Queer Sonorities: Sound as Persuasion in Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons

ABSTRACT

This essay considers the feminist implications of Gertrude Stein’s sonic devices in the extended prose poem Tender Buttons, a study in persuasive sound that avoids the foreclosures of semantics and grammar through the ephemerality of sound. Situating domestic space and its conversational tones as the sonic context in which Stein produced her work, I explore how she offers collaborative, embodied, and playful communicative strategies that encourage the reader to hear and speak the sounds of her domestic experiences. In Stein’s prose, vocal readers exceed the impositions of written text through performance and linguistic sonorities enabling the sounds of words (as opposed to their meanings) to slip away from static positions. Readers are encouraged to participate in the process of making meaning, to both sound out and listen to the words on the printed page. Stein’s sound writing, in other words, resonates with feminist communication theories that foreground listening, collaboration, experiential knowledge, and forms of collective agency.

KEYWORDS:

• Postmodernism
• queer domesticity
• rhetorical theory
• sound studies
• Gertrude Stein
• Tender Buttons

Notes

Throughout this essay, I borrow this phrase from Mark Derveaux, who uses it to refer to the sounds (rather than the meaning) of words.

In his Sonic Persuasion, Greg Goodale writes that “[v]oices and noises produce meanings beyond words uttered and recorded” (4).

Further, Kirsch notes that most of the women rhetors recovered from the annals of history do not theorize persuasion or language; many instead illustrate the dialogic or conversational. Kirsch’s excellent study of Stein’s composition primer “How to Write” posits Stein as a theorist of rhetoric via the cannon of invention rather than (merely) a conversationalist. The conversational tone found in Stein’s prose poetry actually enacts the rhetorical theories laid out in her primer (286).

In Sonic Persuasion, Greg Goodale argues that “the explosion in the power and primacy of English departments after the turn of the twentieth century dictated to other disciplines in the humanities the importance of the printed word” (6). Consequently, the study of the spoken word waned, as did the “status of the ear” and an interest in listening.

Much like Sally Miller Gearhart’s attempt to “womanize rhetoric,” French feminists writing in the 1970s hoped to create alternatives to the definitive and univocal closures of masculinist systems. To find a way around and out of those constitutive logics, Derridian feminists took on the ambitious project of remaking meanings and identities at the level of language. Many specifically addressed phallogocentrism, which describes how language privileges, through structural coercion, the masculinist logics of absence and negation. Helene Cixous’s “Laugh of the Medusa” (Cixous, Cohen, and Cohen), for instance, offered as an antidote escriture feminine, which aimed to write “through the body” and out of the confining symbolic structures. Similarly, Monique Wittig in The Lesbian Body attempted linguistically to rebuild a “lesbian body” outside the dominant symbolic order. Both recognized the inherent persuasiveness of symbolic systems but considered the arguments of masculinism embedded in language escapable.

I say “lesbianism” instead of “lesbian identity” because I am not convinced that Stein conceived of herself in those contemporary terms. Moreover, it may be worth noting that Stein reputedly dismissed political feminism, although it is clear that she disliked the “patriarchy,” or at least its poetry.

“Melanctha” is the second chapter in Stein’s first book of short stories, Three Lives, and marks her foray into primitivism through its attempt to replicate a Black dialect.

This is the general interpretation among literary scholars. For further details, see Bercovitch (213).

Notably, Picasso’s famous “Portrait of Gertrude Stein” places the author at home in her favorite chair. Stein responded with her own “Portrait of Picasso,” placing in artistic dialogue their respective communicative experiments.