Tender Buttons

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...