with. 

While Stein uses syntactic parallelism to generate synesthetic associations, she also creates a synesthetic effect by stating a nested relationship, where the first object is “in” the second object; this allows her to turn some objects into containers — suggesting an interiority to objects that the reader is not capable of immediately noticing. Under Glazed Glitter, Stein writes, “There is no gratitude in mercy and in medicine. There can be breakages in Japanese. That is no programme” (Stein 9). She establishes that there is no “gratitude” in “medicine,” which suggests that there can be “gratitude” in “medicine.” Further, the intangibility of “gratitude” suggests an invisibility to this quality being inside of, or a part of, medicine: the reader learns about an intimate quality vested inside of the medicine that they were not previously aware of, and recognizes their inability to see through the capacity of these physical objects into their core. “There can be breakages in Japanese” is a similar sentence, using a concrete word to suggest rifts or shatters inside of the language itself, which suggests that the language’s multifaceted identity is voluminous enough to contain spatial breakages, in a way that a reader would not expect by considering the exterior of the language when it is brought up, traditionally, in a text. Under A Box, Stein writes, “Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid same question, out of an eye comes research, out of selection comes painful cattle” (Stein 11). This expansive sentence continuously repeats “out of” in order to assert the repeated emergence of new objects from past objects. The ‘container’ objects, as well as the new objects which are being unearthed and examined, range from the tangible to the intangible –– from “kindness” and “rudeness,” to “eye” and cattle” –– suggesting that every object is capable of being born from a previous one, or housing another object inside. Tangibility and intangibility are collapsed in this hierarchy of nouns which function as shells for other nouns. The reader is brought face-to-face with their inability to see “inside” objects, to recognize the other entities they contain, which form such complex and nuanced elements of its identity. Panoramically, the structural framework of the prose-poem reflects this. Each section is like a ‘container’ dedicated to describing each object, with an X-ray-like vision into all the associated qualities and fragmented stories bottled up inside that object; however, this vision inherently implies the depth that exists within each object, depth which the reader can never be sure if they will ever truly know, even as Stein plumbs and exposes some pieces of it for us. 

While Stein’s synesthesia serves to highlight the multitudinous possibilities of each object’s role and interiority that the reader was not formerly aware of, her dense visual format squeezes her writing in such a way that prevents the reader from having time to digest and decipher individual phrases, creating a sense of purposeful inaccessibility. Although her language is as metaphorical and complicated as pure poetry, she does not use any of the formatting strategies that poets use in order to make their work more easily absorbable. Each of her sections is composed dominantly of block-like paragraphs that create walls of text. Although there are occasionally individual lines peppered throughout, she frequently devolves into long sequences of sentences with no break in between or enjambment to allow the reader to focus on one image at a time. Within each sentence, she also squeezes multiple independent clauses together with very little grammatical conjoining factors, such as semicolons or conjunctions. Under A Substance in a Cushion, she writes, “What is the use of a violent kind of delightfulness if there is no pleasure in not getting tired of it. The question does not come before there is a quotation. In any kind of place there is a top to covering and it is a pleasure at any rate there is some venturing in refusing to believe nonsense” (Stein 10). Although the first sentence should be question, there is no question mark that gives the reader time to pause and attempt to respond to the question mentally; there should be a comma following “in any kind of place,” and the final independent clause, beginning with “at any rate,” is completely ungrammatically tacked onto the previous clause with no semicolon or conjunction. Not only are her sections dominantly composed of un-enjambed prose, but she purposefully refuses to correctly glue together her lines –– with the exception of the occasional “and” –– to create a sense of endless length, where the reader can never be sure when the sentence will come to an end. There are few syntactic markers that can create predictability as to when her thought will be completed. Each image easily bleeds over into the next; they speak over one another like multiple voices in a conversation jostling for attention. Stein’s visual condensation into un-enjambed blocks of text and her stitching together of run-on sentences deny the reader the time to consider each phrase within a sentence locally before moving onto the next part of the sentence, and refuse to allow the reader to pause after each sentence before moving onto the next globally. Her sentences are presented in a fast-moving montage, like a film reel blurring by, yet she invites the reader to consider an expansive amount of possibilities of new identities and roles for each object through the synesthesia-related strategies mentioned above. The reader recognizes their insufficiencies in fully comprehending the inner worlds and shifting agencies of the objects, but is not given further exposition, nor syntactic forgiveness, to catch up with Stein’s rapid logic. It is as if Stein is playing a teasing game with the reader, where she beckons them forwards, only to assert how much they do not –– and can not –– know, and refuses to decelerate her stream of consciousness to facilitate their comprehension. 

While Stein works to demonstrate her unwillingness to make easily transparent her synesthetic perspectives on the objects around her, she also simultaneously hints at the depth of her personal interiority through varying the grammaticality of her sentences. Much of Stein’s piece is written with convoluted grammar and incorrect syntax. Under A Piece of Coffee, she writes, “The settling of stationing cleaning is one way not to shatter scatter and scattering. The one way to use custom is to use soap and silk for cleaning” (Stein 12). “Stationing cleaning” are adjacent to each other, despite being the same part of speech, creating two objects of the preposition that are not connected grammatically by an “and;” further, “shatter, scatter, and scattering” lacks coherent parallelism. “Custom,” in the second sentence, is an adjective that is used as a noun. This convolution is difficult for a reader to decipher, and is highly recurrent throughout the piece. Yet, Stein’s language fluctuates in its well-formedness. Sometimes, couched in longer paragraphs, statements appear that obey traditional rules. Under A Substance In a Cushion, she writes, “Sugar is not a vegetable. Callous is something that hardening leaves behind what will be soft…. It shows that dirt is clean when there is a volume” (Stein 9). The central line, “Callous is something that hardening leaves behind will be soft,” sharply increases the directness of her prose; although it is not perfectly grammatical, it seems to move beyond the object-based, visual juxtapositions and make a statement about the nature of individuals. It seems too specific to be an accident of random images placed together; it suggests that when someone grows callous, the process of them “hardening” transforms them, abandoning the qualities of them that are “soft,” severing the present identity from the past one. “Sugar is not a vegetable” and “It shows that dirt is clean when there is a volume” are notably still unclear, but within the paragraph-wide radius of Stein’s more direct statement, the reader might use the relative clarity of that line to attempt to elucidate how the surrounding images relate to one another; it is a better tool to attempt to puzzle through these connections. By intentionally raising her syntactic well-formedness, Stein lays pieces of her opinions bare on a surgical table like clues; the reader might then consider how callousness –– and its newly created map of associated synonyms and antonyms, such as softness, cruelty, kindness, and femininity –– reflects the ways that people utilize cushions, which serve as the object title for the section. Stein’s variation in the level of haziness versus clarity marks the fluctuating opacity of her persona; her interior thoughts peek through and stain the surrounding fog of imagery. Further on, Stein writes, “What is the use of a violent kind of delightfulness if there is no pleasure in not getting tired of it… In any kind of place there is a top to covering and it is a pleasure at any rate there is some venturing in refusing to believe nonsense” (Stein 10). The second sentence seems to speak almost directly to the nature of the poem, as she notes, “there is some venturing in refusing to believe nonsense.” To entirely deny “nonsense,” there is some “venturing;” Stein seems to suggest that in order to fully deny the intelligibility of any piece, even one which appears to be “nonsense,” one must walk around, or spatially avoid, certain pieces of meaning and logic in the work that are like islands in the sea: there will always be meaning that arises from the core of nonsense; one must truly venture around their sensibilities and instincts in refusing to believe that there is anything important to be taken from what might first appear to be nonsense. This also serves as a hint for the reader to make more effort into extracting semantic meaning from the remainder of the piece. These pieces of interiority shine through because they are more syntactically logical than most of the other sentences, and contribute to a sense of intimate personhood. 

While Stein varies her grammaticality to convey the surfacing of the narrator’s interior thoughts, she continues to build upon this sense of interiority by weaving throughout her piece emotionally-charged metaphors that build together into a cohesive identity with specific memories. In Glazed Glitter, she writes, “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” (Stein 9). She juxtaposes “red,” a color that suggests anger, heat, or passion, with “hour,” a marker of time which is sterilized, untouchable and divine; she compares “search,” which is a highly human act, with “hope,” another mood which is atmospheric and nebulous. Why does she choose these abstract parallels to these specific concrete nouns? Stein’s narrator is drawing upon her own identities, memories, desires, and internal tensions to produce these connections. These are not objective connections; rather, they are fragments of associations based on memories –– memories that formulate an identity. For example, Stein’s line, “Callous is something that hardening leaves behind what will be soft,” appears to express an argument about the nature of callousness, that it abandons the soft part of a human’s personality in favor of hardening; its placement in a paragraph about a cushion suggests an association that the narrator has with a cushion –– its origin, its form, the people who use it, the socially constructed settings in which it is used or neglected –– and the trait of being callous (Stein 10). In moving from cushion to callous, Stein creates a connection that is necessarily defined by past experiences; cushion could lead to warmth, or protection, or familiarity, and yet, the imposition of this image demonstrates the memories that have linked cushion, very intentionally so, with callous. Why the hyper-specified lines; why the deeply elaborate abstract extrapolations? It is as if we are reading an individual’s past as superimposed on top of these objects. Possibilities may flash through a reader’s head –– tales of a shallow, unemotional man abandoning a woman sitting on a cushion, or a woman cutting off her hair to move away from the more metaphorical ‘cushion’ of traditional beauty –– but perhaps they do not. No matter what, these abstractions –– “hope,” “interpretation,” “charming,” “callous” –– are undeniably fraught with subjective grief and love. The voice of the speaker is not a fragmented mosaic, but begins to form a narrative identity through the gathering and superimposition of these words, which contain emotional valences that must be mapped onto their respective objects due to past experiences of a person. The reader is thus given hints of intimate, rather than objective, associations with these objects. Her diction of evaluation also serves to solidify the intimate authenticity of the speaker as someone who contains multitudes inside of her. Under A Chair, Stein writes, “A suitable establishment, well housed, practical, patient and staring, a suitable bedding, very suitable and not more particularly than complaining, anything suitable is so necessary” (Stein 18). Under Water Raining, she writes, “Water astonishing and difficult altogether makes a meadow and a stroke” (Stein 22). The traits of the chair are listed out in a series of phrases marching out like traits of a product in a catalog, and the recurrent words are “suitable,” “necessary,” “astonishing,” and “difficult,” many of which recur in other sections (“likely,” another word of evaluation, occurs five times in A Substance in a Cushion. In the narrator’s exploration of the world around her, there is a deliberate application of her own opinions onto the objects in her world that are intertwined deeply with the existence of these objects. They are thus defined by her evaluation and thus, her perception, made possible by a rich interior monologue that the reader is given peeks of. 

Stein’s personhood is bountiful and labyrinthine, full of statements about the world informed by her history and fragmented memories mapped onto the objects around her. Stein’s influence from the Cubist movement, which aimed to to defamiliarize traditional objects and scenes, suggests her efforts to defamiliarize the domestic sphere as a new, foreign territory in order to take ownership over her own mode of interpretation, where she holds unconventional perspectives on relationships, potentially including hierarchies and power dynamics within the household. Stein’s literary career began in 1903, but she published “Tender Buttons” in 1914. By 1907, Pablo Picasso had begun to gain momentum with the Cubist movement. She was strongly influenced by the philosophies of Picasso, who was a close friend of hers, and other Cubist artists, who denied the possibility of any singular objective representation of objects, or people. They employed many techniques to demonstrate the inherent fallacy in attempting to create an objective artistic representation of an object as it existed in nature; these strategies required “a movement in and out of recognizable representation” and “fragmentation of perspective” (DeKoven 1). These are immediately visible in Stein’s work: DeKoven writes, “...[Stein’s] phrases almost make sense…they hover close to coherence, yet remain insistently, almost perversely, beyond it. This writing forces us to relinquish our conventional expectation of coherent sense…” (DeKoven 6). Stein’s writing reflects these strategies: she approaches recognizable descriptions before swiftly moving away and complicating her semantic logic –– for example, under A Petticoat, she writes, “a light white, a disgrace, an ink spot, a rosy charm” (Stein 22); she shatters perspective by providing many ways of considering an object. Cubist work focused on geometric forms placed in a shallow, two-dimensionalized space (Rewald). Stein uses similar strategies to achieve a potentially similar effect –– these techniques allow her to, like the Cubists, shatter the notion of a singular ‘objective’ understanding of objects through the many synesthetic possibilities she suggests, each of which are portals to new modes of thinking about the object. Like the Cubists, she takes objects from the physical world but portrays them in such a way that defamiliarizes them to the reader and offers new paths of consideration — forcing the reader to consider their own blunted comprehension of the object’s depths. The Cubists emphasized the two-dimensionality of their canvas in order to show that art is a separate world from the nature it represents. It is possible that Stein, employing their primary strategies in textual form, aimed to separate her text from the household it represented. In writing, she is capable of building her own interiority in a way where she is the authority. 

Through synesthetic associations that emerge via syntactic parallelism and systems of containment, yet maintaining a highly densified format for her text, Stein establishes the reader’s incapability to engage fully with the multitudinous possibilities for action and interpretation that unfurl around each object as both subject and object. Her control over her readability and the intrusion of her personal memories suggest her personhood that is, in itself, another container with depths the reader will never fully have access to, allowing for the emergence of her agency within the world of her own creation.

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Works Cited

DeKoven, Marianne. “Gertrude Stein and Modern Painting: Beyond Literary Cubism.” 

Contemporary Literature, vol. 22, no. 1, 1981, pp. 81–95. JSTOR, 

https://doi.org/10.2307/1208223. Accessed 9 May 2023. 

Rewald, Sabine. “Cubism: Essay: The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History.” The Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, 1 Jan. 1AD, 

www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/cube/hd_cube.htm. 

Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms. Claire Marie, 1914.