19 pages • 38 minutes read
Tender Buttons [A Long Dress]
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Background
Historical Context
While it would be a fundamental misunderstanding of Tender Buttons to claim what it is “about,” the text is infused with eroticism, largely inspired by Stein’s partnership with Alice Toklas. The poem as a whole is layered with sly puns and references to sexuality, and much has been made of the title and its potential reference to nipples and the clitoris—tender buttons—and female sexuality in general. As a woman growing up at the start of the 20th century, Stein was part of a society far from any widespread acceptance or tolerance of being gay. While being gay in general was cause for widespread social oppression and even violence, there was at least a thread of cultural precedent for attraction between men in the 19th century, with the aesthete movement and the Oxford of Oscar Wilde. Lesbians faced intense oppression and cultural invisibility, and Stein broke barriers not only in aesthetics but in representation as well.
One of Stein’s early short stories written in 1903, “Q.E.D.,” is notable for being one of the earliest examples of a coming out story in English literature. Additionally, Stein’s later essay “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene,” is not only a groundbreaking depiction of lesbian love but is also important for containing arguably the first published use of the word “gay” in reference to orientation. Stein pushed the envelope not only in literature but in sexuality and the historical and cultural understanding of being gay.
Artistic Context
Much can be said about Stein and her surrounding artistic context, as she is both artistically and historically a nexus for a variety of art forms, movements, and traditions. However, perhaps the most important context to understand for a poem from Tender Buttons is the influence of Cubism. Cubism is primarily and most famously a movement of the visual arts, but it had incarnations and influence in a wide variety of art forms and inspired movements. Pioneered by several painters, notably including Stein’s close friends Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris, Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde theory and practice. Characterized by representations of concrete forms and objects that are broken up and reassembled into many angles and planes, Cubism attempted to carry further the project of Impressionism. Rather than try to reproduce objects and figures in perfect Neoclassical objective accuracy, Cubism instead reproduced a mode of perception. While the tradition of Western art had long privileged a single viewpoint, Cubist art attempted to depict objects through a multitude of viewpoints at the same time.
Stein celebrated the Cubist experimentation by the painters in her coterie, even helping them to achieve recognition and commercial success (as she notably did with Picasso). However, her participation in Cubism was not limited to her role as curator and patron. Instead, Stein applied the techniques of Cubism to language, creating works of literature that presented words and sentences defined by multiple intersecting planes and perspectives. While Cubism on its own does not entirely “explain” the techniques of “A Long Dress” and Tender Buttons in general, it is a crucial part of the grammatical “strangeness” that defines the text. Instead of simply depicting an image of a “long dress” (or any of the named objects of the “Objects” section), Stein presents a jumble of intersecting grammatical perceptions and syntactical modes that are a part of her impression of those objects.
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By Gertrude Stein
